July 24, 2003
Dear Mr. Novak:
I am writing on behalf of my friends at People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), as well as compassionate consumers across the globe, to urge KFC to implement PETA?s list of eight simple things that need to be done to reduce cruelty to chickens raised and killed for your carry-outs.
For example, I would like to see KFC stop allowing chickens to be bred and drugged so that they become so heavy that they cripple under their own weight, end the starvation of birds who are constantly hungry because they are bred to grow too quickly, stop burning the beaks off parent birds, and make sure slaughter methods do not permit animals to be scalded to death in feather-removal tanks. As you know, full details of PETA?s recommendations are available on KFCCruelty.com. They are based on the scientific work of KFC?s own animal-welfare advisors and would eliminate only the most horrible abuses of these animals.
If KFC suppliers treated dogs or cats the way they treat chickens, they could be charged with the crime of cruelty to animals. I am a vegetarian because I realize that even little chickens suffer pain and fear, experience a range of feelings and emotions, and are as intelligent as mammals, including dogs, cats, and even some primates. These remarkable animals are deserving of at least a little kindness.
Please let PETA know that you will end the most egregious forms of abuse endured by chickens raised and killed
for KFC.
Sincerely,
Sir Paul McCartney
PEOPLE FOR THE ETHICAL
TREATMENT OF ANIMALS
501 Front St., Norfolk, VA 23510
July 24th, 2003
Lexington readers: Check out the “Tours and Events” page of Epitaph Records’ web site. Notice anything famililar in the header area?
July 18th, 2003
I picked up “Read Music - Speak Spanish” from Conor Oberst’s (of Bright Eyes and Winona Ryder fame) project, Desaparecidos. Nothing extraordinarily interesting about the music. But I’ve been craving a good rawk fix and the weepy Nebraskan delivered. Fans of Jawbreaker, Avail, Quicksand, and At the Drive In will not be disappointed. And while railing against consumerism is hardly groundbreaking, the band’s genuine disgust about how they’re “moving dirt to make a Greater Omaha” is powerful stuff. The packaging of the CD is great. The cover just shows a two lane highway cutting through empty planes. But a thin, transparent overlay (just like Modest Mouse’s “Build Nothing Out of Something”) hints to the future of this of this empty prairie. The CD booklet is the Omaha City Planning Department Recommendation Report - January 26, 2000. The purpose of the report is to clear the subdividing of 120 acres into 320 lots. After each track listing is a land-use topic. For example, following track four, “Man and Wife, the latter” is “Grading and Drainage,” which mandates that an erosion and sediment control plan must be developed and implemented prior to grading the site… The sanctimonious whining on this record can be annoying, of course. And some of the lyrics are just embarassing: “I want to pledge allegiance to the country where I live. I don’t want to be ashamed to be American…” There is even a song dissing, gasp, the Mall of America. Pitchfork’s review of the CD summed it up pretty well, “I bet anyone ten dollars that Naomi Klein’s No Logo is sitting on Oberst’s bedside table right this second.”
July 18th, 2003
It’s summer, the economy sucks, time to rethink the living room. Armed with issues of ReadyMade, Dwell, and maybe a few a tattered home design catalogs (mostly just for inspiration), it seems like everyone I know is busy on a project around the house or apartment. Our philosophy has been to look online, in catalogs, and in local showrooms–and then try to make it happen at Target. The apartment is pretty hopeless, really. If the walls looked like the ceiling, the floor looked like the walls, we would be in decent shape. These bloody wood-paneled walls are a bitch. But it’s fun to get an idea of what our place could like if design actually was within reach. Similarly, Sarah and I have this game when we walk around our neighborhood. It’s called, “What house would you want if you could have any house?” Our choices are pretty much the same. Comfortable bungalow. Or maybe craftsman style simplicty with a striking coat of paint. What is discouraging is that we know that when the time comes to buy a home, we’ll have only a few affordable options. I just don’t want to be in a development off the interstate that greets you with flags and signs that say, “Homes from the 120’s!” and are mandated to have one of the following words in their nature-inspired name: Glen, Brook, Plantation, Mill, or Run. I have not been able to find a satisfactory answer to this question: Why aren’t new subdivisions reflecting the diverse interests and tastes of prospective buyers? Why only beige houses that are a cartoonish mish-mash of traditional styles!? I took this question to a local builder recently. I had been working on a web site to promote a five-flat condo development he is doing in the Old West Austin/Clarksville area. He acknowledged that there is a demand for change and even pointed to a few New Urbanist successes (are there any NU failures?). But from a purely financial standpoint, it still makes sense for him to continue with the CSD (conventional suburban development) approach. “The reality is that the only people doing cool stuff either have a partial subsidy from a federal or local program, or have a special interest in urban design and architecture,” he said bluntly. I’m still not entirely convinced. The fact is, there is a market for something better. If there is a problem with New Urbanism projects, it’s that because they are enormously popular, market forces drive up prices and they are often out of reach to many of the people who want to live there. In fact, many arguments against New Urbanism and Smart Growth, usually from the cultural right, point to rising housing costs as a reason to continue with the status quo.
Speaking of the Right, a friend alerted me to an article called “It Takes a (Well-Planned Village)” in the latest issue of the National Review, a conservative magazine home to one of my favorite writers, Jonah Goldberg. This has to be the first time ever that New Urbanism has been appaluded in the conservative press. But what I thought was really interesting was that it helped me understand why we’re not seeing more mixed-use, urban infill, and good design. It is understood that in most communities, modernist, post WWII zoning codes essentially prevent anything other than what we’ve seen over the past fifty years. But what I didn’t know was how difficult it is for a banker to make a loan for a mixed-use project. The loan “can’t be sold into a secondary mortgage market– where the loans are bundled and repackaged as securities–since that market is itself single-use-oriented. Lending for mixed use means that the bank’s money can’t be rolled over, it’s tied up for the life of the loan.” This is true even with the knowledge that the loan would perform well.
As a side note, I tried to Keep Austin Weird and buy my copy of Nat’l Review at Book People. I went to the Politics and Current Issues section and couldn’t find it. All the usual mags were there–The Nation, Dissent, Atlantic Monthly, Mother Jones, etc. I even found some socialist periodicals and a few anarchist publications. But Austin’s naughty conservatives will have to go to Barnes and Noble to get other viewpoints. Book People might want to look for another motto, as “A Community Bound by Books” doesn’t make much sense.
July 16th, 2003
It’s hard to find enthusiastic supporters of Clear Channel, radio’s big bully. In fact, there are now sites exploring the question, “How many ways has Clear Channel sucked today”? Thanks to an increasingly deregulated industry, Clear Channel’s reach will probably only continue to grow. I imagine many music fans and concert-goers have wondered when they will be rewarded with some of the promised innovations as ownership rules are relaxed even further.
Enter “Instant Live,” a service Clear Channel launched in May that, gulp, actually seems pretty damn cool. Instant Live offers fans a chance to drop about $10 for a CD of the performance they just attended. There are no edits and the recording quality is said to be excellent. Chris Dahlen, a writer for Pitchfork, recently saw ex-Letters to Cleo vocalist, Kay Hanley, at a club in Boston. He documented “everything that happened during the set– every joke, cough or bum note that could be compared to the disc” and indeed the CD he took home reflected the concert in its entirety. As I read about his experience, I couldn’t help but to wonder what would happen if an artist dissed Clear Channel. Would the comments be recorded and not only available for fans after the show, but also at Best Buy, the exclusive distributor of Instant Live recordings? Dahlen took this question to Clear Channel Executive Vice-President, Steve Simon, who replied, “If an artist goes through the paces of doing this with us, they’re doing it because they want to sell discs. They’re doing it because we have a relationship with them, or have created a relationship… By the time you’ve been through all that I don’t think there’s much of a concern that the band’s going to then get up there and call you names.”
I see a lot of fun possiblities with Instant Live. Let’s say you’re in a band and will likely never be played on a Clear Channel radio station. In fact, you’re so bad that it would be a victory to be played on your college’s student-run radio. About half way through a Zwan concert you walk by the recording guys (they will be easy to spot with all of their equipment–no Sony mini-recorders here) and scream, “Monkey Spank Spicoli rules man! Go to www.monkeyspankspicoli.com to hear some funk-tastic MP3s!” Leveraging the power of Clear Channel and Best Buy, Monkey Spank Spicoli will then be catapaulted from obscurity to an up-and-coming buzz band, eventually broadcast on several of Clear Channel’s 1,200 radio stations.
July 14th, 2003
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