Month: July 2007

Ga Ga for the Last Next Big Thing

In 1976, Lester Bangs greeted the Rolling Stones minor album Black and Blue with a sense ironic relief. “They really don’t matter or stand for anything, ” he wrote, “which is certainly lucky for both them and us. I mean, it was a heavy weight to carry for all concerned. This is the first meaningless Stones album, and thank god!” Slightly less witheringly (but only just so), The Onion’s Noel Murray writes of Spoon’s latest long player, “For those who thought Spoon’s one-two punch of Girls Can Tell and Kill The Moonlight marked the group as a contender for the ‘Best American Band Of The ’00s’ label, Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga may be a disappointment. It’s not as bad as all that. But it doesn’t sound like the Next Great Statement from a band that has been making instant classics since 1999’s Series of Sneaks. But, now that I […]

Portrait of a Charming Man

It’s hardly unusual to find a glowing hagiography of a corporate CEO in the pages of a major newspaper. I’m not, per se, opposed to feting J.W. Marriott. If you can get past the creepy fact that he’s a high elder of the Mormon church, he’s just a charming old man who values family, tells hokey jokes and makes a point of being personally courteous to his workers. However, when the Washington Post goes so far as to twist the words of a leader of the hotel employees union to make the CEO of one of the most viciously anti-union companies in the country sound like a good boss, well, that’s when I get mad. The Marriott corporation runs an anti-union operation as pervasive and sophisticated as Wal-Mart’s. First-line managers are trained to call the corporation’s central union-busting office at the slightest sign of discontent. Corporate’s union busters fly in […]