• Nada Surf

• Nada Surf

• Nada Surf

• Nada Surf

• Nada Surf

• Nada Surf

• Nada Surf

• Nada Surf

• Nada Surf

• Nada Surf

• Nada Surf

• Nada Surf

Mat Hayward shares great photos from Nada Surf’s intimate performance at the Triple Door, set up by Seattle radio station KEXP.

Today, a federal appeals court declared California’s ban on same-sex marriage unconstitutional, saying a state can’t revoke gay rights solely because a majority of its voters disapprove of homosexuality.

In a 2-1 ruling, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco said Proposition 8′s limitations on access to marriage took rights away from a vulnerable minority without benefiting parents, children or the marital institution.

“Proposition 8 served no purpose, and had no effect, other than to lessen the status and human dignity of gays and lesbians in California,” the court said.

For more, visit the San Francisco Chronicle.

No text accompanied the image, and no press release has been announced, but it seems as though they’re dropping hints that the creation of the long-awaited follow-ups to 2010′s Plastic Beach and The Fall is underway. (via Filter)

• Canon Blue

• Canon Blue

• Canon Blue

• Canon Blue

• Canon Blue

• Canon Blue

• Canon Blue

• Canon Blue

• Canon Blue

• Canon Blue

• Canon Blue

• Canon Blue

A gorgeous set of photos of Canon Blue’s LA show by Chad Elder.

• Talib Kweli

• Talib Kweli

• Talib Kweli

• Talib Kweli

• Talib Kweli

• Talib Kweli

• Talib Kweli

• Talib Kweli

Long-time Verbicide contributor Shahab Zargari shares great shots from Talib Kweli‘s performance at Insert Coins in Las Vegas.

There is contrasting tension between the two movies. In Clouzot’s movie, the trucks move at a snail’s pace with every bump in the road adding tension, whereas in Speed, Annie Porter (Sandra Bullock) barrels down the highway, unable to stop or even slow the bus.

Anyone would be crazy to board that bus in Speed or drive those trucks in The Wages of Fear, but the motivations are fairly well fleshed out in both movies. Stuck without money, Mario must take the risk because he has no other option. The movie makes a strong comment on the insignificance of the worker when compared with the great demand for oil.

Although there are no subtitles for this YouTube clip, this scene is very important. Soaked in oil, Charles Vanel’s character, M. Jo, nearly drowns in a pool of crude. Rather than risking the truck getting stuck in the mud — and therefore stopping the shipment of nitroglycerin to the oil field — Montand closes his eyes and literally runs over Vanel’s character. Oil is significant — human life is not.

In Speed, Reeves’ Officer Traven breaks every rule in the book, and is advised by his best friend on the police force that his luck will run out one day. Like the bus plowing through everything in its path, Traven is a force of nature, and the intense action and drama of the plot draws him toward Annie Porter — regardless of the fact that they have nothing in common and barely talk. Listen to Keanu describe their relationship off-screen…

What the fuck is he talking about? Springtime? Twice during the movie, Traven and Porter talk about how relationships borne under intense stress never work, but finally they agree that sex will suffice. Traven didn’t have to jump on that bus, but he felt compelled to, and his love of action and adrenaline brought him to fall for Porter when they both are against the odds. Speed is meant to be fun, but it also touches on what compels cops to do their jobs: they are all adrenaline junkies.

Speed is better than you remember it. The script is crap, but the idea is novel. Also, it’s directed by cinematographer Jan De Bont and has a surprisingly good look. The Wages of Fear, however,is a classic that must be seen — with or without Keanu and Sandra.

• Fujiya and Miyagi

  Photos by Suzi Pratt.

• Fujiya and Miyagi

  Photos by Suzi Pratt.

• Fujiya and Miyagi

  Photos by Suzi Pratt.

• Fujiya and Miyagi

  Photos by Suzi Pratt.

• Fujiya and Miyagi

  Photos by Suzi Pratt.

• Fujiya and Miyagi

  Photos by Suzi Pratt.

• Fujiya and Miyagi

  Photos by Suzi Pratt.

Check out Suzi Pratt’s great photos from Fujiya & Miyagi’s performance in Seattle.

This “snowpocalypse” left around 300,000 people without power, and I was one of them. The power at my apartment was out for six days.

Many nights were too cold to sleep. My partner and I survived by standing on opposite sides of the kitchen counter, surrounded by candles, playing highly competitive games of Hello Kitty Uno. For warmth, we boiled water for hot tea on the porch using our camping stove, and drank cheap red wine. For musical entertainment, we dug our beat-up boom box out of the closet, attached some tin foil to the antenna, inserted some D batteries, and took a journey through modern radio.

When I was young, I deified radio DJs, sitting on my floor all night moving the dial from station to station, occasionally calling in to win prizes, even using blank tapes to make mixes of my favorite songs.

Nowadays, like most people, I simply don’t listen to the radio as much as I used to. I’m preoccupied with surfing the internet, streaming Netflix, playing XBox, and listening to my MP3 player. When I’m in the car I plug in my iPod or I listen to the local jazz station. It’s just the way things have progressed. I hardly even know what radio stations exist, let alone which one I should be listening to.

Sitting there, playing cards in the candlelight night after night, I took an extremely random — yet delightfully fun — journey through Seattle/Olympia radio. I spent a lot of time listening to the shows on 89.3 KAOS, The Evergreen State College’s radio station. I especially enjoyed “Excuse All the Blood” with Seamus O’Reilly, “Campfire Island” with Frank Barber, and “One Chord to Another,” in which a gal named Melissa was filling in for Johnny Koch. I didn’t stop there, though. I bounced around to the classic rock, light music, cheesy pop, classical, and hip-hop stations as well. I even listened to some monastic chants and opera.

Here’s a big list of the songs that made me dance, smile, laugh, cringe, and reminisce in the darkness. If it was legal I’d make you a set of mixtapes. It’s not, so I’ll just share a list.

Prince – “Purple Rain”
Des Ark – “It’s Only A Bargain If You Want It”
Cyndi Lauper – “True Colors”
George Michael – “Faith”
Meat Loaf – “I’d Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That)”
Fugazi – “Epic Problem”
Nicki Minaj – “Super Bass”
Sleater-Kinney – “Taking Me Home”
Simple Minds – “Don’t You (Forget About Me)”
Two hours of awesome metal and thrash on “Excuse All the Blood”
Elton John – “I’m Still Standing”
Unrest – “Foxy Playground”
The Little Willies – “Lovesick Blues”
Kelly Clarkson – “Stronger”
Thao & Mirah – “Squareneck”
Pitbull featuring Ne-Yo – “Tonight”
New Order – “True Faith”
fIREHOSE – “Things Could Turn Around”
Peter Gabriel – “In Your Eyes”
Free – “All Right Now”
LAKE – “Sing 99 & 90”
Katy Perry – “The One that Got Away”
Smoking Popes – “Writing A Letter”
KT Tunstall – “Suddenly I See”
Kool & the Gang – “Fresh”
J. Geils Band – “Love Stinks”
The Eagles – “Already Gone”
Semisonic – “Closing Time”
The Raincoats – “Lola”
Dexy’s Midnight Runners – “Come On Eileen”
Led Zeppelin – “Kashmir”
The Ritchie Family – “The Best Disco in Town”
Kool & the Gang – “Let’s Groove”
Gloria Estefan & The Miami Sound Machine – “Rhythm Is Gonna Get You”
Madonna – “Vogue”
Soul City Symphony – “The Hustle”
Lady Gaga – “Poker Face”
Alice in Chains – “A Looking in View”
Rhianna – “We Found Love”
Gym Class Heroes – “Stereo Hearts”
Mecca Normal – “Man Thinks Woman”
Cyndi Lauper – “Time After Time”
Dr. Hook – “Sexy Eyes”
Etta James – “At Last”
Adele – “Set Fire To The Rain”
Smashing Pumpkins – “Today”
Snoop Dogg & Wiz Khalifa – “Young, Wild & Free”
Ani DiFranco – “Which Side Are You On?”
Guided By Voices – “Doughnut For a Snowman”
The Cure – “Let’s Go To Bed (Live)”
Haddaway – “What Is Love”
Vivian Girls – “Dance If You Wanna”
Lionel Richie – “Dancing on the Ceiling”
The Black Keys – “Lonely Boy”
Madonna – “Like a Prayer“

Little known and inconspicuous, Brooklyn venue 285 Kent is a tiny warehouse riddled with graffiti. It is a dark, hot, and, yes, dirty space where the beer and mixed drinks appear to be store-bought. Oddly enough, all of these things make it one of the Williamsburg neighborhood’s most interesting and enjoyable venues — assuming you love being tightly sandwiched between bespectacled, skinny jeans-wearing music junkies…and I assume you do.

On Saturday, January 21st, the warehouse became home to the polyrhythmic, noise jam experts, Akron/Family, who took to the stage after openers Dustin Wong and Bad Weather California, both of whom put on an impressive show.

They enticed the frothing and surging all ages crowd with bombardment of experimental textures and sounds before moving into the opening song, “Gravely Mountains of the Moon.” With no end, but rather a heavily reverberating progression they rolled into one of their more well known tracks, “River,” which pleased fans immensely, who screamed along with them. “River” came to its signature climax and erupted with an onslaught of energy from both artists and fans, who jumped in time with Dana Janessen’s percussionary pyrotechnics.

One of the most incredible — if not most heart-warming — moments of their insane performance was the elaborate and sprawling version of “Island.” The track is from their new album, S/T II: The Cosmic Birth of and Journey of Shinju TNT, and it took the audience to another place. Seaton and Olinsky prepped the audience for the mesmerizing journey with witty and sassy dance instructions. Putting their “asses out,” as Seaton said, and with no shame at all, they encouraged fans to throw one finger up in the air. With hands held high, the completely mesmerized group of concertgoers swayed gently from side to side. From there, the harmony grew and the bass swelled into a pulsating and beautifully explosive anthem to an island somewhere far away. The crowd fell silent for the first time all night, entranced in the slow progression and climax of the song. It was an unexpected but happily welcomed change from the combustible web of noise that preceded it.

That moment of powerful emotion was quickly countered by the band’s need for noise, and as the night progressed, so did the chaos. Between jumping and moshing fans came improvisational chord progressions, kaleidoscopic sounds, and the erratic burst of song. After endless prompting from their frenzied listeners, the band finally caved and produced a hypnotizing rendition of “Say What You Want To.”

In signature Akron/Family style, the trio moved between moments of quiet introspection to elongated and distracted waves of distorted sound. As things began to come to a close, Bad Weather California members slowly began to join in the party, making their way both onstage and into the pit of hyped-up fans. As sweat dripped from beards and articles of clothing were ripped apart, Seaton and Olinsky ran their microphones through mixers creating an ambient thunderstorm of sound. They franticly scratched guitar notes and manipulated every chord with pedals and noisemakers into echoing waves.

They made their way off stage and in typical concert fashion, the crowd refused to leave. They sang a random assortment of lyrics from various songs and cheered with hopeful excitement for just a little bit more. Never ones to leave fans unhappy, the group made their way back onstage for an encore — and as fans sang the refrain to “There’s So Man Colors,” it was clear that these Colorado natives have a second home in Brooklyn. They ended with “Light Emerges” and a deep admiration for the crowd that had provided the shot of adrenaline for the show.

Verbicide Free Download: Click here to download “Silly Bears” by Akron/Family

I was not girly growing up, and could probably count the total numbers of dolls I ever owned on one hand, but I have never wanted anything more for Christmas than I wanted an American Girl doll in 1997. It was an infatuation. I knew the catalog front to back: there are some spreads I can recall from memory even now, 14 years later (Molly’s school set! Kirsten’s Christmas kit!). Back then — operating as “Pleasant Company Inc.” — American Girl Inc. sold five models of these historical dolls in the late ’90s, three of which were originals that had been around since the company’s inception in 1986: Felicity, Kirsten, Addy, Samantha, and Molly. Each girl possessed her own set of honorable “American” traits, and each came from an exciting, romantic period of American history.

In 1998 the company also sold “My American Girls,” modern-day dolls that resembled you, but I didn’t know a single girl in the third grade who decided to go for a doll without a backstory.  In the ’90s there was a genre of historical fiction for kids dedicated to the pioneers who traveled West in the 1800s (true story, look it up), and I was obsessed with it. There was something epic about moving across the entire country at a glacial pace that thrilled me, I guess. Kirsten Larson, this 10-year-old girl whose Swedish family settled in Minnesota in the 1850s, the star of the Meet Kirsten books, was “my American girl” from the beginning.

I keep saying “girl” and not “doll” because these were not the kind of dolls intended to instill in girls some sort of maternal trait. Each American Girl had her own book series, with titles like Meet X, X and The Holiday She Celebrates, X Faces a Big Life Thing, etc. In order to appreciate the dolls, you needed to have read the books: the dolls are essentially statues — not just of their characters, but of the whole era their characters represent. So when Christmas ’97 came around, I had read all of Kirsten’s books and knew her whole story, and so I needed the Kirsten doll to seal the deal, to make her character (and all of the pioneers involved in the crossing) tangible and real.

Sure enough, when Christmas morning came I opened a box with Kirsten (“a brave, steadfast girl of the Frontier,” according to the catalogue) inside. There she was, in the (plastic) flesh, dressed in her petticoat and her blue apron, her shiny blonde hair styled in looped-up braids. For my sister, my parents chose Felicity, whose resume listed adjectives like  ”spunky,” “brave,” and “independent-minded.” Felicity represented the Revolutionary War era.

That is what these dolls did well: represented, and introduced girls to, history. My sister, who never read books, slowly developed an interest in this period of American history, brought on by a curiosity of Felicity’s life. She too wanted to be familiar with the era in which Felicity lived. To keep up with my sister I had to cultivate an interest in Colonial America as well, so that year, to quench our sudden fascination, my parents took us to Old Williamsburg for a long weekend (Minnesota was too far away, not enough of a tourist spot). Clari brought Felicity, and I brought Kirsten along for the ride. After all, it was their country’s history, too.

Today, when you go to American Girl Inc.’s website, their mission statement states that “American Girl [dolls] show girls of today that they can do great things if they believe in themselves and each other.” There is no history aspect mentioned. The company’s PR changed its tune after receiving a lot of criticism in the ’90s by feminist groups who claimed that, by selling dolls in dresses, the company was doing nothing to actually empower young females. It isn’t the same anymore, but in 1997 when I scoured their catalogues, every single doll you could order came clad in a pretty dress.

In response, the company published a line of self-help books, in which the company taught American girls about hygiene, ettiquete, and how to deal with every kind of feeling. American Girls, Inc. began to focus more on making sure their company was empowering girls socially, rather than focusing on the education through which girls could also feel empowered.

The flagship American Girl Store opened in Chicago in 1998. Before that, dolls were mailorder only. In Chicago for the first time over New Years, I went, not the least bit ironically, to check the place out. The store is awesome: huge, colorful, and way better than the Barbie house in the Toys “R” Us Union Square. But I was almost immediately bummed out when I noticed the majority of my fellow morning shoppers were young girls huddled around the “My American Girl” kiosk, where they were all browsing for dolls that resembled themselves.

“But I need a green eyed one! And it needs to have brown curly hair,” I heard a girl who looked to be about 11 explaining anxiously to her mom. “They only have green eyes and straight. And it comes with a journal, yeah?”

I must have looked totally depressed by what I was eavesdropping, because that’s about the time when the sales associate approached me.

“Are you having any trouble? You’re gonna have to wait in line to order one of these,” I was told as she motioned towards the My American Girl kiosk we stood near. “But if you want one of those historical ones over there, it isn’t much of a wait.”

“Are people just, like, not into them anymore? Like Kirsten and them?” I asked, almost wanting to cry.

The saleswoman raised an eyebrow at me. She wasn’t very sweet. “Rarely, a lot of collectors though. ‘Old’ isn’t ‘cool’ anymore. You think these girls give a crap about the old girls?”

Something came to mind to say something about history not being old, and history being more of a perpetual thing you can still learn from, and that history, like stories, cannot get old. But the sales associate totally didn’t care — she was just here to sell this shit, so I kept my mouth shut.

It’s 2012 and all those girls have YouTube accounts where they record themselves talking and I should have known. American Girl History is dead.

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Christina Drill is from Fair Lawn, New Jersey and currently writes and teaches in Panama City, Panama. Follow her on Twitter! (@stidrill.)