End of Silence

Despite a nagging head cold and having spent the day in New Braunfels at the last day of Wurstfest (a family tradition), I headed down to the Compound on East Fourth to check out The Evens for their first Austin appearance. The Evens are Ian MacKaye of Fugazi and Minor Threat fame and Amy Farina. Farina plays drums and sings while MacKaye plays a Danelectro baritone guitar and sings.

I’d never been to the venue and I’m not even sure if it’s going to continue to host live music. MacKaye mentioned that someone lives on the property and the band is known for playing non-traditional rock venues like basements of libraries and churches. They played a gallery in Dallas the night before. It was essentially a yard between several corrugated metal structures. The weather was perfect, something MacKaye commented on several times.

This set list isn’t in the order played (and I may have missed some), but it’s pretty close. They played “Cut From the Cloth”, “Everybody Knows”, “Cache Is Empty”, “Eventually” and “Dinner with the President” from Get Evens. There were several songs from the first record including “Shelter Two”, “All These Governors”, “Sara Lee”, “Mt. Pleasant Isn’t”, “Blessed Not Lucky”, “On the Face of It”, and “You Won’t Feel A Thing”.

Anyone who’s familiar with MacKaye won’t be surprised that the evening was politically charged. The stripped down arrangements of the songs lent themselves to showcasing the message. MacKaye enlisted the audience to sing along during “Mt. Pleasant Isn’t” and “You Won’t Feel a Thing”. The whole event had a feel of a campfire sing-along crossed with a protest sit-in; a bit cliched perhaps, but given the current state of things, not entirely unwarranted. In introducing one song, MacKaye likened the changes in DC to periodic storms, a storm comes in, does some damage and then people clean up and rebuild. To him, the current administration is a particularly nasty storm. Perhaps the 100 or so people in attendance were looking for a respite from the storm and hopefully got what they were looking for. There’s going to be a lot of clean up work to do.

I wrote about my neighbors, Ignite Learning, back in March of 2006. Well, they’re back in the news this week.

The inspector general of the Department of Education has said he will examine whether federal money was inappropriately used by three states to buy educational products from a company owned by Neil Bush, the president’s brother.

John P. Higgins Jr., the inspector general, said he would review the matter after a group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, detailed at least $1 million in spending from the No Child Left Behind program by school districts in Texas, Florida and Nevada to buy products made by Mr. Bush’s company, Ignite Learning of Austin, Tex. Mr. Higgins stated his plans in a letter to the group sent last week.

Members of the group and other critics in Texas contend that school districts are buying Ignite’s signature product, the Curriculum on Wheels, because of political considerations. The product, they said, does not meet standards for financing under the No Child Left Behind Act, which allocates federal money to help students raise their achievement levels, particularly in elementary school reading.

The Bush administration doing something for political reasons or family considerations? Shocking.

h/t AmericaBlog