Youth art programs see decreased summer funding
Dried up grass. Dried up funds. These are the givens as the summer months approach in Gainesville, and for William Eyerly, this is both unfortunate and totally expected.
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Dried up grass. Dried up funds. These are the givens as the summer months approach in Gainesville, and for William Eyerly, this is both unfortunate and totally expected.
With soggy weather all around, no TV to watch football on and no late-week finals to wait out, Chyanne gathered her belongings and went home earlier than most in Gainesville.
The UF gymnastics team and about two dozen aspiring 2020 Olympians stocked local food banks Sunday with enough canned goods to outweigh a handful of 5-year-olds.
About 500 people collectively took a giant step - and thousands of sweaty smaller ones - Sunday for those who have yet to take their first.
The Santa Fe College Teaching Zoo opened its haunted home to more than 5,000 people for an afternoon of fairy tales and furry tails Saturday for its 15th annual Boo at the Zoo.
Students applying for credit could soon hear a familiar motto: 21 means 21.
Dale Ginder is 7 years old. He is from Gainesville. He loves his Gators.
Noisy, surging guitars; octopus-arm polyrhythms; Bono hollering on like a hopped-up Pentecostal preacher; spectacularly transparent declarations of purpose whooped in flailing whoa-oh frenzy. These are the first sounds of "No Line On the Horizon," U2's new album, and they combine to say what, with this band, goes without saying: This is a statement.
Aside from an obvious flair for album titling (makes you want to shout, "'Ray Guns' are now, bitch!" doesn't it?), vocalist Inara George and soundboard extraordinaire Greg Kurstin also have a way with swinging '60s pop music set to fantastically modernized, yet still retro, production. Does this make sense? If not, think of "Ray Guns" as the aural equivalent to Disney's Tomorrowland - both create a future that will never exist by looking to tail-finned Cadillacs and moon landings as points of reference. This record awaits the mythical Year 2000, and in so doing, delivers groovy neo-psychedelia ("Ray Gun"), doo-wop era Motown complete with seductress spoken word bits ("Baby"), and breathy cocktail lounge balladeering ("Meteor"), all in a sleek electronic shell. "Diamond Dave," George's irresistible tribute to the great David Lee Roth, is not only the most catchy song here, but the only appropriate evidence by which to date this offering. It's Van Halen hero worship dressed in spacey beats and a plat-blond 'do, and as such, cooler than Judy Jetson in a discotheque.
If the election of President Barack Obama was a big can't-we-all-just-get-along inquiry to the good people of America, then "Gutter Tactics" is a scathing, unqualified "Hell no!" Or "not yet," anyway. Atop corrosive grooves tangled in haywire electronic beats, this Garden State duo spits tales of torture, war, civil rights abuses and the like, exposing every closeted sin, protesting all the wrongs that still need be righted. "Armed with Krylon" and "Who Medgar Evers Was" make up a suite of continuously devolving ambient rap that taps a well of run-for-your-life paranoia. The latter track works off a big, beefy drumbeat, spiraling feedback and lyrics about assassination. Indeed, this is dark stuff that takes nerve to slog through, and that's speaking nothing of the introductory monologue - a caustic, hell, fire and brimstone throwdown from the Rev. Wright himself. Or as Dalek likes to call it, "feel-good music."
Emil Svanängen is moving on up, literally. Having recorded his first album on a laptop microphone and CD-Rs in his mother's cellar, the Swedish popsmith now makes a big enough name for himself to afford real studio equipment, a high-end computer, and presumably, his own home. In keeping with the little-guy theme, "Dear John" comes off like techno-fied Belle and Sebastian - Svanängen sings in breathless, hushed tones, as if trying to carry on a conversation in a library after running a marathon. Most of these songs flirt with electronic chamber pop, veering at alternate forks into "Phantom of the Opera"-esque theatrics ("Harm") and somber, Postal Service dance tunes ("Summers," which would fit snuggly on "Give Up"). If there's a turnoff, it's that a lot of these tracks are too prettily twee for their own good, like a good-looking guy who never makes the first move. And winds up living in his parents' basement.
Trends always expose themselves on the third album. The Look only buys you so much time. Catchy singles only take you so far. By album three, you're either the White Stripes or you're Jet. Or, you're Franz Ferdinand, stuck in that untenable middle ground - milking the same-song formula for all it's worth, and in turn, fielding diminishing returns. So it goes, Tonight's "Ulysses" takes on "Do You Want To," which was take-two on "Take Me Out." That's a lot of "takes" for one sentence, not so many for three and a half years - the time between albums. And if this seems like a momentum killer, well, it is. So too are these songs - "Turn It On" and "Live Alone." They're all the same, really: slinky little danceable groove rockers that have three things in common. All catchy, all disposable, all written by a band destined to be the answer to a trivia question.
A.C. Newman is a silent killer. Left to his own devices, the New Pornographers' evil genius retreats from hook-a-second power pop to fiddle around with a less potent arsenal - off-kilter rhythms, tuneless guitar riffs, minor-key progressions. They're all here in one form or another, though working only as masking agents, attempting in vain to veil Newman's intoxicating melodies. Preferring slow burn to out-and-out explosion, "There Are Maybe Ten or Twelve" and "Prophets" qualify as growers by Newman standards, but in time each reveals itself as seductively charming as "Mass Romantic" or "Mutiny, I Promise You." "Changeling," on the other hand, is a throwback in this regard. Thriving on a big, obvious, harmony-laced chorus, it's further proof that Newman strikes two ways - in his own words, "Like A Hitman, Like A Dancer."
For whatever reason, "40 is the new 30" doesn't necessarily hold in the world of rock 'n roll. Seems the Glimmer Twins have so wrecked all notions of aging gracefully that success in AARP terms simply means not embarrassing oneself. Naturally, the Boss holds to a higher standard - bosses always do - and so "Working on a Dream" plays like another of Springsteen's "best album since…" candidates. Of course, it's not, because it's like the last handful of great songs about gritty underdogs and the power of love, E Street themes through and through. "Life Itself" and the Beach Boys nod "This Life" feels like Asbury Park, 1975, but the goosebumps stuff is in "Last Carnival," a campfire hymn about picking up early and moving on, no matter the circumstance. It's a potent reminder from an ageless guy who still knows best: we gotta get out while we're young.
"Blood Bank"? More like bloodletting - well, the last song anyway. The first three on this four-track hold-me-over from indie-folk songsmith Justin Vernon ebb and flow with all the woodsy beauty of an icy stream or a staggering moose. Mr. Bon Iver plays sparsely arranged acoustic pop that lives and dies on lyrical content and vocal delivery. In the case of the title track and "Beach Baby," an achingly fragile voice spins off melodic narrative flush with images that come alive in the depth of their detail. "Babys," likewise, continues the theme with cappella passages, chopsticks piano, and a warm refrain - "Summer comes to multiply." This is throw-another-log-on music for snow-ins, chamomile tea and photo albums, except for the unholy Dylan-Daft Punk union of "Woods," which takes a leak on your crackling fire and sends you running for a snow shovel and icepick.
Worlds collide in Castle Donington, England. Devo grows up a punk band; disco hones its chops at CBGB; black leather sprouts sequins. Late of the Pier wears the side effects. A four-piece from the British Isles, the young new wave act shows off all manner of mishmashed influences, piecing together a sound that filters the '80s' choice bits through a laptop, distorts them to hell and discards everything else. This cut-and-paste style makes room for swirling synths, Nintendo-bleep percussion, even Sabbath-lite riff rock ("Heartbeat"). But these secondary players all feed off the band's bread and butter: the almighty groove, which achieves a heightened state in the form of the menacing electro-blast called "Whitesnake." It's a song that unlocks imaginative, other-dimension scenarios - two-steppers take over Studio 54; Madge learns guitar; hipsters dance to power chords.
Glasvegas takes its name from hometown Glasgow and Sin City, which means that the Scottish quartet has an uncanny knack for haphazardly conjoining words and musical trends. To the surprise of no one, the NME crowd has anointed these Clash look-alikes London's latest and greatest craze du jour as This Month's Beatles manage a sound that pillages from almost every English musical movement of the last three decades. Shoegaze grandeur? Check. Ringing Edge-style guitars? Check. The Smiths' melodrama? Oh yeah, it's there -- most shamelessly in the form of "Lonesome Swan," a hackneyed rip of "I Know It's Over" with a guitar line set to the latter song's "Then why are you on your own tonight?" melody. Particularly grotesque is the Joe Strummer knock-off "Stabbed" that repeats ad nauseam, "I'm gonna get stabbed."
The beat-challenged white man's attempt to appeal to please cool urban people, the remix album already exists as something of a superfluous curiosity, but gains an added aura of "WTF?" whenever someone as supremely talented as Thom Yorke indulges in its futile pursuits. It is safe to say that each and every one of these nine edits resurfaces inferior to its predecessor, but The Bug's adaptation of "Harrowdown Hill" takes the butcher-job crown as it (for lack of a better term) erases the track's devastating electric guitar coda. Elsewhere, Various' "Analyse" rendition kills any sense of rhythm with stuttering drum machine percussion and layers of reverb. Yorke includes two versions of "Black Swan," which would seem laughably unjustified if not for the chorus's eloquent summation of the remix: "This is f----d up/ f----d up."
You may think to yourself, "No. Anderson Cooper and Animal Collective have nothing in common." You would be mistaken.
If you've ever been to a wake, you know that death cleans up real nice - velvet casket, crisp new suit, lots of pretty flowers. It's this bizarre phenomenon, the union of darkness and beauty, that Antony takes to haunting extremes with "The Crying Light," a smiling cadaver of an album that opens with the line "Her eyes are underneath the ground" and only gets more frightening from there.