Brett Brownell is the Multimedia Producer at Mother Jones, and has visited all 50 states. He also helped launch MSNBC's Up with Chris Hayes as a video and web producer, served as new media director for the employee rights organization Workplace Fairness, and founded the annual global photography event Worldwide Moment in 2007. He is a graduate of the University of Southern California's School of Cinema-T.V. and grew up in Arlington, Texas.
You know how when you get a song stuck in your head, you're not always sure how it burrowed its way in there? Well, people who attended The National's May 5 performance at New York's MoMA PS1 museum can be pretty damned sure. Over a six-hour period, the band played "Sorrow," off its 2010 release, High Violet, 105 times in a row.
The special performance, aptly dubbed "A Lot of Sorrow," was technically a work created by the Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson as part of his ongoing "explorations into the potential of repetitive performance to produce sculptural presence within sound."
The following clip, supposedly starting around 2 hours and 40 minutes into the show, includes three of the repetitions.
During a Reddit AMA three days later, a band member reflected:
Actually as the hours went on I think we all realized that this experience was something special for us—there was a weird hypnotic resonance and spirituality to repeating the song over and over. We almost didn't want to stop and we learned something about our capacity for endurance and the song opened up in surprising ways...By the end it didn't feel like we were playing it anymore. We know the idea seemed pretentious in some way, but Ragnar has this mix of humor and sadness that feels quite similar to what our songs about...We're very glad to have done it.
This week, The National, follows up its hypnotic performance with the release of Trouble Will Find Me, their sixth studio album, on the 4AD label.
Trouble Will Find Me
Trouble... is replete with the usual mix of sorrow, longing, depression, and nearly infrasonic tone of singer Matt Berninger's voice that fans of The National have come to know and love. But some of the tracks still provide you with the opportunity to rock out, lest you need a break from your whimpering.
For example, there's "Sea of Love," the video of which the band premiered during its AMA. A fan had asked, "What is your guys' favourite music video?" Whereupon the band replied, craftily, "Actually there's one video that we all really love, so we made this homage." They revealed the link to the new video. And the sleuthing promptly began for the original.
A single-take shot in a sparse, nondescript room, with nothing but a dangling microphone, air-conditioning unit, and boy wandering in from off-screen: It didn't look familiar.
Nor should it. It mimics a video for a song first released in 1995—in Russia—by Soviet-era punk band Zvuki Mu. The song title, "Grubiy Zakat," means "Rough Sunset." Check it out:
Bryce Dessner, who plays guitar for The National, told PRI's The World that he "fell in love with it immediately" when he first saw the video on YouTube. "We have to do something like this," he told his bandmates.
They reached out to Zvuki Mu, but were unable to track down any of its members. Obviously, that didn't deter them from making their own version.
Next up for The National: a vinyl version of their six-hour MoMA performance for charity. Seriously.
If the new album, epic vinyl repetition party, and homage to a Soviet video aren't enough for you, you can get more of The National in movie form. Singer Matt Berninger's brother Tom was brought on tour as a roadie and ended up making a haphazard documentary about the band called Mistaken for Strangers. If you can make it to Australia by June, you can catch the next screening at the Sydney Film Festival. I'll leave you with the trailer.
Watch: Public defenders and legal advocates discuss ways to solve the nation's public defense crisis, 50 years after the Gideon decision:
In January 1962, a man sitting in a Florida prison cell scrawled a note to the United States Supreme Court. He'd been charged with breaking into a pool hall, stealing some Cokes, beer, and change, and was handed a five-year sentence after he represented himself because he couldn't pay for a lawyer. Clarence Earl Gideon's penciled message eventually led to the high court's historic 1963 Gideon v. Wainwright ruling, reaffirming the right to a criminal defense and requiring states to provide a defense attorney to those who can't afford one.
Fifty years after the ruling, many legal advocatescontend that the justice system is still failing the poor. Last week, the Supreme Court disappointed reformers when it refused to rule on a case involving a Louisiana man serving a life sentence after waiting five years in jail while the state came up with money to pay his court-appointed lawyer. (The federal system for defending the poor is relatively well resourced, though it's also struggling with budget cuts. Several of the attorneys defending Boston bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev face up to three weeks of sequester-mandated furloughs later this year.)
Just how bad is the state of public defense in America? The charts below detail some of the biggest challenges plaguing the system.
Mother Jones' cover story for May/June 2013, "Schizophrenic. Killer. My Cousin.", features a collection of eerie, yet beautiful photographs of abandoned mental hospitals. They're the work of Jeremy Harris, a Brooklyn photographer who began sneaking into these buildings in 2005. In this video Jeremy explains the project and shows off some of the hospital artifacts he's collected along the way.
Note: the video production was originally a co-production between Mother Jones and Tumblr's Storyboard. But following the interview, Tumblr announced it was closing Storyboard.
We're told that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. For many of us, it's also the most rushed. Convenience foods like frozen waffles, toaster pastries, and cereal are quick, comforting, and often nostalgic. (I will always associate Lucky Charms with Girl Scout camping trips.) But how healthy are they? We decided to find out:
Our analysis of the nutritional labels yielded some surprises. For example: Quaker apple walnut oatmeal contained more sugar (22 grams) than a S'mores Pop Tart (19 grams).
For each category, we tried to choose at least one product whose packaging suggested it was a healthy alternative to traditional breakfast convenience foods. The comparisons were sometimes surprising. For example: Eggo's "nutrigrain" waffle had more sugar than its buttermilk version. Nutritionally speaking, the Nature's Path Wildberry Acai toaster pastry was almost identical to the S'mores Pop Tart—the only differences were that the Wildberry Acai pastry contained slightly more calories and saturated fat, and only one gram less sugar, than the S'mores version.
Here's a comparison of the nutritional labels of each product by category:
On Tuesday, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell declined to respond to questions from reporters about his campaign's plans for attacking Ashley Judd, as revealed in a report by MoJo's David Corn. Instead McConnell simply repeated accusations about a wiretapping conspiracy. Via the Washington Post, watch:
It was "quite a Nixonian move," a deadpan McConnell said. "This is what you get from the political left in America these days."
As we reported on Tuesday, Mother Jones was not involved in the making of the tape; after obtaining it, we published a story on its contents due to their obvious newsworthiness. It is our understanding that the tape was not the product of a Watergate-style bugging operation. Read the full report here.
