Adam Sandler has confessed that becoming a father has taken its toll on his sex drive.
“The Wedding Singer†star, who is father to three-year-old Sadie and second daughter Sunny, born last November, revealed he did not think about getting between the sheets upon seeing his wife Jacqueline Samantha Titone naked.
“I don”t see women as sexual [...]
Posts Tagged ‘adam’
Adam Sandler says fatherhood has ruined his sex drive
July 25th, 2009 |
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‘Now I’ve experienced every age’
July 24th, 2009 |
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‘In old age you can close your eyes and summon your youth at will. As a writer it puts one at a distinct advantage’
‘The idea that memory is linear,” says Penelope Lively, crisply, “is nonsense. What we have in our heads is a collection of frames. As to time itself – can it be linear when all these snatches of other presents exist at once in your mind? A very elusive and tricky concept, time.”
It’s the concept that has provided the backcloth to which Lively has stitched the plots of her novels for the past 40 years, and which has driven her to scale the heights of both children’s and adults’ fiction (she remains the only author to have won both the Carnegie medal and the Booker prize). It’s the disjunction between time and memory that intrigues her; the irreconcilability of the calendar’s steady forward march with the extempore jumble of shards and fragments that we carry around in our memories, encapsulated in the heroine of her 1987 novel Moon Tiger, who declares from her deathbed: “There is no chronology inside my head.” Now 76, Lively finds that her own experience of ageing has deepened rather than resolved the paradox. “In old age, you realise that while you’re divided from your youth by decades, you can close your eyes and summon it at will,” she says. “As a writer it puts one at a distinct advantage. When writing Moon Tiger from the point of view of an old woman, I kept worrying: would she really think like this? Now I’ve experienced every age, and can fish back.”
It’s an advantage she exploits to the full in her 16th novel for adults, Family Album. Published next month, it is a sophisticated investigation into the effects of time’s passage and the reliability of memory presented in the guise of a minor-key domestic drama. Half a century of sprawling family life is dished out via the kaleidoscopic, atemporal accounts of the nine inhabitants of a gently disintegrating Victorian villa. The central mystery, which is scarcely a mystery at all, is revealed piecemeal, with no recognised moment of denouement: the novel’s real revelation is that our individual histories bear only a passing relationship to those of the people who have lived alongside us.
When considering Lively’s own life, however, it’s a struggle to tease it apart from her generation’s collective narrative. “I see myself,” she concedes, “as someone manipulated by history.” She was born Penelope Low in 1933 in Cairo, where her father was employed by the National Bank of Egypt. Her earliest memories are a snapshot of interwar expatriate family life, from the well-staffed house on the city’s outskirts to the nanny-turned-governess and the elegant, distant parents. An only child, she spent hours playing by herself, existing in what she describes in her memoir Oleander, Jacaranda as “a condition of frenzied internal narrative”. The outbreak of the second world war kept the family in Cairo until 1942, when she, her mother and her governess fled to Palestine to wait out the fighting. After peace was declared in 1945, Lively discovered abruptly that the global turmoil had its articulation in her own life: her parents’ marriage disintegrated, and she was dispatched to boarding school in Sussex.
About school, she is emphatic. “It was ghastly. I’d never been to any kind of school, and I was hopeless at it. Schoolgirls can be very malevolent: nowadays it would probably be defined as bullying, but then the concept didn’t exist – and this wasn’t somewhere it would have been bothered about, anyway.” The trouble wasn’t confined to her fellow pupils: Lively remembers the school itself as “extraordinarily unimaginative. One punishment was to read for an hour in the library, which pretty much summed up the attitude towards literature. I was reprimanded by the headmistress for having a copy of the Oxford Book of Modern Verse in my locker.” Holidays – spent in the family house in Somerset with her grandmother and her aunt, the artist Rachel Reckitt (whose woodcuts now hang on Lively’s walls) – provided a respite. The household’s familiar objects (an intricately worked sampler, the napkin rings in the silver cupboard) would eventually resurface as touchstones in her 1995 memoir-cum-social history, A House Unlocked, in which her love for the place and its occupants is palpable.
Still, Lively excelled in the school certificate at 16, prompting her father to pay a visit to her headmistress. “He said to her: ‘I understand that quite a few girls go to university nowadays. I was wondering if Penelope should think of it.’ She looked at him in horror and replied ‘Oh no, no – our girls don’t do that.’ The implication was that you got your school certificate and married – or at worst tried a domestic science course.” Luckily, her father took a more enlightened view. Lively was moved to a crammer, and applied to Oxford to read modern history. “I wasn’t an assiduous student, and I didn’t get a good degree, but it certainly formed my mindset,” she says. “I’d gone to Oxford with the idea that there was an account of the past, and the study of history involved learning it. But in my very first tutorial I was set an essay entitled ‘Who were the Jutes?’ I went to the Bodleian, read everything I could find on them, and realised there was no simple answer: people were still arguing about it. The experience of learning about history and the ways in which it’s discussed kindled my interest in memory. It didn’t make me a novelist, but it very much conditioned the kind of novels I’ve written.”
It was at Oxford, too, that Lively met her husband. Their meeting marked another moment in which her life-story bumped up against that of the century. Jack was a working-class boy from Newcastle, Penelope “a girl from the southern gentry”: it was only thanks to the war (which saw Jack evacuated to the house of a retired schoolteacher who recognised and cultivated his intelligence) and the social upheaval that followed that their paths crossed at all. Newly graduated, Lively was working as a research assistant when Jack arrived. “I’d heard some of the other fellows talking about this very clever chap coming over from Cambridge called Jack Lively. I remember thinking the name sounded like a character in an 18th-century play,” she smiles. Their friendship, fostered “over coffee in smoke-filled rooms”, quickly blossomed, and in less than a year the pair were married. It was a relationship that sustained them both until Jack’s death from cancer in 1998, 41 years later, although Lively is at pains not to romanticise it retrospectively, pointing out that “like any marriage, it had its periods of white water”. “In many ways Jack was very different from me: much cleverer, very combative. His chief intellectual pleasure was a good argument, and he had a shorter fuse than I have.” But he was, she says, always quick to apologise – and when it came to her writing, he acted as both ally and advocate. “He thoroughly enjoyed the fact that I wrote, and was always my first reader. I never asked him directly ‘what do you think?’, because of course what you want to hear is that the whole thing’s superb, and he would never have said that. But he commented on the specifics. I don’t have that any longer, and I miss it hugely.”
The couple married in 1957 and moved to Swansea, where Jack took up an academic post. Their daughter, Josephine, was born within a year of their wedding; their son, Adam, three years after that. At a stroke, Lively found herself removed from the intellectual atmosphere of Oxford and launched on to motherhood’s merry-go-round. “It was difficult,” she admits. “I was just 24 when Josephine was born – doing all the nappy stuff in extreme youth, really – and there were the usual constraints of not being able to afford a babysitter and so forth. Academics were just as poorly paid then as now, and we didn’t have a penny to spare. I survived by making friends with other young mothers who were interested in the same sort of things; we used to get together with our children on the beach and talk. That was a life raft. And I read passionately: if I was feeding the baby I always had a book in one hand. Though when they reached three or four, I was able to read with them, which was a joy.”
It was this immersion in children’s literature that first prompted Lively to put pen to paper, although she held off from doing so until her mid-30s, when her son was in school. “Reading with the children made me think: I wonder if I could do this?” she recalls. Her first novel for children, Astercote, was published in 1970; she followed it with two or three others which she dismisses now as “crap, quite honestly”. It wasn’t until the publication of The Ghost of Thomas Kempe in 1973 that she found her register. “I tried to write out of my own adult preoccupations with the operation of memory and the nature of evidence,” she says, “but in a way that meant children would come away from it thinking ‘I’ve read a ghost story,’ rather than ‘my gosh, I’ve just read a book about the operation of memory.’” She succeeded: the tale of 12-year-old James’s struggle with the shade of an ornery 17th-century alchemist won the Carnegie medal, became a staple of school reading lists and led the critic David Rees to praise it as “unique … neither history nor fantasy, but something of both.”
Although The Road to Lichfield, Lively’s first adult novel, wasn’t published until 1977, she had begun writing for an older audience long before. “At the same time as the children’s books, I was writing short stories for adults and putting them away in a drawer,” she says. “I wasn’t convinced I had anything to say to people of my own age.” In the end, however, the move into adult fiction – a discipline Lively views as “not different, but done differently; I’ve always seen the shift between the two as a gear change” – became “necessary. I remember thinking after several children’s books, there were things I couldn’t do there; ways in which I wanted to write, things I wanted to say. A lot of fiction is to do with the discussion of emotional responses, and there are limits to the emotional responses a child can have – they’ve experienced love, for example, but not sexual love. There’s a whole landscape you can’t explore.”
After The Road to Lichfield, Lively’s publishers persuaded her to turn out her drawer, and a prize-winning collection of short stories, Nothing Missing but the Samovar, followed. In 1979, Kingsley Amis awarded her the Arts Council National Book Award for Treasures of Time, the story of an archaeologist which draws explicitly on what Lively’s former editor, the poet Anthony Thwaite, calls “her authority and fluency on the subject of the persistence of the past”. She notched up her second Booker-shortlisting in 1984 for According to Mark, and when Moon Tiger was published in 1987, Lively found herself on the shortlist once again, this time facing a line-up that included Iris Murdoch, Peter Ackroyd and Chinua Achebe. “I wasn’t a favourite,” she recalls candidly. “I wasn’t expected to win, so I wasn’t expecting to win. But Jack said to me that lunchtime ‘You just might, so you’d better have something to say’. I gave it about three minutes’ thought, and then had to stand up and speak on national television.”
Moon Tiger is the story of Claudia Hampton, a brittle, self-reliant historian who excavates her own memories as she lies dying and finds her affair with a British army officer during her time as a war reporter in Egypt at her life’s core. Lively draws on her own childhood to furnish the novel, but there the similarities between her and Claudia end. “I never felt very close to her, although I admire her,” she says. “I like women like that, upfront and aggressive. Male readers’ reactions were very interesting: I used to get letters from men saying either ‘that’s just the sort of woman I’ve been looking for all my life’ or ‘I couldn’t stand her’ – which always seemed to say more about the men who were writing.”
Ah, those male readers. Throughout her career in adult fiction, the perception that Lively is a “women’s writer” – with all the vaguely negative connotations of that label – has persisted. Reduce her novels to plot-points and it’s possible to see why: she is fascinated by families, gives precedence to relationships and is comfortable writing within the domestic sphere. But Lively rejects the classification. “I don’t think it’s true,” she says. “My last novel [Consequences] was romantic, but everyone’s entitled to one of those, surely? And Family Album is indeed a family book; but after all, men live family lives too. I find the notion that a book could be ‘for’ women or men puzzling.” Thwaite puts it more succinctly: “The idea of her being a woman’s writer comes from people who haven’t read her.”
Over the past decade, in fact, Lively has been edging away from fiction into memoir: in Oleander, Jacaranda (subtitled “A Childhood Perceived”), she considers the relationship between childhood memory and adult hindsight; in A House Unlocked, she examines the connections between her family’s history and that of the wider world. And in Making It Up, her latest and most ambitious effort, she approaches her personal history rather as one of the archaeologists who populate her work might approach unearthed artefacts: turning her life’s chief junctures over in her hands, and exploring the possibilities they represent. “I don’t know quite what prompted it, except that it’s an old-age book,” she says. “You have to have reached a point where you can look back over your life and see the moments when you went in one direction or another.”
Despite having health scares over the past few years, Lively continues to write. “It’s always just gone on,” she says. “I remember reading an interview with Iris Murdoch in which she was asked how soon after finishing one book she started the next: she said ‘half an hour’. I’m not quite like her – there’s usually a gap, and there was a long one after Family Album: I didn’t start a new book for nine or 10 months, and thought maybe that was the last one. But then an idea came into my head. So off I go again.”
Lively on Lively
“Chronology irritates me. There is no chronology inside my head. I am composed of a myriad Claudias who spin and mix and part like sparks of sunlight on water. The pack of cards I carry around is forever shuffled and re-shuffled; there is no sequence, everything happens at once. The machines of the new technology, I understand, perform in much the same way: all knowledge is stored, to be summoned up at the flick of a key. They sound, in theory, more efficient. Some of my keys don’t work; others demand pass-words, codes, random unlocking sequences. The collective past, curiously, provides these. It is public property, but it is also deeply private. We all look differently at it. My Victorians are not your Victorians. My seventeenth century is not yours … The signals of my own past come from the received past. The lives of others slot into my own life. I, me. Claudia H.”
Reading this passage, I feel as though someone else wrote it. Someone else did, of course; I am not the same person I was then – I have read more, thought more, forgotten plenty. It is in the voice of Claudia Hampton, the narrator of the novel – a historian and journalist – and, while she is not me, I did give her some of my thoughts about the operation of memory and the nature of evidence. I never entirely liked Claudia, but I had great respect for her, and envied her ability to crash through life in a way that I cannot. And note that – in 1987 – she is not yet computerised but sees a nice analogy between “the new technology” and her own thought processes.
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Adam Hanft: President Obama Profiled Me
July 24th, 2009 |
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What Barack Obama wants to do is financial profiling. And in its way it’s philosophically as intellectually and morally indefensible as racial profiling.
Modiba: ‘AfroBlues’ Performance Connects Two Continents On One Stage
July 24th, 2009 |
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Mixing musical cultures is easy. Doing it well is an entirely different matter. The Lincoln Center’s “Afro Blues in the 21st Century” provides valuable insight not only into what works, but also what does not.
Patterson Hood: Murder & The Family Man
July 24th, 2009 |
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By: Kayceman
 Patterson Hood |
A few years back I did a panel with Patterson Hood. The topic was Music Journalism, and while everyone knows Hood as the passionate leader of the Drive-By Truckers, he’s also a hell of a writer and has dabbled in journalism, hence his seat at the table. More than anything that was said that afternoon, what I remember was Hood bouncing his brand new baby daughter on his knee as he spoke.
Although I was supposed be illuminating prospective writers on how to form a pitch and what the proper follow-up protocol with an editor is, I was deep inside my own head trying to come to terms with Patterson Hood the family man. Is this the same guy who crushes bottles of Jack Daniels onstage, sweats all over the front row and sings about death, incest, war and all the other creepy things crawling around in the shadows?
Clearly it is, and as you get to know Patterson better, you realize this is what makes him who he is. He’s not a Rebel Flag waving cartoon character or Southern stereotype. Not even close. He’s complex, deep and fiercely intelligent. He’s been singing about “the duality of the Southern thing” for more than a decade, but it’s on his new solo album Murdering Oscar (and other love songs) (released June 23, 2009 on Ruth St. Records) that we get a complete picture of the duality of Patterson Hood.
With half the songs coming from his pissed-fucking-off younger days of 15 years ago and the other half from the calmer father of today, the unique circumstances behind the recording of this album allow us a very intimate and relatively complete view of the man. But unlike a “Best Of,” which could also give one album the opportunity to tell a life-spanning tale, Murdering Oscar maintains continuity and has that album feel, not a cut-and-paste sample platter.
In between touring with the Truckers and working on their next studio album (due in 2010), finishing up the Live From Austin, TX CD/DVD (released July 6, 2009 on New West) and the upcoming September release of The Fine Print (A Collection Of Oddities and Rarities 2003-2008), as well as the album and tour with Booker T., Hood found time to finish Murdering Oscar. The majority of the basic tracks were cut as a trio featuring Hood, DBTs drummer Brad Morgan and bassist David Barbe (who also co-produced the album with Hood). Oscar was filled out by Truckers bandmates Mike Cooley (guitar), Shonna Tucker (bass) and John Neff (pedal steel/guitar) as well as Don Chambers and Centro-matic‘s Scott Danbom (keys/fiddle) and Will Johnson (guitar).
Calling from his studio while hard at work on the aforementioned upcoming Truckers album, Hood offered us the better part of his morning as we both downed a pot of coffee and discussed Murdering Oscar, his difficult childhood, bouts with depression and thoughts of suicide, divorce, the transition from Jason Isbell to John Neff and Jay Gonzalez in the DBTs, George Bush, recording with his dad, and of course, his precious daughter Ava Ruth Hood. Like he sings on “Goode’s Field Road”: “I’ve always been a family man deep down…”
JamBase: Murdering Oscar is a mix of songs from about fifteen years ago and some that are more recent, is that correct?
 Drive-By Truckers |
Hood: Yeah. I moved to Athens in the spring of ’94. I wrote a bunch of songs including the title cut, and I didn’t have a band or any studio time or any money so I made a cassette in my apartment of these songs and called it Murdering Oscar (and other love songs), and I stumbled across a copy of that cassette ten years later when I was about to take some time off from I guess “The Dirty South” tour. The Truckers were about to take a little bit of time [off]. I was having a daughter. And so I stumbled on those songs and I really thought they had held up and ended up kind of being inspired. But my life had changed drastically in the intervening ten years. And so I really liked the songs but I didn’t necessarily feel that way anymore, so I kind of wrote some answer songs to it and then recorded it right around that same time, January of ’05, right before my daughter was born. I was planning on putting it out that year and then because of music business bullshit reasons it never happened, so it’s just now coming out.
JamBase: The album has a lot of continuity to it. It doesn’t sound like an album of songs from fifteen years ago and songs from today. How did you make those fit, both sort of in temperament and vision but also just in the sound and sort of how you presented them?
Hood: I’m very much the same writer, although in a lot of ways I’m a real different person, if that makes sense. So, the points of view are pretty different from song to song. Like sometimes I would have the old song right next to the new song. I did that actually on several points in the sequence, like “Screwtopia” right before “Granddaddy.” That’s about as opposite a take on having children as you could possibly have. When I wrote “Screwtopia” I was just getting divorced and I was ten years, eleven years away from having my first kid, and at that time probably didn’t really picture ever wanting to have one. I was pretty much the opposite of marital bliss, and so the sentiment of the song is kind of snotty or shitty a little bit, but I like the song a lot. And I wrote “Granddaddy” right before my daughter was born and it’s probably the sweetest thing I’ve ever written, even though I think it probably still has a little bit of my sarcasm. But it’s definitely my nicer side. I liked having those two songs right next to each other in the sequence. Usually on a Truckers record, so often Cooley and I write about the same things, and from usually pretty different points of view, sometimes even extremely different points of view, so it’s almost like I kind of simulated the same thing, just on my own.
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You write some ruthless songs and paint some creepy-ass characters. We’ve spoken a number of times over the years and you’re always very sincere, very nice and easy to be around, but there’s clearly a very dark side that you’re able to either conjure or draw on. I’m wondering where does that dark side come from? You said you are happier now and you are much more at peace. It sounds like life is good for you. So, do you have to conjure that? Do you have to pull it out of somewhere, or is it just sort of waiting in the wings somewhere?
 Patterson Hood |
It’s pretty much in the wings. I mean I keep it at bay, you know. I definitely try to be a nice, decent person to be around. I don’t want to sit around and be gloomy all the time or anything like that. I’m not really gloomy. I’ve got more of a really black, dark sense of humor more than anything. But I went through a lot of really fucked up periods in my life where I was very unhappy, either internally or externally or both, and pretty depressed a lot of the time as a kid. I had a pretty weird [childhood]. My school years weren’t necessarily happy ones, and particularly the younger ones, and so I’ve probably got a lifetime’s worth of dark shit in some back corner that I can [call on]. But generally that was my way of dealing with it even as a kid. I started writing really young and that’s how I kept from doing something really stupid or more self-destructive than just trying to kill myself with partying. I could have easily been a lot worse than that, but I had the writing. It was my outlet, where it all came out. And I’m generally drawn to kind of creepy, fucked-up stories, too. I guess there is that continuity in my writing; I’ve always kind of had that side. But usually, particularly if I’m in a pretty creative period, most of it gets out there and so I’m not walking around being an asshole all the time. I would really hate that. I generally like people.
How important were the Murdering Oscar sessions to bringing Neff back in full time [to Drive-By Truckers]?
I think it led directly to it. And I can tell you the exact moment was when he did the part on “Screwtopia.” I remember when he did that I was like, “You know, I’d really, really like him to play on the next Truckers record and start playing with us [again].” It’s kind of funny because ironically, that was one of the few things that we could all agree on at that time, because that wasn’t a particularly great time in the band’s history. There was definitely at least two camps going on in the band and the two camps weren’t necessarily seeing eye-to-eye, and John [Neff] coming in and playing with us was the one thing that everybody could agree on.
Do you find that there’s a thematic thread that kind of runs through Oscar, something that makes it so cohesive?
 Patterson Hood by Matt Pence |
Absolutely. It’s the yin and yang of family attachment. The title sounds kind of tongue in cheek because I’m not necessarily known for writing love songs and so there’s a certain amount of sarcasm in the title. But it is true, too. I mean it’s kind of like a nod and a wink but it’s also true. You could break it down to where each one of those stories in its own way has at least a second meaning that could be construed as a bit of a love song, “Heavy and Hanging” probably being the one that’s stretching it the most, but in some ways that was a little bit of my love song to Nirvana. I moved to Athens the week that Cobain killed himself and I was a huge fan. And I was a huge Replacements fan before that. And so that was like, wow, this band finally kicked the walls down and got to actually do what all these bands before ‘em had tried to do and not been able to, that whole run of great kind of pop bands but that had songwriting that kind of transcended that. There’s a whole genre of those bands and none of ‘em ever found success. And finally this band did and they kicked down the doors and they had a number one record and it destroyed ‘em. Or something destroyed ‘em.
At that time you didn’t know really quite what it was, and dealing with all of that, and having gone through my own pretty borderline suicidal shit not long before that, it definitely fucked with me. And that was a big part of the songwriting of that whole group of songs. All those songs were written in like a three-month wake after that. Revisiting and coming back and writing the second half of the record in late ’04, early ’05, that was a pretty different point of view. I was having the first taste of something. I certainly felt successful. I mean, I don’t know, I may not have been. We’ve never been on the top of charts or any shit like that but I feel like we’ve been wildly successful. And that was kind of just starting to sink in, that, “Wow, we actually pulled this off. We get to do this.” Around that time, I was having a daughter, and just married my beautiful wife and got a house. A house! I was homeless three years ago. Now I live in a fucking house, and we own it. Kick ass! So that’s the point of view I wrote the second half of the record from, and when I say second half I mean not literally, the songs are all mixed in.
You mentioned “Heavy and Hanging,” which I really enjoy, and you talked about the bouts with depression and trying to conquer that. I’m curious, how have you sort of gotten past it, because obviously you have?
 P. Hood by D. Vann |
I think I was just lucky. My writing, having an outlet for it [was essential]. It’s gotta go somewhere, and sometimes that isn’t even enough, but I was lucky that I was able to make it be enough on my end. That and knowing that it would kill my grandmamma. I mean those were the two big things. It was like I couldn’t do anything to hurt her and I was lucky. That was enough.
Another aspect of this album that was a big deal for you was recording with your dad. What was that like?
It was fantastic. I’d always wanted to. At the same time I wanted it to be the right [project]. It’s the kind of thing that if it didn’t work it would really suck. It’s not like if the chemistry don’t click, well, then you have a beer and that’s it. When it’s your dad it’s different. It’s expected to work. And we had once tried to work together, years and years earlier, back in ’89. We recorded a Christmas song together for like a benefit thing and it was fine, but it wasn’t the same thing. And years earlier he was gonna produce an EP of Adam’s Housecat, my old band, and we had a disagreement like 20 minutes into it and he ended up walking out of the control room and not coming back until we finished. So, punk rock was our generation gap, and that happened when I was about in junior high school, which is, of course, the right age for something like that to happen. So, working on this project kind of got us past that.
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Photo by: Susan J. Weiand
What does your dad think now?
 Patterson Hood by JPWalabamaasswhuppin.com |
He loves it. He’s thrilled. He’s a proud papa now. And the fact that it was hard earned just makes it that much nicer. He totally gets what we’re trying to do and what we’re doing, and he’s thrilled that we’re having a good run with it. We’re actually gonna get to play together in July [Ed Note: show is Friday night - 7/24]. His band [The Deacons] is opening for my band, so the Truckers are playing back home in Florence at this old theater where I used to go see Walt Disney movies as a kid. And dad’s band’s gonna open the show, so that’ll be a blast. Another first!
You mentioned the Bush years and post-9/11 and I think the effects of bad politics and hard times in America clearly resonate in your music very frequently, but now with Obama and with a little bit of hope and with a daughter, does it affect the way you write?
I’m sure it does. It’s too early to tell how but I’m sure it will [affect the songwriting]. I think our music is very political but it’s always on a personal level. There’s never, hopefully never, any big grand political statements. But politics affect people’s life, and much more than people want to admit. I think in the last few years that may be the one positive part of Bush’s legacy. It’s kind of taught people that it actually does matter who you vote for, and that you don’t really want to vote for an idiot. You want to give the keys to someone who can drive, you know? Or else you’re wrapped around a telephone pole.
If you step back from your career now and you look at the Truckers – playing bigger rooms and selling more albums, you did this record with Booker T. and with Neil Young on it – things are probably better than ever. Does that sort of alter where you set your sights now? Do you have new goals, bigger goals, different goals, anything like that?
They’re not that different. I mean yeah, now I want to be able to keep my house and I want to keep working my job that I love and not have to go work another job, so there’s that slant on that end of it. But as far as artistically, it’s been the same goal. I want to continue making good records and interesting records, and some may be better than others and some may try things that fail, and that’s okay. If we get around to making a really bad one, I just hope it’s for that reason, and I hope at some point in time we try something that just fails and therefore the record doesn’t work, as opposed to just trying to make a polished, slick version of the same record over and over. That would be the failure to me.
Absolutely. You gotta fail to be great.
 Patterson Hood |
We’re so fortunate for our business model because the first real success any of us ever had in our lives came as a result of trying something really ridiculous. I mean the most ridiculous thing I ever did in my entire life is the thing I’ll probably be known for when I’m dead, if I’m still remembered at all. I mean what’s more ridiculous than Southern Rock Opera? And we knew it at the time, but because of that it’s like whenever there’s the tendency to play it safe we can always say, “Well, actually playing it safe didn’t really work for us.” The safest record we ever made’s probably A Blessing and a Curse, and that’s nine out of ten Truckers fans’ least favorite, and it’s probably my least favorite. I’m not in any way badmouthing that record because it’s got “World of Hurt” and “Space City” on it, and those are two of my very favorite songs of our entire run of all this. But overall, if I had to pick a least favorite album we made, it’s A Blessing and a Curse.
You guys make amazing records, but originally it was standing there watching you guys do your thing live that sort of split my head open and made me a believer, so to speak. And to this day, every time I see you guys you all leave it out there every time and there’s a real catharsis going on. I see it in the band and I feel it in the crowd, and it affects people’s lives in a lot of ways. So what does the live thing do for you, as the performer?
Oh, it’s all of that! It’s just exactly what you said. That’s why we do it. It’s the catharsis. To me the measure of a good night versus a bad night isn’t how tight we are or how well we play. There might be that night where we really did play good, you know, that’s cool. That’s always good, but it’s the catharsis [we're after]. It’s that moment when it completely kind of goes off the rail, whether it ends up landing on the wheels or not, that I treasure about the show. To be honest, that’s probably why Cooley and I have played together for so long, because he’s out there, he’s the one who drives the Trans Am and he’s gonna see how fast he can make that curve every time, without fail, and with no regard whatsoever for the outcome. Having that on stage every night, no matter what, is a real thrill to me. I love it, and that encourages the rest of us to do the same and to follow suit. But it’s not like he has to twist arms or drag us kicking and screaming. There have definitely been points in time in our history where there’s been a more play-it-safe minded faction at work for him to rebel against, and that’s probably made for some interesting times, too. But right now is a real extra-good time because it’s just clicking. It’s just a magical time. And you know, Jay Gonzalez [keys] started playing with us I believe about a year ago now, maybe slightly over a year ago, and it was almost like a piece of a jigsaw puzzle we didn’t even realize was missing until he was there. It’s been really good.
Is Jay gonna be around for the long haul as a full member of the band?
Yeah. I don’t see him going anywhere. He’s a huge part of this next record we’re working on, and he’s co-writing it, too, so it’s great.
Are there any details about the album that you can share? Anything at all, whether it’s an album title, to what it’s sort of about, to where your head is, anything like that?
All I’m saying is, because it’s too early to know exactly how it’s gonna all end up, but we cut 25 songs in 25 days and now we’re trying to figure out how to whittle it down to a more manageable length. It definitely rocks harder than any record we’ve made since Alabama Ass Whuppin’ [2000]. It’s pretty rock solid. It’s got more of the big rock songs and less of the quieter moment songs than say the last album did, or even the last couple albums have. I think it was time for that. I was ready for that. I was ready to make a record that pretty much came out guns blazing.
Drive-By Truckers tour dates available here.
JamBase | Dirty South
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Forced apart
July 23rd, 2009 |
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By Meirion Jones
BBC Newsnight
Nineteen-year-old Canadian Rochelle Wallis married her Welsh husband Adam in November 2008, two years after they first met and fell in love.
But now Rochelle is about to be deported from the UK and has been told that she will not be able to come back to see Adam until she is 21.
She has become the first unintended victim of changes to UK immigration laws which were designed to protect young British Asian women from being subjected to forced marriages.
In a letter to Adam’s MP, Mark Williams, to whom the couple turned for help, the UK Border Agency described Rochelle being forced out of the country for the next year and a half as just an "inconvenience".
"I think it is a horrific case – government policy that starts out with good intentions, but a blanket approach that nets in the most innocent of people."
Mark Williams MP
But Rochelle sees it differently: "It’s more than an inconvenience, he’s ripping my marriage apart – he’s taking the only thing I have and throwing it away."
Mr Williams says the couple’s plight is an example of what happens when a blanket government policy is applied to a specific issue:
"I think it is a horrific case – government policy that starts out with good intentions, but a blanket approach that nets in the most innocent of people."
Photographs lost
Adam and Rochelle first met in Canada two years ago and then kept in touch on the internet until she cameto visit Adam in his home near Aberystwyth in March last year.
Rochelle had a six-month visa and only intended to stay a month, but the couple fell in love and decided to get married and stay in Wales.
They applied for permission to marry from the Home Office a month before her visa ran out.
However, the authorities lost their passport photographs causing delays and when permission did finally come through it was with just a week to go before her visa expired.
The couple were not able to organise a wedding in less than a week, but they did get married a few weeks later and then sent in the forms applying for Rochelle to stay.
However, Rochelle had technically over-stayed her visa.
Adam and Rochelle were caught in a Catch 22 – or rather a Catch 21.
She would have had to have gone to Canada and applied for a spousal visa and then come straight back in.
A genuine marriage
But four days after their marriage, new immigration rules were brought in to stop forced marriages, which meant that if Rochelle left the country she would not be allowed to return until she was 21.
Although they had married with the permission of the Home Office and no-one disputed it was a genuine marriage, and certainly no-one claimed it was a forced marriage, Rochelle still faced being sent into exile for 18 months.
"Couples who are genuinely married without any issue of force being involved are falling foul of the immigration rules – the Forced Marriages Act was never intended to frustrate their marriages"
Leading barrister Khatun Sapnara
The UK Border Agency wrote: "This may cause the couple some inconvenience", but that they had increased the minimum age for spousal visas to 21 to reduce the chance of "forced marriages".
After the Forced Marriages Act was passed in 2007, the Home Office commissioned independent research from the University of Bristol to look into the effects of raising the minimum age to marry foreigners to 21.
The researchers asked victims of forced marriages – and the organisations which have campaigned on their behalf – whether they thought it would be a good idea.
Only one in six said yes.
The majority thought that the risks would outweigh the benefits and they specifically highlighted the "human rights implications" of "the impact on marriages entered into… by mutual consent."
But the Home Office, having commissioned the research, ignored it and brought in the new regulations which have caught out Adam and Rochelle.
‘No exception’
Leading barrister and part-time judge Khatun Sapnara helped draft the Forced Marriages Act.
It was an important human rights measure intended to prevent thousands of young British women from mainly Asian backgrounds being forced into marriages against their will in Pakistan and Bangladesh.
But she believes the Home Office’s decision to raise the age was a mistake: "Couples who are genuinely married without any issue of force being involved are falling foul of the immigration rules – the Forced Marriages Act was never intended to frustrate their marriages."
"It’s insane. We can go anywhere except my home country, where we got married, and where they gave us permission to get married.""
Adam Wallis
She is shocked at what has happened to Adam and Rochelle and called on the authorities "to look again" at their case and "exercise discretion".
The UK Border Agency say "the couple’s situation is not a compelling enough reason for an exception to be made in this case".
But Adam and Rochelle do have one chance – they can move to any other European Union country and they will be allowed to live together as man and wife and get work.
The only place they cannot is Adam’s home – Britain.
"It’s insane", he says. "We can go anywhere except my home country, where we got married, and where they gave us permission to get married."
When asked about the case a Home Office spokesman told Newsnight that Rochelle "was refused permission to remain as a spouse because she came as a visitor and remained here illegally after her visa expired…
"As a measure to protect young people from being pressured into sponsoring a spouse from overseas we have raised the age for sponsorship for a marriage from 18 to 21… overall we believe the various benefits outweigh the drawbacks."
Watch Rochelle and Adam’s story in fullon Newsnight on Thursday 23 July 2009 at 10.30pm on BBC Two, then afterwards on the Newsnight website.</p
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
Jay-Z Subs for Beasties at APW
July 23rd, 2009 |
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JAY-Z CONFIRMED AS FRIDAY NIGHT HEADLINER OF ALL POINTS WEST MUSIC & ARTS FESTIVAL
SHOW TO MARK HIP-HOP SUPERSTAR’S U.S. FESTIVAL DEBUT
 Jay-Z |
ALL POINTS WEST MUSIC & ARTS FESTIVAL organizers have just confirmed the U.S. festival debut of Jay-Z. The hip-hop superstar and pop culture icon will sub for the Beastie Boys who had to cancel all tour dates due to Adam “MCA” Yauch’s cancer diagnosis. Jay-Z will take over the headlining slot for the opening night (Friday, July 31) of the critically acclaimed annual event.
This show will mark the U.S. festival debut of Jay-Z, who last year performed at a variety of overseas festivals including the U.K.’s Glastonbury, Denmark’s Roskilde Festival, Norway’s Hove Festival and the O2 Wireless Festival in London. In a review of a recent show, the LOS ANGELES TIMES‘ Ann Powers said, “Jay-Z shows are fun because the rapper is so adept at spinning liquid gold; his mouth is one of the most nimble in the genre’s history, and he uses it to present thoughts that are sharp, funny and resonant.” (July 4, 2009)
Grammy winner Jay-Z joins Tool (Saturday) and Coldplay (Sunday) as headliners of the three-day, multi-stage music and arts festival. ALL POINTS WEST will also feature performances from Echo & The Bunnymen, My Bloody Valentine, Vampire Weekend, MGMT, MSTRKRFT, Gogol Bordello, The Black Keys, Fleet Foxes, Neko Case, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Arctic Monkeys and more than 65 artists appearing throughout the 80-acre historic location that has panoramic views of the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island and the Manhattan skyline.
ALL POINTS WEST MUSIC & ARTS FESTIVAL organizers would also like to extend their best wishes to Beastie Boy Adam Yauch as he undergoes treatment for throat cancer. For those requesting refunds based on this news, ticket refunds are available at point of purchase for Friday single day tickets only.
Complete lineup, tickets and more info available at www.apwfestival.com.
Check our coverage of APW 2008 here.
Yeah Yeah Yeahs Replace Beastie Boys at Lolla
July 22nd, 2009 |
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Yeah Yeah Yeahs Confirmed to Replace Beastie Boys at Lollapalooza
 Yeah Yeah Yeahs |
Following Monday’s news that the Beastie Boys have had to cancel all tour dates due to Adam “MCA” Yauch being diagnosed with cancer, we’ve already heard word of who will replace the Beasties at Lollapalooza. Filling in Saturday night on the Budweiser stage will be Yeah Yeah Yeahs.
You can find more info and still get tickets at www.lollapalooza.com.
Adam Sandler “The Tonight Show With Conan O’Brien†VIDEO (July 20)
July 21st, 2009 |
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Adam Sandler and Conan talk about their odd jobs growing up in this video from The Tonight Show Monday, July 20.
Adam’s new comedy Funny People opens July 31.
Adam Yauch Has Cancer: Beastie Boys Cancel Tour
July 20th, 2009 |
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Beastie Boys tour dates cancelled; album release postponed
Adam Yauch diagnosed with parotid gland tumor
Beastie Boys have today (20 July) issued the following statement:
 Adam Yauch |
Adam “MCA” Yauch of Beastie Boys was diagnosed last week as having a cancerous tumor in his left parotid (salivary) gland. Luckily it was caught early and is localized in one area, and as such is considered very treatable. It will however require surgery and several weeks of additional treatment. Fortunately the cancer is not in a location that will affect Yauch’s vocal chords. Beastie Boys have canceled all upcoming concert appearances to allow time for Yauch’s surgery and recovery. The release of the band’s forthcoming album Hot Sauce Committee Part 1 will also be pushed back.
Paraphrasing from a video statement on Beastieboys.com, Yauch said, “I just need to take a little time to get this in check, and then we’ll release the record and play some shows. It’s a pain in the neck (sorry had to say it) because I was really looking forward to playing these shows, but the doctors have made it clear that this is not the kind of thing that can be put aside to deal with later.”
A statement from EMI reads: “Our thoughts, love and prayers are with Adam Yauch, his family and the Beastie Boys. The most important thing is to allow Adam to focus on staying healthy. We wish him all the best and a speedy recovery.”
Beastie Boys’ Adam Yauch Cancer Diagnosis
July 20th, 2009 |
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Adam Yauch, of pioneering rap group the Beastie Boys, has been diagnosed with what is described as a “very treatable†cancerous tumor in his salivary gland.
The announcement came from the group, which has cancelled all scheduled tour dates and is postponing the release of its upcoming album whie Adam undergoes treatment.
“Luckily it was caught [...]