Standing up for Canada
Peter McKay is supposed to be hobnobbing with Condi Rice this weekend - do you think this family's case is likely to come up? Or will he be too busy trying to get to first base?

Canadian boy caught in Texas detention

Aircraft's chance landing in U.S. calamitous event for 9-year-old, his Iranian parents

Feb 16, 2007 04:30 AM

Michelle Shephard
Rick Westhead
Toronto Star Staff Reporters

A 9-year-old Canadian boy is in a Texas detention centre after his flight to Toronto made an unscheduled stop and U.S. officials detained his family.

Now the boy's Iranian parents are pleading with Canadian officials to help secure the family's release from the immigration holding facility, which has come under fire for allegedly detaining children in sub-standard conditions.

"All the time he is asking me, `Why am I wearing the uniform? Why I am here?'" the boy's mother said, as she sobbed during a telephone interview from the detention facility yesterday.

"We didn't do nothing. My child is innocent."

The parents, who have no status in Canada, asked that their names not be published out of fear of eventually being returned to Iran, where they say they were previously imprisoned and suffered physical and sexual abuse.

Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes
Some updating going on in the blogroll and elsewhere. We bid a sorrowful adieu to three fantastic blogs: Michael Berube, Billmon's Whisky Bar and I am Eating My Husband's Soul. All three seem to have retired from the blogosphere and we are all the poorer for it. Prof. Berube, as a prominent academic and semiprofessional pundit, can still be read here and there, and we can only pray that Billmon will come back someday (or that the New York Times will come to its senses and use him to replace the odious David Brooks) ---I don't know what happened to the author of I am Eating My Husband's Soul, but I suspect legal trouble with the Denny's chain could conceivably been involved.
In their place, we bring you Indexed, where you can find math and chart comedy along the lines of the this:



A list of good Japan blogs is in the making and I'm also looking into adding a list of podcasts, so if you have suggestions, by all means leave them in the comments.

Additionally, we have joined Blogshares -- a sort of stock market game where blogs are substituted for companies. Dave Monroe of the must-read Dave's Snarky Northern Canadian Blog (see blogroll) has generously given me his holdings in The Woodshed, which I will be splitting with him as long as he doesn't mind me trying to acquire a few more shares in his joint. So click on the link and come and drive up the share price --- we'll all get rich I tell ya! Fabulously wealthy!

And you just know they voted Republican
Some people really never get past the mental age of three and still think the universe revolves around them. Follow the link and scroll way down to read about people who think the notion that the Earth revolves around the sun, or that it moves at all is based on Jewish Kabbalistic propaganda and responsible for the French Revolution and Communism. No, really.

And for my next trick: loaves and fishes!
by way of Canadian Cynic, just because it gave me a much needed laugh before work

Kanadian Korner #3
Good Day eh!

Come back Chevy, all is forgiven
the Woodshed salutes CNN announcer and smart ass Jack Cafferty .
Up next on Point/Counter Point, Lou Dobbs calls Paula Zahn an ignorant slut, Soledad O'Brian will have a commentary on "Sax and Violins on Television," Richard Quest will present the news for the hard of hearing and Father Guido Sarducci will have a report from the Vatican. That's the news, Goodnight, and have a pleasant tomorrow.

Vigilantes by any other name still stink

Given what has been going on in Arizona, I don't think it is a huge jump to think this could be the work of fellow travelers of the Minutemen. Gee, a bunch of bigots start spouting hate, prompting a bunch of other bigots to start waving guns around and another bunch of bigots start shooting people. What were the freakin' odds? The last line of the article in the second link is telling -- human smugglers shooting people out in the desert are unlikely to be wearing something as dramatic as berets. Anything that theatrical sounds to me like a bunch of uber-patriot military fetishists turned vigilante. Doubtless the freepers can explain to us how it was all the fault of the vicitims for seeking a better life in the first place instead of staying where they were and working for some mega-corporation's dirty little branch plant for a dollar a day.

In other news from Stupidville, 25 percent of Americans think Jesus will return this year. And that is according to an Associated Press poll, not a survey of members of the 700 club. If you are an American reading this, just remember that one of the next three people you meet is likely to think the rapture is going to occur in the next 10 months. So don't lend them any money.

"Tokyo - city of violent degenerate foreigners"

This is a magazine which just came out in Japan, "Gaijin Hanzai Ura Fairu" the translated title of which is "Foreigners Underground Crime Files" (your translations may vary).

I'll rant later, first have a look at some of the contents. As is usual with these sort of incidents in Japan, Debito Arudou has done all the heavy lifting for us lazy foreign parasites.


Here is an image from one of the chapters, that I think indicates both the tone and quality of this charming piece of racist trash:

The text reads: "Oi Nigger!! Get your fuckin' hands off that Japanese lady's ass!!"

Other highlights:

Article about crimes by Iranians:
イラン人を捕まえ！！
Catch the Iranian!!

Article lamenting Tokyo’s demise into lawlessness:
不良外人暴力都市！！
City of Violent Degenerate Foreigners!!

Article about foreigners scamming Japanese for money:
毟られる日本人。『シャチョサン、ATMコッチデス』
Japanese getting conned. “Theesaway to ze ATM, Meester Managing Director”

Feature of foreign guys picking up Japanese women (What this has to do with ‘crime’ is unclear)
YELLOW CAB REAL STREET PHOTO
お前らそんなに外人がイイのかよ！！
You sluts really think foreign guys are so great, huh!!
そりゃあ日本人は小さいけど。。
We know Japanese guys are small, but..

On its own it is appalling, but what is more appalling still is the societal acceptance of such a magazine. It isn't sold at some seedy neofascist bookstore tucked away on a side street in the redlight district or anything like that. It originally went on sale at the Family Mart chain and other major convenience stores. It isn't some obscure little rag no one will ever see, it is mainstream media. Both Debito and Japan Probe are calling for a boycott of stores selling the magazine, which seems to working

Gaijin is a bit of a nasty word. Somewhere between gringo and nigger, it is still a common, if impolite term used to refer to foreigners in Japan. My "Foreign Resident Registration Card" is generally referred to by anyone outside a government office as my "gaijin card." Many Japanese and even newly arrived expats don't even recognize it as an offensive term and a lot of expats will use it to refer to themselves and their foreign friends.

Those who don't live here may not realize that Japan has its own aparthied system. Many bars, restaurants, clubs, public baths and other establishments do not allow non-Japanese on the excuse that our inability to speak language or understand the rules will cause problems. People of Korean descent in Japan - many of whom are second, third and even fourth generation residents born and raised here and most often descendants of slave laborers brought to Japan during its colonial occupation of the Korean Penninsula before and during WWII - cannot become citizens.

It is an article of common wisdom in Japan that foreigners, especially Koreans and Chinese, and increasingly Iranians and Africans, are responsible for most of the crime in the country, a bit of common wisdom that the facts simply do not support.

"Japan's crime rate is one of the world's lowest at 1,776 reported crimes per 100,000 people in 2005, according to the latest government statistics. The number of crimes among Japan's 2 million foreign residents in 2005 was 2,380 per 100,000.

Offenses by foreigners rose to a record high of 47,865 in 2005, from 47,128 a year earlier and 40,615 in 2003, according to police statistics. The number of non-Japanese arrested is also rising, to 21,178 in 2005 from 20,007 two years earlier.

The statistics don't break out visa-related offenses, which in 2003 accounted for 46 percent of crimes committed by foreigners. By their nature such breaches can't be committed by Japanese citizens.

Japan's overall crime rate in 2003 was 2,185 per 100,000 and 2,120 among foreigners. Excluding visa offences, the rate was 1,570 per 100,000 foreigners."

(source: Bloomberg News)

Big black buses decorated with Hinomaru and rising sun military flags, blaring loud martial music and slogans ("revere the emperor and expel the barbarians" is a favorite) are a fairly common sight in Tokyo. They are operated by ultra-nationalist groups, which are in turn funded by the Yakuza often as a way to launder money. Such groups are major supporters of the rightist conservative factions of the ruling LDP party and have been known to physically attack politicians and journalists who disagree with them. As a result, they are rarely mentioned in the mainstream press.

Rampant racism, sexism and militant nationalism are the 800 pound rhinos in the living room of Japanese politics. Everyone knows they are there, but feel it would be impolite to mention them.
Here is a more comprehensive account of this horrible racist magazine (with other discussions of the same issue here, here, here, here and here)

The scary part is that this is just the latest manifestation of a much larger problem. You will notice that none of sites linked to are Japanese newspapers or other media. That's because the Japanese media has yet to mention this magazine, which is put out by a sizable publisher, or the fact that a major convenience store chain was willing to carry it in its hundreds of stores nationwide. Not even the English-language press which caters to foreign and foreigner-friendly readers.

I am frustrated, ashamed and embarrassed by this. I've lived in this country for nearly ten years now, and most of the Japanese I've met are the nicest, kindest, most open-hearted and hospitable people you could ever hope to meet. I'm sure most (probably all, at least I hope so) of my native Japanese friends would be equally appalled by this collection of racist claptrap -- I once had a total stranger apologize to me for his fellow citizens after one of the hate-blaring black buses went past in the street. But there seems to be this societal blind spot when it comes to foreigners, especially non-European ones. The not-so-subtle encouragement of this attitude in the mainstream media here, both Japanese and English-language is reprehensible. All that is required for evil to succeed, is for good men to do nothing.

Yokoso Japan, indeed

Simple solutions to complex problems: school board edition
Problem: Born-again Christian teacher recorded by student preaching to class, telling them Noah had dinosaurs on the ark, that evolution is wrong and that anyone who isn't a Christian is going to hell, specifically singling out a Muslim student.
Solution: Ban recording in classes

Vocal minorities

While doing some quick research on the religious make-up of India to fact-check a story our paper was running, I was surprised to find that Christians, comprising 2.3 percent of the population, outnumber Sikhs (1.9 percent) Buddhists (0.8 percent) and Jains (0.4 percent) in India. The second largest group is Muslims (13.4 percent) with the dominant Hindu faith comprising 80.5 percent of the population (all figures are for 2001).

Casting about on the web for a similar set of figures for Canada, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that the second largest "religious" grouping in Canada is atheist/agnostic/no religion.
Looking at the census data it is clear that not only is Canada becoming less Christian-dominated in terms of overall demographics, but that the bible-thumping literalist fundementalist Christian denominations are shrinking faster than the more liberal Christian faiths like the United Church.

We are still mostly Christian, with the Roman Catholic Church predominant at 43 percent of the population as a whole (cough Quebec cough) but the reality based community is number two with a bullet, doubling to about 16 percent of the population since 1981. The evangelical, apostolic and born-again churches have also doubled their following --- and here's the real kicker --- to a whopping 2.5 percent. That's right, in contrast to the U.S. where this group is growing at an alarming rate, there just aren't that many of them in Canada - 780,000 in 2001. So even if you include the other conservative leaning Christian faiths - the Jehovah's Witnesses, the Mormons, the Baptists (and Canadian Baptists are to Southern Baptists as Peewee hockey stars are to Wayne Gretzky) the numbers of the faithful still don't come close to the number of people who ticked the "none of the above" box for religion on the 2001 census. Suck on that you Focus on the Family, queer-hating, home-skoolin', what-about-the-children-for-God's-sake-what-about-the-children, Rapture-awaiting, book-banning, pulpit-pounding thickhead true believers.

Now would someone please explain to me why this tiny group of very vocal Christian cultist seem to have Stephen Harper's nutsack in a death-grip? Surely if you want to court the largest voting blocs in the country your priorities are the French Catholics, followed by the WASAA's (White Anglo-Saxon atheists and agnostics) and Christian liberals in the United Church.

So why do the Fundamentalists wield so much power in Ottawa and other centers of government.? Why do they have their own TV channels and carry so much weight with school boards and local governments? Why don't we pay them so much heed and the large chunk of the population that has no strong interest in religion so little? Is it because atheists tend to be lone wolves politically, running the full political spectrum from neofascist right-wing libertarian traditionalists to commie pinko anarchists to live-and-let-live libertarian liberals, while fundamentalist congregations tend to be flocks of voting sheep?

Follow the link for a whole bunch of interesting facts and figures about how Canada does religion.

The top ten:

Roman Catholic 12.8 million 43.2% of the population

No religion 4.8 million 16.2%

United Church 2.8 million 9.6%

Anglican 2.0 million 6.9%

Other Christian, 780 thousand 2.6%
Apostolic,
Born-again,
Evangelical

Baptist 729 thousand 2.5%

Lutheran 607 thousand 2.0%

Muslim 580 thousand 2.0%

Other Protestant 549 thousand 1.9%

Presbyterian 410 thousand 1.4%

For the record, Jews, Sikhs and Buddhists each comprised about 1 percent of the population.
All figures from the 2001 census, as compiled by Religious Tolerance.org, who have it all laid out in a nice chart at the link above.

Another interesting tidbit:"About 37% of people in the Yukon, 35% in British Columbia, and 23% in Alberta reported no religion. This compares to 6% in Quebec, and fewer than 2% in Newfoundland & Labrador."

I can understand how spending winters in the Yukon might convince you that there is no God, but 23 percent of people Alberta, usually portrayed as Canada's Bible belt, rejecting organized religion was a bit of a shock.

McCarthy does some

hard traveling on 'The Road'

Kevin Wood / Daily Yomiuri Staff Writer

The Road

Cormac McCarthy

Picador, 241 Pages, 24 dollars

Bleak, desolate, cheerless, barren, joyless, disheartening--there are over a dozen synonyms in the thesaurus, but none of them really do justice to Cormac McCarthy's stark, dark vision of postapocalyptic America put forth in The Road.

And yet, amid the cold ashes of a nuclear winter, McCarthy shows us a tiny, glowing ember of hope in the love between a father and son and the purity of a small boy's heart.

In an ash-covered world of eternal twilight and biting cold, where nothing grows and the living often envy the desiccated corpses that litter the landscape, a nameless, tubercular father and his sickly young son travel the highways of the Northeastern United States, heading south and east. Their goal is the distant coast, where they hope in vain that things will be better somehow. Masked against the drifting ash, their meagre possessions piled in a shopping cart, the two trek on, scavenging canned food, tools and clothing where they are able and dodging gangs of cannibalistic bandits and slavers. Their only protection from such marauders is a revolver with just enough ammunition to take their own lives. Their only safeguard against the constant specter of death from starvation and cold is each other.

It is about as cheerful as it sounds. McCarthy's greatest strength as a writer is not his plots or characters, but the atmosphere he creates through artful minimalist descriptions and sparse narration. The atmosphere here is forbidding, to say the least.

At the same time, in a strange way, The Road may be McCarthy's warmest, most emotional work. The contrast between the bleak, hopeless landscape of a dying Earth and the tenderness for each other displayed by the father and son is heartrending.

McCarthy describes the two as "each the other's world entire" and it is clear that while it is the man who keeps the boy alive by foraging for food, building fires and protecting him from human predators, the father needs the son as much or even more than the son needs a provider and protector. The man, like the rest of the world, is dying and knows it, but goes to great pains to keep hope alive in the boy that things will get better. Despite having abandoned any pretense of morality in their fight for survival, the man draws strength from his son's insistence on kindness to strangers and faith that the parent and child are "the good guys." In an utterly amoral world, the boy is his father's moral compass, keeping him from following the rest of the world into savagery. At one point the child pleads for the life of a starving stranger who has stolen all their possessions, convincing the father to let the man go free after they have reclaimed their food and meagre equipment:

"He was just hungry, Papa. He's going to die.

He's going to die anyway.

He's so scared, Papa.

The man squatted and looked at him. I'm scared, he said. Do you understand? I'm scared.

The boy didn't answer. He just sat there with his head bowed, sobbing.

You're not the one who has to worry about everything.

The boy said something but he couldn't understand him. What? he said.

He looked up, his wet and grimy face. Yes I am, he said. I am the one."

Indeed, the boy is the personification of all the good left in the man's world. His wife has given in to despair and taken her own life, and every vestige of the old world is gone. He stays alive only to make sure the boy survives and does not despair.

The two live a life of almost complete immediacy. For them there is no future but the vague aim of reaching the coast and, for the boy at least, no memory of the past except for a hazy recollection of his dead mother.

McCarthy's spare prose matches the barren landscape of the novel. It is stripped even of much of the punctuation--there are no quotation marks and precious few commas or apostrophes. Like Hemingway, McCarthy pares his writing down to the barest essentials, purging it of descriptive excess and extended metaphor until it becomes akin to prose poetry. One can open the book and chose a passage almost at random and see McCarthy's mastery of rhythm and imagery:

"In those first years the roads were peopled with refugees shrouded up in their clothing. Wearing masks and goggles, sitting in their rags by the side of the road like ruined aviators. Their barrows heaped with shoddy. Towing wagons or carts. Their eyes bright in their skulls. Creedless shells of men tottering down the causeways like migrants in a feverland. The frailty of everything revealed at last. Old and troubling issues resolved into nothingness and night. The last instance of a thing takes the class with it. Turns out the light and is gone. Look around you. Ever is a long time. But the boy knew what he knew. That ever is no time at all."

Unlike Hemingway--whose entire body of work probably comprises a lexicon of no more than a few thousand words and only a few hundred of those of more than three syllables--McCarthy has a clear affection for using obscure but appropriate terminology. The man descends to a "gryke" in the stone of a mountainside; a roaming bandit army is accompanied by a "consort of catamites"; the man and boy are described as "mendicant friars."

Despite the gloom and doom, the book is ultimately uplifting and even moving, without descending into mawkish sentimentality or emotionalism. McCarthy is one of the most skilled writers working today, and The Road shows him at the top of his form.

(Feb. 3, 2007)

In Yer Ear

Kevin Wood / Daily Yomiuri Staff Writer

NORAH JONES

Not Too Late

Toshiba EMI, 2,500 yen

New York-based pop-jazz chanteuse Norah Jones is back with her third solo album, Not Too Late.

Jones continues to mine the same vein of subtle, sophisticated and subdued ear candy that made her two previous solo efforts smash hits. Not Too Late is possibly Jones' most personal album to date, recorded as it was in the home studio she shares with partner and longtime collaborator, bassist Lee Alexander.

Jones wrote or cowrote all 14 songs on Not Too Late and the recording shows her maturing as a songwriter and singer. While her previous albums were stylistically diverse with covers of Tom Waits, Hank Williams, Hoagy Carmichael, and even a bluegrass duet with Dolly Parton laid alongside Jones' own jazz-inflected mix of country, soul and classic pop, Not Too Late has a more cohesive feel to it. The songs flow into one another and there seems to be a more focused artistic vision.

That is not to say Jones' sound has become homogenized--if anything she has become more adventurous. As with her previous outings, most of the songs are built around Jones' piano and acoustic guitar played by a variety of guests including Jesse Harris, Tony Scherr and Kevin Breit. Jones even takes a crack at the fretboard herself on one track.

As a composer, Jones' early jazz training shows in every note, as does her obvious affection for simpler country, folk and old-time soul. Her songwriting style harks back to the prerock days of the Tin Pan Alley composers who wrote for artists such as Frank Sinatra and Patsy Cline. While songs of that era may seem bland in comparison to punk rock, bebop jazz or more flamboyant modern pop, they, like Jones' compositions, have a sense of substance, craftsmanship and musicality that most rock-based pop music simply doesn't have. Jones' songs are very much in the tradition of these so-called standards.

Still mostly understated and midtempo, songs like "The Sun Doesn't Like You" and "Not My Friend" show a darker side than Jones has previously revealed. She also gives us some political ruminations--the Brechtian "Sinking Soon" sounds like something accidentally left out of "Cabaret." "My Dear Country" is an ominous minor key lament that reminds the listener that "Nothing is as scary as election day." Going a step further, Jones shows her political colors with the lines "Who knows, maybe the plans will change/Who knows, maybe he's not deranged" with the context leaving very little question who she's singing about.

Not Too Late is a deeper, darker and more complex work than any of Jones previous material but still eminently listenable.

KELLER WILLIAMS

Dream

Buffalo Records, 2,500 yen

Keller Williams is a name that is not well-known outside the jam-band subculture, and that is unfortunate because the singer-songwriter and one-man-band has the kind of positive, upbeat, quirky sound that has broad appeal.

Dream, Williams' ninth studio album, pairs him with a wish list of favorite artists who are also mostly off the beaten track. The guest list includes Grateful Dead frontman Bob Weir, experimental banjo virtuoso Bela Fleck, bass whiz Victor Wooten, jazz guitar ace Charlie Hunter, String Cheese Incident, Michael Franti, John Scofield and Martin Sexton.

Oddly enough, the standout track among the many excellent duets is "Restraint" a bouncy, earthily sexy and funny number that is pure Williams.

Dream is a must-have for Williams' fans and an excellent introduction to Williams and his kindred spirits for the uninitiated.

(From The Daily Yomiuri Feb. 3, 2007)

Free Josh Wolf

Journalist Josh Wolf Longest Jailed In History - News

"The federal grand jury is seeking unaired sections of a videotape Wolf made of an anarchist demonstration in San Francisco on July 8, 2005, in which a police officer was injured. The panel is investigating a possible attempted arson of a police car that was partly paid for with federal funds. Wolf contends that handing over the tape would make him into a spy for the government and impede his ability to work as a journalist."

Damn straight, make the Gestapo do its own dirty work! Fight on!

Blessed are the meek

Which is good because they aren't going to get much other than a blessing from Christians like the good Rev. E.F. Briggs. Now in his late 90s, I suppose he is hoping the hurry the rapture along. So much for turning the other cheek. Apparently the notion of freedom of religion including freedom from religion is lost on this bozo-of-the-cloth. Do by all means write and tell the good Rev. E.F. Briggs what you think of him, after all he has left us an address. I know I will.

Update: Apparently the not-so-good Rev. Briggs went to his reward last year, so he isn't likely to read your letters or mine.

Franken 4 Senate
While he hasn't officially announced just yet, NBC is reporting that Al Franken will seek the Senate seat currently held by Republican Norm Coleman. Give'em hell Al! I bet you never really thought about this when you were introducing the Al Franken decade back on SNL, did you?

my old hometown
The depressing part of this story, aside from the obvious redneckery, is that my old hometown of Sault Ste. Marie has become shorthand for such bigotry to Quebecers. Personally, I always thought it was ironic that the city council there were the first gang of jackasses to jump on the English-only bandwagon back in the early 90s when the town has a French name and about a third of the population speaks Italian fluently. (thanks Joe!)

you can't make this stuff up

From Think Progress via Fark, we are told the new White House Pastry Chef is very, very well prepared for his new job.

Now hear this:
As you can see, we here at the Woodshed have made the leap to the new Blogger, though there seem to still be a few flies in the ointment.
In the meantime, you can listen to a brand new installment of Urayasu's answer to the three stooges on Rubber Chicken Radio.

Frankenreiter now riding his own wave

Kevin Wood / Daily Yomiuri Staff Writer

For Donavon Frankenreiter, life is all about balance. Hardly surprising for someone who started surfing at age 9 and turned pro at 16. But it isn't just a matter of keeping a low center of gravity on his surfboard. For Frankenreiter it means keeping a balance between family and career, between staying home in California and traveling the globe, between the artistic and the athletic.

Now 34 years old, Frankenreiter is still an active pro surfer, jetting off to ride the big waves in front of the cameras and promote his various sponsors. Since 2002, however, he has split his working life between surfing and making music.

"It's something I've always done. When I was traveling for surfing, it was just one of the things I always took along--some surfboards, a bag of clothes and an acoustic guitar," Frankenreiter told The Daily Yomiuri earlier this month over the phone from his home in California. Frankenreiter had just returned from the Caribbean, where he had been plying one of his trades for an upcoming surf film, the latest in the popular Drive Thru series, and was about to jet off to Brazil to play as a supporting act for Ben Harper a couple of days later.

After Brazil, Frankenreiter is planning a short recreational surfing trip to Hawaii to break up his flight to Japan, where he is to play nine shows across the country in just 12 days in February. The breakneck pace continues in March with a whirlwind tour of Europe.

Frankenreiter is no stranger to Japan, having visited about a dozen times on surfing expeditions and for the shooting of at least one surf video. He also wowed the crowd at the Fuji Rock Festival last summer and has a real affection for Japan.

"I love coming to Japan, it's like nowhere else in the world. We had a lot of fun at Fuji Rock. I just wish we could have stayed longer and checked out more of the bands."

"It's hard; I'm gone a lot. My wife is expecting our second child in April, so I'm taking some time off. It's tough to balance music, surfing and family--this will be the first break I've had in about four years, but I'm taking four months off," says Frankenreiter, adding sheepishly that he will probably spend a lot of time writing new songs with an eye to going back into the studio later this year to work on a new album.

Asked whether he considers himself a singing surfer or a surfing singer, the shrug can almost be heard over the phone. A few moments of conversation show that the two pursuits are very much Frankenreiter's yin and yang: "I love doing both, but it's great to be able to get away and do something else. The music thing can get pretty crazy with the touring and recording and promotional stuff, so it is really nice to be able to put it down and not think about it, just go surfing for a few weeks and then come back to it fresh. I've been surfing since I as 9 and surfing still keeps me healthy. It clears my mind and my soul...The two really balance each other out."

Frankenreiter's surfing connections have played a big part in his musical career. When he was 16 he moved to Hawaii's famed North Shore and rented a room from the wife of surfing legend Jeff Johnson, father of pro surfer-cum-pop star Jack Johnson. Being the same age and both fanatical surfers, the two became fast friends.

"I was already playing guitar when I met Jack and so was he, but we sort of bounced stuff off of each other. I'd teach him a song; he'd teach me a song. Later on, we did a few surf movies together," Frankenreiter says. "We've been friends a long time."

Both started getting more serious about music around the same time, and Johnson's early success enabled him to start his own label, Brushfire Records. Frankenreiter's first eponymous album came out on Brushfire in 2002.

The comparisons were inevitable and possibly even apt, given how much the record was shaped by Johnson as producer. The two share some stylistic similarities and are old friends, but after a while Frankenreiter clearly got a little tired of being written off as a Jack Johnson imitator by people who clearly had not listened to his music.

"I wanted people to listen to my music and to know who I was...Sometimes it was a little too close for comfort," he says.

For his second effort, last year's Move by Yourself Frankenreiter moved to a new label under the Universal Music umbrella, Lost Highway. Two years on the road with his own band and a different approach to recording made for a different record.

"The first album was done with Jack's band and we recorded it on Pro Tools, which makes it really easy to move stuff around. I'd never done a record before and I was really impressed by the things they could do...It was great working with Jack at his studio in Hawaii."

The second album was done with Frankenreiter's own band, and most of it was recorded live onto two-inch tape. "Recording live like that is very much about capturing a moment, getting the best vibe down that you can," Frankenreiter says.

A slight departure from the mellow folksy charm of his debut, Move By Yourself is full of funky blue-eyed soul grooves that sound reminiscent of '70s R&B stalwarts Curtis Mayfield and Stevie Wonder with a dollop of Lenny Kravitz and a smidgen of Beatles thrown into the mix for good measure.

The last track on the album, "Beautiful Day," was recorded in one take on the spur of the moment with bassist Matt Grundy improvising a guitar lead and drummer Craig Barnette playing a shaker that happened to be close to hand.

"It was about two in morning and I had this idea and I wanted to get it on tape, mostly for the guys to learn the song with the idea that we might record it. So we just crowded around one mike and I started playing--if you listen to it, you can hear the rhythm guitar is slightly out of tune--and it just worked. It has this great vibe to it."

In music, as in surfing, sometimes you just have to ride the wave.

Donavon Frankenreiter (with special guest Timmy Curran) will play Feb. 6-7, 7 p.m. at Ax in Shibuya, Tokyo, (03) 3444-6751; Feb. 9, 7 p.m. at Drum Logos in Fukuoka, (092) 771-9009; Feb. 10, 7 p.m. at Weather King in Miyazaki, (0985) 20-7111; Feb. 11, 7 p.m. at Club Quattro in Hiroshima, (082) 542-2280; Feb. 13, 7 p.m. at Big Cat in Osaka, (06) 6535-5569; Feb. 15, 7 p.m. at Club Quattro in Nagoya, (052) 264-8211; Feb. 16 7 p.m. at Kyoiku Bunka Kaikan in Toyama, (076) 432-5566; Feb. 18, 7 p.m. at Jasmac Plaza Zanaedu in Sapporo, (011) 261-5569.

(Jan. 27, 2007)

Obama puts the hurt on FOX
Barrack Obama is not and has never been a muslim, met his father only once, did not attend a madrassa as a child and Jon Gibson and Steve Doocey and the staff at Moonie owned Insight Magazine are a lying bunch of mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging cretins for saying otherwise and trying to claim that it was the Hillary Clinton campaign that gave them the info.
This is what the Democrats need to do every single time some charater assasin like Jon Gibson or Bill O'Reilly opens their piehole to spout bullshit. Call them on publically, loudly and point by point. Then demand a retraction and public apology, or better yet sue the bastards.