College officials across Indiana fear new visa restrictions adopted in response to the 2001 terrorist attacks could cause many foreign students to miss this year's fall semester.
Baseball is one sport people love to over-intellectualize. I've heard fellow Cubs fans tell me that Carlos Zambrano is a better young pitcher than Kerry Wood or Mark Prior. (He's not.) I've heard even non-Cardinals fans tell me that Albert Pujols deserved the 2001 National League Most Valuable Player Award over Barry Bonds because Pujols' team made the playoffs and Bonds' didn't, forgetting that Bonds hit 73 homers. (Nope.) And countless times, I've heard that so and so didn't win not because they lacked better players but because they lacked team "chemistry," whatever that is. (That's preposterous.)
EVANSVILLE -- Trustees at the University of Southern Indiana voted Monday to approve a nearly 8 percent increase in tuition and fees for the 2003-2004 school year. University President H. Ray Hoops said the school's business office will "manage the heck out of the dollars." Tuition for in-state, undergraduate students will be $3,885 a year.
DECATUR, Ind. -- Strangers and National Guardsmen joined together Wednesday in an effort to save homes surrounded by flood waters brought on by days of thunderstorms. The St. Marys River in northeastern Indiana remained at record levels and several hundred homes around Decatur had been flooded or were being threatened by high water.
SINGAPORE -- Fighting back tears and reading from the Quran, dozens of mourners Wednesday prayed as they prepared the bodies of two Iranian twins who died during separation surgery for the long journey home.
Most people know that the Bloomington Playwrights Project is a great place to find innovative theatre, but few realize how this organization benefits the community outside of the artistic sphere. One of the many ways the BPP gives to the community is with the Acting Against Hunger Benefit in conjunction with the Community Kitchen of Monroe County. The Second Annual Acting Against Hunger Benefit will be at 6 p.m. Sunday at the BPP office, 312 S. Washington St. The cost is $30 a person and because of limited seating, reservations must be made by Friday.
In 1986, the Supreme Court ruled that states can make private sexual behavior illegal. This case, Bowers v. Hardwick, has been held over the heads of homosexual couples since that time by those who consider homosexuality deviant and immoral.
If there were such a thing as an architectural crime against humanity, Paris' Charles De Gaulle Airport would be one. After struggling through the bottleneck-plagued circular check-in room, you take a moving walkway through a plastic tube the color and texture of a giant intestine to a floor of insipid duty-free shops.
From the day we take our first breath to the day we take our last, one thing controls our life more than anything else -- love. Whether it is love of God, love of country or love of another person, it is an emotion we can't escape and can't live without.
Imagine having to tell your parents you got expelled from school because you couldn't walk fast enough. That's just what college students in Ohio might have to do.
BATESVILLE, Ind. -- A roadside bomb exploded in Iraq as an American military convoy rolled past, killing a soldier from Indiana.
KHARTOUM, Sudan -- Aviation experts were examining a Sudanese airliner's black box and other evidence Wednesday to determine why the plane crashed shortly after takeoff, killing 116 people.
BANGKOK, Thailand -- After international pressure, Laos freed two European journalists and an American interpreter who had been sentenced to prison for the death of a rural guard Wednesday.
Looking at the album cover, I see Josh Kelley's drinking a cup of coffee. He must have been listening to this album. Of the two things that most offend me most in music, the completely, intentionally, sterilized, unoffensive manufacture of mainstream pop music ranks right up there with the hypocritical shock-value arrogance of pseudo-self-important modern art. Now that I've got that out in the open, I can go into detail on the music for the drones. The few hooks that exist seem borrowed and the writing is empty at best: "You've been bad / You've been good / Did you lose your mind / Like I knew you would?" In his sweater and unkempt hair, Josh Kelley is a hard guy not to like and the organ work and occasional banjo and steel help too.
Goth and metal don't mix. For evidence, listen to Type O Negative's Life Is Killing Me. Is frontman Peter Steele serious or joking? The more one listens, the more unsure one gets. For example, a song on Life Is Killing Me is called "(We Were) Electrocute." Sorry, but wordplay doesn't go with this music. While this reviewer might be missing the joke, there's no questioning the music: it's lethargic, restrained and bland. Guitar shredding is absent, leaving the listener to focus on Steele's overmodulated baritone. With repeated listenings, Steele's singing just gets annoying.
This album reminds me it's alright to be pissed off and say it and shrug it with a dance step at the same time. "We Don't Stop" is the best single I've heard yet this year, couched in an album of hip-hop dance that focuses on something true even if musically it's a bit repetitive. Michael Franti isn't afraid to have a sense of humor with his agenda, via the politically charged wit of Jurassic 5 or Living Colour (though invariably sounding much different).
Hardcore is the punk-metal hybrid that has a hard time getting a mainstream following since punks and metalheads disagree more often than "tastes great" and "less filling." The other problem is the larynx-shredding vocals. Even those with a hardy musical appetite have a hard time getting used to the hyperintense barking.
In the most generalizing and stereotypical way possible, one can divide most indie-rock bands into two broad categories: the 'always building up to something' band, and the 'something important is happening right now' band. The French electronic band M83 belongs to the latter category. Its second full-length Dead Cities, Red Seas, & Lost Ghosts creates a sound that is as big as an ocean (or a sea?) and as depressingly ephemeral as, uh, a ghost.
Tindersticks, a six piece big band with an intimate sound, has created a beautiful album with Waiting for the Moon, its sixth studio LP. And it is enjoyable to listen to despite its lack of originality. Tindersticks play a sound derived, clearly, from Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, but somehow it works. Cave, the reigning king of underground music (at least as far as this reviewer is concerned), specializes in morbid lounge ballads that are beyond astounding.
The connection between the neo-psychadelia of The Polyphonic Spree and cult living is a little too easy to make; it's been done before. But for a band with 23 plus members, pop orchestral arrangements and vaguely alluring lyrics, ignoring the connections would be a fallacy.
