This morning, NPR’s Morning Edition ran a story on the potential for Lab-Grown meat. Much like how scientists grow sheets of skin for medical use from cells, animal muscle can also be grown..and hey! animal muscle is meat. Mmmm….delicious, test tube meat.

Almost any meat eater who went to college or has a hippie friend (or reads the Synthesis Blog) has seen at least one video of animals at the slaughter and the absolutely horrendous conditions there, so it’s apparent that meat eaters don’t care where their food comes from as long as it tastes delectable. So why not meat from the lab? No animals harmed, no animal waste; it will still take energy to create the “shmeat,” but not as much as traditional meat-producing facilities. Oh, you wonderful futuristic world, you! Now WHERE’S MY FUCKING HOVER BOARD?

From NPR:

Though the idea of growing animal parts in a lab rather than on a farm has been around for a century, it has never seemed like a good time to talk about man-made meat. But the concept has had some famous proponents, including Winston Churchill in his 1932 essay “Fifty Years Hence”: “We shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium.”

Churchill was likely inspired by the work of Alexis Carrel, who at the time of Churchill’s comment had been keeping alive a cultured piece of chicken heart tissue for 20 years.

Even PETA and other animal rights activists are into the idea.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. PETA recently announced a $1 million contest to create commercially viable chicken meat, sacrificing neither chicken nor egg. The deadline is 2012, the contest rules Herculean and the prize money paltry. But the thinking is pragmatic: If people must have meat, and factory farming is an animal nightmare, why not find a high-tech alternative?

Peter Singer, author of the 1975 treatise Animal Liberation, is all for it.

“I always thought it would be a good thing,” he says. “The same way that I think it’s good that the abuse of horses for pulling loads has ended. … I think it would be good if the abuse of animals for raising them for meat were to end, because we had a technological solution to that. We had an alternative.”

So here we are at the doorstep of the animal-less meat culture future. Next stop, Soylent Green.

Last week when I wrote about “Pancho and Lefty” I hadn’t realized that the man who made that song famous was having his birthday right around the corner. Today, American songwriter and Outlaw Country Music King Willie Nelson turns 75. NPR’s Fresh Air did a nice piece on Willie today, you can check it out here (audio available after 3 PM EST). They also played a portion of an interview and live set he did with Terry Gross from a few years back, and you can hear the whole thing here.

Willie Nelson will release a live album with acclaimed jazz trumpeter Wynton Marsalis on July 8th on Blue Note Records. Entitled Two Men With The Blues, the album was compiled from a two-night stand at the Lincoln Center in January of 2007. I got my advance press copy last week, and while the blues ranks kinda far down the list of my favorite genres, the disc is legit, showcasing two masters of American music. Here’s a teaser:

Though this post is semi-masturbatory in nature, I still can’t help but be stoked that the best radio station not on Satellite, NPR, picked local yokels Surrogate’s song “15″ as their Song of the Day. Check it out on the NPR web site, like it, then go to Amazon and buy the damn CD so that I can spend my summer vacation rocking Saddam Hussein’s ass back to Russia like I did last year.

Photo by Harland Spinks

Edging out Austin, TX bands I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness and …And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead, Springfield, Missouri quartet Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin has emerged as this year’s winner of SXSW’s most ridiculous AND uncomfortably long band name. Destined to never fit onto a venue’s marquee (at least without using “5″s as “S”s), or become a catchy acronym (SSLYBY…nope, I got nothing. But I guess you can spell their acronym in a calculator: 551484. SWEET HUH.), the band is slugging it out, confounding bloggers with their vaguely political name and early ’90s college rock throwback sound. But if you’re like me and never got over In The Aeroplane Over the Sea and still light up at the mention of Archers of Loaf, then your hornrimmed glasses will fog up with delight/mouthbreathing.

Here’s a good SSLYBY/551484 sampler:

There, and now you love them.
Still, I’d rather listen to NPR’s David Sedaris yammer on about pissing into a cup. God that’s depressing.

Tour dates (shamelessly lifted from Filer’s site) after the jump. (more…)

The other morning I was lucky enough to catch Terry Gross interviewing Zac and Ethan Holzman from Dengue Fever on her nationally syndicated interview show, Fresh Air. For those unfamiliar, the band is reviving Cambodian Pop, a style of music that became all but extinct during the time of Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge.
Originally created during the Vietnam conflict, Cambodian Pop was the result of locals listening to American Armed Forces radio, grooving on the psychedelic San Francisco / post-British Invasion sound and mixing it with their native language and instruments. Then shortly after, Pol Pot and his cronies took power and murdered most of Cambodia’s intellectuals and artists, rendering the fledgling musical style all but destroyed. Nearly 30 years later, in comes Dengue Fever, a group of Americans plus a Cambodian singer, who proceed to re-record classic Cambodian Pop songs, as well as their own originals in the style. And it’s super ill.

I interviewed Dengue Fever’s bassist Senon Williams and singer Chhom Nimo (the latter at the time spoke very limited engrish) as the 2nd Annual Ioda SXSW Party in 2006. It’s great to see the band picking up steam and turning a new generation onto rad psychedelic rock. Their new album, Venus On Earth, is available now.

So while laying in bed in a semi-delusional state on Monday morning (I was sick) something snapped me back into reality. It was an unmistakable sound: Pinback, live. But I was listening to…NPR…didn’t make any sense. Since when does NPR appeal to me and my sensibilities so much?

Then the thought hit me: fuck, I’m getting to be an old liberal. Oh holy hell….

Whatever, I guess I’m cool with it, I just need to get some gray sweatervests and a beige turtle neck and I’ll be set. At least I’ll have my fucking live Pinback.