side note: I wanted to introduce our NT readers to a new band called Midwest Hype. They are out of LaPorte, Indiana and I’ve seen them a few times live and let me tell you, they put on an incredible show. We at NT liked them so much that they have been added to our permanent “Friends/Artists of NT” at the bottom left of every NT page. If you want to check out any of their songs or tour dates, you can click on that link and it’ll take you to their Myspace page.

CLICK HERE TO CHECK OUT THEIR MYSPACE PAGE

CLICK HERE TO CHECK OUT THEIR WEBSITE

We don’t add too many new artists to this list b/c we consider it exclusive. Check ‘em out and let us know what you think. Enjoy!

side note: Joe Fitzsimmons, one of my best friends, has been working on a photography projects for years…..he has started to organize his photos. Below is a summary of his project. I posted a few of my favorite pics below……You can also view the rest of his photos here. Enjoy!

what is the value of something? can it be measured by price? should it be? i bought this blanket at a resale shop for a buck with the idea of incorporating into the environments which i’d travel and people i’d meet. Along the way it’s come to represent much more than just a symbol of how I see things.

With all the bullshit that life throws at us, it’s important to remember that no matter what passport we possess, what god we profess our subjective faith to, how much money we have, how many stars we can see out of our windows…we’re all basically bound by the same thing, and that’s the fact that we all wake up, go to sleep, see the same sun/moon…basically, just try to appreciate the things that connect us rather than focusing on the things that divide.

Tennoji area, Osaka, Japan

Maiko – Kyoto, Japan

Kyoto, Japan – location name to come

side note: this is an excellent article……this one should be emailed around for everyone to read.

By Frank Rich
The New York Times

It turns out we’ve been reading the wrong Bob Woodward book to understand what’s going on with President Bush. The text we should be consulting instead is “The Final Days,” the Woodward-Bernstein account of Richard Nixon talking to the portraits on the White House walls while Watergate demolished his presidency. As Mr. Bush has ricocheted from Vietnam to Latvia to Jordan in recent weeks, we’ve witnessed the troubling behavior of a president who isn’t merely in a state of denial but is completely untethered from reality. It’s not that he can’t handle the truth about Iraq. He doesn’t know what the truth is.

The most startling example was his insistence that Al Qaeda is primarily responsible for the country’s spiraling violence. Only a week before Mr. Bush said this, the American military spokesman on the scene, Maj. Gen. William Caldwell, called Al Qaeda “extremely disorganized” in Iraq, adding that “I would question at this point how effective they are at all at the state level.” Military intelligence estimates that Al Qaeda makes up only 2 percent to 3 percent of the enemy forces in Iraq, according to Jim Miklaszewski of NBC News. The bottom line: America has a commander in chief who can’t even identify some 97 percent to 98 percent of the combatants in a war that has gone on longer than our involvement in World War II.

But that’s not the half of it. Mr. Bush relentlessly refers to Iraq’s “unity government” though it is not unified and can only nominally govern. (In Henry Kissinger’s accurate recent formulation, Iraq is not even a nation “in the historic sense.”) After that pseudo-government’s prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, brushed him off in Amman, the president nonetheless declared him “the right guy for Iraq” the morning after. This came only a day after The Times’s revelation of a secret memo by Mr. Bush’s national security adviser, Stephen Hadley, judging Mr. Maliki either “ignorant of what is going on” in his own country or disingenuous or insufficiently capable of running a government. Not that it matters what Mr. Hadley writes when his boss is impervious to facts.

In truth the president is so out of it he wasn’t even meeting with the right guy. No one doubts that the most powerful political leader in Iraq is the anti-American, pro-Hezbollah cleric Moktada al-Sadr, without whom Mr. Maliki would be on the scrap heap next to his short-lived predecessors, Ayad Allawi and Ibrahim al-Jaafari. Mr. Sadr’s militia is far more powerful than the official Iraqi army that we’ve been helping to “stand up” at hideous cost all these years. If we’re not going to take him out, as John McCain proposed this month, we might as well deal with him directly rather than with Mr. Maliki, his puppet. But our president shows few signs of recognizing Mr. Sadr’s existence. (more…)

Tonight, one of my good friends is playing at the Tonic Room (2447 N. Halsted | 773.248.8400). His name is Tommy Heinz, but goes by the name Playen. You can check out some of his music at 3 of his Myspace sites. here they are:
SITE 1
SITE 2 (WHICH IS MY FAVORITE, MUSICALLY)
SITE 3 (more of a background on Tommy)