• C. Elliott
• Howe Gelb, Brian Lopez, Gabriel Sullivan

We love it when arts converge! Continents, politics ... even better. So we dispatched C. Elliott to bring you photographs of a French-flavored graphic novel's debut set in a concert by some of Tucson's most Tucson-y musicians: Howe Gelb, of course, plus Gabriel Sullivan, Brian Lopez, William Sedlmayr and Chris Black.

Don't shotgun a beer like a D.A.B., bro.

Scott Arellanno and  Wyatt Thurston of Raging Mammoth launched a new Kickstarter project that will change the world of shotgunning beer, forever. It's called the Beer Tusk. Arellanno and Thurston are both seniors at the University of Arizona and want to help you party harder than Andrew W.K. on a good day. 

" 'Shotgunning' has been around since the eighties. We noticed that people were cutting their fingers and hurting themselves," Arellano said in a phone interview. The entrepreneurs struggled to settle with a final product after various beer claw designs and beta testing with friends, family, college students and graduates looking to relive the glory days.

A pledge for as little as $10 will get you a Beer Tusk that doubles as a keychain bottle cap opener that creates the perfect square to thrust alcohol in your "party hole." The page says there was some thought and science behind this invention: 

After a year of testing, through maximum exposure at college parties, tailgates, and gatherings... our tusks are still working like the day they were made.

Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, who saw his poll numbers plummet after signing onto the Gang of Eight's immigration-reform proposal earlier this year, is now openly deriding the idea of comprehensive reform. Talking Points Memo reports:

The most prominent conservative supporter of sweeping immigration reform is calling on Congress to dial back the effort and instead focus on making incremental changes, delivering a significant blow to the prospects of reform.

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) now opposes a bicameral conference committee to reach a final resolution to the Senate-passed bill, his spokesman said, arguing that the support is not there for a comprehensive overhaul and that Congress should act where there is consensus.

"The point is that at this time, the only approach that has a realistic chance of success is to focus on those aspects of reform on which there is consensus through a series of individual bills," Alex Conant, a top spokesman for Rubio, told TPM in an email. "Otherwise, this latest effort to make progress on immigration will meet the same fate as previous efforts: failure."

As I noted in The Skinny last week, the road ahead for comprehensive immigration reform—i.e., any plan that includes a path to citizenship for people now in the country illegally—is rocky. Member of the Arizona business community are flying back to D.C. today as part of a push by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to get House members on board, but most GOP House members seem more inclined to listen to the Tea Party base than to business types these days.

Dan Nowicki at the Arizona Republic talks to Arizona business leaders who say that President Barack Obama's push for immigration reform may make it harder for House Republicans to go along:

For most of this year, Obama has kept his distance from the legislative action, giving the Senate’s bipartisan “Gang of Eight” of four Democrats and four Republicans the time they needed to craft their bill. The group included Republican Sens. John McCain and Jeff Flake of Arizona.

Because of the delicate political dynamics of the House, Obama’s increasing presence in the immigration debate gives anxiety to some pro-reform business leaders who traditionally have a good rapport with Republicans. The fear is that some GOP partisans who might otherwise support reform could balk if they feel Obama is muscling them.

“It hurts more than it helps,” said Glenn Hamer, president and CEO of the Arizona Chamber of Commerce and Industry, who, with other business leaders, will travel to Washington next week to lobby lawmakers to pass immigration reform. “We understand and we appreciate that this is a big issue for him. It’s a big issue for the country. This would be a good time for the House of Representatives to really pass out its vision for immigration reform.”

On last Friday's AZ Illustrated Politics, Tucson City Councilman called for the repeal of SB 1070 because it was creating problems between Tucson police officers and the Latino community. He said that the Tucson City Council may take some steps to create a new policy limiting how long Tucson cops will detain people they suspect are in the country illegally while waiting for the Border Patrol.

Kozachik also talked about the Broadway widening project between downtown and Country Club Road, as well his recent efforts to draw attention to the links between gun violence and domestic violence and the upcoming Loft Film Festival.

On the AZ Illustrated Politics roundtable, Pima County Democratic Party Chairman Don Jorgensen and Tucson Hispanic Chamber of Commerce President Lea Marquez-Peterson discussed the hurdles in the way of comprehensive immigration reform, Attorney General Tom Horne's political problems and the upcoming Tucson City Council election.

Lou Reed died at age 71 yesterday. As of this writing, an official cause of death hasn’t been confirmed. The circumstances of his death are certainly less important than the achievements of his life, because without Lou Reed, the worlds of popular music and culture would be very, very different, even today.

Everyone’s heard the famous Brian Eno quote, "the first Velvet Underground album only sold 10,000 copies, but everyone who bought it formed a band." This much is true. There would be no Iggy Pop without Reed. No David Bowie. No punk rock, no hip hop, no electronic pop or rock music. Any artist who has attempted to push the boundaries of what could be considered pop or rock music since The Velvet Underground & Nico hit record store shelves in early 1967 owes Lou Reed their career. Reed brought high art and pulp-novel noir into rock and roll in a way that made the accomplishments of The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and Bob Dylan seem tentative, even squeamish. They teased; they hinted; they hid behind allegory and innuendo. With Reed and the Velvets, everything was laid out in the starkest of light. Culturally, his crowning achievement of that era was to be the first to deny the myths of the hippie counter-culture. Drug abuse was ugly. Free love was not consequence-free. While the hippies were protesting the Vietnam War with stoned flower-power, America and the rest of the world was quite literally burning, and the music of the Velvets reflected this like no other. The amoral, deglamorized drug tales “Waiting For The Man,” “Heroin,” and “White Light/White Heat”; the twisted sexuality of “Venus in Furs”; the tragic-comic portraits of social posturing in “All Tomorrow’s Parties,” and “Stephanie Says”; and the combination of all of the above in the cataclysmic “Sister Ray” violently defiled the baby boomer lie. The Velvets were hated for it.

But Reed had the courage to keep shoving that lie back in the face of the counter-culture that purveyed it. He also had the courage to write honest and beautiful portraits of purity, because like any true artist, he wouldn’t deny any part of the spectrum of life. “I’ll Be Your Mirror,” “Pale Blue Eyes,” “I Found a Reason,” and “Perfect Day,” the latter from his most successful solo album, Transformer, rank among the most naked and compassionate love songs in twentieth century music.

With the Velvets, Reed introduced free jazz, avant-garde classical music, musique concrete, minimalism based in the primal rhythms of Bo Diddley, and pure noise into rock and roll. He brought the pop-art sensibility and literary innovations of mentors Andy Warhol and Delmore Schwartz, respectively, and it was no longer just rock and roll music. There is popular music before Lou Reed, and there is popular music after Lou Reed. People didn’t know what to call it for another decade, until punk rock was a full-fledged international movement.

That’s a fraction of Lou Reed’s legacy; the tip of the iceberg. By most accounts, he was an awful, cruel person, like another master of the last century, Pablo Picasso. But there is the art and then there is the artist. And the art stands high like a monolith, but also as a battering ram — the sound of ground being leveled for new ideals and ideas to be built upon. The implications of the line “I put you in the mirror I put in front of me,” from “Pale Blue Eyes,” run as deep as any religious or spiritual text. In “Some Kinda Love,” from the Velvets’ 1969 eponymous album, Reed sings, “between thought and expression lies a lifetime.” That lifetime could be one millisecond or one thousand years. It is infinity, and in that space, “the possibilities are endless” (also from “Some Kinda Love”). This is the gift that Lou Reed gave to me. The words and music that opened my mind, eyes, and ears, and the endless possibilities of perspective.