Tuesday, March 29, 2005
[compton lecturer]
is it just me, or is jay-z starting to remind you of a certain smoking camel?
(I ain't getting any younger)
look inside for details
Fools lament the decay of criticism. For its day is long past. Criticism is a matter of correct distancing. It was home in a world where perspectives and prospects counted and where it was still possible to adopt a standpoint. Now things press too urgently on human society. The "unclouded," "innocent" eye has become a lie, perhaps the whole naive mode of expression sheer incompetence. Today the most real, mercantile gaze into the heart of things is the advertisement. It tears down the stage upon which contemplation moved, and all but hits us between the eyes with things as a car, growing to gigantic proportions, careens at us out of a film screen.
- walter benjamin, "one-way street", 1928
(sundaysundaysunday)
Monday, March 28, 2005
half full
me: "what came first, the chicken or the egg?"
(fits of giggles)
my niece: "the cloud"
Friday, March 25, 2005
workworkwork
shout out to dalek, the bassplayer from Tool, ISIS, Bonnie Prince Billy, DJ LT. Dan, Chops from the Mountain Brothers, Matt Sonzala, Gavin McGinness, those British dudes that played the shit out of those synths at Victory Grill on the Eastside, DJ Jester dat filipino thug and of course Busdriver, Saul Williams and Rob Sonic for making last week last longer than it should have.
you don't know what you missed.
and now, sports.
Wednesday, March 23, 2005
color tv
(otherness is synthesizers and soft guns in the hands of Chileans, Argentinians, Mexicans, Uruguayans--kids who when they look up they see the strands of a history mapped with dictators, nationalism and bad pop music. A creative disparity: how to balance the impulse to construct newness with two pesos in your pocket. A history full of maps, colored with glitzy tv personalities that represent the people up the block. A history full of maps.)
(chatter)
we here think you talk awkwardly.
all spanishy and shit.
President of Mexico: Sighing
[between breaths]
Tuesday, March 22, 2005
sincerely + white rooms
Sunday, March 20, 2005
WORDSOUP
Things That Were Real Before This Weekend that I Didn't Know:
Saul Williams really likes the Game and is currently listening to T.I. screwed and chopped.
Rob Sonic likes Russian literature.
Busdriver has never had a drink of alcohol in his life.
Saul Williams is funnier than you think.
Rob Sonic has never listened to the Mars Volta, but will.
Busdriver's dad directed Krush Groove.
Saul Williams wishes he could watch TV.
Rob Sonic once battled Busdriver in an imaginary country.
Busdriver doesn't trust his audience.
Saul Williams bought me drinks.
Rob Sonic sounds like that crazy guy from the Simpsons who thought he was Michael Jackson but ended up being a dude from Jersey.
Busdriver likes Kafka.
more shit I didn't know but learned at SXSW includes, but is not limited to:
Brian Wilson is a crazy mofo (like, seriously son.)
Elijah Wood goes up to your shoulders in height, no matter who you are.
The Wallflowers are not dead, unfortunately.
Japanese people are crazy mofos. (Brian Wilson just might be Japanese inside)
more to come later...
Thursday, March 17, 2005
modern romance
Kissing cousins and aural elbows: hip-hop (with a capital[ist] "H", son) and indie-rock. My article, not yet produced, for a local music site (HoustonMusicReview.com) is about how both camps look at each other with pouty lips. Like everything beneath the sun, it has to do with race. Are bands like TV on the Radio, 90 Day Men, The Mars Volta and Cafe Tacuba (to bring in some suvvvern flava) young Jackie Robinsons or peformers of their otherness or just some melanin-endowed rhythm machines>>>>>?
I'm also getting down in it with my column for XLR8R called "After Silence" (all serious and shit) covering anything from drop the lime to weird white-label remixes of Bjork and other stuff that makes the TRL ears go limp.
"We got to go back to the store and get you an 'N'"
on another weirdo nonpost-racial tip: why didnt anyone bring De La Soul heat for Dove's "work hard like wetbacks" line on "Ooh"?? I was just listening to it a few minutes ago and realized that I dont remember cats really bringing it to the forefront of a broader cultural debate like Hot 97 politiks. I guess its okay to go all Strom "Bitches Ain't Shit but Hoes and Tricks" Thurmond on it when it comes to Mexicans.
They don't really listen to music anyway. or read.
Wednesday, March 16, 2005
"the four seasons is ghetto, son"
saturday I'll be interviewing three of the most interesting rappers beneath the Spin radar: Busdriver, Rob Sonic and upstart no-namer, Saul Williams for Signal to Noise.
you will find me with a tape recorder aimed at anything that moves.
Monday, March 14, 2005
the other line
Don't have a conversation on the phone with your mom while sitting outside in a coffee shop and being 30, wearing red glasses and pants that make me think your a B-list celebrity. moreover, don't have a conversation that includes lines such as:
"Why do you always do this, mom?? I'm hanging up--No....No! I'm tired of this..."
and
"Thats why I don't like calling you, this is why....I'm----okay......well, yeah, but....(sarcasm meter red) fine. I'll talk to you later"
at audible levels to where children in Peru can hear you.
dude. You're 30.
not so glad , bitches
You learn things being around famous and sometimes-famous and oh-my-god you recognized me famous people.
This was one of those weekends.
In the middle of Xiu Xiu's pop surrealism and old man pants, I learned that being 33 does not mean you can wake up and not have to do push-ups (he does too many to count, daily). It also means that you are fully capable of educating the young white youth through foosball (man has a mean slapshot). My Yay Area wallet-sized Morrissey, Jamie Stewart, is a paperbag full of disturbing humor, genuine humanity and prickly intelligence: in short, a good friend. Plus, the man knows his literature.
Yesterday, I also found out that writing for the New Yorker and having a book little kids will be reading for years to come (thank you No Child Left Behind As Long As There Is Oil In the Ground Act) will make you a prick. Malcolm Gladwell is one of these people. Today, while signing his pricey hardback copies of his Neuroscience for Oprah Watchers book, Blink, the man did not crack a smile for the tens of people gawking at the skinny, out-there haired Gladwell. Granted, the guy could have been having a bad day but there is no excuse for disregarding basic civic codes such as "hello" and "thankyou" in favor of a snobbish shyness. It was inriguing to say the least.
Then, minutes later I accidentally ran into Elvis Mitchell. He wins the Affable Critic of the Year award. After inviting me and my lady to drop by his Four Seasons hotel so he could see her film he was nice enough to chat a bit. "What are you doing here, Elvis?" I impishly asked. "Watching movies, hanging out", the good-natured man replied. And then, the former New York Times film critic and backdoor academic at Harvard joyously walked into the warm Austin sunlight with his snaky dreads in tow.
Authors are inherently hermetic and today I realized the polarities of both sides: one didn't want to be fucked with and the other was giddy to be recognized.
This week can only get stranger...
Thursday, March 10, 2005
the noise of tomorrow
inching my way closer to a gig at the Mexic-Arte Museum. Now, I just have to remember to fix up, look sharp.
table for two, please.
Outer
how many times have you stared out the window and seen a pink man, wires dangling from his face, walk across your lawn?
"You should really get new sneakers"
"I bought these shoes in Rome, on credit of course--I don't make much at--"
"Whoa, out of control. I didn't ask for your life story, dude"
"--Being a pink man, its the private sector, really. They killed Eazy-E."
"What are you talking about?"
"Ghandi wore these shoes, well, I mean, not these shoes in particular, but certainly ones like them--"
"Dude, you're not thinking straight. You need sneakers"
"ones that were this silky Italian brown...brown brown brown"
"This is inane. I'm going inside"
"Plus, his had these little frizzy things on them, well, not like frizzy frizzy, but they were real hair-like, like Woody Allen's hair only smarter..."
and then the curtains came down.
Wednesday, March 09, 2005
youlisten
I give up. Though dude is one my favorite writers, I can't read him right now. Ulysses is a seemingly great work (all 200 pages I sank my teeth into) but it requires all 1440 minutes of a day to dig out a few ounces of meaning. The book itself is not that complicated structurally (though it does rank with The Sound and the Fury and this book). Language, for Joyce, is more than functional in telling a broader story here, its about the post-rational moments of immediacy involved in reading a sentence. It fragments the reading process and what is normally elemental in constructing a broader textscape is a paragraph-in-itself: five words long and meaty. Not to step on any toes, but the brilliance of this book needs to be taken in doses all at once. Unfortunately time won't allow that for me right now. Moreover, I don't have that kind of discipline, yet. I've grown accustomed to reading multiple books at once and you can't really appreciate this book if you do that. Its easier to digest four novels that are equally challenging but on a collective level.
sorry, James. You may have had an operatic voice, stopped cursing when you were older, a good tipper and wore four watches at once, but I'm going to have to pick up your novel later this year. Finnegan's Wake is still on my personal bestseller list (how did he write a book in that form for that long!).
on a different note, I'm working on a new story that takes place solely in a hallway. It involves a fourtyfour year old history professor, a letter he wrote twenty-two years ago detailing how he was going to leave his wife and a cup of coffee. his name is Gustavo. and he smokes too much.
and "neuro" is finally working properly. It is being hosted on a website by a benevolent friend.
meepmeep.
Tuesday, March 08, 2005
glass shadows
la dolce vita ain't nuthin' to fuck wit. when the rain pours from the sky's pores: you look up and watch daylight's crevices throw gang signs at you. I did it. believe me. (when I was younger, video game systems were novels).
this weekend:
friday getting freaky with my friend and indie-rock Morrissey, Xiu Xiu.
saturday cutting a rug with german blip composer and minimal cereal eater, Smash TV at this. Digital art and frizzy-haired white kids that mistake convulsions for dance aesthetics.
sunday listening to Malcolm Gladwell telling me to think about not thinking while watching a picture of the word think and listening to Bob Dylan sing "think about it" over and over while people whisper behind you "thinking is thinking" and then and then and then and then...
ahem. anyways....I'll be at this if you want to find me.
Monday, March 07, 2005
The Absent
Proceed with caution as you enter the symphony
Degrees of pulse will increase intensely
Syndrome was caused by the deadly drums
But the battle was won by swords being swung
Slicing with a vocal
From the international vocalist
Ya style is too local
To fuck with this
All fits of antagonists
No assistance movin motionless
Mysterious swiftness
Thoughts roll down the shaft of the brain
Mental gives the signal to the physical
Whirlwind kicks and hits from every angle
Violent temperments
Uncountenance dented
Poison vintage wine rhymes I invented
Chumped by the drunken punches that punches the heart
Vital sparks from the arteries start
-Masta Killa, "Glaciers of Ice"
for as long as I can remember I've always loved the line, "Ya style is too local to fuck with this". coming from Houston where every other dude was DJ Screw's third-cousin and the term "crunk" was new and harmless, I always criticized my Southern rap brethren on the basis of being hyper-regional and not post-geographic enough. sure, the beats were fire but as someone who enjoyed more syllables in a verse than in a lecture on Hegel, I leaned towards snobby NY rap of the 90's (Company Flow, Sir Menelik, Natural Resource, Wu-Tang) and left the rest of that stuff to the birds. around my neighborhood, the suburban white kids bumped Screw and everyone else watched the gentrification of gangsta rap from a distance. I suppose ubiquity can make you hate things.
fast forward six years and now every New York rap critic is on this shit.
who would have known?
Saturday, March 05, 2005
strictly business
I always wanted to run my own game.
p.s.s.s.s.s.s.s. freelancing for music rags barely buys you a cup of coffee.
Friday, March 04, 2005
critico
me on Prefuse 73's new album. weirdly enough, the editor (whose generally very good about this stuff) decided to play Jenga with my piece and awkwardly place something that was originally in the middle of the piece at the very end. I guess beats do have ethnicities, but that really wasn't the ending point. ah, editors.
also, I'm working on getting a mini-roundtable interview with Saul Williams, Rob Sonic and Busdriver in Austin for a possible cover feature in Signal To Noise. Gets me horny for revolution just thinking about it. I love complicated lyricism and dense rhymers, so maybe we can just talk about how hot beats have overshadowed avant-emcees for the past (insert Golden Age nostalgia here) years.
oh, and my friend that works at the Texas State Capitol said that Karl Rove wrote a letter to his boss: the creep actually has better handwriting than Bush.
Thursday, March 03, 2005
átmosfera
Using a friend's socks and the energy bestowed upon those who have nothing to lose, I think I may have landed a job at the Mexic-Arte Museum. This space, one of three in this entire country dedicated to the advancement of Mexican art (a concept I loosely adhere to) is both a protest to those who think we're all mariachis and tequila and to those that think we don't read. Nationalism is something that I abhor and kinda cling to like a kid to his mom's side--for comfort, rationalized purpose and for the illusion of community. Not to sound cynical, but I have beef with cultural propriety as well as relativism (moral or cultural). But, as the wise Westsyyyde representative, Nate Dogg once whoofed "it ain't no fun if the homies can't have none"--homies in this case encompassing humanist impulses and not the sex tones the song entails. Community is more complicated than most discourses understand it to be. It can hurt you. Or give you joy.
Writing is going well--working in the daytime is great, but once in a while staying up all night and fleshing out a story makes me feel like this. I'm finally midway through Marias' novel and its wonderful and wonderfully dense. Márquez's autobiography reads like a novel (granted, one that blurs voices and temporality). Nalo Hopkinson's book transports me to spaces where time is on display. In non-Mexican art museums.
You saw that one coming, didn't you.
Wednesday, March 02, 2005
afterfuture
Simon Reynolds on M.I.A. makes so much sense my mother called me to tell me my head hurt really bad. His idea of pop musicians as dissertations should be taught at Yale next to that kid who only reads Derrida to make him think of the past (and he laughs and laughs and laughs).
yee-haw.
so, my friend who works at the state Capitol told me Bush wrote the Secretary of State a letter and his handwriting looks like chickens overtook his hands for five minutes poked lasers in his brain (the 2% that works) and wrote it for him. No wonder he likes Tom Wolfe.
gross and stuff.
black leaves
I'm not much for these overseeing critical lists, but one thing did hit me with both humor and intrigue from this year's Pazz n Jop list. Greg "Hip-hop is like, soooo dead, dude" Tate, longtime Voice scribe selected Velvet Revolver as his best album of this past year---like, ewwwwww. For someone who thinks hip-hop is dead, this ain't no betta, woadie. To make the situation even more historically awkward, he dug Devendra Banhart (someone I shared a hospital with at birth...seriously) as his last selection. This is a good thing.
Back to our regularly scheduled programme.
Tuesday, March 01, 2005
grime typewriter
gang gang dance literature
& thoughts go out to the good folks of Subtle. those American roads can be tougher than you think. theres no greater event than a car accident to make you feel.
