Wednesday, June 29, 2005
you shouldn't have breathed, dad
the gallery is closed, people.
Monday, June 27, 2005
as we walked up
hollowed out by the same dreams: without reason.
(ethnic robots on the sun. like drizzled blips of blood in the air.)
Sunday, June 26, 2005
basslines as trees
all over the walls
--Alicia Keys and Faith Evans in Vegas a few months ago. No children were hurt during this concert. The End.
blood invisible
Three novels that have nothing in common but are like music: William Gibson's Virtual Light, William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying and Sandra Cisneros' The House on Mango Street.
Everydaywelookupandthereissssssky.clippingsofeyesandbillboardsofthinhearts.loudstompsandquiet nations.eyesclosed.
this film is worth watching.
Wednesday, June 22, 2005
nounspace
Zipping through streets I realized that narratives are post-geographic and we forget. China's in-the-now modernist, Mian Mian's novel, Candy--when you squint--looks similar in scope to Mexico's beloved media darling Xavier Velasco's 2003's Alfaguara winning book, Diablo Guardian. Not to get too Ivy League on LSD(eleuze) here, but although geography is important to both narratives they connect in the abstract thematic space of the novel itself: two young female characters experiencing the world through drugs, outdated rock music and tropes involving rebellion and coming of age. And that seems more interesting.
Neato.
Monday, June 20, 2005
the clouds are not low income housing
Juana Molina is nicer than she looks (though she did get heated at some Argentinean dude who wouldn't shut up during her show). Loop pedals and abstract voices are her friends. She talked about growing up in Buenos Aires and listening to American and British music and not understanding a thing--the feeling of listening as pure understanding. Considering that ninety-percent of the people at the show didn't speak spanish (she asked them), it was a fitting anecdote.
Something everyone should see: The Littlest Robo by Shynola. It was actually a student film from one of them.
/bleepbleep/
Saturday, June 18, 2005
soundless
Thursday, June 16, 2005
t(error)
Yo, yo, yo
I can feel 'em gettin closer to me
I heard they're searchin for me
High and low they wanna know me now
OK, I can feel me gettin closer to them
I've got that strap in the back of my mind
And I'm prepared to take them down
(Yeah) I can see her she's tryna get revenge
I know I treated her badly
Now she's on her way to bein angry
I can see it
I'm gonna be that boy from E3
Livin through the TV
The soldiers they're behind me
Waitin I'm on the way to the top
And I'm gonna take my area straight to the top with me
There's more artists where I came from
They'll be treddin after me
Watch this space
I'm settin the pace like Dizzee
I represent the underground that's where I get busy
My name's Wiley call me Eski boy
Can't test me boy
I'm blessed rude boy
Rip that S off your chest rude boy
I'm make you go home, sit down and practice boy
You can't match this flow
I'm treddin on thin ice with this flow
Roll Deep's behind me bro
Yeah it's that time to get doe
- Wiley, "Treddin' On Thin Ice"
whiteheartbeats
Javier Marias, probably one of the best writers that are still into breathing, is a narrator of interiority. Linear thinking and one-way narratives go out the window for intense psychological analysis and tangents the size of London. To read pages of pure thoughts is like listening to white noise. A Heart So White--his first novel I've read--shouldn't be by most (voting) Americans: it doesn't really go anywhere, rarely moves or looks the other way. Endings are here to make us feel warm, but for Marias (and most writers) they're impossible. The last sentence reads like any other in the novel. And considering Spanish novels are meant to be read in Spanish, this translation is the closest an English reader will ever get to español. Fidgety vowels, Autobahn sentences and thick meaning is something most living American writers (sans Delillo, Delany and a handful of others) rarely articulate.
Plus, someone shoots themselves in the heart. What drama queens, these Spanish.
Wednesday, June 15, 2005
ausente
snippet:
When days looped and the static of small gestures became suffocating—getting the mail, kissing his wife, writing and erasing equations, scribbling formulas and proofs—Gustavo would put on thick, black frames that he didn’t really need, ones encircling his tiny, green eyes to make him feel like he was doing something out of the ordinary. Like his father and mother before him, both now buried somewhere in central Mexico, he didn’t believe in fate, instead in that which he could only understand now. So, something as simple as turning on the television, reading the newspaper backwards, wearing two watches, tapping his feet while his students took exams—these were small revolutions. It was a day like this that he first decided to write on an empty page; one ripped out of an anthology of Chilean poetry, in great detail how he would end his marriage. If his life, as he saw it when he had just graduated at twenty-two, became a loud drifting, he would end it.
the rest soon come.
Monday, June 13, 2005
my rhymebook is Tolstoy thick, son
Thumb through the next STN for my interview with Busdriver, Rob Sonic and some young upstart named Saul Williams. It'll be like watching water or listening to loud birds. Seriously.
Sunday, June 12, 2005
a world within the word
I suspect I have spent just about exactly as much time actually writing as the average person my age has spent watching television, and that, as much as anything, may be the real secret here.
- william gibson
(my follow-up story to "neuro" should be done, soon. see what happens.)
Friday, June 10, 2005
straight outta the hamptons
For all my Tokyo heads: dub is free. Rebel Familia, say hello. With Green Milk From the Planet Orange (who, single-handedly win the Philip K. Dick Best Band Name Award), Japan is back like The Game and Compton and pink light highrises and tight jeans and bad stadium rock and macrobeats.
Don't sleep.
white screens
In a few weeks, I'm interviewing Cafe Tacuba--Mexico's Talking Heads. Now lets just stay professional, here. How do you say 'ohboy, ohboy' in Japanese?
Wowsers.
Thursday, June 09, 2005
fashionistas in the clouds
There was a sign one day that I couldn't read. Blurred like slippery photographs, it wandered the streets. Years later, I remembered it said 'paradise, paradise'. Then, I walked away.
p.s.s.s.s.s.s.s.s. I finished Javier Marias' A Heart So White on a day where sunshine made the Stock Market giggle. And I will tell you why it is worth building a library with a thousand shelves and only one book.
Tuesday, June 07, 2005
throw yo berliners in the air
Monday, June 06, 2005
automatica
Like clockwork, I realized I liked these things better than I thought. I just happen to pick them along time ago. Non-novels from Adrian Tomine's Optic Nerve empire and some nobody Jewish kid from Minnesota who whines a lot. Dylan, like gelatos and baseball in the summertime, makes me all warm inside.
Saturday, June 04, 2005
tomorrow
look both ways
PAGING ME, PAGING ME:
I remember when I saw Dave Chapelle walking around Union Square last year with shades on and clean sneakers: poor guy, hope he's okay. It was weird cause minutes earlier I had bumped into this guy with a backpack on. And then later, I saw this girl walking into a movie theater in Chelsea. Then, I went into a subway and the lights went woooooooooooooooosh.
Thursday, June 02, 2005
and now a word from our sponsor
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- dat boy Tunde from TV on the Radio
I guess being sorta famous and having the critics all over your you know whats still doesn't mean the Steve Albini-endorsed code of industry ethics doesn't apply. yee-haw.
Wednesday, June 01, 2005
and spacecrafts were walking
Forget all that sunshine and frothy grass: we here to bring real heat. And if Strawberry Alarm Clock was your little brother's name, then you'll jump like France at a huge constitutionless rally at this. They're two records I put in my next column thing. Ante up, moms.
(talk talk talk)
