Pop, We Will Eat Your Brains

Japanese artist Hiroki Arashi makes funerals out of heros.

(Via: We Make Money Not Art)

Andy Kehoe, "Souvenir of Lovely Stranger"

Xiu Xiu- PJ in the Streets

Xiu Xiu- Save Me Save Me

Justin Grant, "Maria"


Philly painter whose work is like watching Marc Chagall getting beat up by the 13th Floor Elevators. Watch out for this dude, he paints as much as the normal person watches television. And he knows his Russian beers.

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Warsaw last week, saw two bands that I love for their nutso philosophies and long hair. The Apes confused me because their original lead singer Paul something was in the audience and not on stage. I guess he no longer sings for them. Instead, we got Del the Funky Homosapien's brother, seen above (sorta), who sang about weird shit like he was Del. Alan Vega had cholesterol problems or something and didn't show up and the keyboardist for The Apes, a very congenial-looking girl, had a mask on and with an effects-laden mic, told us in a creepy way that Vega ain't gonna be here. But then who cared because the Liars played with bombhearts and hair-flinging love. They pounded two drum sets and a tuneless guitar for over an hour of almost formless bliss. Songs melted. Angus changed from a welder's outfit into a two-piece skirt suit. And what did he say, "We started this tour in Poland and ended it at Warsaw." Grow your hair long and then cut it, kids. He never stopped moving.

Miguel Calderon, "Attack", 1998

Current TV now has Murs for a host.

(pic by dayvidday)

I move from spidery jazz piano to micro-dub DJ's. Forget being spoiled, this city is rotting any ideas of a broader musical geography outside New York. This week alone I've seen Brad Mehldau beautifully render a piano mute with prettiness, using an eloquent layered playing system that is jaw-dropping. He played 5 encores (including a rendition of "Paranoid Android" that would have made Radiohead proud). Tomorrow I'm seeing Deadbeat here followed by the Liars, The Apes and Alan Vega (!!!) at Warsaw on Saturday. And it doesn't end: Buck 65 in Central Park, Yuka Honda and Sean Lennon (!) at Tonic, TV on the Radio in Prospect Park, Smash TV at Avalon, Seu Jorge in Central Park, the Boredoms at an art gallery in the Lower East Side, Mission of Burma at Warsaw, Amadou & Mariam, Diplo, Antony & the Johnsons, Silver Mt. Zion, Gang Gang Dance, Deerhoof. Of course, there are other places where you can catch all these people (London, Chicago, LA) but theres something eerie about a city pregnant with possibility. I think its seeing marching bands outside of subways. Or Spanish guitarists in the subways. Joyful noises and tomorrow rap.

Duh. I told you.

I will be seeing Brad Mehldau, the heroin-addicted, Radiohead-covering piano virtuoso tonight at Carnegie Hall. He will be by himself on stage. There will be a piano as well. You should be happy.

Spike Lee talks like he has marbles in his mouth. But, last night, at PS1 MOMA in Long Island City, a packed house of kids from Harlem and Brooklyn coupled with young professionals came to hear Michael Arad and Spike. In hot Nikes, the oldish-looking Lee walked out and gave a short talk on a life in the arts. Like a wise man wooed by Hollywood, Lee talked to the kids, told them to do what you love, not live by your parents' expectations. That the arts may not make you the most money, but that it will make you happy. Michael Arad, the affable architect who designed the World Trade Center Memorial, fielded some tough questions but delivered a very emotional explanation as to his connection to 9/11 and why he felt so compelled to design the WTC Memorial (seen below, on the newspapers).



Both were nice, Spike like an old friend to everyone, taking pictures with countless kids, fans. Even when a girl asked if he was hiring, he was laughing. Not the best orator, but a good sport, he's bananas.

"What advice would you give to someone going to college"
"What school you going to?" Spike asked.
"Virginia State" The chubby kid said.
"Play sports? You get a scholarship?"
"No, but I'm going to play football there"
Spike thinks a bit. Waits.
"What position you play?"
"D-Tackle"
Spike chuckles. Waits again.
"Yoooouuuuu a little small to be playing Defensive Tackle, aren't you?"
People go bonkers with laughter.

Xiu Xiu, "Clowne Towne"

Carlos Fuentes writes like he's twenty. But his new novel, The Eagle's Throne, which I haven't read yet, sounds brilliant. It's 2020, Condoleezza Rice is the US President and she's cut off Mexico's means of communication. Thats just a footnote to the socially critical book that is a great account of the loony times we live in. Fuentes' other brilliant novels, especially The Death of Artemio Cruz have always been progressive and maybe this work is a reaction to the writers who aren't young but are in literary years. People like Xavier Velasco, Ignacio Padilla, Rodrigo Fresan and Juan Villoro--the Boom done boomed. Fuentes, now in his fifth decade of writing, is still going strong. Pssshh, plot-wise, he's better than he's been in years. It's pretty humbling to know you can not only write this long, but still write loud, experimental novels (at least in terms of ideas) at 78 years old. Why can't rappers age this well?

Sasha Frere-Jones does it again with this wonderful chat between Radiohead members.

(pic by So Stark)


Mark Ibold, seen here in a nice yellow t-shirt, was at CBGB's last night, with a bass guitar in his hands, next to, um, Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo and those other people. Youthy something. The former Pavement bassist has taken over Jim O' Rourke's old job. Does he put that on his resume? Does Jim O' Rourke have a resume?

Someone needs to answer these nail-biting questions.

EL-P, who is much shorter than you think, has enlisted Trent Reznor and the Latinos on acid, the Mars Volta for his new upcoming album, I'll Sleep When You're Dead. Sounds like a soft Tarantino film or bad British movie. But, I guess ambition does make you look pretty ugly. I'm just kidding Jamie, I'm just waiting for the Company Flow reunion, cause after talking to Big Juss in Austin during SXSW, he said you guys were back together. Mr. Len where you at?

Talk is we're reaching an ending, not a beginning. And its healthy discussion, though some of it is not well thought out. But, here we are. Let free markets kill American 'realness'. The weirdo kids will keep on rapping. For historical purposes, let me say I get giddy when thinking about Subtitle and dalek on the same stage. I've supported both these peoples back when I wrote for URB (Scott--where's my check?).

Julianne Shepherd, writer extraordinaire, hips us to one of the most lucid conversations on imagery and women in hip-hop. Word to Julia Kristeva, this is real.

The Knife, "Silent Shout"

Videos are going to kill someone one day. With their shiny graphics and Swedish people. Silent Shout is bananas.


Philip Sherburne told you so.

(pic by Rocco Kasby)

Danny Masterson didn't clap. Last night, at New York's Knitting Factory a packed house came out to watch Sonic Youth Junior bust out some jams. Furiously, this quartet, cute as a button, came out and ripped through hits from their debut album. People responded warmly, but, I think most of us in the back felt like the old bug had gotten us. This seemed too high school, I was afraid I was gonna see my English teacher roaming around, making sure no one was making out. But, the lead singer is going to be around for a while, I can almost hear record label execs drooling over this 18 year old Karen O meets Kathleen Hanna. Put it easier: without this girl, this would be the four wide-eyed kids making beautiful noise down your suburban street. I want to hear them in two years, after they're jaded from the touring and bored of three chords. After Kim Gordon has introduced them to Ikue Mori and Thurston Moore tells them who Will Winant, Steve Reich and all those avant-garde people, because that album is going to be a classic. But, really, Danny Masterson was there and homedude didn't clap, seemed real nice though. And godfather extraordinaire Thurston Moore was hanging out, looking very David Fricke. I wanted to just shake his hand. Or be his neighbor--wouldn't that be nice? "Hey, Thurston, nice job on the yard. I use an electric lawnmower myself. You?"

Dreams.

RIP

Are these kids America's Arctic Monkeys? Be Your Own Pet, darlings courted by Thurston Moore while barely able to vote or die in war, are playing tonight at the Knitting Factory. And, I will be there. Because I haven't seen a trashy rock show since living in a small art town outside of d/a/l/l/a/s. And there wasn't no gorilla vs. bear then, there was only tiny messageboards & Art Prostitute galleries. Afros and all, this quartet I'm sure ain't the new Sonic Youth, but maybe they will be for one night.

Diplo's podcasts are bonkers. "Mad Decent Podcasts" he calls them. Ha Ha Ha. They make me want to climb into the internet, pet it and walk away like I stole something. And is he not, unless you're Teutonic, keeping DJ culture alive single-handedly? When people are talking death rap, and not like the Gravediggaz but like Fabulous, we need DJ's! And the Liars!

Press here.

Kehinde Wiley!

And here is a video from his opening at Dietch projects last year.

(pic by Le Merde)


I go dizzy looking at New Yorkers whiz by with their pretty shoes & big thoughts. Last time, there were these pink shoes. And I thought what if art school was this giant room with white walls made of Ian McEwan novels and they had to use laptops to draw pictures of British people. But, not, like, Jane Austen British people. Chantelle Fiddy folks, grime, Kehinde Wiley beautiful messes.

"Move, yo"

And, after I looked up at Gazelle frames and green polo shirt. I moved.

"For Rebecca"
by Yacht

Alias & Tarsier- Ligaya

Simone, we need you!

People in the audience Kool G Rap is my name
I write rhymes and insert them inside your brain
And DJ Polo, the man I'm behind
He operates the turntables when I'm rocking my rhymes, see...

(x4)

Psychopath on the phonograph, nut of the cuts
You heard the boy slice, is he nice or what?
He's the main entertainer inside the show
And he goes by the name of DJ Polo, see...

(x4)

I supply the data, he's the wheel operator
We're walking tall and we're called the terminators
I'm Kool G Rap, and he's Polo
He cuts like a pro when I go solo
He's a record spinner winner, that you can bet
Eats DJ's for dinner on his table set
With cuts he concocts and the party rocks
DJ's want to Xerox it out the box
A professional performer, wheels of steel trainer
One hundred percent excellent entertainer
The maker and creator of the lyrical line
Idea of Shakespeare, the mind of Einstein
Surrender, pretender, you don't exist
As a vocalist, so you can kiss this
I'm Kool G Rap, greatest of all times
And you can see it, inside my rhymes
See it's a demo

(x4)

My recital will form a musical brainstorm
Powerful sound waves where ear drums are torn
The performer recites, competitors ignite
Audiences tonight I came to incite
Fascinating results, a defeat will be difficult
Equivalent to a thousand volts
To my brief rap speech you attach like a leech
Examine when I'm jamming and when I preach
Before I'm completed, you will all be deleted
You said I sucked, instead I succeeded
Fan fascinator, I supply data
According to the groove, I'm a real smooth operator
I activate a musical device
Dialogues are concise, no need to splice
My system contains musical rap rain
Instrumentals inserted inside your brain
All levels rate low with a medium tempo
I give a dramatical cameo show
And now you know DJ Polo
These party people are ready to go
See it's a demo

(x4)

Better than a Snicker when it comes to a snack
I go solo with Polo when I'm in combat
I'm the MC humanoid and I just get annoyed
Boy you'll be destroyed cause you copy like a Polaroid
Coming like a meteor inside any area
Make the people merrier, vicious like a terrier
Like a terrorist, I will terrorize
Telling any territory I'm a glory enterprise
The microphone fanatic, cause I'm the Asiatic
Brotherman from the motherland, rappers automatic
Ly suffer as I suffocate, then I start to alienate
Make you an inmate, so you cannot retaliate
Mutilate at a rate to penetrate you
No other crew can rescue
My talents are balanced my audience is silent
MC's stop biting or I'll get violent
It's a demo...

T-shirt!

"They zip their rackets into their cases and sling them over their shoulders. Freed from red lines and the glaring white walls and the rules of the game, they walk along the courts to the Coke machine. Strauss buys a can for himself. Perowne doesn't want one. You have to be an American to want, as an adult, anything quite so sweet."
-Ian McEwan, Saturday p. 118

But, me? I was trying to move out, get my stuff together and maybe move to New York. I didn’t want to go to college, for what? I still had my boombox, all my shoes and some tapes. Some friends of mine who went to art school here told me that there was some spacey stuff happening in New York. The Lower East Side, there, you could live for real cheap. But, every time I thought about leaving, my heart hurt.

I wanted to be British. Like on this crazy new channel called MTV, those videos with the black makeup and those synthesizer beats. Made me forget about Reagan. That friend I was telling you about, Memo, he would say, “Reagan isn’t the problem, mujer, he lets people like me and you in to this country every day, its those damn hippies in Berkeley—those are stopping us from getting rights. You think they care about us? Nothing but white people feeling sorry, de veras.” And my stomach would hurt because I wanted to cry, how could he believe that? I thought how weird it was that after all these Mexicans came here, like me, that they suddenly loved the government and everything that could possibly hurt them.

My bra was too tight. I couldn’t take it anymore. I decided to go back home, thinking I was never gonna find work. Black Casio calculator watch, the one I bought last week, beeped. It was seven. Stores were closing and today’s newspapers were useless in trying to find a job. Fog was over the city. Grabbed my scarf, wrapped it tighter around my neck. I turned a corner, getting back on Geary street when I saw an older lady, long black hair and dark brown skin: I heard her talking to her little daughter. I could barely understand what she was saying to her, but it was in Spanish, and the little girl was starting to cry, she was wearing a tiny red coat and some doll shoes. I stopped, turned my boombox off. Without saying anything, my eyes began to get watery. They were walking towards me, up Geary, towards downtown, I guessed. I put the boombox down on the sidewalk and tried not to look at them. Even though my heart was starting to hurt, the beats making me move (I could never stay still when it hurt because it felt so strange), I still looked. The lady looked old, her face wrinkled, no one walking down the sidewalk looked at them. I just moved over, against the glass window of a coffee shop. They neared, walked passed me, the little girl running ahead of the lady. “Catarina, ven para aca, Catarina!” the lady yelled at the little girl. Watching them pass, the lady brushed against me on the crowded sidewalk. And warmth filled my stomach.

Jon Caramanica, the Energizer Bunny of freelance journalists, brings us this in The Believer. Unbelievable!

I ran into the El-P last night at Max Fish. He's much shorter and mediocre-looking than I imagined. Maybe Cannibal Ox can make him prettier. And, to further make the last twenty-four hours surreal, I came down to get some lunch and guess who was standing in the lobby, looking seven foot and able to rap? Foxy Brown.

I couldn't talk to either of them.

"A historical account of sincerity must take into its purview not only the birth and ascendancy of the concept but also its eventual decline, the sharp diminution of the authority it once exercised. The word itself has lost most of its former high dignity. When we hear it, we are conscious of the anachronism which touches it with quaintness. If we speak it, we are likely to do so with either discomfort or irony."
-Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity, 1970

"The Housekeeper Series" by Alida Cervantes.

I wrote about Juana Molina's new album for Stop Smiling here.


Instructions: boil a pot of coffee, drink, sit on virtual toilet, read.

Uh oh. Here we go again.

Sesshu Foster is writing about LA here. I love the idea of writers having their own blogspaces to scribble out notes, like one huge virtual notebook. But, I don't like writers.

Poo. Thats what this album is. First off, who told these murderous geniuses that they could come back as G Unit cheerleaders? Fiddy should be on your label, Prodigy. And Havoc: mid-tempo beats make me sleepy. You guys making shit for the streets of Gary, Indiana? BORING.

This record should have been called Monopoly Money.

But, if you are in the D.F. (for all my readers below the border), go to this:

Argentinean songstress and nice lady, Juana Molina's third album, Son is great. Her music will cause indie kids to move in masses to Buenos Aires and then realize that they can buy ice cream or a sweater. And that is the power of music.

I live where Polish people are the rulers of the universe. But, just below my neighborhood, big sunglasses and tight jeans are the way. Between them, sits a nice park named after McCaren. Like Brooklyln Vegan tells us, someone paid a lot of money to let us have fun in a pool. Not with water, though. And this summer, bands like Of Montreal, Deerhoof and Iron and Wine will be playing there. New York sometimes makes me laugh and laugh.

Mmmmmm, Pierogis.

What are your thoughts on digital art and its relationship to the different forms of communication in our dense and continuously changing world. Is there any return to the "comforts" of a "homogenous" culture on the horizon?

Here again we have two different answers depending on whether you believe in "conceptual frameworks" or not. If you do, then you also believe that there's such a thing as "the bourgeois ideology of the individual," a pervasive framework within which all artistic production of the last few centuries is inscribed. But if you do not believe there was ever such a thing, then history becomes much less homogenous, much less dominated by any one framework, and hence you begin to look at all the different ways in which art has escaped the conditions of its production (which admittedly, did include ruling classes as suppliers of resources). Put differently, once you admit that history has been much more complex and heterogeneous than we have been told, then even the "enemy" looks less in control of historical processes than we thought. In a sense, what I am trying to do is to cut the enemy down to size, to see all the potential escape routes that we have been overlooking by exaggerating the importance of "frameworks" or "ideologies." Clearly, if the enemy was never as powerful as we thought (which is not to say that it did not to say that it did have plenty of power) the question of the role of art (digital or otherwise) in changing social reality acquires new meanings and possibilities.

How does your philosophy of history differ from those of previous philosophers? Do you feel affinities with any contemporaries on this subject? Deleuze and Guattari, maybe, with whom there's a sense of continuous, vertiginous change - a tacit admission that history is continuity, but seething, ebbing, and flowing continuity?

There are two main differences between my philosophical ideas about history and those of previous philosophers. The first one, which is shared by many these days, is a rejection of Platonic essences as sources of form, you know, the idea that the form of this mountain here or of that zebra over there emanates from an essence of "mountain-hood" or of "zebra-hood" existing in some ideal world or in the mind of the God that created these creatures. Instead, for each such entity (not only geological and biological entities, but also social and economic ones), I force myself to come up with a process capable of creating or producing such an entity. Sometimes these processes are already figured out by scientists (in those disciplines linked to questions of morphogenesis, like chaos theory and non-linear dynamics) and so I just borrow their model, other times I need to create new models using philosophical resources - and people like Deleuze and Guattari have been very helpful in this regard. The other difference is my rejection of the existence of totalities, that is, entities like "Western Society" of the "Capitalist System." The morphogenetic point of view does allow for the emergence of wholes that are more than the sum of their parts, but only if specific historical processes, specific interactions between "lower scale entities," can be shown to have produced such wholes. Thus, in my view, institutional organizations like bureaucracies, banks, and stock markets acquire a life of their own from the interactions of individuals. From the interactions of those institutions cities emerge, and from the interactions between cities nation states emerge. Yet, in these bottom-up approaches, all the heterogeneity of real nation states can be pockets of minorities, the dialect differences, the local transience - unlike when history is modeled on totalities (concepts like "society" or "culture" or "the system"). In this latter situation homogeneity has to be artificially injected into the model.

One thing everyone seems to agree on is that there are so many different frameworks of interpretation available today that we have lost track of the world we inhabit: the "natural" has been displaced by the human; we as a species have altered the atmosphere of the planet, changed the composition of the oceans, even created seismic disruptions. There's an overwhelming sense of anthropocentric agency, over determination: "There is nothing that man hath not wrought." How do you think this sense of ƒber-agency so prevalent in philosophical, historical, and political discourse will change in the future?

I agree that the domination of this century by linguistics and semiotics (which is what allows us to reduce everything to talk of "frameworks of interpretation"), not to mention the post-colonial guilt of so many white intellectuals which forces them to give equal weight to any other culture's belief system, has had a very damaging effect, even on art. Today I see art students trained by guilt-driven semioticians or post-modern theorists, afraid of the materiality of their medium, whether painting, music, poetry or virtual reality (since, given the framework dogma, every culture creates its own reality). The key to break away from this is to cut language down to size, to give it the importance it deserves as a communications medium, but to stop worshipping it as the ultimate reality. Equally important is to adopt a hacker attitude towards all forms of knowledge: not only to learn UNIX or Windows NT to hack this or that computer system, but to learn economics, sociology, physics, biology to hack reality itself. It is precisely the "can do" mentality of the hacker, naive as it may sometimes be, that we need to nurture everywhere.


manuel de landa rules.

The Bunnybrains!

Like Willie D, Joan Didion writes without romanticism. I finally finished her wonderful The Year of Magical Thinking, a memoir thats equal parts love story to a past long gone and an ode to the Future. Short, heartfelt and full of grimy emotional moments, Didion uses nouns & verbs to punch symbolism, throw things at death and scream for 200 pages about how and why her husband, John Dunne, died the way he did (at dinner, of cardiac arrest). Didion, a great journalist, talks facts as much as poetics. What was it that her husband actually had? And when her daughter was in a coma, she sought out medical journals and pre-search engine paper things to help her brain understand the emotional horror. With one of the best passages on grief I have ever read, she proves to be gifted at presenting tiny moments of hope.

Endings are never real, she seems to say.

I wrote about the Wisconsin rapper/producer for XLR8R a few months back. And now he is coming to New York. Pack up your drum machines.

Todd P tells us so:

Wednesday June 7th @ MICHELINE'S

:: Japanther
:::: Hey Willpower
:::::: Juiceboxxx / Squidbotz

[ MICHELINE'S ]
1124 Broadway @ Koscuiszko | Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn
JM to Loscuiszko | 8pm | all ages + BYOB | $6 | 718.453.0400

That's the title of Nas' new album, according to Def Jam. The record, a much-awaited sweeping statement of a culture gone wonderfully zany, comes out September 19th. Which really means, like, June of 2011 or something. Nas is still alive?

Eyes stay peeled, more news as it develops.

(by Jessica Finson)