noter

New blog - peterholslin.wordpress.com

2009-11-16T14:50:00.000-08:00

Hi all,

Blogspot has served me well but I've decided to move over to WordPress. From now on, you can read my insightful articles and silly thoughts at peterholslin.wordpress.com.

Best,

Peter

Redesign

2009-11-16T13:45:00.001-08:00

You may have noticed some cosmetic changes that I've made to Noter. I was getting tired of the old look and thought it'd look nice with a change. But I'm still trying to work out some kinks.

Feel free to leave comments and suggestions.

Totally dental

2009-11-13T22:39:00.008-08:00

My mom and I made a curious discovery about half an hour ago on the corner of 30th St. and University Ave. in North Park: three-dozen heavy boxes containing hundreds of plaster molds of peoples' teeth.

The boxes were the discarded records of Western Dental, located just a few steps away at 2948 University Ave. Along with the dental molds were several binders containing detailed patient records--names, birth dates, social security numbers, and all.

As we stood there examining the dental molds, a pickup truck pulled up and three guys started hauling the boxes into the cargo bed.

Feel free to put aside some boxes for yourselves, one of them told us.

"Where are you taking this stuff?" I asked.

"Dump," he replied.

Quite a few questions linger: What were all these molds and records doing sitting on the street? Why take it away so late at night? And is it all really headed for the dump?

But one thing is certain: I won't be getting my next checkup at Western Dental.

Tent City II: Imagining San Diego County with Sheriff Jay in charge

2009-11-11T08:42:00.003-08:00

This article was published in this week's issue of San Diego CityBeat:

At Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s “Tent City,” inmates sleep in Army tents, wear pink underwear, eat 15-cent meals and join chain gangs to pick up trash in Arizona’s desert heat.

For Jay La Suer, a former state Assembly member from East County who wants to be San Diego County’s next sheriff, the notorious Arizona lawman known alternately as “Sheriff Joe” and “America’s Toughest Sheriff” has been an ally and a mentor. In fact, as part of his own tough-on-crime platform, La Suer has vowed to build a tent jail that’s just as unforgiving.

“I can’t see any reason why we wouldn’t,” he told reporters during a press conference before a fundraiser at Marina Village Conference Center last Friday, where Arpaio headlined with a jocular, 25-minute speech. “We’re going to save taxpayers money. We’re going to incarcerate people at a cheaper cost, which is going to make you safer.”

La Suer, 69, a conservative gun-rights advocate and immigration hardliner who imagines himself as “Sheriff Jay,” is easily the race’s most divisive candidate. Depending on whom was asked at the event—the 200 donors dining on meat and potatoes in the woodsy hall or the four-dozen mostly Latino protestors chanting “Racist sheriff, racist friends, this injustice has to end!” just beyond the parking lot—Sheriff Arpaio’s endorsement is a blessing or a curse.

La Suer faces stiff competition from the incumbent, Sheriff Bill Gore, a former FBI agent who has the support of much of San Diego’s political establishment, political analysts say. But he will have better chances if he manages to expand his conservative East County base and beats Gore’s main contender, Jim Duffy, a 28-year police veteran toting the endorsement of the Deputy Sheriffs’ Association, in the June 2010 primary.

So, what would San Diego look like if Sheriff Jay were to take command of the Sheriff’s Department and emulate Sheriff Joe? We fed Sheriff Joe’s record in Arizona into our virtual crystal ball and took a peek:

A new Tent City

To save taxpayers money and relieve prison overcrowding, Sheriff Jay follows the Arpaio model and pitches a tent city in Otay Mesa.

Maricopa County paid $1 million to house 500 inmates in Arpaio’s first tent prison, while it costs $80 million to house 5,000 inmates at San Diego’s jail Downtown, La Suer noted at a debate in September, according to East County Magazine. A state-of-the-art stun fence and hydraulic watchtowers bring up the price tag, but housing inmates in canvas tents saves the county as much as $65 million.

To make the 5,000 inmates in San Diego’s jails regret what they did—even those who are just awaiting trial dates and therefore presumed innocent—Sheriff Jay bans coffee, candy, pornography and transistor radios. But inmates are given the opportunity to compete for McDonald’s and pizza in a grueling reality contest called “Solitary Survivor,” a spin-off of Sheriff Joe’s “Inmate Idle.”

What Sheriff Jay doesn’t realize is that Sheriff Joe has been the subject of more than 2,000 federal lawsuits alleging poor prison conditions, prisoner abuse and wrongful deaths, costing taxpayers $41.3 million in liability claims and insurance costs, according to a 2008 study by the Goldwater Institute, a conservative think tank based in Phoenix.

As the years pass, Sheriff Jay is swamped with federal lawsuits alleging poor prison conditions and wrongful deaths, which siphon off the money the tent city saved.

Immigration sweeps

Denouncing San Diego as a “sanctuary county” for undocumented immigrants, Sheriff Jay joins 287(g), a federal program (Sheriff Joe is an enthusiastic participant) that allows local police forces to partner with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to enforce federal immigration laws.

Jay initially vows to adhere to the program’s regulations by focusing on major crimes, like human trafficking and drug smuggling. But, instead, he enforces immigration the Arpaio way and launches a series of indiscriminate sweeps that target people who, as observers note, “drive while brown.”

The effort leads to a few hundred arrests but fails to close down any drug cartels or smuggling operations—as was the case in Maricopa County between 2007 and 2008, when the sweeps brought on a $1.3 million deficit in one three-month period, led to 200 arrests of suspected illegal immigrants and nabbed zero human-trafficking bosses or drug kingpins, according to the Goldwater Institute report.

The San Diego Minutemen applaud the sweeps and fill the ranks of Jay’s volunteer posse (a citizen-semi-deputization program modeled on Sheriff Joe’s), but police complain that Jay has overstepped jurisdictional bounds, county officials blast him in the national media and civil-rights leaders and Latinos stage mass protests. As they did in Maricopa County, the sweeps lead to a Justice Department investigation into allegations of racial profiling and a class-action lawsuit filed against Jay, the Sheriff’s Department and San Diego County.

The Obama administration refuses to reinstate 287(g) for San Diego County. But Jay is just as defiant as Arpaio was when Obama reined in his 287(g) powers and promises to keep sweeping.

More crime, less efficiency

As Sheriff Jay gains international attention, San Diego County sees a dramatic increase in crime as deputies struggle to investigate cases—just as Maricopa County experienced between 2004 and 2007, when the rate of reported violent crimes increased by 69 percent, homicides alone grew by 166 percent, the arrest rate plummeted, thousands of felony warrants went unserved and deputies responded sluggishly to 911 calls, according to the Goldwater report.

To attack the massive problem of unserved warrants, Jay stars in “Book’d,” a reality show based on Sheriff Joe’s “Smile… You’re Under Arrest!” that compels fugitives to participate in elaborate pranks leading to their arrest.

Unimpressed, The New York Times editorial board votes Sheriff Jay “America’s Second Worst Sheriff,” after Sheriff Joe.

Delusions of grandeur

Seeing enemies everywhere he turns, Sheriff Jay suspects that somebody is out to kill him. Eventually, he comes to believe that CityBeat columnist Edwin Decker has teamed up with the Arellano-Felix cartel to hatch a bizarre assassination plot.

As Sheriff Joe did to the Phoenix New Times when he was having similar delusions, Jay issues a subpoena to CityBeat, demanding documents related to the reporting, editing and writing of all articles about him, along with e-mails, IP addresses and other sensitive information about the alt-weekly’s readers. When CityBeat responds with an editorial criticizing the subpoena as a “blatant violation of our Constitutional rights,” CityBeat editor David Rolland is arrested.

The FBI investigates whether Sheriff Jay used his powers to intimidate and harass his critics, as it’s now doing with Sheriff Joe.

Adding to Sheriff Jay’s legal troubles, Sheriff Joe sues him for intellectual property theft.

Photo: Sheriff Jay (left) and Sheriff Joe, by David Rolland

Friendship Park just got friendlier

2009-11-07T20:40:00.009-08:00

Well, not exactly.

The Border Patrol has built a "public access area" allowing entrance to a portion of the no man's land that runs against the border fence at Friendship Park, the bi-national hang out spot that stands against the border in Border Field State Park.

But activists are lamenting the fact that the new public zone blocks off human access to people on the other side of the fence. Visitors need a government-issued I.D. to enter (effectively keeping out undocumented immigrants), limits occupancy to 25, and bars "physical contact with individuals in Mexico."

"Friendship Park is a place characterized at its root by human contact, human touch," John Fanestil, a member of a local coalition called the Friends of Friendship Park (of which my mom is a member), told me over e-mail. "Friends don't greet friends from a distance of six feet across two fences."

In years past, people in the United States used to meet people in Mexico at the park to hang out, talk, and even hand tacos between the fence. But in January, the Department of Homeland Security blocked off public access to the fence, creating the 150-foot wide no man's land as part of an effort to construct 700 miles of triple-tiered barriers stretching the length of the U.S.-Mexico border.

The Friends of Friendship Park have been lobbying for months to restore public access to the border fence, meeting with the Border Patrol and the Department of Homeland Security. All the while, they've sought to remain connected to their friends across the border in creative ways--for instance, via long-distance conversations in sign language. [I gave a Border Patrol agent some questions about the new site, but he hasn't returned my calls.]

With the new zone, the Friends will no doubt find new ways to keep in contact with their pals across the border.

On Monday, the Friends are going to hold a candlelight vigil at noon to mark the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Directions: Take Hwy 5 South, exit Dairy Mart Rd, turn right (west) and follow the winding road to the entrance of Border Field State Park. You will be allowed to drive in to reach Friendship Park.

Job hunt scam

2009-11-06T09:48:00.004-08:00

I found the job posting on craigslist, of course. From my e-mail.

from	john duke
to		Peter Holslin
date		Sun, Nov 1, 2009 at 8:03 AM
subject		RE: Administrative Assistant application

The Hiring Desk of the company has reviewed your resume and we believe you have the required qualifications. This is a work from home data entry job and you will get paid weekly doing data entry inputting (alpha and numeric data) into excel database,work is sent via email and you will be working M-F.
Earn $28 per hour
Do you have a yahoo messenger on your computer. To proceed with this Data Entry Clerk job position you must undergo an online interview via yahoo messenger.
I want you to setup a yahoo messenger (IM) Mrs Becky Wiliams and Instant Message this ID (beckywiliams44@yahoo.com) asap for the interview so you can get considered for the position

from	Peter Holslin
to		john duke
date		Sun, Nov 1, 2009 at 10:16 AM
subject		Re: Administrative Assistant application

Hello John,

Thank you for your consideration. I have contacted Mrs. Williams for the interview but so far she hasn't replied to my IM, but I will keep at it.

There is some information I would like to know about your company. What is the company called and what does it do? Does it have offices in San Diego? Do you have a website?

Thanks!

Best
Peter

from	john duke
to		Peter Holslin
date		Thu, Nov 5, 2009 at 5:08 AM
subject		RE: Administrative Assistant application

I want you to setup a yahoo messenger (IM) Mrs Jenifer Daches and Instant Message this ID (jeniferdaches@yahoo.com) asap for the interview so you can get considered for the position

Rupa & The April Fishes take in the good, bad and ugly of the border

2009-11-01T13:48:00.002-08:00

This article was published by San Diego News Network yesterday

Rupa & The April Fishes do what they can to bridge boundaries — political, geographical and musical.

Take for example an April concert at Friendship Park south of Imperial Beach: Half the band performed in the United States while the other half played in Mexico, standing on the other side of a rusted border fence that runs into the ocean.

And consider “Este Mundo,” their latest album: As songwriter Rupa sings alternately in French, Spanish and English, the band swerves seamlessly from heady Indian raga into festive Jewish klezmer into romantic French chanson, sometimes in the same song.

The problem is that boundaries can be hard to surmount, a point that became glaringly clear when the band toured the U.S.-Mexico border region last April. At a hostel for migrants in Tijuana, Rupa met a man who had smashed his ankle and barely survived his journey across the border. And near El Centro, they explored a cemetery filled with over 500 unmarked graves — all of them migrants who had perished during their sojourns across the unforgiving desert lying between Tijuana and San Diego.

“Este Mundo” is dedicated to the thousands of migrants who passed away while trying to cross the border. But the album is anything but grave. In fact, it’s rather carnival-esque, driven by upbeat rhythms, bright melodies and tender lyrics. Even the sadder moments are full of gusto: Over the wacky boom-chuck and off-beat accordion pumps of “Por La Frontera,” Rupa asks in Spanish, “How can a line be worth more than a life?”

Rupa, a 34-year-old physician who tends to sick patients in a San Francisco hospital when she is not on tour, wants her music to consider both hope and tragedy. After all, she points out, the lovely shores of the Pacific Coast are less than an hour’s drive west of the rugged canyons of East County’s backcountry.

“That kind of contrast is the truth of life—it’s not all joyful, and it’s not all miserable. It’s not all struggle, it’s not all celebration. But there seem to be equal parts of these things,” she said. “I feel like honest art, for me, is something that can try to hold those poles in the same word, in the same gesture, in the same song.”

In part, the April Fishes are an expression of Rupa’s own complex identity. Her parents are from India; she grew up in Southern California, and she has also spent time in Southern France.

“I consider myself a citizen of the world,” she said. “I’ve been living in several different cultures and I wanted to give a musical voice to that experience.”

But the band’s sound — a synthesis of Balkan-styled accordion passages, languorous draws on the cello, heavy trumpet lines, jumpy upright-bass solos, Latin-tinged rhythms, and Rupa’s laid-back acoustic guitar strums — isn’t exactly serious. Feeling more light-hearted than Manu Chao, it’s actually a lot of fun.

That’s not to say that the songwriting process has always come easily. For two years, the band struggled with “Soy Payaso,” a downright schizophrenic song that begins with a dark flute passage and languid pops of tabla, segues into a madcap Jewish wedding tune with swirls of accordion and chants of “Hey!” and finally moves into the kind of upbeat French swing that belongs in a smoky cabaret.

“It took years to be able to play that song well, so that it felt that the styles were seamlessly blending together out of the same mouth, not like five different people talking at the same time,” Rupa said. “It takes living and breathing and sweating and loving each other, being kind to each other, learning about each other, spending time together and talking about music and working on music.”

Eventually, it came together. “Now, we’ve got it in our hands and we can play with it,” she said. “Every time we play it, I think, ‘Oh my god, is the audience gonna go with us?’ And every time we play it, it’s a total ride.”

Touring along the U.S.-Mexico border was an intense experience all its own. Recently, the band finished an hour’s worth of music telling the stories of the people they interviewed between shows, who had faced danger and hardship on journeys across the border, or who had plans to.

Whether it’s the good or the bad, though, the band has been eager to soak it all in.

“There’s a real hunger and curiosity — everyone exhibits a complete life curiosity, like almost at all time,” Rupa said of her bandmates. “This whole thing is just one giant experiment and God knows where it’s gonna go and what the next step is, but it’s been quite a ride.”

Peter Holslin writes about music for SDNN.

Event info
Who: Rupa & The April Fishes
When: 9 p.m., Wednesday, Nov. 4
Where: The Loft (UCSD)
Tickets: $5-$12
Info: www.artpwr.com/events/392

Event info
Who: Rupa & The April Fishes
When: 9 p.m., Thursday, Nov. 5
Where: El Lugar del Nopal, Tijuana
Info: www.lugardelnopal.com

Hateful religious zealots provide for a teachable moment

2009-10-17T09:25:00.006-07:00

This article was posted on the blog of San Diego CityBeat this morning:

October 17, 2009 - 8:33 am — Peter Holslin

Aside from its glossy signs (“GOD HATES FAGS,” “THANK GOD FOR 9/11”) and its sickeningly callous tactics (its parishioners have protested at the funerals of AIDS victims and soldiers who died in Iraq), Westboro Baptist Church is perhaps most famous for prompting creative counter-demonstrations.

Ten years ago, filmmaker Michael Moore and a team of gay friends chased around the church’s founder, Rev. Fred Phelps, in a giant pink bus dubbed the “Sodomobile.” Last March, a group of frat boys at the University of Chicago danced to such queer classics as Donna Summer’s “I’m Coming Out” and Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer” during a WBC protest.

And on Friday afternoon, a boisterous crowd of gay-rights activists, open-minded church-goers and high-school students from across the city met half a dozen WBC protestors picketing outside the San Diego High School Educational Complex with signs bearing slogans like “LOVE IS ALL U NEED,” “GOD IS LOVE” and “GOD LOVES FAGS.”

When it comes to hatred, Westboro Baptist Church has it in spades—the organization is anti-gay, anti-Jewish, anti-Catholic, anti-military and probably anti- some other things that observers haven’t yet noticed. The group is so hateful, in fact, that even some of the country’s most intolerant evangelicals have distanced themselves from it: The late Jerry Falwell, well-known for his homophobic remarks, once called Phelps a “first-class nut.”

But that hasn’t dissuaded Phelps and his followers, many of whom are either related to Phelps by blood or through marriage. In fact, this has only encouraged them to focus their ire on rival evangelicals as well: They once condemned Billy Graham as a “Hell-bound false prophet,” and they protested at Falwell’s funeral in 2007.

The Phelps clan has essentially made a business out of their work. Some members, including Phelps’ daughter, Shirley Phelps-Roper—who showed up at Friday’s protest in sunglasses and a “Godhatesfags.com” tank top—are trained lawyers who work for the family’s law firm, Phelps-Chartered. They are known to sue aggressive counter-protestors and municipalities that fail to provide for their safety.

On the other hand, these veteran media hounds are able to escape accusations of committing hate speech by putting their hatred into God’s mouth. “We’re not judging anybody. God is,” said Jonah Phelps-Roper, a 12-year-old Westboro member carrying a red-white-and-blue colored sign saying, “ANTICHRIST OBAMA IS DOOMED.”

The Westboro members showed up at the corner of Russ and Park boulevards today—one of the first in a series of planned protests at high schools, Jewish centers and churches this weekend—just after 2 p.m., a few minutes before school let out. Posted kitty-corner to the school and often blocked by a throng of cars, their presence was barely registered by many of the students who began pouring out of the campus down Park Blvd. Of course, it helped that crowds of demonstrators espousing universal love filled every other street corner, drowning out the Westboro protests with chanting and drumming on pots and pans.

But it was still a media bonanza over at the Westboro corner. As the police tried to maintain order, photographers snapped pictures, cameras rolled and the Phelps disciples spewed their hyperbolic gospel in interviews. “Homosexuality is an abomination,” Shirley Phelps-Roper told a TV news reporter. “These children have been taught that God is a big, fat, stinking liar—that it is, in fact, OK to be gay. He says you’re going to Hell if you do that. They’ve been taught, ‘No, God is a liar.’”

At lunch earlier that day, many students were dismissive of the group. Westboro could hardly claim to have any fans at San Diego High School, which has its fair share of students who are queer-friendly, or have Roman-Catholic parents or relatives in the military, or all of the above. Lupe Brito, a junior at the School of Media, Visual and Performing Arts, one of the high school’s six “small schools,” had only one thing to say to the Westboro clan: “Get a life.”

But many students had been briefed about the protest in class, and members of the Gay Straight Alliance made their presence known when the protestors came—commandeering the school’s marquee at the corner of Park and Russ and covering it with a giant, hand-painted GSA sign. “They’re just invading our school,” said Jo Gookin, 17, president of the GSA. “This is a place of learning. It shouldn’t be brought here.”

All the same, some teachers considered the event a perfect “teachable moment”—a debate over the boundaries of free speech flaring up just outside the school’s gates. “I think that the students had a very good reaction to hearing about it. A lot of students were just really supportive of tolerance and equality,” said Kara Potter, a math teacher with purple hair who was standing with the equality crowd. “It brought up a good point for discussion.”

And what was the lesson for ninth grader David Jones? “Let people be who they are. Let them be free to express themselves,” he said. “Who am I to judge you? We’re all humans here.”

Photo: Shirley Phelps-Roper standing on the American flag and waving her signs. By Kelly Davis

“I Refuse To Lose!” - Comrade Fatso and Chabvondoka's Poetic Revolution

2009-10-05T19:41:00.003-07:00

This article was published in the October 2009 issue of The Brooklyn Rail. Photo by Benjamin Herson.

by Peter Holslin

Over thirty years have passed since Dambudzo Marechera wrote The House of Hunger, his landmark 1978 novella about the brutal relationships and decayed ideologies of colonial Rhodesia, the southern African nation now known as Zimbabwe. But hunger remains a common theme in Zimbabwean poetry and music, manifesting itself as both a metaphorical yearning for freedom from corruption and oppression, and as something quite literal: a desperate need for food.

Zimbabwe became independent in 1980, after a vicious liberation war, and the country became a model of economic prosperity in Africa. But true democratic freedoms have never been achieved under the leadership of President Robert Mugabe, a guerrilla leader turned dictator. And it feels as though the slam poet Comrade Fatso is continuing from where Marechera left off when he begins his own House of Hunger, an album of pointed rhymes and fresh grooves that’s being reissued online by Nomadic Wax, with the wanting words, “My belly wakes me again.”

Set during Operation Murambatsvina (or “Drive Out the Filth”)—a 2005 nationwide campaign in which soldiers and police demolished tens of thousands of houses and vending stands that the government deemed “illegal”—that opening track, “Bread & Roses,” captures both types of hunger. Fatso takes on the persona of a street vendor who watches as a policeman smashes her vegetables. “Here come the forces of good/ Those who wage war on food,” he says in his steady cadence.

I thought ours was the land of the fruits
Now crushed by these blind boots
Saying my food is dirty
No, my food is dignity
It sends my children to school, you see

“Comrade Fatso” is the performance name of Samm Farai Monro, a lean 29-year-old with long dreadlocks and a dry wit, who eats with his fingers and rhymes in a patois of English and Shona (the language of most Zimbabweans). The son of white community organizers born in Zimbabwe, he resists being sucked into the bitter identity politics that have haunted Zimbabwean activism over the past decade. “You have to deal with issues regarding color, but that’s not what’s at the core of our crisis,” he told me in a phone interview.

What does lie at its core, as he makes clear in House of Hunger, is a system of institutionalized patronage and state-sponsored violence that sustains the immense wealth of a minority of political elites and punishes those of the country’s 12 million people who want to build something better.

Monro is an avowed activist and experienced grassroots organizer—when he isn’t touring with his band, he’s working for Magamba!, a youth activism network that hosts a monthly spoken-word event and does outreach in economically disadvantaged townships. But House of Hunger is only political, at least with regard to government, in the sense that it was banned from state-controlled TV and radio broadcasts when it was first released in Zimbabwe in March 2008. At its core, the album is about personal relationships—and the unbreakable love, crushing poverty, dark humor, and shocking acts of violence that bind them.

Fatso’s verses often ooze anger and ache with pain. But the yearning vocal phrases of singers Chiwoniso Maraire and Nyengeterai Zembe, and the supple guitar, lustrous marimba, and mbira (an iron-pronged instrument played with the thumbs), and dynamic beats of Fatso’s band, Chabvondoka, inject the songs with positive energy. And even Fatso’s most mournful verses are followed with words full of hope and vision. “Here, those with hope and head / Are beaten, battered, left for dead,” he intones in the title track, over a slow groove with a somber guitar phrase and meditative mbira passage. After he dissects the House—“brick upon brick” of corruption, the “cement” of apathy, the kitchen where “chefs cook up feasts of famine”—he concludes, “It’s time to build a house for all / And it all starts if we stand tall.”

House of Hunger is similar to the driving mbira-style guitar songs of the legendary Thomas Mapfumo, who sang in support of the Zimbabwean liberation struggle during the war. But today, Fatso and other radical performance poets engage in non-violent battle with toyi-toyi, a leg-kicking revolutionary dance invented during the liberation war, which anti-apartheid activists later adopted in South Africa. At shows, the poets are energized when their audiences toyi-toyi. “It’s just a beautiful state to be in,” Leslie Tongai Makawa, a fellow slam poet who helps run Magamba!, told me in April in Washington, D.C., before playing a concert as part of an East Coast tour with Fatso and Chabvondoka. “You’re saying, ‘I refuse to lose!’”

The concert, performed in a large room of a church-owned building, was held on the 29th anniversary of Zimbabwe’s independence. After Chabvondoka launched into a sweltering jam at the end of their set, Fatso broke into a passionate toyi-toyi. Dozens of Africans and Americans in the packed audience spontaneously rose from their seats to boogie. The feeling of joy was as palpable as the smell of Zimbabwean food—cornmeal, beef, and collard greens—wafting in from the lobby: a deep hunger satiated, at least for that night.

Last playlist

2009-10-05T17:00:00.012-07:00

Last week was devoted to lasts--last chance to eat Ray's greasy pizza, Vanessa's addictive pork dumplings, Panade's perfect muffins, and Africa Kine's awesome Senegalese food; to hang out and goof off and take in New York's frenetic energy. I've eaten delicious farewell dinners and I've received heartfelt goodbyes. Tomorrow evening, after five wonderful years of living in New York City, I will be back in my hometown of San Diego, California.

One of my best friends just told me to make a playlist for the plane ride. I thought I couldn't handle that. But once we said goodbye and I hung up, it occurred to me that that's exactly the kind of thing I should do. So here it is, my last playlist in NYC. When I put it on as the plane begins to take off (rules be damned!), it should make for an invigorating and possibly tearful listen:

1. "Rumors" - Cheb Khaled & Cheba Zahouania (Together)
2. "San Jose Fight Song" - Ten In The Swear Jar (Accordion Solo!)
3. "Choufi" - Abderrahmane Djalti (Choufi)
4. "Vinon So Minsou" - Ouinsou Corneille & Black Santiagos (African Scream Contest)
5. "K-Force" - The Vision (Waveform Transmission Vol. 2)
6. "Techno Dread" - 2562 (Aerial)
7. "A Little Lost" - Arthur Russell (The World Of Arthur Russell)
8. "I Don't Play The Drumz" - Ten In The Swear Jar (Accordion Solo!)
9. "Conspirer" - Luciano (Tribute To The Sun)
10. "Bread & Roses" - Comrade Fatso & Chabvondoka feat. Chiwoniso (House Of Hunger)
11. "Teerera" - Max Wild feat. Oliver Mtukudzi (Teerera single)
12. "Segue Bezikh" - Unknown Artist (Choubi Choubi [Folk & Pop Sounds from Iraq])
13. "Leh Jani" - Omar Souleyman (Highway To Hassake [Folk & Pop Sounds of Syria])
14. "Waldiha" - Cheb Tarik (Algerian Raï)
15. "Right?Star!" - Martyn (Great Lengths)
16. "Brand New Day" - Dizzee Rascal (Boy In Da Corner)
17. "Fly" - Two Eyes Meet Redux (Pop Songs On Illusions And Tragedies)

Kimi Djabaté, Karam (Cumbancha; 2009)

2009-09-21T12:03:00.002-07:00

This review was posted to Cokemachineglow.com today:

Kimi Djabaté
Karam
(Cumbancha; 2009)
Rating: 70%

Kimi Djabaté, a griot from the West African nation of Guinea-Bissau, was literally born to play music. Hailing from Tabato, a village famous for its griots—hereditary bards charged with telling the oral history of their tribe—he first learned to play the balafón, a resonant African xylophone, when he was three years old. From there, he learned to play kora (an African harp), various traditional percussion instruments, and guitar. But being a talented musician in a poor musical family had its drawbacks: he was often forced to sing and dance for money.

Djabaté has lived in Portugal since 1994, which led to another set of struggles. This personal history resonates through his second solo album, Karam, in unexpected ways. Its fifteen tracks are guided as much by layers of percussion and glossy stringed instruments as Djabaté’s longing lyrics, giving an otherwise uplifting set of songs a somber quality. “Mulo-nhaneta / Mulo-torrota-je,” Djabaté sings in the title track, in his native language of Mandingo. As bright strands of kora (African harp) and acoustic guitar float over an upbeat rhythm, these lyrics offer a sobering reminder: they roughly mean, “People suffer so much / It’s a tiring experience.”

Following the griot tradition, many of Djabaté’s songs pay tribute to important people—his mother (“Ná”), a strong woman named Fatumata (“Fatu”), a man who has lost his wife (“Dabô”). Using the tribute song as a framework for discussing society, he highlights the inequality that many contemporary Africans face, critiquing male chauvinism, misogyny, economic inequality, and ethnic prejudice. But the music is often simultaneously sad and beautiful: over the sublimely slow beat and wandering balafón of “Mogolu,” a chorus intones, “Yo mogolu mancaynhan”—“How come some have so much and others have nothing?” In that way, Karam is anything but hopeless. Indeed, more than once, Djabaté tells the listener, “Dance!”—and tracks like “Mussolu” and “Manla,” with their invigorating Latin-style grooves, are perfect for doing just that.

The slow, elongated woodwind refrain of “Kodé” exemplifies the suffering that Africa has experienced over the years: the strident anthem of African independence fifty years ago has evolved into a funereal dirge. In recent months, Guinea-Bissau itself has endured shocking political instability. With Karam, Djabaté highlights the kinds of prejudice that have contributed to this suffering. But his music feels like a kind of salve, glowing with optimism over words aching with sadness.

:: myspace.com/kimidjabate

Various Artists, Shadow Music of Thailand (Sublime Frequencies; 2009)

2009-09-14T06:55:00.003-07:00

This review was posted on Cokemachineglow.com Friday:

Various Artists

Shadow Music of Thailand
(Sublime Frequencies; 2009)

Rating: 70%

Sublime Frequencies releases aren’t particularly thorough or edifying—with their cut-and-paste cover designs and scattershot liner notes, often they’re as makeshift as the woefully ignored or long-forgotten strains of global music they present. Of course, this is partly what makes these releases so remarkable and alluring. The dogs that some men are, sometimes all a record might need is a picture of two pretty Thai women in tiny dresses on the cover—as is the case with the 2007 comp Thai Pop Spectacular—and it’s sold. Then again, there are also serious music geeks who would simply be wooed by an intriguing title like Shadow Music of Thailand.

This compilation, which was released as a limited edition LP last year, isn’t nearly as party hardy as the label’s other recent releases (Omar Souleyman’s Dabke 2020 and Group Doueh’s Treeg Salaam), but it’s just as distinct. The comp’s seventeen tracks, many of them clocking in at under three minutes, document a uniquely Thai style of garage rock from the ’60s known as “shadow music,” named after the UK’s sly instrumental band the Shadows. In a way, the “shadow music” here is comparable to popular songs by Ethiopian artists like Tilahun Gessesse, who incorporated the pentatonic scale and traditional melodies into Afro-funk. Only in this case, Thailand’s regal folk melodies are employed to make something slower and headier, more akin to surf-rock.

The musicianship feels amateurish throughout, and the comp features more than a few janky guitar solos, but there is a worldliness and flexibility to these songs that make some of them infectious. The Son of P.M., one of several bands put together by the prominent singer and composer Payong Mukda, makes a psychedelic Latin-style groove in “Plaeng Yiepoun,” its lithe organ melody leading Latin-inflected rhythm guitar and gleaming xylophone chords. In “Pone Tala Pone (Indian),” a reverb-drenched guitar phrase melds with vaguely Eastern drumming and melismatic vocals, making for something strange and heady. In “Lao Kratob Mai,” Johnny Guitar creates an indigenous feel with a meditatively plodding beat, an ornamental xylophone melody and warm organ fills, but the band mixes things up by tossing in a grizzled and psychedelic guitar solo.

Sublime Frequencies got plenty of attention earlier this year when they hosted a UK and European tour that put Souleyman and Group Doueh in the same bill—making an irresistible and otherwise unlikely combination of gritty Syrian dabke and hypnotic guitar music from the Sahara Desert. But the label’s strongest point has always been its releases of splendid and obscure music from Southeast Asia. In that respect, Shadow Music of Thailand certainly gives the Khmer Rocks label’s Cambodian Rocks series a run for it’s money.

:: sublimefrequencies.com

Track Review: "Putcha Handz Up"

2009-09-07T14:14:00.000-07:00

CLP f/ Rayzaflo :: "Putcha Handz Up"
From BASSS Brains (Brd Basss Germany; 2009)

Germans make stunning graffiti, but their hip-hop doesn’t have the best reputation. Unimpressed with the country’s heavy-handed gangsta rap, the production duo CLP—Chris de Luca and Phon.o—has teamed up instead with American and South African MCs more familiar with funky grooves. In “Putcha Handz Up,” rhymes are contributed by a stylish teenage MC from Jackson, Mississippi. And it’s no surprise that somebody who describes herself on Myspace as “HUMAN CRACK N THA FLESH” can make this track ooze with crunked aggression.

The point of putting your hands up isn’t necessarily clear. Where Cypress Hill’s “Throw Your Hands In The Air” conveyed a certain conviviality with its laid-back groove, and Danzel’s “Put Your Hands Up in the Air” exudes hype with its pulsating synths and mindless repetition, “Putcha Handz Up” makes a severe demand: “Getcha mothafuckin’ hands up.” Confronted with a slamming beat, a leering sample of what sounds like a plucked string, and Rayzaflo’s rapid-fire rhymes, you might wonder what’s coming to you if you don’t put those hands up. A Courvoisier bottle to the face, maybe?

:: myspace.com/rayzaflo

The Best Business Names in America

2009-08-24T07:49:00.008-07:00

As an employee at a stationery and toy company, it is my job to get in touch with a limitless array of American businesses: gift shops, toy stores, pharmacies, hospital shops, wineries, camps, Audubon societies, car washes, general stores, specialty stores, boutiques, etc. Needless to say, in my work I come across a lot of different business names, some of them so unique and fantastic that they are worth publishing here for posterity. For everyone's enjoyment and inspiration, here is list No. 5, compiling the best of what I've come across most recently:

Heavenly Outhouse

Enchanted Closet

Wearable Vegetables

Uncommon Scents

Pull Yourself Together

Bed Bath n’ Bonz Inc.

Chubby Cherub

Bohemian Angel

The Flying Mule

The Flying Carp

Wacky Rabbit

Upstart Crow

Paper Tyger

Happy Owl, Too!!!

The Mugger

Tough Luck Cowboy

Jealous Gardener

Sugar Daddy’s

Real Baby

Bayou Baby

Hipster Kids

Author Squad LLC

The Booklegger

Valiant for Truth Bookstore

A Great Good Place for Books

A Clean Well Lighted Place for Books

Wild Card

Plum Crazy

Eclecticity

Chez Weenie

Wooden Heart

Blackmail

Avant Garden

Smile Herb Shop

Beastly Bites

You-Nique Bow-Tique

Marsha's Vineyard

Wallpaper History Society

Moritz Von Oswald Trio, "Vertical Ascent" (Honest Jon's Records; 2009)

2009-08-21T23:13:00.005-07:00

For some the little orange and white rocket on the cover of Vertical Ascent might conjure a cinematic set of images: a suspenseful countdown, engines roaring to life, lift-off, the gradual climb, and finally disappearance into space. But don’t be mislead; there is nothing so straightforward, predictable, or bombastic here. In fact, the album’s most linear feature—the track titles, which move from one numbered “Pattern” to the next—belie the wonderfully prismatic shifts of glimmering percussion and impressionist electronics within.

A sublime paradox like this is just what one would expect from a collaboration headed by Moritz Von Oswald, who is celebrated for his contributions to the groundbreaking and otherworldly minimal techno outfit Basic Channel, among other things. Oswald has found natural partners in Max Loderbauer, from the ambient electronica group Sun Electric, and Sasu Ripatti, the versatile Finnish electronic composer who goes by many aliases. All of them are intimate with the ethereal realms of electronic music, and they are all classically trained (Oswald and Ripatti in percussion, Loderbauer in piano), but they are also just as capable of producing sultry, dance-oriented grooves. On Vertical Ascent, using hand-made metal percussion, Rhodes, and electronics, the trio has concocted four long improvisational tracks that are as heady and layered as So Percussion’s take on Steve Reich’s Drumming, but as fresh and cool as a Neapolitan.

Sounding at once organic and unreal, Vertical Ascent is full of beautiful contradictions. The crude, steady clap of “Pattern 1” at first sounds completely random as it rubs against brisk swirls of hi-hat, but gradually the two lock together to maintain a driving rhythm that mutates and glistens. The slow bass pulse of “Pattern 2” leaves breathing space for echoes of tinny percussion, lingering bells, and subtle strands of keys, making for a feverishly meditative twelve minutes. “Pattern 3” has an exhilarating but bizarre feel, its lush Rhodes chords and jarring waves of electronics driven by ricochets of mutant steel drums that pan from ear to ear. The heavy beat and dub bass of “Pattern 4” is a refreshing return to more conventional minimal techno fare, but eventually the steady groove is overtaken with quaking electronics—proverbial locusts descending on the cornfield of common practice, or just some mischievous fun?

It’s a testament to Basic Channel’s influence that hardly a day goes by without mention of the duo somewhere in the electronic music universe. Some might take the title of this album to be a preposterous suggestion that Oswald is looking to reach even greater heights in an electroacoustic realm. But it seems more likely that this trio has humbler intentions: showing little interest in wowing the listener with an impressive climax, they explore all the splendor of the journey itself.

:: honestjons.com

Rating: 79%

This review was published yesterday on Cokemachineglow.com.

A Roman naval battle... in Queens?

2009-08-12T21:26:00.002-07:00

History tells us that the Romans relished the sight of blood and guts even more than Americans do. Where we have any number of slasher-film favorites (see two installments of Hostel, five of Saw, and soon 10 of Halloween), the Romans actually had live-action splatterfests with gladiators fighting to the death.

And every so often, the emperor would put on a piece of prime-time edutainment that rivaled anything the History Channel has ever produced: a nautical bloodbath called a naumachia, which pitted armies of prisoners in boats against each other in reenactments of historic naval battles. “It was kind of the ‘bread and circus,’” explains Duke Riley, an artist-in-residence at the Queens Museum Of Art. “But it always seemed to occur right around a point in time when society was about to fall apart.”

With America beset by two wars overseas and economic recession at home, Riley figured it was time to revive the debauchery of the Roman age. On Thursday, August 13, he will host a modern-day naumachia in a big reflecting pool near the Unisphere (the imposing globe sculpture) in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park. The spectacle will include lots of model ships and role-playing combatants waging war "with baguette swords and watermelon cannon balls."

Brawny and spread with tattoos, Riley is something of a renegade. He was arrested two years ago for taking on the Queen Mary 2 cruise liner in a single-seater Revolutionary War submarine that he built out of plywood and fiberglass. It was a profound reversal, as he saw it, of the British Siege on Long Island in 1776.

And then there's the fact that the props for his naumachia—the stands, the gladiators’ outfits, the boats themselves—have been built entirely out of refuse.

Using tons of reeds harvested from local beaches, chunks of Styrofoam pulled from the Flushing River, and junk salvaged from an abandoned ice-skating rink attached to the Queens Museum, Riley and a team of volunteers have built an impressive fleet of vessels that will be ceremoniously destroyed. Among them are a Peruvian catamaran, a gun-metal-grey battleship, replicas of the Staten Island Ferry and the Queen Mary 2 (“I had unfinished business,” Riley says), and a 30-foot-long Egyptian vessel with the fearsome head of a pointy-beaked bird affixed to the bow.

Over the past few months, Riley has been using the ice-skating rink as a construction space, all the while tearing the place apart and scouring for materials. A recent visit revealed a haphazard mess of useful materials, including broken palates, plastic bottles, fashion magazines, confetti, and the torn-up bottom half of a plush toy. Ceiling tiles have been painted to resemble the regal archways of the Roman Colosseum. Plastic hard hats have been affixed with colorful broom heads to make combat helmets. Bruised melons are rotting in preparation for their use as cannonballs and smashed heads.

During Roman times, prisoners set to engage in naumachia knew what they were in for, greeting the emperor with a resounding cry that Riley swiped for his spectacle's title: “Those who are about to die salute you!” But a big question hangs over the heads of this week’s combatants, consisting of teams representing different museums in Queens, the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Manhattan. No real blood will be spilled, Riley insists, but he is vague about how exactly things will play out. “I have some idea of what’s going to happen, but not entirely,” he says.

The naumachia is on Thursday at 6 p.m. The event starts at the museum, then goes to live music at the Unisphere, and then proceeds to the reflecting pool for the battle. Dress code: Toga.

You can take a trolley from the Willets Point-Shea Stadium 7-train stop to the museum.

This article was published today on A.V. Club New York. Photos by Kitty Joe Sainte-Marie.

N-Type, Rinse: 09 (Rinse Records; 2009)

2009-08-12T11:21:00.005-07:00

Rating: 75%

Don’t be put off by the preponderance of iTunes as a DJ tool these days—DJing is, and has always been, an art form in and of itself. To say nothing of the prowess of mix masters like Jeff Mills, the relatively simple process of combining the right tracks to produce wonder and invigoration in a listener is a special kind of magic. Derrick May, one of Detroit’s first techno producers, explained it best when he said of the practice: “I learned the philosophy of how to make records speak to each other. How to make records sing to each other. How to make them talk to each other. How to make music out of music.” This is the guiding philosophy of the electronic music industry, and it explains why people buy FabricLive and Dubstep Allstars mixes when they can just as well download free Resident Advisor and Rinse FM podcasts. Also, it explains why Rinse’s new mix by N-Type isn’t a mere greatest-hits-of-the-moment comp, but a satisfying release of its own kind.

N-Type, a tall and bald DJ and producer who seems to take his name from a semiconductor employed in what’s called the doping process (how vaguely clever!), occupies a prominent position in the global dubstep community. Living near the London offices of the vaunted Rinse FM radio station, he stuffs his weekly programs with tracks from top producers like Kromestar, Coki, Skream, and Benga, along with loads of new material on those coveted pieces of disposable vinyl called dubplates. With credentials that are already impressive, Rinse 09 is a strong addition to N-Type’s already-strong CV—if dubstep pioneers were the type to have CVs. (Kode9, a faculty member at the University of East London, certainly is.) N-Type shows a predilection for dubstep’s dark, propulsive roots on this mix, but he also shows an enthusiasm for juicier and more bizarre elements that are emerging as dubstep grows internationally and becomes increasingly harder to nail down.

Rinse: 09 opens rather portentously, with a sample of a man giving a lesson on the likes of the “Badman” (which include “the best clothes,” “the best cars,” and “the best music”), his voice soon giving way to vapors of wobbly subsonic bass. From there, it’s all gastrointestinal bass rumblings, snapper-jaw snares, and dub-tinged synths from the likes of the Others, Benga, and Skream, along with more funky selections from LD. N-Type deftly mixes in some exceptional, varied elements: the steamy quasi-tribal beat of “King of Kong”; the feverish electronics and pulsating nuclear meltdown alarm of “Rhythm”; the tense jungle inflections of “Burning Up.” But the unrelenting grooves are what carry this mix from start to finish. To put it May’s way: these 34 tracks toast each other. They bump and grind with each other. They pogo together. Never letting up, Rinse: 09 makes one giant banger out of dozens of bangers.

For fans of Burial’s transcendent vibes, Rinse 09‘s sleek toughness might bring to mind the distasteful image of bros in North Face jackets and baseball caps surreptitiously puffing a blunt in a darkened club. But let’s just say that if these tracks were being mixed live, adherents to the heavy grooves of Dub Police would have good cause to demand at least one crowd-pleasing rewind.

This review was published today on Cokemachineglow.com.

Time for Uncle Sam to Let Go of Iraq's Bike Seat?

2009-08-01T18:36:00.010-07:00

Check out this curiously-worded memo by Col. Timothy R. Reese, the chief of the Baghdad Operations Command Advisory Team, MND-B, which has the offhandedly urgent title, "It’s Time for the US to Declare Victory and Go Home."

Among the strange, domestic-themed idioms:

"Since the signing of the 2009 Security Agreement, we are guests in Iraq, and after six years in Iraq, we now smell bad to the Iraqi nose."

"Iraq is not a country with a history of treating even its welcomed guests well."

"The [Iraqi government and Iraqi Security Forces] will tolerate us as long as they can suckle at Uncle Sam’s bounteous mammary glands."

"The [2008 Security Agreement] outlines a series of gradual steps towards military withdrawal, analogous to a father teaching his kid to ride a bike without training wheels. ... We now have an Iraqi government that has gained its balance and thinks it knows how to ride the bike in the race. And in fact they probably do know how to ride, at least well enough for the road they are on against their current competitors. Our hand on the back of the seat is holding them back and causing resentment. We need to let go before we both tumble to the ground."

To paraphrase Uncle Reese: We should put the cookie jar away because the Iraqi government wants to bake brownies. Iraq pour itself a glass of milk. And even though, in spite of Maliki's efforts to swab it all up with his old college tee-shirt, the government commits milk spills that cost the country enormous amounts of milk money; even though the den is a total mess, the garden is overgrown, and the kids are still fighting over the T.V. remote that is Kirkuk; even though the Sunnis aren't doing their homework, and Sunni hall monitors aren't getting the respect they deserve from those lazy asshole prefects and hall monitors who aren't inviting us to their parties; and even though bullies still roam the halls brandishing AK-47s and setting off bombs, the fact is that our cookies are overcooked, and we're crowding the kitchen terribly.

"Therefore, we should declare our intentions to withdraw all US military forces from Iraq by August 2010," Reese writes. Or, to put it another way: It’s time for the US to declare victory and go home!

I'm sure America's anti-war activists are wringing their hands over this one.

Nurse With Wound, "The Surveillance Lounge" (Dirter; 2009)

2009-07-29T15:12:00.002-07:00

Steven Stapleton, who for thirty years has been recording under the moniker Nurse With Wound, is to music what David Lynch is to film: an ambitious experimentalist inspired by the brash antics of Dada and the trippy vibes of Krautrock, whose releases win glowing reviews (“Genius, pure unadultarated genius”) as well as biting critiques (“And no one seems to give a shit”). In some of his more recent releases, like Lynch, Stapleton has dredged the wretched from the mundane—in the Shipwreck Radio series, he and collaborator Colin Potter reworked field recordings from the fishing village of Svolvær, Norway into sonic flotsam; in last year’s Huffin’ Rag Blues, he highlighted the wasted dirtiness of Martin Denny-style exotica. But in The Surveillance Lounge, Stapleton, along with longtime collaborator Andrew Liles and a team of vocalists (including David Tibet, leader of the mystical folk outfit Current 93), dredge the wretched from outright squalor. Nothing if not a monument to panic-inducing terror, Nurse With Wound’s latest full-length gives us some idea of how it would feel to have one’s soul annihilated in the Black Lodge, the demonic lounge hall of Twin Peaks.

Creepy is a great word to describe some of the more memorable selections of Stapleton’s 122 collaborations, albums and singles, and it is an especially appropriate descriptor here. Based on a commission for a live soundtrack of F.W. Murnau’s 1922 silent film Der Brennende Acker—which delves into such heavy themes as greed, devotion, and death—the album’s four extended tracks are full of ghoulish drones, jarring transitions, and some of the most unsettling vocals (an unpredictable mix of jabbering, croaking, and clipped yelling) ever recorded. The mood reaches a fever pitch with the cracked-out horse race monologue of “The Golden Age Of Telekinesis,” driven by hypnotic percussion and accented with a child’s screams and bursts of high-frequency feedback. In terms of uncompromising hideousness, The Surveillance Lounge rivals the famously obtuse “game pieces” of John Zorn’s Cobra (2002) and the hilariously offensive Top 40 medleys of the Residents’ The Third Reich ‘n Roll (1976).

But many listeners will no doubt have lost their nerve (to say nothing of their patience) long before they reach the grating musique concrète freakout at the five-minute mark of “Yon Assassin Is My Equal,” and that would likely be the cut-off point for most everyone else. Frankly, even a Bastard Noise fan is bound to be at least a little disturbed by this one. I can scarcely imagine the right moment for anyone in any situation to sit through The Surveillance Lounge. If it had been released in the years when American troops were subjecting detainees to hours of tunes played at ear-splitting volumes, though, it would have probably have gotten a lot of play at Guantánamo Bay.

:: myspace.com/babssantini

This review was published today on Cokemachineglow.com.

Micachu again?!

2009-07-28T22:04:00.004-07:00

From the Facebook notes page of Sean Elder:

A fast, fun music game to play, to learn more about your friends' musical tastes, or, um, what they've been hiding on their iPods. My list is below. It only takes a few minutes!

Once you've been tagged... (1) Turn on your iPod, MP3 player or iTunes. (2) Go to SHUFFLE songs mode. (3) Write down the first 15 songs that come up--song title and artist--NO editing/cheating, please. (4) Choose 25 (or so) people to be tagged [edit... or DON'T. You go right ahead and choose however many people you wish]. It is generally considered to be in good taste to tag the person who tagged you.

If I tagged you, it's because I want to know more about your musical tastes, or at least a random sampling thereof.

(To do this, go to "NOTES" under tabs on your profile page, paste these instructions in the body of the note, enter your 15 Shuffle Songs, tag 25 people (in the right hand corner of the app) then click Publish, the little blue box at the bottom of your screen).

Sean's list:

Good Luck Charm -- Kinks (BBC Sessions)
I Can't Get My Head Around It -- Aimee Mann (The Forgotten Arm)
Children of the Hydra's Teeth -- And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Our Dead (Madonna)
Julie On My Mind -- Prince Buster (FABulous Greatest Hits)
Wheel Stands -- The Super Stocks (Monster Summer Hits)
Job of Journeywork -- The Chieftains (The Best of the Chieftains)
Save the Country -- Laura Nyro (Stoned Soul Picnic)
Murder He Says -- Tori Amos (Mona Lisa Smile Soundtrack)
Hate & War -- The Clash (Clash on Broadway)
Right to Love You -- Paul Gryten and Myrtle Jones (Chess Blues 1954-60)
Wonderboy -- Kinks (Ultimate Collection)
Baba Ghanooj -- Cavedogs (Joyrides for Shut-Ins)
Medley: Lu/Flim-Flam Man -- Laura Nyro (Spread Your Wings and Fly)
I Can See for Miles -- Lord Sitar (Mojo: The Who Covered)
Track 14 -- Henry Mancini (Touch of Evil)

Sean, I will give you my list and raise you a comment for each track. (My only warning is that my iTunes on my laptop is oversaturated with certain things and lots of music has sadly been banished to external HD exile due to space concerns--I should get that figured out.) Here goes:

"B-Boys Beware," Two Sisters (Fly Girls compilation). Comment: Hell yeah.

"Odé, Sábio Babá Alayê (Agueré E Ijexá)," Afoxé Filhos Oyá Alaxé (pretty sure this is a live recording but not sure). Comment: Mesmerizing rhythms and convivial call-and-response vocals. I'll say it again, hell yeah.

"Train For A Brain," Micachu (Filthy Friends - Mix Tape Vol. 1). Comment: A fellow music critic once described Micachu & The Shapes as dance music as interpreted by Pokemon characters. I probably haven't remembered that comparison exactly right, but at any rate I think it's more or less an apt comparison, and I think it's a good thing.

"Pelas Ruas Que Andei (Ao Vivo)," Alceu Valença (Pelas Ruas Que Andei). Comment: More music from northeast Brazil. I had a friend drop a motherload of the stuff onto my computer a few months back. This is more like gospel compared to the last track; gospel with with wacky keyboards.

"Pamuromo," by Chiwoniso (Rebel Woman). Comment: Marvelous singer/songwriter/mbira player from Zimbabwe. She's so cool that I think I have become cooler simply because I had dinner with her after watching her record in a studio session once.

"Treehouse," Arthur Russell (World of Echo). Comment: Another heeeeeell yeah. Sean, thanks for the track list chain, my list is just getting better and better!

"Aus," Fennesz (Hotel Paral.lel). Comment: The funny thing is that the shuffle is not only making great choices, but linking tracks that fit great next to each other. Chi's rich voice moves to Arthur's rich echo-drenched cello-and-voice moves to Fennesz's rich miasma of electronics moves to...

"Tshitua Fuila Mbuloba," Kasai Allstars (In the 7th Moon, the Cheif Turned Into a Swimming Fish and Ate the Head of His Enemy by Magic). Comment: ...a pan-tribal Congolese spiritual with multi-part harmonies, not to mention the best album title ever!

"Divisions Of Joy," J*Davey (The Beauty In Distortion). Comment: Slightly weird R&B pop with processed beats, just begging for an Auto-tune vocalist. This album always comes on when I have shuffle on; I don't know how this got on my computer because I don't usually listen to this kind of music, though I'm fairly certain it came from the same place as all that Brazilian music and my friend Jon plays keyboards on it.

"Lick Ur," Micachu (Filthy Friends - Mix Tape Vol. 1). Comment: This mix has 33 tracks and a lot of them have a bizarre London grime vibe--the distinctly British side of Michachu's Pokemon dance coin, I suppose.

"Nafrouha l'youme," Abderrahmane Djalti (Choufi). Comment: Layers of live and processed percussion and very fake sounding keyboard horns and strings achieve such great heights of sentimentality with such a low budget.

"North Six (Live)," Gang Gang Dance (Hillulah). Comment: 12 minutes of GGD back when they were a quasi-tribal stoner jam project. What is that I hear, a megaphone alarm run through a sampler?

"Dona De 7 Colinas," Alceu Valença (Marco Zero Ao Vivo). Comment: More Brazilian music; "Love Boat" suddenly comes to mind.

"Bee-Ree-Bee-Kym-Bee," Machito & His Afro-Cubans (Mambo Mucho Mambo - The Complete Columbia Masters). Comment: Afro-Cuban exotica reminiscent of Martin Denny, but way more bombastic. Not exactly my cup of tea (or should I say not exactly my Cuba Libre?)

"Rocked Shocked," Micachu (Filthy Friends - Mix Tape Volume 1). Comment: Micachu again?! Come on, shuffle, you can do better than that!

City of water: Places to go watch ripples and fish

2009-07-15T22:29:00.004-07:00

Water is marvelous to behold, if not always to touch, in our urban environment. Glittering condos and hulking factories clog up much of the waterfront, while imposing gates obstruct access to shorelines in some of our riverside parks. But on Saturday, July 18, people will take boats of all kinds to Governors Island for City Of Water Day—a festival with fishing workshops, bird-watching tours, and a parade of illustrious vessels—to celebrate the resource that courses between the boroughs and splashes up against all sorts of rustic refuges. Here are some waterside destinations for free activities, whether on City Of Water Day or not. Continue reading on Decider...

Renminbi, "Surface" EP (Self-released; 2009)

2009-07-11T22:55:00.002-07:00

Worldly elements are hot in New York City. Among the examples: David Longstreth’s guitar style is often compared to King Sunny Adé’s; Vampire Weekend draws a parallel between a popular Congolese dance and WASPs having sex in “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa”; and members of Gang Gang Dance have been known to favor London grime, Iranian pop star Googoosh, pygmy music, and God knows what else. With highlife-style guitars, reggaeton beats, and vague references to tribal music all the rage, Brooklyn’s Renminbi (the name of China’s currency) almost comes across as a nostalgic throwback to the classic indie rock sounds of Northwest bands like Unwound and Sleater-Kinney. But nobody is copying anybody on Surface: its raw power glimmers with a uniquely passionate touch.

Recorded live by the esteemed Sonic Youth engineer Don Fleming, this EP (which can be downloaded for free at cashmusic.org) follows the lyrical course of a doomed relationship. SMV’s simple synth lines leave much to be desired, but they work as a subdued counterpoint to Lisa Liu’s incredible guitar phrasing—shiny riffs that ascend, descend and twist around to express a range of emotions. The slicing licks of “Portland” are mad with a sort of uneasy happiness, while the stabs in “Toulouse” at points resemble big, silvery teardrops. In “Set-Up”—when the relationship reaches a breaking point—SMV’s buzzing bass and dreamy synth and guest drummer Jenny Johnson’s cymbal-smashing, snare-rapping beat are the most distinct elements, matching the delirious fury of Liu’s guitar and vocals. In “Then We Came To The End,” Liu’s slow chopping-motion chord progression perfectly evokes the theme of the song, which is belted out by the band like a Facebook update: “Everything falls away.” Indeed, there is hardly a sweet moment in these twenty minutes.

What Renminbi lacks in Afro-beat loop pedal experiments it more than makes up for in rich textures and sheer power. Considering that the bashing on Surface already has its subtleties, it will be especially intriguing to hear what this promising band produces when there is a happier topic at hand.

Published this week on Cokemachineglow.com

Michael Jackson, R.I.P.

2009-06-27T18:01:00.008-07:00

The world is remembering Michael Jackson.

At work yesterday, my coworkers put on some of their favorite tunes of his, among them "Don't Stop 'Till You Get Enough" and the Free Willy theme song, "Will You Be There." When I was a little kid, one of my favorite videos was the "Smooth Criminal" section of Moonwalker.

While at work, I received an email from a Congolese man I met at the Dubai International Airport last year. "Bonjour !j'ai tres mal appris la nouvelle du deces de Michael Jackson. et comment la nation Americaine concoit cette perte brutale?" he wrote. "je presente les condoleances les plus attristes au peuple Americain."

After work, I headed to the Harlem Meer and checked out a pole at the Charles A. Dana Discovery Center to go fishing. Heading back to the train, I bought a bottle of water at a bodega. While waiting in line, a Latino man talking to the clerk turned to me. "Man, what do you think about Michael Jackson dying?" he asked. "He was the best performer ever."

The NY Times has reported that Michael was on medication, but it will take weeks before the cause of death can be determined. The police have opened a criminal investigation and are questioning Jackson's personal doctor, Conrad Murray.

I went to the local bodega today. "Bad" was playing on the radio. Back home, I heard Michael's intense, unmistakable voice coming from my Chinese neighbor's apartment.

We miss you, Michael.

Various Artists, "Legends Of Benin" (Analog Africa; 2009)

2009-06-25T12:47:00.003-07:00

Over the past year, Samy Ben Redjeb’s Analog Africa label has released three excellent compilations of irresistible hits of the ’70s by musicians from the small African nations of Togo and Benin: African Scream Contest, a collection of innovative, genre-bending dance tunes; The Vodoun Effect, a sampling obscure recordings by the renowned voodoo-funk band Orchestre Poly-Rythmo de Cotonou; and now, Legends Of Benin, which compiles Cavacha, Agbadja, and Afro-beat hits by four “golden age”-era composers, Antoine Dougbé, Honoré Avolonto, Gnonnas Pedro, and El Rego. It’s difficult to say which compilation is best, but of all three Legends Of Benin features some of the deepest grooves.

Like the other two releases, Legends Of Benin is a pretty package, with extensive, forty-page liner notes detailing composer bios and the story behind the project. Back in 2005, Redjeb was hoping to create a similar series for Zimbabwean Chimurenga music, but he was forced to leave Zimbabwe in the midst of a terrible political crackdown; eventually, Benin caught his eye when he noticed in some records a curious divergence from a vinyl pressing technique common to West African highlife LPs from the ’70s. It would have been interesting to hear some of the more obscure songs from that era that were written in support of the guerrillas who fought in Zimbabwe’s liberation war, but Redjeb certainly wasn’t settling for less when he decided to plumb a treasure trove of rare records to produce these current releases. Legends Of Benin in particular offers a sampling of hits by artists who have been virtually unheard of outside Africa for far too long.

The skilled musicians on Legends Of Benin play incredibly diverse music with feeling, but while some of these fourteen tracks are downright sweltering, others are cool and even somewhat haunting. The propulsive bass line and warm accordion refrain of El Rego et Ses Commandos’ “Feeling You Got” has the gruff R&B feel of Captain Beefheart circa Safe as Milk (1967). Antoine Dougbé’s “Honton Soukpo Gnon,” which hinges on a lilting guitar-and-organ hook, evokes mid-tempo reggae. On the other hand, the horn-accented crescendo groove of Dougbé’s “Honton Soukpo Gnon,” driven by the Cavacha rhythm popularized in the Congo (similar to a reggaeton beat), resembles the soukous style of classic Congolese bands like Franco & le TPOK Jazz and Zaiko Langa Langa. Funky Afro-beat shows up in the jittery drums, lithe guitars and driving horns of Honoré Avolonto’s “Na Mi Do Gbé Hué Nu,” as well as in the intermingling guitar lines and cosmic synthesizer solo of Honoré Avolonto & Orchestre Poly-Rythmo’s “Tin Lin Non.” Latin influences show through in the cool vocals and laid-back guitar of Gnonnas Pedro & his Dadjes Band’s “La Musica En Vérité.” The average yovo wouldn’t hear it, but this famous salsero is perhaps more commonly known for incorporating the traditional Agbadja rhythm into popular tunes like “Dadje Von O Von Non.”

The main reason it takes over thirty years for many talented artists from Africa to gain due recognition in the United States and Europe is because, unfortunately, too few people over here license artists’ songs while they’re still alive. But one can’t fault Redjeb for his efforts: Legends Of Benin is still a worthy collection and a great resource for both the public library and the local club’s Afro-beat night.

:: analogafrica.blogspot.com

Bringing the party

2009-06-24T22:47:00.016-07:00

Tonight, I performed a rare concert at The Glass Door in Bushwick, opening for my musical friends The Binary Marketing Show and Wagner. I keep my music mostly to myself and I usually perform about once or twice a year. The Binary Marketing Show is an up-and-coming electroacoustic band composed of four good friends of mine who are all from the South and live in Brooklyn. Wagner is the solo dance project of my main mec français, Yan Wagner. (None of us knew about this flyer, designed by friend of a friend with a curious imagination, before it was posted on Facebook.) Over the course of several hours, a chill party with a few dozen guests grew into a drunken blowout wingding.

The last time I was at The Glass Door, a scrappy performance space on the second floor of a nondescript building in Bushwick, The Binary Marketing Show played a show with a screamo band from New Jersey on New Year's Eve to an audience of about a dozen. It was the second show that the organizers--Steph and Jonny--had put on; the place had the unseemly name Retox and the walls were all painted a stark white. Fifty-odd shows/parties have gone on since. Now, the walls in the main space are covered with perverse cartoons (a monster with a scrotum attached to his head; an alien with four arms holding a smoky bong and a 40 oz.; what looks to be a caricature of Saddam Hussein, with a corresponding speech balloon that says "I HATE EVERYONE AND MYSELF") and cryptic graffitos ("DOUCHE COUGAR"; "Chuck Norris Beard gives Back Alley Abortions"; "DONNER PARTY PICNIC"; "Re-Pent & thou shall Be SAVED"). The venue seems legal enough and aspiring musicians should take note that it is currently booking shows for July and August. But like we did tonight, you'll have to bring the party!

Despite some technical difficulties early on, my performance turned out great. Enhanced by a borrowed delay pedal, my voice echoed through the room over my blistering programmed beats, jumpy bass lines and harsh keyboard phrases. I sang several of what one might consider pathetic love songs, and in other tunes I covered such interesting topics as my strange fascination with the Ogaden Desert in Ethiopia, my opinion on what should be done with the detention camp in Guantanamo Bay ("Close it down! Close it down! Close it down!"), and the tragic complexities of counterinsurgency warfare in Iraq. But it wasn't the verses that won accolades from a few audience members, it was the beats. Michael Pope, who did crunked-up, down 'n' dirty DJ sets in between the night's three performances, even insisted that I become a producer: Quite a powerful compliment for somebody who has long considered this beat-making little more than a hobby.

The Binary Marketing Show, a bruising force driven by warped samples, resonant guitars, deep rhythms, FX-drenched vocal lines and introspective verses, put on a hearty performance. No doubt I'm seeing things a little bit differently because these people are my friends, but I think that Binary is a hot and promising band. Their new album, Pattern, is complex and rich with detail, sometimes bizarre and other times catchy. In a recent Pitchfork review of the track "Shape Of Your Head", Brian Howe accused the band of literally pretending to be Animal Collective. "It seems like such a meticulous diagnostic of the digi-tribal aesthetic that it can be hard to hear it as its own entity," he writes. Alas, yet another perfectly unique, innovative and catchy song is charged with conspiracy and fraud because a critic is incapable of simply enjoying it. Thankfully, Animal Noises Music Blog published a rebuttal earlier today. "Not only does The Binary Marketing Show's new track, 'Shape of Your Head' not sound anything like Animal Collective's Strawberry Jam," John writes, "but it sounds nothing like Animal Collective."

Wagner quite simply stole the show: The moment he started throwing down his funky, Kraftwerk-style synth lines and infectious clap-heavy beats, the audience became electric. Wagner's music, a cross between classic Detroit techno and glamorous electro-pop, has an irresistible summertime feel to it; we in the audience worked up a healthy summertime sweat as we gyrated wildly.

He played an encore, responding to applause, cheers, and cries of "Encore!" and "Sans déconner, mec!" When the song came to an end, he said, "Thank you for staying."

"Thank you for coming," replied organizer Steph. "It's like an orgy."

Signals

2009-06-22T21:26:00.018-07:00

I just got back from (Le) Poisson Rouge, where I witnessed a breathtaking performance of Steve Reich's Pulitzer Prize-winning piece "Double Sextet" by the hip contemporary classical group Signal. Mesmerizing percussive instruments and herky-jerky piano merged with the dissonant, razor sharp phrasing of violins and woodwinds. The ensemble (heads bobbing and bodies moving, the falcon-like conductor Brad Lubman swishing and cutting with his arms) was propulsive yet subdued, piercing but sublime.

After the show, Reich himself appeared in his trademark baseball cap, making his way through the applauding crowd and going on stage to give hugs and kisses. Considering the mood of the scene, I couldn't help but feel a little regretful that I didn't pull out my phone to snap a picture, even though it would have turned out hopelessly blurry and underexposed. Oh, to simply have the Capped One in a frame!

Now, I'm thinking of this haunting indelible image: life streaming from the eyes of the young Iranian woman Neda Agha-Soltan. Whether or not all of the facts have been independently confirmed, the candid video of Neda's death is fast becoming the definitive emblem of Iranians' call for democratic change. As I follow the hopeful protests and tragic violence taking place in Iran, the image has begun to serve as something of a personal spirit: a reminder that pops up up in unexpected places of the incomprehensibly ugly forces that seek to destroy beautiful common struggles.

Gregg Kowalsky, Tape Chants (Kranky; 2009)

2009-06-16T14:16:00.004-07:00

Renowned for its spacey experimental music, Kranky is a suitable label for Gregg Kowalsky, a composer who lives in Oakland, has a Master’s degree in Electronic Music and Recording Media, and experiments with drone tones and noise. For many years, Kowalsky’s instrument of choice was the computer, but after the release of his first full-length album, 2006’s well-received Through The Cardinal Window, he began to take a more ascetic approach. “I felt limited by the unlimited possibilities of digital production,” he explains on Kranky’s website.

In a subsequent series of compositions and live recordings that he dubbed “Tape Chants,” he traded the computer for acoustic instruments and analog electronic equipment, like piano, gong, analog synthesizer, sine wave oscillator, contact microphones, motors, mixer feedback, and cassette tapes and recorders. In live performances he would place tape decks in different parts of a room and alter the volumes of each as they played—depending on where each audience member sat, they would hear the piece slightly differently. Tape Chants, a studio recording that serves as the third installation of the series, borrows from previous live recordings but dispenses with these spatial experiment and brings in more “rhythmic textures,” as Kowalsky calls them—not actual beats, but elements that suggest a sense of progression.

Like the sonic equivalent of a Mark Rothko painting, Tape Chants at first sounds like one drone tone transitioning into the next; in fact, the record is an infinite realm of fluid colors and textures at once beautiful and unsettling, full of overwhelming sine waves and sublime sounds that mingle and overtake each other. “I-IV,” stretching to an epic twenty minutes, is like a mirage rippling in slow motion: a low hum and a warm flute-like tone give way to a high-frequency tone and a low crackle; the piece eventually evolves into a heavenly warbling sound and a throbbing drum pulse before finally dissipating into weird sonic flotsam. “VI-VII,” clocking in at thirteen minutes, is a cornucopia of harsh sucking sounds, shruti box-like drones, and glassy overtones. The first signs of discernible melody in the 49-minute album are the wandering, submerged piano notes in “IX.” The heavy gong of “X-XI,” which melds with what could be some kind of motor, makes for a meditative end point.

Most people would consider the drone tone a motionless thing, but Gregg Kowalsky has shown the listener that it can be a vibrant pulsating force. It’s perfectly reasonable to listen to Tape Chants at an ultra-low volume (a la Morton Feldman), but to absorb all of the color and contour of this veritable ocean of sound, I recommend playing it very loud.

Rating: 75%

:: myspace.com/greggmkowalsky

A version of this review was published today on Cokemachineglow.com

Interview - Outspoken Alpha Intellect

2009-06-01T10:34:00.003-07:00

Leslie Tongai Makawa, aka Outspoken Alpha Intellect, is an up-and-coming rapper and activist from the southern African nation of Zimbabwe. A regular at the House Of Hunger poetry slam series in Harare, the capital, Outspoken’s reflective poetry delves into the joys and hardships of everyday life amidst the severe economic hardship and horrifying government-sponsored violence of the past decade. On the twenty-ninth anniversary of Zimbabwean independence, Outspoken spoke with CMG just before he performed a concert in Washington, DC. In an insightful interview, Makawa discusses his upbringing in Harare, the Essence (his band as well as the state of mind), and toyi-toyi—a dance dating back to the war for independence that fellow Zimbabwean slam poets have adopted as a symbol for the struggle for human rights.

CMG’s Peter Holslin (CMG): How has the tour been? [At the time, Outspoken was touring the East Coast with Comrade Fatso, another Zimbabwean poet, and Fatso’s backing band.]

Leslie Tongai Makawa, (LTM): Well, it’s been an experience. Because it’s like good energies you get from the band and from the crowd, but at the same time, you now, you do get tired. Funny enough, it’s something that you feed off of, like even the fatigue and all of that.

CMG: Is this the first time you’ve been to the United States?

LTM: This is the first time I’ve been off Africa. It’s been dope. It’s been unreal. I know I’m in the States, but I’m like looking for the American experience. I don’t know what that is. It’s like I’m waiting for something. I am getting so much from it, but at the same time I’m hesitant. Like, ‘You know, the American experience is about to happen any day now.’ It’s not the movies I’ve seen. Maybe that’s the thing. You expect so much, because in an hour, hour fifteen, if it’s drama there’s so much drama packed in. If it’s action, there’s so much action. You expect stuff to be happening. Like, you know, the world to stand still for a day.

It’s been an experience. I became a fan of hip hop again. I was in it. This is what I wanna do.

CMG: Were there any experiences you had that were extra-special, that you’ll take home with you?

LTM: Yeah, like having people coming up to you and giving you a jewel from something you said in your poem, and saying how something affected them in a positive way. It’s something that reminds you why you do what you do. I remember like three or four, it’s just that I was so tired I don’t remember where it was. But I’m sure one was at Tufts [University], the other at [the Trinity International Hip Hop Festival.]

CMG: What happened?

LTM: Someone comes up and they’re like, “You know, the piece you just did, it touched me deeply.” It always leaves you, like, “Wow.” I know they were good, but when it actually does happen, it’s always like, “Wow.” That’s pretty big.

CMG: Did anybody toyi-toyi?

LTM: I did. [laughs] Yeah, like some people in the crowd. The girls at Wellesley, there were some that were actually from Zimbabwe and Zambians and quite the number that could toyi-toyi. And, you know, they got into the groove. Funny enough, it was one of our not-so-big crowds, but the energy that they had, to date I can say that was one of the best performances because we really got connected with the crowd. It was like one energy, and it was beautiful. Plus, they were all girls, but you can leave that out.

CMG: What is the significance of toyi-toyi? What does it mean to you?

LTM: Toyi-toyi—to define it I would say it’s more like, celebrating the freedom that they can’t take away from you. Celebrating the fact that, even if you are in shackles and chains, in a cage, the inner self cannot be tainted. They can get to the point of killing you, but they can’t kill you. They can just destroy your body. So it’s like realizing that everyone does have a limit, and you really cannot control a person. The only way you give that across is when you give the people an illusion that you can. So, it’s like a defiant celebration. You can see it in the dance. It’s like egging people on, like “Yeah, what?” Funny thing with Toyi Toyi, it’s used before a battle or confrontation, but it comes across like a celebration in itself. It’s just a beautiful state to be in. You’re saying, ‘I refuse to lose!’

CMG: What do you hope to get out of this tour? And what do you want to express, to give to the audience?

LTM: All I have to give is my message and my experience. And funny enough, I’m one guy that thinks that when you don’t expect nothing of no one, that’s actually when you get something going. As long as I can get to a person’s mind, and enlighten them about a situation, and have them thinking and spark up a positive image, I think my work is done. Because a lot of people wanna go straight into action, like, “OK! We heard your problem, man! What you need?“ I just need positive energies to support a brutha. I think that’s like the most powerful prayer someone can give to someone else.

CMG: So tell me about yourself. Where were you born?

LTM: H-town, Harare [capital of Zimbabwe]. Born and raised in Avonlea [a suburb of Harare]. But my heart stays in Mufakose. That’s like a township. That’s where the black laborers were allocated [during the colonial period, when Zimbabwe was called Rhodesia. Thing was, you’d have people that would make it from that township, but it was named Mufakose ‘cause, you know, even if you kind of made it in life, you probably would be robbed in that neighborhood, and killed. Or if you did make it, you’re still gonna die. Either way, you’re gonna die: that’s what it means.

CMG: And you grew up there?

LTM: That’s where my mom was raised, and that’s where my mom’s family was. So that’s where I grew up. That’s where people actually were.

CMG: What did your parents do?

LTM: They both retired. My mom was like a bank teller. My pops used to work at the Ministry of Education, retired, became the Director General for the Zimbabwe Association of Pension Funds. That’s what he retired from. Now he’s a counselor for the University of Zimbabwe. He goes there every once in a while, says where they’re messing up, they don’t listen, and he goes back to the farms. [My parents] are now farming full time.

CMG: Do you have siblings?

LTM: Yes, I’m the last born in a family of four. First born being my sister and two other brothers. And they all used to rap. Yeah, I grew up in that. My sister was called Constable Rhyme.

CMG: Constable Rhyme?

LTM: Yeah. Don’t ask. And my brother was Professor Tricky. My uncle was African Chemistry. My friend was Prince Neka.

CMG: So you grew up around hip hop?

LTM: I was listening to Run-DMC, just trying to be down. I was a little kid, you know. LL Cool J, “Mama said knock you out!” And then I kinda chilled. When I was trying to discover myself, I moved away from the music. I found myself going back into it, but there was more reggae this time. And then I started hearing like, Notorious BIG and 112 and stuff, and I was like, this is nice. Happy music! And I found myself back in hip hop. This was before hip hop was like underground and commercial. It was just people doing what they do. For me it was the golden days, like ’94, ’95, ’96. You know, Lost Boys, Craig Mack. Ah! I can’t stop. Skinny Busta Rhymes, with the locks. Skinny Busta with the good locks. Crazy. Yeah.

CMG: When did you start writing?

LTM: Well, I started writing in primary school, like fifth grade, sixth grade. Instead of doing my homework, I’d be writing stuff. I wouldn’t call them like poems or verses, I was…expressing myself. My moms beat me, telling me, “You need to do your assignments, not this stuff.” I just went to school for her sake. My literature teacher, who happened to go to the same school as my father, and was bullied by my father, he used to pick on me to provide the answers. Like, you know, put pressure on me. He used to call me by my pop’s name, he used to call me Hilton. He wouldn’t call me by my own name. So this one time I wrote a poem, and I got in trouble because it was so good, he thought I had lifted it from some other place. And with me trying to explain so much, I got into more trouble. So that kinda fizzled me out and I was like, “You know what? Forget you.” So I kinda stopped, but then I only stopped writing for them. I just kept on [makes a scribbling motion] for me.

CMG: I’m really interested to know how you started writing more politically-motivated stuff, and how you got involved with the House Of Hunger poetry slam.

LTM: It kinda started when my education started. It was like, But what is this? What…what…what’s going on? Why should I learn what you want me to know, that I don’t want to know? What does it help me? And what does it help you? I’m not gonna work for you. I’m a part of the system, but why can’t the system attune itself to my needs? It was a whole bunch of questions that needed to be answered. The House Of Hunger poetry slam was like the perfect podium. Now I actually have an outlet where I can actually bring out my frustrations.

[My poetry] is labeled as political but if you actually do listen to some of my stuff, it’s more like a question to individuals. Like trying to analyze a situation. It so happens that an individual is in society, and a society is governed by politics, but that’s how the pieces become political. You know, you can have pieces that actually incite people into doing things blindly. Instead, I would rather have pieces that might not move you physically, but move you mentally, to a better place.

CMG: Who are some poets and writers who have inspired you?

LTM: Ah, well, that one is a tough one. Like I said, I really didn’t like the education system. I really didn’t like reading the books they wanted us to read. So most of the time I actually found inspiration in the everyday race, like, you know, the struggles that mothers would go through, the struggles that our parents would go through. I could see relationships breaking down because of external forces that have no relation to the family. There are people that inspire me, but it’s like people that are so close—like the words that come out of sister Chi’s mouth. [He is referring to Chiwoniso Maraire, a Zimbabwean-American songwriter who performed at the concert that day.] You know, it’s like I’m a fan more than an artist. Every experience for me is so humbling that sometimes I wonder if I’m playing the game from the opposite side of the fence. Like I should be in the crowd, and watching you guys.

CMG: Do you go by Outspoken Alpha Intellect, or is it just Outspoken?

LTM: It’s funny, it was a joke, my whole name. ’Cause I was looking at hip hop and how, you know, guys have these names. I was like, “You know what? I wanna have one of the longest names in hip hop.” So the whole name, the whole tag, is Outspoken Alpha Intellect The Humble Neophyte True Indeed I Am Proof Of Emcee Also Known As I The Kept Brother Inner Silence Love Thy Neighbor. Those names represent different parts of self. The Outspoken…sometimes you just need to stamp your authority. But then the counterbalance to Outspoken is Inner Silence, the place where I exist before I let out. And then there’s the Alpha Intellect [he pronounces it “eye-ntellect”], which represents the first thought. What I said right now is like the first thought that is coming out of my mind. But then, in order for me to have these full thoughts, there is the Humble Neophyte, which is the guy that chilled and, you know, has to learn and experience life in order to give something back to life. And then there’s True Indeed. That explains itself. Whatever you say, it has to be true of you in actual action. I Am Proof Of Emcee…that’s just for hop hop’s sake. Don’t ask what an emcee is. When I do what I do, or when I am who I am, that’s me being an Emcee. Love Thy Neighbor, that says it for itself again. And I The Kept Brutha…I am the kept brutha. I’m in a crew called Dialectric Blue. My rhyme partner is called Upmost Mybruthazkeepa Rhyme For Days. And we roll deep. He is like my brutha, you know? We look out for each other. And as much as I am the kept brotha, I keep my brotha close.

They all have like different parts that I am learning of myself. But then it was also like a piss take, just bein’ Outspoken Alpha Intellect The Humble Neophyte True Indeed I Am Proof Of Emcee AKA I The Kept Brutha Inner Silence Love Thy Neighbor! I find beauty in that, as much as it is comical.

CMG: When did you start playing with the Essence?

LTM: Two years ago. The one dude I went to high school with. He used to close me on my hip hop tapes and stuff. I used to close him some of his. “Close” is when you borrow something and you don’t give it back. “Yeah, I closed you man!” Yeah, he’s the guy who plays the guitar. His younger brother plays the bass. And this other kid plays the drums. Verity [Norman, a South African woman who helped organize the event] plays the violin.

I wanna learn the kora). I wanna learn something that’s just, [makes carnal sound of enjoyment]. A message can be communicated just by the different instruments that’s being played. I’m trying to make beauty. I wouldn’t label my music as poetry or hip hop, it’s just a bunch of beautiful crazy stuff that I’m yet to get at. We just wanna create beautiful things.

CMG: In your life, did you have any experiences that inspired you to write, or make you rethink the way of the system?

LTM: Growing up was like an accumulation of events. They always get you. Like, constant triggers. Like, Hey, that can’t be right! Is that right? And while you’re still twisted in that situation and you’re growing with it, you get triggered by another one. There were like small instances. I can’t say there was one thing that was like, Paradigm Shift!

CMG: But even a small thing…

LTM: OK, growing up in Avonlea, we were like one of the first few black families to move in. I didn’t know racism or anything like that. You’re a kid and all you see are kids and grown-ups.

When black people would talk to other black people, they wouldn’t give each other as much respect as if they were talking to a white person. So there was that in-built superiority complex. And I started questioning like, Yo! But… If you go to Zimbabwe now, a person who is like a boss or whatever, is referred to as murungu. Which is, “white person.” It’s like slang but it’s been accepted.

CMG: So in the word itself, being white is associated with being the boss?

LTM: Yeah, and superiority. Regardless if you are a black boss, you become a murungu, which is white person. So it’s that inferiority complex that’s embedded in us. And it like thrives below the radar. It’s even engaged in an argument with us. It’ll rage on for days. And there’s another statement, “MaBhoi.” Someone would say, “Ah, MaBhoi!” Like, “Ah, these blacks!” It’s like a generalized dis that would bring down a whole race.

That stuff would weigh heavily on me. You would find those energies, that chop you down from these angles. As much as you can blame it on a black and white dynamic, there was a black and black dynamic. That’s why my poetry is more like to focus on self. Just to feed the beauty that you are, the being that you are. That’s the only way you can play a pivotal role in society. ’Cause when you’re saying, “Yes, I’m a being in society, but I’m mad weak,” you’re not going to hold up the burden for everyone else. That’s what made me who I am today.

CMG: Artists and activists have told me, and I’ve also gotten the impression from news reports, that everything has become politicized in Zimbabwe. How do you feel about that?

LTM: The newscasters have their agenda. Fair and fine. But I believe that once you take someone’s pain, and someone’s tears, and just break them down into mere statistics, and facts, it’s like robbing the story of its essence. The story that was gonna be said by that person’s mother or brother is not the same story you’re gonna get when you switch on the news, when you read the newspaper. Because that agenda has nothing to do with the people involved. It’s the bigger picture—This place is messed up! He’s messing it up! So many people have died! But it doesn’t have that humanity aspect to it. It’s like I’m not Outspoken; I’m not Leslie Tongai Makawa—I’m a Zimbabwean; I’m the guy coming from the place with the messed-up economy. These are all the labels that I have now with me. I’m broken down and categorized. It destroys you being a person, you being a being, and it makes you this whole question mark, which I don’t believe in. I’m like, What?

Beyond the troubles, beyond the beauty that they advertise in the tourist sector, beyond the political, the economic, the health problems, beyond the smiles, the hate and everything, there is that essence that lies there, that makes it what it is. We can’t be defined by events, or history, or how our future’s gonna be.

CMG: Is that why your band is called the Essence?

LTM: Yeah. I like to chill in a realm. I know I’m not yet there, but I’m gonna be there in the next two years—like a realm where it’s not music and it’s not poetry, but it’s words, sounds, emotions, feelings. That thing that’s beyond the musical notes, the notations, the jargon they have in music school. I just want to exist with the feel-good shit, or the make-you-think shit.

You can’t say, “Ah, this is wrong.” I think that statement is true if it’s finished with ‘To me.’ Like, that is wrong to me. ’Cause what’s wrong to me might be right to you. And I think that’s the breaking point of understanding self and understanding others: realizing that we are different. This world would suck if we had nothing but Outspokens. Probably argue all day and kill each other off. So we need to understand that we find that beauty within the difference in existence.

Life is a beautiful thing, man. Every breath we get is a blessing. A lot of the times we don’t realize that. We don’t take the time to appreciate that we’re here. It’s beautiful. I love it when I’m sick, because every time I’m sick, I remember all those times that I wasn’t sick. I just let those days roll on by. You remember all the times you’re sick, but never when you’re OK. You remember all the times you’re broke. Like, “I’m broke. I’m broke, man. Been broke for two weeks.” I don’t know why we always focus on the negative, you know? And even when you are broke, that doesn’t finish you. That’s not the definitive moment.

The first two words that exist in that statement is “I am.” And that’s a state that you have to appreciate. Yes, I am…broke? Whatever. But I am. Those are powerful words. It’s like a breath of fresh air for me.

This interview was published today on Cokemachineglow.com. Photo courtesy Outspoken.

Omar Souleyman, "Dabke 2020 (Folk and Pop Sounds of Syria)" (Sublime Frequencies; 2009)

2009-06-01T10:29:00.005-07:00

Dabke, a popular music and dance style in the Middle East, means “stomping of the feet” in Arabic. Taking its name from a time-honored technique used to compact dirt while building a house, dabke‘s fantastical keyboard lines, swooping string arrangements, and bombastic beats serve as the soundtrack for impressive group dances at joyous parties and weddings. The eight tracks on Omar Souleyman’s Dabke 2020 (Folk and Pop Sounds of Syria), released to coincide with a recent European tour, are frantic and scrappy compared to mainstream dabke hits. Even Souleyman’s own 2004 chart-topper “Khataba” boasts of significantly glossier production values. But for their low-budget feel, the songs here stomp that much harder.

Omar Souleyman, one of Syria’s most famous singers, exudes coolness and mystery, always appearing in his trademark getup: black mustache, red-and-white checked kaffiyeh, dark sunglasses. (Adding to the mystique, Mahmoud Harbi, who writes much of Souleyman’s lovelorn verses, is said to often stand next to him during performances and whisper poetry into his ear.) Very little is known about Souleyman in Europe and North America, and much of what we do know has been probably culled solely from Sublime Frequencies’ press releases and the interesting liner notes of Highway to Hassake, a fantastic compilation of some of Souleyman’s hits put together by Mark Gergis and released in 2007. A geek like me will scoff at the 46-word blurb on the info sheet that comes in Dabke 2020‘s cardboard packaging, but all curious English speakers need to know is that Souleyman and his band throw down some of the fastest, most ass-kicking party music that side of the Mediterranean Sea.

While overblown house tracks by the likes of Bad Boy Bill are perhaps the closest American analogue to the explosively romantic dabke produced in Beirut, the tunes compiled on Dabke 2020—which were previously released in Syria on cassette tapes over the years since 1999—is more comparable to the oppressive hardcore techno of R&S Records. The compilation opens with ominous buzuk noodling and roughly hewn crooning on “Atabat,” which segues seamlessly into a brutal six-minute keyboard jam, “Lansob Sherek (I Will Make A Trap),” that features the relentless popping of an Iraqi zenbur drum. “La Sidounak Sayyada (I’ll Prevent The Hunters From Hunting You),” with a wheezing, stop-and-go keyboard motif set over a four-to-the-floor stomp, has the feel of one of Paul Elstak’s fun-loving gabber tracks. On the other hand, “Kaset Hanzal (Drinking From The Glass Of Bitterness)” closes the CD on a meditative groove driven by a repeating piano arpeggio. Barely clocking in at 40 minutes, the eight tunes mostly follow the same pattern—over driving beats on drum machines and hand drums, Souleyman answers phase-shifted keyboard lines and mesmerizing riffs on traditional stringed instruments with raspy verses and hyping exultations. As one might expect, this makes for great party fodder.

Dabke 2020 is a skimpy release, especially considering that Souleyman is said to have released upwards of 500 cassette tapes of live and studio recordings in his home country since 1994. Those who haven’t heard Souleyman before are better off starting with Highway to Hassake, but the serious fans won’t want to miss this. If the two Sublime Frequencies compilations just aren’t enough, however, the local Middle Eastern store might have some great cassettes for sale. Simply mention Souleyman’s outfit and the clerk will know who you’re talking about.

I'm back in the saddle at Cokemachineglow.com. This review was posted today.

A Happy Marriage: American Jazz Meets Shona Dance Music

2009-05-08T07:31:00.009-07:00

On a February evening at a spacious art gallery in Midtown, Max Wild blew the lively melody of his tune “Tamba” on alto saxophone, shimmering in a purple-and-pink sport coat and silvery sneakers. Suddenly, his band dropped into a driving groove that swelled into a torrent of skittering drums and wailing guitar.

“Tamba” means “to dance” (and in the imperative, “Dance!”) in the language of the Shona people, who are native to Zimbabwe, the southern African country where Wild grew up. In the opening section of the tune, drummer Obed Calvaire follows the 12/8 gallop typically played on hosho, shakers made from dried maranka-pumpkin gourds, filled with seeds, and used in anything from traditional possession ceremonies in the countryside to pop concerts in Harare, the capital. “In Shona music, the rhythm just keeps going,” Wild said. “It keeps going the whole way through.”

When he performs in Africa alongside Sam Mtukudzi, a popular Zimbabwean songwriter, showgoers will be dancing within the first moments of the set. But at the Ana Tzarev gallery, an enthralled audience of about seventy people sat still in creaky wood chairs, and only a few heads swayed.

This did not come as a disappointment to Wild, who feels just at home at Shrine, the bumping world music venue in Harlem, as he does at 55 Bar, the cozy jazz venue in Greenwich Village. He plays for diverse audiences: the New Yorkers who sit as they contemplate his jazzy harmonies and the Harareans who join in the sweaty revelry of his Afro-beat grooves. “It’s a nice challenge to be able to play for different people,” he said. “It’s important to be able to reach everyone, and to make music accessible to everyone.”

***

Jazz and Shona music are gracefully married in Tamba, an album Wild co-wrote with Mtukudzi that’s set to be released on ObliqSound in Fall 2009. In Zimbabwe, where diversity has been under siege for nearly a decade, this collaboration stands to be refreshingly progressive.

The day before Wild played at Ana Tzarev, it so happened that Zimbabweans had good cause to dance: Morgan Tsvangirai, chairman of the country’s most prominent opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), was sworn in as prime minister. In his inaugural speech, Tsvangirai vowed that the new “transitional government” would bring justice to dozens of political prisoners, restore an economy thrashed by relentless inflation, feed a starving population, and contain a raging cholera outbreak.

The result of five months’ worth of negotiations mediated by the Southern African Development Community, the region’s fifteen-nation bloc, the arrangement pairs Tsvangirai with Zimbabwe’s infamous president, Robert Mugabe. Locals are reasonably skeptical. “We are all fine, and of course everyone is hopeful!” wrote Penny Yon, an administrator for the Pamberi Trust, an arts organization based in Harare, in an email that week. “But we have been hopeful for a long time.”

***

Wild grew up in an atmosphere radically different from the one you would read about in the news today. “Zimbabwe in the eighties was like the jewel of Africa,” he said in an interview at his Washington Heights apartment. “You go back and it’s still the same country, and it’s still beautiful, but it’s just amazing how bad it can get.”

Wild, 31, who has bluish gray-green eyes, a rugged, boyish look, and a penchant for flashy shirts with colorful African patterns, was born in Essen, West Germany. His parents, both left-wing academics, had done research in Zimbabwe when it was called Rhodesia and ruled by the colonial regime of Ian Smith. His family moved into a white colonial-style house in Harare two years after Zimbabwean independence in 1980. At the time, this relatively small country was an economic powerhouse, renowned for its stirring vistas, tasty tobacco, and hypnotic Shona mbira—an ancient African family of iron-pronged musical instruments played with the thumbs and right index finger, a certain type of which is used in time-honored ceremonies to help summon ancestral spirits.

Wild remembers growing up in a harmonious multiracial society. “All my friends were either white or black, he said. “There’s no difference.”

***

But even in Zimbabwe’s cosmopolitan capital, Western instruments like saxophones were uncommon. When Wild was twelve, he was taken by his friend’s extraordinary skronker from the United States. “When you’re a kid, you wanna do what your friend does,” he said. “It just sounded really cool, and looked really cool.” He started taking lessons with Rick Van Heerden, an expressive saxophonist who introduced him to music by the likes of Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, and John Coltrane.

Meanwhile, his dad brought home the latest local LPs, his nanny tuned the family’s “Starship Enterprise–type” stereo system to ZBC Radio 2, and he listened to the driving chimurenga music of Thomas Mapfumo—famous for his paeans to the liberation war, known as the SecondChimurenga (Shona for “struggle”)—and the low-slung grooves of Oliver Mtukudzi, who is celebrated for his perceptive, allegorical lyrics. Wild never guessed that he would eventually collaborate with Mtukudzi on a single, or that he would record an album with Mtukudzi’s son. “Back then, I didn’t really know who anyone was,” he said. “It was just, like, music to me.”

Wild dreamed of being a jazz saxophonist in New York City. He left Zimbabwe in 1993 to finish high school in Germany, and advanced to the bigger jazz scene of London, where he studied at the Guildhall School of Music. Finally, he graduated from the Manhattan School of Music in 2004. Within a few months, he was producing his first album, Zambezi Sunset, with his current band. But after his dream came true, he realized that he was “just one of a thousand other jazz saxophone players in New York,” he said. Then it dawned on him that, “even if it was just subconsciously, my tunes had been influenced by Zimbabwe and my upbringing. So I thought: Well, if I just accept where I came from, that’s really who I am.”

***

At that point, however, President Mugabe sought to deny whites like him that right. In 2000, egged on by an anti-white veteran’s movement, Mugabe’s ruling party, ZANU-PF, launched a violent campaign to seize the country’s commercial farms from their white owners. Vengeful mobs of war veterans—many of them clearly too young to have fought for independence—set upon white farmers’ homes, terrorizing their families, attacking their staff, destroying their property, and haphazardly parceling out their land. The economy fell into a death-spiral of rapid inflation.

Vilifying whites as “Rhodesians” and dismissing blacks in the rising MDC as “puppets” of Britain, ZANU-PF worked to silence anyone who dared to speak out against its schemes. As a minority of political and military elites built extravagant mansions and zoomed around in brand new Humvees, lush farmlands lay fallow and the average Zimbabwean struggled to pay for a bag of cornmeal, the local staple. Gradually, food evaporated from supermarket shelves. A deep, widespread hunger set in.

In a country where artists and activists say that ordinary aspects of daily life have been eclipsed by divisive politics, Wild’s collaboration with Sam Mtukudzi may come across as a bold statement. Tamba is an intercontinental call to swinging hips, invoking the cathartic act that Zimbabweans have long cherished as a cultural institution—a way to connect with ancestors, to mend collective wounds, to express love, to simply have fun. As Wild puts it, the music “speaks for itself”: Over the hosho beat of “Tinomutenda” (“We thank you [Lord]”), Soren Moller’s jazzy, offbeat keys interlock seamlessly with Jesse Lewis’s jumpy, mbira-style guitar phrasing.

Tamba was written and recorded in three weeks in April 2008, in a house in New Jersey. It was finished in March, a few weeks after about Tsvangirai was injured and his wife was killed in a tragic car accident. Grim news, speckled with glimmers of hope, continued to emerge about Zimbabwe’s transitional government: Shortly after Tsvangirai took office, ZANU-PF began a final push to remove white farmers from their land. Civil servants now get meager $100 vouchers as monthly salaries, and food has returned to store shelves, but not everyone can afford it. According to the World Health Organization, the cholera epidemic has waned, but dozens of people still die of the curable disease every day.

Some observers never had faith in the transitional government to begin with, and others are beginning to lose it, along with their confidence in the determined Tsvangirai. As for Mugabe, it seems that nothing short of a miracle will win him the trust of international leaders, who are wary of giving the shaky administration economic aid that could help rebuild Zimbabwe.

***

For Wild, finishing the song “Kuvakidzana”—Shona for “to build something together” and also “to build each other”—had been a struggle all its own. But it came together beautifully.

Opening on a bracing 12/8 groove, “Kuvakidzana” blossoms into a divine 4/4 section. Like a gospel choir, Mtukudzi and Alicia Olatuja, a New York-based singer, reach into the upper register as they punctuate each passage with “Kuvakidzana!”

For months, the song was without lyrics and mbira. Oliver Mtukudzi enthusiastically agreed to fly over from Zimbabwe to record, but the contract was mysteriously cancelled. Mapfumo, the chimurenga music star who has lived in self-imposed exile in the United States since 2000, dropped out the day before a planned studio session in late February. So Wild sent the mix to his California-based friend Chiwoniso Maraire, a Zimbabwean-American songwriter who was planning to contribute to another track. She began writing the lyrics for “Kuvadizana” that night.

Maraire thinks of “Kuvadizana” as a love song about “the bigger picture,” about a people working towards a greater goal, she said. “In this time that we are now loved ones, we need to listen to each other,” she wrote in Shona in her thick notebook, according to her rough translation. “Nothing can go wrong when we understand each other / Nothing is impossible if we know each other / This time of giving each other trouble and stress, let it end here / In that way, our building of each other [building something together] will begin now.”

***

In a low-lit recording booth the next day, wearing her glasses and faded-camouflage jacket, Maraire sang ideas for the opening section. “OK, just stop it there,” she said. “That’s a direction. Is that a good direction?”

“Yeah, that’s a good direction,” Wild told her, standing next to the mixing board. “Except, what I didn’t like at the end of the phrases—you were still kind of making it too pretty.”

“Dude, that’s what I do!” she said, giggling. “OK, I’m going outta my boundaries. Seriously, it’s cool. Alright, so don’t make it that pretty…”

When the sound engineer replayed the angular guitar and cool keys, she sang a series of breathtaking flourishes, making the words move to a unique rhythm.

“Yeah, that’s exactly it!” Wild said. “Just let it breathe.”

In the mixing room, Wild’s two delicate hosho, with their natural handles, laid on the coffee table. One was wrapped in a white ACE bandage. Content with the take, Maraire proceeded to add harmonies to Mtukudzi’s and Olatuja’s “Kuvakidzanas.” In a month, the American mbira player Chris Berry would complete the song with the resonant voice of the ancestors. Wild smiled gently. “It’s going to be the new hit for the summer,” he said.

Photo: Max Wild and Sam Mtukudzi performing at the Harare International Festival for the Arts, by Jekesai Njikizana. This article was published in the May issue of The Brooklyn Rail.

The Best Business Names in America

2009-04-09T10:28:00.002-07:00

The Best Business Names in America list is a time-honored tradition here at Noter, a celebration of the best business names that I've come across as an employee of a New York-based manufacturer of stationary and children's toys. I usually like to take my time, but lately I've come across so many doozies that I just had to put installment No. 4 up now:

Paperazzi

Memo’s Wonderland

Now It’s Personal

Goin’ Postal

For Moi?

Crumm Snatchers

Fancy Schmancy

All Gussied Up

Glad Rags

Shut Up & Dance!

Don’t Be Stupid

Things You Never Knew Existed

Prissy Britches

Ophelia’s Folly

Casanova’s Downfall

Jezebel’s

Tome On The Range

Funky Mountain

Milton’s Babysaurus & Stroller World

Eternal Brat

Polka Tots

That’s Our Baby

Fat Baby

Baby Melt

Babywizards.com

Donut Man

Dumpster Man Inc.

Bruise Bros Corporation

Junkman’s Daughter

Junkman’s Daughter’s Brother

Steve Martin's Natural Encounters, Inc.

Sunken Gardens

History of Diving Museum

The Dump

Gun Connection, LLC

Ding-Dong Lounge

Star Barks

"They need to take responsibility for their country..."

2009-04-07T15:03:00.015-07:00

From the Iraqi perspective, here is the view of Barack Obama's first Presidential visit to their country: a man flown in secretly, delivered to Camp Victory “to say thank you to the troops,” and gone in five hours.

I cringed as I read President Obama's rehashed talking points on his Iraq policy, a "responsible" prolonged withdrawal—specifically, I cringed at his patronizing Theys.

"They need to take responsibility for their country and for their sovereignty," he told U.S. troops in a short speech at a Saddam-era palace in the Green Zone, a section of Baghdad that the U.S. Army captured exactly six years ago. "They have got to make political accommodations. They're going to have to decide that they want to resolve their differences through constitutional means and legal means. They are going to have to focus on providing government services that encourage confidence among their citizens. . . . We can't do it for them."

I have never experienced the humiliation of occupation, but I can say now that I have experienced the humiliation of occupying. Many times before, I have said that the government and people of the United States have a responsibility to improve Iraqis' lives through nonviolent methods. Troop count alone—whether it goes up or down—will never define our progress and our righteousness. And here is President Obama, the new partner, the emblem of a new era, laboring the point of “responsibility" while neglecting the very people for whom we were supposed to have fought this war.

The responsibility to hand over responsibility? Bandied about and buzzing, the word "responsibility" is beginning to remind me of those doomsaying two words of May 2003—words so haunting that you needn't be reminded of them, and so historic that they have their own Wikipedia entry.

Image from The New York Times' Baghdad Bureau blog.

Never forget?

2009-03-20T15:27:00.016-07:00

We will never forget Vietnam. We will never forget the attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. On October 7 next year, Page One of The New York Times (if there still is a Page One) may even memorialize the launch of Operation Enduring Freedom and the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. But today, March 20, 2009, there is no space reserved on the front page for the Iraq War, now beginning its sixth year.

Just as Afghanistan's was the less-important war last year, Iraq's is a low priority this year. As Afghanistan and Pakistan have exploded into the public consciousness, violence in Iraq "has flattened at the lowest level since the war began six years ago." Iraq's provincial elections "took place in a remarkably peaceful climate" (although, at least five candidates were assassinated). The status-of-forces agreement signed by the U.S. and Iraqi governments in late 2008 "will reduce boots on the ground and U.S. influence on Iraqi matters." President Obama has vowed to end combat operations by August 2010. Last month, Obama told the world: "Iraq's future is now its own responsibility."

A year ago today, I wrote on this blog: "The question of American responsibility remains fixed in reality; it always will. Let's proceed with that question on our minds." Even I, in a sense, have moved on: to music, to the war in northern Uganda, to the crisis in Zimbabwe. Like so many others, the recession haunts me like a poltergeist. But I still believe that even after all of our troops leave Iraqi soil two years from now (if all goes according to plan), we as Americans must still consider our responsibility to Iraq. We can work to find secure living situations for the millions of Iraqi refugees; or donate to progressive cultural institutions in the country, like the Iraqi National Library and Archive. We can just read a few great books to learn more about the nation that our nation has invaded and occupied, and to understand the war's historical implications.

I understand that this will be a struggle. This past year has brought so much hope, but there have also been so many dark days. Many of us will forever reserve this day for memories and tears, for the contemplation and recognition of innumerable sacrifices and scars. But for many Americans, recent memory has cast a pall over those of the past.

My musical doppelganger rears its ugly head

2009-02-23T10:38:00.016-08:00

Postscript:

"My name is Jonas!" -Weezer

Ever since I hiked through the Mission Valley showroom with my mom before moving to New York City to start college five years ago, I've always hated Ikea. The labyrinth of home supplies, flat pack furniture and jars of lingonberry jam (labeled "IKEA FOOD") in Red Hook was no less disorienting and exasperating. But once I reached the section of desks and workstations, I felt content. That's where I found this concoction of particleboard and beige, ersatz-wood veneer: starkly practical, big, and ideal. Writing this here feels like therapy.

***

I've been meaning to write an entry about this - for that matter, I've been meaning to write about a lot of things - but writing has become practically impossible. All I have by way of desk space at home is a cramped particle board desk burdened with impractical cubby holes, plus a metal folding chair, rusty and blue. My Macbook is crippled and sputtering - its battery is fried, the keyboard has gone mad, the CD-rom drive is broken, and a series of USB hook-ups (external hard-drive, external CD-rom drive, external mouse, external keyboard) keep it on life support. The act of sitting down to read a single article, or to write a single sentence, is torture. If I was dead and hellbound, I would probably be condemned to spend eternity writing a novel in this very room. This week, I'm going to melt the folding chair into a concentrated ball and fire it into the sun. I will tear the panels of my desk to pieces with my bare hands, drink the blood that spills from my veins in order to revitalize my spirit, and huck the chunks like silver Frisbees to the moon. I will conjure a tornado inside my room; it will sweep up all ill elements and carry them into the stars. I will consult with Harmonia to make a new room. In the mean time, I will tell you this from my work desk:

Some good friends of mine run a record label called the 8088 Record Collective, and a song of mine went onto the collective's latest two-disc compilation, The 8088 Record Collective Compilation Vol. III, which features 22 fantastic tracks by musicians and bands from across the United States, namely Arkansas, Texas, North Carolina and New York. To learn more, check out this informative infomercial.

To hear more of my music, check out the Two Eyes Meet Myspace page. To obtain a copy of The 8088 Record Collective Compilation Vol. III, e-mail me or visit 8088's Last.fm page.

Franco & Le TPOK Jazz, "Francophonic: A Retrospective Vol. 1 1953-1980" (Sterns Africa; 2008)

2009-02-10T10:06:00.007-08:00

Franco & Le TPOK Jazz wasn’t so much a band as an institution. Led by the eminent François Luambo Makiadi—le Grand Maître, the Sorcerer of the Guitar, the posthumous Commander of the Order of the Leopard of former Zaïre, or simply Franco—the band helped forge the immensely influential Afro-Cuban style once known as African rumba, now called soukous, out of clavé rhythms, the arpeggios and solos of the sebene, and of course Franco’s wicked guitar. The always impressively large band didn’t itself invent the genre, but Franco and co. certainly were its champions. For anyone curious about the history of African popular music, Francophonic is an invaluable resource, distilling Franco & Le TPOK Jazz’s humongous output (by one estimate, the band released many as 150 albums in four decades) into a two volume set. This first installation features 28 carefully selected tracks, a glossy booklet full of photos (including one of a smiling Franco in traditional garb groping a woman’s breast), and a detailed and insightful essay by compiler Ken Braun, mapping the band’s evolution from a scrappy beerhall act into an intercontinental powerhouse.

Franco is legendary for his silvery guitar licks—elongated, harmonious, and sliding. But as Braun writes, he was more than just a great guitarist. In many ways, he embodied the revolutionary transitional age from which he emerged: the years when the Belgian Congo became Zaïre; when the government’s preferred language went from French to Lingala; when the eminent political leader Patrice Lumumba suffered a grisly assassination and Mobutu Sese Seko ascended to power, introducing pro-West policies, platitudes on African “authenticity,” and torture chambers reserved for political prisoners. Over a long and highly successful career in which he ballooned into a 300-pound gourmand, Franco was a folk hero and something of a playboy, a cautious patron of Mobutu who indulged in European fashions and penned songs in French, Spanish, Lingala, and Kintandu, the tribal language of his mother. He had few qualms about setting sophisticated arrangements to endorsements of commercial products (who knew that the 1973 hit “AZDA,” with its sly guitar and six-part harmonies, was actually a one-off advertising a Volkswagen dealership?) or tributes to the Mobutu regime’s policies. But his verses, sung in the mbwakela lyric style, were also known to deliver acidic criticisms masked in allegory. “Liberté,” a romantic African bolero of jangling guitar and piercing horns, is ostensibly about an authoritarian wife, but nobody can ignore the subtext of a line like, “Since you’ve confiscated my passport I’m determined to regain my liberty.” Franco’s patronage seemed to bolster Mobutu’s own popularity, but it ultimately failed to save him from state harassment—he and his bandmates were even thrown in jail once, on the pretext of writing “obscene” songs, after the public got hold of some particularly nasty bootlegs.

The most fascinating aspect of this compilation is Braun’s essay, which examines the importance of each track with lyrical passages and a bit of historical analysis, working as a useful adjunct to the tracks themselves. Disc one shows us the early years of Franco’s career. Opener “Esengo ya mokili” is one of Franco’s first studio takes, recorded in August 1953 with the help of his street urchin friend Dewayon. Throwing down a driving samba, the two of them are already lauding themselves, singing: “Let the priests Dewayon and Franco and the others / sing a rumba.” By 1957, with the singer Vicky Longomba as a de facto frontman, the bandmates are introducing their motto in the comparatively dainty “On entre OK, on sort KO”: One enters O.K., one leaves knocked out, a point they clarify with the sultry guitar, pared down rhythm, and striking vocal harmonies of “Tcha tcha tcha de mi amor.” As the Congo gained its independence in 1960, Le OK Jazz grew to twenty but Longomba dropped out, to be replaced with songwriters-vocalists Mujos Mulamba and Kwamy Munsi, who conjures swing-like razzle-dazzle with “Bolingo ya bougie,” replete with punctuating bass, plucky guitar, and another one of those oblique multi-part vocal harmonies the band is famous for. “Ku Kisantu kikwenda ko” (“I will not go to Kisantu”) is decidedly more cryptic, a take on an old song from Franco’s mother’s village, with a subdued guitar and an opening sketch that perhaps alludes to the witchcraft of a neighboring village.

Disc two takes us through the ’70s, after the tragic death of Franco’s brother Marie-Marie, a short hiatus, and a transformation of the band: Franco added the acronym for “Tout Puissance,” triumphantly dubbing his band Franco & the Almighty O.K. band. (O.K. meant, alternately, Oscar Kashama, his OK Bar, and, as Braun puts it, “Yeah! Everything’s cool.”) At their height, Franco and his bandmates have been known to fill half of an LP with one grooving song, allowing them to develop the transitional soukous style. This they do in “Chèrie Bondowe 2,” with Franco working off a light bass line with shiny ascending guitar licks as the vocalists and musicians come in and out; just past the halfway mark, the band suddenly moves into a hot double-time finish. “Kinsiona” (Kintandu for “Grief”) and “Mambu ma miondo” (“The problem of land”) are meditative and mournful, with haunting vocal harmonies soaked in reverb, respectively reflecting the tragedies of Marie-Marie’s death and the post-colonial wars. Closing on the ten-minute, drum machine-laden oddity “Nalingaka yo yo te” (“I don’t like you”), Braun has shown us the signposts of an oeuvre full of wit, pomp, and sadness, but he notes that there still are ten more years to go before le Grand Maître stops strumming.

Franco must have known he was on to something when he crafted his first guitar out of tin at the age of seven. Now, his kind of languorous phrasings are so omnipresent that they show up in anything from Vampire Weekend to Ugandan dance music made on FL Studio. If you haven’t before heard the African rumba evolve before your ears into the proper soukous, then Francophonic is what you need.

Rating: 80%

:: myspace.com/letpokjazz

Published today on Cokemachineglow.

Marion Maerz, "Burt Bacharach Songbook" (Reprise Records/Bureau B; 1971/2009)

2009-01-29T21:44:00.003-08:00

For every pop singer who achieves celebrity status, there are dozens whose budding music careers tank before their fame fully blossoms. It’s a story so common that the list of names could go on forever, if only we hadn’t forgotten them all. In Germany forty years ago, that’s what happened to the sprightly young pop singer Marion Maerz (who, it’s worth noting, had a comeback in the ’90s and emerged again in the ’00s). Burt Bacharach Songbook was supposed to revivify her career, a sign of her refinement and maturity, but it ended up a commercial failure. Now that 38 long years have passed, the record is getting another chance. Largely forgotten except by collectors, emblematic of so many grand ambitions and ill-fated dreams, Burt Bacharach Songbook might finally win Maerz the recognition she never received back in the ’70s. But it seems more likely that these stale arrangements will fall into obscurity once more.

Putting on Burt Bacharach Songbook feels like opening a time capsule and peering into the ephemeral pleasures of another age, one that bears a striking resemblance to today. Maerz practically lived the short life of an American B-level pop star, getting a spot on a Pepsi-sponsored talent show as she studied to be a secretary, losing the contest but winning a contract with Polydor, shooting to the top of the charts with her first single, “Er Ist Weider Da,” and then steadily falling out of fashion over the next decade or so. Coming in the twilight of her fame, Burt Bacharach Songbook feels strangely anachronistic. Maerz’s bright voice, reciting Bacharach lyrics in German with subdued rolling Rs, exudes a teeny-bopper’s coy innocence. On the other hand, Ingfried Hoffmann’s stale band-orchestra ensemble arrangements—with its grooveless rhythm section, mock-triumphant horns and hyper-dramatic strings—are fit for a washed-up celebrity living out their last years in a Las Vegas amphitheater. This is supposed to be Maerz’s prime, but it sounds like she has already passed it—without having grown up in the first place.

With the recession in full swing, this re-release couldn’t have come at a worse time. Burt Bacharach Songbook faces a tough American audience—so many of them reared, no less, on the laws of fame that spelled Maerz’s demise forty years ago and that, on American shores, are now explicitly enforced on American Idol. Burt Bacharach Songbook probably won’t pass the muster of the disagreeable Simon, or win nearly as many sales as Taylor Hicks’ next record, but it still deserves a second round. If anything, it can assure all those who failed to make the cut that even the obscurest stars have their day. (For all I know, Maerz has a cult following that has been waiting on this re-release for decades.) Only time will tell how successful Burt Bacharach Songbook will be this time around, but one thing is certain: even if it languishes, it’s not disappearing any time soon if it goes up for sale online.

Rating: 50%
As it appeared on the Glow today

Dinky, "May Be Later" (Vakant; 2008)

2009-01-26T21:59:00.004-08:00

Under the moniker Dinky, Alejandra Iglesias has run much of techno’s worldwide gauntlet. She was born in Santiago and she’s cool with fellow Chilean producers Luciano and Ricardo Villalobos. She lived in New York City during the grimy, golden rave days of NASA and currently resides in Berlin, long a hotbed for minimal techno. In an oevure spanning the past nine years, she’s matched a dance background and an avant-garde sensibility reminiscent of Arthur Russell with the limber grooves of her Chilean confederates and the more mechanical thumps of the Berliners, conjuring an exquisitely elaborate swagger.

May Be Later‘s nine tracks are variegated “four to the floor” stomps, powered by beefy kicks and jumpy wet bass lines, overlaid with metallic percussion, ricocheting congas, dancing laser shots and unpredictable clicks and clacks. In “Mars Cello,” bizarre vocoder vocals coo over a racing heart beat rhythm and the disjointed plucking of what sounds like one of John Cage’s prepared pianos. “Fademein” takes off like a pixilated rocket ship with a squawking bass and Jorge Gonzáles’ sexy robot vocals. Atop the glassy scraping and harsh hi hat of “Sunday Set” lies a liquidy loop, jazzy keyboards and, finally, a funky modulated synth. It’s refined party music, intricately composed and hard-driving.

May Be Later is the kind of record that seems to transform depending on how loud you play it. Put it on low and it’s mellow morning music. Crank up the woofers and it’s a wacky romp. So if $18.98 for CD or $22.98 for vinyl feels like to high a retail price, think of it as a two in one deal.

Rating: 73%

:: myspace.com/dinkydj

Published Friday on The Glow.

Kusikia, "Turtle Wars" (Self-released; 2008)

2009-01-23T13:43:00.003-08:00

In the East African language of KiSwahili, kusikia means both to hear and to feel. Clearly, this Portland-based duo of guitar and drums understands that sound is a vibration and music a nutrient, coursing through you, injecting energy into your body. In the case of Turtle Wars, though, music sometimes feels more like the fever cycles of malaria, with unrestrained outbursts taking hold of lilting refrains.

Kusikia has the angular edge of Slint and the languid attitude of Delta blues, cultivating a live sound in which things like loop pedals are conspicuously absent. But really there is no saying exactly where this band is coming from, although one might presume that it’s a despairing realm. Then again, right before guitarist Nsayi Matingou throws down the deep and swaying theme of “D,” she lets out a happy giggle. Like “D,” tracks “Danger” and “Trouble” follow a similar improvisation-friendly structure—and they are just as foreboding: Matingou puts down a heady guitar line, singing in rich murmurs over Peter Ryan’s intricate drums as the tension builds; finally it erupts into malarial tremors of gnarled riffs and skittering crashes, only to return ever more gently to the original motif. The driving beat and cutting chords that open “Heart,” and the propulsive three-chord bass and hoe-down beat to follow, offer an invigorating change of pace. “Rumbly” forms the album’s fever pitch, beginning with a crushing blast that segues into a strained, stabbing motif. As Ryan clobbers his toms and cymbals, Matingou repeats creepily, “I just wanna be friends.” The mood lifts at the end of closer “War,” when Matingou breaks into laughter. Ryan, with his wacky shrieking, seems to indicate that the fever has passed.

Yet it’s not finished. Kusikia has been tearing across the northwest and, in due course, their bruising but brittle sound is sure to materialize in recorded form again—indeed, like most strains of a defeated malarial fever. Unlike such a scourge, however, many listeners will be more than happy to welcome Kusikia’s heavy doses of catharsis into their body.

Rating: 71%

:: myspace.com/kusikia

This review was published Wednesday on Cokemachineglow.

The Best Business Names in America

2009-01-23T13:31:00.005-08:00

Bringing a close to an update hiatus, I present to you the latest Best Business Names in America list, which I've compiled since August in my capacity as an employee of GMP. (Check out the previous lists here and here.) Feel free to e-mail me with any suggestions for the next list.

He Who Eats Mud

The Cloak and Dagger

Negod Gwad

Lucky Wang 2

The Flying Carp

Ain’t That a Frame

Xtreme Bean!

Don’t Eat The Furniture

Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary

Robot Village

Fingerhut

Crafty Olde German

The Butler's Secret

Butler University

Stoner, Inc.

High As A Kite

Hip Hop Horses & Decked Out Dogs

Gonzo Parenting

Paranoid Parents Stop Worrying Shop

The Portable Baby

Gypsy Baby

I Know You Like A Book

La De Da Books

Shrine of the Black Madonna Bookstore

Whimsicality

Sharondipity

Pow! Science!

Whoops! & Co.

Screamin' Monkeys

No More Monkey Business

Globsterpotamus

The Wacky Shack

Cardthartic, LLC

Ro Sham Beaux

Coolest Toys On Earth

Shoplift.com

Year-End 2008

2008-12-29T10:39:00.004-08:00

Check out Cokemachineglow's year-end coverage, including the top 50 albums of 2008. I wrote the blurb for Gang Gang Dance's long-awaited Saint Dymphna, which won the No. 3 spot on the list:

To read the reviews of Saint Dymphna is to be assaulted with a string of increasingly disparate references: ambient, dub, grime, reggaeton, My Bloody Valentine, Magik Marker, In The Nursery, Deutsch-Amerikanische Freundschaft, "Brazilian guitar," "various strains of Central African music," etc. Effectively, Saint Dymphna isn’t an "exercise in trendy appropriation" or a "pastiche," but it is "a worthy amalgam" and, as the Glow put it, "possibly the most complex and weird dance album of the year."

I can just hear the band members’ sighs. “We just make music, man,” said guitarist Josh Diamond in November, when I asked him if he felt Saint Dymphna was more mainstream than 2005’s landmark God’s Money, which some critics have suggested. “It’s not up to us. People can decide whatever they want, if it’s more mainstream or less.”

To be sure, nobody can deny that a dizzying mix of worldly elements weave through Saint Dymphna's exploratory 44 minutes. A syncopated reggaeton beat drives the otherworldly “First Communion”; Tynchy Stryder brings grime to the electro-rocker “Princes”; a robotic old-school techno beat collides with vaguely Arabesque guitar licks in “Blue Nile”; new wave romanticism, rave bombast and Pro Tools-style studio trickery merge in “House Jam.” But Diamond is right: different listeners can make many different connections, depending on who they are and what captures their imagination. Streaming into my ears, this record conjured the celebratory abandon of intricate Arabic dabke (or “stomping of the feet”) and the cosmopolitan boldness of Bollywood, without the daring string sections. But with each listen, the associations gradually melted away. And I realized that Saint Dymphna‘s slow builds, hypnotic transitions and sustained bursts of catharsis are inimitably distinct.

Naked City’s schizophrenic "Speedfreaks" practically defined musical pastiche. This is the polar opposite. Both are children of the composition era, in which the old ritual and consumer-based contexts have given way to a nuanced exploration of media itself. But while Naked City’s jazz-metal noisecore merely proved to be one of John Zorn’s wackier experiments, Gang Gang Dance’s raw polyglot tongue—Diamond’s incandescent and percussive MIDI-wired guitar, Lizzie Bougatsos’ wispy and echo-warped voice, Brian DeGraw’s intricate employment of crappy Yamaha drum pads and warm modular synths, former drummer Tim DeWitt’s nimble beats—seems to have revolutionary potential. Like jazz, hip-hop, and punk, working alongside the best of electroacoustic pop contemporaries Black Dice and Animal Collective, Saint Dymphna has the potential to galvanize new unities out of elements that once appeared completely unrelated. This can help create a whole new musical—if not social—framework.

Yes, I have some abstract and incredibly high dreams for society. But what I want from Gang Gang Dance is reasonable: just keep doing what you’re doing. Our associations may differ, but this is something we can agree on. “The only sort of plan is to try and move forward,” Diamond said. “To try and not rest, or like get stuck in some specific frame.”

This is my blurb on High Places' self-titled full-length, which came in as No. 50:

I love fast music full of unadulterated aggression. I love dark, feverish ambience. This especially when the destruction of the world and the set-backs in my personal life join together to ruin my day, putting a subdued grimace on my face and a groan of hopelessness into the bottom of my throat, training my eyes to the eternal forward, enabling me to block out the world as I walk as fast as I possibly can down the sidewalk. In my mind’s eye, I’m weaving through the wreckage of life.

Inevitably, I grow weary. I take a big, deep breath and put on High Places. These implacable, sugary melodies, Mary Pearson’s dreamy, reverberated vocals, Rob Barber’s interlocking percussive amulets and drum pad—all of it is so remarkably soft and yet so detailed that it can never grow tiresome. In my mind’s eye, the waste has cleared and my future child and I have followed a rainbow-colored cobblestone pathway to the county fair. It’s not any old county fair, mind you, but one in a faraway wonderland populated by pixies and frog princes. Each of them is equipped with a valuable lesson to be learned, about exploring different perspectives, about taking nothing for granted, about harnessing constructive powers to face the challenges in life.

Sometimes, I find myself listening to this record two or three times in a row. Inevitably, I’ll put on something a bit more aggro. The grimace and the groan and the frustrated tunnel vision will return. But I will always have High Places—and my child will have it, too. And if I grow tired of the record, it’s only because I’ll have listened to it too many times to count.

The Biggest Weapon in Northern Uganda

2008-12-14T08:21:00.006-08:00

Update, 12/31/08: In late November, when a government ultimatum expired, Kony failed yet again to sign a final peace agreement that would end the war. A week after this article went to print, the Ugandan, South Sudanese and DR Congo militaries kicked off a renewed military campaign against the LRA. Now, reports are circulating (here, here, here, here, and elsewhere) that LRA fighters slaughtered over 400 villagers over Christmas in northeast Congo. The LRA denies the allegations. For more, check out the Ugandan dailies The New Vision and The Daily Monitor, as well as the great Ugandan news magazine The Independent.

Lucky Bosmic Otim, a popular musician from northern Uganda, is practically impossible to reach by phone. He has one, but it’s always turned off. The only way to contact him is through his friends, whose cell phones have invariably been turned off as well. When I finally met him last June, at his wife’s house a few kilometers outside the provincial capital of Gulu, he explained that his fame has attracted undesirable fans.

“The rebels, they used to call,” he said. “They wanted me to be part of the peace talks. When they call you like that, it’s very, very, very bad.”

Bosmic was referring, of course, to the Lord’s Resistance Army, a rebel outfit that has terrorized the north’s predominantly ethnic Acholi population for over twenty years, kidnapping children, forcing girls into sexual slavery, training boys as fighters, and turning them against their own villages, neighbors, even families. But since the Ugandan government’s peace talks with the LRA ushered in a period of peace in this war-torn region two years ago, Acholis have begun to rebuild a society devastated by violence, poverty, disease, and mass displacement. And a fledgling music industry has exploded, with musicians like Bosmic rocketing to stardom.

While many hits sung in the Acholi language of Luo deal in love—like Jackson’s “Atye ii Mar” (“I’m in Love”)—a strain of popular songs by artists like Bosmic, Jahria Okwera, and Jeff Korondo are raising questions about the complicated, controversial issues that haunt Acholi life, like domestic violence and the return of battle-hardened child soldiers. “They’re all educative,” said Nicky Afaye, a producer at the leading Mega FM radio station. “They all endeavor to really speak about peace.”

For his part, Bosmic, a lean twenty-four-year-old with an intense, searching expression, is perhaps most famous for his reggae-tinged entreaty “Peace Return,” a chart-topper at Mega FM driven by a syncopated piano line and a synth flute melody. The song echoes a desperate refrain commonly heard in the north: “Peace return/To northern Uganda/It’s our prayer.”

Judging by Bosmic’s penchant for battle fatigues—as he sat on a grass clearing with his two-year-old in his lap, he was decked out in a grey camoflage jacket, green designer camo pants, small dreads with orange tips sticking out of a maroon beanie, and a wristband in Rastafarian green, yellow, and red, embroidered with a marijuana leaf—he addresses the subject with militant zeal. “They call me a freedom fighter,” Bosmic said. “But ours is not through guns. Our guns are the microphones. The mic is the biggest weapon.”

As with many others here, war and all of its attendant problems have dominated Bosmic’s life. He was born in Kitgum, a province close to the border of South Sudan, but his parents died in a civil war in the ’80s, when a southwestern Ugandan resistance movement led by Yoweri Museveni overthrew the government and established a de facto military regime with democratic flavoring—which Museveni still rules over today, still as president of Uganda.

After he was orphaned, Bosmic came under the care of the bishop at a Protestant church in Gulu, where he played a traditional stringed instrument called the adungu and sang for the church. “When I was in the church, others were already singing this ‘world music,’” he said. “But to me, they were not bringing out the message I wanted to pass to the world. Their music was full of obscenity, talking about love only. We have got so many orphans who need help in the world. We have got victims of war, wars around the world. So I thought it wise I should join, so that I also pass the message to the world.”

As he grew into his teens, Bosmic began writing lyrics loaded with Christian themes and political messages. Eventually, inspired by the late South African reggae artist Lucky Dube, he himself took on the name “Lucky” and produced a string of Afrobeat-style songs using the music programming software FruityLoops, the inexpensive, easy-to-master backing band of most northern Ugandan singers.

With cheap cassettes of his music sold in the market, and his songs playing on Mega FM, Bosmic quickly took on a devoted following, mostly in the Acholi districts of northern Uganda. He incorporated English lyrics into his songs to reach a wider audience, and became something of a regional icon when the low-budget music video for “Peace Return” showed up on YouTube a year ago, boosting international awareness of this often-overlooked war.

There is a telling contradiction between the stark messages of Bosmic’s lyrics and their backdrop of reggaeton beats, squeaky-clean instrumentation, and uplifting melodies: His music bursts with hope, but songs like “Suicide Drinking” are also dogged by anger and frustration about a broken Acholi society.

Gulu, a small town where hundreds of international aid organizations and local, small-time NGOs are headquartered, is full of bars and clubs. In the three weeks my traveling partner and I spent there, a party scene thrived. Scores of locals and expats alike spent long nights drunk on Ugandan beer and liquor, shooting pool and grooving to Bob Marley, American R&B, dancehall covers of songs like Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car,” and Acholi crowd-pleasers with relentlessly fast beats.

Music and dance are cornerstones of culture in Acholiland, the central districts of the north. Norman Okot, a music and dance trainer at Health, Education, Literacy, and Sports (HEALS), a Gulu-based nonprofit for war-scarred children, told me that the Acholis have a dozen traditional dances, each geared toward a specific activity: the Bwola, or royal dance, for the coronation or death of a king; the “war dance”; and the Laraka Nraka and Ajere, courting rituals for boys and girls. “Anything to do with life in Acholi, whether life, or death, or pleasure, is always accompanied by dancing,” Okot said.

So it is with northern Uganda’s contemporary music. The north’s nightclub scene, locals told me, often serves as a venue for dancing and drinking away the horrific memories of war and the difficulties of everyday life. “If you go to my village, there is a dance hall,” said Stellah Akello, an Acholi college student from a village near Gulu. “If you go to my mother’s village, there is a dance hall. People are tired of war. They want peace of mind.”

Yet the happy excesses of the clubs sometimes mirror the more poisonous excesses of the men who wallow in the hundreds of Internally Displaced Person camps scattered across the region. An estimated two million people have been displaced during the war. Many of them were forced to move into these unsanitary camps of crude mud-brick huts, starkly different from the lush forests of trees, elephant grass, and corn and cassava crops that surround them. Traumatized and unable to work their fields because of the LRA rebels stalking the bush, many men in the camps turned to alcohol. Today, aid workers and camp residents say, lots of men still laze away their days drinking locally brewed beer, while their wives take care of the family.

Alcohol, aid workers and residents say, fuels the gender-based prejudice, domestic violence, and rape endemic in Acholiland. Sometimes, aid workers and residents say, men will even steal the food aid their wives pick up from the World Food Program in order to buy more alcohol.

In “Suicide Drinking,” Bosmic blasts the widespread use of alcohol as an escape. “They are trying to drink off their lives,” he said.

It may be peaceful in northern Uganda these days, but the war isn’t over yet. The LRA has continued attacking villages and abducting children in villages near rebel hideouts in Central Africa, destabilizing the region and stoking fear. In Uganda, thousands of IDP camp residents have no means to go home. By all accounts, Ugandans will only believe the war is finished once Kony has signed a final peace agreement. But he failed to show up for the signing last April, and rebuffed negotiators again in late November. The Ugandan military has considered taking on the LRA in a renewed military campaign, but Acholis will only be able to fully restore their society after the war ends, international aid workers and Ugandans say. And reconstruction is, itself, an extremely daunting undertaking. “Where do we begin? Educationally, we are nowhere. Economically, we are nowhere. Politically, we are nowhere,” Bosmic said. “We are crippled. We don’t have legs.”

To Bosmic, the Acholis’ only remaining wealth is the thick greenery and fertile soil of the land, which they have depended on for survival for hundreds of years. Last June, he pulled out a notebook with lyrics scribbled on the lined pages, and showed me a new song he was about to record.

The song is called “Kakana,” Luo for “My Tribe,” and it sends a sobering warning: “Don’t sell off your land.”

This article ran in the December/January issue of The Brooklyn Rail.

Ricardo Villalobos, "Vasco" (Perlon)

2008-12-08T16:28:00.007-08:00

Rooted in a purist anti-'ardkore mindset that spawned a variety of at-home listening styles in the early ’90s, “minimal” usually brings to mind the mutated techno of Berlin’s Basic Channel and the vaguely paramilitary ethos of Detroit’s Underground Resistance. Minimal house that later emerged from labels Mille Plateaux, Perlon, and countless others, trading cold robotics for wet timbres, dancier beats, and more heavily affected vocal layers, gave the spacey vibe and hypnotic repetition a streak of seduction and soul. But while the Chilean-born, Germany-based producer Ricardo Villalobos has long been a minimal techno-house posterboy, his Vasco is a dynamic and refreshing work all its own, transcending minimal bounds in bold colors.

Vasco might have been the landmark album few expected had it been released before the Vasco 1 and Vasco 2 EPs, which came out months ago. As one commentator at Resident Advisor points out, Vasco‘s potential impact might be diminished by the fact that only the underwhelming “Skinfummel” is hitherto completely new. But the DJ-dance industry doesn’t tend to humor the dreams of the auteur and Villalobos is more likely to be satiating the sweaty with beautiful ephemera at Fabric, London’s famed nightclub, alongside old-school techno DJ Richie Hawtin (a definite Detroit betrayer, bless his soul). In moments like these, there’s no saying what Villalobos will do. In the end, all is forgiven for the fifteen more minutes we get to hear of “Minimoonstar (Full Session),” that which forms Vasco's calm heart.

“Minimoonstar (Full Session)” comes across as a brilliant jam, but it seems more apt to think of it as an exercise in ornamental focus. Overlaid with flourishes of resonant bass strings, guided by synth marimbas that twist around a jaunty motif, the fresh drums’ deceptively easy beat undergoes subtle shifts—a roomy snare fill here; a shimmer of the high hat there; a clicking kick accent. A treat to the end, the beat does not change so much as evolve. “Electronic Water” keeps the pacing, while the atmosphere is more viscous. Beginning with a jerky bass hum and a subdued, compact beat, ricocheting steel drums gradually gain velocity. After an abrupt resonating clang, upper-register tones flicker as a wet bass squiggles around and occasionally reveals itself as (what sounds like) an affected steel drum. “Electronic Water” is not a track to dance to—it’s one to drool over while in the depths of a La-Z-Boy and listening on hi-fi speakers—but “Amazordum” is, featuring a disco-tinged four to the floor stomp that seems almost crude compared to the gentle, melodious loops that interlock with it and the glassy, punctuating lead. “Skinfummel,” driven by a vocal sample of a French woman that gets chopped up into splatters and doused with echo, closes Vasco on a mild, weird note.

Vasco can feel like a limber and glossy foil to Jeff Mills’ frenetic Waveform Transmission Vols. 1 and 3, but it can also seem more akin to So Percussion’s mind-melding adaptation of Steve Reich’s Drumming. In the mellowest of ways, it’s one of the boldest minimal albums of the year—and surely one to carry us into the next.

Rating: 81%

:: myspace.com/ricardovillaloboscocoon

This review was published today on Cokemachineglow.com

Fennesz, "Black Sea" (Touch)

2008-12-01T18:29:00.006-08:00

Christian Fennesz’s compositions marry the romantic sentimentality of the Beach Boys with the musical transcendentalism of Karlheinz Stockhausen. And while Fennesz’s electroacoustic phantasmagoria has taken many forms—heavily distorted grumbling overlaid with angelic synths, planes of oscillating fuzz, even a couple bizarrely straightforward singer-songwriter tracks—water served as a consistent theme in his 2001 masterpiece Endless Summer and equally as masterful 2004 follow-up, Venice. For its part, Fennesz’s follow-up to those records most resembles the element of water. Vaguely melodious, embedded with overtones, sometimes placid and sometimes stormy, Black Sea is like a wave in that its diverse parts meld together to form a powerful, all-encompassing entity.

Fennesz’s compositional process makes songwriting and sound engineering a singular act. With his electric guitars, a laptop, and a variety of waveforms and effects, Fennesz creates ribbons of guitar plucking, chunks of white noise, and fragments of synth sounds, then mutates them and finally patches it all together into something implausibly fluid. Listening to Black Sea, you will probably feel like you’re drifting. In the opener, gasps of a heavenly chorus dissipate under a wave of squiggling electronics. In “Glide,” gentle hums embedded in distorted clouds gradually form a wandering chord progression and stabs of subsonic bass. (Unfortunately, the vinyl edition does not include “Vacuum” or “The Colour of Three.”) The white noise-tinged electronics, plinking guitar, and groaning bass in closer “Saffron Revolution” gestate like a thick fog that floats along and eventually fades away. Even the silence between the tracks seems integral to the album, serving as a bit of respite before the next miasma.

For its occasional forays into tiresome mid-level fuzz, some listeners might dismiss Black Sea as sonic wallpaper. Not only would that overlook all of the record’s incredible details—like the buzzing electronic yawns in “The Colour of Three” and the cathartic blasts of mutated splashes in “Perfume For Winter”—it would miss the point entirely. Black Sea‘s impressionistic strands do not play specific roles so much as melt into their corresponding elements, much like the phased motifs of minimalist composer Steve Reich, to subsume all of music’s parts into a unique sonic form. The subtle and savory contour of the texture, working as melody, harmony and rhythm, is an end in itself.

The uninitiated listener might compare Black Sea to being lost in deep sea, where there are no pathways, no buoys, and plenty of hungry creatures below. On the other hand, Fennesz fans might compare Black Sea to the arrival of a long-awaited vacation—one that might just take them to the unique resort city of Odessa, Ukraine, where they can splash around in the Black Sea’s beaches. Either way, Fennesz’s latest album needs a patient and curious listener who is willing to rethink the very things they listen for in music.

Rating: 79%

Cokemachineglow combined rating: 75%

:: myspace.com/fennesz

This review was published today on Cokemachineglow.

Old Favorites - Miriam Makeba, "Makeba Sings"

2008-11-28T15:04:00.005-08:00

Miriam Makeba, the multilingual singer affectionately known to the world as “Mama Africa,” had a turbulent life, in large part because of the odious presumptions and endless roadblocks of apartheid. The Afrikaner government of her home country, South Africa, tried to negate her with thirty years of exile—barring her even from attending her own mother’s funeral. But instead of silencing Makeba, her exile laid bare the cold cruelty of South Africa’s dysfunctional system, as well as racism across the globe, amplifying her rich, soaring voice on the world stage.

By the time South African apartheid fell in 1994 the world was a more open place, but Makeba’s work was not finished. She devoted the rest of her life to a litany of good causes, and spent her final moments two weeks ago singing at a concert in Italy, in support of Italian journalist Roberto Saviano, who has faced dire threats for his bestselling book about the Naples mafia. At 76, still radiating energy but possessed of a thinning voice, Makeba sang her mouth-popping international megahit “Pata Pata,” then walked off stage, collapsed, and passed away.

History will remember Makeba mostly for her activist triumphs, no doubt. When it came to her music many of her obituaries dwelled on her two most famous songs, “Pata Pata” and “The Click Song,” and mentioned little else. But just as she was an important activist, in many places Makeba was as ubiquitous a pop presence as Louis Armstrong. Accordingly, she has left a huge body of recordings—including 28 studio and live albums, eight greatest hits compilations, and scores of videotaped live performances—that can be mined for lesser-known gems. In memoriam, music blog Global Groove has posted a download of Makeba’s out of print 1965 RCA Victor LP Makeba Sings. Released the same year as the Grammy-winning An Evening With Belafonte/Makeba, Makeba Sings finds the bold singer in a relatively straightforward context, delivering heartwarming tunes with fluttering tropical arrangements, the kind typically reserved for Disney scores. What peels this LP away from the bland conventions of retro calypso and exotica is Makeba’s searing voice, which spans at least three languages in 35 minutes and imbues captivating tracks like “Cameroon” and “Kilimanjaro” with an almost startling intensity.

If anything, Makeba Sings shows that Miriam Makeba was too smart, too passionate, and too dynamic a presence to be crammed into the staid format of the exotic ditty. Even if, like me, you were too young to witness her triumphant testimony against apartheid at the UN and never managed to attend one of her many farewell concerts, it can make for a nicely nostalgic listen. Put it on when you grow weary of wading through the blizzard of live concert footage, LP rips, and photo-montage tributes posted on YouTube.

This review was published Wednesday on Cokemachineglow.com.

Interview: Chris Doeblin of the Independent Booksellers of New York City

2008-11-20T09:42:00.006-08:00

Last month, as I was working on a book store guide recently published in the New York section of the Onion AV Club - posted here - I sent some questions to the owner of the academic shop Book Culture, Chris Doeblin, about the Independent Booksellers Of New York City, a trade alliance he recently helped found. Over e-mail, Doeblin writes about IBNYC's origins, their push for an "I Love My Indie Bookstore Week," and more. (Edited for length and clarity.)

But first, some breaking news: IBNYC affiliates will celebrate "America Unchained" this Saturday.

From the Friends of the IBNYC Facebook page: On Saturday, November 22, communities around the country are urged to “unchain” for just that one day—to maximize the impact of your dollars and inject potentially millions more into the local economy through joining other residents to do their shopping, dining out and other business only with locally-owned independent businesses. IBNYC bookstores throughout the city welcome you to their stores that day - and some will be sponsoring special events, which are listed here: http://ibnyc.wordpress.com/2008/11/21/support-independent-businesses-america-unchained-day/

Peter Holslin (PH): Tell me about the history of IBNYC – who started it, when, and why?

Chris Doeblin (CD): I initiated a couple of conversations with Beth Puffer, General Manager at Bank Street, Henry Zook, owner of Book Court and Sarah McNally, the owner of McNally- Jackson booksellers. Each of those conversations was enthusiastic and supportive, so with Sarah and Jessica Stockton from her store, my Exec. Manager Annie Shapiro and marketing manager Kelly Amabile, we invited the rest of the stores in NY, got a space a Random House and had our first meeting in May. Over 20 stores were represented.

My initial reason, still holding by the way, is to create an organization that can, over the long term, gradually raise public awareness of the benefits our stores offer to NYC and to create a shift in interest and dollars spent to independent business. It's the cultural greening of literary/retail NY. The group will do this gradually through public presentations and events, articles in local media etc., and by publishing a guide to our businesses, a map [and] a web site.

We get to work together, which is a wonderful thing. The level of professionalism, acumen and experience that we find in the meetings we've had is a joy.

PH: What's been going on with IBNYC lately? Are there any events coming up? Is the list/map expanding?

CD: We just had our third meeting and several new stores came- The Strand and Powerhouse Books. Several weeks ago we came out at the Brooklyn Book Festival. We just completed our proto map and guide, complete with our logo. Among our long term goals are the creation of an "I Love My Indie Bookstore Week" that would be filled with events, guest booksellers, free books author visits and of course publicity. Over time, I think this is something we can really build on and get our message out. It's better to shop at the Independent Local Bookstore. We also are aiming to perfect our guide to stores in the map form and on line.

PH: How have people responded to the alliance?

CD: Very strongly! We've set up no hurdles in terms of attendance or dues and we continue to have people come to us to attend meetings or join. We've got a long way to go, but as long as we have a sufficient and sufficiently diverse number of volunteers for the board and our committees, we should carry on for many years.

Many from outside the booksellers group, people on the publishing side for example, are very supportive. I have also received a great deal of support from other booksellers in other parts of the country that participate in independent business alliances. Steve Bercu from the Austin bookseller BookPeople, for example, wrote to me. AMIBA has been very supportive and we've decided to ally with them to make our incorporation easier and to share in their wealth of experience. I am really impressed so far.

PH: Can you tell if the alliance is yet bolstering independently-owned bookselling businesses in the city?

CD: So far, yes. I think, for example, the people we reached at the Brooklyn Book Festival have re-elevated their consumerism towards independently-owned book shops. I think once we have a successful "I Love My Indie Bookstore Week" and get masses of people thinking about the benefits of having our shops in our communities, we'll start to say we are on a roll.

PH: How have independent booksellers in the city been affected by Amazon.com and chains like Barnes & Noble? Are these seen as scourges, the death knells of independently-owned bookselling?

CD: The effects of the B&N and other chain stores expanding is over, long over. There will be more and more closings of their stores following the several that have already closed. And given this recession on the horizon, Borders could be closing all its locations by the spring of 2009. This of course won't be all good news for the indies, as publishing corporations react to those losses. But the independents alive today in New York are strong, professional, savvy at marketing and much more likely to survive the upheaval ahead.

Amazon is a monster and yet many of of us benefit from selling through Amazon. Of course, that continues to affect us. Of course, the tide of consumer sentiment that supports the inherent good one does in shopping at local indies is only beginning to come on and for a city like NY, with so much available within walking distance, I estimate that we're also at the end of the purely negative effect that Amazon has had. It has been nearly 12-13 years. But yes, many many books are shipped into NY to our clients and neighbors. But, you see, we're past the thrill of ordering on line we are already at a point where going into an IBNYC bookshop is a wonderful and valuable experience. What a joy it is to spend time and visit in one our shops - that sentiment has only grown more acute as choices have diminished. We benefit from that.

PH: Do you have an idea of how independent booksellers have been affected by the recent economic crisis?

CD: It's too early to tell, but book stores have historically done very well in recessions. I remember the 80's and early 90's and it's a good niche to be in.

PH: How do you envision the future of independent bookselling in New York City—and how will this future affect the city's literary culture and diverse civil society?

CD: I continue to see intelligent, successful young people choosing bookselling as a career and turning from other work to this work. This is the most optimistic indicator to me. I also sense a growing worry amongst publishers that they are losing control, fiscally and over their authors and marketplace. The answers for many of the publishers lies in the indies. They need a diverse marketplace for retail.

I see a literary and civil marketplace that embraces and nurtures more carefully some of the aspects that do rebound the benefit or our communities and the kinds of lives we can lead in our city. Indie bookstores and all bookstores to a great extent are certainly part of that. We are part of the cultural code that people want to live with and share. Over time, authors, publishers and readers will gradually and continually grow even more supportive of indies in particular. A very small upturn in our businesses would have a huge affect on our perpetuity, our job creation, etc.

A little change will have a huge impact. So I think for those of us that don't have our pants on fire already, the future is bright.

The Binary Marketing Show, "Yield What You May" EP

2008-11-19T10:19:00.006-08:00

The two unassuming southerners who make up The Binary Marketing Show are friends of mine, but I’m not the kind of person who would write a glowing review of something that actually sounds awful. I am more of a humanitarian type, one who would risk looking foolish to try to save somebody or something he loves from self-destruction—and if there is one band in this world that always seems on the verge of exploding into a mess of brilliant strands that never regroup, The Binary Marketing Show is that band. Its very essence centers around workicide: the band describes its 2007 full-length Destruction Of Your Own Creation as “synth folk textures in a context of hopeless and nihilistic fanaticism,” and most of the dozen or so performances I’ve seen (usually after I’ll get a text message alert about the show at the last possible minute) consist of cathartic, frustrated improvisations on the skeletons of their intricate electro-rock recordings.

Yield What You May is by turns disjointed and pulverizing, but the EP also has its moments of sweet bliss. Instrumental “Trust And Candor” opens with a twisting mash of musique-concrète, and gradually gives way to Jason Meeks’ galloping drums and a syncopated 8th note build-up that seems stolen from a circus carousel’s organ. Then, cymbals and toms burst in and meld with layers of reverberated trumpet in a dramatic climax that evokes heavy rain. In “In Tongues And Ideas,” the jarring shake of an electronic hi hat guides beatific, shining layers of guitar as Abram Morphew sings in a homey southern twang, “And everyone bumps into one another / But we are hardly aware of each other / And this separates you and me / Might as well be infinity.” The blissful chorus plays host to driving strains of cascading guitar and a ghostly keyboard line, as the two cry in unison, “Whoa oh oh, oh oh oh, oh oh.” The closer, “Six To Eight Hertz,” with an off-beat accordion-like rhythm line and a testy back and forth between Morphew’s vocals and crashing drum fills, suggests—as Binary Marketing Show so often does—that the EP’s dying moments will brim over with power and glory. Instead, the two suddenly and unpredictably descend into a sublime half-beat chord progression and drums playing in reverse, making a calm lull that sucks up into silence. Perhaps the two are suggesting that all of this should just be remembered as a tempestuous hallucination, or not remembered at all.

On a Brooklyn rooftop one night this summer, I realized that this duo commands a restless sound that needs to be nurtured, not killed. In the first few minutes of their set, the party’s lanky birthday boy shot into the air like a rocket, sparking the modest crowd into a frenzy of dancing. The next twenty-five minutes felt like we were all one exhilarated organism. Take that, workicide.

Rating: 70%

:: Stream the entire EP
:: myspace.com/thebinarymarketingshow

This was published yesterday on Cokemachineglow.

"Rubber Chicken" by Caspa

2008-11-13T09:15:00.006-08:00

Whoa. This tune merits some explanation. The dubstep producer’s success is definitely not measured by the girth of his or her wobbler bass. But the fact that the dizzying subsonic effect has wiggled its way into Britney Spears’ 2007 hit “Freakshow” demonstrates that it hasn’t only become the shake by which you identify dubstep, but a colour friendly to even the most trite fodder of the masses. Senior dubstep producers like Skream and Benga, who nurtured the style with reggae, dubplates, and the delightfully pseudo-analog FruityLoops TS404 patch (and who now share an affinity for wobbling with certain Estonians) must be well aware that there is something about that deep gestation that draws you in. In quarter- and eighth-note tremors synched up with sultry half-step beats, the wobbler disturbs and coaxes, eases and throttles.

Caspa's “Rubber Chicken,” which appeared on vinyl in 2007’s Tempa Allstars Vol. 3 and got mixed by Youngsta into the Rinse label's new I Love Dubstep CD compilation, is so overwhelming that, frankly, it took me a great effort to finally listen to this all the way through, only to listen a dozen more times. And that happened in my room, where it flowed out of a paltry pair of computer speakers—imagine being in a giant, foggy black club amongst a crowd of sweating people and having this thick tone pulse through your body with megawatt speakers…

At my next engagement with Dub War here in New York City, I’ll say bring it on.

This track review was published today on Cokemachineglow.

"IRAQ WAR ENDS"

2008-11-11T19:50:00.007-08:00

So reports Page One of the curious "New York, Saturday, July 4, 2009" edition of "The New York Times" I obtained tonight.

The lead article, by Jude Shinbin, reports: "WASHINGTON - Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom were brought to an unceremonious close today with a quiet announcement by the Department of Defense that troops would be home within weeks."

It continues: President George W. Bush, "noted that the Iraq War had resulted in the burning of many bridges. 'Yet our history with allies runs deep,' he said, 'and we all know that friends forgive friends for anything. Or nearly.' A spokesperson for the French Ministry of Defense confirmed that France would assist the U.S. withdrawal. 'The U.S. helped the Soviet Union defeat Hitler. We do recognize that.'"

Also in this issue, columnist "Thomas J. Friedman" announces his resignation: "I have no business holding a pen, at least with intent to write. ... to have been so completely wrong about so huge a disaster as what we have done to Iraq - and ourselves - is outrageous enough to prove that people like me have no business posing as wise men, and, more importantly, that The New York Times has no business continuing to provide me with a national platform."

Keep your eyes out for a copy of the "Times" that might be floating around the streets near you...

Update, 11/12, 1:07 pm:

The real Times notes that the infamous Yes Men have taken credit for the fake newspapers. In a statement issued today, they wrote: "In an elaborate operation six months in the planning, 1.2 million papers were printed at six different presses and driven to prearranged pickup locations, where thousands of volunteers stood ready to pass them out on the street."

Independent Bookstores of New York City Unite!

2008-11-11T09:39:00.014-08:00

As it appeared in the New York City section of The AV Club in the 10/23-10/29 issue of The Onion. [It's not available online and I'm having problems with posting a pdf.]

Shop Write
A few small bookstores worth haunting

Small bookstores in our famed literary city are precious wellsprings of inspiration for aspiring novelists, forums for chain-smoking anarchists, prime loitering spaces for jobless weirdoes, and more. But ever-rising rents and the encroachment of corporate chains and online booksellers have killed off many treasured shops, and the economic meltdown suggests a bruising season to come. To save indie shops from extinction, a new alliance called Independent Booksellers Of New York City has put up a website (ibnyc.org) with a list of over 70 affiliated stores, a map of their locations, and a pretty pink bird. Among some of the uncommon favorites:

Bluestockings
(172 Allen St—Lower East Side)
Organized as a feminist worker’s collective, Bluestockings is run by hip 20-something volunteers (women outnumber men 4 to 1) and a staff of co-owners who describe themselves as “reluctant capitalists.” The focus has always been on feminist texts by authors like Jennifer Baumgardner and bell hooks, but there are also essential titles on politics, economics and activism from the likes of Naomi Klein and Michael Albert. All day, young anarchists and old Democratic Socialists alike pore over the ’zines, drink the coffee, and prepare for the leftist revival. Evenings play host to activist-led discussions, such as recent lessons for how to divine compost from garbage.
Emblematic impulse buy: DivaCup menstruation kit
Model patron: Thurston Moore

Oscar Wilde Bookshop
(15 Christopher St—East Village)
This historic shop has served the gay community in Greenwich Village since 1967 and favors everything from Ellen Hart’s series of “Jane Lawless” mystery books to Randy Shilts’ definitive tome on homosexuality in the U.S. military. The friendly staffers are knowledgeable within their specialized focus, and they’re eager to share what they like about undiscovered gems. All of which makes for a warm and welcoming environment, especially for those who fear being outed in a bustling aisle of Barnes & Noble.
Emblematic impulse buy: Firefighter/merman Christmas tree ornament
Model patron: Vaunted memoirist Alison Smith

Brownstone Books
(409 Lewis Ave—Bed-Stuy)
Urban planner Crystal Bobb-Semple opened this family-oriented shop with her husband eight years ago to build up community along a sleepy avenue in her family’s picturesque neighborhood of Bed-Stuy. (There’s also a branch at the Brooklyn Academy Of Music in Fort Greene.) The focus tends toward what the owner herself deems “important books” (The August Wilson Century Cycle, Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao), and the tiny space makes for quite a neighborly place, with events that have featured a children’s book illustrator and the inspirationalist behind The Hustler’s 10 Commandments.
Emblematic impulse buy: Moleskine notebook
Model patron: Queen, a former Black Panther

Melville House
(145 Plymouth St—DUMBO)
Situated in a neighborhood peppered with the offices of literary journals (The Brooklyn Paper, The London Review) and lots of other bookshops, this showcase for the publisher Melville House carries its own titles plus essentials from fellow indie houses like Verso and Soft Skull. Laid-back events marry cheap beer with timely presentations: It might have even been reassuring to visit during the second presidential debate, when Harper’s publisher John R. MacArthur discussed his new book You Can’t Be President: The Outrageous Barriers To Democracy in America.
Emblematic impulse buy: Bobble-head doll of Yiddish author Sholem Aleichem
Model patron: A multimedia artist pushing a stroller

Freebird Books & Goods
(123 Columbia St—Red Hook)
Freebird is an ideal place to laze away a Sunday, and not just for the special section labeled “Great Jackets, Bad Titles, And Just Plain Weird” (see: Loxfinger: A Thrilling Adventure Of Hebrew Secret Agent Oy-Oy-7). The soft-spoken owner might just brew you some coffee and offer fascinating insight into the yard of Red Hook shipping containers across the street. The monthly events are impish (recently, visitors celebrated Thomas Pynchon’s birthday by faxing the author congratulations), and the “post-apocalyptic book club” might yet prove prescient.
Emblematic impulse buy: Moxie soda
Model patron: “Sweaty Eddie,” junk salesman —Peter Holslin

Interview: Josh Diamond of Gang Gang Dance

2008-11-08T09:07:00.001-08:00

Gang Gang Dance is renowned for explosive, brain-melting sonic adventures inspired as much by African indigenous music as London grime. But this Manhattan-based foursome is no one-trick pony: last spring they pulled off an elaborate audio-visual presentation at the Whitney Biennial in New York, in August they conducted an orchestra of 88 drummers on the Brooklyn waterfront in an epic cross-country collaboration with the legendary Japanese band Boredoms, and most recently they released Saint Dymphna, a transcendent record that the Glow’s own Mark Abraham calls “possibly the most complex and weird dance album of the year.“ The day after Barack Obama was voted in as the first African American president in US history, guitarist Josh Diamond spoke with CMG on the phone about channeling the right energies, using a guitar hooked up to MIDI, upcoming plans to record a new album, what happened to former drummer Tim Dewitt, the purity of Japanese food, and more.

CMG’s Peter Holslin (CMG): How do you feel about the outcome of the election?

Gang Gang Dance’s Josh Diamond (GGD): I’m psyched man, I’m really psyched. I’m a little bewildered, as well, because it seems like this unbelievable potential for our country to finally be more progressive. You travel around the world, and most places get it by now, and it’s so frustrating. I mean, New York gets it. There’s a lot of places that get it.

[Barack Obama]’s a real caring human being, you can really tell. And it’s just beautiful. I think it’s beautiful to go from slavery to today. I just feel there is a chance, you know, for some progress. And I haven’t felt that way in a long time and, if anything, was really cynical for the last eight years. You just feel the weight of everything. I know that there’s pit falls as well. I know also that the world is pretty fucked right now, and we’re pretty fucked in a lot of ways. But I think that there’s a chance for Robin Hood. For true Socialism.

CMG: So, I just want to get this straight: Is Gang Gang Dance named after the Gang-Gang Cockatoo?

GGD: No, we found out about the Gang-Gang Cockatoo later. It’s named after this record that Brian [DeGraw, the band’s keyboardist/percussionist] got. I never remember the name of the band, but it’s like, he went to a record store and bought all these different, really diverse records and brought them to the counter and the guy was like, “Oh, you like all this stuff? Try this record out.” It was some band and the title of it was Gang Gang Dance. He took it home and it was the worst record he’s ever heard in his life.

CMG: So when you found out about the cockatoo, what was your reaction?

GGD: Is that the bird that won’t stop singing?

CMG: Um, I don’t know.

GGD: Yeah, I’m pretty sure it is. It’s nice to have strange connections. There was another one, it was a video of Ashanti’s. She was describing this dance move that she did and she said it’s not quite hip hop, it’s not R&B, it’s not funk, it’s kind of experimental or whatever. She said it’s called ‘gang gang.’ So that’s a little connection too. Pretty cool.

CMG: So you’re heading to Milwaukee right now, a few days into your tour. Is there any place that you’re looking forward to, or not looking forward to?

GGD: Right now, particularly just with this new kind of potential environment we have here in the United States, I’m looking forward to seeing all the places, you know?

CMG: Do you prefer to play in any specific kind of environment?

GGD: Oh, for sure, for sure. We started off this trip opening for Of Montreal and we were playing these big theaters and a couple of them were kind of nightmarish for me personally. There’s seats, and everybody’s sitting down in assigned seats. The vibe is just gone. I like playing places where you feel the audience there with you. I like the smaller clubs, where we shine.

CMG: Gang Gang Dance has a very distinct sound, but there are also elements of reggaeton, grime, and other styles of music. Are you planning this out, or are you just inspired in such a way that elements of different music end up in your songs?

GGD: It’s the latter for sure. We improvise. It’s a really natural thing. This is my therapy session.

CMG: How do you feel about Saint Dymphna? Do you think it’s a more mainstream record as most reviewers, and as your press materials, have said?

GGD: As far as the mainstream thing, I think it’s still pretty weird. The production quality is a lot clearer than our last record, which people pick up on. I don’t know, we just make music, man, that’s what happens. It’s not up to us, people can decide whatever they want, if it’s more mainstream or less. We didn’t plan it to be any particular way.

CMG: From what I’ve read, it sounded like the process of making Saint Dymphna was pretty fractured and frustrating. How did the record come together?

GGD: It didn’t come together for a long time, it was a fractured process. And I think maybe there was a bit too much in our minds at the time when we started making it. There was a lot of pressure inside the band to make this more ambitious thing, whatever that was. I think that force, the pressure to do that, was messing everything up. We have a really natural way of making music. Things work out the best for us when we actually just accept ourselves.

But that was only one thread of the fractured process. We’d start recording and then we’d have to go on tour. We would go to a studio and make some headway, and then, like, not finish what we were working on and have to take, like, two months off, and gather money, or go back on tour, and come back to try and start where we left off. By that time, we couldn’t even go where we left off, you know?

CMG: It’s like you have this energy going, and then once you cut it off, you’ve lost it…

GGD: It’s lost, to a large degree. We also had a really hard time, like, putting the right energy into making the record. But finally, in the last month and a half, that’s really when the record was made. We had one last push, we recorded almost all of the record. We used a couple of old recordings but almost all of it was recorded then. And we mixed with our sound engineer, Sean. It was a much more natural process and I think we finally just were like, ‘OK, we’re gonna get this done.’ It was just so relieving to have something. I’m proud of it, I just can’t deny that there was turmoil in making that record, you know? But we’re going to record a new one, to make up for that.

CMG: It’s in the works right now?

GGD: We’re gonna record in January. We’re going to the desert, to Joshua Tree, for a month. And we’re going to make demos on our own, and then our sound engineer, Sean, is going to fly out. We’re just going to record it all in the family, you know? I think it’s gonna be awesome.

CMG: When you look back, how do you feel about the band’s development? Have you ever had an idea of what you wanted to do, where you wanted to go with your music, some sort of plan or goal or something?

GGD: It’s intense to look back on it because it’s almost been a decade of my life, with the band and my friends making music. But looking back is always way different than looking forward and I don’t think that we had a plan. Certainly not in the beginning. Really, I think that we just really believe in our music and we try and be as pure as possible and as close to that kind of ideal, the ideal that we believe in our music. To continue making music, all the time. The only sort of plan is to try and move forward, to try and not rest, or like get stuck in some specific frame.

CMG: How did you, personally, start making music?

GGD: I played the violin from the age of four to the age of, like, fifteen. Music has just been something I’ve always done.

CMG: As for your guitar—is it run through a MIDI processor?

GGD: I don’t know, I could get techy on you…it is a MIDI processor, but it’s a pick up that is able to split the signal into like six different signals, then it’s a box that recognizes the pitch and converts it to MIDI.

I’ve been doing it for a long time, and I’ve had different guitars that have different pickups and I finally got a nice piezo pickup. If anybody wants to do it, those are the best ones for the job. The real weird thing about it is that it’s basically failed technology. This stuff has been around for years and nobody really wants to use it. It doesn’t sell very well, it has no money behind it. It works pretty well, actually.

CMG: Why do you use synth sounds on a guitar, instead of using a normal guitar or a keyboard?

GGD: Well, as far as the normal guitar thing, I like to think of our music as very colorful. I feel like there’s a lot of different textures and colors it makes. That’s what makes our music special. I felt, with a guitar, it felt too limited. No matter how much you change the sound, it always sounds like a guitar. And as for not playing on a keyboard, you just play differently on the guitar, there’s different ideas. To me it just works. I’ve been doing it for many years, and it just makes sense to me. It might not make any sense to anybody else, but…

CMG: Has your increased popularity over the past few years brought the band more funds, for new equipment or better production quality? How has that affected the band, if at all?

GGD: There’s up and downs for us, all the time. There are some times that we’ve had in the last few years where we did get some money, to be able to get equipment and to be able to…like, we payed for our last studio time by ourselves. I think that we’re more fortunate than a lot of bands out there. This summer was really hard financially, and all of last year before we didn’t have this new record out. They didn’t wanna book us anymore. They were like, “Come back when you have a record out.” And we were out of fashion and out of favor. And we’re in fashion, I guess for the moment, and we’ll probably fall out of fashion, but still make music. I just think there’s an even flow.

We don’t make very much money. We’re below the poverty line, as far as this country is concerned. I would like things to change a little bit as I’m getting older. We’re all getting older. And it’s not age, specifically, but it’s the demands on your life, you know? When you’re doing this, it’s very intense. I’d like to have some sort of…not reward, but it’d be nice to feel more secure.

CMG: Do you have a day job?

GGD: I bartend in New York, at a bar in Brooklyn.

CMG: What happened to your drummer, Tim Dewitt? I read that he got shot, which is very saddening to hear. Also, he’s not credited as a band member on Saint Dymphna.

GGD: He’s in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and he’s OK, totally fine. I don’t know, he wanted a break from the band. He wanted to, I think, make his own music for a while. I don’t think he was happy living in New York City. He had a hard time there. He would’ve been happy just being on the road all the time. Going home for him is like ripping his heart out or something like that. He’s still one of my best friends. He makes amazing music right now, and producing, learning how to produce records. We don’t know what’s going to happen with the future. I mean, we saw him in Chicago and he almost jumped in the van with us.

CMG: Gang Gang Dance is often glommed together with Animal Collective and Black Dice. Since 2000, a lot of similarly weird acoustic-electronic hybrid bands with quasi-tribal, experimental and worldly elements have emerged. Do you think this is a movement, a phenomenon? Or is this just part of a cross-cultural musical conversation that’s been going on for decades?

GGD: [Chuckles] Intense. I don’t know, that’s a long question. Well, you named some of our contemporaries. We used to share a practice space with those two bands. That was years ago and it was like this little strange vortex. It was all three of us in the same room, in the practice space. The one thing that really stands out to me about that is we were all very different. There were a lot of similarities at the same time, but the sounds of the bands were very distinctly different. And that was beautiful.

I think we were just trying to make our own music, and that’s how we made it. And we still try to do that, you know? And now there’s all this press, and attention, and this idea that there’s like this thing going on, which isn’t anything. It goes on in different places as well, in Indian music you hear music from ’60s rock and roll and stuff like that. Whatever. One of the most beautiful things you can do is just make your own music, do your own thing.

CMG: How do you feel about the term “world music”?

GGD: I think it’s a capitalist term. It comes from, to some degree, trying to categorize something so you can sell it. I think that that’s a large part of it. Categories can be helpful, in some ways. I can go to a store and I can look in the world music section, and I can go to the section on Africa.

The term “world music” is very trivial. I mean, ideally, I’d like there to not be any borders in the world the phone cuts out for a couple seconds, cutting him off mid-sentence. That’d be Utopia, for sure. Even now, we have Obama and it’s interesting, because I think that patriotism is OK to a certain degree as long as it doesn’t turn into some sort of crazy nationalist thing. But, it’s interesting. Now, we’re Americans again. I felt like we’re Americans today.

CMG: What are some of your nonmusical sources of inspiration—like books, places, food?

GGD: Japanese food. And Japan is wonderful. We went there this summer. I’ve been to Japan twice. It’s inspiring for me to go through Japan. Just the way that people treat visitors when you go there, with humility, and hospitality, and respect, and patience. People are beautiful there. There’s just a different kind of way to take in a visitor, an outsider, to their home. That’s been really inspiring. I try to take some of that with me when I leave. I’m still workin’ on it. It’s really intense, man. For me, that’s a heavy thing, to be treated so well, so beautifully. And Japanese food, it’s just really fresh and healthy and if you stay there…like we were there [this summer] for like ten days and it just makes your body feel good. It’s just really pure food.

This interview was published yesterday in Cokemachineglow.

Asad Qizilbash, "Sarod Recital/Live in Peshawar" (Sub Rosa)

2008-11-06T23:46:00.005-08:00

For centuries, Pakistan’s northern city of Peshawar has withstood the plunder of invaders and served as asylum for refugees. Today, flanked by war-torn Afghanistan and war-torn Kashmir, it’s a magnet for bloodthirsty members of the Taliban and Al Qaeda. But things aren’t all bad: Sitting on the Iranian plateau at the edge of the Khyber Pass has had the effect of making Peshawar a cosmopolitan place rich with diverse languages and cultures. All of this explains a lot about Sarod Recital/Live In Peshawar, a performance alternately mournful and free by Pakistani sarod player Asad Qizilbash: the stark red of the cover, the fact that the producers edited out the audience’s applause to ensure their safety, and the guttural wails of Qizilbash’s courtly instrument.

The sarod, a wood and skin lute with between 18 and 25 strings that sit on a fretless piece of metal that lets the strings glide up and down the octaves, is itself a contested thing. There is some dispute over whether it originated in Persia or India, but either way both influences are apparent—considered a bass version of the Persian rubab, it’s often performed in the classical Indian style of raga, whereby the musician improvises on a recurring motif. Qizilbash draws heavily on the teachings of Indian sarod master Ustad Amjad Ali Khan with his adventurous glissando phrasing and bold staccato plucking; his work is heavier than the oft-bland tracks on The Rough Guide to the Music of Pakistan, and his sarod is deeper and more muscular than the sitar.

In elongated, improvised strands, the three tracks on Sarod Recital soar and quiver. The moody, 27-minute improvisation “Raga Darbari” moans with passion. Its opening minutes are an impressionistic dawn full of searching slides and gentle plucks, conjuring the hues and textures of mountain terrain and the frenzied bustle and spicy aroma of an age-old bazaar. Five minutes in, Mustafa Khan enters with a throbbing tabla beat as the sarod’s heavy strings stab, jerk and slash, mirroring the sadness and spilled blood of battle. Halfway through, at the fourteen minute mark, Qizilbash’s fingers flail and whirl around a galloping melody that echoes in your head after the record has finished. Treacherous and full of wonder, it’s like watching the crags pass as you ride into Afghanistan on a horse.

In the American media, Pakistan gets a terrible rap. The picture hardly strays beyond the political gamesmanship of various statesmen and paramilitary types and the looming threat of nuclear weapons. Sarod Recital/Live in Peshawar shows a far more complex Pakistan, a lustrous place built by an array of peoples, including Buddhist ascetics, Sufi mystics, and the red-hatted Shi‘i Muslim warriors of the 14th century known as the Qizilbash; a place at once traditional and modern, with a culture inhabited by cardamom tea, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s velveteen voice and the Hellfire missiles of American Predator drones.

Rating: 70%

This review runs today in Cokemachineglow.

Change has come

2008-11-04T23:55:00.003-08:00

CNN's video of President-elect Obama is streaming into my ears. When I first heard, I was in shock with such happiness! So many times on this blog, I've bemoaned so many of the tragedies America has wrought, I've cried for the fog of propaganda to fade away. Life has become unreal and horrific. Now, I cry for this. I feel reality again. I am inspired. I gush tears of joy.

Ballot be casted!

2008-11-04T06:35:00.005-08:00

Yesterday was a nonpolitical day - I usually listen to WNYC and beloved Brian Lehrer, BBC World and Democracy Now!, but I just couldn't take it, it almost hurt. Only one thing matters at this point: the vote. Instead of saturating myself with news on news coming from DR Congo and Somalia, and the massive mash of election and economy coverage, I bathed in the hours and hours of music I've acquired lately from various sources. The crunked FruityLoops dubstep of Benga, the dark crooner Mahmoud Ahmed and his funky horn band, the hypnotic Gang Gang Dance, Zé Di's explosive samba, the wailing sarod of Asad Qizilbash, the gentle, lush, slightly dissonant indie pop of Broadcast. In the afternoon, I bought compact, rather insufficient computer speakers and plugged them in when I got home. Can you believe that, in a full year without having stereo speakers, I only went out to buy some yesterday - and they were mere computer speakers? Oh, what you have missed for so long, with only the tinny amplification of a Macbook! To full blast the new speakers went, creating a rhythmic, melodic and harmonic massage.

Well, a few minutes ago I walked a couple blocks to the local elementary school and voted for Barack Obama and Joe Biden. Now it's just a matter of waiting out the day - all of us, Brian Lehrer, the NY Times election team, the Arts and Letters editors, the Iraqi journalists on Inside Iraq, contributors to Cokemachineglow and Resident Advisor, the young people in black winter coats and black eyeshadow waiting in line behind me, my coworkers, all of us have to endure the excitement, anticipation, anxiety and tension of this day. Hearing the results that will come in late tonight, literally seeing and hearing them, knowing that they are truth, might feel like drowning. Or, it could be like breathing air again.

Headhunter, "Nomad" (Tempa)

2008-10-29T10:24:00.005-07:00

Rating: 80%

Nomad opens mysteriously, with a mild vacuum and electronics like gales of wind. The steady kick drum quietly enters and gains velocity. An implacable piece of electro-percussion pans back and forth, scampering like a horned lizard. Over two minutes pass before a seductive synth line and a grooving high hat alight on the creeping bass. Who is this nomad, and through what hazy region does he travel? It seems that this is an outsider of the future, either on the run from a cyborg-killer or looking for the nearest nightclub.

In fact, the nomad is the boyish Headhunter, the Bristol, England, producer of the ever-evolving dubstep genre that emerged from the UK Garage scene alongside grime several years ago and quickly took on a global following. Nomad, Headhunter’s first full-length release and first offering in CD format, is steeped in dubstep’s traditions—the sprightly half-step beat, the ominous two- and three-note synth lines, the heaving, subsonic bass that blasts out of the sub-woofer directly into your solar plexus—and sure enough, Headhunter employs the trademark “wobbler” bass in the aptly-titled “Baseflow.” Dubstep tunes from the likes of Skream and Benga are spacey and dark by nature, but hits like “Midnight Request Line” are tinged with hyphy-esque funk. Headhunter’s Nomad, taking cues from the mutated sonic vocabulary of minimal techno connoisseurs like Berlin’s Basic Channel, is altogether headier and more unreal. This is a futuristic, moody and vaguely menacing kind of dance music.

Saturated in colorful trails, bursts and spurts, driven by an ostensible half-beat shuffle—think “dun dun POP dun,” not “dun POP dun POP”—and overlaid with fast, intricate and infectious patterns of claps, shakers, congas and snares, these ten tracks meld together in such a way as to imitate the evolutionary phases of some half-organic, half-robotic being. “Prototype,” with its creepy echoes, propulsive bass and whipping snare, brings to mind Johnny Mnemonic’s would-be assassin, whose thumb doubles as a razer-sharp lash. It’s capable of triggering a quasi-spiritual trance on the dance floor, and just as well the soundtrack to the nail-biting final showdown between Molly Millions and the assassin up in the windy, decayed geodesic domes of Nighttown. The pursuit gives way to the plodding kick drum, lazy snare, and squawking, wandering bass of “Technopolis,” which segues into the leering “Grounded,” in which rapid-fire congas, propulsive taps and popping sounds deliciously snap together in intricate concert. Liquidy layers and juicy layers, all sandwiched, pushing deeper and forward, finally give way to the breathtaking “In Motion,” an anthem for cyborg sex if there ever was one, with cool, shimmering high hats, a punching synth hit that seems lifted from Nintendo and a bass that groans and beckons: Prithee, dearest cyborg, satisfy my loins for all time.

“Physics,” “motion,” “flow”...if Headhunter was Robo-God’s messenger, his statement to the growing international dubstep clan would be clear, familiar and irresistible: move that body.

:: myspace.com/dubstepheadhunter

This review was published today on Cokemachineglow.

Songs on love, in all its joy and despair

2008-10-16T06:38:00.007-07:00

Love songs can compel one to do crazy, bold things; they seem to imbue relationships with magic. But love is fluid, taken for granted and thrashed, and often it finally dies under strain. From that void of emptiness and despair come the heartbreak songs. This cosmic bond rarely survives the sojourn through hell, to produce an inspiring work like Windy & Carl’s Songs for the Broken Hearted. Continue...

Published yesterday on Cokemachineglow.

Toast To Us

2008-10-11T09:12:00.002-07:00

If Hawnay Troof was a workout routine and not a hyperactive electronic dance act, Vice Cooler would be its spasmodic Richard Simmons. At the band’s September record release party at the Williamsburg performance space Death By Audio, Cooler set the beats on his Dell laptop to an ear-pummeling volume and gyrated his heart out. Wearing a black dress shirt and beige suit, he barked into the microphone, jumped, wriggled, and spun. He crashed into the audience and fell to the floor. Back on the twelve-inch-tall stage, he drew the audience into his reverie, beckoning with spirit fingers. “Don’t you touch me. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah!” he sang, leading some forty audience members in the chant from “Connection,” the dizzying hip-hop track from his new release, Islands of Ayle. “Why can’t you feel me? Na, na, na, na!” Continued at the Brooklyn Rail... Photo by Savage Pink.

Deeper into the dark

2008-10-10T15:59:00.019-07:00

This morning, my boss and I were called into the conference room to sit in on a meeting between Mr. M., VP of G/MP, a modestly-sized and resilient publishing house of stationery and children's educational toys, and the president, Mr. G.

Sharply dressed, his collar unbuttoned, his arms taut, his eyes piercing, his expression serious, his deep wrinkles and leathery white skin augmenting the sagacity of his words on business, G.G. sat at the end of the dark wood table and calculated in his head - twist this, cut down on that, pour money into this, bring up those numbers. The VP, an immense fellow with a cool demeanor, sat to G.G.'s side, nodding, interjecting, consulting documents. My boss sat across from me. Brainstorming about ways to maximize profitability, the three of them engaged in a numbers conversation that seamlessly shifted from subject to subject and grew faster and faster, to the point that it became incomprehensible to me. Suddenly, a live recording of the Ethiopian singer Mahmoud Ahmed and his band popped into my head. I listened to the imaginary alto saxophone wend its way through a sultry and ominous melody.

These days feel like October 2006, when the Military Commissions Act appeared and shot through Congress in a flash: Being thrashed and upturned, experiencing fundamental change, falling ever deeper into the "death-spiral." Only then, I applied sharp focus to the ghastly tectonic shift meant to swallow up the invisible Others. Now, I am aloof, focused on countries continents away, other peoples and cultures, but the devastation is descending on me and my ilk.

The other day, on my usual calling spree, I asked Stewart, the owner of a book store in Illinois, if he'd like G/MP's catalogs. He gave a deep sigh. Sure, why not? "We're not doin' a whole lot right now," he said. "But who knows? Better times will come."

On Cokemachineglow, a track review of Alva Noto's "U_03"...

Suffocated by my Macbook’s worthless speakers, “U_03” sounds like a fax machine on the fritz. But in the hermetically sealed soundscape of my headphones, this track sounds like a fax machine—or even one of these fancy multi-use appliances—that has been dismantled and rebuilt into a cyborg that communicates in funky rhythms. Alva Noto mastermind Carsten Nicolai, an intense looking German who mines jpg data files, telephones and indeed fax machines for sonic material, starts the piece out with a rapid succession of high-pitched blips and abrupt kicks that pan right and left to make a tight beat. It gets heavy—really heavy—when deep and buzzing electronics suddenly burst forth. Verily, upon this aural plateau, the fax machine cyborg ghost rides tha whip.

The river, the desert, the wild...

2008-10-06T19:55:00.010-07:00

On Saturday a jolly band of misfits joined adventurer Rob Buchanan on a row up the Hudson river to the mythic ruins of a castle along the Palisades, near a sandy bank a quarter-mile past the George Washington Bridge. The tip of the island sat before us. We assembled benches from logs, collected fagots to make fire, played the celebrity game (Wim Wenders and William Carlos Williams, if just a W!), and drank white wine and beers and cider into the night, while the remaining dots of cityscape radiance endured.

When all was quiet on the lawn of the ruins, overgrown with lush green grass, I slept beside Martine Holmquist, an old friend of mine. But the sudden rattling of rain drove me to consciousness. Dreamily content, massaged by the oppressive sound of the water, I immediately fell back asleep. After I emerged from the tent, I took strange-tasting instant coffee, in my glass jar-cup, and for a moment it felt as if I hadn't had coffee in days, weeks, months. Ha!

Back on the Whitehall gig, in the fog and sprinkle, the world was a damp and cold gray. It felt broken.

This week on the Glow, a review of Group Inerane's Guitars From Agadez:

The Tuareg people, camel-herding nomads of the unforgiving Sahara in West Africa, are known to perform a unique kind of blues known alternately as Tichumaren (which means “music of the unemployed” in their native tongue of Tamasheq) and simply “guitar music.” In the ’90s, it sprung up as a form of local communication—often the only means of distributing information, cassettes of Tuareg bands like Tinariwen spread from refugee camps in Lybia and Algeria into the villages deep in the Sahara and Sahel deserts, telling the news and calling for freedom from oppression. But over the past several years, the genre has rocketed to international fame and taken on new meaning. It has spoken to oppression worldwide: In 2003, the Navajo traditional/punk band Blackfire performed in solidarity with their subjugated kindred spirits at the “Festival in the Desert” in Mali. And Tichumaren has unified musicians hitherto unrelated: lately, Tinariwen has teamed up with the French band Lo’Jo and… Robert Plant! Guitars From Agadez, the latest installment of what Sublime Frequency calls the “Tuareg Guitar Revolution,” is a set of live recordings by Group Inerane, a ragtag band of men and women from Niger, headed by Bibi Ahmed, a master of languid guitar grooves. The record is a nice historical document, but it’s the band’s hypnotic desert blues that will make English-language listeners smitten. Continued here...

And a Q&A with Portugal. The Man's John Gourley:

When they’re not touring, half of the foursome Portugal. The Man resides in the northwest. The other half hails from the sylvan wilds of Alaska. Songwriter John Gourley, for his part, is a native of Wasilla, the epicenter of the state’s evangelical movement and the home town of vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin. Last month, Gourley posted a touching missive against the Alaskan governor on his band’s website. Over e-mail a day before the vice-presidential debate last Thursday, he didn’t have any juicy tidbits on Palin to share, but he shouted out to his musical allies, recommended some Alaskan bars, explained how his father might’ve met Jesus and discussed the band’s new album, Censored Colors. Read more...

Photo by Nadia Chaudhury.

In the den of Republicanistan, Palin rules

2008-10-03T09:49:00.016-07:00

Last night, I joined a team of bleeding-heart liberals to cross into "Republicanistan" and crash a watching party for the New York Young Republican Club at the Houndstooth Pub in Midtown. I had pretty low expectations for the Vice-Presidential debate after reading Jack Shafer's primer and I expected to lose composure at some point and blow our cover. In the end, the experience was not nearly as infuriating as it was surreal and depressing.

The debate began shortly after our team downed some Jagger shots and briefly chatted up the well-dressed, 30-something technocrats sipping cocktails in the bar's dimly lit basement space. Watching the debate on FOX News, I whooped and hollered on cue for the first half, simultaneously trying to keep up the act and focus on the actual words of the candidates. I got the impression, though, that us city-dwellers weren't the intended audience. With Palin's cornpone talk and Biden's invitations to visit his working class home town, they clearly were trying to court the small-town "Main Streeters" of America's battleground states.

Both of them put up a pretty good fight, but I don't think either of them came out particularly victorious. But Palin's getting a lot of credit for not doing anything extremely stupid. As the NY Times notes, “She succeeded by not failing in any obvious way.” For me, Palin proved to have the most memorable comments.

Early on, with total lack of irony, she parroted Barack Obama's platform of change: "I do respect [Biden's] years in the U.S. Senate, but I think that Americans are craving something new and different and that new energy and that new commitment that’s going to come with reform,” she said. “I think that’s why we need to send the maverick from the Senate and put him in the White House, and I’m happy to join him there.”

Later, she repeated McCain's economic policy: a key to economic stability is cutting excessive government spending. Clearly, the Republican ticket wants it both ways, since they simultaneously plan to continue the War in Iraq, which is estimated to cost $2 billion a week.

She proceeded to lambaste Barack Obama for not supporting the so-called surge that, she said, "has proven to work." McCain did the same thing in last Friday's Presidential debate. The weird thing is that, in fact, the surge has proven not to work. Let's not forget that America started the surge in 2007 to make "breathing space" to build a viable Iraqi government. When he unveiled the plan, President Bush said that, "over time, we can expect to see Iraqi troops chasing down murderers, fewer brazen acts of terror, and growing trust and cooperation from Baghdad's residents. When this happens, daily life will improve, Iraqis will gain confidence in their leaders, and the government will have the breathing space it needs to make progress in other critical areas."

But has the Iraqi government made any progress? No. Iraq's parliament is just as fractious, corrupt and unreliable as it was over a year ago. Recently, an Iraqi journalist for McClatchy newspapers named Laith wrote that, over a year into the surge, most Iraqis still have no faith in their government: "All the Iraqis realized that our political parties don't care about us and that money and power are their only concern. We just wait for the last day of the age of this failure government and parliament. Until that day; those people means nothing to us but a thorn in the heart of Iraq that casues pain and bleeding."

Experts credit the "Sons of Iraq," who turned against Al Qaida in Iraq and joined forces with the US military, for bringing down the violence. They also note that Muqtada al-Sadr brought down the violence when he enacted the Mahdi Army cease-fire. But according to this transcript, Palin never even mentioned the words "Anbar" or "Mahdi" (although she did say the word "maverick" 15 times) during the debate. At any rate, there are signs that the peace is about to crumble again into sectarian conflict and political infighting. [Lunch break is almost over: I'll have to post a blizzard of hyperlinks later.]

My carefree whooping came to a halt when Palin declared, "Now, Barack Obama had said that all we're doing in Afghanistan is air-raiding villages and killing civilians. And such a reckless, reckless comment and untrue comment, again, hurts our cause. That's not what we're doing there. We're fighting terrorists, and we're securing democracy, and we're building schools for children there so that there is opportunity in that country, also. There will be a big difference there, and we will win in -- in Afghanistan, also." I could no longer cheer for such inaccurate and preposterous acts of rhetorical gymnastics.

This marked a turning point in the debate, after which everything got progressively more disturbing. At one point, Palin made a crack about Biden's late wife, once a schoolteacher. "You mentioned education and I'm glad you did," she told Biden. "I know education you are passionate about with your wife being a teacher for 30 years, and god bless her. Her reward is in heaven, right?" To that, the Young Republicans cheered.

I dwell on Sarah Palin here because she is a dangerous campaign tool who has trivialized the election. Lately, I've wondered if there is a medieval demon-impostor I can compare her to. Over e-mail today, I brought the question to my mom, an expert on Rennaissance literature. She had a fascinating and insightful response:

I’m more familiar with early modern imagery . . . But in both periods, you have two strands: either religious imagery of anti-Christ figures/ female monsters or secular imagery of folksy, secular Robin Hood heroes. Most of the folksy lore pits “haughty and wealthy elites” against “the folk,” “the many-headed monster” of the peasantry. Robin Hood lore is rich in the early modern period, but what you see is either 1) that the aristocrats were right all along to fear the vulgar, rough peasants who would wheedle their way into high places of authority or 2) that the rough peasant is a hero, by overthrowing an always corrupt or inept aristocracy.

The female monster tradition is probably the tradition that best characterizes the current situation, but it is viciously misogynistic. It draws upon the “lipstick on a pig” metaphor—you may see a beautiful appearance, and you may be captivated and charmed, but this woman is really the whore of Babylon, and will lead you to Hell. Or worse, she is a pig.

The problem --for thoughtful people-- with this literary tradition is that there’s no position to occupy to critique the folksy hero—except to take the side of the haughty elites. You are either folksy, vulgar and peasant OR you are an aristocrat who holds yourself high above the lowly, little people. There’s no way to critique the false posturing of the peasants who would rise to power without validating the aristocrats.

Basically, Sarah Palin is drawing upon this whole tradition—and the polarization works in her favor— as have the Republicans and the red state/blue state distinction for the past 8 years. This distinction serves a figure like Sarah Palin very well—because it distracts both red state and blue state believers from the contradictions within these categories. Red Staters will not critique Sarah Palin, because she “stands for” their resentment of the elite, Washington insiders, and everything you want to associate with them. Whether she is qualified for the position is irrelevant—her genuine, authenticity as a folksy outsider is all the qualification she needs.

Check out these lyrics by Lynyrd Skynyrd, “Red, White and Blue” from their Vicious Cycle CD, produced in –you guessed it—the big year for political music, 2003. And a performance-- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26vYdayusrU Here’s the Sarah Palin anthem if there ever was one.

But where would Lynyrd Skynyd be without plastic LA friends and music producers?????? Indeed, this positioning is pretty dishonest.

Love,

Mom

"Red White And Blue"

We don't have no plastic L.A. Frynds,
ain't on the edge of no popular trend.
Ain't never seen the inside of that magazine GQ.
We don't care if you 're a lawyer, or a texas oil man,
or some waitress busting ass in some liquor stand.
If you got Soul
We hang out with people just like you

My hair's turning white,
my neck's always been red,
my collar's still blue,
we've always been here just trying to sing the truth to you.
Yes you could say we've always been, Red, White, and Blue

Ride our own bikes To Sturgis
we pay our own dues,
smoking camels, drinking domestic BREWS
You want to know where I have been
just look at my hands
Yeah, I've driven by the White House,
Spent some time in jail.
Momma cried but she still wouldn't pay my bail.
I ain't been no angel,
But even God, he understands.

My hair's turning white,
my neck's always been red,
my collar's still blue,
we've always been here
just trying to sing the truth to you.
Yes you could say
we've always been, Red, White, and Blue

Yeah that's right!

My Daddy worked hard, and so have I,
paid our taxes and gave our lives
to serve this great country
so what are they complaining about

Yeah we love our families, we love our kids
you know it is love that makes us all so rich
That's where were at,
If they don't like it they can justget the HELL out!

Yeah!

My hair's turning white,
my neck's always been red,
my collar's still blue,
we've always been here
just trying to sing the truth to you.
Yes you could say
we've always been,
Red, White, and Blue

oh..oh..Red, White, and Blue....
Red, White, and Blue
oh..oh....Red, White, and Blue

Palin portrait courtesy the Alaskan government.

Glowdown - Shit Hits Fan

2008-09-30T10:44:00.006-07:00

In the Glow this week: a review of "Shit Hits The Fan" by Brooklyn quartet Bad Credit No Credit, a Q&A with Saint Louis noise-monger Joe Raglani, and a review (goes up Friday) of Guitars From Agadez by Group Inerane, players of Nigerien Tishoumaren, otherwise known as "guitar music," which originated in Lybian refugee camps during the second uprising of the '90s.

"Shit Hits The Fan" by Bad Credit No Credit - John Le Carré recently wrote an article in The New Yorker about the A Scanner Darkly-esque working conditions of British intelligence agents during the Cold War. These days, Carré writes, the job is just as shrouded in blind faith and paranoia, with Islamic terrorism the only invisible threat. “Shit Hits The Fan,” full of intrigue and suspense, is an able theme song: the drums and bass work in a tight groove as rain-stick and screams accent the seductive sax and tense croon of Carrie-Ann Murphy, who affirms, “All signs point to apocalypse.” Keep reading...

Interview with Raglani - Joe Raglani, founder of the experimental label Pegasus Farms Records, is a mainstay of the cozy music scene in Saint Louis, Missouri. Though he has been playing music for nearly two decades, Raglani’s latest record, the ominous and atmospheric Of Sirens Born, is his first major step out of his post-industrial home base and towards a wider audience. Over e-mail, he talks about Of Sirens Born, sources of inspiration, Saint Louis’ decayed art scene, and continuing to live “the dream.” Continued...

The McCain strategy - Americans are stupid

2008-09-26T09:54:00.016-07:00

First, McCain says he's got to postpone today's long-awaited debate and suspend his campaign, so he can fly over to Washington to help save America's economy with a clear and bipartisan mind. But while he sits through a fruitless White House meeting with President Bush, Congressional leaders and Obama, his campaign ads still go on the air. Now, citing "significant progress" in negotiations for the complicated $700 billion bailout proposal that went nowhere yesterday, his campaign is up and running and the debate is going to happen.

All of this for political gain!

"The difference between Barack Obama and John McCain was apparent during the White House meeting yesterday where Barack Obama's priority was political posturing in his opening monologue defending the package as it stands," a press release announcing the resumption of the McCain campaign reads. "John McCain listened to all sides so he could help focus the debate on finding a bipartisan resolution that is in the interest of taxpayers and homeowners."

Here's a strategy: Switch off the presidential race's omnipresent politicking, like a light, so you can put off an important debate and simultaneously demonstrate that you have a "bipartisan" outlook that solves problems. And then pray that voters still on the fence won't notice that you played politics by trying to erase them, and then failed to win the support of your own party to ram a complicated bill through Congress that will have massive effects on these same voters.

McCain must think that most Americans are pretty fucking stupid, huh?

Raglani - "The horror! The horror!"

2008-09-25T07:10:00.004-07:00

After a century of twiddling with the knobs of modular synthesizers, splicing magnetic tape, collecting field recordings, borrowing from foreign musical traditions and doing what we now merely refer to as “sampling,” pioneers of the electroacoustic arts have fundamentally improved music. Now, the world is host to sonic landscapes—turbulent oceans, jagged cliffs overlooking arid savannah, blighted cities reminiscent of Blade Runner‘s Los Angeles. Joe Raglani’s Of Sirens Born, inspired by recordings of Latin American folk and the treacherous jungles depicted in Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God, takes the listener on what sounds like a voyage through a creek of sludge in a dark sewer of St. Louis, Raglani’s post-industrial home base. Awash in grumbling drones and dissonant harmonies, swollen with a tension that rarely finds release, Of Sirens Born is at once terrifying and sublime. Continued at the Glow...

Head To Head - Gétatchèw Mekurya & The Ex + Guests

2008-09-19T18:19:00.004-07:00

It’s been nearly forty years since Ethiopia boiled over with the revolutionary politics that claimed thousands of innocent lives and nearly killed the proud East African nation’s sultry and horn-driven music. Thankfully, after the Dergue regime’s blood-soaked revolution came to an end in 1991, the producers of Éthiopiques took on the honorable task of distributing to a wide audience the musical epoch that began in the ’60s with auxiliary police bands in the capital, Addis Ababa. Continued at the Glow...

Limbo in the North - Will the war in Uganda ever end?

2008-09-17T10:20:00.012-07:00

Eveline Alobo, a weary, rail-thin 50-year-old mother of five, turned in her chair to look at the man waving his arms in the air. In one hand, he clutched a cane; in the other, a bottle of home-brewed beer. Through the hot, hazy air of the dry season, the babbling man, in his torn shirt and hat, resembled a marionette.

“He is drunk,” Alobo said, frowning. An Association of Volunteers for International Service (AVSI) staff member hopped up and ran towards the man, clapping his hands in the air to scare him off.

Alobo, an ethnic Acholi, lives in the Acet Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camp, about 75 miles from the border of Sudan, one of hundreds of camps that dot Uganda’s northern region. Acet looks like most of the other camps: The fertile undergrowth typical of neighboring villages has been cleared away, making room for a few simple structures that serve as schoolhouses and a clinic, plus row after row of mud-brick huts with thatched-grass roofs, many of them furnished with little more than a pot for cooking. Every few yards, a latrine shaped like a porta-potty juts out of the ground. Using the latrines makes the camp more sanitary, but children fear them, so small rivers of human waste run down the mud pathways.

“The sanitation is just shit,” said Louisa Seferis, program director for AVSI’s Northern Uganda office, which monitors and manages camps in three of Uganda’s northern districts.

Alobo moved to Acet 20 years ago. She fled her home after the Lord’s Resistance Army—a rebel outfit that’s been terrorizing the region for more than two decades in an attempt to overthrow the government—raided her village in the middle of the night. She watched as rebels pulled her husband and daughter from their hut and hacked them to death with machetes, then made off with her son.

Now, like most of the displaced, she faces the filth and widespread alcoholism of the IDP camps.

Continue reading this article, which I co-wrote with Hannah Rappleye, at San Diego CityBeat...

Post-Surge Iraq - America's "House of Cards"

2008-09-17T10:20:00.011-07:00

Last night, NY Times reporter Dexter Filkins read from his new book, The Forever War, and led a Q&A session that proved rather inconclusive. In his white dress shirt and blue blazer, he looked nothing like the haggard man pictured in his recent NY Times Magazine article "My Long War," but he had the classic nonchalant air and beaten-up face of a war journalist, and his diction was loaded with military lingo. He smiled and chuckled a lot. "I'm totally nervous," he said, about doing the night's event. "I'd rather be shot at with a 50 caliber machine gun."

Filkins is the "death wish" type of journalist who races through battle zones unfazed and wins the good graces of Marines and media critics alike for his down 'n' dirty reporting. His book looks O.K. – it’s a collection of stark and/or action-packed personal accounts of Afghanistan in the late ’90s, the Sept. 11th attacks, and the early years of the American invasion and occupation of Iraq. I've only gotten through the first couple chapters (busy with other books), but already a vehicle, several buildings and a head have exploded into oblivion; a hand has gotten chopped off during a public execution at a soccer stadium; and the tragic fate of some child soldiers who worked for the Northern Alliance has been poetically alluded to. I can tell already that this isn't going to be another Taliban, Assassins' Gate, Night Draws Near, or No True Glory. Filkins doesn't have the sharpest intellect, but he can make sense of chaos and horror with a nearly photographic sense, and that's where his book is strong. "It's just stuff that I saw," he explained. "It's representative of my experience."

He just got back from Iraq last Friday. During the Q&A, he said that Iraq is really peaceful now. "The gains are real," he said. But he referred to the country aptly as a "kaleidoscope," and said that it's a "fool's game" to predict what might happen there in the future.

He shied away from opining on the situation, but he suggested that all of this success would amount to little if we withdrew from Iraq in a year. The most elucidating point came when an Iraqi man Filkins apparently knew pressed him on the rivalry between the "Sons of Iraq" - the Sunni fighters and tribal leaders allied against Al Qaida in Iraq, who are famous for bringing down the violence - and the Shi'i-led government. If Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki continues to marginalize the Sunnis (Maliki recently said that he plans to incorporate only 20% of them into the Iraqi Army), won't Iraq eventually devolve into sectarian conflict again?

Filkins had an ominous retort. With the "Anbar Awakening," the United States built an immense "house of cards," he said. “And, you know, a house of cards is better than no house at all.”

“Is it gonna last? Who knows?” he added. “Stay tuned.”

Trax - Abe Vigoda + Experimental Dental School

2008-09-15T22:54:00.002-07:00

Abe Vigoda is often described as “tropical” or “calypso punk.” That might be accurate if jagged rock music drowning in reverb alluded to things tropical, or if Michael Vidal and Juan Velazquez’s howling and stabbing guitars actually brought to mind the up-beat, feel-good hits of Harry Belafonte. Read more at CMG...

Experimental Dental School’s charm lies as much in their agitated ravaging as in their name. Read more...

My debut at Cokemachineglow

2008-09-10T11:26:00.005-07:00

Islands of Ayle, Hawnay Troof’s sophomore album, is like a group-hug between strangers in a sweltering show space—simultaneously implacable and infectious. Continued at Cokemachineglow...

Plus, I've got two track reviews for you:

"Ya Yumma Weya Baba" by Mulla Abdussaheb: The Muslim leader Abu Ja‘far Al-Mansur founded Baghdad in 762, and for hundreds of years the city served as the glorious capital of the Abbasid caliphate. Then the Mongols sacked Baghdad in 1258, ruining everything. Read more...

"Break On Through" by Marc Ribot's Ceramic Dog: Cover songs are risky. They can be uninspired, irrelevant, excessively nostalgic, offensive to the original, or all of the above. Read more...

Fun with the news!

2008-09-08T07:40:00.002-07:00

Check out this quote, taken from an article published in yesterday’s New York Times. I took out some key terms to make it a mad-lib. Have at it!

“Does the (1.)_______ government really wish to operate in the modern world as an outsider, alienating free countries and trying to rally the world’s dictatorships?” (2.)_____ asked.

1. industrialized nation
2. top government official of rival industrialized nation

Here’s mine:

“Does the American government really wish to operate in the modern world as an outsider, alienating free countries and trying to rally the world’s dictatorships?” Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin asked.

Tibet after the Olympics - "We're still going to fight"

2008-08-23T16:12:00.030-07:00

Keeping the pressure on China on the last days of the Olympic games, a throng of demonstrators converged on Times Square today to raise awareness about China's occupation of Tibet.

The event, organized by five community and advocacy groups, began at the Chinese consulate on 12th Avenue by the Hudson River. The protesters then marched to Times Square and formed a human chain that started at the corner of Broadway and 42nd St.

"We just wanted to send a message out to the world that, although the Olympics may be ending this week, the Tibetan struggle is not ending," said Tengin Carlo, 28, a member of the Tibetan Women's Association, a local community group that helped organize the march. "We're still going to fight for the people of Tibet."

Sean Su, one of the day's speakers, a Taiwanese member of the Formosan Association for Public Affairs, estimated that over 3,000 people turned out for the day's events. Police officers in Times Square declined to offer an estimate. The number of protesters at the bustling street corner, who sat inside a rectangular metal barricade that stretched for two blocks, appeared to be in the hundreds.

Most of the demonstrators wore black t-shirts that read, "CHINA STOP THE TIBET GENOCIDE." Demonstrators said that China has been committing "cultural genocide," dominating the land of Tibet, brutalizing its people, and destroying its culture and traditions.

Lobsang Chundoy, 53, a Tibetan chemist who lives in Seattle, Washington, said that his home country has felt alien during visits over the past two decades.

"It's like being in someone else's country," he said. "If you go anywhere, you see Chinese."

For her part, Carlo, the member of the Tibetan Women's Association, who was born in Nepal, has never visited her parents' home country. She said that many people of Tibetan descent and of her age were born elsewhere, because their parents had escaped after the Chinese occupied Tibet in 1951.

Carlo said that obtaining a visa to Tibet is difficult, especially since the Chinese government will regularly "check on" members of Tibetan organizations outside China.

Tibet has experienced an intense crackdown during the Olympics, organizers said, estimating that over 140 Tibetans have been killed, and 500 injured, since the beginning of the games.

The Chinese government has also detained meddling visitors from abroad. Last Tuesday, five American members of Students for a Free Tibet, an international advocacy group that helped organize today's human chain, were arrested in Beijing for displaying a banner next to the Beijing National Stadium that read "free Tibet." That same day, Beijing police arrested James Powderly, a New York City-based graffiti artist, for projecting the message "Free Tibet" on buildings using a specially-designed green laser.

In Times Square, the only disruption or counter-demonstration was a burly, blustering Caucasian man carrying a stack of China Daily newspapers, who intermittently showed up to bark at the crowd, accusing "Taiwan" of being a "tool of the CIA."

At one point, he yelled, "CIA tools! CIA tools, that's all you are!"

When the speeches came to an end, the activists sang the Tibetan national anthem for seven dramatic minutes. All the while, kitty-corner to them, the latest Olympic scores flashed across the Dow Jones ticker.

Once the Olympics come to an end, according to Nick Dulotta, 20, a member of Students for a Free Tibet, community and advocacy groups in New York plan to escalate pro-Tibet activities. He added that the most important day will be March 10, 2009, the fiftieth anniversary of the Tibetan uprising, when a mass anti-occupation revolt spread across the region.

"I think that we'll see even more dedication, more increased action, more support from around the world," he said. "Now is the time."

Photography by Ryan Hale

At long last...

2008-08-23T12:25:00.006-07:00

...our Veep-hopeful is revealed! Senator Joe Biden. Right now I'm watching Barack Obama and Biden's heartful speeches in Springfield, Illinois, on Al Jazeera online TV. The two of them are bro-ing down, big time. And there's been at least one vague reference to Langston Hughes. The crowd roars!

What I don't like about Joe Biden is his "soft-partition" idea for Iraq. Helene Cooper of the New York Times describes it as such: "There would be a loose Kurdistan, a loose Shiastan and a loose Sunnistan, all under a big, if weak, Iraq umbrella."

Ergo, it's a fool's plan.

The Smell

2008-08-20T16:14:00.014-07:00

At the edge of the Rift Valley in Nairobi, Kenya, little Wendy strikes a pose. Photo by Hannah Rappleye.

Nairobi, 6/8/08, the dry season:

I am sitting on a well-kept couch and eating fried green beans and oily beef, picking it up with chunks of chapati, and feeling a little sick. Hannah and I are in the living room of the family of our friend Mike Tiampati, Program Manager of the Mainyoito Pastoralist Integrated Development Organization. His two adorable daughters are going crazy on orange Fanta, and we're watching "Project Fame," a low-budget East African imitation of "American Idol" sponsored by Kenya's famous Tusker beer. First up is a cover of "Billie Jean." Later, a fellow in a tilted stetson hat sings Usher. They're all amateurs, but they're strivers. Before we discover who is dumped and who is saved, I look Hannah in the eyes and suggest that it's time to go.

It's dark as we walk through a sort of grimy alleyway towards the guest house. Mike, 35, tall and burly, a bold man with a genial manner, totes his defensive weapon - a long club with a knob at the end. A drunk man stumbles by. Any moment, I tell myself. It's just about to happen; and then it does. I double over and eject all the contents of my stomach onto the ground. My eyes water and snot bursts out of my nose. I can taste bile and Fanta . I amble a few steps and vomit some more.

"The Maasai say it's the best medicine," Mike says, chuckling.

There is something peculiar about our guest house. As we cross a muddy field in our approach, I notice a young man and woman standing together awkwardly move away from each other, and proceed to stroll towards the front gate separately. Once Hannah and I enter the dimly-lit barroom, buzzing with activity - couples sit at a few couches, smoking cigarettes and chatting, in groove with the music - I go in search of a bathroom. The place hosts many rooms, but only singles and double-sized beds. The bar sells water, cigarettes and bottles of Vat 69, Bond 7, Waragi, and other hard liquors. In this crammed, convivial atmosphere, I find the bathroom along the hallway. Mike's only gone here a couple times for drinks; he describes it as a "rendezvous" site. Mike would never stay here, because he is a married man.

The next morning is overcast. Hannah and I are sitting in patio chairs by the front door, waiting for Mike to bring us to Narok, where we will meet Maasai tribesmen and women. We're feeling slightly annoyed - inside, as the ladies clean the bar, a Christian radio program called "Women of Faith" blares over the speakers. Stentorian voices spread subliminal messages in a fog of pious feedback. "The Father goes so far beyond what a wayward child deserves," an intense voice says over the radio. "The Father runs and throws His arms around you."

The show ends and on comes a loop of power-ballads that praise Jesus Christ, in all his glory. I imagine that the point of all this is to rock the sin out of the entire guest house, using blessed noise.

"This music makes me want to drink whiskey and have sex," Hannah says.

A few minutes pass, and she recognizes one tune and sings along:

"Our God is an awesome God
He reigns from Heaven above
With wisdom, power and love
Our God is an awesome God!"

Then, suddenly, something familiar emerges from the daily morning bustle. It's the smell again.

The smell is pungent, wet, but neither sweet nor bitter. It is not distasteful, but it's not pleasant. It may be the ruddy mud fermenting in the heat - but the smell shows up where there is no mud. All of a sudden, anywhere, it is there. I might be walking around one of Kampala's suburbs, or cramming my legs into the seat of a rumbling coach bus and resting my head against a window that doesn't open, or sitting calmly on the back of a sputtering bodaboda while swerving through a busy street: the smell is there. A couple days back, I passed an invisible wall when I entered a grass lawn at a hostel in Jinja, and there was the smell. Its formula activated and prodded the swirling in my intestines, and I threw up. I've never asked any locals, ex pats or visitors about the smell; it remains a mystery.

Now, in the parking lot before me, I smell the smell.

I feel truly mystified, haunted, dare I say harassed! I sniff and shake my head, turn to Hannah and rattle on about the smell, the smell again. It's everywhere! I write into my notebook every instance I can remember of encountering the smell. I want to know, What is the smell?!

Yet we're waiting so long that eventually we get up to go walk down the main street, and we buy bicuits and a toothbrush. By the time we're back at the patio chairs drinking Krest with Mike telling us about Maasai tradition, the smell has disappeared and I've forgotten for a time that there ever was a smell. When I go up to northern Uganda, to Gulu, the smell is not there.

The smell is omnipresent, here or not here. It could be a sign.

Do you know what the smell is?

The Best Business Names in America

2008-08-20T09:01:00.006-07:00

Since the beginning of 2008, as an employee for GMP, I've made exactly 2,583 phone calls to toy stores, gift shops, bookstores, gourmet stores, pharmacies, and countless miscellaneous businesses from across America. As you can imagine, I've encountered a lot of good store names. (Check out my older list.) Today, I present to you the best of the best:

Dog Ate My Homework
Brass Banana
PsychoBaby
Zandoozles
Figpickles
Jabberwocky
Village Wizard
Trees of Mystery
Cool Baby
Illiterature
Nonchalant Mom
Up With Learning
Go Fly A Kite
Destination Paper (voicemail: “Your road to a custom message starts here.”)
Learn On Your Own
Assembly Line Toys
World’s Best Toys
Pocket Full of Therapy
Latte Tots
Murray’s Toggery Shop
The Toggery
Try & Buy
Tra La La
Fun Kuts
TransLoad America
Babyland (shops of this name exist in CA, FL, IL, LA, MS, NJ, NY, PA and VT)

Nairobi Hustle

2008-08-08T09:10:00.007-07:00

Every nation has its hawkers. They are average Joes and Janes, out to make a few dollars (American, Canadian, Liberian, or Zimbabwean), dinars (Serbian, Jordanian, Algerian, Lybian, or Iraqi), dirhams, doubloons, euros, francs (French, Djiboutian, Congolese, Burundian, Rwandan, or Malagasy), pounds, shillings (Irish, Somali, Tanzanian, Kenyan, or Ugandan), pesos, quetzals, leones , birr...continued at The Galiwag.

An announcement to my Facebook readers: I accidentally deleted the post "Women," about gender equality and human rights for women in Northern Uganda, from my Notes page. I'm sure all five of you have noticed already. For the record, you can read it here.

66 Months for Hamdan

2008-08-07T22:15:00.013-07:00

It took an hour and a half to decide the fate of Salim Hamdan, Osama Bin Laden's former driver: 66 months imprisonment. He's served most of his sentence already, so he'll only actually be behind bars for five months. Nevertheless, the United States can detain him until the endless "war on terror" comes to an end.

"I would like to apologise one more time to all the members and I would like to thank you for what you have done for me," Hamdan reportedly told the jurors when he heard the verdict.

He was convicted of providing material support to terrorism, but not for committing conspiracy to murder Americans. The verdict is a limited victory for the Bush Administration - a tacit validation of the perfidious legal framework it set up after September 11, according to Jane Mayer's great new book The Dark Side: the Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals, to do what it pleases to anybody who might be considered a terrorist.

This is the first war crimes trial held by the United States since World War II and America has done something unprecedented: it put the war criminal's chaperone on trial.

Like many points during the previous eight years of my life, this is a preposterous and nearly surreal event. Why, I wonder, didn't America first try Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the attacks of September 11, 2001, the most definitive moment of my generation? We certainly have enough evidence of his crimes, obtained through torture, along with a laundry list of confessions.

There's a relatively simple answer. All of this - Guantanamo Bay, the "enhanced interrogation" of "illegal enemy combatants," trials held partially in secret, which accept evidence obtained through hearsay and coercion - is so ad hoc that it needs a trial run. So, to get things started, the tribunal takes on Bin Laden's taxi-man, a family man and day laborer to the defense, an "Al Qaeda warrior" who served "as the last line of defense for Al Qaeda’s senior leadership” to the prosecution.

This is yet another definitive moment in American history. The sentencing is like a coronation for Hamdan's martyrdom.

In 2006, the Supreme Court ruled in the Hamdan v. Rumsfeld case that America could not deny Guantanamo detainees, who have been detained for years without being charged with a crime, the age-old write of habeas corpus. Bush's Military Commissions Act of 2006, stupidly ratified by Congress, threw that reasoned conclusion into the garbage. And now, taxi-man Hamdan is finally going to jail - setting off a protest by Amnesty International that seems to win the empathy of Hamdan's own judge. "I hope the day comes when you return to your wife and your daughters and your country," Navy Capt Keith Allred, the tribunal's judge, told Hamdan.

Meanwhile, in Gutananamo, Khalid Shaikh Muhammad awaits trial. In Afghanistan, the Taliban is stronger than it's been in years. And somewhere out there, Osama Bin Laden is still in hiding. White House staffers aren't dancing in the streets just yet, but a recent statement announced that, "We're pleased that Salim Hamdan received a fair trial."

Let me translate the double-speak: "fair" means "curbed" and "trial" means nothing.

Photo: Salim Hamdan, originally posted on the CNN.com.

Guess what?

2008-08-01T17:09:00.002-07:00

I'm back, and I've got some chutney to share!

Would You Rather...

2008-07-23T01:15:00.008-07:00

Gulu, Uganda. Recently:

The rain is finished. The sky is overcast and a thick dew encroaches on this wide, windowless conference room. I realize that the interview conditions are terrible. There are too many note-takers here. One of them, thankfully, is a woman, Hannah. But I, unfortunately in this circumstance, am a man. What's worse, our interpreter, too, is a man: Victor Oloya, former abductee of the Lord's Resistance Army, and founder and Chairman of War Affected Children's Association, an NGO based in Gulu. My only consolation, at this point, is that the woman we're going to interview has approached us herself.

The three of us sit in cramped, wooden desk-chairs and create something of a circle around Anena Aginess, a 23 year-old from the village of Awach. Aginess has a small face and smooth features. Her hair is drawn down tight in cornrows. Her front teeth are missing. She pays no attention to the swarm of mosquitoes that harass us. Her head hangs down and she focuses her big brown eyes, her dilated pupils, down at the floor.

We begin with questions that are usually basic, but always churn your guts here. She has two brothers, who live in Gulu, and one sister who lives in Awach. The LRA killed her father in 1995. She has two children, one of them conceived in the bush.

In 1996, LRA rebels ambushed her village, abducted her, brought her to the thick wild of Kalongo in Pader District and gave her away to a rebel commander 20 years her senior. She became a mule, carrying water and supplies on her head for her captors. They beat her when she walked too slow.

The commander who called himself her "husband" raped her and made her pregnant. He forced her to stay at his side in the battles against the Ugandan army. One day, she tried to escape. As punishment, he stabbed her in the right leg with a bayonet. Aginess lifts up her long skirt to show us the scar.

During the battle of Atiak, two years after her abduction, he was shot and killed. She asked her cousin, another LRA commander, to let her escape. She told two of her companions, who were also abused and treated like mules, of her plan. Together, at 4 o'clock in the morning, they fled into the bush towards the nearest town. They found some civilians, who took them to the local council.

Finally, after going through experiences too horrific to relate, Aginess and her friends were free. Back in the bush, rebels found out that her cousin had helped her escape, and they killed him.

When Aginess returned to Awach, the villagers feared that the LRA would return, to seek vengeance. There were no rehabilitation programs available. And, she says, nobody in her community helped her. Eventually she met a man, and they had another child together. But he rejected her first baby, so she left him and moved in with her family.

Now Aginess lives alone. Every morning, she goes to the market to sell fruit. She's trying to start a small garden, where she can harvest crops to sell. But she hardly sees her family and she has little help. Her children are 8 and 2 years old. She worries about their education.

About a million LRA abductees have registered with the government, she says, but there is no government assistance. There are just UPDF soldiers, who themselves are known to commit sexual abuse and violent atrocities.

When we are finished asking questions, Victor, Hannah and I walk back to the center of Gulu. Victor chats with me and ignores Hannah, who walks behind us. The three of us are stuck in an overwhelming quiet, so there is not much to talk about. Victor waves goodbye when we reach WACA's office. When he is gone, Hannah recounts a match of the game "Would you rather...?" We had played it the week prior. I asked, "Would you rather be a man or a woman?"

Now that she's given it some thought, Hannah says, she would rather be a man. It's interesting that she has been thinking about this, I tell her, because so have I. If I could do it over again, I say, I would rather live the life that is undervalued, neglected, even despised, but that is ultimately more admirable, which requires ineffable strength and responsibility in the face of great ugliness, corruption and impotence: I would rather be a woman.

In with the Out Crowd

2008-07-17T07:27:00.001-07:00

A jazz musician with a well-honed punk sensibility, Marc Ribot has been a mainstay of New York City’s downtown music scene for more than twenty years. He is not an easy musician to pin down—in defining his work, one would need to employ a stack of hyphens or get rid of categories altogether...continued in this month's issue of the Brooklyn Rail.

Women

2008-07-10T02:34:00.008-07:00

I've been traveling around Uganda and Kenya for a month and a half now, and I would estimate that 98 percent of the people I've interviewed so far have been men. I already was sick of it a while ago and now I am really sick of it. I am in Gulu now and I realize that women's rights are the most important and the most overlooked and underappreciated issue affecting Uganda as a whole, if not, you know, the entire rest of the world.

"Ugandan men are arrogant," Emma, a young student, told Gary and I at Embassy Bar the other night. I get the impression that "arrogant" is only one of the many of nasty adjectives you could use. Christine Okot, the Ugandan Government's Gender Officer for Gulu District, recently offered a couple others: "stubborn" and "big-headed."

I'm not trying to say that all men are bad here, nor am I trying to say that I truly understand the issue - because, of course, I can't - but it's become obvious: Women are like mules in Uganda. They are property. "A man has a right over the wife and everything the woman owns in the home," Okot told Hannah and I yesterday.

Ask any woman here and they will tell you that gender inequality is rife, that domestic violence is normal and, if anything, encouraged. The situation has become so much worse because of the war. LRA rebels used rape as a tool to destroy the lives of Acholi women. And after the Acholi community was crammed into overpopulated, isolated, dirty and dangerous IDP camps, where many people have lived for decades, rape and incest increased and gender roles changed radically.

"All the time you spend roaming around," said Michael Ojok, a 24-year-old resident of Acet Camp in Gulu District, who has lived there seven years. "You don't have your garden, you don't have crops." Living in the IDP Camps, Ojok and many others have told me, so many men feel helpless and resort to drinking. When they run out of money, they steal bicycles, land, or the food aid distributed to their wives, to drink more. Then they come home and beat their wives.

Meanwhile, the women take care of the children, take care of orphans, collect the seed from the World Food Programme, dig the gardens, grow crops, fetch water from the bore hole, and pretty much do everything else. "All the responsibilities are on the women," Esther Abwol, a mother who lives in Olwal Camp in Amuru District, told Hannah and I. "It is up to you to struggle and make sure your family is O.K."

Today, aid workers and camp residents said, now that people are free to return to their villages and tend their crops, the problem is still huge. Just look at all the drunks farting around in the camps on an average weekday. There were plenty at Acet Camp on Tuesday. Even the Local Community Leader of Odek Subcounty was falling-down drunk.

There are a number of aid groups that deal with women's rights, like Straight Talk and Boy Talk, which holds regular sessions for women and men about sex, health issues and how to stop domestic violence at home. Christine Okot, the Gender Officer, runs working groups that network with state institutions and aid groups to promote gender equality in development programs.

But Okot said that too many aid organizations here fail to address the underlying causes of gender inequality, domestic violence, rape and the spread of HIV/AIDS, which is intimately connected to these problems. "They tackle the symptoms," she said. "They think that drinking is the problem."

Women here, working women, students, aid workers and government officials alike, say that the true problem lies with culture and tradition. Girls just getting into maturity have been pushed into marriage. Women can't leave the house, even to go to the hospital, without asking their husband's permission. If women are raped, they are often blamed for it themselves. Some women worry that they are not good enough wives if their husbands don't beat them.

It's a matrix of issues - political, cultural, economic, psychological. How do you find a solution? Women here say that men need to be more deeply involved in promoting gender equality. And ultimately, the next generation of leaders need to be educated about gender equality and human rights. "Your children are still young," Okot tells the women of the community. "Train the young people."