July 2005 Archives

The unsteady ramp from "'80s nuclear paranoia" to "Clintonian 'new covenant'" is totally my shit right now. It is my shit in song form. It is my shit in real time. It is so my shit, in fact, that I have maybe become marginally insane. So 12,000 words at 18-pt type "times new roman" double spaced gets you going to about 68 pages in MS word. And it feels like a lot if you even shoot for half and push. I feel fucking awesome, exhausted, elated (and also marginally insane). What year is it? Marisa called midway through 1992 (my 1992, the 1992 in my living room, my mind) and told me she is giving me a Warren G greatest hits mix that she made. Marisa is totally the best and the coolest.

Emerged from fourth (sixth? eighth) day of str8 16-hr writing cocoon, and broke into the city cause I needed life. Loping up b'way at 10th, looking, musing, WHEN I RANDOMLY RUN INTO---MY CASCADIAN COMRADE DAVID CHANDLER, the man, the myth who i have not seen FOR ONE WHOLE YEAR. he is here playing live contact drums with SF vintage-machine technorati eats tapes (a dance party you should get with) and DJing, and before i know it it's 2 am, he and Julie and I are closing down Techno Sushi (I thought it appropriate), the kpt.michigan cover of the smiths' "there is a light that never goes out" is playing, we are talking beats and the night is temperate and it is also serendipitous.

I forgot to tell you that I happened to catch a preview of the new Reverend Run video for "Mind on the Run," wherein a skyscraper-sized Reverend Run stalks the streets of NYC carrying a chihuahua and at one point lets the dog run free while he waves to a little girl wearing a sharpied Joan Jett t-shirt. this is because the song, presumably produced by [rick rubin rick rubin rick rubin], samples "I love rock n' roll," and RUN IS STRAIGHT SPITTING into the camera, all hungry-like. it is all very ok against the comeback odds. plus there is some Russell workaholic subtext.
my l.a. people say it is on the radio there but i am too exhausted to google it beyond this Russell label update thing, sorry.

OMFG, if you are in the ST LOUIS MO area, please give Becky Smith, superstar of the next issue of Hit it Or Quit It, a job. She is funny and skeptical, but not necessarily cynical, and can write like a hurricane, and lives amazing lives and goes to pro-choice activism workshops. Those are her job qualifications, or at least the ones I know about. Give her a job writing at Ms. magazine.

And in case you didn't think this was another non-subtle embedded advertisement for HIT IT OR QUIT IT ISSUE 18: "MEN IN ROCK"--COMING VERY SOON! PREORDER HERE. The fruits of 5 am power-editing phone-conferencing between jessica, miles, j.r. and I, finally realized, inside is starring Becky's supersharp review wildstyles, Matos' probing, book-length Hold Steady Q&A, jessica's miranda july interview, Cali "LA scene report" Dewitt, Amy Phillips and Cody Critcheloe of the SSION: in conversation, Jon "fuck a blog i'm out in the streets(/craigslist)" Caramanica's amazing "Bedtime Stories with MOP" interview, Mia Clarke on "the posthumous queer mystique of dusty springfield," Talib's G-Unit MANifesto, Sean G.O.A.T. Fennessey writing an essay on technotronic's Ya Kid K that broke my tender mind wide open and also some Fennessey Stones Throw NOW AGAIN reissuery Q&A = bigtime boners for funk fans, crate diggers, historians, and waxpoetics crowd, Britt Barton-Lindsay of equitable servitude fame
and the funniest reviews section ever including:

JR's reviews "AS LOU RAWLS," Jessica's reviews "AS GEORGE PLIMPTON," Miles' reviews "AS HIMSELF" and... did I actually write anything in this issue?... I reviewed Guns n' Roses Use Yr Illusion I & II, wrote tandem readings of Lil Wayne Gangsta Grizzilles vs. Destiny's Child Destiny Fulfilled, and
VOCABULON SLANGTIONARY, THE BEST MOST HILARIOUS SLANGXICON YOU HAVE EVER READ.

Not to floss, but yo, Hit it Or Quit It is totally the best/deepest/funnest to read music magazine in america (and america's only explicitly feminist music magazine (inclusive of men and hip-hop)). I guarantee we had more fun making it than pretty much anyone has ever had making a magazine, basically ever. I cannot fucking wait until it gets back from the printer, I JUST WANT TO TOUCH IT!

HOLY CRAP also on Becky Smith's cool friends who do things like Different Kind of Dude Fest.

Or--may we defer to Joan on this one?:

"Quite simply, I was in love with New York. I do not mean 'love' in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and never love anyone quite that way again. I remember walking across sixty-second street one twilight that first spring, or the second spring, they were all alike for awhile. I was late to meet someone but I stopped at Lexington Avenue and bought a peach and stood on the corner eating it and knew that I had come out of the West and reached the mirage. I could taste the peach and feel the soft air blowing from a subway grating on my legs and I could smell lilac and garbage and expensive perfume and I knew that it would cost something sooner or later--because I did not belong there, did not come from there--but when you are twenty-two or twenty-three, you figure that later you will have a high emotional balance, and be able to pay whatever it costs. I still believed in possibilities, then still had the sense, so peculiar to New York, that something extraordinary would happen any minute, any day, any month."

Ezra (no, the other Ezra... not EZRA ACE CARAEFF, he the man of first New York, then Portland... but EZRA SELOVE, he the man of first New York, then Portland, then New York, or New Jersey, I cannot figure) Ezra spends a fraction of a summer in Portland, comes back to New York, and asks, "What the fuck just happened?"

As Marisa would put it, you feel the edge leave you when the plane lands. Portland. I've lived here, in New York, for exactly one year--one year and two days, actually--and I am just starting to feel my edge come up, like scales, like a book I can refer to and nod, or the reference another former Portlander, Anna Bond, told me to pick up when I moved here, the Not For Tourists guide, which I never did because in my mind, my central park is named wanderlust. It was the wise Dee Johnson, who once lived in New York but is now from Sweden, Dee Johnson told me to wander, and look at everything, and I love wandering and looking, on streets and museums and in buildings and et cetera. Rapacious, it's true; neurotic, I'll cosign; aloof, depends on who you kick it with, but god love this whole fucking city, New York is the best place to wander.

Yes, the Ezra I knew second, he got it. And if it's any comfort, after you spend enough time near the Portland waterfront, letting your impatience sap, you start to invert, and the analogy is more like the Keanu in... Parenthood.
Welcome back.

Now, for me, back to work.

THE MOST PROMINENT ANTHROPOMORPHIC QUALITY OF NICK SYLVESTER's BLOGMACHINE: HILARITY

two-time DJ partner/longtime homie/purveyor of "double barrelled soul" dance partays Chazz Madrigal has started an audioblogDOME with his extensive collection of SOUL FORTY FIVES, AND MORE. (hey i never knew!)

Found a 1963 copy of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich on the subway ystrdy w/Solzhenitsyn's fine, brave "letter to the congress of soviet writers," beseeching the council to stop willingly censoring/silencing authors, and authors to stop altering their own texts simply in the interest of, well, not getting sent to the gulag and/or "disappearing." Stellar example of the shit that happens in a closed society.

Also ingesting Sonic Youth's Dirty yesterday for research, for the first time in 9000 years. last night Sasha said no, it's not the sonic youth he knew and hated it when it came out, but it was the first one i got my hands on, out there in '92, out in the sticks, at a sam goody or something in a mall, DGC mass distro thank you very much (I got dirty before goo, to be sure) so I loved it. fuck i still love it "and i know... there's something down there, sugar soul" and the beefy riff on "drunken butterfly" weighs 90-11 lbs, like my fave song ever by SY, "ELIMINATOR JR" (from daydream nation) swaggers and hits 120 mph on the ugly grit stick shift.

It came out over a decade ago, but Dirty: STILL RELEVANT! Kim Gordon sings about abortion (/domestic violence/ revenge killing) ("shoot"), anita hill sex harrassment & naked model-magazines ("swimsuit issue") and the winner of the "IS 2005 1991?" award, "Youth Against Fascism," with Thurston's gag-reflex lyrics: "yeah the president sucks, he's a war pig fuck" and the immortal "black robe in swill/i believe anita hill/ that judge'll rot in hell." HOLA COMO ESTA. but "placating" language like "special character" (NY Times pg A21, paragraph 2) and "damage control," (NY Times pg A19, final paragraph) no placebo for teenage riot, teenage riot que tal?

Thee tunnel I jog thru daily is tagged in white chalk:

STOP HIDING YOUR FATE

I've been waiting for someone to erase it for something around three months. Hasn't happened yet but as of today it reads:

STOP HIDING YOUR FAT

word to prospect park body rights tag-taggers '05

nonsensical quasi-brevity from jshep feminista busytronix zone 1814

FIVE. rachel raimist, amazing hip-hop feminist/scholar and director of essential 1999 women-in-hip-hop doc Nobody Knows My Name is doing a US DVD release of her film and is seeking beats, songs, b-girl battle footage, etc. for the updated release. For more, make a stop here.

FOUR. which reminds me, mi lady Miranda Jane sent these links way back in the paleozoic: archive of links, articles and info compiled by Rachel Raimist and Miranda Jane. AND list of references about hip-hop feminism or written by hip-hop feminists.

THREE. PRE-APOLOGY FOR THE FOLLOWING STREAM OF CONSCIOUS, UNPUNCTUATED NEEDLEDROP: whoever said r&B ladies proffer feminist response to misogy hip-hop first? Joan Morgan? Jeff Chang said it in his "AMERICAN BOOK AWARD WINNING" sociopolitical history of hip-hop can't stop won't stop( READ IT NOW IT IS SO IMPORTANT), also Mark Anthony Neal probably said it in a column, cause he is a supergenius-- and jess harvell said it again recently in his voice piece on teedra moses.

well anyway, 17 yr old Teairra Mari, "roc princess" has this new track called "get up on ya gangsta" which is my mall/living room/jogging anthem right now, and has become number 7 on my top singles of 05, between the mary j. blige hate it or love it remix and and spooky dance band's "Chemical reaction." sure sure teairra, with her R&B banging on la playa, she is a YOUNG HIP HOP r&b woman like ciara, amerie (nix on brooke valentine that alb, nay), her voice filling up the virtual CIPHER ZONE OF women rapping IN THE MAINSTREAM (barring missy, that one song on the missy album where mary j. raps, & kim and remy's forthcoming joints). go jigga and la reid. but also, a bunch of dudes wrote teairra's lyrics, which is kinda crazy cause it's like, WO SHIT! I FEEL LIKE she is totally singing to me and my girls! even tho there are too many songs within a monotheme: ("i'm keeping my pants on" or "my dad was totally absent so i'm keeping my pants on" or "you don't love me like my daddy didn't love me so i'm still keeping my pants on" but seriously, holler for the vocalization of absent-dad life) which makes me think maybe all the men writing her lyrics are EITHER: 1. really talented, 2. read as many teen magazines as i do, and/or 3. are/were in the throes of getting dumped.

anyway "get up on ya gangsta," produced by the genius poli paul for spencecow ent., llc--WHO ALSO WROTE "DIP IT LOW," WITH TEEDRA MOSES AND PRODUCED ON COMPLEX SIMPLICITY. DO NOT SLEEP!--poli paul, he would like to give us a slither snake apres-Timbo wobbly synth line and boom-chik, boom-chik syncopation, with a chorus that unfolds as follows: "he don't really love ya/he just wants to crush/get up on ya gangsta girl/and leave that n. alone" tuff gong. i'm totally sharpie-ing teairra mari on a t-shirt.

TWO. ebenezer is vacationing in germany, and yet he still finds time to send links... but openbar.com, it's not at all what you think. either way i'm like wtf eben homie, you're in Germany, eat some doner, see some museums, hit up a trahnce party, unplug.

ONE: yeah, yeah. yeah, yeah yeah.

ok. mon crew and i hit up the weekly dj hotspot of caps y jones "we got mixtapes" this sat and were duly flattened by their breadth--those dudes drop sharp conjunctions, assonance i.e. "I'm Really Really Hot" (missy) into "Hot Hot Hot" (the cure)--and on some straight "my ass moving" tip, HI. Blas and Nicole and I got down for somewhere between four and 400 consecutive hours, the peak being a fresh introduction of Prince standard "Erotic City," after like, 35 club tracks in mindbreaker crescendo-denouement. And, um "Tenderoni"? HI, again. Totally made up for missing the auditions for So You Think You Can Dance.

(speaking of Blas, John Blasioli dot com will soon be open for business: handmade and tailored shirts for you by the dude who made the Decemberists look like a Soviet constructivist poster.)

Sunday, Ezra quipped, "There's nothing like getting a one-size fits all T-shirt fired at you from a machine gun," as Shea Stadium was pelted with the universal truth of all sports: sure, some games are fine examples of triumph of will, excellence of character, metaphors for social climate... but the guarantee of every major sporting event is the part where they shoot promotional Ts into the stands. I was also rather disillisioned when I discovered the "take me out to the ballgame" singalong is now the "Fisher Peanuts" singalong but there it was, in my face, American pasttime.

I never really got into baseball, but I faulted television; I always thought when I saw it live and in concert its mystique would finally be revealed. But when #1 NY baseball fan Ezra flew in from Portland yesterday, ostensibly to make Trevor, Mike and I attend Mets vs. Dodgers game 53... two things happened. First, without realizing it, I spent most of the game either talking about music, asking Ezra and Mike who was who and what was what on the field, and scouring Shea Stadium for vegetarian snacks, with little success. Second, life reiterated to me that basketball is my favorite sport (I like the way they dribble up and down the court). I grew up watching video-era MTV; perhaps the information age has compounded my already hi-NRG yearning for tight courts, speed, tension, spectacle (PEACE TO DEBORD), but baseball still doesn't engage me. Spent the train ride home caressing my rasheed wallace wallet photograph.

BUT. did you know that when an individual met is up to bat, a song of his choosing accompanies the projection of his face on a giant television? LIKE
David Wright, VA rookie: "Suck My Kiss" by the Red Hot Chili Peppers
Doug Mientkiewicz, 31--Poison's "Nothin But a Good Time" (this says to me: "Get to the beer line, jokers, I'll just be down here on home plate CHILLINNNN")
Mike Cameron: Jay-Z's "Public Service Announcement"--THE FIRST VERSES, from "my name is Hov" and ending on "hottest chick in the game wearing my chain," which helped me bond with the dudes behind us who also continued rapping past the cut-off. Is baseball's slow appeal couched in bonding/community? Is it the intellectual sport, or the mathematical sport like billiards or something? I would like to know and don't. Baseball people, help me out, please and thank you.

cop the REAL de stijl

The Situationist International listserv (subscribable at nothingness.org, of course) is generally a bunch of dudes arguing about spectacle en francais, but on occasion someone recommends a book or sends a link that redeems the whole deal. Today I got the international dada archive, which basically makes me want to pass out with happiness.

Sean Tejaratchi... bonjour!

Joe gross sez from his girl-culture watching post in Austin aka Lil Houston: "Anyone interested in contempo girl culture needs to pick up this month’s Comics Journal. It focuses on shoujo manga, which is Japanese comics aimed at young women. For the first time, scads of it is being translated into English and girls are buying it like CRAZY. For example, the best selling graphic novel series in America is a shoujo series called “Fruits Basket,” which, let’s face it, is one of the best titles ever."

Which neatly follows the amount of English-translated porn manga I sold while working at a fanzine/comix shoppe in Portland OR--titles like, you know, "young assy faeries" about sexy manga nurse/dragon hybrids doing whatever whatever--kids and old men loved that stuff.

4000 dpi, my friends. In answer to my "Age of Irony" dates & footprints plea, Steven Shaviro--self-described "academic whose research/writing is based on the premise that science fiction novels are the most accurate source of social theory for the 21st century"--writes:

"You might want to look at a not-quite-science-fiction novel by Alex Shakar called THE SAVAGE GIRL, particularly pp. 136-142. This traces the prevalence of irony in American popular culture of the last 50 years as an effect of marketing/advertising. According to Shakar, or I should say one of his characters, the American Age of Irony began in 1961, when the Volkswagen was advertised in Life Magazine precisely on the basis that it was ugly, uncool, etc. (p. 138)...

"Basically, the marketing research analyst who is giving a speech on the pages I indicated describes the 1961 Volkswagen ad, goes on to explain why irony is a successful marketing technique, and ends by saying that "it was the successful incorporation of irony [into marketing and mass culture] that won the Cold War."

GRAZIE.

Meanwhile, Marx: still the dude. "Like Molière's bourgeois gentleman who discovered to his amazement that for more than 40 years he had been speaking prose without knowing it, much of the Western bourgeoisie absorbed Marx's ideas without ever noticing."

Finally, in the "and the band plays on" category, I am slightly hot for this Jay 211 track "Ox". The Jay 211 verse is like ZZZzzzzzz, but Coolwadda, of the normally underrated (if rated at all?) Chico and Coolwadda, breathes a little fire (and homophobia... sigh. jesu christe)--All crtsy the left coast megaphone Dub CNN.

Pardonnez-moi, but I ain't nobody's steady girl!

More importantly!

* Eff a telenovela, THIS SHIT IS INSANE!

* Special Julianne "Couch Research" Section: If you can fill in the blank: It is commonly accepted that the American "Age of Irony" began in or around 19__," and/or can recommend a book or three on the topic (that are not written by Jedediah Purdy, thank you v. much) please email julianneshepherd@yahoo.com. I will give you a prize!

* No fucking way. From this point forward, Nick Sylvester is totally my hero: how one man takes a crumb and blows it up Titan-size, in a sole interview with the "new voice of h-town," is something approaching mindbreaking. ("BALL HOG OR TUG BOAT!": the original Jokaman press release somewhat famously misidentified his collaborator "MICHAEL WATTS" as "MIKE WATT")

Surely you have been following the Karl Rove leak scandal with a combination of disgust, dread, cynicism, fear and utter unsurprise that "the architect" of Bush's 2004 "re-election" and the Iraq War may or may not have leaked the name of a CIA Agent in order to discredit her ambassador husband, who says he has evidence that the African nation Rove was blaming for selling uranium to Iraq (leading to their never-existed WMDs, the WMDs that Rove used to justify the whole Iraq War in the first place) could not, in fact, have done anything of the sort. Surely.

The news coverage in The Voice is particularly excellent this week. Read the whole section.

And now, without diminishing the gravity of the situation, I shall elaborate upon my sensational header.

In James Ridgeway's piece Grime Pays: a Karl Rove Chronological Tour, Making All the Stops, he describes one of Rove's early, dirty-campaign tricksicles, a privileged-man's frathouse stunt to end all frathouse stunts:

FALL 1970: Rove pays visit to Chicago campaign headquarters of Alan Dixon, a Democrat running for state treasurer. Disguised as a volunteer, Rove steals official campaign letterhead and sends out 1,000 invitations to people in the city's red-light district and soup kitchens, offering "free beer, free food, girls, and a good time for nothing" at Dixon headquarters. When hundreds of homeless and alcoholic Chicagoans show up at a fancy Dixon reception, Rove succeeds in embarrassing the candidate. Dixon still wins the election.

Now. To those of you who have seen 1985 dance movie Girls Just Wanna Have Fun--the film that, along with Flashdance, set down the boy-meets-girl class-struggle template for many dance movies to follow, including Dirty Dancing--the above paragraph will sound incredibly familiar. Not only is Girls set in Chicago, but you may recall the scene in which Sarah Jessica Parker, Helen Hunt and wee Shannen Doherty discover that bitchy, wealthy socialite rival Natalie is having an exclusive debutante ball. The three spunky chicas, all wearing acid-wash jean-skirts, furtively "borrow" an invite from a neutral party, race down to the local photocopy shop where they order "50--no, a HUNDRED and fifty" copies, then hit the mall, passing invites to punks, drug addicts, new wavers, lesbian bodybuilders, and other malcontents and social misfits--all to the tune of Cyndi Lauper's classic "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun," sung by someone who is painfully not Cyndi Lauper.

When the punks literally crash the party [read: the Clinton years] by jumping through a WINDOW at the country club (despite the fact that they all have invites), it's not just time for choreographed dance numbers... it's time to destroy the food spread. A guy with a liberty hawk puts his Converse inside a turkey, and Jonathan Silverman's character drops a blueberry pie in Natalie's important dad's toupee, "RUINING his beautiful SILVER HAIR" (all to the tune of Holland's "Wake Up the Neighborhood"). Natalie, the pride and the fury, is totally humiliated--no, perturbed: "THIS. MEANS. WAR." [Rove again!] In retaliation, she coaxes her dad [Rove] into using his political/corporate leverage to make sure she [Bush] and her 7-foot-tall beefcake professional dance partner [Cheney] win the DTV dance contest against Sarah Jessica Parker [Kerry] and her SUPER hottie partner [Edwards]. (The super hottie partner being basketball fan/dancer/rebel-with-a-heart/prototype of my perfect boyfriend Jeff Malene, played by Lee Montgomery.)

Paying off the judges... would Karl Rove do that? Hmmm. Was Girls Just Wanna Have Fun writer Amy Spies--who later wrote on the Doherty's much-loved series Beverly Hills 90210--referencing Chicago political history, but flipping the script to fit with her class sympathies? Was she visually redeeming Alan Dixon through a film for teens about a television dance contest, and perhaps making further commentary on the dearth of women and/or the lack of representation and voice teen girls have in politics? Did she, by setting her story in Chicago and perhaps referencing Rove's political behavior there, foretell the Bush administration's demise?

I don't immediately know, because there is no good bio information on Amy Spies on the interweb, and whether she is either political OR a medium. But when in doubt, call the Screen Actors' Guild "Actors to Find" 800 number. Feel free to bet on whether I will actually do this.

Junichi puts it down on the maniacal right winger John G Roberts.

I would like to add that focusing on the hot-button issue of Roe v. Wade is imperative, but also implies that he might be a suitable choice were he "moderate" on womens' right to choose. That angle distracts from the fact that he has argued AGAINST continuing laws that uphold desegregation in public schools, FOR religion in public schools, AGAINST issues protecting the environment and AGAINST prisoners' rights. He is also a corporate-gladhandy lawyer who has represented ultra-conservative Bush Admin mouthpiece FOX NEWS, among others. This man holds devastating views and even if he fronts a "moderate" viewpoint on womens' right to choose, there is no way he is appropriate to even eye the supreme court, much less sit on it.

Please sign moveon.org's petition, at the very least.

not surprising, but...
ugh.

sigh.

From the Alliance for Justice:
John G. Roberts, nominated by President Bush to a seat on the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, has a record of hostility to the rights of women and minorities. He has also taken controversial positions in favor of weakening the separation of church and state and limiting the role of federal courts in protecting the environment. The Alliance for Justice opposes his nomination to the D.C. Circuit....

While working under Presidents Reagan and Bush, Mr. Roberts supported a hard-line, anti-civil rights policy that opposed affirmative action, would have made it nearly impossible for minorities to prove a violation of the Voting Rights Act and would have “resegregated” America’s public schools. He also took strongly anti-choice positions in two Supreme Court cases, one that severely restricted the ability of poor women to gain information about abortion services, and another that took away a key means for women and clinics to combat anti-abortion zealots.

Read the rest of the report here, but warning: it's bloody, like brains smeared all over the windshield bloody. This dude is an anti-abortion, pro-segregation (!), anti-prisoner's rights religious zealot/corporate handiman. The fuck.

my life has been cancelled because of work, still may end up in DC, Baltimore, Chapel Hill; either way you should go see jessica and al read because they are terrific and funny and passionate.

Or just read about Jessica's an my night of stories.: Of reds and yellows and "lost boys", days when Avenue C was a place you didn't go so much unless you were squatting there or wanted to score, even before the Koch years, even before Jessica and I were born. Appropriately, we were power chilling in the kind of oldschool East Village walk-up I used to fantasize about living in when I was 14: incorrigable, dank, creaky, cluttered with perf. art props and artists who paint their entire apartment the color of slightly dried blood, unequivocally their own domain. After the reading, Al pointed to Larry and Aaron Cometbus and said to me, half-smiling and slightly breathless, as breathless as Al gets anyway, maybe more like windswept: "I wish the "me" at 19 could see me now and say 'look! this is you! you are reading FROM YOUR OWN BOOK in a radical bookstore, a reading attended by all these other writers you admire.'" That's how I felt in Kembra's apartment. I felt like time-traveling to my alienated teen self in Wyoming, so lonely and angry and sloughed off but still dreaming about the world around me, knowing it must have a wider range than "home on the range," and telling my young self, "Don't cry now, you'll get there." (I would probably also tell myself to lay off the herb and go to college, but now I'm just being maternal.)

There, incidentally, was standing between a human-sized stuffed shark puppet and a giant upside down crucifix. Totally awesome.

Larry walked us back to our car, talked UK riot grrl and we explained to him the definition of gender radicalism, and lamented the use of the words "gay" and "fag" as "cool slang," and the subjectivity of reclamative language. He said whenever someone uses the word "queer," he grates, because for him in in high school it was an epithet in the vein of: "Fuck you queer I'm gonna kill you."

Larry lived in a squat on Ave C in '68. Buy his autobiography when it comes out. Meanwhile i will stay in the internet age and superglue my eyestrings to the computer's face.

there is only love,
sheptronica

Barring sleet/fire/snow/last-minute meetings i must take--warning: there is a 97% chance of one these things occurring--I will in fact be reading and performing a new feminist time-based piece on the two tiniest-town dates of the Al Burian/ Jessica Hopper summer reading tour.

Pride Up Head Down is a semi-autobiographical dance/reading performance about isolation, fistfighting, real-life heartbreak, real-life murder/suicide, the circular battlefield of redemption as attainable idea, using yr bloody nubby finger stubs to climb the fuck out of a mental sewage plant, early 20th century Mexican immigration and America's iron-fisted assimilation tactic of cultural shame, bad education and disinformation, sitting in a gutter, and re-imagining an ending where everyone wins. Okay I will uprock!

July 19th: Providence, RI @ Dirt Palace Feminist Art Space - 7:30 pm
July 20th: Easthampton, MA - Flywheel Community Arts - 8 pm (2 Holyoke St)
w/ Sara Jaffe

I have never been to providence but it is my sixth or seventh favorite song on "daydream nation" ("eliminator jr" is the first). i have never been to easthampton but have spent a great deal of time in northampton and amherst, which i imagine share similar terrain. i hope i can come see you!

Jona is posting flickr photos of his European tour with Luckey Dragons, Devendra Banhart, Electrelane (a band which features HIT IT OR QUIT IT #18 contributor MIA CLARKE), C*** Ros**, Sonic Youth, Joanna Newsom, Wolf Eyes and other of America's modern-day Jodorowsky ensemble cast, including Rahzel (the human beatbox and sixth or seventh wonder of the world--seen here posing with Jona, who is WEARING ORANGE PLASTIC WAYFARERS AND A CROCHETED FAKE BEARD). It is idyllic like you are there, getting wide-angle perspectives on cartoony Eurocandy and store signs in slightly non sequitur English (I understand the impulse, papi chulo, I named my blog after a thrift store in Berlin). Also here peep Jona trying to "act normal... act normal" while posing with Shirley Manson of Garbage. Ha! Ha! And you get to see Devendra driving a boat and wearing NO SHIRT but TONS OF EYELINER.

PS. That last photo reminds me of this great artist I used to date who got purposely bad tattoos as a living performance art. As I recall, he had a misproportioned tattoo of Texas on his chest, a heart with a misspelled word (sorry, I can't remember what it said, something like "MOM FORVER"), an india ink-and-needle (aka "prison") tattoo on his knuckles that said something like "KOBRA," some awful line drawing of like, a UFO dropping bombs up and down his arm, and like, a crucifix on his palm. It was terrific and made me laugh although it was also very lonely act--He presented it as a series of permanent visual body gags, but anyone unaware of his intention to art/humor would react with the same pity or sympathy they'd reserve for you know, a three-legged chihuahua.

Anyway here is the video for the song Jona said was a Dutch summer jam, the song "Watskeburt?!" by De Jeugd van Tegenwoordig, who are deemed on the site as "Hiphoppers uit Amsterdam," but is more like three dudes chatting while driving a Techno Mini. Note "fa shizzle" lyric in first verse (woo American pop culture global export woo) and what sounds like the wobbly bending of dutch to approximate new yorky/ eminem-ish accent, or rather something in between. The beat is kinda fresh but the language barrier is bumming me out. Why the FUCK dont' I know Dutch?!

As I told K the other night, so much for pocos pero locos! This is a great piece. You know that whole "Mexican hip-hop takes over" thing? Um, yeah. Anglo crossover? Cultural mingling? The key, as always: songs about ass. At parties and in the marketplace, CULO traverses all borders.

Well, some of them, anyway.

Houston what's up with you?

(p.s.check the photo on ahorre.com, "the Hispanic marketing site." VERY interesting!)

reading this great old interview with my favorite Marxist theologian/ Punk Planet dun Joel Schalit (now headmaster at tikkun) and if you ignore the overblown intro/annoying conspiratorial questions from the interviewer, you get to the point where Joel, off the cuff, states the following:

"America has a very strong egalitarian ethos, despite being anything resembling an egalitarian state, and there are certain discursive prohibitions upon discriminating and persecuting people on the grounds of class. So Americans are encouraged to find ways to disguise economic discrimination by being given religious frameworks through which to carry on the act of class warfare without having to say so. Religion, at its core, is always about class. And yet it is in absolute denial that it possesses any economic meaning whatsoever."

Tres interressant. The interview's from 2002 but apply it to now and see what you get. Joel is a mind tiger.

Mssr. J. Kun has posted mp3s from a record called "Electric Latin Love Machine," woo woo, and if you listen to "Samba de Victoria" you might be convinced Richard Hayman is acid house's lost great-uncle, on a record dating back to--what year is it? Hey, the scholar isn't telling!

Secondly, Lance Chess--a scholar of the streets--sends a great link detailing how, legally, Krack "not-so-invincible" Rove could be pegged for 500 years (if anyone actually does anything about it) based on the Jonathan Randel precedent set in 2002. AWESOME!

p.s. I like Sad Ass Stripah. Partly my autobiographical fascination with fistfights, partly my empirical curiosity for tracks about them (READ ABOUT IT IN HIT IT OR QUIT IT #18!), which are almost always fueled by "get off my man, bitch" territorial authority--but are particularly more intriguing when they involve crews and turf and aggression and loyalty--tho that was the great failure of one of the best lady-beef movies, mi vida loca; realistically they would've been fighting over girl-gang superiority, ownership over the block, not the same dude Ernesto who knocked up two chicas--but I DIGRESS! IT IS 5 AM AND I AM WRITING AND WATCHING RERUNS OF THE PARENT 'HOOD! USHER IS A GUEST ON THIS EPISODE!

I like "Sad Ass Stripah," the simplicity and precision of its attack on Jentina's legitimacy and freshness, no Brooke Valentine tropesville (o how that song is tar on the shoe-soul of my girlfight trax list), and she never really calls her a ho. Sure, it's average battle-rap traffic, but you know. the sun is coming up, my capacity for articulation and complex thought has been supplanted with the vision of hot young Usher in a black tee and a skully singing "You make me wanna" OK GO AHEAD!
As much as I love Omarion "TOUCH" IS MY JAM--HAVE YOU READ THE BOOK about BEEF2K?!, the humility (or not-yet planet-sized ego) of a young Usher will always be fodder for a flutter.

Number of attendees shorter than Lady Sovereign: 0
Articles currently being written about Lady Sovereign's expressed midgethood as purely gestural: 3 or 4
Best dancer: Nick Sylvester
Amount of Lady Sov "as Feminem!" production I don't like all that much: "9 to 5"
Percentage "9 to 5" grew on me after I watched the video: 94,000%
That one song that sounded like Fannypack: 1
Amount of sub-bass I think should be upped in every song ever made: 99%
Percentage of how punk fucking rock it was that Lady Sov exited the show with hand over mouth going "I have to barf": 92%
Amount of bloggers blogging the amount of bloggers in attendance: 2992992299292
Amount of bloggers blogging about the bloggers in attendance, who totally forgot to link to Gabe T: 29929992292992
Swedish hip-hop websites that are offering compilations for a nominal fee: www.desofo.com/music
I think I was talking through most of the "Hollaback Girl" freestyle: Jesus, woman
But I think it was a semi-serious conversation: okay...
I think I couldn't even see the stage anyway: fine!
Amount of times Sov had to restart "Random" because the CD player skipped: like, 3
How much more we love Sov now: 1 million percent

Thoughts on Select Tracks of Disc One of the PDX Pop Now! Comp 2005, in real time:

* The Minders' plan, to undercut themselves before the haters can, is especially disarming on harmonic thirds. The tune is measured, the vox reigned in, but I can see them pounding 17 Pabsts each at a bar in SE Portland after they shut down the four-track.

* On this song by The Blow, she doesn't feign sex in her voice like some electro-vampers on that deep dish glitch (someone's been listening to grimetrax?) but she's proprietor of a literary, kinda Erica Jong ish you might miss if you pay yr whole libido to the sub-bass.

* You don't know Nice Nice. "Uh-Oh" is what I think they do best--stutturing robo-dub w/megaphones--and I think you are sleeping because you haven't seen them live. Also Jace Clayton-approved, so what do you think?

* Please Step Out of the Vehicle does not sound like Bratmobile even if you think they're going to 'cause of the primitive tom/surf intro. It's more like well the slackermeister boybands from the mid-'90s Merge catalogue. Butterglory? Politely angsting and lumbering for about a minute-twenty.

* He doesn't sing about it in this song ("Evil Falls") I don't think, but Emil from Holy Sons was Minding the Store before Pauly Shore ever even thought about making a reality show about it. Emil totally worked the door at Pauly's mom's comedy club in LA like, 7 years ago and has some good stories about Pauly, chicks and weed. Anyway I think we know which one has the talent in this scenario. (Hint: IT IS THE ONE WITH THE VOICE LIKE A FRESH PIECE OF CILANTRO TICKLING THE NUB OF YOUR NOSE.)

* Yacht: HOMEY! Track is called "Daydreams with Daffodils (the Stepperz Remix)" but the "Z" in "stepperz" connotes its total dissociation w/Chicago, other than a kinda 8-bit glitch-malfunction cover of R Kelly's "Ladies Night," and the fact that stepping to it is basically impossible.

* I sometimes think Glass Candy exists solely to piss people off. "Lovin Machine" is a good example: a distant electro track that kind of bored-postures, in one handclapped place, shifting only to stamp out a cigarette, for seven minutes. But wait! Ida No is actually singing the lyrics to "Iko Iko"! Leave it to GC to turn a once-political song into a vamping yet completely distracted fuckathon.

* PERSONAL NOTE: From 2000-2001 I was in a band with 2/3 of 31 Knots called "Is This OK?" (It was my band and I named it thankuvmuch.) It was me on guitar & vox, Joe on drums and vox and Jay W. on bass. After our first show, my friend Brad Adkins told me in that cynical smacker tone of his, "It's like 31 Knots, but with a girl." What a dick! I would never write a lyric like "Cavalier of arms, I covet thee!" That is pure Joe, a man who collects antique statuettes of Roman gods and spent an entire summer dressing like he was on a minor league baseball team in 1936. (But then I am the woman who named our subsequent band "The Ghosts of Women Who Haunt Cliffs" and totally ripped off Satoko Fujii.)

* If Is This OK? was the chick 31 Knots, Alan Singley is the boy Mirah--his voice can do that real swoopy dippity-do it dipthong whatever you call it, a pretty tumbler slide from note-to-note, and make it sound swoony not strained. Sample lyric: "We're just passing around the guitar singing country songs and the place is jumpin'!" ?? Campfires are not normally what I would characterize as "jumpin" but I lead a charmed life and this song is called "These Trees are for Resting."

And as for Spooky Dance Band, "Chemical Reaction"--I owe more than this. It's transcendant and it is devastating and it's been two years and hearing Orion's voice again is breaking my fucking heart.
Miss, love, thinking about you. I will write more again.

Connie is my full-time homegirl and co-slangspirator (she is the origin of both "B'Dang" and "Beyonce'd.") Her interest in punk rock is super casj, aside from a semi-regular shakedown to Brody Dalle's The Distillers.

So she calls last night. "I went with Funk to this super exclusive all-day concert in West Linn. It was being filmed by this guy Brendan, I guess he's the drummer of Fugazi."

Funk, that's Chris Funk, our friend who has garnered some national notoriety for playing in the rock band "The Decemberists," and slightly less national notoriety for DJing the biannual B'DANG parties at Connie's and my old house.

But you mean Brendan Canty?

"I don't know, he makes some DVD where he has a bunch of bands play in a house, and films it, and then they burn the house down."

Fucking a. Who played?

"I don't know, I didn't even care, god I'm in such a bad mood. I went to represent for the camp. You know, it was the usual Portland people. Sleater-Kinney, Modest Mouse, I went with Funk cause the decemberists played a song. Lifesavas, The Thermals, The Planet The, Tom Heinl. I just hung out eating catering and watched bands play one song to ten people all day long. Then they burned the house down."

THEY BURNED DOWN A F'ING HOUSE?

"Yeah."

What are you doing now?

"I don't know, Shines and Jumbo and some people from the Warped Tour are coming over in a Winnebago. God, I'm in such a bad mood."

i am ovaries-deep in work but I want to ask you a question: I went to the Park Slope Pavilion & saw this movie Dark Water (aka The Ring: Outtakes) perhaps you have heard of it, starring famous Park Slopana Jennifer Connolly, who votes at the same jr. high school as I do, but surely lives in a much nicer apartment. So anywz, the film is not so scary, but like other Koji Suzuki scripts, the idea of unfulfilled motherly duty jet-fuels its fear factor. My question is this: does mother-seperation/abandonment paranoia fit into a specifically Japanese, national culture-matrix like the badracula post-apocalyptic teen slasher flix and gruesome tales of crazed vengeful dominatrixes? (Linked are my two faves.)
OR!
Is this simply lurking in the mind of Koji Suzuki and I should maybe give him the number of my thurrapist? (Miya Yoshiko, pls come to the front of the class; I think you just answered my question.)

Anyway say something pls and I will do some research and write on it here, after I am done with the crazy amt of craziness I am currently arm-wrestling.

Couple weeks ago I asked for peoples' tales about the last time they were in a fistfight. Perhaps cause no one fistfights (good on ya) or perhaps because no one's dying to display their stories of defeat!, but the only people I know who took me up on my offer were my best friend Jessica, because she is my best friend---and, ironically, Cali, the lovely Cali, now and forever a gentle fawn in hot pink briefs. The man whose extremely involved workout/smoking routine I aspire to emulate. Here is Cali's tale of final mortal kombat, in beautimous detail:

hiya shep,
teenage fisticuffs were plentiful for me. i was full grown at twelve AND the only punker in 8th / 9th grade. My GF, Barbara Bean, was the only goth in the whole city.

i was so insulted! im no nazi! i listen to conflict!
anyway, i got suspended for like two days.
that's it.
xoxo

Still love you, to all mi Missy-loving comrades: I thought I would change my mind. But after compare/contrasting and realizing this Missy Elliott album is still the self-same missy elliott album I heard three months ago in a godforsaken (yet heavily sandwich'd) listening session, barring a couple guest spots, full songs ("My Struggles," "Can't Stop"), and the H-town kow-tow track "Click Clack"--

I fully stand behind my initial "hokay" and casual enthusiasm about an album I should, in theory be falling off my badonkey-donk over, what with its explicitly feminista expressions ("Mommy"), its heart wringing confessional ("My Struggles") and the presence of both Grand Puba and Fantasia Barrino. (And Vybz Kartel.) I do admit, the beats for "Joy" (Tim) and "On and On" (Pharrell) = netherworldly; I like that Mary J. raps; my favorite Missy song is a ballad, technically ("Nothing Out there for Me") and my favorite Angie Stone song of last year was written by Missy Elliott. I feel The Cookbook's vaguely floundering, "Common Sense Spitkicker tour 2000"-style "I am going to traverse through the popular genres of today" thing doesn't work for me with Missy like it does for MIA, because Missy has already innovated being freaky space lady, swing & sass & hungry on the come up--and also, the lyrics, they're not so hot. But to paraphrase Chris "all up in mediabistro.com's revolving door" Ryan, I don't want to love music INFUCKINGTHEORY. I want it to blow up in my heart like an angioplasty. I want it to feel like a fix.

Bee Minus!

* Dancing with myself is how I find my center. My favorite state of being, the cubbyhole with no reigns, living completely inside the music, sensorless but drawn on by the beat. I would make a terrific back-up dancer. A better back-up dancer than television anchorperson. So I dropped off my people at their cribs after dinner and walked to Southpaw, the Rub 'at is, because it is near to my house and i needed to let go of the grip. PS I think one of you hybrid mash-up dudes should do "Bizarre Love Triangle" with "Nolia Clap," if that is not too like 29 yrs ago. It would sound hot, the handclaps in BLT are the floater mini-friends of the ones in NC; they'll work if you screw em. Those are both records DJ Eleven killed, but he did not put them together and I do not know why.
love,
nerdfest.

* Right now my dream job is "person who writes the video summary captions for Blastro.com." Id est: "Juelz Santana is teaching the class on how to use the mic." "Ying Yang Twins are popping the champagne with dozens of scantily clad beautiful ladies." "It's a gloomy rainy day, but that does not stop Avery from thanking the Lord." So succinct! So understated! Such gently lilting haikus! I sent them a fan mail.

* Bedtime at 3 am, what with this newfangled writer-all-the-time-style means that not only am I totally going 2-3-4-5-6 or 7-11 days without actually seeing anyone in the flesh, so that when I go to the video store I practically stick my tongue into the video dude's ear I am so happy to see a person of my age with a vague understanding of my artistic interests, even though he is only talking to me because I am renting Lars von Trier's medea (and then only purely for research), and because he is so deadeye-obsessed with Miranda July I am afraid to even tell him her blog address--

this sleep-schedule shift also means I get to phone my late-night friends on the westside. Tonight the lucky recipient of my walk-home phone call was my friend Chantelle, a booker at a major venue in Portland, OR; she is basically the den mother of Portland, everyone wants something from her, but somehow she manages to dole out the dates without cracking up, even though people like accost her mid-dinner, hands outstretched and imploring/demanding about the potentiality of their band scoring that much-coveted gig opening for Will Oldham and the Freewheels of Steel. People: pls do not accost Chantelle about your show when she is obviously having dinner at a restaurant with a friend. (At least wait until after the first course.) Let's talk more about the behind-the-scene unthanked duty of the club booker: she is the one who shouldered the shit when the band Hood's tour dowry got thefted from the downtown, she is the one who fulfills the hummous and Mineralwasser riders for one-time Captain Beefheart/PJ Harvey guitar techs with OTT guarantees playing Monday night shows, she is the one who, on this particular evening, was scouring for herb; the roots reggae group performing felt they hadn't been offered enough "hospitality" and straight refused to go on until their herbal neglect was remedied with some of that UNFUCKWITHABLE OREGON KIND. Chantelle'd already offered an eighth of a bag but it had been smoked up, in its entirety, by their horn section. "I have to go," she giggled, "I have to score some dope." She called back at like 6 am EST, left a message.

Sandra Day O'Connor has resigned from the Supreme Court. A woman's right to choose, among other important civil liberties, is in jeopardy. Another appointment will be made by Tuesday. Here is a list of things you can do now.

It's Spike Lee-movie hot again but our new air conditioner, handed down from the same friends who gave us the TV, actually puts me in a somewhat less comfortable state. My most pungent air conditioner memories involve exes and cheap hotels; the least contentious tale is about Ezra and I, on our ill-planned but idyllic road trip through the American South, when we pulled into Baton Rouge as a serial killer stalked through the LSU campus, raping and stabbing his female victims. We checked into the Vacation Inn and posted up at an old style, walk-up Dairy Queen near a swamp, dripping vanilla soft serve down our hands and onto a picnic table; the dining area was in the open air and perpendicular to those peculiar driftwood markers that jut out from water in Louisiana like suspended-motion alligators, and I kept imagining the killer sneaking out from behind the trees--maybe it's because of the movies, but there is something about swamps that inspire a teetering in your own safety.

The "concierge" back at the Vacation Inn warned us to lock both our locks because the serial killer was still loose. We cinched the deadbolts, showered off the heat, and discovered the only thing worse than the stale-pool oxygen of an air conditioner is that and cheap sheets. I couldn't sleep; even in the comfort of Ezra's wondrous strength and baseball reflexes, my killer dreams sat low as swamp light. It was also the summer of Elizabeth Smart, the papers screaming about baby girls gone for naught, and my OCD had manifested itself in a decidedly unhealthy missing persons fixation. In a year when a lot of people left me, I was desperate to know how anyone so loved could simply vanish.

So it's the humid stick that I like, not so much the artificial coddling of the cool air box. So at 1 am, hot and wanting a smoke and with slightly more than $.54 in my skirt pocket, I hoofed up Vanderbilt to Ft. Greene, passing other sweaty people, cop cars, taxi cabs and a mirrored vanity discarded on the corner a block from my building. Up the way to Ebenezer's, who promised a cigarette even though I quit and some company and some compare/contrast about our collective summer dates from Columbia, the university. But he didn't tell me about the dance party, population: three. I slid through the door and up the steps into a closed circuit moment of spazz, where no one felt too self conscious to flip their shit. We danced to English Beat and Slits 7-inches and popped our lungs singing to "Tainted Love," the original version by Gloria Jones, shadowing the heart-wrenched wails of a woman on the verge--and The Police and Neil Young and Neil Diamond, James Chance, Soho "Hot Music," oh god, Bad Brains, Biz Markie, Kurtis Blow "The Breaks." I took photos of records I wanted to remember with my phone. Siouxsie and the Banshees picture disc. Sly and the Family Stone. I felt spiral-eyed with desire: Play another. Play another. Play another. I could listen to "Hot Music" and The Slits, only, forever, now, the moment without rule. Where is the repeat button.

Eben and I interpretive-modern-danced to the floor, intertwined in mock-fight like statuettes, me making wave motions to his feet with my fingers and the right side of his body slightly twitching. I left with Young Marble Giants on the stereo, but that is not a commentary on how I feel about their music.

At three a.m., on the walk back home, feeling safe but also imagining I was probably being reckless, I saw a man who'd tried to take the free vanity, but was instead struggling to free himself. His shorts had snagged on the mirror's beveled edge and he was nigh depantsed, grunting, possibly high. Got an eyeful of white Hanes before I made it back to my own stoop.