OOOH… ON THE J.E.S TIP

* In “The Last Days of Lisa Left Eye Lopes,” Left Eye speaks on “Creep,” how she was against releasing the song as a single because she felt it promoted negative behavior: “If a woman’s man is cheating on her, instead of telling her to cheat back, why don’t we just tell her to leave?!” Said she almost wore black tape over her mouth in the video. Foreshadowing. The last time I heard a multiplatinum selling artist talk about the consequences of what you speak and weighing social responsibility was approximately last Nevuary. Or I Cant Rememberuary. Love forever to Ms. Lopes. RIP. Watch it, even if you dont have TV or hate TV, find a way to watch it. She was complicated – greater, fuller than we even imagined. Human – a cutter, it is revealed. Her heart fierce and true.
* The June issue of Monocle has a good cover story on how cell phone / ringtone sales are floating the South Korean music industry and how Korean pop musicians see the major phone company SK Telecom as important as any record label, because it actually gets them paid. I would quote it / elaborate but I left the mag in the black plastic bag, which Chantelle has, which she’s babysitting since our tour of New York City’s finest Lower East Side bars, which started out classy – the spot where the Egyptian owner spotted us with complimentary cantaloupe hookahs cause he felt my magic tattoo and thought I might be Egyptian, too, and we broke it down on the udjat and 5000 years of cultural history – and ended up assy, in its last logical endpoint, NYU undergrad’s grimest/hottest barfing-lounge, the Odessa. The Odessa is the kind of place you don’t want to be when they turn on the lights. The Odessa was a conduit for us landing somewhere (somewhere!) with an ensemble of Mexican skater/DJs and a cool girl in a Poison T-shirt in Bushwick at 7:30 in the morning, wondering, “where is the subway,” wandering, “where is the subway,” thinking we would maybe just keep walking east, all the way until we landed into the ocean. That we would step into the cool dip and float across the Atlantic and land in Morocco and no one would ever know. But no, the hot rumble of the train felt fleet beneath our feet, eventually, and we followed its tracks and found homes. Follow the tracks, a good way to find where you’re going is to follow the tracks.