Project Kill Nazi Redemption

Before seeing Quentin Tarantino's alternate World War II story, Inglorious Basterds, I reflected on a few Nazi killing fantasies that have impressed the world's imagination in the past couple decades. The most brilliant I believe is the computer game, Wolfenstein 3d, created by id software initially just for Windows in 1992. Wolfenstein started the 1st person shooter genre in the gaming industry that has now become a multi-billion dollar industry in itself.

As a young Jewish boy growing up in Los Angeles, I was already familiar with playing video games glorifying violence. But I distinctly remember the irreproachable morality of playing Wolfenstein. In other words, my mother did not seem to feel any guilt allowing me to play it. And we offered the game as gifts for the birthdays of many other Jewish boys during my elementary years.

In this alternate world, I took on the avatar of a Polish, perhaps even Jewish soldier, attempting to escape a labyrinthian Nazi castle, killing the bastards along my way. In fact, little did I know that I would eventually be the Rambo-like agent overthrowing the entire Nazi regime, assassinating Hitler -- the final boss. I mean what foresight in 1992, Hitler as the final boss of a shoot 'em up video game. And I killed that mother fucker over and over again.

The dream of reimagining more redemptive ends to World War II run deep in the American collective consciousness. And that ferocious fantasy is exactly what Tarantino taps in Inglorious Basterds. *(Spoiler) The concept of annihilating the most powerful Nazi heads -- including that of Hitler -- within an occupied Paris cinema is Tarrantino's brilliant representation of such a revenge fantasy. While the Nazis watch a self-congratulatory spectacle of their own feats, at least three separate groups of conspirators successfully plot their deaths and thus the end of the war.

The fantastical demise of the Nazis within the French cinema is ultimately the brilliant concept that holds the film together. The cinema -- as repository of chimeras, alternate realities, and the realizations of our most unimaginable dreams -- is the magical setting of this revenge. Perhaps the cinema is the contemporary symbol most capable of vindicating us from our traumatic histories and horrific truths, at least for those sublime moments of experiencing catharsis. And within this particular Parisian cinema, we can obliterate the masturbatory spectacles of Goebbels' Nazi film making with the dramatically explosive, Jewish fueled cinema of modern day America.

And as if burning, shooting, and blowing up all the head Nazis wasn't enough, we also get to dream revenge in the shape of carving a swastika into Hans Landa's head. The act, I know, may seem too ethically abrasive for a Jew. Although if you've ever studied Passover, then you know that atrocities from 4000 years ago still irk us. Ultimately, the swastika carving points out that the identity and moral implications of Nazism goes beyond the typical episodic nature of warring parties. Once the war is over, a Nazi should not so easily shake his or her affiliations with the machine.


So, it seems we've entered a new stage of viewing WW II. One where we rewrite the history and satisfy our inflicted guilt and anxieties, as the last horizon of people holding real memories of the events die off. The said truths shall become legend and in legend we can invent myth.

Unfortunately I could not find a copy of Wolfenstein 3d for Mac OS x as I did want to revisit some of my childhood simulations of Nazi killing catharsis. However, my good friend Adia did draw my attention to a promo "Bear Jew" game posted on Eli Roth's myspace page. I suppose I'm not so far off associating the Wolf with Inglorious.

Intoxicated Rhythms

I wrote a couple drug related music lists for the Guardian. Despite the possible implications of my finding drug use as particularly inspirational, I'd prefer to side with Ice T in his Curtis Mayfield "Pusherman" flip. Music can get you high! Oh the cliche, but what can you do when it's true?

I'm looking to expand these two lists, the first regarding albums made by musicians while under the influence and the second, songs about love interests that are really about drugs. So give me your suggestions!




Albums Recorded By Intoxicated Musicians

I had considerable difficulty in compiling a top ten list of albums recorded by musicians while under the influence. An almost mythological speculation inundates the many so-assumed drug inspired recordings, especially those of the psychedelic 60’s. But most artists do not care to divulge their less than sober stories, or do not quite seem to remember them. For these reasons, I admit my own suspicion of the following list’s indelible accuracy despite my late nights of fuzzy research. I thus advise the reader to measure these drugged-out recordings with the highest dose of skepticism.

Ash Ra Tempel and Timothy Leary — Seven Up (Kosmiche Kuriere, 1973)

While recording, members drink a 7-Up can laced with LSD.

Dr. Dre — The Chronic (Priority, 1992)

The much-imitated and never duplicated source of blunted funk rap.

David Bowie — Station to Station (RCA, 1976)

On a cocaine trip to new-wave space.

Sly and the Family Stone — There's A Riot Goin' On (Epic, 1971)

Famously recorded in Sly's Bel Air drug mansion.

Leak Bro's — Waterworlds (Eastern Conference, 2004)

Get wet with these rhymers on a PCP holiday.

Quasimoto — The Unseen (Stones Throw, 2000)

Madlib gets wicked with psilocybin mushrooms and a voice modulator.

DJ Screw — 3 N' The Mornin' Pt. 1 (Bigtyme, 1995)

The originator of purple drank (codeine, promethazine, alcohol).

The Cure — Pornography (A&M, 1982)

A dark journey into LSD, cocaine, and alcohol.

Pink Floyd — The Piper at The Gates of Dawn (EMI Columbia, 1967)

This Syd Barrett acid trip will keep you away from drugs forever.


Songs About Love Interests That Are Really About Drugs

I noticed a revealing trend in songs about love interests that are really about drugs. Men enjoy personifying their drug of choice as alluring or mischievous women. Female artists tend to just sing about the drug -- or sometimes mind melting, clouded narratives about white rabbits a la Grace Slick. Despite this disappointing limitation I tried to create a well balanced list by defining love interest in the broadest sense possible. I mean, this is all the many layers of interpretation anyway.

Rick James — "Mary Jane" (Motown, 1985)

Marijuana's classic cut just to get your feet wet.

The Beatles — "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" (Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, Capitol, 1967)

Heavily debated, but really, is this not about LSD?

Laid Back — "White Horse" (Sire, 1967)

Don't ride heroin, but get up on that white pony!

E-40 — "White Gurl" (My Ghetto Report Card, Reprise, 2006)

Another Yay Area cocaine anthem.

Paper Route Gangstaz — "Keyshia Cole" (Fear and Loathing in Hunts Vegas, Mad Decent, 2008)

Tribute to the Oakland-based singer -- and potent brand of herb.

Don Cherry — "Brown Rice" (Don Cherry, Horizon, 1975)

Oh, seductive golden brown of heroin!

Cab Calloway — "Minnie The Moocher" (Brunswick, 1931)

Save your wallet and stay away from Minnie, that drug fiend inside you!

Steely Dan — "Doctor Wu" (Katy Lied, ABC, 1975)

A tad colonial, but still an insightful meditation on the opiate trade.

New Layout

I made the layout simpler to accommodate my recent abundance of writing. I feel that even though the page might not look quite as stunning, its easier on the eyes for reading. To my loyal readers, what do you think?!

Vacations and Gaslamp Killer

Hey blog world! I've been on vacation up through Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver and then back down the coast to San Francisco. I have some great Vancouver graffiti pics and also a few little timber towns I'd like to write on. But until then, I'll try to satiate my five readers with a piece I wrote on The Gaslamp Killer for the Guardian. It's been my most thought out article yet on music, and I'm quite proud of it, even though somehow along the copy editing way someone got rid of one of my periods and two sentences train wreck! But really, who the hell cares?

I wrote about Gaslamp the first time I saw him DJ at Minna in SF. And I've come to associate Foucault's writing on limit experiences with Gaslamp's turntable performances. A limit experience is the pushing of the self to the limits of its familiar understanding so that the experience itself deforms, mutates, and transforms the self as a result. Foucault reads the notion in the works of Nietzsche and Bataille. It does not have to be quite as disruptive as Gaslamp's performances, which are charged with aggression and loudness; but the effect is always disruptive, jarring, but restorative. In fact the limit experience can be a simple daily exercise, reading a book without preconceptions, training a heightened awareness of one's surroundings so as to develop a less rigid source of knowledge. Anyway, the limit experience is a fascinating concept in Foucault, which he only briefly touches on in a few places a couple years before his death. Here's GLK.


Music can teleport you to far-off lands and spark nostalgia for distant times. It might elicit lost memories or even summon illusions. You may have never visited Istanbul or São Paulo or lived in the 1960s, but music infects the imagination with a visceral experience of the unknown. The effect is uncanny, mesmerizing, beautiful, and even therapeutic.

But what happens when music pushes its ability to displace to an extreme? When music annihilates your familiar sense of space and warp holes your usual expectations of time? Can listening to music transform you? Los Angeles-based beatsmith and DJ the Gaslamp Killer certainly thinks so. "The music I'm looking for is the stuff that will cut through your brain and just make you feel ... almost overwhelmed," Gaslamp slowly explains. Whether arranging cosmic abyss mixtapes like I Spit On Your Grave (Obey, 2008) or crafting his own twisted productions, including his just-released debut solo EP My Troubled Mind (Brainfeeder), Gaslamp displays a developing genius for charting hallucinatory odysseys into vertigo. His haunted, cinematic music unhinges the listener, approaching a surreal dissociation and restoration of the self.

William Benjamin Bensussen didn't identify as the Gaslamp Killer until some time after moving to Los Angeles three years back. He grew up in another troubled Southern California paradise cloaked in its own rusted mythology: San Diego. There, a restless Bensussen was already broadening his musical horizons in the fifth grade, listening to Too Short, Jimmy Hendrix, and Dre. A few years later he attempted to satiate his curious, nearly frantic energy by freestyle dancing at raves and in b-boy circles — to electronic and hip-hop music respectively. But it was DJ Shadow who bridged those fractured worlds for Bensussen and ignited a desire to dig into jazz, funk, and psychedelic crates. "I started on this frenzy trying to find all the originals. And then I realized that Shadow had sampled half of his stuff, and he wasn't as much of a genius as I thought he was," Gaslamp recalls, laughing. "That's when I started looking for older records and thinking, well, maybe I could do this."

Bensussen's dark nom de plume is a bittersweet tribute to his unlikely origins. As a 19-year-old college dropout, he flipped wax in San Diego's glittery Gaslamp District to a sometimes hostile crowd. Bensussen remembers bitterly a particular confrontation with a vindictive listener. A strikingly beautiful woman — who intimidated the then-teenage DJ — queried him angrily why he wanted to ruin her time with his fucked up music. Why? Dumbfounded, wounded, and angry, Bensussen drew sadistic nourishment from the provocation. It helped inspire his first mixtape project, the circa-2000 Gaslamp Killers, a lo-fi guzzling of psychotic drums and horror sonic bits. Recently, Bensussen decided to rename himself in light of this original labor of love.

Gaslamp has yet to settle down. He helped found L.A.'s monolithic weekly showcase for uncut beat-driven tracks, the Low End Theory, in the fall of 2006. And he's secured a close affiliation with Flying Lotus' bubbling imprint, Brainfeeder. But Bensussen's troubled mind still wanders, like his music and his words, in perpetual hunger for the rawness of life. "[My music] comes from more of a vicious area," Gaslamp explains, searching for the right words. "Not angry, just passion — but a passion that can't be sugar-coated."

This unmediated passion takes Gaslamp into many dangerous and strangely ethereal caverns. It also jettisons him to the homes of foreign musicians marked by the same shattered pathos. My Troubled Mind gathers its influences from all over the globe — Turkey, India, Russia, Mexico, Germany, and Italy. But the way Gaslamp employs samples from these regions defies their idiosyncratic place of origin. He has a rare skill for extracting universal otherworldliness from regional sounds. And he implements their fiercely destructive yet uplifting spirituality into his mind-melting compositions. His music and DJ sets become performances, elusive experiences leaving you charred and fiending for more of their ineffable allure. "I'm glad people can't describe it," Gaslamp says, nearly yelling into the speakerphone. "Once they are able to describe it, that's when they chew it up, spit it out, and leave it behind. The more indescribable and amazing it is, the more you'll hold on to your people, your listeners."