CROOKS AND GRANNIES

Rerouting Writing

2010-02-02T17:39:00.000-08:00

Hell crooks and grannies friends! For the time being, I've rerouted my writings to two virtual locations.

The Hydra Magazine: I started an online magazine / blog for both my self-published works and those of the Hydra collective.

Digital Deliverance: For my published works, I started a tumblr account (mad cleaner content).

If you were wondering, Granny Wesson and Cyrus the Humble are napping. They will return in the near future!

Show Review: Gil Scott-Heron Today

2009-10-06T20:42:00.000-07:00

I tried to curb my anticipation for Gil Scott-Heron’s performance at the recently made over Regency Ballroom last Friday. But how could I? I wanted him to amaze, to enrapture with his musical poetics, and most secretly, to redeem my nebulous view of a 70s era, politicized soulfulness unrivaled by today’s musicianship. It’s an idealistic and surely ridiculous image we children of the 80s have learned of the decade before ours. But it’s one so ingrained and endlessly reminded that we can’t seem to shake it free.

While Los Angeles revival funk band Orgone grooved (peep their solid cover of “Funky Nassau”), singer Fanny Franklin expressed an equal excitement about bearing witness to the legend. And when Scott-Heron finally stepped onto stage, strutting choppily to the microphone, the audience erupted in wailing applause and shouts. He looked older and moved with certain difficulty, his body appearing thin underneath his loose fitting clothes. His face was angular and gaunt with patches of gray hair pouring from the sides of his hat and from his chin. A lady sitting in front of me asked incredulously if that old man indeed was Gil. I nodded with certainty but really had no idea. After all, he’s hardly recognizable compared to his younger self clad with the iconic afro and psychedelic garb. Today, it’s a rare occurrence to see Gil Scott-Heron. He has been in and out of prison for the past decade on drug and parole transgression charges. Some reports imply his suffering from being HIV positive, something Scott-Heron addressed perhaps indirectly when he told the Regency that a media frenzy on the internet continues to concoct all sorts of chimeras about his life.

Ebbing our immediate impressions, Scott-Heron opened with a consciously cheesy comedy routine where he got comfortable with the crowd. It reminded me of the legend’s simple humanity -- like a venerable uncle who still tells bad jokes at a family dinner. As soon as the routine verged on the unbearable, he transitioned into a monologue and solo song in tribute to Sister Fannie Lou Hamer. And when Scott-Heron’s voice boomed forth from his brittle body, everyone immediately felt his unparalleled soulfulness and brilliance. With age, Scott-Heron’s bright voice has gained a hoarse resonance, adding even more layers to his street inspired poetics and wisdom.

Gil Scott-Heron guided his soul-jazz outfit, the Amnesia Express, through some of the strongest moments of his catalogue. The band retained a decidedly solid hold on their expressionistic 70s earthliness but bent towards a lush, jazzy psychedelia. Although technically rusty and hiccuping occasionally with offbeat rhythms, it worked. Scott-Heron bellowed “We Almost Lost Detroit” to set the mood for a conflicted era shaped as much by violence as hope and love. He lamented today’s popular understanding of jazz as a sterile and passive musical style with a charging take on “Is That Jazz?” And in waxing poetic to introduce “Winter In America”, Scott-Heron pondered whether the season’s indifferent coldness might be revenge for us cherishing the other seasons more. A fifteen minute version of “The Bottle” -- sung in a dreamy, melancholic tone -- swept the climax. The performance swayed from lyrical musings to groove laden songs and improvised solos, each song extended into a prolonged and interwoven narrative.

Despite the real possibility of coming off trite, there was a remarkable sincerity to Gil Scott-Heron. His creative expression stemmed from life experience rather than a need to perform a spectacle and preach a message before a crowd. Song reflected life and life in turn was shaped and illuminated by song. For a moment I felt that magnitude of revolutionary spirit burning distant in another hazy generation. It was aged and hardened in one man’s beautiful, gravely voice, and filled the auditorium with its sweetness.

Seattle Slewing It

2009-09-23T23:04:00.000-07:00

Montreal-based turntablist and producer Kid Koala (born Eric San) is the type of artist you can expect to take some formidably playful risks. Known for his virtuoso skills scratching and mixing on the wheels of steel, back in 1996 he was the first musician in North America signed to the U.K.'s boundary-busting label Ninja Tunes. Arriving in the wake of a fantastic mixtape, San's debut hip-hop-jazz-funk crossover Carpal Tunnel Syndrome (Ninja Tunes, 2000), featured a video game and a surreal comic book he designed himself. For San, the creative impulse is dedicated to telling a compelling and unlikely story. Free for download at www.nufonia.com, The Slew's 100% — San's self-released fourth effort in collaboration with long time friend Dynomite D — continues this tradition.

San and Dynomite (born Dylan Frombach) had discussed collaborating on a full-length project ever since vibing together on a couple spacey jazz singles about a decade ago (peep their "Third World Lover"). Thus, when Frombach was enlisted by his cousin Jay Rowlands to produce the score for a feature documentary on elusive Seattle psych-rock recluse Jack Slew, he brought San along. That was four and a half years ago. The documentary has since fallen through, but the score evolved independently into a masterfully abrasive and chest-rumbling soundscape. "We wanted to do some Black Sabbath meets the Bomb Squad," San tells me, laughing.

Initially the loosely-defined "Black Squad" duo gathered concrete inspiration from Jack Slew's unreleased material — an ample body of work, thick with ferocious dusty breaks, bluesy vocals, and fuzzed-out riffs. Slew has a gravelly yet piercing voice that cuts right through the drums. He sings knowingly of freedom lost and the fragile sentiments of an ape trying to become a man. It's rich material that just begs for sampling. San and Frombach reassemble the parts to produce a fresh perspective on the dangerously free spirit of the outlaw. "We needed a car chase scene, and a jail break scene, and then we ran with it," says San. Indeed, the album roves widely and digs deep, concluding with the epic moral struggle of "A Battle of Heaven & Hell."

Despite a cinematic narrative akin to a rogue spaghetti western, The Slew nearly succumbs to the usual pitfalls faced by turntablist albums. In the aesthetic sphere of turntablism, the scratching and abrupt pattern changes can sound gluttonous and overtly technical, warping the sonic landscape into a show of narcissism. "On the one hand [100%] is super-psychedelic, loud, and banging," San explains. "On the other hand" — he laughs — "it's the most masochistic, purist turntable record I've ever made."

However, what saves the effort from sadism as well is that the Slew's hip-hop inspired pastiche takes cues from authentic recording techniques of early '70s rock. San and Frombach dove into their history books to study the methods for producing the screeching drums and sandblasted guitar riffs of that era. To really polish the coarsely hypnotic sound, they asked Mario Caldato Jr. — the engineering innovator behind the Beastie Boys' Paul's Boutique (Capitol, 1989) among others — to master the effort. The result is an interweaving of pummeling breaks and wa-wa guitar nastiness fractured by effects modulations and the emboldened seams of mixing and scratching. And it hits loud.

Koala and Dynomite originally entertained the idea of performing 100% live with 14 turntables. Fortunately, they scrapped that idea in favor of working with Chris Ross and Myles Heskett, the former rhythm section of Australia's the Wolfmothers. Ross and Heskett play bass guitars, drums, and organ while Kid Koala and mad scientist partner P-Love (Paolo Kapunan) handle six turntables. San had to build "bass-proof, shock-proof turntables" to face the monster loudness that will ensue on the Slew's two-and-a-half-week North American tour. "We bought spring-loaded tone arms and made custom vinyl to cue faster, so we can just drop the needle and go," he says. "We are going to just cut loose."

also published in SFBG

Confessions of a Download Junkie

2009-09-08T20:43:00.000-07:00

I did it again man. I got home from work and locked myself up in my room. I closed the blinds and locked the door with the dead bolt. Not that anyone in San Francisco really cares. Hell I saw some old guy doing it in a cafe last week. No shame. But it's still embarrassing for me. I just prefer to be alone when I do it alright?

Just me and the succulent adrenaline that it brings. Oh I love that rush of blood straight to my eyes, squeezing them big and painting them glossy. Sometimes I don't even mean for it to last more than a couple hours. But then I just keep on digging into the veins. There's all sorts of hidden ones, the virgin, untapped ones. Oh those beauties. No broken links, just pure life and gorgeousness ready for my assault. Begging for my hands to possess it and drink down its love.

If you can hit one of those cavernous forgotten ones, that's when the trip feels real nice. Beautiful. Sublime. A release. When I find those man, I can go for hours, I can go all night fucking long. I pass out for an hour or so as the sun rises, crippled on my chair with a bent back like the letter C. It's still glowing that bluish hue of electronics in my room. The computer is still humming along, ushering my own breath, as if saying it's all going to be OK. Yes computer, we'll make it through.

But I don't know if it will. I keep going back. I keep on wanting more. And more mother fucker I need it. Don't take it away from me. I feel gluttonous. I'm repulsive. This is all so disgusting. I mean at least it doesn't cost me anything. But all that time that I'm just sitting there, whisking my life away into the corrosive depths of blogspots and torrents. Waffles for breakfast and soulseek for dinner. Google blog searches for a snack -- snacks all the time. I mean they're just there to help me right. It's not like they want me to hold onto this addiction.

Are bloggers the new pushers? What the hell am I thinking. This is ridiculous. Yo wait a minute, is it high quality shit man? I'm not fucking with that unless it's at least 320 kilobytes per second. Holy shit, I just found the complete 16 volume Dusty Fingers compilation in FLAC. I'll finish this post later.

Project Kill Nazi Redemption

2009-08-27T18:49:00.000-07:00

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

2009-08-21T00:26:00.000-07:00

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

2009-08-18T21:48:00.000-07:00

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

2009-08-14T15:56:00.000-07:00

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."

Writers' Block On The Run

2009-07-17T18:52:00.000-07:00

I've produced a couple new articles on graffiti in San Francisco that were both published in the SFBG this week. The first is oriented around this week's free issue and explores five lesser known public art locations in the city. I got a chance to catch the grand opening of Kommunitas, of Bluxome allery fame. It has some mind blowing murals now, the most stunning piece boasts over 500 colors across maybe 50 feet of wall space. Check the picture above.

You can find pictures of the Mac Dre in Langton Alley here, 3 parts of the Defenestration here. And a historical document of the Defenestration building at Funk and Jazz. No pictures of Lilac but Plug 1 has some shots of the Iz the Wiz tribute. Historical document of Bluxome / Kommunitas at Graffiti Archaeology. Nothing for Oak Parking lot yet, anyone got some?

I also wrote an article in defense of the tag. Oh the hated on tag! I thought it could use some love or at least a bit of context. The film Infamy (2005) does a pretty good job providing more background and perspective on the aesthetics of and lifestyle emerging from the tag.

Sanguine Soul: Drums and Fire

2009-07-14T14:32:00.000-07:00

New Sanguine Soul webpage is up! Wow, Shelmatic and I worked on that shit the whole friggin' weekend, trading off on one edit, another edit, and more until we came up with this template. If anyone out there knows how to do a drop down for our tracklist, but without stopping the audio player if it's being used, please let us know! That would be the illest right there.

So for this episode we brought "drums and fire", quite a fertile concept I think for a mad range of musical nastiness. Definitely expect more conjunctions in the future. Escaping those dichotomies but still producing a magnetic tension which inspires creative thinking and artistry. Big ups to The MF Gaslamp Killer for hooking up the Q&A, and if you haven't copped it yet, peep his new mixtape, Hell and The Lake of Fire Are Waiting for You! We talked right before his show at Paradise Lounge with UK's Andy Votel; wrote a little short something on it here. Now that's some swarming drums and fire.

Sanguine Soul: Summer Madness

2009-07-07T22:58:00.000-07:00

Kool & The Gang's "Summer Madness" doesn't sound quite the same in the consistently mild temperature of San Francisco summers. Once every couple months the mercury still rises, definitely a lower threshold in this breezy city, but a beautiful one that sends thousands onto their stoops and the streets. And I still have my memories of Los Angeles' horribly burning asphalt, the ghastly humid thickened heat in New York and Philadelphia, as well as the endless sweat and daily reports of elderly deaths when I used to live in Paris, the frugal city of no air conditioners.

On the last Sanguine Soul radio show, we premixed some summer jams while making Korean / Chinese / Vietnamese BBQ at Moss Studios. Definitely a few classics thrown in the mix as well as a newer strain of sun drenched tunes for your listening pleasure.

Also, for a more exhaustive arhive, check out Oliver Wang's summer music blog.

Writers' Block: Graffiti News

2009-07-02T22:40:00.000-07:00

I started a regular stint writing on graffiti for the Bay Guardian. Its called "Writers' Block" in tribute to New York's original Writers' Bench as well as a play on words for a suppressed medium or restrained creative force. In my first article I explored the phenomenon of crushed newspaper dispensers and placed them in a broader historical context of modern graffiti's evolution and spread across the globe. I think I'm going to just republish all the articles on the blog for organization purposes, so enjoy and tell me your thoughts!

Modern graffiti practice -- born out of New York’s behemoth subway system nearly 40 years ago -- has diffused across the globe arguably faster and further than any other subculture of our time. Many thought the prohibitive end of New York subway graffiti in the mid-1980s might mark the death of the movement itself. But the phenomenon has instead grown vibrantly, evolving in imaginative and cunning ways while unexpectedly inspiring thousands of offspring movements worldwide. Regional mutations of graffiti now prosper in urban centers from São Paulo to Tokyo, as well as the sprawling suburbs spanning Paris and Phoenix, and even in small town America.

San Francisco was one of the earliest cities outside of the East Coast to contribute heavily to graffiti’s development. Young writers painted on freight trains in attempts to mimic their eastern counterparts’ love for subway cars, but they also brought the medium to life on the more stationary public spaces; walls, rooftops, billboards, and street furniture all gained color in rhythm. To this day the city is a hotbed for the creative evolution of style, approach, and placement. Graffiti tattoos the skin of our city, breathing vivaciously yet ephemerally in the rapid changing visual landscape.

During my morning routine in San Francisco’s SOMA district I come across hundreds of graffiti pieces. The moment I step outside my flat, vibrant names call forth on the neighboring walls, twisting and swinging frenetically in with an incandescence that is brighter than the fog-smothered sun rays. A school of simply stenciled koi fish meander curiously along the concrete sidewalk, snaking up the side of a storefront’s iron cage that is painted with a woman’s statuesque face locked in distant meditation. I jaunt over to the newspaper dispensers and reach for the daily only after appreciating any new stickers and wild, hand style lettering or drippy, dirty tags and rotating wheat paste prints, all competing equally for my attention. And I take a moment to imagine the people out there who took the time to get up, the thrills they must have felt, the inspiration that brought them out to the streets to write a shadowed name or post up a devilish cartoon character.

Is the newspaper vendor not the prime placement for graffiti -- both literally and metaphorically -- in this post-subway train era? Covering the pervasive street furniture are the etched names of hundreds of locals. Some invent complex calligraphy and craft intricate geometrical balance to stylize their nom de plumes. Some choose the course of improv for the signatures and let the muses of the moment guide their ink-saturated markers. And still others invest countless hours of preparation to the act of clandestinely posting up ready made stickers during the dead of the night or even the grind of the day.

A writer’s obsession with the news dates back to a now infamous article published by the New York Times in 1971 on the city-wide popularity of Taki 183 and his many pen pals. As soon as the article hit the streets circulating around the boroughs, young people quickly realized just how famous Taki had become. It spawned even more imitators and helped catalyze a movement. The irony of Taki’s expanded notoriety is that he refused to provide his last name in the article. Even though roughly the whole city discovered that “Taki 183” referred to a Greek 17-year-old named Demetrius who lived on 183rd Street in Washington Heights, nobody knew a thing about him beyond his omnipresent signature.

The writer’s signature is not an autograph in the traditional sense. The graffiti autograph is the mark of an alter ego coming into being. And that alter ego is the work of art itself, just as Calvin Broadus Jr. creates the living artwork known to many as Snoop Dogg (or in comic art, just as Bruce Wayne offers the performance piece Batman). Rather than a mark of ownership over another piece of work, the graffiti signature is a disjointed movement towards self-ownership. Instead of glorifying the originator of the artwork, the writer’s signature celebrates its own existence in a self-referential movement leaving the creator of the work anonymous. The writing of the autograph affirms an identity, its personality shaped through the stylization of the letters. And though graffiti puts emphasis on an individual’s yearning for self-affirmation, the practice is ultimately not an indulgent or egotistical project. The graffiti signature takes place in the context of a city’s public space, an environment that provides a vehicle for developing a social identity and facilitating collective dialogue among all people as free and equal citizens. The signature is a coded cry for both personal and social recognition.

While writers rarely make the news in all-out Taki 183 glory, the graffiti-strewn surfaces of newspaper dispensers distribute the news to the people. Each piece tells an intricate story saturated with drama, intrigue, and mystery. Every day we choose whether to make the effort to read these encrypted tales, whether to participate in the dialogue. We choose our responses from indifference to engagement and enthusiastic appraisal to vehement disgust. Some people challenge their underlying assumptions about the stigma of graffiti whereas others stubbornly adhere to their beliefs about its devastating harm to our quality of life. But I suggest at the least to pay attention. Otherwise you might just miss out on some of the most compelling, awe-inspiring stories that San Franciscans tell each other every day all over the streets, all over the news.

Sanguine Soul: Transformations

2009-06-29T19:33:00.001-07:00

I'm happy to announce that our radio program is no longer limited to the signifier of a day of the week. Sanguine Sunday has transformed into Sanguine Soul. We got a new web page in the works, and Honey Knucks has been working on a logo for 9 months now, so we'll see where that's going. Until then, enjoy our slightly confusing wordpress, we still got some mad decent content. We push the "transformations" episode in a time of political upheavel (Iran, Honduras), en memorium of the king of pop, and in the midst of all that, a more exacted conceptual orientation for our show, and a conversation with Khingz's about his debut solo LP, quite of the transformative variety, "From Spaceships to Slaveships."

Fresh Artistry: Karriem Riggins Expands Jazz, Informs Hip-hop

2009-06-26T13:15:00.000-07:00

On Wednesday I dropped by the historic Oakland Yoshi's venue for the first time to peep Karriem Riggins introduce his new quintet and blend some mad decent jazzified hiphop with Pete Rock. A veritable young lion in the jazz world and a much sought after beat conductor on the rise in the hiphop world, Riggins is displaying some impressive talent and unique skill for crossing the two monstrous genres.

If you want to get some background, I wrote a brief article on Riggins for the SFBG. Rachel Swan at the East Bay Express layed down some more details about his life and work.

I recommend peeping his Hella International mix. Madlib, J-Rocc, and seemingly Riggins as well have been pushing a style of looping jazz beats, cutting them in and out in a fragmented blunted funk aesthetic.

Listen: Karriem Riggins Live at Hella International - Stones Throw

You can also cop his fresh, and ridiculously impressive mix-tape, featuring original production, remixes, and jazz loops, Kaleidoscope. Expect a debut CD soon, whether it will be the Karriem Riggins Quintet or a full length of the Jahari Massamba Unit, we'll have to wait and see.

Album Review: Nickodemus' Sun People

2009-06-19T14:08:00.000-07:00

My editor at the Guardian just passed me the new Nickodemus record, Sun People, for a review. I'm usually hesitant of world music despite my absolute love for all sorts of outernational sounds, from Mulatu Atstatke to Turkish psych and Brazillian bossa nova. You just never know whether the producer will pull off a uniquely multiculturally inspired sound, or just reap the benefits of marketing to the crassly cultured NPR audience who fiend for the next opportunity to bust stagnant salsa moves on the next fundraiser galla dance floor. Nickodemus is far beyond this cheese. Dude makes an excellent brand of uplifting, groove heavy music.

Live Review: Erykah Badu Gets Out of Her Mind

2009-06-11T17:04:00.000-07:00

In anticipation of releasing her brilliant sound odyssey, New Amerykah Pt. 1: 4th World War (Universal Motown, 2008), Erykah Badu, a.k.a. “Analogue Girl in A Digital World,” a.k.a. “Fat Belly Bella,” a.k.a. “Low Down Loretta Brown,” clarified her artistic objectives on an Okayplayer form. Posting as analoguegirl, Badu affirmed, “As much as I would love to be just a recording artist, I am not. There’s a difference. I am a performance artist first; there’s a difference.” Having the chance to see Badu perform live at the Warfield June 6, I could not agree more with her distinction.

Erykah Badu performs at L.A.'s Club Nokia June 5, 2009, the night before her San Francisco gig. Photo by Beth Stirnaman via LA Record.

Dressed in a mystical mauve kimono, golden skull cap, and gem encrusted space goggles, Badu strutted onstage in profile, tracing her steps forward like a celestial, hieroglyph narrative. A cinematic whirling rainstorm of bleeps and lasers and synth bubbling keys reverberated in the background, aspiring to transport the audience to the far reaches. This intergalactic resonance would remain the most consistent frequency throughout the performance; each transition of song and style marked by its cosmic joy of noise. Badu’s enigmatic presence recalled Sun Ra’s theatrical myth making, framed by an open ended aesthetic in Egyptology and a surreal space age, radicalized belief in the power of music to free the soul from its rusty, earthly shackles.

But this outlandish and historically rooted ethos did not restrain Badu’s emphasis on the contemporary. The high priestess of hip-hop soul incorporated the gods of our musical past into the urgency of the now. The tensions of old and new styles and sounds continuously pressed against each other throughout the remarkable performance.

Sometimes the antagonisms felt dramatically sharp. To introduce the set before Badu entered stage, her solid boogie funk outfit played a couple of the original tracks sampled in the production of 4th World War. The tribute to these musical foundations was contrasted by the DJ dropping Lil Wayne’s gutter poetry banger, “A Milli,” a wild song that encapsulates the sonic zeitgeist of the youngest generation of hip-hop heads. At other times Badu chose -- in a smoother fashion -- to synthesize contrasting musical elements with her own highly original, personal touch. Armed with a vigorous back catalog, Badu redefined some of classic soul grooves like “On and On” and “Didn’t Cha’ Know” in accordance to 4th World War’s coarsely textured and somewhat dissonant sonic landscape. While crooning her smoked-out throwback joint, “Back in the Day”, Badu cut in and out of the song to channel her muses, tracing the aggressive and playful soundscapes of Ice Cube and Slick Rick to feel good soul jams and real old school bluesy ballads. At one moment Badu reinvigorated her moniker, jazz scatting to sing the cosmic electronic keys in Afrika Bambaata’s “Looking For The Perfect Beat” all while reproducing the unforgettable bass line on the drum machine. To arrange such a complex performance -- seamlessly referencing and remixing musical history in a compellingly contemporary style -- Badu succeeded in translating and expanding the formal aesthetic of the hip-hop DJ into the art of the composer-singer. I’m not even overstating it.

While unraveling the many historical layers behind her sound, Badu slowly unburdened herself of wardrobe layers. Each shedding of an item enabled one of the many schizophrenic characters which make up the complicated being of Erykah Badu to manifest. The initial, arkestral space creature transformed into a golden headed free flowing being, and for the second act, Badu changed garb completely into a simple red summer dress. She whisked around the stage like a funkified ballerina, singing from her younger-aged repertoire of intimate coming-of-age joints. Shining the spotlight on her own personal struggles, Badu showed us the conflicted trajectory which led her to the apotheosis of her new mythological project articulated most transparently in “Healer,” the cyphered song marking the opening and closure of the first act. In “Healer,” Badu refines her musical vision, declaring a mysteriously therapeutic and transcendental power of hip-hop as more expansive than religious or governmental entities. The meaning behind this notion of spiritualized hip-hop is left vague, but there might be a clue in Badu’s closing actions. The sorceress sips her tea and implores the crowd, “Get out of your mind!” Badu is certainly out of her own.

This article was co-published on SFBG.

Sanguine Sunday - Global Rhythms

2009-06-08T19:54:00.000-07:00

Last Fall I traveled through Eastern Europe and made it to the frontier of the Occidental world in the great city of Istanbul. The city is actually built partially on the European continent and partially on Asia; the Bosporous bridges actually bridge the two continents. Istanbul once was Constantinople, the seat of the Byzantine / Eastern Roman empire, and before that served as cross sectioned portal between the eastern and western worlds.

What very few people over here in California know is that Istanbul has an extremely rich musical history, informed by a global sensibility just as much as the people and city are. What emerges from this heritage is a uniquely provocative and cosmopolitan sound, blending many soulful and bass heavy styles from around the world with a backbone in Sufi mysticism and Turkish percussion. I found a great record label during my stay by the name of Doublemoon Records. They do an excellent job detailing their musical objectives.

Over the past 10 years, in synergy with three sister companies, Doublemoon has succeeded in nurturing a roster of promising talent into internationally recognized artists. Ranging from Sufi-electronica to groove alla turca, from jazz to gypsy funk, from oriental hip hop to Anatolian blues the musical gems that emerge from recording sessions are documented and recorded by Doublemoon. As such, Doublemoon Records is the sole platform for musicians with an amorphous ethnic identity to come together to create, collaborate, and communicate through the universal language of music.

Listen to a taste of this sound in our Sanguine Sunday Radio "Global Rhythms" set. Also, we're putting up a poll to vote for a new name on Wednesday, so please give us your input!

Party Crimes : Pilooski's Black Hole Drums

2009-06-01T21:09:00.000-07:00

Did you miss the Donuts Party last Saturday night featuring the dirty disco edit wizard Pilooski? The French based deejay made his only West Coast appearance--clouded in the spring fog of San Francisco and smoke machines of 103 Harriet's handsome basement gutter--for a night of cosmic travelin and blapping disco percussion. So if you did sleep on dude on the local tip, then unless you travel to / live in Europe, it might be a minute til he drops in on our wavelength again. My solution: go comb through the internet waves to enjoy some of them flipped inside out, baring the internal flesh like a dog's stanky horse food tooth, jams.

Pilooski gained fitting acclaim on the blogosphere and in underground jams the world over for his grainy cosmic edits of disco classics and surprising choices from the ranks of Elvis and Franki Valli. After releasing Dirty Space Disco in 2007, the beat conducta released a series of 12 inches off the deep crate digging label, Dirty Sound System. The collective just finished sifting through the nebulous depths of France's psychedelic grooves for a new volume of dank mind expansion.

If you're unfamiliar with Pilooski, I wrote a Sound Lesson on him a year ago. There might be some free shit still linked to it.

On a side note: I was more impressed with opener Derrick Love's galactic gamma-ray picks. Lucky enough for us locals, he spins the far out disco jams that give the genre a bold ass name at the monthly shaker Gemini Disco.

Sanguine Sunday - Electric Soul

2009-05-31T23:04:00.000-07:00

We experimented with the conceptual orientation of "Electric Soul" for yesterday's edition of Sanguine Sunday Radio. Our sets are inspired by the music of the minimal synthesized grooves of Swedish outfit, Little Dragon, who are about to release their follow up to last year's brilliant eponymous debut. And lucky for us, we got a chance to catch up with lead singer, Yukimi, for a Q&A in the middle of the show. This episode is sure to sooth the somnolent and the perpetual anxious. Spasmodic therapy straight to the ribs, god. Enjoy!

Sanguine Sunday - The Sample Edition

2009-05-24T20:54:00.000-07:00

In store for you this episode on Sanguine Radio we dropped a full fledged show dedicated to the sample. What many don't realize outside the fairly insular Hiphop community is that the layering of samples cut from previously recorded tracks is a highly refined aesthetic formula. Taking bits and pieces from old grooves, the Hiphop beatsmith arranges and manipulates a montage of sounds to cast an entirely fresh composition. The art of sampling is no simple theft.

The emcee flows over these beats, letting their ink spill over the multi-tiered archeology. In a sense, the lyricist spits over history, rejuvenating the past with a new horizon of meaning, and informing the present with the soul sonic flavor of the ancestors. In fact, we could call this craftwork musical montage in line with Eisenstein's montage theories on film. I like to think that this sample episode is a continuation of the Sound Lesson series, just a lot of back and forth dialogue between the originals and the new songs which reference them.

For the past couple decades legal battles have entangled the sample aesthetic intrinsic to this unique craft of beat production. And in recent years, the laws become stricter and more intensified, casting a hazy gloom over the future of this musical style. We turn to our legal expert, Danielle Furman from Art Venture Law, to drop into the studio and shed some light on the copyright issues relevant to the recording industry. What she tells us is certainly alarming yet at the same time hopeful for the future of sample production. Tune in and tell us what you think about the current state of sampling laws--whether they restrict the proliferation of new forms of art or protect the recording industry and the artists it represents!

Live Cuts: Soulive Get Down

2009-05-18T13:43:00.000-07:00

Soulive pt. 1 - Live Independent SF 05-15-09

Soulive pt. 2 - Live Independent SF 05-15-09

Recording my live cuts series at San Francisco's Independent couldn't get better. No searches, no accusatory glares at my hand held recording device which might just look explosive, and an amazing sound system. You know, I really need to research the legality behind what I'm doing.

Anyway, Soulive brought the heat! Three hours of the heat. They jumped off on the pure funk tip fresh from their new album, Up Here, piecing together a revitalized arrangement of Michael Viner's breakdance anthem, Apache. Peep the Soulive pt. 1 live cut right above. Listen to the brass section, the Shady Horns, just carry that groove to the funkified oblivion of the mothership! Singer songwriter Nigel Hall impressed everyone with the diversity of his flow, covering the works of James Brown and Curtis Mayfield with a soulful crooning completely idionsyncratic to his own style. Yet, Soulive went far beyond rejuvenating the classic grooves; they funkified their way into new space rock territory and funky soul outer reaches and uplifting call and response jams.

They arranged the nearly three hour set into a coherent meditation on the funk. The band streamlined their meandering styles with an expert subtlety, giving credence to their efforts as a tightly nit band. Yet, each personality had its time to shine. Each composition opened up endless solo improvisation on the drums, the horns, the keyboards and the organs, the guitars. . . the unstoppable grooves. At one point in the show, guitarist Eric Krasno and keyboardist Neal Evans calmly left the stage to imbibe in some drink while drummer Alan Evans blew up the spot on the solo percussion until they returned to continue the jam minutes later. The funk just keeps going on and on and on.

Singing a Song for My Mother

2009-05-14T15:37:00.000-07:00

Hamilton Bohannon - Singing a Song for my Mother

This Mother's Day inspired me to sort through my knowledge of songs dedicated to the joyful force of motherhood. Nothing, and I really mean nothing comes close, to Hamilton Bohannon's wonderful tribute, "Singing a Song for My Mother." The jam is cushioned by other extraordinary grooves off Bohannon's first album, Stop & Go, a monster funky soul soundscape released on Brunswick Records in 1973.

Bohannon's composition for Singing a Song rides a delicate tension between melancholic estrangement and effusive love. He makes this feeling of distance from the comfortable security of one's mother a mood of intimate warmth rather than of hopeless alienation. And the song sways with an endless joy, just charged with a vulnerable yet affirmative solidity. It truly encapsulates the sensual resonance of a grown child's relation to his mother in sonic form. So what do you think, does anyone have Hamilton Bohannon beat on the ode to the mother tip?

Sanguine Sunday - Food

2009-05-11T19:06:00.000-07:00

Enjoy the beat buffet we cooked up for your listening pleasure on Sanguine Sunday Radio. These tantalizing audible treats are sure wet your appetite, or your libido, perhaps both. I want to know from my six loyal readers, what's your favorite food jam? What did we miss?

Sound Lesson: Soupy Jenifa

2009-05-07T18:28:00.000-07:00

De La Soul - Jenifa Taught Me (Derwin's Revenge)

Maggie Thrett - Soupy

Wow, it's been nearly a year since my last sound lesson. I need some crate digger out there in the internet waves to help me out with this feat. Let's kick it off again.

The idea behind these sound lessons is to dig out the dusty history sampled by classic Hiphop tracks. It is always fascinating to hear an old drum break or vocal cut completely reworked into a new sonic landscape. The montage made out of old pieces not only rejuvenates the energy of those aged works, but it also constructs a fresh and new perspective on the musical resonance.

Although accomplishing such innovation with production skills is not an easy task. And many beat conductas have failed along the way to actually construct something blazing new out of the old. But then you got the geniuses like Prince Paul of De La Soul acclaim, an innovator and true taste maker of stylized sound and theatrical Hiphop (the originator of the album skit). Their highly original and brilliant 1989 album, 3 Feet High and Rising, bumps 24 fresh joints patch worked together by literally hundreds of songs from America's pastime. You can even get a taste of the breadth of the samples at sample lesson grandmaster, Kevin Nottingham's, archive.

There are a couple glaring oversights, but for me the most important one gives the life to "Jenifa Taught Me". What happened to stunner Maggie Thrett's anthem, Soupy, released in 1965 off DynoVoice Records? Soupy is a brilliant jam, just that raw uncut funky soul for yo ear. Not to mention that Thrett was also an actress, crooning that futuristic spirit on the mothership.

It makes me understand all the more clearly why De La got their minds all worked up for this girl named Jenifa, oh Jenny. But who the hell is Derwin? Just a virgin? There's got to be more.

Also, Maggie Thrett was an actress who elegantly displayed her futuristic beauty on Star Trek among other cult hits. That's her on the left up her. A sparkly mothership crooner.

Interview: Exile and his Universal Sound

2009-05-04T21:32:00.000-07:00

Exile Interview (original)

Exile Interview (with beat)

I had the chance to chop it up with Exile after his performance with Blu at Berkeley's annual Hiphop in the Park festival. We sat on a gnarled park bench straight out of Middle Earth, and Exile traced the journey from his humble beginnings making music to where life is taking him now. I already thought Exile demonstrated some mad ingenuity in his creative process, but now I am ever more convinced that the man has just got a serious gift, and deep sympathy, for stylizing sound.

If you're not familiar with Exile's unique brand of earth power production, then you've got an expansive catalogue of music to experience. Spanning the gamut from soul spliced grooves tapping into the richness of the human spirit to gritty beats urgently calling forth action, this Los Angeles beatsmith is capable of a universe of sounds.

Exile gained notoriety for his masterful production for Blu on their seminal 2007 release, Below the Heavens, an album quickly garnering recognition as a Hiphop classic. However, Exile got his start much earlier in the game, collaborating with LA rapper and crooner, Aloe Blacc, in the noname backwards group Emanon. In 2004 they released a groundbreaking soundscape harmoniously politicizing music (or to coin a phrase, musicifying politics), The Waiting Room, and recently reissued their smoked out underground tape, Imaginary Friends, originally put out on the grind in '96. And before all that, dude made his way around beatboxing and flipping loops on the tape deck, or spitting helium induced raps about scandalous moms light years before Quas. And amidst all that science, he made a name for himself bombing the walls with sweet and sticky aerosol paint.

The honey drenched drums and textured harmonies don't stop there. Exile dropped Dirty Science in 2006, showcasing his talent collaborating with monster lyricists like Oh No, Ta'Raach, and Ghostface. And most recently, Exile concocted his first instrumental album purely out of samples from the radio. This concept album, simply titled Radio, stretches the creative process of Hiphop to its limits. Exile crafts music out of disparate elements broadcast on the air, bits and pieces of sound which he affirms himself, you're not supposed to make music out of. The end product is a compelling montage of human voices and mechanical noises layered upon each other, a rhythmic sound sphere depicting the way we see the world.

In tune with "Radio", we broadcast the interview with Exile on Sanguine Sunday Radio for our dedication to Hiphop in the Park episode. I decided to post up the interview separately in two forms. The first is tiered with Exile's beat mix for Mary Anne Hobb's Radio 1 show, and the second is the sparse interview in its original taping, full with the lush sounds of Berkeley's very liberated and never duplicated, People's Park. You can also cop the Radio 1 mix and peep the playlist of unreleased beats at her BBC home.

Dancing in the Rain: Hiphop in the Park '09

2009-05-04T00:28:00.001-07:00

Bayonics - Live HHiP 2009

J-Boogie's Dubtronic Science - live HHiP 2009

Blu - Dancing in the Rain - live HHiP 2009

Yo god, I been bloggin' for a minute! The 13th annual Hiphop in the Park comes around, and I realize that this is the first time I'm scribin' double on an event. But more amazing than my own silly ass jazz, let's meditate a moment on UC Berkeley's Students For Hiphop group holding it down for the thirteenth year straight!

Think of it, each four years the torch has to be passed on to next generation of Hiphop heads in student form. In that case this is the fourth generation of beat driven park slangin' youngins who follow through with tradition and still push it forward on the next level for the new kids comin' up on the block. Thanks to yall for providing the livest jam for the whole community!

For those unfamiliar with the ritual, Hiphop in the Park is an annual celebration of the ultramagnetic spirit of Hiphop for the people by the people, and harmoniously enough, in Berkeley's very own People's Park. Breakers boast commandos on the linoleum, DJ's cut it up on the decks, graffiti writers bomb the boards, spit flows from MC's like hot blooded revolution, poetry expands the mental to the most high, and on the absolutely fundamental tip, the people from all walks of life celebrate the joy of living.

I admit I was worried this year. The rain clouds cast a dark spell on my expectations for the course of the Saturday afternoon. But even when I arrived at one, the park was already bubbling with over 100 heads, posted up with hoodies and umbrellas unwilling to let nature's gloom take away from their high spirits. By the time the ten piece funkified Hiphop outfit Bayonics hit it off, the rain had already subsided to occasional drizzles. And once Bambu ripped the mic with Phatrick cuttin' it up on the clocks, you could feel the shadowed rays of a sun just slightly reverberating in the clouds.

I definitely have to credit the highlights of the afternoon to J-Boogie's Dubtronic Science and the ever talented headliners, Blu & Exile. J-Boogie along with his brass band and a hoarde of mad decent lyristics delivered an amazing set in the lines of his recently dropped "Soul Vibrations" album sprinkled with more than a couple tracks of new material. And while Blu might have inhaled a little too much of that North Cali herb for his own good (memory loss!), he still together with beat conducta' extraodinair Exile, showed us why the duo is making some ridiculously potent music for the two thousands. Who knew dancing in the rain could sound, and feel, so fresh?

If you missed it, I got the live cuts, if the live cuts ain't good enough, rituals come consistently. See you next year!

Where Worlds Cross

2009-05-01T16:12:00.001-07:00

The other day I dropped by Moe's in Berkeley to peruse their lovely book collection. I usually start out in art book section and then move my way up to the language department, ending with the sweet dessert of philosophy topped with some social theory cherries. That's the shit right there.

This time though I halted in the art books for a little longer than usual. I found a Prestel Publishing book in their street art series called "Paris Street Art" put together by Romuald Stivine and Vito Del Forte. Dragging my fingers through the brightly colored pages, I recognized many of the pieces gracing the Parisian street walls. I also recognized the neighborhood; the curving walls at the bottom of Parc de Belleville or the swooping landscape of Pere Lachaise, even the alley ways off Rue des Cascades or by Cafe aux Folies.

I would see many of these paintings in the magnificent Menilmontant neighborhood, right over the hill from Belleville, the two districts where graffiti artists lay down the law of beauty in the streets of Paris. Well, I would more than see them, you could say that I was a regular collaborator. Especially during the Winter months of 2005 and 2006 where civil unrest uprupted in the streets all over France in response to the oppressive use of police authority in the ghettoized suburbs and then later, the government's attempt to liberalize worker's laws.

Those were the glory months of graffiti during my stay in Paris; classes canceled for months, the feeling of uprising in the air, creative energy spewing rainbows from spray cans onto peeling gray walls. It was an empassioned and naively brilliant time reminiscent of the the acclaimed phrase of May '68 tattood to the walls of the old vanguard; "Sous les pavés, la plage."

Anyway, while flipping through the pages I had a thought, "Wouldn't it be crazy if one of my paintings just happened to be in this little flip book?" And sure enough, on a page parallel to the geometrically balanced works of l'Atlas, one of my schizophrenic little monsters gaping a toothsome mouth at the moon in torment.

What a strange experience. An experience where so two idiosyncratic and divided worlds cross spheres. I surreptisiously slid through the the streets at night and put up these strange scribbled marks on the stone walls and corroborated heavens of Paris. Days later, and it must have been only a few days because that painting was buffed quick, a street photographer by legal name Vito stumbled upon this horrific mural, and it touched him. He took a picture, expanding my transient moment into a pixelated image with thickness.

After assembling many other photos in the streets of that Winter and Spring of protest and violence, Vito finally published a book that was distributed worldwide. He searched out as many source names as he could, but in the world of graffiti the signatures (where they are actually authored) do not so easily trace back to an identifiable, legal origin. So there I was, holding this book in my hands, my mind traveling distances to recount the swiveling paths that finally closed their abysmal, cipher loops into that moment.

I wonder now, do I find out who Vito the photographer is and tell him of my experiences? Do I pursue this path of hardening the loops of anonymity into a reciprocal moment of direct acknowledgment? Or do I enjoy the pure incognito relations we developed, basking in the beauty of two contingent lives dialoguing from a resonant distance, and letting go? Or is this blog post, shot out in the depths of the internet waves, already taking the next step towards such mutual recognition?

My scribbled Demon which Vito published is mysteriously missing from this following collection of photos.

Vito, si tu lisait ce message, envoyeriez-moi un email!

Rejuvenating San Francisco's Graffiti Debate

2009-04-29T21:08:00.000-07:00

The San Francisco city government is working harder than ever to rid the streets of graffiti. Last week a number of city administrators, police officers, homeowners, and more than a few concerned citizens met in Chinatown for the “Anti-Graffiti Street Huddle.” Such a firm title suggests to the populace of San Francisco that the question of local graffiti is not open to discussion. The city will stop at nothing to "beautify" the city. In fact, they are already disseminating their hardheaded position with speculative and poorly researched propaganda videos.

Little might these agitated anti-graffiti huddlers suspect that the value of modern graffiti is a richly debated issue among city dwellers around the world. In fact, it has been for the past thirty years. And millions celebrate the beauty and life illegally placed public markings bring to the street.

Many proponents of graffiti argue for its legitimacy by pointing out the aesthetic qualities of the craft. Graffiti is an art form, they say, and as such should be respected by legal codes as somehow above the ranks of “petty vandalism.” Or perhaps, we can respect graffiti as in tension between vandalism and art.

While I myself agree wholeheartedly that graffiti is an art form, in fact the most compelling and challenging art form in contemporary times, I feel that this argument already takes off on a wrong start. As soon as this “art” position rears its head in forums and discussions the hard liners swoop up a simple logical opposition. In KQED’s forum on the subject in preparation for the huddle Paul Henderson, chief of administration at the San Francisco District Attorney's Office, voices the paradigm syllogism; 1) graffiti is a crime 2) a crime cannot be art 3) graffiti is not art. Simple enough position despite its silliness implying that illegality excludes art.

Endlessly arguing over whether graffiti is or is not an art is not pertinent to convincing public officials and people in general who are set on their aversions to the writing on the wall. We have to dig deeper in bringing to light the causes at the basis of their distaste for the craft. And to do so, perhaps the initial orientation of “is graffiti an art?” can be used as a didactic tool for posing an all more fundamental question. Let's try rejuvenating the graffiti debate.

Why is graffiti a crime anyway? For many, such as our exemplary point of reference, Mr. Henderson, this question may sound ridiculous. Graffiti is a crime insofar as the “vandal” does not have permission to mark the private or publicly owned surface. The legality of publicly placed fixtures and markings comes down to "permission"; for instance, in the admitted case of advertisements. Such legal advertisements bombard the city dweller with visual messages, oftentimes of offensive nature, far more than any illegal markings and murals. These advertisements garner their public permissibility on buildings and buses, subways and streets, billboards and street fixtures by, in essence, buying their access.

All that distinguishes the permissibility of advertisement and the illegality of graffiti is the lack of the latter’s money. With money, an individual is enabled the buying power to access and mark the publicly viewed surfaces under the authority of the private property owners. Hence, the private individuals who have the funds to own property therefore dictate to the public citizenry what they are allowed and not allowed to see in the public streets. The public sphere is therefore reserved for the visual spectacles that oil the productive machine of consumption, marketing cultural experiences and instilling desires for goods and services to the citizenry at large.

Is there not a problematic antagonism in the fact that the free citizenry do not have any direct power over what they see in the public sphere? Why do private individuals own and have full legal discretion over the publicly viewed surfaces of their property? In our current political and
legal climate can we even assume something such as “public space,” which might allow the free expression of the people, actually exists? Why is this not a first amendment issue anyway?

In reflecting upon the consumption of democratic values primarily by the small population rich enough to own property, I always come back to wonder what it is about graffiti they find so offensive? Does the fantastical tag of local adventurer, “Chan”, make us feel attacked and brutalized as we walk by its drippy ink on the wall? Does the cartoonish image of a “Girafa” cut into the deepest recesses of our security with its long, pointy neck? Perhaps the intense movement and complex geometrical balance of a “Revok” mural calls into question the very basis of our bourgeois principles telling us to keep our personal expression where it belongs, in our personal homes or in the sterilized museum.

Some worried citizens may throw up their hands and shout, “but these kids are disrespectful gang members!” While I do not have any statistics to point to, I attest that some graffiti is certainly gang related and aimed towards marking territory, but the larger majority of the art form is dedicated to creative personal expression, the craft of calligraphy, and playful visual interplay with the city streets.

What makes graffiti different than advertisements is that it is a “quality of life” crime, our trusty interlocutor may argue. But does spray can art and illegally placed public installations really disturb or hamper the aesthetic appeal of the city any more than advertisements? In fact, a good portion of the population prefers the free expression of graffiti imagery and calligraphy while most of everyone finds advertisements invasive and abusive. And at least graffiti is not trying to sell you something. All the graffito achieves is suggesting to the viewer that someone out there in the anonymous public streets is alive, and wants to be hard, and is quite concerned with stylizing his or her personal signature.

If we want to start having fruitful debate about graffiti we need to seek out the origins of this worldwide phenomenon. In a globalizing market economy where the gap between rich and poor widens, freedom of expression is becoming more and more subsumed under constant surveillance, and codes of behavior become stricter and increasingly enforced, the booming popularity of graffiti tells us in its urgency something hugely relevant. Graffiti is a symptom of social apparatuses where not everyone feels implicated in the public governance and free expression of the citizenry. Ultimately, to write graffiti is to yearn to affirm one’s individuality in a city where idiosyncrasy is suppressed and voices of the outskirts often unheard.

Instead of spending billions of dollars buffing over the messages left on the walls by these thousands of youth and young adults, perhaps we should invest in the education and social infrastructure to facilitate the empowerment of these neglected voices. Rather than incarcerating people for minor acts of vandalism, we might spend those billions of dollars to catalyze the self-determination of all individuals pushed to the borderlands. And we may have the funds to help inform the free expression of the many personalities yearning desperately to cultivate themselves.

SangSun Radio: "Rollerspace Boogie" ft. Shred One

2009-04-26T15:21:00.000-07:00

A handsome load of the late 70's and 80's funk phenomenon known as "boogie" has been attributed to the stylizing libido of the roller skate rink. Bad movies aside, this feel good, sexy music expands far beyond the boundaries of the skate rink and camera lens, stretching even to the distant realms of outer space. With that in mind, the Sanguine Sunday crew pushed our eleventh episode in the theme of "Rollerspace Boogie".

Imagine rollerskating on the polar ice caps of Mars, with hologram powered skates, and well Mars is really just a psychosomatic dream. That's the kind of paradox we work with. All antagonisms are harmoniously joined in this scandalously lovely brand of funk music. From the thumping bass line to the high tonal keys, the seductively hoarse vocals to enchanting harmonies, and to the hot blooded, bass guitar riffs highlighted by rapid fire lasers, rollerspace boogie will take you there.

Cultivating our booogie taste buds, we feature a mad ill, soul inspired funk set by the illustrious DJ Shred One. Afterwards, we chop it up with Shred One about her beginnings on the clocks, the much needed warmth of boogie music, and the open ended future of djing. Listen to that Rollerpsace Boogie.

Fiending for more boogie love? You can peep Shred cuttin' it up at LiPo Lounge in Chinatown with the rest of the Sweaterfunk Crew every Sunday night. Enjoy a potent brew of special whiskey, play a game or two of pac man, and get your groove on to strictly vinyl jams in the finest underground basement San Francisco has to offer. LiPo also happens to be home of the most stunning facades--a sort of cave portal to a Chinese-American 50's noir film-- in the entire Bay Area.

You can also listen to Shred One spinning her own boogie-down vision of funky soul at Le Circque, Thursday nights at Yoshi's. Read up at Get Sync'd (where I yanked the photo, big ups internet community!).

Live Cuts: James Got Ants in his Pants

2009-04-23T18:48:00.000-07:00

Live Cuts: James Pants SF 2009

Little did I expect to sneak into the Great American Hall to see the Stonesthrow Records DJ tour. After all, I already bought tickets to peep the label originator, Peanut Butter Wolf's, on the video spinning tip and a couple live shows by the likes of James Pants and the newly signed old skool soul stunna, Mayer Hawthorne. But damn. Handheld recorders are not allowed in elite venues like the GAMH. I would hope for a little more openness from a historic venue of counter-culture San Francisco, tucked neatly in the Tenderloin quarter's strip club turned early bird special prostitute haven.

For the sake of steady bloggin', you know I got to break the rules. For this edition of "Live Cuts" James Pants freaks out a fresh monster jam, "Let Me Brush", with his band, Royal Zodiac. While not much is known on the blogosphere about the newly formed outfit, they certainly can rip some unadulterated funk. While the band holds down a heavy backbeat, flooded with high tonal keys and bass guitar riffs, Mr. Pants flops around like a wild salmon on stage maneuvering between a cowbell, percussion, keyboards, and the microphone all while trying to keep his cool. Although staying debonair might be too much to ask for anyone trying to fill the role of three other band members, Pants puts in an exceptionally entertaining and sonically pleasing effort.

The live sound from Pants and Royal Zodiac feels more new wave funk than the electro-boogie overtones of last year's refreshingly original debut album, Welcome. The leaning towards improvising on the keys and manipulating synth laden atmospherics experiments with the vibrance of the lush arrangements but without too much finesse, interrupts the steady groove. Adorned with a poof-ball beanie, Pant's exercises the most astutely ironic, pop antics, as he bounces sporadically and thrashes his hips in diamond like angles akin to a slightly confused and feverish David Bowie gyrating with ants in his pants. The show certainly adds much needed cohesion to the multi-flavorded music, he just doesn't look all that comfortable playing the role.

Battling Wanderlust

2009-04-20T22:14:00.000-07:00

In moments when I am stricken ferociously with the itch to move, the curdling desire to travel across the vast lands of earth, bitten by the anxiety for adventure, I turn towards the masterful expertise of Seneca. The Roman politician turned Stoic philosopher offers endless suggestions, maxims, and daily practices of mind and body for those who choose to work towards pursuing the good life. He affirms

We should live with the conviction: "I wasn't born for one particular corner: the whole world's my home country". If the truth of that were clear to you, you would not be surprised that the diversity of new surroundings for which, out of weariness of the old, you are constantly heading fails to do you any good. Whichever had came first would have satisfied you if you had believed you were home in all. As it is, instead of traveling you are rambling and drifting, exchanging one place for another when the thing you are looking for, the good life, is available everywhere.

Meditating upon such a maxim evokes a sun stroked revelation. The spirit clears its throat, my veins breathe in the wild concrete, and I find myself briefly at home in this strange world.

Interview: The Groove Merchant, Cool Chris

2009-04-19T19:52:00.000-07:00

Groove Merchant 4-17-09

For International Record Store Day I caught up with Cool Chris, owner and manager of San Francisco's notorious Groove Merchant Records shop. Taking a tip from a recent Whatimseeing tribute, I biked over with my partner in crime to the infamous Lower Haight destination. The Groove Merchant is nestled among the richly colored Victorian buildings with a surprisingly unassuming appearance. One dollar milk crates and a sun drenched "bought and sold" street sign beckon passerbys who might otherwise miss the simply painted "records" in bubbly letters on the facade. Nonetheless, what awaits inside is nothing short of a mecca for seekers of the most killer black crack.

Producers and collectors of rare vinyl across the globe know this nook chock full of obscure hiphop, disco, psych, soul, funk, and Latin donuts. Trading, buying, selling, and shooting the shit, Groove Merchant Records is a loud marketplace for digging wanderlust.

Chris takes us on a trip down memory lane recounting the history of Groove Merchant Records and how he became involved. We then discuss the internet's increasing impact on local record stores, the many tensions developing in the battle between vinyl and digital music, and finally, the much argued over beginnings of hiphop on wax. Listen to the insight only possible from an expert 15 years deep in the bizness.

This interview was part of the inaugural celebration for our first Sanguine Sunday Radio broadcast on Pirate Cat Radio 87.9fm, the largest independent and community radio station in all of San Francisco! Our tenth episode, "Rapper's Delight", was an exploration and breakdown of the roots of hiphop on wax from 1979 and on.

Unfortunately, we're having some technical difficulties translating the show into mp3 format, but if you were lucky enough to hear us live, shout us out! Tune in every Saturday 8-10pm, stream live online, or peep the Sang Sun Radio website for archived podcasts (yes!).

Live Cuts: The Windy Budos

2009-04-16T21:25:00.000-07:00

Caught the Budos Band blast out their latest afro-soul powered set last night at the Independent. I wanted to experiment with some in crowd live recording on that mad clandestine level with my handheld. Fuck pictures, I got the imagery of sound baby.

Budos Band live 04-15-09 Ind. SF 1

Once "Los Barbudos", the bearded black haired members of all possible styles shortened their name to Budos after someone decided to shave off the face scruff. Well, now they thrive fully bearded again, funkifying the spectrum of afro rhythms and psychedelic melodies off the highly successful soul revival label, Daptone Records.

The eleven piece outfit (short on some brass this time) played a range of songs from their discography and new joints off the up and coming album. The sound journeyed through adrenaline charged dance numbers, springing horns and funky backbeat, to far out meditative jams serrated with electric keys laced upon an endless, hypnotizing bongo percussion.

While Budos enthusiastically thrives in pumping the dance floor full of sweaty grinding bodies, I found them strongest in their spacey experiment with psychedelified afro-funk. These tracks are definitely in debt to the original arrangements of Mulatu Astatke', Ehiophia's premiere jazz / funk virtuoso. They sway with the wind of the Mediterranean, soaking up the African sun, and finally washed over the dirty Summer waters of their home place, Staten Island New York.

Rapper Poets: DOOM vs. Bukowski

2009-04-15T17:26:00.000-07:00

Two weeks ago DOOM (dropping the MF) crept out of the shadows to unleash an apocalyptic maelstrom onto heads. His latest effort, Born Like This, is still resonating in the soundwaves, listeners and critics alike scrambling to make coherent DOOM's catastrophically pleasing formula. I don't plan to give any definitive answers here, but I anticipate that the album's title offers some clues to understanding DOOM's broodingly vicious cartoonery.

It is rare that a rapper makes reference to a white American poet of longstanding acclaim in the cannon. Although it would be unfair to call the haggardly magnificent Charles Bukowski a conventional member of the West's finest lyricists. DOOM chooses the title "Born Like This" to directly reference the revealing documentary on the life and work of Los Angeles' most prolific barfly, Bukowski: Born Into This (2003). A poet born into ugliness and horror and loneliness; a rapper born like a cartoon clip and masked warrior and tragic tale.

In the documentary, director John Dullaghan splices some of Bukowski's spoken poems over archived footage of the man going about his daily affairs. The montage of Bukowski's keen lyrical despair over sparse 1960's - 70's Hollywood is gripping if not completely unsettling. The brutally honest and troubled words of "Dinosauria, We" are particularly compelling.

DOOM's "Cellz" begins with revamped vocals cut from the film's clips of "Dinosauria, We", an apocalyptic meditation on the filth bred by humankind in the end of days. The minimal quality of the Bukowski's short of breath rhythm is filled out with gong-like dissonant drums warning of explosive terrors and shots. Dramatized keys straight out of a cult detective film whirl "Dinosauria" into a hyperbolic cartoonish tale. And perhaps that's all it ever was. The end of days foretold by Bukowski sets the horizon for DOOM's coming, "Born out of that / The sun hidden there / Awaiting the next chapter".

DOOM / Cellz (10) / Born Like This

Enter DOOM, a rapper with poetic ambitions. A mask striving for authenticity. A name always changing. A lyricism fighting to be heard. And some unadulterated, mad live, ridiculously talented flow from the metal faced bard.

For more tales of human caused mass destruction like "Dinosauria, We" look for Bukowski's insidious collection, Last Night of the Earth Poems.

Billboard Takeovers

2009-04-13T18:21:00.000-07:00

Cruising down brunch boulevard in Los Angeles (3rd St. West Mid-City) has become one of my favorite afternoon visits in the city of cars. Not for the caramel pancakes, or organic wheat toast, or grade C movie stars, but for the endless supply of mad ill billboard bombings! Boutique stridden and grove congested 3rd St. is home to one of the most rapidly changing street exhibitions in the country. And yes, I feel expert enough to claim such boasts.

Those who lift their noses to the sky and not just towards their red velvet cupcakes enjoy whimsical and sometimes stunning treats without being taxed. When it's not Augor or Revok destroying heavens with ridiculously well crafted pieces integrated into the billboard designs, other cats step up to the metal plate. Low-fi camera represent!

Sun Ra: Calling Planet Earth

2009-04-09T17:54:00.000-07:00

The cosmic jazz legend, Sun Ra (born Herman Poole Blount), is an enigmatic force embedded in technicolor myth. He has said himself to have descended to these lands from Saturn. Aliens from a distant rock disclosed to Sun Ra the power of music and soulful vibration. In other dimensions, music can wash clothes, heal diseases, free enslaved peoples. Galactic myth builds, saturates, transforms, and unravels before us.

In a series of interviews, films, and live events Sun Ra called without a touch of irony for the isotope teleportation of black people to another planet where self-affirmation, love, and community may reign. For Sun Ra, "Black" is no simple color term, but designates all persons oppressed or systematically frustrated, all living beings seeking spiritual rejuvenation and emphatic liberation.

In 1971, Sun Ra was given the chance to call planet earth through the role of an academic. He expounded his afro-arkestra philosophy to a UC Berkeley classroom in the African American studies department. My dear friend Edgar from World with Words has graciously researched the syllabus and found the list of books required for the class study. One might not have better luck actually finding these luminous scrolls on earthly soil. Nonetheless, thanks to Edgar, the music syllabus still circulates.

Sun Ra expounds, calls, and descends. For your consideration, a triplet of videos in tribute to the Sun Ra dynasty.

Outro J Dilla: The Man Becomes His Music

2009-04-08T18:37:00.000-07:00

I decided to revisit an old post on the late and great J Dilla. Enjoy.

The question of a supernatural afterlife remains a dubious if not outright unanswerable enigma for us beings of limited powers. If we would put aside such narratives of a divine heaven or cursed hell or even dreams of reincarnation, we might come to acknowledge an infinitely more tangible idea of the eternal afterlife here on earthly soil. The possibility of a resonating memory so essential that we cannot imagine the world without it. Paradoxically, this kind of consonant memory--human and fragile--can take on an absolutely necessary and eternal value for us.

Just consider for instance an artist gifted enough to create beautiful works and pass these animate memories onto us in the form of an aesthetic legacy. Such a legacy shapes our understanding of not only art but the sense of meaningfulness that orients our lives. A number of the more introspective artistic types--confronting their own inevitable deaths (despite whatever beliefs they might hold about a supernatural realm)--become intrigued if not obsessed by the possibility of such a legacy. Wracked by inner conflict, they grapple with the notion that the lifespan of sublime artwork outlasts that of the progenitor.

In recent memory, a young musician by the name of J Dilla (born James D. Yancey) reflected on the afterlife of his art in the 2006 release of his provocative and brilliant soundscape, Donuts (Stones Throw Records), just days before his untimely passing. Dilla's production submerges the listener deep into his idiosyncratic brand of soulful frequency and lush rhythms. His sonic universe provokes and inspires, lingering in the crevices of our imagination. As a voracious flood of tribute albums, songs and articles continue to praise the life and music of Yancey (this one included), there is no doubt that his music is transforming into just this kind of aesthetic legacy.

While struggling to survive in a hospital bed in late 2005 and the twilight months of 2006 with the debilitating immune condition, lupus, J Dilla gathered the courage to release his most captivating effort. In a story that has become almost mythical in proportion, he worked bedside with musical equipment brought by his mother, known intimately to Dilla as Ma Dukes. Each of the 31 tracks he completed do not last much longer than a minute reflecting Yancey's failing endurance yet resilient devotion to tie together his final creative vision.

  Interpreting the conceptual purpose intrinsic to an instrumental hiphop album is quite different than analyzing the transparent narrative and content of a singer's lyrics. However, hiphop arrangement makes no unsolvable mystery of the multiple stratospheres that build its sampled architecture. And while listening more carefully to Donuts and unraveling some of its layered puzzles, there is no question that Yancey was trying to come to terms with his own death on the approaching horizon by way of his production. Some of the cryptic code offers itself to us listeners.

  As if peacefully saying goodbye to the terrestrial and firmly implanting himself into the everlasting through his art, Donuts ironically begins with the 'outro' and ends with the 'intro'. It does not take a leap of imagination to think that Dilla, a man completely absorbed in his music, understood his own life in terms of a musical narrative. The title 'outro' on the introductory track hints to the idea that Yancey composed Donuts as a personal meditation on death. We bear witness to the outro of a human life--the conclusive chapter--in the form of a tragic yet triumphant swan song.

31 - Donuts (Intro)

The meaning of the closing 'intro' is more veiled in structure and purpose. Prefaced by two hymns of goodbye that halt and hesitate, reach out and shudder back, each song addresses a farewell to a respective audience. In “Bye.” Dilla opens a dialogue with his listeners, holding onto the Isley Brothers’ crooning, “Don't ever. . .” as we finish the words solemnly, “say goodbye”. And in crushing sincerity Dilla implores us, “I feel you”, implying that there is no reason for us to say last goodbyes despite the emphatic period at the end of the song's title. In the brooding penultimate dirge, “Last Donut of the Night”, Dilla dwells on the arresting texture of his self-realization that his life's work would soon come to an end. We feel his anticipation of a pending finale through the ghostly guise of an MC introducing the life's work of an anonymous musician about to take stage. That frozen moment of suspense comes to an abrupt interruption with an insight of clarity hurled forth in the lucid 'intro'.

motherlode - when i die

In this heart wrenching very last song Dilla manages nothing short of a musical apotheosis. He employs a sample of one-hit wonder Motherlode's 1969 single, “When I Die”, a heartfelt soul jam originally directed towards a distant lover readdressed to everyone who listens. The track is propelled by serene percussion that drives Motherlode to chant in chilling harmony during the chorus, "When I die / I hope I'll be / The kind of man / That you thought I'd be". In the concluding 'intro' Dilla strategically cuts Motherlode's chorus to elevate the self-proclaiming "be" intertwined twice with the contrasting concept "die". The acoustic quality of the words are manipulated into near incomprehension, as Dilla deconstructs the notions of being and death into their minimal sonic elements of raw feeling.  

Facing death head on, Dilla elongates Motherlode's vocals into a celestial proclamation, emphasizing not only the beauty of life but even his own oncoming second life, as he dissipates into becoming, and finally being, the music itself. As a last memory recorded in wax, Dilla aligns himself with a heritage of musicians who have passed but continue to live on in the hearts of all who hear his everlasting sonance. Maybe that is why we do not ever have to say a last goodbye.  

Intro J Dilla.

The Melancholic Death of the White Rabbit: Chapter 4

2009-03-18T21:33:00.000-07:00

Lying underneath the freeway and cradling the dusty shores of the bay is a stone of unusual powers. Submerged in buzzing fumes and caked in greasy feces is a stone beaten by the winds of time and mutated by humankind’s fists. A stone unlike other stones. A stone that speaks voluminous stories about an unfinished future yet imagined. A future anticipated only in the unconscious memories of a dream’s shadowy characters. A future yet crafted. The hardness of the stone still unformed, almost soft. An unrecognizable future still waiting to pave its way into the gut of our fragile species.

It is true that we no longer live in the ancient age where a human might be transformed into a pillar of salt at the instant of a wrong turn. Nor are we born into a mystical age where an omniscient being speaks the guiding, absolute Truth by way of burning bushes. We do not even live in the majestic epoch when feeble heroes (David) overcame enormous villains (Goliath). But a delicate spark of such ancient mysticism lingers in the darkest fog puddling over our melancholic modernity. We still live in a time where things breathe the puzzled allegory of prophecy. And we must not neglect these signs! Yes, we must engage in meticulous exploration. The future calls on us to practice refined exegesis of the riddles scribed onto nature’s wrinkled skin. Belshazzar ignored the writing on the wall, “numbered, weighed, divided” gleamed the symbols before the fall of Babylon.

An imprinted face of the killer stares back at us in globular strokes of white paint. And what a mysterious beast of unimaginable disfigurement! Or is it supernatural origin? His spiked skull adorns two hooked horns reminiscent of Michelangelo’s horrific Moses. An ovular beak clad with forests of teeth beams sardonically. The empty eyes spin in endless cyphers. His skull is curved in the skeletal shape of a scream or a Faustian bird.

Or, the image strangely resembles the white rabbit in demonic form. Its face is melted to the rough bone and ears charred to tree stumps of cartilage. Burnt fur settles into the recesses of the rocks among gray pebbles and plastic needles. I cannot make out the scribble of yellow paint framing the bottom arc of the teeth. Words or mere ornamentation? A signature or a title? A prophecy or an accident? The return of Belshazzar’s mistake?

I cannot make out whether its a portrait of the murderer or the murdered. Did the white rabbit paint the killer’s image in aid of our detective pursuits? Or, did he in his last moments wish to once and for all imprint his own visage in a rocky eternity upon the melting shores of the freeway?

If you were chased by your killer and knew you would not survive, what would you do? Imagine. In your last moments would you fill your heart with redemption, scribbling anxiously the portrait of your killer on nature’s palette? A just being will see the signs and avenge such unfairness of your death you reassure yourself! Your pen grows steady and you gather strength in the thought of such tales of justice and balance. Or in those last moments would you etch yourself onto the solidness of a stone that would outlast your rotting corpse? A last shadow by which others may remember you. Paint the tribute to such an astounding life on the elderly palm of this crumbled mountainside! Pray to the drenched sands of Narcissus for your future my white rabbit! A vengeance, a memory, a story told--your destiny is finitely returned.

The Melancholic Death of the White Rabbit: Chapter 5

2009-03-13T20:55:00.000-07:00

Chapter 5

Guider to distant regions of the earth and discloser of worlds of infinite possibility, how your death renders me forlorn! A death so melancholic that we do not yet realize the extent of your passing. The wretchedness of your threaded corpse--impaled on the sliver end of a lone support beam--still requires time to be seen and felt. Our bodies lug forward listlessly in your wake, driven by a mechanical habit heavy with rust rather than the joyful spirit of volition.

Was it the Madman who guarded the entrance to the belly of the freeway who caught you in a moment of indecision? Perhaps the whooshing noise of this demonic land under the concrete behemoth freeway startled you, or the sporadic spouting from the steamy sewage pipe slowed your foot. Or, did the Madman manufacture a trap, designing it from strewn shopping cart pieces and rubber tires, powering the engine with stolen electricity from the hidden underpass wires?

It must have been the fastidious Troll! Have you heard of that wide-eyed Troll who patrols the entrance to thresholds? He planted a garden rich in engineered seeds, watered his crop with guzzling waste, and cultivated roses in the filth of it all--was it he who offered the rabbit to his gods? Was it this robber of imagination who required a sacrifice to construct his gravely altar honoring the specters of the forgotten past? Did he wish to strike vengeance and fear in the hearts of all who could not believe his previous mythological predictions? All who laughed carelessly in his face and spat at his boots? And what will become of us now, the bearers of dead white rabbits and compelled believers in porcelain gods? By what creative powers might we invent a destiny still unwritten and a future worth living? By what means will we gather a courage never before demanded for humankind?

Oh, what dissemination I trick myself into believing! If the white rabbit is dead then only we could have killed the beast. Yes, you and I--we are his murderers! The troll has built a tomb for his lord in this illuminated garden of excrement. And he has forgotten his own graveyard, leaving its nurturing to the deadening drone of the cars on the freeway and the fleeting pounding of the trains that come and go like clockwork. The open toothed sepulcher takes nourishment in the sewage spilled forth from the city's most dreadful underground arteries. And it bathes in the shit, the dirtied plastic, the oily purple waters of the bay's shore.

But how did we do this? How could we pollute the entire sea with our excrement? Who gave us the rag to muddy the the skies? What were we doing when we chained the stars to the earth? Where is it moving now? Forward, forward, endlessly forward? Towards mass produced horizons? Is there any other direction? Are we not straying even through an infinitely organized nothing? Do we not feel the horrendous grumble of heavy space? Has it not become hotter? Is night not continually closing in on us? Do we need not yet feel the divine composition of the white rabbit? White rabbits, too, decompose. Springs of inspiration may be drank up and pissed out.

Yes, the white rabbit is dead. The white rabbit remains dead. And only we could have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, us most pathetic murderers of all murderers? What was most adventurous and outstanding of all the world has yet seen has bled to death under our waste: who will wash the blood from our hands? What unadulterated water is there left for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games could we ever invent anymore? Is not the despair of this deed too hopeless even for us? Must we ourselves not become white rabbits to even appear worthy of it?

Upon the horizon of the junkyard docks, a makeshift, stuffed white rabbit bobs in the blinding skylight. It sways in a dissonant percussive rhythm like the chopping of a sail's broken mast in the shifting winds.

Hybrid Worlds - Where Animation and Live Action Meet

2009-02-22T19:41:00.001-08:00

The employment of animation in live action film introduces a rupture of evident artifice to the screen. Film typically relies on a disseminated form of presentation, divulging the viewer as voyeur into an apparent reality through the perspectival boundaries of the camera lens and hidden editing of scenes. What is left for the viewer is an experience that makes invisible the creative process and crafted architecture of the work. By contrast, animation produces the opposite effect, displaying in its very appearance the constructed and imaginative character of the visual art.

The Surrealist Belgian painter, Rene Magritte, is perhaps the most famous for taking up the aesthetic thematic of the deceptive character of visual representations with his treachery of images (La trahison des images 1928-29)series. The paradigm example is the landmark painting, "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" (This Is Not a Pipe), which makes manifest the contradictory elements inherent in representative, visual art.

The tension engendered by juxtaposing elements of live action with animation parallels the antagonistic characteristics intrinsic to the creative capacities of the human spirit. Is there a more effective way to express the surrealism of dreams and hallucinations or the exaggerated qualities of cartoonish characters and cliched themes? How else might one exhibit a human being's ordain ability to inflict the world around us with fantastical myth or even sensible meaning? The hybrid world affirms without hesitation the artifice of art, the inherently deceptive character of visual representation that tend towards making invisible its own productive process. And the more adventurous among us might even generalize such an argument over to perception as a whole.

In the newly released music video for Kid Cudi's lonely stoner single "Day N' Nite", the director (who is it?) uses rotoscope to drape live footage over with costume-like illustration. The effect is one of herb induced hallucination partly forged by a healthy dose of city life paranoia. Broad plains of color divided into boldly outlined geometrical shapes act as transitions between each individual scene of illusion.

In another light example of this strategy, director Eric Wareheim produces a frenzied dance number for Flying Lotus' "Parisian Goldfish" off his acclaimed 2008 Los Angeles album on Warp Records. Innocent gyrating figures transform into over-sexualized cartoon porn stars on the backdrop of flashing disco lights tending towards vertigo spasms of love. Beware.

Perhaps one of the most famous instances of the hybrid world is Robert Zemeckis' direction of Who Framed Roger Rabbit in 1988. A fantastic dual world populates the film. Illustrated personages called "Toons" and their related ontological dimension coexist alongside the human world. The interplay of live action and animation displays the power dynamic between two conflicting ways of being (toon and human). And the phenomenal movement infused in tension, release, and synthesis of the toon / human dimension might encourage one to reflect on the capacity for the imagination, more specifically artistic creation, to take on its own life.

A year later in 1989, French auteur Alain Resnais critiqued the conventional distinction between low and high art in his controversial film, Je Veux Rentrer a la Maison (I Want to Go Home). Resnais exemplifies the beauty inherent in cartoon characters possessing a sublime quality equal to that found in great works of literature like Flaubert and Balzac. Cartoons are breathed into existence by the swiveling of simple lines, two-dimensional coloring, and geometry, gracing the silver screen with strangely agile figures that belie the laws of physics.

Ari Folman's critically acclaimed "Waltz with Bashir" exhibits the most radical use of animation informed by live footage. The imaginary war-torn hallucination of a soldier's search for his lost memory is abruptly made manifest in its ultra-sensitivity by a climactic clipping of live footage of the Sabra and Shatila massacre in Lebanon.

Hybrid worlds permit an unparalleled aesthetic strategy for drawing out antagonisms, conflicts, and imaginative artifice, guiding the viewer in a sensual experience without delusion of its means. Any other notable examples?

The Sound-Image: Floating Points' Radiality

2009-02-12T21:50:00.000-08:00

Sound and light are unique physical phenomena that tend to belie our direct tactile grasp. The ear perceives a sonic source of extended spatial distance, often of unknown source, by capturing and amplifying the vibratory waves in the air. The eye is perched at the heights of an Olympian mountain. This small organ of manifold layers might see things originating from enormous distances, even stretching time in looking millions of years into the past while gazing into the stars.

How might one touch the sharp brightness of the sun's radiation? In what way might one come to hold onto a melody that dissipates like a phantom a moment after being heard? Try to put into words the substantial quality of sound or an inkling of light's tactile sensibility.

Perhaps this refusal of strict objecthood is a reason why light and sound have both been associated with supernatural sources, and divine powers, throughout history. In Ancient Greek mythology, Prometheus robs fire from the gods and gives the gift to human beings. Take the invisible voice of a strange, omnipotent God booming awfully from the burning bush. Or further back, consider the immediate creative power of some great Being producing entities with his spoken words, stating in simple grammar for instance, "Let there be light."

Such meditations on sound and light arise from my viewing of a new Floating Points music video, Radiality, constructed under the direction of Hayden Bannochie & Alex Pissourios. Working from the title of the composition, the music video attempts to weave together a central converging point, a structural radius, where sound and image in a particularly modern context magnify sensual form.

In the beginning there was darkness. Darkness glides along melodic chords, opening its eyes into the static cut scene of an electricity tower looming over skeleton trees. A filtered burgundy orange air washes over the static. Our modern age is one of a proud Prometheus that grants us the force of electric fire to harvest the energy to warm our bodies.

The radius of such industrial fire is dynamic. It twists and turns with the rhythmic dissonance of a watery slap bass and piercing bolts of light that crash onto the screen like falling rain on a win shield. Brooding chords wither along zigzagging laser lines drenched in the smoggy haze of sunset. The electricity tower pulses synthesized swirls of burning drums, eventually broken down into its infrastructure-- the collaborating lines of twisting geometry-- bending into a vertigo of angles. Building in momentum dabbling computer signals work their way harmoniously into the dithering melody, rising and falling like spasmic breaths of air.

While sound travels in waves, light betrays such easy classification. In fact, light is the only physical phenomenon that can be measured as a wave or a particle, depending on the reflective stance of the observer. Perhaps such a dual physical make-up is what allows light to manipulate the sensual effect of music, informing the feel of vibration while making its invisibility more tangible.

In Radiality, Floating Points explores the physicality of the sonic and visual phenomena. Bass heavy synth wrangles the chest mirrored by the piercing quality of abrupt splashes of light that bother the eyes. However, the radiality of sonic-light also strives to reenchant our sterilized impressions of mechanical electricity and factory sound with the enigmatic immateriality that influenced the ancients to reflect on the supernatural. Grasping the infinite in such phantom-like phantasmagoria is an impressive, if not sublime feat.

Make sure to turn the sound UP when listening and make the screen as large as possible. This video demands full perceptual attunement.

Floating Points will release an album soon, stay tuned!

The Wash

2009-02-09T23:08:00.000-08:00

Lying at the corner of 6th St. and Folsom in a nearly petrified state of waste are the remains of a car wash. Simple in stature, the rectangular car wash is open ended, a collapsed sunroof to the heavens, stations for manual cleaning neatly mounted at entrance and end. The building grazes the corner sidewalk much like a Taco Truck, transgressing typical boundaries of commercial space, edging ever closer into the intimacy of the streets where pedestrians walk in bipedal fashion rather than ride on four wheels.

A place where drivers dismount their steel steeds, breathe in the cosmic gases of industry, and pay a couple green bills for their robot's purification. A structure for meditation. A robot cleaned and a mind restored. What to make of an abandoned car wash in the historic auto district?

Much like human beings, robots require occasional cleansing by ablution. Detailed rituals of purification have been developed to remove clods of filth from the robot, refreshing its thickened skin to a softened stage of premature innocence.

Rolled onto a conveyor belt apparatus, initial baptismal waters lightly wash over the surfaces of the soiled vehicle. Only the exterior receives these water blasts, which increase in vivacity and pressure as the rolling machine grows accustomed to the cleansing ritual. A soapy residue churns out from socket furnaces and piping to envelop the robot in a wispy, sud concoction.

Once thoroughly johnsoned & johnsoned, spongy cobalt creatures--dressed in the furry hair that recalls nothing less than an elderly smurf--spin spasmodically, gently lacerating the vehicle with their rubbery tentacles. Although slightly painful for the robot, the rapid whippings break up knots of dirt still intact after the ablution soaping. The filth amalgamates in preparation for a final vacuuming from gyrating suction necks, whisking the sludge into the sewer's oblivion with billowing chokes of gas. Alas, a car manifests itself, stammering for destination, yearning for concrete, beckoning contenders, anticipating a medley of primary colored lights.

Sanguine Sunday is Independent

2009-02-03T19:09:00.001-08:00

Sanguine Sunday is now independent of Crooks and Grannies. All further episodes and posts can be found on domain of the eponymous title. Updates come twice a week, once upon a time, on Sunday.

Tune it. Kick in the door. Grind it out.

A Waltz into Trauma

2009-01-23T14:46:00.000-08:00

By mistake I saw Ari Folman's animated documentary about the 1982 Lebanon War, Waltz with Bashir, back in October. Let me clarify, I was in the dreadful city of Brussels, completely exhausted from three days of sleepless travels, and had just escaped along with my companion a meddlesome Belgian--which was not too difficult considering his morning drunkenness, broken leg, and freshly slashed face--who insisted on showing me the main shopping district.

We surreptitiously ducked into a local movie theater, choosing to watch the next available screening, Waltz with Bashir. After the fat Belgian lady working at the counter finally agreed to sell us tickets (she did not think we should see an Israeli film with French and Flemish subtitles while she stupidly identified the Hebrew language film as in Arabic), we settled into our seats and enjoyed a moment's of rest before the start.

I never fell asleep. Waltz with Bashir opens suddenly with frothing yellow-eyed hounds running through nondescript Israeli streets, knocking down everything in their path, coming to a stopping point outside a lone square window where an unshaven man blankly stares into the monsters that haunt him. The nightmare begins.

Director Ari Folman tells the story of himself, a middle-aged Israeli filmmaker who lost his memory of fighting in the 1982 Lebanon war at the age of 19. The scene of the hounds, a recurring nightmare told to the aged Folman by a fellow soldier, jump starts his psychological journey to recapture his own memory of the war. The result of this journey is the creation of Waltz itself, an imaginatively construed world outside of our earthly dimension. Art director and illustrator, David Polonsky, and director of animation, Yoni Goodman, execute richly colored, chiaroscuro illustration that recalls the aesthetic quality of graphic novels.

Folman's film becomes a reflection on the dynamic nature of his fractured memory, as he investigates the reality of the blocked experiences by seeking out, and conducting interviews, with others present alongside him during the war. We witness Folman's live interviews (two dubbed over for the sake of anonymity) that take place in illustrated bars, rural homes, or a car, splicing immediately over to the recalling of dreamy sequences of escape and hipnotic meditations on horrific war scenes. The soundtrack propels this pschyedelic discplacement of experience, ranging from rhythmic drum claps mirroring the movements of a racing heart during night terrors, ironic pop music chanting about the thrills of bombing Lebanon reflecting the soldier's experience of returning from war to a land of general normalcy, and the incessant machine gun fire--chilled by the silence of death.

How does one recount the atrocities of war? What creative form might inch towards capturing the its reality, a reality that by its very natue eludes our grasp? A reality that human nature resists, repressed into the realm of myths, denied and blocked up in the subconscious. How might one detail the journey of recollecting this lost memory, divided and traumatized by its origin? Waltz thrusts the the unreal into the real, seamlessly layering hallucination with brutal fact, the construction of memory with some truth to be remembered. There might be no more exacting medium than animation to disclose such interplay between the imaginary and the real, and the complete breakdown of these categories when taking up the horrors of war.

Throughout the narrative we see repetitive sequences of the younger Folman wading in the sea outside of the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps where Lebanese Phalangists massacred thousands of Palestinians in vengeance of the assassinated president-elect of Lebanon Bashir Gemayel. Folman struggles with his guilt, coming to acknowledge the fact that he, and otherIsraeli soldiers, permitted the Phalange militia men to enter the camps. They stood by a few hundred yards away, perhaps unable to believe the sure signs of the massacre right before them.

In the dreamy state Folman rises to the shores with his troupe. They dress in fatigues under dreary, yellowed sky lit by flares and walk sullenly into the dilapidated, blown out buildings of West Beirut. The sequence repeats on end throughout the narrative, reaching a corner turned where hijab adorned women scream in terror, yell, and then the whirling sound of silence. Again and again the audience witnesses this scene, anticipating the view of atrocity, dreading the moment, and again and again, the impending fact is cut off from us.

Folman faces the problem intrinsic to any documentary of atrocity; how does a director disclose such brutality without turning it into a spectacle? How might a filmmikar avoid transforming such horrors into phantasmagoria for our own entertainment, seated in cushioned theater chairs, our bodies circuited into a lit up screen that affords a vicious movement of suspense and drama.

In the final scenes of Waltz Folman transitions abruptly from the magestically powerful animated world into gritty, documented footage of the massacre. We see bodies stacked and beginning to rot, rubble and human parts indistinguishable, the spilled entrails of a ferocious massacre. And just for a moment we are taken to this time and place, thrown violently outside the bounds of the protected camera lens, enveloped within the horror.

Somehow Folman's animated, hipnotic dimension prepares us for this task, doing consistent labor on our sentiments, shaping our abilities to imagine the impossible, and fooling the body's defense mechanisms into accepting the most unreal of all realities. For a moment, the veils of the spectacle fall back, the protective cognitive system breaks down, just a moment enough to grasp the absolute terror.

Folman's final work is nothing short of a masterpiece, a compelling anti-war documentary that achieves the most exemplary of moral efforts: to disclose the genuine reality of horror and trauma, hoping to guide us to feel the obligation of working towards its demise.

Sanguine Sunday - Resolution (ep. 3)

2009-01-20T23:07:00.000-08:00

We've been trying to orchestrate a podcast feed, but such a feat combined with the time consuming ventures in learning sound editing in logic, has postponed our new years mix so long that well, it's almost 2010 already. Granted it's only the middle of the month, what better day to throw out a mix on such a remarkable day that triumphs a call to action and resistance to petty delays and griping commitments to future goals (you know, making a legit podcast.)

Friends! I give you our resolution. Until the podcast comes, we shall harness the internet's maternal riches in its nourishing offer of zshare!

Let's get down to the program. In the spirit of the new horizon set forth by 2009, Honey Knuckles cuts up some soul collaborated proto-break tunes--putting emphasis on the afro-beat, disco, and krautrock sectors--with the resolution of improving his b-boy technique in the cypha'. And I (Z-Noooote) take the year of recession to reflect upon the magical quality of money. In resolving that it's time to either find a hustle or make some more cash money in recession times, or less ambitiously, just wondering about the poetics of the dollar bill, I find some inspiration in a collection of cross-genre dollar lamentations, on the grind motivations, and fuzzed out flows flipped up for my own purposes. Finally, Aisha rocks steady with some knowledge on the Oscar Grant protest in Oakland and the perennial abuse of police authority in the inner city. Let the chi flow!

Much resource is to be found in the rich history of music to help us make the resolute kind of resolution that will prove lasting. So peep that shit. And tell us about your transformations.

Download here.

Tracklist:

Honey Knuckles - Breakin' Breaks

Mark Ronson - God put a smile on your face feat. The Daptone Horns (Talk)
Lefties Soul Connection - Code 99 (Talk)
Dave Cortez with the Moon People - Happy Soul with a Hook
Sharon Jones - I just dropped in to see what condition my condition was in
The Pointer Sisters - Send him back (Piloosky Edit)
Ides of March - Aire of a good feeling
Gil Scott Heron - The bottle
Fela Kuti - Roforofo Fight
The Beginning of the End - Funky Nassau Pt. 1 & 2
Manu Dibango - Soul Makossa
Manu Dibango - Moni
Kraftwerk - The Robots
Holy Ghost - Hold On
Can - Vitamin C
Lowell Fulsom - Tramp
Eric B. & Rakim - Know the Ledge
The New Mastersounds - Land of Nod (Lack of Afro remix)
Maceo and the Macks - Soul Power 74
Red Astaire - Mambo El B-Boy
The Budos Band - The Proposition (Talk)
Cymande - Dove (Talk)

Z-Note - the Money Mix

Young-Holt Unlimited - Ain't There Something Money Can't Buy
Amral's Trinidad Cavaliers Steel Drum Orchestra - The World is a Ghetto
Bohannon - Save Their Souls
Demon Fuzz - I Put a Spell on You
Sly and the Family Stone - I Cannot Make It
Public Enemy - Shut 'Em Down (Pete Rock edit)
Common Sense - Soul by the Pound
Slum Village - Get Dis Money
Stevie Spacek - Let the Dollar Circulate
Billy Paul - Let the Dollar Circulate
The Sylvers - Stay Away From Me
Black Merda (w/ Linnie Walker) - People Let me Know
Eric B. and Rakim - Paid in Full (Coldcut edit)
Eddie Bo - The Thang (Part 2)
Eight Minutes - I Can't Get No Higher
Fatback Band - Goin' to See My Baby
James Brown - Give it Up or Turn it Loose (remix)
Run DMC - Hard Times
The Flying Lizards - Money

Big ups to Edgar at Words, Words, Words for providing a resonant response to the soul recession episode and kicking me to the Billie Paul's soulicious brain melter, Let the Dollar Circulate. Peep his bombastic, well versed journey through a rag-tag history of American soul recession music.

Endnote: to be improved in the beta stage --> mic levels, mixing skills, music knowledge, radio voice, suggestions?

Sanguine Sunday - (Recession Soul) - ep. 2

2008-12-21T15:40:00.001-08:00

Ya' it's that time of the year, one brisk San Francisco morning after winter solstice, the days are just about to get longer but not much brighter. In tune for the Holiday season in the midst of thin wallets and heavy eyelids, Sanguine Sunday mixes up some of what we like to call recession soul. Bringing you that uplifting flavor from the hustle to the bounce, some of those I need monay type of jams, and even the more contemplative what the hell is goin' on with our economy ballads--recession soul covers all it takes to overcome the despair of dusty pockets.

In the spirit of such hard times, Aisha interviews Rayan on the grind, a struggling San Francisco renter and resident of Moss Street about the merits and craft of couch surfing. Meanwhile Zeno mangles 2 for 40 dollar buttered up lobster dinners. Keep on listening for a surprise battle between man and crusty sea beast; shit is sinister.

And Happy Holidays everyone! Moss Street's Sanguine Sunday will see you again in 2009!

LISTEN

Intro
Souls of Mischief - 93 Til' Infinity (inst.)

DJ Zeno
Slum Village - Reunion
Black Milk - Bounce
James Brown - Talkin' Loud and Sayin' Nothing (remix)
Pilooski - Can't There be Love
De La Soul - Say No Go
James Pants - We're Through
Jesse Johnson - Can You Help Me
Brothers Johnson - Ain't We Funkin' Now
Slave - Slide
Bernard Wright - Spinnin'
Con Funk Shun - Got to be Enough
DJ Quik - Tear it Off
Roland Appel - Dark Soldier

Honey Knuckles
(Talk) Eddie Kendricks - My People...Hold On
The O'Jays - For The Love of Money
Laura Lee - Crumbs off the Table
Charles Wright & the Watts 103rd St Band - What Can You Bring Me?
Joseph Henry - I've Never Found a Girl
Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings - What If We All Stopped Paying Taxes?
Sound Experience - Devil With the Bust
Breakstra - Getcho Soul Togetha (Part 2)
Brick - Dazz
Carl Carlton - She's a Bad Mama Jama
Lyn Collins - Mama Feelgood
Fatback Band - Backstrokin'
Lakeside - Fantastic Voyage
Jackson Sisters - I Believe in Miracles
Earth Wind and Fire - Brazilian Rhyme
Patrice Rushen - Forget Me Nots
Herbie Hancock - Wiggle Waggle
Johnny Pate - Shaft in Africa
(Talk) Barry White - I'm Gonna Love You Just a Little Bit More Baby
(Talk) Gary Bartz - I've Known Rivers
(Lobster Dinner Freestyle Battle) Edan - Sing it Shitface Instrmental

Endnote: Zeno AKA Krimpnasty is looking for a stable moniker. Suggestions appreciated.

Sanguine Sundays

2008-12-16T18:59:00.000-08:00

What up blog world. I have been taken a hiatus to get my soul together, but I just felt a pinpoint abyss in my swelling heart without updating this little virtual grab bag of my life. And all the personalities that fit into that, big ups Granny Wesson and Cyrus the Humble. Oh ya, Granny's been holding it down on her new music blog teamed up with Def1, the keskejecoute headmasta. It's on the come up.

Anyway, in the past few months a new persona by the name of Zeno AKA Krimpnasty has been added on to the mix of my schizophrenic psyche. The dynamics of this antogonistic sideplate has not been synthesized in any harmonious way yet. Big ups to D-Rock AKA the illustrious Honey Knuckles, that smooth operator, I have been translating my music interests into the chopped and screwed ways of djing.

So we developed this little concept of an online radio show, eventually a podcast, and perhaps on the distant horizon something more ambitious. We call it Sanguine Sundays--props to Aisha for that sinster double S moniker--and we hope to introduce you to the music we are listening to, the way we listen to it, and the way we scrape it all up each and every Sunday afternoon. Expect the deep monster funk, word power Hiphop, soulclap breaks, fuzzed out psych, throw back soul, new wave, boogie, electro, sprinkled with some rock and let's call everything else incognito.

The first episode is blazingly titled Moss Street Meats. Enjoy.

12-14-08 - As we approach the end of 2008, the Moss Street family decides to do a little bit of winter cleaning of the freezer. Items included a bag labeled "meat", kosher chicken that was once resurrected from the trash can, and mystery Filipino meat from our early 2008 excursion to Manilla Oriental Market. Memorable quote of the evening: "Does this meat have cheese in it?" "No."

playlist :

Intro
Talkin' All That Jazz (remix)

Honey Knucks
Cutie Pie - One Way
Paperboy - Ditty
Soul 2 Soul - Back to Life
Salt N' Peppa - Shoop
Jamiroquai - Virtual Insanity
Black Street - No Diggity
Paula Abdul - Straight Up
David Banner - Play
Santogold - You'll Find a Way (Switch remix)
Marshena Shaw - California Soul (Mad Decent edit)
Latyrx - Lady Don't Tek No
Eric B. & Rakim - Paid in Full
Tribe Called Quest - Scenario
Beastie Boys - Shadrach
Dizzee Rascal - Fix Up Look Sharp
Red Astaire - Love to Angie
Sir Joe Quartermain And Free Soul - So Much Trouble
Bar-Kays - Soulfinger
James Brown - Get Up

James Brown - Honky Tonk Popcorn Part II (talk over)
James Brown - Funky Drummer (edit)

Zeno

Nas - Queens Get the Money
Big Beat - Billy Squier
Slum Village - Do You
Del tha Funky Homosapien - Dr. Bombay
Ultramagnetic MCs - Ease Back
The Jaz - To Your Soul
Divine Styler - Ain't Sayin' Nothin'
Bar-Kays - Hit and Run
De La Soul - Me Myself and I
Jungle Brothers - Doin' our own Dang' (JB's mix)
Main Source - He Got So Much Soul
Marie Franklin - Bad Woman
Big Daddy Kane - Warm it Up Kane
Coldcut - Fat (Party and Bullshit)
Notorious B.I.G. - Party and Bullshit
Madvillain - Monkey Suite
Outkast - Wheelz of Steel

Outro
J Dilla - Donuts

Art Corridors Part 2: Balmy Alley

2008-08-21T23:28:00.000-07:00

Granny Wesson's last angry brilliant post on Bluxome Alley got me thinking about the history of public art in San Francisco. In asking myself where it all began I posed a question demanding more research than I ever imagined. So, I specified the question a tiny bit, where and when did the alleys decorated top to bottom with murals originate?

And that takes me to the Mission District's infamous Balmy Alley. Intricately decorated and broadly diverse, the murals reflect the numerous perspectives that make up the neighborhood's rich Latino heritage and new contingency. However, the images do not always find easy peace with each other. Paintings often bleed into contiguous murals, blurring the lines where one ends and another begins, and even confronting one another. Look carefully and you might find remnants of murals from the past -- disappearing ever so slowly with a fight -- flitting in the corners of walls or under chipped wood fences.

The humble origins of Balmy Alley date back to the early 70's, coinciding with the same period that graffiti began to take over New York's subway lines. The first mural was organized by Mia Gonzalez under the tutelage of Susan Cervantes and Carlos Loarca. Youth from the "24th Street Place" program designed the mural, and together with people from the community, painted it during the Mission's first mural painting community event.

In the 1980's Balmy Alley evolved under the direction of Ray Patlan and Patricia Rodriguez. Hoping to call attention to the atrocities and injustices in Central America, Patlan and In 84, Rodriguez helped organized the painting of over 26 murals informed by the theme of "Peace in Central America". Balmy Alley thereby took on a particular political flavor. The walls were coated with direct political messages, expressions of rage, hopeful calls for unity, and personal narratives. It was during this period that Balmy Alley gained worldwide fame (and to this day, you might notice a lot of tourists cruising though the corridor.)

Ever changing and shifting with the community's own development, Balmy Alley now possesses a soothing but vibrant character. New murals appear as weather rains down on garage doors and old wooden posts crumble away piece by piece. The many flower bushes and trees that align the Alley's winding red brick road marks the corridor off from other alleys situated in warehouse districts or along hard cement pavement. It's rare to see mural art in an alley juxtaposed with the greenery, or that nature so well integrated into a somewhat unforgiving urban environment. But Balmy Alleys offers just those anomalies and surprises, if you take the time to look.

Flickr archive coming at the end of the month!!

Art Corridors Part 1: Bluxome Alley

2008-08-15T01:05:00.000-07:00

What beats standing in line for an hour at the SFMOMA to see an incredible collection of works by Frida Kahlo - and then waiting in another line that winds up the four levels of stairs before you can view any of the paintings?

And then squirming through a cluster jam of dribbling faced, snot-nose drenched denizens and gawking tourists who pinball bump their way around because they're listening to a guide tour that soundblasts their ears so they can't hear you, and they already weren't looking because they're walking all over the place with their eyes, and that damn audio guide filters their aesthetic experience with average facts about exceptional things, and it just makes you a little depressed and somewhat angry and horribly frustrated with the idiotic experience of moving about through a museum that makes such a fuss about trying to be a dry, sacred place? But then you forget about all that because good god James Brown, those paintings are fucking amazing.

Anyway, what beats it? Well it's probably worth it, but for a change of viewing pace, how about walking through one of the many mural alleys that serve as public art corridors through sun or moon, rain or shine, broken glass or sewage waste? San Francisco has a long history of mural art dating further back than Diego Rivera's famous paintings in the 1930's, and many official muralists or wraith-like graffiti artists continue the legacy to this day.

While many city dwellers are familiar with the Mission art corridors--the likes of Clarion Alley's vibrant path negotiating Mission streetlife and Valencia boutique etiquette, or nearby Balmy Alley's themes on indigenous self-determination and revolution--the SOMA district boasts its own public graffiti wall in the form of a two part Bluxome Alley.

The walls, warehouse windows, pipes, poles, air ducts, staircase banisters, and all other unidentified objects of industrial infrastructure act as canvases for Bluxome's alleys graffiti art. Colorful names stretch across a dingy background wall space of pale tan tone. The letters form complex geometric shapes and sometimes integrate faces into its composition; winding, swiveling, screeching, and bubbling into the third dimension.

Bluxome St. lies within the developer dream neighborhood, Mission Bay, parallel to Townsend and passing through 6th and 5th streets. The tiny two part alleys cross perpendicular to 125 and 145 Bluxome. Enjoy a pleasant day admiring the rising of catastrophic condominium buildings aligning the highway entrance and the concrete lined corridor of beautiful image poems (you know, graffiti). Bask in the absurd clashing of contemporary urban lifestyles right in the thick of it! The threshold lingers on.

And before you let those markers loose, peep the rules, son. However you want to take them.

View the entire flickr set here.

The Spotless Mind Raps of Jay Electronica

2008-08-07T01:17:00.000-07:00

If you take a minute to cruise the hiphoposphere, in all its virtual glory, or on the concrete streets, in your favorite dusty record store, or all up in the ink spilled magazines, then you might have heard about this new, Jay Electronica. And I'm not just posting abut him because I can't stop talking about musicians influenced by movies.

There is no doubt that Jay Electronica is breaking down barriers. Trying to define his style leads to a refreshing enigma. He came up in New Orleans but lived all over the country and lost the accent. He flows supremely over clashing Dilla beats but sounds at the top of his game on his own melodic production void of any drum breaks. He spits slick rhymes concocting mystical images of spiritual understanding and at the same time rips bubble gum rappers into atoms without effort.

If you don't believe me, before copping the mixtape which will introduce you to the music--What the F*ck is a Jay Electronica--just listen to "the Pledge." Jay loops the lulling melody that pervades Michel Gondry's widely influential film, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), to construct an awe inspiring song. The lack of percussion sounds immediately fresh in a music game ridden with computer generated drum snares and overly produced rhythms. The imaginatively brooding melody repeats nervously in the distance infusing Jay's meditative reflections with a cutting potency. The song generates a feeling of uneasiness and fascination, a dangerous balancing act between hope and desolation.

In the longer version of the song Jay interslices the track with sample vocal cuts from other films, primarily the classic Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, directed by Mel Stuart in 1971. The sonic samples from the film draw the listener in through a nostalgiac attraction to a film that partially shaped the imagination of many American childhoods and a novel wonder produced by the strange context we're hearing it in. The vocals also act as chapter marks in a largely epic song taking on the length of about eight minutes, giving the listener a much needed moment to reflect.

If you're going to Rock the Bells then you will also be seeing Jay Electronica. Give me the word on it! A full length album is due out by the end of the year.

The Sound Image: Quasimoto's "Come on Feet"

2008-08-01T23:32:00.000-07:00

Despite my pathologic habit of initiating a concept series and then never following up with a single successive post, the idea of the sound-image is too irresistible. So, a second post is in order, and what better candidate than Madlib's helium voiced alter-ego, Quasimoto, represented cordially by a florescent green puppet animal--slightly resembling a hideous faced possum--in the seminal underground release "Come on Feet". Madlib, born Otis Jackson Jr., dropped the single in 2000 on the original Quas album, "The Unseen", simultaneously rejuvenating and making a cemented name for Stonesthrow Records.

Saturated thoroughly with weed smoke and toad slimed mushrooms, Los Angeles' beat konducta par excellence Madlib ventures into the astrolands of the Hiphoposphere in his psychedelic exploration of the basic anatomical apparatus that keeps us moving around; our two feet.

Before we get to the acid trip puppet show video, let's break down some of the historical elements shaping the track's spacey quality. Giving "Come On Feet" a clamoring, other worldly feel, the running hypnotic melody cut from Alain Goraguer's psych-jazz soundtrack of Laloux's La Planete Sauvage shapes a dissonant, multi-textured soundscape. That's fitting considering Fantastic Planet is an animated epic story of a revolutionary battle between sensitive human and rational alien produced in 1973 but taking place in a temporal dimension far outside of our own. Madlib reaps crackling effects of stumbling footsteps and shadowy figures to construct a nocuous sound array that threatens to stir the most guarded corners of the listener's paranoia.

The vocal edits and samplings take their influence from another film of a more local, but equally mind bending, variety. Distorted clips chopped from Melvin Van Peeble's original 1971 blaxploitation film, Sweetback's Badasssss Song, surround Quas' raps dedicated to the prowess of his running legs. "Come on feet / cruise for me / ... Come on feet / Come on run." The listener is quickly gripped by the wrenching terror that overwhelms a fugitive escaping the authorities.

Surely inspired by the cinematic coherence between La Planete Sauvage's sound and image as well as Sweetback's song and visual landscape, Madlib pieces together the spacey liftedness with the terrestrial density of the urban jungle.

The unusual puppet animation employed (by some unknown art director) for the video of "Come on Feet" synthesizes the brooding sense of unfamiliarity and estrangement--consisting in both its airy and earthy forms--that permeates the sampled films. Sound and image lock together to produce deranged effects in the audience, most likely seated or standing still, interpolating monstrous feet as they loiter.

Just entertain your feet for a couple moments. Wiggle the toes. Slip your consciousness into the outer appendages. Imagine the inner motors of your mind beamed outwards from each protruding appendage. How monstrous and unsettling are they?

Question: Does anyone know the art director for the "Come on Feet" video?

Side note: "Feet" is a standard biblical euphemism for genitalia. Take, for example, Saint Jerome's description of a prostitute as "the harlot who opens her feet to everyone who passes by".

Pie in the Sky: Dreaming of Electric Shoes

2008-07-27T17:42:00.000-07:00

In cities across the world electricity lines lace intricate black lined patterns across the sky, connecting disparate individuals and communities into the the global village.

Long ago, somewhere in America's city streets, some young person stared up at the electric wires, and feeling a little bit alienated, a tad curious, and overwhelmingly anxious to make a mark on the city, the starry-eyed American child tied up some dirty shoelaces and swung them over the lines.

After fifteen attempts, the laces looped over and over in a balancing act between the two weights, and the shoes finally locked in. The youngin's footprints settled into the electric pathways to gingerly sway in the summer zephyrs next to perched birds taking a moment of rest from the long days of hustling for food in the garbage packed gutters.

The critics of my romantic account might tell a more violent story about the birth of the electric shoes phenomenon. It might very well be true that young David Schulim raced hurriedly home to his Lower East Side brick behemoth home in some nasty galoshes (that original gangsta' 1910's style), where he got heisted by the neighborhood hoodlums.

It started hailing real hard, and the kids bred on American ingenuity and battle techniques, quickly churned the idea to make poor little Davey crawl through the muddy snow in his socks, forever remembering his beat downs on the way to school, as the weather torn relic of defeat dangled sadly over the block.

Urban legend and myth abound circling the meaning of the shoes that jostle just underneath the electricity lines. What does it all mean?

Seasoned historians of gangsterism reading this must be growing real upset, pointing vindictive fingers at the all too cliche stories I'm telling about the origin of electric shoes. Surely, they yell while gesticulating wildly, the first appearance of clinking kicks in the sky mark the territory of a nearby drug house. "You didn't know?!" they say with a contemptuous smirk of the lips.

The shoes hang from the wisping wires like a secret code in the hood, understood only by the locals rummaging around for the goods. When one pair rises, others tag along jealously, as the pushermen business grows and reaches a critical mass, billowing into an all out war for territory and money.

My electric shoe fanatics, I assure you that all the stories equally possess the kernel of truth, as we trace along the genealogy of the phenomenon in American history, let us remember that the beginning, no matter what it may be, never ultimately limits the haphazard development of some strange cultural practice.

No story completely holds the end all essence of electric shoes, and in fact, the meanings continue to disperse themselves into the streets. New sagas are being told by elusive neighborhood characters who play with the numerous urban signifiers that constitute our public space. Just look up occasionally and enjoy the stories being told...

1) Woodcut Bird - numerous sightings noticed in Los Angeles around 2006, slowly becoming extinct in the concrete environment. Artist: unknown.

2) Money Bags - recently spotted in Los Angeles. Quite exciting progression of the art form--maybe some motivated electric shoe artist will throw up some pie in the sky soon! Artist: unknown.

3) Above Arrows - Ubiquitous street artist, Above, became infamous a couple years back for his lyrical wordplay painted onto two sides of a woodcut arrow, often making a game of the signs and words of the urban landscape.

4) Converse Shoes - The most direct homage to electric shoes, these colorful woodcuts littered artist friendly neighborhoods throughout California several years ago. Took this photo in Balmy Alley off 24th in the Mission in 2004. Artist: unknown.

Do any of my three loyal readers know these artists? Anyone know some local contributions in Frisc Town to this growing tradition?

And then, there's this.

The Vortex Room Brings Back Cinema

2008-07-17T13:56:00.000-07:00

While cruisin' the boulevard in my smelly kicks I sometimes indulge in that surging impulse to peer through the ubiquitous store windows that candy coat the streets, showcasing all their little treats categorically prepared just for tempting my wallet to shovel out its guts. Store after store pass, the same endless routine of clothing, furniture, liquor and food, the four basic elements of modern urban existence all fused together by the common driving force of entertainment.

My eyes jet elsewhere, flipping to the florescent signs, shifting higher towards the rooftop cornices and spiraling back down the iron fire escape that winds gently between box cut windows offering, behind drawn curtains, a scant glimpse into a lived world -- dirty dishes piled in the sink, a humming television, floating bodies moving in and out -- all in hopes of locking my eyes upon any object not for sale, concrete enough to stabilize my thoughts.

I sometimes imagine streets filled with a different kind of business, a more intimate and hospitable kind of market where purchases fade into the background of things and connections with people rise to the forefront. Alas, my dreams of purposeful capitalism driven by a little more soul aren't so ridiculous, because I assure you my readers, that I have glimpsed such possibilities!

A hidden speakeasy in the heart of the SOMA sector speaks directly to my cravings. A plain warehouse facade, once perhaps the exterior of a humble print shop, disguises the portal into a supergalactic experience within! Upon entry, the human being walks through a tiny corridor and emerges into a spiraling realm of film reel vertigo and brooding light fixtures cyphering on the walls.

Welcome to the Vortex Room, a classic speakeasy lined with black leather couches, a bar stocked with fine whiskeys, and a projector shooting the most obscure mm prints onto a screen just big enough to envelop your entire visual landscape.

The Vortex Room is managed by Cosmic Hex, an internet based preservation resource of discarded or neglected film gems, organized for member download at quite the reasonable price. These folks are the crate digging archivists of the film world, with a knack for seeking out acid trip psychedelic soundtracks, the most twisted horror plots, and the untimely cult films (C-Films) that we could baptize as a-classic.

The otherworldly atmosphere of the Vortex Room serves as a catalyst for the viewer to imaginatively fall into a full cinematic experience that glides into another dimension of sound and color.

The cinema used to be a focal point in communities from an era not so long ago, serving as a social hub for entertainment, news and education, or even spiritual restoration and elevation. The French would convert palaces into extravagant cinemas while Italians viewed them as more important than the Church (I point to Cinema Paradiso).

The Vortex Room harks back to just this sort of era where the cinematic experience inflicted a resounding sense of awe into people. Once again we journey on spaceships throughout the universe of human emotion and thought, landing on Earth again once the lights turn back on, feeling replenished and joyous with life.

Many might accuse me of absurd nostalgia or idiotic romanticism for a cinematic milieu of simpler days, but the Vortex Room agrees that a futuristic intimacy with film and people is still possible while staring wondrously at the glowing moving image.

Two films, or a series of shorts, stream every Thursday night around 9pm at 1082 Howard in between 7th and 6th. Entry for $5! Here's the calendar.

We Funk(ed) Up Frisco

2008-07-14T21:49:00.000-07:00

I haven't been steady bloggin' lately, since the mobbin' of non-virtual life has caught me up in the hustle. Hopefully my three loyal readers don't mind too much, or else I'm just going to be writing for myself from now on.

Enough of the nonsense, let's get to the program.

While sliding through San Francisco's night life the past couple years I've become disappointed with the lack of a solid Hiphop - Funk - Soul scene that holds it down on a consistent week to week basis. Maybe I'm spoiled because Los Angeles pushes the movement hard. But most of the big name DJ's in Frisco -- you know, the ones who've apparently been in the game for a minute and paid all their dues -- seem to compromise their style by playing a stream of the jiggy club shit to an audience that shrinks in numbers each week.

While I got no problem with the bass heavy club bangers that rock the party, I'm looking for the balance in style and content that reflects the Bay's rich music history. In the end, the Hiphop heads ain't happy, the DJ's don't feel it, so what's going on?

Saturday night, Montreal's We Funk radio DJ's Professor Groove and Static proved that Baydestrians really do fiend for a nickel bag of The Funk. Packing Elbo Room's top floor like a sardine can, We Funk demonstrated the crowd pleasing legitimacy of their funky soul hustle. Static dropped the classic boom bap Hiphop leading smoothly into Professor Groove's crescendoing dirty diamond funk. They switched off every thirty minutes or so, letting the tempo rise and fall in thick cascading motions like a multi-layered sexual grind.

While spinning together for twelve years on the notorious internet radio station and doing their homework digging deep into the crates, the DJ duo developed a streamlined set of slamming jams that pulse with soul clapping percussion. The finely woven fabric of Apache-style breaks, In response, not only did the crowd soak in the music, the air conditioning rafters literally started sweating and dripped onto the dance floor's many writhing bodies. You can call that a make it rain remix.

Special shout out to ShredONE for making wefunk happen!

Be sure to scope out the We Funk radio archive of over 520 radio shows, updated bimonthly (about) with a couple new shows each time. Peep the interviews, dialogues, and mixes (with set lists) raising the peoples on Hiphop like the Wake Up Show used to. You can also listen to the weekly Friday night live streams at 2am (est).

Album Review: RZA Loses Focus w/ Digisnacks

2008-07-06T23:32:00.000-07:00

Last winter, New York's seminal Wu-Tang Clan dropped the highly debated 8 Diagrams, marking the fifth and perhaps final chronicle in their kung fu Hiphop mythology. Powerhouse members of the Clan, primarily Ghostface Killah and Raekwon, met widespread criticism and poor album sales with fingers pointed at their musical director and spiritual leader, Robert Diggs, known to most simply as RZA.

Devoted Wu-Tang connoisseurs shrugged their shoulders at Digg's unworkable sonic explorations, hoping that a second coming of RZA's alter-ego, Bobby Digital, the futuristic street hustler sage, would vindicate the co-founder by proving the genius of his beatsmith experiments.

However, not only does Digi Snacks never venture into the unchartered psychedelic Hiphop territory of 8 Diagrams, it also fails to weave together the brooding cinematic coherency that typically marks RZA’s grime-soul production.

Digi Snacks fumbles endlessly for a sense of identity, jumping abruptly from introspective meditations on death in the slicing “Long Time Coming,” to the flailing club banger, “Straight up the Block,” that negotiates Digital’s slowed down clunking rhymes en français, hyper-speed Jay-Z vocals formed into the hook, and silly thug rants courtesy of David Banner.

The sonic environment parallels the schizophrenic lyrical content, steering wildly through spacey video game sound effects mismatched over crisp syncopated drums that only occasionally pull the flows back down to earth.

RZA pushes his idiosyncratic gritty-shaman style on a few singles, but the most notable joints lose their credibility when placed within the washed out context of the album as a whole. The hardest hitting joint on Digi Snacks, “You Can’t Stop me Now,” a soul powered epic devoted to the Wu-Tang legacy, made many (including myself) prematurely believe Diggs could rejuvenate the prowess of the Clan.

Featuring the ubiquitously sampled chant “No matter how hard you try / you can’t stop me now” from psych-soul group Whatnauts’ single, “Message From a Black Man,” RZA interweaves melodic chords of lingering bass plucks over crunchy percussive claps. Nonetheless, upon completion of listening to Digi Snacks, the championing flow of the song rings hollow, and might keep you second guessing whether it was just the sample that made Digital sound fresh in the first place.

We might give Diggs the credit that the personality disorder inflicted Bobby Digital reflects the ongoing internal battles that plague us in the digital age, as the album commences with a short introduction to the conflicted savior-gangster as a character “that struggles between the good and evil within himself.” But Digi Snacks glides on the boundaries of any spiritual synthesis, succeeding in providing the listener with only what the title offers, a haphazard assortment of decadent side dishes that not only feel gluttonous, but also leave the listener hungry for a fulfilling meal.

Here's the track list. The last song is ill (so, listen to tracks 2, 3, and 16)

01: Digi Snacks (feat. Understanding)
02: Long Time Coming (feat. Danny Keyz)
03: You Can't Stop Me Now (feat. Inspectah Deck)
04: Straight Up the Block (feat. David Banner, Beretta 9 & Monk)
05: Booby Trap (feat. Dexter Wiggles)
06: Try Ya Ya Ya (feat. Monk & Thea)
07: Good Night (feat. Reverend William Burke, Thea & Crisis)
08: No Regrets
09: Money Don't Own Me (feat. Monk, Christbearer & Stone Mecca)
10: Creep (feat. Black Knights, Christbearer & Thea)
11: Drama (feat. Monk & Thea)
12: Up Again (feat. Beretta 9, Reverend William Burke, George Clinton & El DeBarge)
13: Put Your Guns Down (feat. Startel)
14: Love is Digi Pt. II (feat. Beretta 9, Crisis & Thea)
15: O Day
16: Don't Be Afraid

Waste your time and download it.
Waste your money and buy it off koch records.

E40 Hyphifies the Apple Store

2008-07-01T00:04:00.000-07:00

Peeped the director of traffic himself, E-Fonzarelli, causing dread shaking madness at the apple store off Powell station. While most of the Financial District soaked in happy hour by drinking dirty martinis after a hard day of work at internet start-ups gmailing their friends all day, the more intense side show baydestrians got stupid doo doo dumb in one of the world's finest technology boutiques. Weird.

The line grew a couple blocks up 4th St., making shopping bag burdened tourists from the Midwest gaze in awe and wonder for a second, but soon enough their focus returned to the thrill of buying things and so they kept on walking.

E40 Water's dexterous street hustle flow, straight outta' Vallejo while reppin' East Oakland to the fullest, filled up the sonic airwaves vibrating around pristine mac books and bouncing off white washed walls. A pummeling "Ooooooooh," the legendary bass heavy noise developed by E-40 himself, sonic boomed an elderly man down to the ground while the call and response "Baaay Areaaaaaa" reached decibel levels so high, my sources tell me, that it could be heard echoing throughout the subway tunnels.

On the real though, the environment was absurd enough for the hyphy legend to spit a somewhat lackluster twenty minute performance and still sound super nice on the mic. What does it matter when you're E-40 and you got three hundred cats making thizz faces at each other reflected so exquisitely off little shiny Ipod screens?

Be on the look for E-40's new album, The Ball Street Journal, dropping this Fall at a blog near you.

4onephonics Unleashes Boogie with Dam Funk

2008-06-29T23:16:00.000-07:00

Over the last few years living in the Bay Area seeking out Hiphop and its multitudinous offspring, I became quickly familiar with the innovative triathlon skills of the DJ collective, 4onefunk, paying dues in the scratching, battling, and mixtape circuits. Taking their steez to the next level in 2005, DJs Teeko and Max Kane established the 4onephonics band with drummer Austin Bohlman and keyboardist Colin Brown from the Mononphonics seven piece jam band.

The group utilizes two turntables as instruments, operated by mix wizards Teeko and Max Kane, to manipulate prerecorded elements as well as synthesize spontaneous sounds with the drum machine. Bohlman carries the groove forward with a heavily syncopated percussion that soaks in the break beats while Brown's cascading keys jazz up a groovy melody. Occasionally the horns of Monophonics join forces to stretch the capabilities of the group's organic swaying music even further. The final product is a powerhouse funk group informed just as much by the heavy grooves of Tower of Power as Herbie Hancock and the Scratch Pickles.

However, last night at the Elbo Room I witnessed 4onephonics like never before. Opening a set for the newly signed Stonesthrow records breakthrough, Dam Funk, 4onephonics unleashed a side developing project that blew the roof off the sucka'. Hooked up fully with deep boogie vinyl, spacey synth heavy keys, a sliding bass thump, and even a vocoder, 4onephonics constructed a sticky, grinding atmospheric noise that filled up Elbo Room's top floor with head nodding awe and sweaty writhing.

I must have been sleepin' on it for awhile, because sure enough, 4onephonics' myspace page showcases a couple tastes of their new boogie inspired joints. The low rider anthem, "Gfunkin on the C1," cruises steady with a clapping boom bap that lets the gurgling synth pop keys sink their chords thickly into your skin. Moving towards the spacier tip, "Controller ONE take ONE" totes a pummeling drum lick, whinnied along by scratching that transforms the prerecorded vinyl into a chopped up cosmic melody that sounds almost like a futuristic saxophone that secretes sex.

There's also a touch of the live shit, where you can really hear how Teeko and Max Kane cut up unchartered tuntablist territory, making previously unheard patterns of sounds.

4onephonics opening attuned my ears to a higher boogie refinement to get down with Dam Funk. Dropping joint after joint of boogie funk bangers, Dam Funk schooled the crowd on the names of each song in the most generous way possible, sharing the love by calling out names without any sense of elitism.

Dam Funk just released his first 12'' on Stones Throw called "Burgundy City," and plans to release a full length album by the end of the year. He grounds his music on the heritage of boogie but calls his own production, "future funk", keeping the music organic by using analog machines and special chords that avoid some of the synth pop soulless robotism that ravages much of disco.

Since I'm still learning about these the history of boogie funk I found the interview with Dam Funk in the last issue of Wax Poetics to be real informative. He drops the knowledge on the rock bottom foundation that everyone who loves this music needs to know.

As far as boogie, early Slave and Cameo are examples of popular boogie. That was the second wave of funk music. James Brown and Sly Stone created the first generation. Boogie is the sound of slap bass, loud claps, melodic chords, and synthesizers. Boogie followed the last gasp of disco.

Boogie includes releases on labels like Prelude, Sam Records, late Waste End Records, late Brunswick, and U.K. labels like Elite. Boogie-ologists will mainly tell you it's from the '80s, and it encompasses Italo disco as well.

You can cop some dope mixes by Dam Funk on Stones Throw's podcast #28 and the recently dropped One Day Later set. I have yet to find any of his original production to download, so if you wanna' hook us all up, the comment section is open.

Final Notes: Be on the look out for 4onefunktion events monthly at the Elbo Room (including guest appearances at Free Funk Friday each second Friday).

AND: 4onefunk reconstructed a Dilla track. Amazing. Dilla's influence is unstoppable.

The Bayview Graffiti Warehouse: The Bombers' Temple

2008-06-23T01:44:00.000-07:00

In the weary streets of the Bayview district, slabbed down against the gooey Bay waters of the Central Waterfront, nestled in between the funneling lines of the colossal highway buzzing with destination and a shiny skate park clanking with consecration, lies a behemoth brick and cement structure, abandoned by those in charge of the means of production, opening up the space for its artistic renovation.

Seek and ye' shall find the foreboding gateway to a land few and far between in these modern days of urban gloss overs. Jump the weeded blocks, scale the seaweed clad fence, rusted by the hands of bronzed clams, and fiddling through clunking sewage waters, just a hopscotch distance from brittle tire isles, a punctured tin opening calls to you, my wide eyed urban explorer.

The solid tin lining of the gateway reach towards the heavens like a Romanesque Church's ribbed vaults. Paralleling the hierarchal scaling of Church murals that divides the secular and the sacred, the graffiti elevates in accordance with risks indulged and craftsmanship mastered. The ambitious bomber seeks the highest point to make a mark that leaves a legacy.

And just like the sweeping windows of a thick walled basilica, the white sunlight washes the towering gateway in a luminescent glow, spotlighting stylized letters of the English language, bathing wooden planks and haloing swirling lines in a celestial splendor.

Oh, let us baptize this behemoth the Bombers' Temple by dunking its goliath skull into a vat of bubbling aerosol. I walk softly on my toes in your gateway with head cocked upwards so as to respect the gods and their idols that leave behind their earthly spirits to linger naturally according to the toils of time!

But higher than all fly the nomadic pigeons, who dive through the broken plexiglass and swoop across the rectangular arches, finding refuge in the heights that encourage an avian paradise for feces dropping and psychotic wing flapping. Tarred feathers stick to the muddied grayish black soil that mars the gateway floors, making the city slicked explorer trudge deep through even more shit to pass through the portal.

Slide through the portal, and cross the brightly lit basilica that stretches further into the outlands, supported by cigar shaped drum columns, each colored with vibrant geometrical designs overlapping one another in a fresco frenzy. A coating of sandpapered wood chips graces the floor, fooling the visitor in a disturbing trompe l'oiel, as if the ground was the natural soil of the Earth, and not the desolated erosion of human junk.

I know not of the machinery that still straddles the many rooms of this behemoth warehouse. Perhaps ships used to be stationed in the stalls, like horses waiting for the necessary cycles of grooming and sleeping, or perhaps even a changing of parts, hanging on tightly to the same definitive form, but gradually becoming a whole new structure over the course of many physical replacements of parts.

At what point may we call the abandoned warehouse an urban museum, glorifying the works of hundreds of participating community artists, and free to the public viewing for appreciation, cognitive development, and cultural criticism?

View the entire flickr set here.

The Sound Image: Nick Uff's Vision of Portishead

2008-06-18T01:41:00.000-07:00

Growing up in the 90's I never cared much for the MTV style music videos replaying like clockwork on the daily. The predictable narrative structure of a bunch of musicians singing to a camera that sporadically zipped through fifteen angles within a few seconds failed to add anything substantial to the music itself. I found it all pretty boring.

My stubborn distaste led me to some experimentations of my own with image and sound. I learned pretty quickly that smoking some herb and relaxing my back to twisted post-apocalyptic animation, while playing grinding spacey beats, could elevate the music listening experience to a subliminal state of wonder and transplant my body fully into a surreal absorption in the imagery. The audible and vision became one.

Since then I've trained myself to be able to reach that state of awe without any indulgence in drugs (although hallucinatory inspiration can't hurt). Many other experimenters in the sound image must be on the same page, because since then, I've noticed a lot of artists cultivating delicate skills to create films that explore the relationship between what is seen and what is heard.

I'd like to dedicate a new series in this crazy little blog to the videos that seamlessly intertwine music and image to produce the captivating inter-sensorial experience that as of yet lacks a codified description. Unfortunately, my linguistic baptizing skills escape me at the moment, so the preliminary concept shall be simply called the Sound Image. (suggestions anyone?)

We can start off this series with a couple relatively new films produced by Nick Uff for Portishead's groundbreaking third album after a ten year hiatus, fittingly titled Third. Mr. Uff's animation style harks back to the more traditional cartoonist method of hand drawing each frame. The jagged and looping lines of Uff's pencil sketches gives birth to his characters and landscapes while informing the scenery with a resonating sense of the artist's own emotional input.

Mr. Uff further adds to the raw texture that permeates the animation by shooting the frames entirely on 16mm. A buzzing choppiness scratches the surface, intensifying the movement of the camera's perspective that whizzes deeper and deeper into the ephemeral world that manifests itself.

The camera consistently falls into the eyes of a character, serving as the gateway into a new dimension of contour and filling that itself eventually dissipates into another world or spirals back to one previously seen but thereupon under the guise of a richer context. This collage strategy draws the viewer into an overlapping sphere of visual movement and vibration, concretely paralleling the formal structure of Portishead's music.

Mr. Uff describes his own creative process as consisting in a simple evolution of his first pencil stroke. An image comes to mind or the hand moves on the piece of paper, and the world begins to develop from the founding conception. "I don't storyboard my ideas, but let the films go where they take themselves. There's all sorts of ideas in there - things that have happened, a bit of social comment - like a stream of consciousness you could say."

In "The Rip", Beth Gibbons sings haunting stories of white horses rescuing her from the despair of lost love. The soft guitar matched by resounding keyboard melodies darkens Gibbons' introspective mood. Uff's animation brings out the horrific quality that emanates from Gibbons' voice through imagery of grotesque figures overwhelmed by the decadence of ghostly cityscapes.

Uff also plays with the ambiguous depiction of figures falling blindly to their deaths or flying joyously in the sky, ending abruptly with the song nearly suffocating on its tension. This embrace of the ambiguity by aggravating the tension seems to imply that artistic creation may sometimes lead to release and restoration, but at other times, it may intensify the feelings of suffering and loss that inspire it.

Portishead evokes a more desperate sentiment in the alarming synths of "We Carry On." The track increasingly builds towards a bass plucking tension that, once again, never gives. Uff's animation elaborates on just this tension by shifting violently between a broken love narrative, jungle-like urban landscapes that grow rampantly, and our disturbed voyeurism of shadow demons taking possession of humans.

The broken collage and focus on abundant decadence bring to mind the cutting geometrical structures and monocled prostitutes that give German Expressionist paintings a powerful sense of alienation and loss. Hope lingers slyly in the depths, but that pulsating tension constantly keeps us wondering; are we rising up or rising down?

Red Astaire doin' James

2008-06-15T23:32:00.000-07:00

A couple weeks back I hesitantly scoped out Frisco's newly promoted Hiphop / Soul / Funk "Money Shot" weekly in an Irish bar on Polk St. suffering more identity problems than a biracial child adopted by a troubled lesbian couple. Actually, my scoping out of the event was limited to five feet away from the door where I peered through two bouncers asking my lint filled wallet for ten dollars.

I must admit that the title "Money Shot," referring to a cum splatted Benjamin visage (or was it just a black eye), on top of the ridiculously overdrawn "Saints and Sinners" anthem of s O' Reilly's Holy Grail Irish Pub did not really, let's say, motivate me to do anything but get the hell outta' there.

Last night my feel for "Money Shot" took solace in the integrity of Massive Selector's promotion, bringing to the Bay such huge successes as the Stevie Wonder party and last week's "Happy Feet" featuring Bobbito and Rich Medina (who didn't show but Bobbito and Hakobo held down the cuts like nobody's business).

A James Brown tribute headlining Sweden's remixing production wizard, Red Astaire, AKA any child's nightmare wonder, Freddie Crugar, (he also goes by the birth certificate name Fredrik Lager) at an Irish pub, aligned with murals of a haloed Rick James sandwiched in-between Richard Pryor and Kurt Cobain, all illuminated by Byzantine stained glass portraits? Now I'm fucking inspired. That's when identity trouble gives birth to the transformer genius of some cultural amalgamation.

Here's the low down on Mr. Lager. Red Astaire gets the big ups from the breakers, the club junkies, and the DJ nerds world wide who are drawn into his smooth beat conducting techniques that whirl your feet oh so naturally into nu-jazz popcorn.

Schooled in the 80s by the diverse dusty grooves he listened to while working at Space, a legendary record import shop in Stokholm, Red Astaire cultivated an intense taste for funk, Hiphop, disco, Latin, and electro. He cemented his wave twisting production style together with a Hiphop sensibility for dirty break beats balanced by the soulful lyricism that gets the party crackin' in the three feet high and risin' way.

Around '94, Astaire joined the Raw Fusion Records label, an influential Swedish label created by Mad Mats, and would release consistent limited edition EPs, 12 inches, and singles throughout the decade. Astaire didn't get much love on the international circuit until his "Follow Me" single, a jazzy liberation joint sliced with clashing percussion propelling melodic chimes, and a powerful impact verse from Method and Redman, released on G.A.M.M. records in 2003. Ubiquity then released his full length album, Soul Search, in 2006 to widespread success in Canada and the US.

I got my hands on 2007's Nuggets for the Needy, which includes a couple break beat nu-soul club bangers on top of "Follow Me." A definite nugget is Astaire's edit of Angie Stone's 2002 hit "I Wish I Didn't Miss You", entitled in ode form to the singer, "Love to Angie." I agree completely with Oliver Wang that this joint is sure to get someone in the crowd to poplock instantaneously, those drums are too irresistible.

In the spirit of James Brown tributes, I also couldn't stop playing "The Wildstyle," an Apache style bongo driven rhythm that cuts up Brown's flustering "Soulpower" lyricism with some grandmaster technique scratching straight outta' Flash's S. Bronx bedroom. The rebirth of the wildstyle? I'm ready.

Snatch Red Astaire's Nugget's for the Needy (2006) G.A.M.M. records.

If the download hits the spot, don't forget to support the artist.

The Open Studios of Taller Tupac Amaru

2008-06-08T18:40:00.000-07:00

I took flight out of San Francisco's wind chill summer Saturday afternoon to soak up some lovely Oakland sun at the the annual Open Studios of the revolutionary minded art collective, Taller Tupac Amaru. The collective includes a powerful trinity of artists; Favianna Rodriguez, Jesus Barraza and Melanie Cervantes.

Arriving at the Studio, I was welcomed into Rodriguez' childhood home where funky soul jams pervaded the sonic wavelengths, delicious (oh so damn delicious) tamales and cold beer waited patiently for my hunger in the backyard, and people emanating a general spirit of warmness got down with some electric relaxation.

The many political posters and colorful, bold lined prints are made by the collective with a single screen press located in the backyard's corner shed. Their diverse works were placed throughout the home, some framed on the walls and others settled on tables and the floors sleeved in plastic covers. The vibrant atmosphere within the home illuminated a sense of cultural heritage that informed the works while completely avoiding the sterilizing feel of a museums' white walls and neutralized space.

Taller Tupac Amaru's artwork ranges from passionate depictions of the hardships endured by indigenous peoples, political posters for local events, to more stylized abstract and personal pieces. A call to arms poster by Cervantes displayed iconic images of Chicano activists clad in kafiyahs called for solidarity between Palestinians and indigenous Americans, both peoples stripped from their land, pushing for self-determination.

Many of Rodriguez' prints explored the concept of identity; I particularly found captivating a print of two bold eyed humanoid creatures fusing into a single beast atop a jaggedly lined blue and black background whizzing wildly in triangular motions. The simple and cutting iconic graphics immediately brought to mind my recent viewing of Emory Douglas' work.

Just on that note, Barazza and Cervantes jointly nodded to the history of the Black Panther movement (and its ten point plan) by producing an empowering, brightly colored print of the EZLN's Women's revolutionary laws.

All the artists claim to take influence from a long history of political poster artists, Chicano painters, and graffiti writers, as well as the many worldwide grassroots organizations committed to working for social justice. The members spend much of their time openly sharing their knowledge and techniques with youth throughout the Bay Area in outreach programs like Eastside Arts Alliance.

You can find many of the prints for sale on the artists' websites linked above.

Rodriguez along with co-editor Josh MacPhee will be celebrating the release of their new book, Reproduce & Revolt, displaying a huge collection of international political graphics on Wednesday at Counterpulse on 9th and Mission in SF.

Gaslamp kills Minna

2008-06-06T12:44:00.000-07:00

The last time I crashed a Minna party I nearly fell asleep on the couch out of boredom, so it's been a minute since I've checked out the spot. Last night the musical lineup including Los Angeles' The Motherfucking Gaslamp Killer (Willow) as well as Daedelus made me recheck my distaste for the venue and give it another chance.

Typically Minna exhibits sub par contemporary art that bites other styles. Some of the colors and neo-surrealism compositions are pretty, but they lack the raw inspiration of an artist who is captivated by the need to express something higher. Are my expectations too high? Luckily, it's pretty easy to let the art fade into the background when you got some amazing DJ's cutting it up on the ones and twos who are gripped by just that sort of inspiration.

I'm really talking about the Gaslamp Killer who rapidly clicked, and dervish like spun, and vigorously scratched his vinyl donuts while rocking his Jewish fro up and down, crazily flipping his fingers with the percussion as if the poltergeist of the music possessed his body. That's some spiritual release right there.

Gaslamp commenced the set with some hard hitting boom bap Hiphop riding soul samples like Ghostface and Dilla (can I get a copy of Jaylib 2 yet damn it?) mixed seamlessly with percussion driven beats (including some new shit by Flying Lotus.) The straightedge genres of music soon became more blurred as Gaslamp slided into the mix some dirty cosmic psychedelic and alt rock while turning up the highs so hard that the crackling bass shook the silly metal installations hanging on the wall.

The drums continued to tie the dusty grooves together as the hype grew quickly into some more obscure funk tracks from India and Africa as well as some yelping psych funk straight outta' Turkey. The obscurity led into classic American funk that slammed the dance floor with the gospel anthem "Save" featuring Arethra Franklin's distinctive soul crooning carried by a swift drum break. The progression demonstrated an aggressive understanding of music as emotional release and spiritual restoration. The dance floor seemed to agree.

Gaslamp wanted everyone to remember his own roots as a rave head before he started spinning all that Hiphop, funk, and soul, and beyond shit. The story goes that Gaslamp's endtroduction to DJ Shadow served as the bridge into this this parallel universe of sonic listening. So the sound crept up in bpm even more as Gaslamp filtered in clashing electro swaying with horns and booming with synths. Fitting as an end to this set, Pilooski's Franki Valli re-edit, "Beggin'" dropped to finish shit off.

Don't know about that Gaslamp Killer blow your mind and grab your soul shit? Two months ago he released the sun blazing heat, "i spit on your grave" mix off Obey Records. Support the artist too, the box set comes with some goodie snacks.

Or maybe you're in LA sometimes? Be sure to check out the Low End Theory Wednesday nights at the Airliner in Lincoln Heights. Can someone bring this weekly event to San Francisco, apparently they got a monthly in NY already? Last night shows that the Bay needs and wants some of that genre bending Hiphop inspired psych, funk, soul, electro, reggae, world madness.

Sound Lesson: Pilooski the Sonic Editor

2008-06-02T23:02:00.000-07:00

The art of re-editing songs comes with many dangers. The craft demands not only enough skill to conjure up an innovative song that pushes music forward but also the mastery to match if not surpass the quality of the original track. The re-editor must breathe life into dusty bones. He faces the challenge to make the old sound new.

Paris based DJ, Pilooski, who also is known by his Polish name Cedric Marszewskihas, achieveds just this pinnacle style of re-editing shelved classics into body rocking dance party jams. Last year Pilooski gained international recognition in nerdy DJ / blog communities for his re-edit of "Beggin'," a pop hit dating back to New Jersey's legendary Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons.

Pilooski cleanly cuts up the guitars of ESG's "UFO" (does any ESG sample not sound amazing?) with a boom bap drum break that propels the vocals into hyperspeed and defy sonic laws by sounding damn smooth if not James Brown soulful. "Beggin' " is one of those tracks that reaches toward the sweaty, adrenaline rushed climax of the party when everyone is wildly dripping the music.

The flipped up video of Beggin' succeeds just as well in resurrecting the dead with some new superpowers.

Part of Pilooski's genius is that he reaps forgotten or neglected elements out of older joints that were never gilded the status as classics. These songs have not been dogmatically hardened into our collective minds by their incessant replay on nostalgiac compilation albums seen on late night infomercials or kitschy diners or oldies radio stations.

Pilooski's proud defiance of codified genres and exceptional digging powers opens up an overflowing reservoir of history to inform his ever growing taste. Listen to how Pilooski transforms the powerful croons of Nina Simone into a slammin' dance thumper in his newly released remix of "Take Care of Business" on the 4th Verve remixed compilation.

Many of Pilooski's edits (and he has many) can be found on the rare and highly sought after limited vinyl releases by Dirty Sound System. Dirty is a group of Parisian selectors that pride themselves on comin' up with the dusty diamonds that inspire and break expectations. These tracks are released with some edits (by the likes of Pilooski) on compilations that fittingly go by the name "Dirty Diamonds." From ominous space disco to thumping krautrock drum breaks, cruising past the euphoric Balearic islands to the syncopated gardens of Northern Soul, dirty does not fear geographical or psychological walls.

Following the numerous "Dirty Diamonds" EPs came a full length Pilooski compilation, dirty edits vol. 1. It also includes a couple surprising covers that will bend your ears backwards.

01 . Mono Puff - Pretty Fly
02 . 99 Frames For Prince - 1999
03 . Alan Parsons Project, The - I Robot (Pilooski edit)
04 . Edwin Starr - Get Up (Pilooski edit)
05 . Pointer Sisters - Send Him Back (Pilooski edit)
06 . Steve Lawrence & Eydie Gorme - Black Hole Sun (Dirty Reissue)
07 . Unknown - Untitled
08 . Ari Boulogne - Le Petit Chevalier
09 . Can - Mothersky (Pilooski edit)
10 . The Human Beinz - Nobody But Me (Pilooski edit)
11 . Pipilotti Rist - I'm A Victim Of This Song (Wicked Game)

Download part 1.
Download part 2.

The Carnaval Children

2008-05-25T19:21:00.000-07:00

While walking down Harrison in the Mission during the annual Carnaval festivities today I suspected some foul play as soon as I saw Manuel the Blacksmith. I first spotted him from a good distance dancing to techno music in a slow writhing motion. He was wearing his proudest achievement, a disco ball tunic plate that glittered in the sun like wet fish scales. This discoplate has the magic power of numbing his opponents into a zombie state where they follow his every creepy demand.

Manuel the Blacksmith is part of an iconoclastic crew of role playing gamers that took their marginalized lifestyle into the occult. They developed intricate rituals of virtual prayer and celebration as well as complex public ceremonies that aim towards abducting cultural events for the sake of irony and pity.

I met Manuel over twenty years ago at the California Renaissance Fair, a time when things were as simple as good old lightning bolt fun. But even back then Manuel would show signs of his derision for role playing culture and his need to try out something so daring, so evil, that I just couldn't believe it would ever happen.

Manuel's sparkling discoplate and snakelike riggling attracted many children who wanted to stare and poke. He smiled a hideous grimace and directed the children to sit in some chairs where they would wait for what he called "the most sought after magic balloon show in all of the lands." I figured that witch, Griswalda, high school sweetheart of Manuel, must be behind this magic show.

I watched from afar and documented what I could without being seen. Sure enough Griswalda the Sorceress appeared out of the crowd and started smoothly hypnotizing the children with her balloon stunts and rhyming tricks. Even though Griswalda placed stuffed animals in a circle around her, she did not look amiable, in fact her large blue eyes were wild as ever, so wild and demonic, that my camera could not capture her image until she blinked.

She commenced the magic show by learning each child's name, repeating the monikers incessantly, elongating the syllables and holding her breadth in between the sounds, steadily gaining the trust of the little innocents who stared with mouths hung open. On a loudspeaker she would rap terrible tales about the kids, concocting wicked stories about the children and the balloon beast that she blew up, and neatly folded, and tied up right before our eyes. Some of the poor babes laughed and clapped wildly but a few recognized intuitively the horror of Griswalda and so they cried their little hearts out. Just look at the contrast!

Once each child acquired a magic balloon, ranging from a dragon butterfly to a worm monkey, they were ushered into a so-called "the bouncy ride of a child's most exquisite dreams," named Jurassic Adventure.

But as more and more parents looked around hysterically for lost children, I knew there was something fishy about this adventure. And sure enough, as I walked into a small alley way behind the ride I saw the most horrible thing, small children being caged and churned up and down on a human sized rotisserie!

I screamed but covered my mouth immediately to conserve my clandestine position. It's hard to be an elderly spy. Luckily police were everywhere, but after I told them of these disgusting happenings, they laughed at me and told me to go back to the senile home.

Fucking police. They just sat around giving each other high fives and shooting the shit about busting some kids who dropped ecstasy at a rave called Popsicle.

Some priorities. Look at what happened to the children.

Sold for seven dollars a pop for a "Super Chicken Kebab." Many people enjoyed the barbecued baby meat on a stick.

Sound Lesson 4: Dilla's Donuts

2008-05-20T13:38:00.000-07:00

I've been noticing more and more Hiphop artists playing with the concept of art taking on its own life independent from the life of the artist. While Vaughn Bode constructed a self-sustaining world of mystical wizards, lizards, and bodacious women that enchanted bombers worldwide, J Dilla (born James Yancey) produced a resonant universe crafted out of disparate musical histories that aggressively calls the listener to fall deep into his own sonic world.

While struggling to survive in a hospital bed in '05 and '06 with the debilitating immune condition, lupus, J Dilla gathered the courage to leave behind his best album, Donuts. Dilla worked bedside with musical equipment brought by his mother. Each of the 31 tracks he completed do not last much longer than a minute reflecting Dilla's failing endurance yet resilient devotion to tie together his final aesthetic vision.

While listening more carefully to Donuts and unraveling some of its layered mysteries, I realized that Dilla was trying to come to terms with his own death on the approaching horizon. Some of the cryptic code offers itself to us listeners.

As if peacefully saying goodbye to the terrestrial and firmly implanting himself into the everlasting through his art, Donuts begins with the 'outro' and ends with the "Donuts (Intro.)" Adding to the spiritual quality of the album, the finale 'intro' aims towards Dilla's own apotheosis by employing a sample of one-hit wonder Motherlode's 1969 pop hit, "When I die."

The heartfelt soul jam addressed to a distant lover is propelled by serene percussion that drives Motherlode to chant in harmony during the chorus, "When I die / I hope I'll be / The kind of man that you thought I'd be." In the concluding 'intro' Dilla strategically chops up Motherlode's chorus to elevate the self-proclaiming "be," intertwined only twice with the parallel concept "die," which is manipulated into near incomprehension, as Dilla deconstructs the notions of being and death into their pure sonic elements of feeling.

Facing death head on, Dilla elongates Motherlode's vocals into a celestial proclamation, emphasizing not only the beauty of life but even his own oncoming second life, as he dissipates into becoming, and finally being, the music itself. As a last memory, Dilla aligns himself with a long lasting history of musicians who have passed but continue to live on in the hearts of all who remember.

Intro J Dilla.

The Defenestration Building: Part 3

2008-05-16T12:30:00.000-07:00

Sometimes while cruising through the streets of San Francisco I stumble upon some glistening, confusing gem that calls me in. And then, I research the hell out of it.

I was lucky enough to have this experience on the north side of the old Hugo Hotel, which now boasts an RIP mural dedicated to the late Barbara Bode Falcon.

I'd say the iconic images of voluptuous women with Venus of Willendorf exaggerated femininity beckoned me in like a prostitute's protective solicitation, but then again, that probably wasn't it, since I never make it into any of the sex shops on Sixth St. So, I decided to dig a little deeper than the clothing on the skin and the paint on the walls and figure out the back story behind these notorious characters.

Barbara has been immortalized in graffiti and tattoo culture through her childhood relationship and later marriage in 1961 with the underground cartoonist Vaughn Bode. They bore a child together two years after, Mark Bode, and remained together for a roller coaster ride of ten years before their divorce in '71.

In his comic strips, Vaughn Bode constructed a fantasy world where jive talkin' lizards and a drunken wizard stroll through enchanted forests dotted with prancing, well-endowed women. The curvaceous figure and resilient spirit of Barbara Bode Falcon inspired the form of these women dressed in myriad revealing costumes. The icons were soon stamped into history with the publication of Vaughn's work, "Bode Broads."

I realize that this depiction of Barbara Bode does not have much to do with her real life. In fact, it only describes the life that Barbara took on in the setting of Vaughn's imaginary world, a world hugely obsessed with hyperbolic femininity. Such is the fate of art. Let's take a look at this world.

Vaughn Bode spent his formative years contributing to the underground Manhattan comic scene with the likes of Robert Crumb and Spain Rodriguez in the 60's. After joining the staff of the independent publication, the East Village Other, he spearheaded his own all-comics supplement to the newspaper, the Gothic Blimp Works. During this period Bode released his most famous character, Cheech Wizard, which he claimed to have concocted at age 15, 2:30 in the afternoon, many years prior. Bode published Cheech in the National Lampoon for a number of years.

Depicted as a star spangled yellow hat packed tightly over a red leotard, Cheech Wizard never reveals his face to the reader, and when he shows it to a fellow cartoon, his lovers and interpolators go blind or fall into paraplegic spasms. It remains a mystery why Cheech's identity produces such psychic deconstruction in his viewers. But we must expect an intelligible reason, since Cheech does not conjure magic but rather methodically causes it through his effortless antics.

Self-proclaimed as the cartoon messiah, Cheech often discusses metaphysical questions with his disciple, a slower minded yet insightful lizard. However, Cheech spends most of his time in more down to earth affairs. He searches out parties where he can find cold beer, potent weed, and seductively loving women. The characters speak in an urban slang that borders on the incomprehensible to the poetic. The stories often end with Cheech furiously kicking someone of the male species in the testicles.

Bode aimed to breathe a life into his characters in radical ways that extended far beyond the traditional medium of ink splotched paper. He toured a popular show featuring animated impersonations of his characters while their images were projected on a screen behind him.

Late in his career, Vaughn Bode considered his own life just as much as a piece of artwork as the fantastical world he constructed. After moving to San Francisco with Barbara and Mark, Vaughn started to publicly question his sexual identity.

No doubt influenced by the burgeoning transvestite subculture in the City as well as his ongoing exposure to a more experimental youth culture, Bode soon self defined his own gender identity as somewhere between "auto-sexual, heterosexual, omnisexual, masso-sexual, sado-sexual, trans-sexual, uni-sexual, omni-sexual."

He transformed his appearance from a self-described straightedge "Kennedy" into an androgynous glamor queen with billowing curly hair, long manicured nails, and dark eyeliner. Taking his obsession with the feminine form to the next level, Bode looked into surgical reconstruction of his body, but gave up on the idea when hormones killed his libido.

Bode presents his sexual exploration in two autobiographical works, Confessions of a Cartoon Gooroo, written in a formal essay style and Schizophrenia, published as a thoroughly animated comic strip.

On July 18, 1975 Vaughn Bode died in a tragic accident while experimenting with autoerotic asphyxian, the practice of heightening masturbatory pleasure while strangling oneself with the noose. Although he had succeeded in the practice beforehand, this time a necklace got caught in the noose, constraining it from giving out.

Despite Vaughn's unfortunate fate at the young age of 33, his work lives on. Mark Bode dedicates his life to sustaining the precious worlds that his father constructed. He recounts that Vaughn made him believe at a young age that Cheech was a real wizard, living in the urban jungle wilderness.

They would journey to visit the foul mouthed Cheech but alas, he was always fast asleep and unresponsive in some distant crevice or sewer. These experiences forever inculcated Vaughn's fantastical worlds into Mark's own imagination. Now an artist in his own right, Mark tends to channel the energy of his father's work.

The work of Vaughn Bode also touched many early graffiti writers, notably the works of Dondi and Seen who were attracted technically to the bold lines and vibrant colors.

They drew most inspiration, however, from Bode's ambitious artistic project in crafting intricately connected, self-sustaining worlds, an objective that graffiti artists themselves hoped to achieve on New York City's subway cars. Painting a Bode character now takes on the ceremonial weight of a right of passage in much of the graffiti world.

Let the characters of Bode live on!

Peep some of the comics here.

In these videos of the 1974 Comic Con in Toronto, Bode talks about his life as an artist, the comic publication industry, and the development of his character. Bode reminds us artists to stay true to themselves and always try to come up with their own style, their own worlds.

the Defenestration Building: Part 2

2008-05-14T12:47:00.000-07:00

Copped some shots of the finished murals on the Defenestration Building. ICP and TMF crews representing hard. Remember the ICP Mac Dre mural on Langton Alley?

The Defenestration Building: Part 1

2008-05-09T14:08:00.000-07:00

Passing by Sixth Street's infamous Defenestration Building on the corner of Howard I happily noticed some artists painting the most intricate and colorful pieces that have ever graced the boarded up facade of the Hugo Hotel.

The vibrant aerosol lettering softly laced over years of other names written on the walls, other stories crafted and displayed for the sake of uplifting one of San Francisco's most disregarded and unappreciated neighborhoods. This multi layering of the graffiti, a continuous urban cycle of affirmation, neglect, and reaffirmation, reflects the very history of the Hotel and community itself.

The four-story Hugo Hotel, a mini behemoth of brick masonry, is credited as the first of its kind on Sixth Street. It has been without tenants since a fire burned out a number of the rooms in the 80's.

Inspired by the abandoned building, Brian Goggin transformed the weathered exterior into a public art installation in 1997. He suspended street ravaged furniture in mid air, whirling and shrinking out of the skinny tenement windows and from the roof.

In the staging of the opening defenestration festival, Goggin and his group of artists revealed what they hoped would be a self-determinative gesture of defenestration for the community, a reclamation that "throwing out" or abandonment take on the spiritual act of release. A breadth and an shaking off of frustration.

My eyes dart upwards to catch the bearded grandfather clock in animated suspension, trying desperately to lift up the couches and tables corkscrewing out of the boarded windows, defying gravity, and I cannot help but suspect that the future of this neighborhood no longer holds the promise that it once seemed to have ten years ago. The falling furniture appears more overwhelming than joyful.

As part of the Sixth Street Beautification Project, the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency (SFRA) aims for an incremental approach to urban revitalization of the community. This approach includes the construction of modest income housing and commercial revitalization that turns on the ideal of retaining core affordability while encouraging development.

The SFRA admits that the new objective evolved in response to criticism of their redevelopment projects of both the Yerba Buena and Fillmore districts that displaced thousands of low-income residents with the razing of buildings and new construction of malls, condominiums, and recreation centers.

Included in the body of powers of the incremental approach is the use of eminent domain, which means, the agency can seize private property at what it deems to be fair market value if the property is seen as a blight to the community.

After years of disagreement with the owner of the Hugo Hotel, Varsha Patel, who has been asking for a selling price of four million dollars, the SFRA initiated in January the process of seizing the property by eminent domain. Considering that Patel has refused to compromise for the past twenty years with interested buyers as well as the agency, allowing the burnt out building to deteriorate further, it surely seems that the SFRA fairly employed eminent domain.

We can add on top of Patel's refusal to sell her outspoken contempt for the community "They can put the low-income people somewhere. . . you can be homeless somewhere in Idaho."

Despite the redefined objectives of the SFRA, what lies in the future for the Hugo Hotel and for Sixth Street? Will they raze the building completely and construct an affordable income housing unit with benefits for the locals? Or will it be a high density condominium unity that marks a new era of displacement for Sixth Street?

Lowering my eyes to the bright, twisting colors of the murals on the ground level, the furiously beautiful letters that slowly emerge from the boarded walls, reclaiming the dilapidated behemoth for ourselves, I realize that at least a sliver of that future is up to us.

Bandaged Buses

2008-05-06T13:35:00.000-07:00

O bandaged buses! The wounds of time have taken their toll on your hard metal exoskeleton, leaving the gutted remains of an abysmal inside pilfered by the wind and carried far from home, the carcass abandoned to rot yet placed neatly into organized lines for the sake of careful observation by blue costumed workers, closured tightly within high sparkling barbed fences, waiting and decaying.

Graveyard of another era, preserve what you can, for as long as you can, until your eventual recycling into the next species to come, the new centipede like wheeled animals, wind themselves sinuously through our glistening paved streets into the promise of the future!

Decay quietly old vehicle of burden; the time of youth yearns desperately to sing its own swan song.

Hiphop in the Park 08

2008-05-05T21:52:00.000-07:00

I hit up the 12th annual Hiphop in the Park on Saturday in Berkeley's cozy historic green lands, People's Park. The festival is consistent in showcasing up and coming local artists who wield a variety of weapons from the aerosol can to the mic, and this year proved no different than the past twelve.

Featuring an impressive balancing act of musicians, the heavy hustling flow of Clyde Carson matched by the empowering melodies of Mystic, or Kiwi and Geologic's potent lyricism blending seamlessly with Talia's soothing brand of self-determinism, Hiphop in the Park offered a diversity of sounds to the listener. And let's not forget the impeccable hosting skill of Do DAT from the Attik crew.

Sponsored by UC Berkeley's Students for Hiphop, the festival holds its own as one of the very few free, all age celebrations of Hiphop culture in the entire Bay Area. Where else can one spot the youngins gettin' down on the linoleum with seasoned breakdance veterans? Or an entire park speckled with gravitating freestyle ciphers, revolving like celestial systems around the massive crowd choppin' it up on a beautiful, sunny afternoon? Where else does Hiphop breathe so freely than a park that welcomes the whole community to celebrate together?

Hiphop in the Park proudly showcases the original four elements of Hiphop but goes far beyond graffiti art, breaking, djing, and mcing in reppin' the culture to the fullest. The entire afternoon resounds with the vibrancy of a generation, the thumping fist of a community standing up, and the joyful sing and dance of a people that reap the sweet juices out of life. Now that is Hiphop.

If you missed it, then well, there will always be next year.

Alemany Bus Graveyard

2008-04-30T13:35:00.000-07:00

I went to the Alemany Bazaar this past weekend looking for some galoshes. You never know when the next rain is going to hit in this city, and my old bones can't take another embarrassing fall to the street, all these fuckers darting around looking all scared and worried, thinking that I broke my spine in half. I wouldn't feel so ashamed if they didn't look so damn pitiful about it. Anyway, my old galoshes just got too muddy. Sooner or later my old ass is going to drop dead, and I better be wearing some clean galoshes to match my clean underwear.

After finding my perfect pair at the far corner of the bazaar, I was attracted to these rusted buses over by a shed that were painted with all these bright pinks, blues, and greens. Wow, what memories they brought back of my Grateful dead acid trip days! I haven't thought about those times in a long while. I got closer and realized the colors were more like pale rusted over colors. I suppose the sunlight and my distance had given the hues an iridescent aura.

Just look at these slumbering beasts! Huge hunks of metal, rubber, and glass all mashed together to form some kind of four wheeled centipede creature that used to wind around pavement streets, up hills and through valleys. Now they look like they're in hibernation, preparing for a metamorphosis into something extraordinary, some strange animal with wings and new colors, fluttering around looking all soft and light despite their size.

Or maybe they'll just waste away in this graveyard, penetrated by the toll the elements take on them, occasionally decorated by wistful paint.

Imagine if an organic creature was born with wheels instead of legs.

I'd really love to steal one of these and drive it around for a bit.