| SXSW 2008 Concert Log |
[Mar. 31st, 2008|04:06 pm] |
Wednesday, March 12
Yellow Fever (Austin)
Carrots (Austin)
The Mae Shi (Los Angeles)
Van Morrison
Sunburned Hand of the Man (Boston)
Pterodactyl (Brooklyn)
Ecstatic Sunshine (Baltimore)
Thursday, March 13
The Ruby Suns (New Zealand)
Cadence Weapon (Canada)
Die! Die! Die! (New Zealand)
Eat Skull (Portland)
Mike Rep and the Quotas (Columbus)
Psychedelic Horsehit (Columbus)
Pink Reason (Columbus)
Times New Viking (Columbus)
Friday, March 14
Sea Wolf (Los Angeles)
Elf Power (Athens)
Kimya Dawson (Olympia)
White Rainbow (Portland)
Saturday, March 15
No Mas Bodas (my band here in Austin!!)
Gary Higgins (somewhere in Connecticut)
The Bill Jefferies (Austin)
Jandek (Houston)
Darondo (San Francisco) |
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| Book Log for 2007 |
[Dec. 31st, 2007|07:12 pm] |
SOUTHEAST ASIAN HISTORY
The Gate by Francois Bizot Memoir by a French archaeologist who was restoring the temples of Angkor when the Khmer Rouge seized power of Cambodia in 1975. Mistaken for a spy, Bizot was held captive and interrogated by "Duch," a young, ambitious revolutionary who went onto to earn worldwide infamy as the commanding officer of S21, the prison where 12 of 17,000 inmates survived execution.
Crossing Three Wildernesses by U Sam Oeur Memoir of a poet who survived the Cambodian genocide by burning all his writings and disguising his family and himself as peasant farmers.
Angkor: An Illustrated Guide to the Monuments by Jean Laur
Stalking the Elephant Kings: In Search of Laos by Christopher Kremmer Enlightening, well-written investigative look into the effects of Asia's communist revolutionary movement on the oft-overlooked country beside Vietnam. An Australian journalist, Kremmer navigates a labyrinth of Red tape and bureaucratic cover-up to discover what happened to Laos's king and queen, whose mysterious diappearance meant the termination of the country's 600-year-old royal heritage.
The Mekong: Turbulent Past, Uncertain Future by Milton Osborne The final few chapters serve as a wake-up call about the current threat to the Mekong and all those dependent on this river by China's dam-building compulsion.
The Quiet American by Graham Greene My introduction to Greene, a sharp, Britishly witty yet earnest writer who portrays the danger of the well-meaning American in 1960s Vietnam. I bought an illegal copy of this from a street vendor near Ho Chi Minh's tomb in Hanoi. To try and get the price of the book down from $4 to a buck, I argued, "But it's a copy!" The vendor retorted jadedly, "Everything's a copy. You're a copy." In terms of copyright law and genetics, he had a point.
The Sorrow of War by Bao Ninh An absolute must-read for anyone wishing to meet one of the U.S.'s formerly most-hated enemies, a combatant for the Viet Cong, seen as those faceless killers in the jungle or as John Goodman's character in The Big Lebowski calls them, "the man in the black pajamas." Amazingly, Bao Ninh fought for the North Vietnamese army for 11 years, right up to the fall of Saigon, and survived to write his heart-splattering war tales. Read this alongside Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried.
Perfect Spy: The Incredible Double Life of Pham Xuan An by Larry Berman Interesting look at the tangled web of alliances during the Vietnam War, when who was friend and who was exactly the foe frequently came into question.
Hanoi by Susan Sontag A slim volume of diamond insights by a New York intellectual who braved accusations of treason to visit Vietnam in the mid-1960s. Reading Sontag helped me process some of my trace cultural shock from my trip. At one point, she boils down the primary difference between Asia and America to two emotions, shame versus guilt, the former being what motivates Asians and the latter being what motivates Westerners.
GENERAL NONFICTION
The Colorful Apocalypse: Journeys in Outside Art by Greg Bottoms
Meditation as Medicine by Dharma Singh Khalsa
Power Yoga by Beryl Bender Birch
To Live's to Fly: The Ballad of the Late, Great Townes Van Zandt by John Kruth
Texas Music by Rick Koster
Through Music to the Self by Peter Hamel
NOVELS & SHORT STORIES
Tango for a Torturer by Daniel Chavarria
Fire by Anais Nin
Narcissus and Goldmund by Herman Hesse
Ada by Vladimir Nabokov
Transparent Things by Vladimir Nabokov
Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? by Lorrie Moore
Like Life by Lorrie Moore
Self-Help by Lorrie Moore
St. Lucie's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves by Karen Russell
The Secret History by Donna Tartt
No One Belongs Here More Than You by Miranda July
Ellen Foster by Kaye Gibbons
A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain by Robert Olen Butler
Falling Man by Don Delillo
Don Quixote by Miguel Cervantes (unabridged, you mothers!)
"The Victorian Blood Book" from Evelyn Waugh's personal library This bizarre piece of Victorian-era outsider art is the first thing I checked out at the Harry Ransom Center's reading room. Somewhere along the way, the HRC acquired Waugh's papers, book collection (and for some reason, his large wooden desk); as a collector, Waugh sought strange books and his most notorious acquisition is the Victorian Blood Book, created by an English gentleman for his daughter, perhaps, at the time of her wedding. If he did intend it as a wedding present, I can only imagine her horror at this red-ink- and scripture-soaked scrapbook sitting amongst her new china set and bed sheets. Birds with crucifixes bloodily carved into their chests, flying crosses dripping blood from the skies, butterflies riding the airborne crosses in lieu of flapping their wings, bloody-fanged serpents wrapped around biblical characters--nothing short of eye-bewitching awesomeness.
Reading Goals for 2008:
Jorge Luis Borges
Graphic novels I want to read a Chris Ware book (all the way through, instead of in snatches at the bookstore), Alan Moore (responsible for Sin City, From Hell), and many of the staff recommendations at BookPeople here in Austin.
Biographies of the Founding Fathers
More Graham Greene and works by authors whose papers are stored at the HRC (dare I say it, James Joyce?)
A history, if it exists, of American record labels If it can follow the style and format of Peter Biskind's Easy Riders and Raging Bulls, an astonishing behind-the-scenes examination of the '70s movie-making scene, I'll be a happy camper indeed.
Musicology and Ethnomusicology
Yoga and Meditation
Funny Stuff |
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| Austin Listens 2 |
[Jul. 17th, 2007|10:30 am] |
A few weeks into my Texas resettlement, ink19 called with a new assignment: "I've got something special for you to review." "Oh?" "The new Townes Van Zandt biography!" "Cool." "You know who that is, right?" "Nope." Instead of hanging up in a huff, my editor decided to right this cultural wrong and passed me the bio.
Getting to review To Live's to Fly was an exciting introduction not only to an underrated yet captivating songwriter but to many other talented figures in the cowboy state's musical heritage. Starting with the book's subject, let me just proselytize: hunt down the recordings of Townes Van Zandt and pin them to your chest like a bloody badge. When his biographer attested to the therapeutic effect of Van Zandt's lyrics for listeners grieving a death or other personal tragedy, hope of finding one of those rare musical truthsayers started to well up inside me. And after watching him perform his "Waiting Around to Die" on the truly awesome documentary Heartworn Highways about the '70s new country scene in Texas, anyone who has felt the pain of loss and loneliness should become an instant Van Zandt zealot (like the man weeping in the background (Uncle Seymour Washington, a local character and Van Zandt's neighbor in a character-ridden part of Austin that was eventually cleared for a highway):
Van Zandt's friend and contemporary, Guy Clark, provides one of the most entertaining scenes in the biography (which he repeats for the documentary solely about Van Zandt Be Here to Love Me). Tormentor to city slicker biographers, Clark bedevils attempted interviews with open hostility, references to firearms in his household, and repeated visits to the shot glass. So I was surprised by the tenderness of his performances on Heartworn Highways, but granted he was thirty years younger and the body count of his friends much lower. Compared with the old man who now has murder in his eyes, Guy Clark was in fact downright handsome, as were Steve Earle (who more resembled a dark-haired Jesus than the wasted monster he became later on) and many others in their young buck days.
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| Austin Listens |
[May. 16th, 2007|12:01 am] |
Austin is the music capital of the states, or is it the (((UNIVERSE)))? Either way, despite my J-O-B-less status, I've been working hard to put this claim to the test: Calvin Johnson, Lavendar Diamond, Little Brother, Gang Gang Dance. And Frog Eyes, a Canadian outfit and sweet relief from too self-conscious bands who reflect the indie venue's hyper-see-and-be-seen ambiance so thick you could slice it. How can you tell this about Frog Eyes? Almost the whole time, they play with their eyes closed. Frontman Carey Mercer, Andy Richter's country cousin, the corn-fed guy next door you just don't expect to see center stage of hip music halls, evokes an over-swollen scarlet balloon that's just about to go pop. Both his delivery and the accompanying music are like a single sustained convulsion, a holyroller swept up in spiritual fervor's fever, a tempest in a teapot, the mania of Faulknerian lyrics and avant noise contained within pop's structure.
Frog Eyes's openers and a Wolf Parade side project, Alex Delivery, which included two very watchable woman members with tasteful new wave haircuts and Pollock-styled hand-spattered t-shirts, turned out decent, meandering arty punk-funk jams, but it was their last number that will surely beckon the most recruits to their mood-infested dance revolution.
In concert, Calvin Johnson recreated the nakedness of his recent solo recordings: he wore all white down to his ivory-colored loafers, his back-up consisted of a boy on a partial drum kit who halfway through dropped his brush stick to take Calvin's guitar, and many times the man just sang acapella, on a Saturday night in the center of Austin's mayhemish 6th Street strip, as the headliner for a crowd well past their fourth, fifth, sixth drink. Good gracious! Certainly, that's more nerve than any middle finger-flipping noise band has ever mustered. These days Calvin is Cupid grown up, lyre in hand, wrapped in Roman robes, head wreathed in ivy, crooning elegies about love's current sorry state. But after 30 years working overtime for America's underground music, he's fresh and innocent as a Wurlitzer jukebox playing Buddy Holly.
Gang Gang Dance are no longer one of my favorite experimental bands--they are my new favorite dance band! GGD's live show rewinds back to 1996 when we were all dancing to Chemical Brothers's "Setting Sun." Used to be their Bolly-meets-Bali psychedelic freakout would noodle at length before congealing into a harem rave up. Nowadays they're bringing the funk straight and direct, without leaving any of their weirdness behind. If you can't catch them, their tour diary on YouTube might suffice.
I've also started training with KOOP 91.7. Every other Sunday afternoon you will hear a familiar voice between 3:30 and 4:30 on the Worldbeat program. Next week I'll be reporting on the Femi Kuti & The Positive Force show that's tomorrow night.
Two noteworthy venues to keep an eye on in case you want to time your visit to see me with an unmissable show: Emo's Austin and Stubb's BBQ
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| Austin Eats |
[May. 4th, 2007|05:06 pm] |
 Mexican is the gastronomical grail of cuisine here in Austin. It comes in many variations, fancy fusion fare to rock-bottom cheap eats sold out of mini-trailers that pop up anywhere on a moment's notice. My first meal came from a taqueira (literally, taco shop) up the road from my new home in northern Austin. Situated in a tiny shop by the local mart, this place is a take-out counter with a Spanish menu. Luckily, the breakfast tacos carry translations; so I managed to order huevos and frijoles (eggs and beans), and huevos and nopalitos (cacti). Just 99 cents each. The meal's highlight, though, had to be the taqueria's sauce station furbished with a trio of fresh-made salsas. (Final score: the flame-roasted pepper saw the vanishing ends of my tacos the most.)
At the counter, a woman with whom I got to talking asked me, "Are you from the neighborhood?" Just moved, I replied. "Wow! You're the first white person I've seen around here. I never see any other white people. My husband is black; that's why I'm here." I nodded while trying to register the effect of her neighborly race-related assessment on the lady behind the counter, (beleaguered but not unfriendly, simply focused on the business of cranking out tortilla-wrapped wonders to go) and the third customer, a rail-thin Latino man who had ordered his own weight in takeout and kept muttering to himself. Both were either too distracted or didn't care. Food must be the greatest societal unifier. Just caulk that racial divide with guacamole.
Austin also lays claim to the title, Mothership of Organic and Gourmet Groceries. Whole Foods was founded here, and its flagship store is still going full steam. Its recently opened new location is a cavernous wonderland of the healthiest, choicest morsels that could ever pass your smackers. For a couple of years now, I've been a devotee of Whole Foods, a complete and unapologetic sucker for their marketing to conscientious gourmets (or gourmand in my case). So when the escalator deposited me ground level of their downtown food hall, I felt like Charlie when Wonka busted out his chocolate waterfall. Even by my third visit this past Sunday, I couldn't achieve any real grocery shopping. The store's infinite dimensions and sheer variety forces me into an almost psychedelic rapture every time. It's kind of like trying to compute calculus in a seething night club, the strobe lights and the varieties of wild mushrooms grinding all your IQ points to tiny, useless shards. And you see, each department is booby-trapped with these made-to-order counters: salads, pasta, bbq, seafood, sushi, korean, gelato!!, plus a deli with lord knows all what; so you're sort of like: sod the grocery list. Something spectacular is going down my gullet now. This is a common impulse buy courtesy of the Whole Foods's main marketing device: heretofore, you've been deprived of truly wholesome, quality nutrients, and after assaulting your precious body with toxins and trans fats for most of your ignorance-filled lifetime (that's okay; it's not your fault), well dammit, you deserve nothing less than fresh strawberries at $10/lb! |
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| Alive in Austin |
[Apr. 30th, 2007|09:58 pm] |
The road trip, undertaken as a solo mission in a rental car piled to the lips of driver visibility legality, was a smash. Err, not smashing in a J.G. Ballard way — hurrah. The experience did produce a few hallucinatory moments, which played out my death by crash collision or worse, the dismemberment of some innocent at hand. Something had to be done to counter the screwed-up luck of those who'd chanced into the cross hairs of my hell-bent return to the road after a near year-long absence; so for all their sakes, I betrayed my atheism and prayed. A lot.
Out of the undying distance and solitude of this haul, I caught myself mentally forming groundless alliances with cars, some of whom I'd follow if they looked like they knew what they were doing. "Yeah, we'll pass these slow-ass patheticos together. Now let me ease back into the right lane after you. Ah, that's it...buddy." Other commuters became (literal) sworn enemies. Driving style is the only acid test for characterizing the faceless beings behind windshields. Pretty much, it's a real, simple dialectic, pitting the like-minded, as in those also wanting to keep the highway as sane as it's possible to be at 80-mph+ speeds, against the killer assholes.
Not that there weren't the sublime surprises. Maybe you tend to entertain real easily after a handful of hours spent on the interstate system. But I felt like a kid in line for her first grown-up ride whenever a steep bridge arced up ahead. And beyond the Florida-Alabama border, patches of teacup-shaped wildflowers began popping up alongside the road. Aglow with daylight, the pink petals' similarity to Easter tissue paper always elicited a quiet "ooh!" from me. The emergency call boxes jabbed out of the shoulder, too, like hypodermic needles inoculating the highway against roadside crisis.
Following Highway 10 for close to 900 miles, I imagined how the interstate tied into the lives of the cities on the route's thread count. What was 10's history and psychology particular to this or that region? Was it a modern success story or a source of alienation, a human conveyor belt carrying away family members and neighbors, at the same time depositing strangers from unknown lands? But by sunset, when the asphalt shined in the day's final light, the interstate looked as beautiful as any river, like it was shaking out its hair, just washed and still wet. |
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| The Week in Review: Comedy |
[Apr. 26th, 2007|06:02 am] |
Coming from someone who's lived without cable television for most of her life and has been absent from the country for a damn long time, the following will sound like it's from the Donny character in The Big Lebowski: slow on the uptake and revealing nothing you don't already know. But here are the results of my game of American comedy catch-up this week.
 Aside from catching downloadable clips from the Daily Show, I've never sat through an episode that was legitimately broadcasted by the network. Luckily, since I've been gone, my mom's house has been outfitted with the time-sucking glories of cable. Now, a lot of feedback about the show's spin-off, the wildly successful Colbert Report, says it beats its predecessor. As a die-hard fan of Strangers with Candy, I harbor my own prejudices but Stewart still attacks my funny bone with a closet full of feather dusters. This week I've been revelling in the straight man act he's fine-tuned so well. Whenever responding to some new outrage from the political arena, Stewart pulls a face that simultaneously blanches in shock, becomes puppy-eyed with innocent confusion, and has the about-to-bust look of the class cut-up who's just been handed a scenario so ridiculous it doesn't need underscoring with some wise-ass comment. Luckily for us, Stewart is not one to sit on his million-dollar derision and proceeds to rip the offending talking head a new one.
 While Stewart wears his outrage on his sleeve, Stephen Colbert is the double agent of political parody. Aside from being a masterful improviser and a naturally funny guy, the key to Colbert's success is his unflappable anchorman persona, partly cultivated, partly congenital. He's as cleancut as one of those social prescribers from America's 1950s, lecturing on the evils of imperfect posture or playing the father role in a family sitcom, the firm yet gentle, slipper-wearing judge called in to navigate the household's moral potholes. He reminds me of J.R. "Bob" Dobbs, another figurehead with the sculpted haircut of a total square and whose overall look symbolizes respectability but who beneath the surface spouts delicious subversion. Compared to Stewart, Colbert makes it harder for his enemies to nail him when he parrots their ludicrous platform with complete poker-faced conviction. The Report's shtick, that of the outraged conservative blathering idiocies, is 24-carat comedy gold and just about full-proof perfect. The fact that Bush and many of his mouth-breathing appointees have set such a non-savant tone to political debate only strengthens Colbert's smokescreen. Some conservatives could actually be that dumb.
 Arrested Development is the funniest show to come down the pipe. Period. It reminds me of Twin Peaks, another super-brilliant series that through divine intervention slipped by LCD-pandering programmers to bring prime-time nirvana to a cult of fans afraid to even exhale should the powers that be notice something born of diamond genius had found its way on air. A show that restores my faith in living and keeps me idiotically chuckling to myself weeks after watching the last episode. |
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| The Week in Review: Music |
[Apr. 25th, 2007|01:05 pm] |
Working in college radio put the bulk of new albums literally at my fingertips. But since I've been away for half a year, I'm no longer on top of my game; so this week I decided to find out what's the latest and greatest among the music taste-testers I once counted myself apart of. Catching up with my favorite record labels of yesteryear, I'm reminded of how much my predilictions tend toward the distorted, fuzz-filled, spacey, drony, uhh, feedbacky? Let's face it: stoner rock is my bread and musical butter (right next to, it seems, sexually-loaded top 40 pop that probably influences teens to pursue lots of premarital relations). Or if it's not rock, my musical preferences still replicate the neurological effects of attacking a pan full of space-cakes or quadrupling the recommended dose of extraterrestrial-green cold meds. I'm not sure why because I warmed to much of this narcopop before initiation into the realm of regrettable choices awaiting shiftless, aged teens, like the one I blossomed into by the end of college.
Anyways, listening to what's new on the streets, I realize how much a lot of today's bands hearken back to their predecessors, while seeming to outdo many of the groups who were busy breaking ground in the '90s. Yet, for some reason, the most up-to-date catalogs don't impress or impact me as much. My worst fear is that familiar affliction of the thirty-something hipster: they just don't make albums like they used to, kiddies, I croak, before throat-clearing pointedly at my fellow concert goers spewing cigarette smoke from robust, young-adult lungs and creating the venue's cancer cloud I used to contribute so much to. Still, even after you factor the pointless dragon-chasing of my heady introduction to indie music a decade ago, you have to admit newer artists benefit from all those risks taken by those who came before. All I'm saying is hindsight can't hurt them 7.5-and-up Pitchfork ratings. Partly. The rest of the truth is in addition to their killer record collections, the kids these days pack some head-spinning talent, and I just need to get my groove back.
 On Jagjaguwar, the Montreal-based Besnard Lakes and their new The Besnard Lakes Are The Dark Horse finally make good on that overly used Beach Boys comparison.
 With the new Crytotograms cd on Kranky, Deerhunter appear to be courting the usually divided attention of a bevy of weirdo rock fans.
 Also on Kranky, Tim Hecker has just put out Harmony in Ultraviolet. And let me say: I. Love. This. Man. Because ambient is (ostensibly) the easiest music to make, simply stacking unobtrusive layers of sound upon one another, so often it requires more memory capacity than its typical listener possesses to remember what she heard of it only an hour ago. Hecker is one of those rare producers of environmental music who can create totally absorbing theater out of hums, drones, hisses, and other aural monotonies.
 Spiritualized has a crew of college-aged nephews in Maps, one of those most recently signed by Mute. A medley of the debut full-length We Can Create is up on myspace. |
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| All You Nasty Boys |
[Apr. 24th, 2007|12:09 pm] |
I'm harboring one guilty pleasure right now. And that's "Sexy Back." Before you jump all over me, his new album FutureSex / LoveSounds has received critical acclaim (which seems part of a welcome, new-ish trend among indienistas of showing an open mind toward performing artists who are no strangers to the top 40 charts). Like Pitchfork points out, Timberlake's plaintive falsetto recalls Detroit's most irresistible freak, Prince. Singing like women about what they want to do with a woman, both stand a part from the pack of emcees and crooners wielding their vocal prowess to woo their way into your pants. In the case of male singers, sexually ambiguous vocals suggest (if you're sticking to the old stereotype of femininity) a physical vulnerability and submissiveness, which coming from a man makes for a bold freakiness, qualities that are a hundred times sexier than over-assertions of "masculinity." Those who address their musical valentines to "bitches" and "ho's" should take note. Drop the misogyny-laced threats, boys. More tantalizing is a polite plea for sleaze.
Also, the Neptunes Timbaland's production of FutureSex / LoveSounds is a hip hop remix of the electro pop that has been my passion since I first heard Miss Kittin on Felix da Housecat's 2001 Kitten and the Glitz and the International Deejay Gigolo catalog. A basic, cheesy, and cheap rhythm, insistent to the point of raunchy, plays centerpiece, framed by dramatic keyboard stabs that evoke a catwalk-like spectacle. Peaches also beautifully exploited the sleaze of minimalism in her beats and likewise subverted gender roles for her stageshow persona. These days, long after the electroclash party has seen off its last powdery-nosed guest, The Knife and Ellen Allien fulfill my need for sexy electro, but they are more noir, introspective, and artful. Fine with me. Ironic, though, how the video for Allien's "Down" ranks as one of the most physically repugnant music videos ever.
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| The Unreality of Reality |
[Apr. 17th, 2007|05:24 pm] |
On my trip, I encountered many other travelers who found it impossible to put their digital cameras down for a moment of their vacation. Occasionally, I’d stop to observe this compulsive behavior and wondered why it slightly bothered me. Why couldn’t they just enjoy the sights? Why this urge to document every minor highlight? And who was the poor family member who would have to look at a dozen photos of a coconut cart? Some days I’d even catch myself in the midst of my own photo-taking frenzy. Then I’d silently apologize to everyone and everything around me for coldly appraising them in terms of how they would make for an interesting photo for the folks back home. One day, a disturbing explanation for this behavior popped into my head.
But before I explain, a story told by two German men I met while admiring the limestone peaks of Halong Bay: over dinner, I mentioned my beef with some of the shutterbugs in our group. My confession reminded the Germans of a friend who had gone trekking with them once. On one excursion to a mountain top, the friend decided to sit the day’s adventure out but sent along his camera so his friends could take a picture of the view for him. He half-joked that the photo is the only thing that really matters.
We don’t believe anything is really happening unless we observe it through a camera lens. The line between reality and the movies we watch, the television shows we follow, and the music we listen to blurs more with the passing of each new viewing season. Entertainment inclines us toward roles as passive earning, spending, consuming automatons because only in the cinema house can we live out our passions, fantasies, hopes, dreams, sex and violence fantasies without fear of endangering our comfort zone or dealing with the messy aftermath of fucking or shooting whomever we choose. Risks taken, intimacies shared, beliefs upheld, feelings given expression, if all of these weren’t played out for us by celebrities whose faces are just as familiar to us as those of our closest friends (thank you, checkout counter), then we might find it more difficult to behave, tow the line of the existence we’ve fallen into, not let seep our true thoughts and desires.
Perhaps, (and I'll probably hate myself for saying this) film and television producers have succeeded too well at their jobs of creating overly engaging programming. Maybe, the more we're transfixed by our entertainment, drawn into the story, connect with the personalities, suspend our doubts about narrative authenticity, the less we think of our own lives as "real," not without a camera there to validate what’s going on. The success of entertainment leaves viewers with the notion, partly unconscious, residual of the screen’s afterglow lurking in our mental processing, that we are less real than the entertainment we consume. And if our lives feel less authentic, the need to attend to the issue of living our own lives diminishes.
This theory might explain the popularity of reality television or "realistic" flourishes (wobbly, handheld cameras and all that) added to our entertainment. As a veteran tv-viewing nation, we require more and more “realism” to escape the reality of our own lives. (I’m going overboard with the quotations around “real” and its various forms because I don’t think reality television or reality manufactured for entertainment constitute actual reality.) We need the camera to be brought into the living room of a “real” American family because we no longer buy the struggles and triumphs of actors and actresses posed on a studio set of a living room. |
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| Go West! |
[Mar. 30th, 2007|09:34 pm] |
First of all, saibadee my livejournal homies. I'm back at my mother's house in Florida, catching up with familiar faces and remembering how it feels to sleep in a comfortable bed. I'll be here for two more weeks before shuttling my records, turntables, Asian memories, and money-making schemes to Austin, TX. Sorry if I missed you on my recent Orlando jaunt but you're always welcome here in Palatka. Lots to do -- sample a wild, new Slurpee flavor, contact spirits from the town's bootlegging days, track elusive reptiles at the ravine state park -- I could always use some help kicking the crust from my hometown's eyes. Holla.
I have mixed feelings about leaving my home of the past 29 years. It won't be without regret and a slight sense of betrayal. As a child, I thought Florida was heaven. What kid wouldn't love going to the beach almost every day off from school? As a teenager, I felt quite differently. In fact, I loathed it here. What young, body-conscious anti-socialite with advanced Disney disenchantment and a fashion obsession for the color black wouldn't?
But over the last few years, I've fallen under Florida's spell once more. And all it took was Orlando's choked arteries fraying my nerves every commuting day and a few recent acquaintances equally as fed up with the "City Beautiful's" soul-starved vision of urban development. Along with conversation spiked with a familiar wanderlust, my new friends profferred gazateers and state maps. What's more, they intended to use them! Christmas, the Orlando Wetlands, Sebring, Avon Park, Palmdale, the abandoned Cypress Knee Museum. Beyond the endlessly unwinding commercial strips, we discovered a better fantasyland of sawgrass oceans, cypress canopies, and downtowns out of the The Last Picture Show, all littered with relics of Florida's bygone cowhand era and the failed dreams of some of the crackpots who rode in on Walt's coattails. Titusville, Merritt Island, Homestead, Flamingo, the Ten Thousand Islands. And no, the beach isn't all bad, not when you have the Canaveral National Seashore, a patch of coastline that provides alligator-lined canals, supports bird species galore, incubates baby sea turtles, and offers the antidote to Cocoa Beach with a prohibition on all signs of civilization other than the space center, which against primeval wetlands kind of resembles a futuristic movie set from your point on a beach liberated of volleyball nets and Ron Jon's.
The Sunshine State receives a harsh rep. As a reformed Floridian, I've felt obliged to come to its defense whenever someone starts bashing it. It's a place that requires some digging and understanding before you can grow to love living here. But now I'm abandoning it! In my defense, it's not as if I'm hopping ship for an allegedly more sophisticated metro area like New York City. Nope, this is a jump from one hotbed of redneck action to an even greater one, Texas. One weird state to another, where patriot-minded bumperstickers will continue on in my daily milieu.
Closed down Cypress Knee Museum in Palmdale, FL |
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| Artificial Light |
[Oct. 26th, 2006|12:37 pm] |
From ink19...
The frontman of a hugely popular, breakthrough band is found dead in his mansion from what appears to be a self-inflicted shotgun wound. By his body, however, a young woman has left 21 handwritten journals confessing her assistance in the high profile suicide. Mystery mixes with tragedy as the author, Fiat Lux, vanishes and no other trace remains to prove she ever existed. Inspired by that most famous suicide of the last decade, Spin writer and Guided by Voices author James Greer revisits the 90s alternative music scene in a debut novel that reads like a faux rockumentary commentated by a French Decadent poet.
The dead rockstar in Greer’s story is named Kurt C. and embodies the qualities you would expect the real Kurt to have possessed: gifted, sensitive, quietly charismatic, drug addicted and struggling with the unwanted celebrity of his band N_. [In many ways, Artificial Light makes the perfect companion read to the Gus Van Sant film, Last Days, since both could be reduced (but only if you wanted to miss the point entirely) to artistically superior re-enactments with many liberties taken as to filling in the holes of the authentic story.] Instead of Seattle, the setting is Greer’s former resident city, Dayton, Ohio, hometown of the Wright brothers and the book’s cast of Kurt followers and rock cliche-ridden scenesters. Fiat Lux, a silently observant librarian and barfly, introduces us to the drunks, groupies, and aspiring artists who follow Kurt after hours many a night to Albion, the decaying, eccentrically designed estate built by Orville Wright. Most wasted amongst this circle is Trip Ryvvers of Whiskey Ships, the almost famous band with a singer capable of disappearing two cases of beer in the course of one show.
While the core notebooks next to Kurt's body are written by Fiat Lux, some are credited to Trip, who alternates between writing about the Wright brothers and about not writing about the actual book he’s under contract to complete, an insider’s look into the bands of Dayton’s alternative music scene. Other journals are supposed to be excerpts from Orville’s secret diary, in which he candidly pours out his insecurities, regrets, and the revelation that he was an opium addict, details no one can verify because the diary is missing along with Fiat. Still other scraps reveal the inner thoughts and experiences of different characters told from some unknown but seemingly omniscient narrator. As in a documentary or the satanically scary novel House of Leaves, Greer's story is an assemblage of documents and points of view on the life, music, and death of the book’s pseudo subject. Artificial Light’s readers find themselves also cast collectively as a character –- the audience of a real life murder mystery and possibly, a fan base searching for the answers behind the incomprehensible death of their legend.
Greer’s novel examines many kinds of death – the death of an icon, the death of all the wannabe icons, the death of their scene as well as that of its physical base, the postindustrial American city, and the most grievous one of all, the death of a dream. You can imagine Trip as the voice closest to Greer’s own: his character is trying to write about an already disintegrated music scene and numerous questions about the meaning of its birth and demise continue to weigh heavily on the minds of both. At length Trip meditates on how music rescued his generation from the lightless maw of Deadsville, America, for a while at least until its mainstream reincarnation turned around to gorge on its own brood.
If that last sentence seemed a bit much, I’m only preparing you for Greer’s maudlin poetic prose. While reflecting on the success of band N_, Trip weighs the impact which varies from beneficial to detrimental -- how mainstream acceptance boosted and permanently disfigured the scene at the same time, how it gave birth to that most irksome moral dilemma of staying independent versus selling out, or why some bands are chosen for commercial success while others with perhaps more credibility remain overlooked. Not unfamiliar territory when rehashing 90s underground music, but suddenly Greer seems as if he’s channeling Baudelaire by spinning a maddeningly Tao-like metaphor for Trip's mix of emotions: “the estranged night lay open, unchanged, immobile but strange, brushed by the gently ungently unyielding yielding of the moon ... submerged emerged in the silent unsilent song, submerged emerged from the beauty and the magical unmagical unity.” I kept asking myself, is this good ungood writing? Either way, its overwrought tone suits the topic of someone choosing to die for the adolescent but virtually impossible ideal of artistic purity.
I'd be surprised if you either hate everything about this book or fall in love with its every line. Readers might enjoy the vulnerable honesty of the Wilbur Wright diary, while loathing the encyclopedic descriptions of Fiat’s favorite author. These latter sections recall the chapters in Moby Dick when Melville provides exhaustive detail about a minute facet of the whaling industry; it's background information that only services the author’s particular obsession but unnecessary to the narrative and annoying to those readers who prefer to move along at a nice clip with the story. However, if you read for the same reasons as Fiat –- reading for the sake of it, losing yourself in a book’s tributaries as much as following its main plot line, you’ll get along much nicer with Greer’s novel. As Fiat explains why she loves her rambling author, “there are spiraling stories within stories within stories.” |
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| Bangkok Eats |
[Oct. 15th, 2006|05:26 pm] |
A sample entry from my traveling blog. Stop on by sometime.
After the coup, the biggest news in Thailand is the flooding throughout the central part of the country. Someone forgot to tell me about this before I stepped out my second night to find dinner. After coming to the first big puddle, I almost turned back. But this whole trip is about testing my courage, right? So I forged ahead, until reaching a pond in the middle of the sidewalk. Soaked socks are one thing, but a bout of cholera is another.
I turned around to explore the other, drier direction of the main street near my guesthouse, but my hopes for a restaurant were low since this neighborhood seems too busy at work for fine dining. As in all of Bangkok, however, food vendors along the street were not lacking. Anywhere there’s space to set up a fruit stand or an outdoor soup kitchen you’ll find it, on sidewalks, down the alleyway, under bridges. I’ve heard that some street food can be the best you’ll ever find, but the only dish that smelled appetizing to me was grilled, marinated pork on skewers. (Sometimes, vegetarianism is not in my heart.)
I walked around for awhile, trying to work up the nerve to to buy and eat something, before ending my trek at a medium-sized market in an alley, where I attracted numerous stares as the only Westerner in sight. Every five steps or so, a stomach-turning whiff assaulted my nostrils. My gaze followed one of the more overpowering odors to a table covered with pig parts, not exluding their scalped faces. They were eyeless but everything else remained intact: floppy ears, gaping lips, and their pert snouts still pointing up in the air. So much for that yummy-smelling pork satay.
Earlier at breakfast I had displayed more courage with a bowl of shark’s fin soup. This was during a quick midday jaunt through Chinatown with my friend Andrew before he had to leave to catch a plane back to Taiwan. Just as our taxi pulled up to a curb in Bangkok’s largest Chinese neighborhood, it began to pour. (The umbrella Andrew had chivalrously bought me during a downpour the night before was sitting back in my room due to a theory that just like Florida, it probably never rains in Thailand before the afternoon. Throw that hypothesis onto the pile with the the others. ) After we hustled out of the taxi toward the nearest overhang, Andrew mercifully suggested starting out Chinatown with a meal…inside. We examined the menu in front of the first restaurant we came upon; faded snapshots of soup bowls filled with entire shark fins stared up at us. Andrew, who dives into just about anything, asked nonchalantly, “Want to try the shark’s fin?”
We split one small bowl. It didn’t have a whole fin, but the menu promised us some chunks. These were stringy and extremely gamey; it wasn’t even meat by usual standards but something in between shredded cartilage and a pile of stuff you would avoid walking on at the beach. Andrew said how often he feels eating Chinese food is like eating liquified grease. In this instance at least, the rest of the soup lived up to his unkind description.
While we were waiting for the bill, I noticed the etching on the mirror behind Andrew. It depicted a kind of Chinese fantasy shark: it boasted an extra fin on each side of the usual one in addition to several more just above its tail. |
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| Urbane urban literature |
[Oct. 15th, 2006|05:03 pm] |
My first review writing in eons. Keep checking ink19.com for some more soon!
Bronx Biannual: The Journal of Urbane Urban Literature, Issue No. 1, sets out to give further credence to hip hop’s cultural contributions, perhaps a questionable proposition to those familiar only with its more commercial forms. But don’t doubt that beyond the flash and bounce of a Ludacris video, hip hop is a bona fide movement. Editor Miles Marshall Lewis introduces the Bronx Biannual as an heir apparent to literary reviews of the past, those connected with the Harlem Renaissance and other hallowed circles of African American artists. It's all right if you find your hips swerving to Jay-Z or Missy anyways, this volume is not begging to be taken too seriously. After all, fans of Lois Lane and Clark Kent garner “a shout out” from Lewis as do readers of Amiri Baraka and Aime Cesaire. The selections run the gamut, from blunt-inspired poetry to a cultural critique of Sex and the City versus Girlfriends to a sermon delivered by KRS-One to an investigative report on the Korean-dominated business of African American hair care products.
Let’s begin with my personal favorite: “Pangborn” is a zombie tale as told through Hera, the jive-talking, flesh-eating superfly sister whose line of work regularly takes her from a sass-mouthed robot girlfriend and her home on the moon to carry out professional hits on Earth. This time the target marked for death is holed up in the guts of an unfriendly Bronx housing project. Tailed by her lethal hunger and a private dick who’s made the suicidal mistake of falling for this undead assassin, Hera hauls our wimp asses through the countless twists of post-apocalyptic organized crime. Perhaps the best part about this science fiction short is the way Greg Tate, a longtime writer for the Village Voice, has his central character spit her disses with a smoldering, Pam Grier-like cool. This is a must-read for fans of the crackpot, DC/Marvel-inspired narratives of Dr. Octagon and Madvillain.
Poet, novelist and contributor to The Source, Dana Crum, turns in a taut, coming-of-age story with “Nothing Can Remain Unchanged.” It’s graduation night, and Sidney, the Princeton-bound valedictorian from a disadvantaged neighborhood in Washington, D.C., is wrapping up a heartfelt speech about choosing education over thug life. Unfortunately, his two best friends from childhood have been on the latter path for years. The story’s tension swells as Sidney screeches away in their cherry red 5.0 to celebrate what he suspects will be his last night with his drug-dealing friends. Please don’t die, please don’t die, you whisper to yourself as they hotrod through the streets of D.C. to a party in the city’s notorious Eastside. All the while, Sidney tries convincing his proud but resentful friends that nothing will change when he really wonders how long it will take for them to find their way to prison or the coroner’s office.
Not limited to short stories, the Bronx Biannual leaves no literary genre unturned. In “The Milk and the Meat,” KRS-One eloquently sermonizes to Christians that following in the steps of their savior requires more than warming a bench on Sunday morning. Atheists, don't be too easily turned off: his message of walk the talk easily holds true for non-devout visionaries. Toy collector Michael C. Ladd pens "Browse," a brief, humorous memoir on exploiting his Arab-American features to scare a heavily German-accented hobby shop owner out of any buyer expectations that she may have. And you'll find poetry’s pulse beating in the emcee-like lyricism of muMs’ “Angels in the Realm of Paranoia.”
This collection represents many strong writers, and the selections are as diverse as the different groups that define urban life. For a literary review, such diversity can pose a problem –- a lack of cohesion. Readers may have to tap into the more patient part of themselves to explore Bronx Biannual's widely varied range of voices. Just when you've soaked long enough in one piece it's time to dive blindly into a new subject and genre, as well as the writing style of the next contributor. The purpose of a review is to present a chorus of insights into a given topic, but when beginning a selection in the Bronx Biannual, you often feel as though you showed up late to the party and have to work double time to catch up with the conversations. While compiling the next issue, the editor would do well by introducing the authors and making it thematically tighter. The urban experience might just be too broad and lived by too many to address as a topic unto itself. Perhaps in this case, start with one of the themes within the theme. |
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| Silk Road Yard Sale & Crybaby Party |
[Sep. 21st, 2006|01:57 pm] |
Tomorrow and Saturday begins my open house / yard sale / farewell hooHA! Friends, food, fine tunes, and fabulous fares await you. (A list of the goods that have gotta go follows below.) I'll be hocking merch at 7AM both days and hanging out until late in the night, esp. Saturday. Please nip by, wish me luck or tell me I'm crazy!! before I kick up some Orlando dust to spend a couple of weeks bonding with family before flying into the heart of the latest Thai coup. The directions you need:
I live at 935 W Harvard St. in College Park
Take I-4 to the Princeton exit
Turn on Princeton heading west
Go to Edgewater and make a left
Turn right at the Quiznos
I'm on Harvard and Westmorland
The goods:
~a sweet antique, French-style dresser with mirror and bedside table
~pretty pair of end tables covered in leaf-shaped tiles in white and various shades of blue
~thumpin Technics home speakers
~dual cassette deck, 5-disc cd player, receiver, stand-alone cd recorder that hooks up to your receiver for recording mixes straight to disc
~huge ass Trinitron tv and entertainment stand
~my favorite movies on VHS and some DVDs
~records in the categories of electronica, hip hop, downtempo, dub, indie, experimental, 80s, 70s, many different decades, novelty, soundtracks, thrift store bin; CDs of music too; books on music and other subjects important to you
~handy kitchenware sh*t
~women's clothing in medium and petite sizes
~knick knacks and curiousities galore
and mucho more!
Ya'll come!
Sheila |
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| Personal Announcement + The Silk Road Sale! |
[Sep. 6th, 2006|11:39 am] |
Friends,
In case you haven't heard, I'm quitting my job of over 5 1/2 years and leaving for Southeast Asia on October 7!! Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam are my primary destinations, where the plan is to sleep, eat, do yoga, learn meditation, trek through jungle, flop down on beaches, and look confused most of the time. And if my calculator isn't a dirty liar, I'll be gone for 5 or 6 months. At the very least. Because by the end of that time if a sea creature has not met my stomach yet, I may seek employment and some kind of long term residence, probably in Tokyo!
I'm begging everyone to come and meet up with me along the way. There are a slew of good meetup spots: Bangkok, Phnom Pen, Hanoi. The airfare is often not as much as you'd expect and once you're there we're talking cheap! I'll be keeping a travel blog to entice would-be travel buddies; so keep a lookout for the web address to that.
Also, if you'd like to help me shed my wordly possessions, I'm holding a yard sale on Friday and Saturday, September 22 and 23. It won't be all selfish commerce: there'll be food, music and something of a party atmosphere; so just stop by and give me one last squeeze. Other sellers are welcome to hock their wares. Message me for details. After that weekend, I'll be out of town visiting family.
Thanks for reading!
Sheila |
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| an entry from March I forgot to make public |
[Aug. 30th, 2006|11:25 am] |
Spring break took me to south Florida, a whole other country really and--it occurs to me not without a shudder--possibly the future of the rest of the state. On our way to and from the King Tut exhibit in Ft. Lauderdale, my family and I nosed our vehicle sluggishly along I-95's bleached and cracking arteries, lined with dealerships dealing in anything under the Florida sun. The largest city in the state, Ft. Lauderdale is an out-of control suburban cyst on the cranium of Miami, a congested, sprawling patchwork of residencies and commerce, with its every available square acre invaded by the madness of growth for growth's sake. For an area where most of the development has exploded only within the last 20 or so years, the face of Ft. Lauderdale/North Miami looks pretty haggard. Too many people. Way too many cars. After a day and a half in the traffic, something in our minds snapped and whatever it was that brought us here in the first place...well, you know what, you can have it. As we explored the state park surrounding our primitive cabin site, it felt as though our feet were the 999 billionth to trample the sand footpath that passed pavillions rented by extended families celebrating new babies, birthdays, and general respite from the outside urban encroachment down to the artificial beach lapped by pencil-grey waves.
The Everglades. Ahh, sanctuary lying outside of the southeast Florida coast along the Tamiami Trail. I can see how the point of this national park might escape some. No majestic mountains, no elevation at all in fact, just a limestone shelf supporting an ocean of sawgrass dotted here and there with a palm tree or cypress dome. Peddling on our rented bikes through the Shark River Valley, my family and I met a new alligator every few yards. Somehow fear of these devouring reptiles, which park rangers assert can move five times faster than a human, are disarmed by the way gators can lie so perfectly still and lifeless, not a decimeter of space breathes between them and the ground beneath, like they plopped upon their resting places from 30,000 miles up in the air. |
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| (no subject) |
[Mar. 17th, 2006|03:46 pm] |
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One-man cinematic orchestra A_Scissors conjures the accidental music of a construction site, the grinding of midnight freight trains, the radiance of sunsets and imploding stars, and the chemical imbalance of a mind beholden only to the laws of its own universe, one mashed together from art films, noise rock, and other cultural detritus. Listening to his set at the Peacock Room, I couldn’t shake comparisons to the work of Merzbow, Boards of Canada and Four Tet. His too is a temperamental electronic music that takes risks, keeps it dicey, allows the elements of the songs to clash, introduces a hostile foreign agent into the body to show both the horror and beauty in harmony come undone. For his second number of the evening, he built up a quivering tower of noise piece by piece until it finally collapsed upon our petite-sized listening room. Perhaps, I started to fret, Brian holds too long a leash on his fracturing compositions. Why can’t he keep that robo-puppy in check? Out of the comfort zone he prodded us listeners, the zone that too eagerly awaits electronic music audiences and producers alike. His music is not about connect the dots, okay. You want the melody plus the beat, here comes the breakdown, then the big buildup, take your bow and good night--bla bla bla, go some place else. You listen to be surprised. Good music should surprise and not anticipate listener expectations too much. Not to say that I never nodded my head or pumped my fists. A_Scissors can also make you feel like one funky monkey. I was wiggling, especially during the Techno Animal-like finale. Encore, encore! |
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| (no subject) |
[Mar. 16th, 2006|09:47 am] |
I am surrounded by revolutionaries. This sort of realization can be surprising to someone who lives in tanned, over caffeinated Orlando, a place bursting with theme parks, botox boutiques, and a surplus of optimism.
Okay, so a coworker confides to me that he's recently been waiting for dinner time to stroll into the canteens of area college campuses dressed as a US soldier offering to those he meets a rope tied to the neck of a cohort in a black hood and detainee-orange jumpsuit. Whoa! He reported that the filled-to-capacity Rollins cafeteria came to a graveyard hush 20 seconds before a mob of students swarmed hurling outrage, threats, and then support for the campus saftey and Winter Park police who gruffly escorted the offending duo out to a rather fortunately conspicuous spot in the center of campus where they wrote up trespassing citations. Not surprising. As my old Rollins Latin professor wryly expressed, if the revolution ever came, Winter Park would be the first against the wall.
The second revolutionary of my Wednesday was a WWD cast member impatient with an obnoxiously loud crew in the back of our bus. She vocalized to her acquaintance but loud enough for all of us in the front to hear, "I'm ready to start a revolution for nice people. You know like the Civil Rights movement, but this one would be for nice people." Amen. |
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| (no subject) |
[Mar. 14th, 2006|08:28 am] |
This morning in First Edition, my textbook company's cafeteria, the young black guy briskly working the grill and whom everyone calls Matrix hums along to a snatch of lite music on the radio. A very tall black woman with hair sculpted in a golden pompadour steps toward his work station. "Mm, I love this song," she smiles radiantly.
"That's Kenny G," Matrix acknowledges. "That's my boy!"
I wait for a sarcastic reply or a knowing look, but the pompadour woman just continues beaming over the burger toppings covered in cellophane. |
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