Monday 29 August 2005 at 05:49 am
WAR
OF THE WORLDS
Americans
fight the good fight and lose. But win anyway.
CHARLIE
AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY
Karl
Marx on peyote loses his hand inside his beard. He squints into
twinned mirrors and sees Oompah-Loompahs stretching to infinity,
infinitely productive, infinitely dancing, exponentially servile. Why
outsource to third world countries when we can simply clone?
Happiness
is living inside your own factory.
Having
broken up with Brad Pitt shortly after he sold the Fight Club
franchise to a Haliburton subsidiary, Helena Bonham-Carter has
remarried -- a peasant this time, with whom she shares a sagging
hovel -- leaving Tyler Durden to vocalize his complex, confusing
feelings when Angelina Jolie buys a baby for him in Ethiopia for very
little money. That baby is the cheapest thing Pitt owns. (Which is
precisely the opposite for poor Helena, mother of Charlie.)
Willy
Wonka's lawyers (cloned, Amazonian) are not depicted in this film,
which has excellent lighting, script, etc.
This is because they spend all their time (precious, dwindling) locked in
a legal battle with Jennifer Aniston, whose lawyers (confident,
Californian) have launched a threating and convoluted personal-injury
lawsuit wherein the claimant posits that her former husband was
rendered sterile after prolonged daily use of Wonka Chocolate Bars.
Wonka has always
maintained that it did its utmost to respond to the sterility
concerns as soon as they arose. Wonka Bars are sold in more
than 80 countries, including Canada, Europe, Brazil, Australia and
Israel, where chaste settlers sometimes use the chocolate as a substitute for sex.
Mark Langsworth, the
lawyer who won the Cadbury Schistosomiasis case (blood flukes in the
namesake Egg), said he expected to see at least 50,000 personal
injury claims against Wonka in the US and thousands more overseas. In
a rare press release, Willy Wonka maintained: “I saw the naked
celeb pics of Brad Pitt and Gwyneth Paltrow (who in fact is not
English), and Pitt was pretty small by my standards. There's a high
likelihood that the poor man was sterile from birth.”
Charlie,
Mr Wonka's fetching young helpmeet, assured reporters: “I
believe that Tim Burton's latest documentary will help us reveal to
the public our true aims and trustworthiness.”
Wednesday 24 August 2005 at 8:16 pm
No
tengo tiempo para escribir sobre este trozo de reggaeton, solamente--
¡disfrútalo! Utiliza un sample del riddim de 'Murder
She Wrote', un uber-clásico de Sly & Robbie.
Don
Omar and Wiso G - Química
From
Reggaeton Traxx 14, not just another blazing reggaeton banger -- no,
this one also ups the historico-sexual Coronita-fueled dancefloor ante by sifting through the crates and pulling out classic reggae samples:
basslines from the 70s, synth stabs from the 80s, Sly & Robbie's early
90s hotsteppin' beat, and some rasta saying 'run tings rude boy!'
The lyrics are dope, flipping some reggaeton tropes and offering timeless party advice: Shut the doors so the people can't leave!
Javiah
- Contacto
¿Quien
es Javiah? Ni idea. His sex raps are very.... focused.
Desire, in Javiah's case, overrides all metaphor and lyricism. Girl,
you kill me or I kill you / but there's no disresepct here / take
advantage of the moment - this ain't cheap reggae ... contact, with
that ass. (kill or
be killed: i guess there are
metaphors.)
But
it's about the horns & the harmonies, how the slinky sung words
lick harmony & ride the rhythm. from the same 12".
Tuesday 23 August 2005 at 06:32 am
SWAT
teams bust a Utah drum&bass party! Wikinews article with links, or an eerie
video where
the drum&bass stops as the police state flexes -- assault rifles,
tear gas, and a helicopter! 3-time DMC champ DJ Craze was gonna headline.
on
a positive note: breakbeats & turntablism in Utah, a
Mormon-majority theocratic state, probably represents some strange step
forward.
leaping
a bit -- this makes me think of Philip K. Dick's A Scanner Darkly.
specifically:
"Someday, he thought,
it'll be mandatory that we all sell the McDonald's hamburger as well
as buy it; we'll sell it back and forth to each other forever from
our living rooms. That way we won't even have to go outside.”
Sunday 21 August 2005 at 08:55 am
In
the past few days we've stumbled across a few 'How to Blog' or 'How to
Audioblog' articles-- which tend to be misguided, and, worse,
written from an old-school print journalism perspective. Yuck! Bogs
are a new medium or grave for us to sink into, and should be
treated as such.
Here
at Negropanikkk Dot Com Slash Words, we've invited a guest speaker to
provide us all with a little guide:
HOW
TO BOG - part 1
by Mudd Up! President, C.E.O., and Head Janitor J.J. Clayton
BLOG BODIES: a historical introduction
Over the past
centuries, remains of many hundreds of people -- men, women, and
children -- have come to light during time-wasting activities around
the world, especially in America and northwestern Europe. These are
the "blog bodies." The individual blogs show a great degree
of variation in their state of decomposition, from skeletons, to
well-preserved complete blogs, to isolated headers and comments. Most
date from the centuries around the beginning of our era. We do not
know exactly how many blogs have been found -- many have disappeared
since their discovery.
Many people find it
hard to imagine that the dark brown blogs were once lightly colored
human beings of flesh and blood who lived in timber houses or
concrete high-rise buildings, who nursed their egos, grew obsessive,
made love, shoplifted slang, achieved self-definition via consumer choices, prepared pre-cooked meals, paid taxes, rented
Michael Moore©® DVDs, downloaded Paris Hilton
porn, and manufactured tools.
Facial
reconstructions and remains of their hair and MP3 collections give us
an idea of how they looked during life.
No
one knows how these people ended up blogging. It seems that these
blogs are not the remains of unlucky people who fell into the
Internet after losing their way. According to classical authors, the
Terrorism Age people of America and northern Europe offered human
sacrifices to celebrate military failures, and executed people as
punishment for crimes or perceived social imperfections such as
homosexuality. However, many of those found in the blogs died boring
deaths, or simply became uncool and shriveled away in shame.
Thursday 18 August 2005 at 06:30 am
um....,
yeah, so. today is my birthday... the Man ain't got me down yet! (Mike
ESP informs me that it's Aphex Twin's birthday too)
as you can see, i'm quite content with my books and toys, so-- more gifts for YOU:
Camayenne
Sofa - Andree
This
here is a Very Beautiful African song, recorded in 75 on the
Syliphone label by Guinean pop group Camayenne Sofa. Pure
sunlight. I would go so far as to call it Extremely Beautiful.
If
this doesn't make you happy then you're probably thinking about Iraq.
or No More Chappelle Show. or skyrocketing real estate prices. or
Alzheimer's Disease. or the collusion between the American prison
system and private investment firms. or the fact that we are all one
day closer to our unknowable unavoidable deaths. or.....
'Andree'
comes from a CD comp of 70s West African treasure which i
highly recommend called Discotheque 75 (Syllart). It's in
print and well-distributed, as are a few of their solo albums.
Obake
jaa - Buta Matsuri (Ove-Naxx remixxx! “Dead Man's Q Working
Destroy”)
Big
rough gem! Ove-Naxx is a musicians' musician, plus he's crazy by most
accounts.
Straight-up
Osakan intensity -- absurdist idiolalia vocalizations, this weird
J-pop sensibility, layers of Ove-fuzz and Ove-hash, and it all mounts
to this mad vocoder moment which reminds us that Ove could be a
superstar (or at least not have to work construction) if he ever
wanted to make normal music, but he doesn't, he runs a zero-profit
anarchy pub in Osaka and labors 12 hour days by the roadside --
brother's almost as black as I am. Here, a compartive melanin study of the side by side forearms of Mrs & Mrs Ove Naxx
The band he's remixing, Obake Jaa, is DJ Shabushaba and Oorutaichi. Ove explains: "Obake" is Ghost, Dead man and "jaa" mean like i am. Their album buyable here. I get the feeling that Tristan Tzara would have vibed with the underground music scene in Osaka.
& FOR THOSE OF YOU who MAKE MUSIC
** some dope free VST plug-ins **
Wednesday 17 August 2005 at 04:45 am
tensioned
calm in the eye of the storm, whirling detritus at its violent edges.
Lemchaheb
- Lekbila
creaky
70s moroccan music gets snagged on time
DJ
/rupture - RADIO MIX 58:46 (5 min excerpt)
(sly
& robbie - tabla riddim / knifehandchop - vertical: noize creator
remix / mutamassik - show 2 show: dj rupture remix)
...from
a live mix for radio i did exactly 3 years ago. turn it up, who cares
what your neighbors / friends / co-workers think.
Monday 15 August 2005 at 04:57 am
Baroque
chiaroscuros in the boxing gym. Ice baffles a child who grew up with no
refrigerator, yet he still wants to be a champion
at something specific, he still wants a title. Hilary Swank
Caravaggio, hip to the crystallization of water, harbors similar
dreams. A Berlin prostitute interrupts these dreams, illegitimately.
A million dollars to punch someone's lights out. But how to keep it
in?
How
does hope get lodged in our heads? Yes Danger, yes Forrest--
simplicity can keep it alive. But what about complexity?
Wednesday 10 August 2005 at 5:44 pm
- slept,
woke, slept, woke, miserable life: Kafka's
diaries in blog format! Don't sleep! (i doubt he could...)
-
another nice wordy new blog: Odalisque. Sense
glancingly made, outward links shunned. the main
page holds one oblique entry at a time. “this is why the vowels /
traumatize in chorus”; 
seems like Anne Boyer
rocks a banjo too, which reinforces my theory that all women who play
the banjo are superheroes. (i recorded most of the Nass El Ghiwane
Brussels concert direct from the mixing desk -- listening back I'm
awed, as usual, by Allal's banjo playing, the bite and sing
of it all. Being male however, his confirmed superhero status does
not support my theory.)
-
last
but by no means quietest, Get Stoopid. Audioblog aimed at
the Bay Area rap scene, the most mp3-oriented of the fresh batch of
Bay blogs. lots of fast synthy beats & rhymes, kinda like reved-up, raved-up crunk. The Kinsmoke track there now is energy.
hyphy? grime? baltimore? crunk? i can't
wait for the next genre to drop because the names themselves are so
great. "I DJ mostly whiffle and snug, throw in some cake jams for the ladies..., and crunk / grime blends if
the crowd's up for it..."
Tuesday 09 August 2005 at 07:20 am
*
*
*
WHO
AMONG US WILL AVENGE MISS NINA SIMONE?
Silver
Leaf Quartet - Dark Day [1960]
1.
accappela gospel group
2.
recorded in 1960 by tireless Alan Lomax
3. DoveSong´s library offers heaps of great worldwide folk MP3s
for free -- they say it´s closed, but it isn´t, just be patient.
4. the very same notes are found in The Very Same God
Silver
Mount Zion - God Bless Our Dead Marines (excerpt) [2005]
1.
the question ain't
rhetorical: who will avenge miss nina simone?
2.
the song gets better than this (12 minutes long!)
3.
canada, oh canada
4.
dead kids dont get photographed
5.
god bless our dead marines
6.
HORSES IN THE SKY
7.
GY!BE as a chamber quartert with 7 people crowded into it.
&. burning stars lit up their hair
Saturday 06 August 2005 at 7:05 pm
REGGAETON MEGAWATTAGE
Ordinarily
I say no nukes (unless they're being wielded by North Korea), but Wayne's reggaeton piece
-- the best article on 'spanish reggae' i've come across -- is brilliantly powered by plutonium-drank and/or heavy-moleculed
tetrahydrocannibols. an intensive course indeed.
.
* * *
YOU
ARE MAKING THE WALL PRETTY.
WE
HATE THIS WALL, GO HOME.
If
I were confined to a walled ghetto (or jail, or concentration camp,
or guantanamo) and some foreign guy with money & freedom waltzes
in, paints pretty pictures on my walls, then leaves (the right
passport renders all walls invisible), I'd probably be pissed-off.
To
his credit, Banksy -- a Bristolean graffiti artist who hires a
spokesperson -- does it with panache.
Although
Arofish did it first; only B got the shine. 'It' being, specifically, decorating the
Palestinian side of Israel's Apartheidy, Berliny Wall. Did I say Wall? Oops, I meant to say Security Fence.
Please
excuse my slip-up: in a war against terrorism, clear language is the
first thing to go.
And
remember: You can't have a cease-fire with armed terrorist groups,
because you give them a veto over sugar.
Tuesday 02 August 2005 at 5:37 pm
Off to deep Spain, too deep for internet, atop of a Cantabrian mountain high enough for wolves and bizarre folklore but
too high for cellphone coverage. Sit tight, don't worry, I ain't got
blog depression. (check the whole blog depression
booklet, very amusing, very true) [via various places]
Lazy on the sunbaked plains of Castilla b4 i leave. Cloudless
and deceptively hot. Typing on an dial-up modem
that averages 1.6kB/sec -- about 40 minutes to download an MP3 --
slower if I want to browse websites at the same time. It's great!
(instant cure to blog depression) ... I
don't care how awesome that new song or article is, it just takes too
long to grab... what a relief!
So,
books. Woodpulp and black ink magic. Huggable,
dog-earable, burnable books.
here's the ones whose pages i've been turnin'----
EMPIRE - Niall Ferguson
Airport
bookstore desperation purchase. It's probably informative
and insightful, but every time I read it I fall asleep.
DHALGREN - Samuel R. Delany
...halfway through this behemoth I can say I've never read anything like Dhalgren. That's a big compliment. Very little has happened. It's extremely
well-written. Delany and Cam'ron are the weirdest, funkiest living
writers Harlem has given us.
This
quote fragment reflects Dhalgren's whole: The miracle of
order has run out and I am left in an unmiraculous city where
anything may happen.
Like
it or not, one of America's best novelists is a queer Negro who
doesn't write black books. A sci-fi author who doesn't stick to sci-fi.
(And he sells more than the hip young writers who feel they must take a
stand, for or against, Eggers
et al.) Identity categories in the literary world are unconcernedly
conservative, borderline racist, due in large part to f%@'ed up
identity politics pushed in allegedly enlightened post-WWII academic
thought-- but that's another story.
The past 3 Delany novels I've read
have had these items in common: 1. each one features some kind of
poet on some kind of adventure where writers or poets are unlikely.
2. each one has a character who walks around with at least one shoe
off.
The
miracle of order has run out... Beautiful.
HIGH
RISE - J.G. Ballard.
I
had no idea Ballard would be this good. It's like Lord of the
Flies staged in a high-rise high-income apartment complex on the
edge of London. Plus, the novel is insane in that very controlled
very British way, where the prose remains lucid as it depicts utter
horrendousness breaking out.
Mighty
Jane Jacobs, she who loves hodgepodge polyglot cities enough to actually do
something about it rather than just gentrify and blog-- Ballard must
have gotten down with Jacob's The Death and Life of Great American
Cities before writing High Rise, because the flip side
to his eloquent savagery & satire is the idea that a city's
unsanitized multilayered madness is precisely what keeps us from
going barbaric, rather than the other way around. Straightening out
that thought-chain: skyscraper culture, mall culture, may very well
lead to psychosis.
MONA
LISA OVERDRIVE - William Gibson
Gibson's
Neuromancer/Sprawl trilogy not only birthed the term
'cyberspace' and felt just right in a contemporary way to a
lot of people, it pushed Gibson's future lookback vision that the 'Net didn't
achieve any real maturity until Papa Legba and the voodoo gods rode
in on the scene, rewiring the crossroads alongside misty-eyed AI
machines who made melancholy art. When these beings took root, their
unearthly power and inexplicable presence supplanted the human order
of network protocols and zeros and ones with something more spooked.
A pretty heavy & outright cool idea by my book.
I
could list Gibson's dozen or so structures, the repeating themes and
'idiosyncratic' character-types which he recycles & rearranges in his
early novels, but that would feel
too much like work and I'd expect to get paid or something. It does
grow
annoying though, as do his dull linear chapter-sized narrative
jumpcuts. At least six books he wrote in a row are arranged and
crescendo in the exact same way, each chapter flipping between
characters action until they all coincide in the same room or moment
and the strands resolve into sense.
TIPPING
POINT - Malcolm Gladwell
Another
airport purchase, beggars can't be choosy. I'd love to get New Yorker
staff writer Malcolm Gladwell and New York Times staff writer
Thomas Friedman in the same room. (This would prove that they are two
different people.) They'd flash each other artificially whitened
smiles, and pump each others' hands excitedly, each straining to
out-pump the other. Friedman would start with one hip recollection
about somebody he met in his travels, and Gladwell would retort with
another anecdote. Soon enough they'd be shouting, haggling over some
pseudoscientific point using tales of their charming friends as
proof. It's how they write; I assume it must be how they
party.
-
“On a crispy autumn day in 1775, Paul Revere's lesser known cousin
had his skull crushed by a world-weary grizzly bear named Bobo who
sympathized with the British.” Gladwell strikes his champagne glass
with the little silver spoon, spilling booze on the gongonzola cheese
wedges. Everyone at the dinner party -- not just Friedman -- looks
his way. “The story of how Bobo did this, dear Thomas, is a
marvelous illustration of the second of my rules of the Tipping
Point, the Stickiness Factor. Bobo had discovered that by making
small but critical adjustments in how he--
-
“Bangsomemore,” interrupts Friedman, licking florid lips while
his mustache crinkles like a caterpillar, “is how the Western
workers at Bangalore's DataSys Global Call Center refer to their home
town, but I wasn't able to make this connection until I got there.
Susan Barley -- a cute Ohioan who worked tirelessly on the Kerry
campaign and fled to India for psychosexual reawakening after his
defeat -- explained this to me as I paid her at local wage-rates
for the American-style massage she performed while awaiting a fax from the
Ambassador to Disneyland in my 4-star hotel room with pleasant
air-conditioning and a well-stocked mini-bar. Barley was damn good. The
new face of the flat world is the money shot, I mean, two-way
information transfers where the Westerners bring their accent-free
phone answering skills to the tables and receive pleasure training
from the natives, several of whom welcome polygamous--”
-
“A CONNECTOR!” bellows Gladwell, sending a shudder through the
gathered crowd. Most of the guests have moved to the edges of the
room. Nobody touches the cheese widgets. The Cambodian waitstaff is clearly confused. Although
the French-Vietnamese catering company pays 'em to smile as they
serve, most of them now sport blank expressions. But nobody notices
because everyone's looking at the two authors.
Aware that he is back
in the center of attention, Gladwell nods slowly and continues.
“Sprinkled among every walk of life are a handful of people like
our rather acquiescent
companion Miss Barley, individuals bearing a truly extraordinary
knack of,” clearing his throat with a satisfied leer, “making
friends and acquaintances.”
And
so on. They get sizable advances for writing these types of books,
the corporate lecture circuit pays well, cocaine's a hell of a drug.
*
* *
I
guess he's smart or topical or whatever, but The Tipping Point
is cluttered with faulty logic and tautologies using terms Gladwell
himself has invented. For example: “Sesame Street succeeded
because it learned how to make television sticky... And the specific
quality that a message needs to be successful is the quality of
'stickiness'.”
Thank
you, sir.
THE
ASYMPTOTIC BUNCH
certain
books are so good that the closer I get to finishing them the slower
I go, savoring every turn of phrase. The last few hours before
leaving someone you love, times when you hate the clock-hands for
moving at all. Events whose end you approach on an asymptotic curve.
This = a special category of books.
I
think I'm not crazy because Martin Hold on 2 Young Ideas has
described the same thing, about the same book no less [A Heart So
White], and expresses this idea in a more coherent way than me: “I
actually am reading that novel slowly because I dont want it to end.
Do you ever feel a tiny melancholy when you finish a novel? You have
to rest it back on the shelf and theres no real external proof of the
experience you just had. Its like you lost a good friend or
something.”
my
summer asymptotic reads are:
A
HEART SO WHITE - Javier Marías
(the
article from El Pais on his blog right now is real funny, not to mention prickly)
THE
COLLECTED TALES OF NIKOLAI GOGOL - Nikolai Vasilevich Gogol, trans.
Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky.
Tuesday 02 August 2005 at 05:46 am
My
favorite Prefuse 73 review ever, right here. An undoctored clip from the
current issue of ELLE (spain). Editorial snafu or bristling racial
commentary?
English
translation: “Like a blast from the past-- he learned to sing
authentic black music in church choirs--this north american has
conquered all the music critics with his debut album. His powerful
soul is to blame.”
