Tomorrow night, Friday the 15th, I’ll be DJing at a party with Gang Gang Dance @ The Music Hall of Williamsburg. GGD is great. I have a lot of new music to unleash. This should be fun.
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on Saturday night…. DUTTY ARTZ is organzing a Haitian aid relief party.
As Matt explains: We’ve decided to throw a last-minute benefit show to help make a financial contribution to the ongoing relief efforts in Haiti. If you’ve followed this at all it is an absolutely harrowing, horrible catastrophe that has befallen a place that was already a very difficult place to live for many people. The show is in only two days so PLEASE email this to your friends in New York, put it on your Facebook, Twitter, etc. and help us get the word out. We as DJs will not be taking any payment from this and the proceeds will be donated to charity. We are currently seeking expert advice on who to donate it to, suggestions are welcome.
DUTTY ARTZ TROPICAL RELIEF FOR HAITI
DJs: DJ Rupture Matt Shadetek Lamin Fofana Feliz Cumbe
THIS Saturday 1/16 10PM Bowery Poetry Club 308 Bowery $10 (more is welcome). All proceeds donated to Haitian relief
Anyway, in case you haven’t seen Avatar, its about a white (American!) dude that goes native and becomes their most awesome leader and achieves an improbable, lo-tech victory (but with soul power! and the animals help them!). Awesome battle sequence ! Good vs. Evil, get it ?
In the real world you live in a complicated global capital network that sometimes deliberately but mostly inadvertiantly leverages injustices so that your locality can exist with the wealth and convienience it enjoys. You cannot opt out. You can’t just choose the right items on the Health Food store shelf.
You can use your influence to convince specific companies to change behavior and you can make the best decision when you personally have a decision to make. Don’t just say “fuck it”.
That’s the resources issue. The other issue is racial and cultural understanding. Most of the people who see Avatar will not be White Americans. But we get it, its supposed to be a character you can relate to.
I saw Avatar on it’s opening night here in New York. At first I wasn’t going to write about it, but in retrospect I should have, for reasons Dan Visel mentions here, referencing the Economist piece I upped yesterday, emphasis mine:
A lot of people wanted to talk about Avatar, and there’s a fair amount to discuss there: how pretty it is, how it works as mass spectacle, the film’s deeply muddled politics, how ecology and religion are connected. What stands out to me is how rarely this happens any more. .. The sheer ubiquity of Avatar changed how it could be discussed: something so big can cut across our individual interest groups, enabling broader conversations.
But the inevitable question arises: what does it mean if the only cultural object that everyone can talk about costs $300 million?
me: i couldnt wait, got it off —-. itd been there since July or something. criminally slept on by us!
Lamin: yeah. the album had very little buzz, considering the fact that it was released by Def Jam and produced by The-Dream (& Tricky Stewart)! my sis mentioned it to me after she heard about it from a cousin in Maryland who’s 14 years old! so yeah, this is what 14 year old girls are listening to in the DMV.
A lot of the people who read a bestselling novel, for example, do not read much other fiction. By contrast, the audience for an obscure novel is largely composed of people who read a lot. That means the least popular books are judged by people who have the highest standards, while the most popular are judged by people who literally do not know any better. An American who read just one book this year was disproportionately likely to have read “The Lost Symbolâ€, by Dan Brown. He almost certainly liked it.
Salvador DalÃ: Have you realized that snails are like El Greco? Yes, yes, like Domenicos Theotocopulos, who, having been born in Crete, learned to paint the type of icons they make there with a sense of ownership, yet, as soon as he relocated to Venice, his admiration for Tiziano and the influence of Tintoretto transformed him into the most Venetian of the Venetians, the most sensual, colorful, and excessive painter of the Serenisima, but upon arrival in Toledo a tramatic conversion rendered him sober, austere, old Castillian, the gentleman with his hand on his chest, with an overflowing mysticism, the most sincere character in all of deep Spain.
Oscar Tuquets Blanca: Excuse me sir, but the relationship with snails is still a bit unclear to me.
DalÃ: But Tusquets – it’s obvious! The thing that distinguishes El Greco, the thing that makes him an immortal artist, is his absolute lack of personality, is his ability to metamorph himself, like a chameleon, to absorb the values of his surroundings with such intensity that, in the end, he becomes more authentic than the natives. And the culinary value of a snail? What’s converted it into one of the heroes of so many kitchens and gourmet cooks? The utter absence of its own flavor, it’s capacity to absorb the essences of the condiments that accompany it and transform itself into what the cook desires. Besides, when I use my little fork to extract the snail from its shell, notice how it lengthens, taking on an appearance quite similar to those of the saints floating in El Greco’s skies…
-Oscar Tuquets Blanca, from the prologue to Todo es comparable, translation mine.
[Helix Pomatia, “called by the French name escargot when it is used in cooking.” Wikipedia]
“The land beneath Egypt and Gaza resembles a Swiss cheese,” reports the BBC, “full of holes and tunnels through which the Palestinians smuggle the everyday items they are denied by the blockade.”
Tunnels (and intertubes) perforate ‘national’ borders. Makeshift submarines – narcosubs – circumvent them. Last I heard it cost Japanese kids $2000 to bribe a particular NYC visa worker for a ‘real’ student visa. Fake passports are much, much heavier. Wormholes fill our undocumented world. Money is always the best grease for movement, although people will never be a slippery as capital. But back to Gaza.
According to The Guardian, Hamas licenses, taxes, and provides electricity for these tunnels, while prohibiting drugs and booze and smokes from entering. Sober city. “Palestinian smugglers in Gaza have built dozens, perhaps hundreds, of underground tunnels through the sand to bring a wide range of goods into the small territory, from food to fuel to cattle, to skirt Israel’s economic blockade.”
Hence the U.S.-backed construction of a steel wall, which will stretch for several miles and go roughly 60 ft. underground, an anti-tunnel barrier which reportedly “cannot be cut or melted – in short it is impenetrable.”
“There are thought to be hundreds of tunnels along the border”
The dark osmosis of border smuggling is mostly – but not always – profit-oriented. But enough about walls, and tunnels and submarines which can transport drugs or people or anything, really; let’s talk about fishing. And food.
My friend Maggie Schmitt is working on a series of mini-documentaries about daily life in Gaza. Here is a recent piece of hers which was picked up by The Nation:
Once upon a time, Gaza was known for its citrus trees and its extraordinary seafood, the smell of jasmine in the evening. No longer: now it is hard to find any image of Gaza that does not reek of death, destruction and deprivation. And yet despite the siege, the bombings, and the political turmoil that surrounds them, the people of Gaza continue to live and to create their small share of beauty and grace wherever they can. One of these places is in the kitchen.
What I want to tell you about is the kitchen, with women’s bright eyes flashing as they roll out the dough, and the herb garden religiously tended, and the delicate meal eaten in the shade of a fig tree. But alas, we are in Gaza, and I can’t talk about the kitchen without talking about everything else.
Bad Santa cumbia villera from the one and only Damas Gratis. Pablo Lescano is the most famous person I know who semi-regularly sends me insane emails. Some, like this recent one, contain amazing music. Hilarious lyrics thick with double entrendres.
Today we’ll be holding it down on WFMU from 6-8pm EST. I’ve got a lot of unreleased material from Night Slug’s Mosca, Toy Selectah, y más to shake over the NYC airwaves, Lamin gathered a heap of (cleaned-up) new rap, and since we heart old vinyl too, I’ll be unleashing super-rare vinyl rips courtesy of our man of the cumbias, Sonido Martines (who is currently wandering around the Peruvian Amazon in search of quasi-mythical LPs). Plus a bit of Slowdive shoegaze, to keep you on yr toes.
So tune in, stream via datatubes if you like. I’m sick so our goal is fight cold with heat, outsweat any fever.
broad shoulders, 225-230 lbs, black hair, sometimes wears glasses to read and write. No mustache or beard, dark brown eyes, fair skin […] looked educated and good in business.
White noise. He was offered a drink of water and he refused.
