Mudd Up!  

COLLECTED NONFICTIONS

Madrid, still, stunningly disorganized
wordy, inept

Berlin was broad-shouldered as always

Having staggered home to find somebody's key jammed into the lock of my building, effectively forcing the front door open (The Spanish phrase for this is: ¡joder, hay que ser inepto!), I can now return to nowherelandia. Piggybacked in, not precisely wardriven, on borrowed bandwidth.

Real books become life-rafts in the skim data stream: “content” concretized into form, ink & woodpulp, life you can experience without electricity or tiny fans whirring, pages thumbed or new but already fading--this time next century all our books will be blank, entire libraries of Lethe. Bonfires of forgetting. Or as Marías might say, what will happen to words in books is what happens to memories or thoughts when the person remembering or thinking them stops.

But I'm worming my way through several strong ones now, real books, the kind you can dog-ear or set on fire: Virtual Light by William Gibson, Hip by John Leland, that big nonfiction tome by Borges, and a dully titled collecting of exciting poetry by Joyelle McSweeney. All quite good, in very different ways.

Party People FYI

i´ll be DJing at a free party in Madrid late tomorrow night with Kid606 & others, then on Saturday I´m spinning at Berlin´s Transmediale festival, alongside Mad Professor, DJ Marlboro, and some Montreal Mutek-y acts (Marlboro is the O.G. Brazilian baile funk DJ, he´s the catalyst who brought Miami bass records back to Rio´s favelas in the 80s & has been a scene mainstay ever since).

MELT

 

Hamburgers have agreed to a temporary period of quiet, and Hambuger statements today may be more rhetorical than substantive, an effort to remind Pollsters that Hamburgers have been fighting the Icecream Man, not making concessions to him.

But the Hamburger rebuttals are a sharp reminder of the limits of Mr. Morton's authority right now, even with the backing of Eddie and Joan, and of the fragility of the declarations made today.

The Icecream Man has made it clear that if attacks continue and Mr. Morton does little to stop them, the Icecream Man will resume his military activity.

"One can only have a cease-fire with a state or authority that controls security," a senior Icecream official cautioned here today. "You can't have a cease-fire with armed terrorist groups, because you give them a veto over sugar. What we have today is a cessation of violence, and it can become something more if Morton moves to crack down" on the militants, take away their weapons and destroy their fudge and sugar factories.

Mr. Morton has not yet named a new cabinet or reformed his security forces, the Icecream Man points out, saying: "We know he needs time, and we will give him time, but he doesn't have a limitless amount of time."

But the day was filled with the symbolism of renewed hopes, as the Icecream Man and Pollster leaders sat at a large round table with their hosts, Eddie “President” Hanley, and Joan “King” Arnolds. In the hall, the Icecream Man's flag was displayed next to the Pollsters'. The Icecream Man's spokesmen spun their messages on Eddie and Joan's television stations and both Eddie and Joan announced that they would soon return their empty cups to the Icecream Man.

african mp3s up

GRIME 97

Dubquixote telegraphs in the latest: grime anthem Forward riddim played on NYC hiphop R&B  corporate megastation Hot 97! Blazing to say the least.

Non New Yorkers & non Grime nerds may have difficulty grasping the 'wow' factor of this development.., but Hot 97 is smoke in the city's lungs. It's the station that follows you from storefront to storefront. It cruises by with the windows rolled down. Public. Their dial digits serve as default urban ambience. Grime is awkward, chaotic London-specific music circulating mostly via pirate radio, small-run no artwork 12”s, and D.I.Y. mixtapes and DVDs. Unlike everything played on Hot 97, nobody is making much money in the grime game yet. The most aboveground figure to US audiences is Dizzee Rascal, whose recent album sold far worse than that of every indie band you've ever heard of. So when the gutter-up grime jumps off via the top-down payola frequencies of NYC's Hot 97, well, it's wild, innit?

As unexpected as moral pillar  Bush endorsing Tom Wolfe's smutty novel about co-ed sex, drugs, and partying--wait, that makes a lot of sense...

    Grime on Hot 97 = bananas & hopeful for a bunch of reasons.

(None of them have to do with the actual music though--major label black pop is as bugged-out as ever, and although grime has some seriously mental productions, the Forward riddim's clubfight bounce gets the blood stirring but dances miles away from dedicated grime bent-ness (bass mixes/devils mixes, so solid “dilemma”, jammer's “feedback”, anything Mondie makes using only 2 drum samples, Davinche's warped r&b visions, etc)

    I would write about those reasons but tiny germs inside my body are yelling at me.

AXE