My true identity revealed

If Amy Philips is to be believed, I am a "casually dressed, slightly dowdy indie-rock girl," the target audience for The Decemberists, the Portland, Oregon-based band that played the Kimmel Center last night. Recalling lead singer Colin Meloy's solo appearance at Fez this past January, Phillips writes,

"We swooned and sighed as Meloy played [...] Then we all went home and blogged about it."

Sigh.

Now Playing: The Decemberists, Picaresque. (They are playing the NYU Kimmel Center tomorrow night)

The Wednesday April 27th in the New York Metro Section, the New York Times has printed two photographs of Andy Warhol by Sylvia Plachy, one in which he looks suspiciously like Robert Frost or some other wise old poet.

Remember the AIDS "super-bug"? Remember the fortysomething, crystal-meth using, barebacking New York gay man who contracted it? David France argues in the cover to this month's New York magazine (click link below) that the story was wildly inaccurate and overblown. Of course all the news outlets that trumpeted the superbug as the latest instance of gay depravity are hardly likely to go back now and give us the un-sensationalized bigger picture.

I've started a second blog dedicated exclusively to Kenyan and African hip hop. I will be posting my thoughts as well as links to good articles and mp3s I can find on the web. Please send me stuff that you know about!

Click the link below for the latest in the current rash of stories about people finding body parts in their fast food.

Wendy's is fending off an accusation that a severed finger was found in someone's chili, and now an Arby's has been caught with a piece of skin in its lettuce. The manager of the Arby's was caught, pardon the pun, red-handed, and confessed to slicing his thumb by accident.

The facts aside, I am fascinated by the cultural work that these stories do. They seem to represent an allegorical representation of our anxiety around fast food, and perform our unconscious acknowledgment of the way it dehumanizes both we who eat it and they who make it.

Bob Herbert has a moving op-ed about civilian deaths in Iraq, and he mentions an American aid worker who died there recently.

"Her ultimate goal, which Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont is pursuing, was to establish a U.S. government office, perhaps in the State Department, to document the civilian casualties of American military operations. That information would then be publicly reported. Compensation would be provided for victims and their families, and the data would be studied in an effort to minimize civilian casualties in future operations."

From her lips to God's ear, as they say.

Back from Seattle

Talk about Academic Rock Stars! Just back from Seatlle and the Experience Music Project's Annual Pop Conference. Some highlights, in the form of blind items ...

Who promised that his next book would be called Blonde on Blonde?

Who said that if he had written Love and Theft it would have been called Love and Corroboration ... and would have flopped?

Which author of a well-received book on the blues got snarky about having to live in a world where not everyone knows Chalino Sanchez?

Who called Lil Jon "crunkface minstrelsy"?

Who said Mick Jagger was an updated Zip Coon who went and hunted some cool in order to turn those lips into an asset?

Who dissed my motherland by cracking this joke about unwanted/excessive blog comments: "Hi, I'm from Kenya. Give me your bank account number"?

... And lastly, a non-blind item (click the link) ...

Which fabulous performance artist included this line in her one-woman show, (which is coming to NYC Gay Pride this summer):

"The important thing isn't to look pretty. The important thing is to look like you have something to hide."

Overheard

Penitence text read by Charles and Camilla -- confessed divorcees and adulterers -- at a Church of England ceremony after their nuptials:

"We acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins and wickedness, Which we, from time to time, most grievously have committed, by thought, word and deed, Against thy Divine Majesty, Provoking most justly thy wrath and indignation against us."

-- From the 1662 Book of Common Prayer. Sounds like a custom we ought to revive.

...

Posted by: afrofuturist.

Just got back from Mix's performance art evening, curated by the fabulous (and fabulously pink) Morty. The intense moment came when a performance artist named Crystal Goldmine, who read from 'Biological Exuberance,' a book detailing animal homosexuality in hilarious detail, all the while an accomplice was inserting needles into her back, while a third accomplice projected this live onto the big screen behind them. When they were done, they threaded a ribbon from her hair around the needles, and placed flowers in it.

Adapt or Die is an oddly petulant title for a collection of re-mixes. It is almost cynical, suggesting that the root of musical innovation is a Darwinian struggle for presence and relevance in the market. This is the stuff of some artists -- Damien Hirst and Andy Warhol come to mind -- but Everything But the Girl was a band that always stood for tortured sincerity, notorious in their early years for lyrics like: "I was desperate for love to be pure/What that meant, I never was sure/You spent your time on me/I took it willingly/And I made you trust in literature."

That track, "Walking to You" was on the breakthrough/transition album Amplified Heart. Amplified brought the smash that changed everything: "Missing". Although they later recorded a song called "Lullaby of Clubland," "Missing" was better deserves the title: it was an inescapable soundtrack to two or three summers worth of my nocturnal misadventures in London and New York in the mid-1990s. Its massive success, along with the success of EBTG's Tracey Thorn's guest vocals on Massive Attack's "Better Things," transformed EBTG from a singer-songwriter acousticy kind of act to the sure-footed masters of the electronica realm. It is this legacy in dance music that is tracked on this most recent of compilations, which makes only a single nod to their acoustic roots, on which, defiantly enough, it appears as the final track. They may have adapt to the musical marketplace, but as one lyric puts it "The mind may grow wise/ but the heart sulks and whines and remains a child."

I long ago realized that I would never tire of "Missing," but I was surprised by how great some of the lesser hits still sound. "Temperamental" is a highlight, and the only mis-step is the faux-bossa nova of "Corcovado." The re-mixes I like the best are ones that do not try to re-imagine the song so much as sound like alternate takes, which take a song you still essentially like but have grown weary of hearing the same note-for-note recording. For the most part, this is that sort of album; all the songs are recognizable and for the most part began as electronica in the first place (with the exception of "Rollercoaster", which is also an exception to my rule, in being a "reimagined" song that has changed my mind about the original.)

So the creator of aforesaid bareback videos, Paul Morris, has several pungent essays on his website outlining his philosophy of sex. Here are some excerpts:

"I had coffee a few days ago with a young man who calmly and cheerfully told me about his Wednesday night: he had snorted a bump of crystal, gone to a sex-bar South of Market, and been fucked by so many men that, as he put it, "I lost count at 20 of the hot loads that I took up my ass." He fucked there until the bar closed, at which point he walked to a nearby sex club, Mack, with cum dripping down his pants legs. At the sex club he was fucked by a half-dozen other men. I asked him why he was doing this. He responded, "My diagnosis was a wake-up call. My life is limited. I want to be happy." ...

... in the context of the larger culture — and certainly in the context of the medical / epidemiological culture — this is irresponsible behavior, a fact argued with intelligent futility by Gabriel Rotello.

In the context of a sexually-based American male subculture, however, "unsafe sex" is not only insane, it is also essential. For a subculture to be sustained, there must be those who engage in central and defining activities with little regard for anything else, including life itself. In a sense, not only the nature but also the coherence of the subculture is determined and maintained by passionate devotees who serve a contextually heroic purpose in their relationship with danger, death and communion."

Read more ...

The Mix Festival started things off with a bang last night at Gallery Bar on 27th Street. Aside from seeing lots of friends, it was great to see all the Really Fucking Good short films we programmed for opening night in front of a live audience. (The program will repeat later in the festival)

Gallery Bar was a cool space, although the fact that our sponsor for the night was a bareback porn video company was either edgy or just outre.

There is tons of cool stuff between now and next Tuesday when the Festival ends. Go to the Mix website and click on 'Schedule,' or, even better 'Parties.'

Now Playing: Adapt or Die: Ten Years of Everything but the Girl Remixes

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Posted by: afrofuturist.

NYT Sunday Magazine featured a very interesting profile of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali-born, Kenya-raised, Dutch politician, whose views on Islam and feminism have stirred up controversy, to say the least.

The profile, written by Christopher Caldwell, is sympathetic and revelatory. Ali reminds me of another Islamic feminist, Irshad Manji, whose book has just been released in paperback in the U.S. There seems to be just the possibility that somewhere in the "clash of civilizations" debate Islamic feminism might get a word in edgewise. Ali seems far more of a breakthrough for African immigrant politicians in the West than the ballyhooed but timid Barack Obama.