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Tomorrow I’ll be DJing at a benefit show along with DJ Small Change for an art project which two of my long time friends, including former collaborator Zack Shadetek have been working on. The show is a benefit to raise money for Swimming Cities trip down the Ganges river in India.
From the press release:
Taking a new waterway each year our projects create a vivid community of artists floating into towns to present an interactive environment which encompasses art, sculpture, music and performance. The uncommon talents of our members interact in an organic design process in a unique form of living art. Our previous projects include THE SWIMMING CITIES OF SWITCHBACK SEA on the Hudson River for Deitch Projects and THE SWIMMING CITIES OF SERENISSIMA across the Adriatic Sea for the Venice Biennale.
Basically they build these crazy ass art-boats and float them down various rivers while living on them and doing performances and freaking people out. There are a bunch of good artists, many who are also friends who will be having a silent auction of donated works to raise funding for the project. And there’s an open bar.
FRIDAY MARCH 05
56 Walker St, Tribeca
7pm-1am, $10 Door, Open Bar
DJs Small Change and Shadetek
BD1982 is at the top of my criminally slept on list. Representing the Seclusiasis camp from Tokyo, where he moved from NYC a few years ago, dudes managed to get in with Goth-Trad and the infamous Back to Chill crew while simultaneously cooking up some of my absolute favorite tracks. He’s got a new 12″ that is dripping Xenon.
A. side is Dutty family 77Klash on the gunman tip over the crushing Water Faucet Riddim. The flip is the skittering Space Boots with remixes from some of the the biggest up and comers on the scene the U.K’s Slugabed and Montreal’s Hovatron. It’s hard to describe what happened in Vancouver last month when I dropped the Slugabed mix (Dev79 call it “hyper color style”) since the combination of howling low end fiends and gorgeous writhing Canadians basically led to sensory overload and total black out. If this is the sort of thing your interested in….cop the rest of the tracks @ BeatportBleepJuno DownloadiTunes
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Tracklist:
Colleen- The Happy Sea
8 Ball and MJG- Relax and Take Notes
Sukh Knight – Diesel Not Petrol
Raffertie – AntiSocial (B. Rich Remix)
Lexie Lee- Warlord’s Daughter (Paceface and Sticky Rmx)
Joker- Purple City
Trina Ft. Lil Wayne- Dont Trip (Lunice Lazer Rmx)
Fused Forces- Cock Back and Blast
Fused Forces- Footsteps
LionDub and Shadetek Ft. Jahdan- General (Marcus Visionary Rmx)
Timbaland- Pony Inst.
Cardopusher- Lacra
Salem – Trapdoor
This is a dubsteppy thing- but keeps things fresh and colorful with plenty of pressure.
I’m back on the blogging horse/elephant- new mixes and an exclusive interview with Lisbon’s Octa Push come soon!
This episode of “Gangland” is a crazy documentary about gangs in the Third Ward of New Orleans which get’s even crazier when Katrina hits. It’s definitely pretty sensational but also a compelling and candid portrait of a place and a group of people on the edges of society in a dark moment. It’s 45 minutes, stream it when you’ve got some time.
For those of us who spent a lot of time in the internets Google (the octopus inside) is an interesting subject. Many of us suspect there are a lot of secrets to be found out.
Terius Nash aka The Dream in the studio. This guy is a BEAST. His past two albums are crazy, pretty much all I’ve been listening to for a while. The fact that he’s making shit this fast should just make everyone else quake in fear. He deserves his hype. Shouts to Kingdom via Twitter for the link. I’m on there too. Tweet tweet tweet.
Large Hangars and Fuel Storage/Tonopah Test Range, NV/Distance ~18 miles/10:44 am by Trevor Paglen
Mark Danner is one of the good journalists. His work navigates nearly impenetrable messes of deceit and deception like the 2000 Florida vote recount, the nefarious path to the American war in Afghanistan and Iraq, U.S. Military intervention in Reagen era El Salvador… the list goes on- but I think when you have Susan Sontag call you “one of our best, most ambitious narrative journalists” you’ve pretty much fulfilled your journalistic duty to the world.
One of my biggest fears during the election was that once/if Obama was elected there would be a psychic closure on the Bush years. In a more utilitarian sense, I am afraid that people are so excited about entering a “new era” that they forget that there is a lot of unfinished business from the last 8 years that needs to be sorted out. Danner’s latest piece, “US Torture: Voices From the Black Sites,” which appeared in the new issue of the New York Review of Books on Monday, is doing some of the heavy lifting. It contains detailed accounts of interrogations of “highvalue detainees” at secret “black site” prisons. An excerpt from the piece – about a tenth of it – appeared on the OpEd page of Sunday’s New York Times. It’s a potent reminder that the clean up process has just begun.
Wayne says PDFs are the new MP3s- so here is a PDF of the whole article as it appeared in the New York Review of Books. This is painful to read, and while for some it might be confirming what they thought they already knew- there’s something deeply moving about reading first hand accounts of the abuse against “our enemies.”
I have been enjoying “Da Game Been Good To Me” instrumental for a little while. The song/single is great, but the instrumental by itself is also a superb, sweet country tune.
Those of you who read these pages no that I am not a fan of Justice’s cock rock techno. This article accompanied by photo evidence (above) catching Justice playing “live” with an un-plugged MIDI controller is just too funny to pass up. As someone who has done real live electronic music back in my Team Shadetek days I know how difficult this is to do and do well, so on one level I’m sympathetic, on the other level, you shouldn’t lie to your fans guys. I stopped doing live electronics when my music took a turn towards hiphop, dancehall and grime and I didn’t think that any of the live improvisation I would do would improve the music. Since then my show has been me DJing tracks from a laptop, sometimes with effects. I play lots of un-released new dubs of mine that no one else has and make up my set list as I go along. I figure that’s worth the price of admission. You get to hear my music, mixed and selected by me and get a peek into my present sound, IE the future since it always takes so long to get records or CDs out. I have a new project (more on that soon) that might be appropriate to a live format and so am I actually considering going into loop djing mode (breaking down the tracks into parts and re-constructing live) for that, probably using ableton live, but we’ll see. However, you will NEVER see me on stage with an un-plugged MIDI controller making faces and pretending to do things that I’m not. Thanks to Dan @ Dubspot for the link.
Delicious looking indian vegetarian food. I’m hungry.
I’m a vegetarian. It’s not something I try to stick in people’s faces all the time or have a lot of arguments about. I think of it as my small, daily, repetitive contribution to having a little less violence in the world, consuming less resources and keeping the planet a little greener. I became veggie when, working as a video editor about ten years ago, I had to edit footage of a slaughter house.
If you know video editing you know it means watching things again and again and again. For me the thing that pushed me over the edge was a shot of a guy herding sheep off a truck. One of the sheep resisted and he punched it in the face and kicked it off the high back of the flatbed truck. Usually people think of the slaughter of animals as a dispassionate process. When I saw this guy kicking and punching this sheep it drove home to me the fact that the killing of animals for food is violent, just like the killing of anything.
A friend of mine, a guy that I worked under as an intern at a video studio in high school was vegetarian and what he said about it was that he felt that we, as the human race, have reached a point where eating meat is no longer a survival necessity and has become a luxury. I agree and I think with the more that we learn about the destructiveness of our industrialized life-style to the environment, our lives and the lives of people outside it that it is a luxury that we as a species can no longer afford.
For those who would say: “But we’re omnivores, it’s natural for us to eat meat.” I would say that there is a great deal of “natural” behavior that we don’t practice any more usually because we have developed a higher standard of morality. Murder, slavery and rape all spring to mind. Things which might be considered ‘natural’ behavior in a law-of-the-jungle situation have been shed as our culture matures and becomes more thoughtful. I think that meat eating is one of those things that we should move towards leaving in the violent past of our species.
Collage of various tasty looking veggie foods.
This article from the Audobon magazine got me thinking about all this, specifically in the context of the environment and global climate change, and I recommend it. The main point of it is the terrific energy inefficiency which goes into raising, slaughtering and trucking all that meat.
Barbecue loving vegetarian Mike Tidwell writes:
“Simply put, raising beef, pigs, sheep, chicken, and eggs is very, very energy intensive. More than half of all the grains grown in America actually go to feed animals, not people, says the World Resources Institute. That means a huge fraction of the petroleum-based herbicides, pesticides, and fertilizers applied to grains, plus staggering percentages of all agricultural land and water use, are put in the service of livestock. Stop eating animals and you use dramatically less fossil fuels, as much as 250 gallons less oil per year for vegans, says Cornell University’s David Pimentel, and 160 gallons less for egg-and-cheese-eating vegetarians.”
Something I tell people who start explaining to me about why they eat meat when they learn that I’m vegetarian is that vegetarianism is not for everyone and if you are concerned about these issues simply eating less meat also makes an excellent contribution. I eat milk, eggs and cheese (I could never, ever give up cheese, sorry vegans) but no meat or fish. Thinking about the food you eat from an environmental perspective and making choices like eating lower on the food chain (smaller animals and fish) is both healthier and more sustainable. More than anything my recommendation to everyone is to just think a little bit as you choose what to eat.
Did you notice how cool Barack was in the last debate? Have you notice how much gray hair has popped out of Barack’s head over the course of his campaign? Is Barack able to be himself? Can you really even get angry while in fear of being angry?
In that same/last debate, did you also notice how John McCain was blinking about a hundred thousand times a minute? Did you see the bulge in his neck? He was visibly upset, and you can tell by the way he was interrupting Barack and by his jagged responses. Did you also notice in the second debate when McCain referred to Obama as “that one”? All Barack could do was just smile (and you know that somewhere in his bones, he would like to say that “this is some BS”.)
Anger is a natural emotion, but if you are black, Latino, a person of color, there’s no space in these United States for you to be angry. It has taken me years to understand that as a black person, it is not acceptable to be angry in America. People will be terrified of you, but this is not about me, (I am still angry and trying to realize the difference between proactive anger and reaction anger) this is about Brother Barack.
I pray that Our Beloved Brother Barack has some outlet. I pray that he and Sister Michelle have some private conversations about black stress and internalized racism. Black stress and internalized racism can lead to heart attacks and high blood pressure. I hear that he’s smoking again, that can only accelerate the process.
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J. Edgar Hoover (FBI Director for a very long time) constantly referred to black people, specifically civil rights leaders (including MLK) as communists or socialists. In the last few days, McCain’s criticisms of Obama’s economic/tax policies of “spreading the wealth” as socialism echo those old attacks and accusations of black leaders. That is racist and hypocritical, after McCain voted for the use of government funds to bail out Wall St.
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Here’s what inspired this post… Brand new DB!
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