Friday, December 12th, 2003

Check Eric K. Arnold on Zino and Em.

posted by @ 4:01 pm | 0 Comments

Friday, December 12th, 2003

ON STRIKE!

Thousands of Latinos are expected to strike in California today, refraining from showing up at their workplaces and schools and patronizing businesses, to protest Governator’s attempt to repeal the law granting driver’s licenses to undocumented immigrants. As Schwarzenegger backs down from his campaign pledges–including one to preserve school funding–it’s becoming clear that this was the one promise he meant to kept–an example of Pete Wilson-style race-baiting that is likely to continue. The strike comes on the feast day of the Virgin of Guadalupe, Mexico’s patron saint.

posted by @ 8:00 am | 0 Comments

Thursday, December 11th, 2003

BARNSTORMING

Fine exhibit of post-graf art at Future Primitive Sound.

David(Skwerm) Ellis does massive b+w undulating loops that twist in and out of themselves, kinda like severely warped vinyl. They take on an internal motion and flow. Kenji Hirata also works on a large scale, creating space worms that float into and out of inner space, halfway between Miyazaki and Moebius, and solidity and dissolution.

Doze, wel, Doze is a gotdamn genius. There are lots of sketchbook miniatures here, a few stretched canvases, lots of his signature sentinel enigmas. One of the most interesting pieces was a big Franz Kline-styled canvas centered on a set of black brush strokes…and it makes perfect sense. I always understood Kline as graffiti–a loud, resounding NO. Doze, like all the rest of the best artists of our generation, works like a relational machine and plays mischief with history. Hiphopcentrism.

This exhibit also includes the Edo salon across the street, it’s up until February, and it’s an absolute must-see.

posted by @ 11:59 pm | 0 Comments

Thursday, December 11th, 2003

THE MORNING AFTER THE MORNING AFTER

I was on deadline yesterday, so by now everyone knows that the SF election was the most exciting in years, and that Dem favorite Gavin Newsom won. But both sides are declaring victory. The Dems get a 36 year-old glamour-boy (Clinton II, anyone) with a foxy wife in a key city for the fight against Bush next year, and the progressives get the moral victory of an expanded power base. Newsom most likely will have to deal closely with the left in the years to come. The left needs to remain mobilized because many of their supe seats come up soon, and that may play to their advantage in the next year. Props finally to Kamala Harris, the first African American to become DA. She’s a progressive. Where she’ll stand in the ongoing police scandals remains to be seen.

Exit polls show interesting results:

*70+% of under-35 voters went to Gonzalez.

*Black turnout was low.

*Asian/Pacific Islander voting split between the conservative westside and the progressive inner-city.

I didn’t see any word regarding Latinos, but it’s probably safe to say looking at the district data that Latinos went to Gonzalez.

posted by @ 8:07 am | 0 Comments

Tuesday, December 9th, 2003

NIK COHN’S BIO–EXTENDED VERSION

If anyone still cares, here is a sidebar article to a great New York Times story by Charlie LeDuff called “Saturday Night Fever: The Life”, a story about regulars at the disco in Bay Ridge that used to be called the Space Odyssey 2001, that served as Nik Cohn’s muse. The article is from June 9, 1996. Reading it back now, it’s more sad than anything else. Except that dude is impossibly rich.

“Magazine Writer Says He Made It All Up

The movie “Saturday Night Fever” was based on an article published in New York magazine on June 7, 1976, almost exactly 20 years ago. That article, “Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night,” chronicled the life and times of Vincent, “the very best dancer in Bay Ridge — the Ultimate Face.” Hollywood appropriated the name, Tony Manero, from a real Brooklynite, but the character lives only on film. Vincent, however, was supposedly real-life flesh and blood.

So what happened to Vincent? He would be 38 this year, a full generation later. He would have grown into manhood; he may have married and had children. That is, if Vincent had ever existed. The places and the scenery were real but, the writer of the article now says Vincent was a figment of his imagination.

“He is completely made-up, a total fabrication,” Nik Cohn said by telephone from his Long Island home.

In a follow-up article printed in The Guardian two years ago, Mr. Cohn said he based his piece on a young man he knew in England. “My story was a fraud,” he wrote. “I’d only recently arrived in New York. Far from being steeped in Brooklyn street life, I hardly knew the place. As for Vincent, my story’s hero, he was largely inspired by a Shepherd’s Bush mod whom I’d known in the Sixties, a one-time king of Goldhawk Road.”

Mr. Cohn wrote in The Guardian that he began to feel guilty about the falsity. “Spurred in part by retroactive conscience, I began to put in hard time in Brooklyn, steeping myself in Bay Ridge lore. Gradually, my invention became real to me; my hero came to life. In my imagination, I kept a detailed log of his progress, tracking him as he changed jobs, moved away from home, grew out of disco, left the neighborhood and then returned. I noted his marriage, the birth of his two daughters; watched him pick up a gambling problem; saw him slither toward middle age.”

The pressure to produce the original piece was great, he says. Mr. Cohn was brought over from England, where he was a renown pop-writer, to find a splashy dance story for New York magazine, known for it’s interpretive, in-the-subject’s-head style of the so-called “New Journalism.”

A 1971 New York magazine article by Gail Sheehy rattled the planks of New Journalism when it was discovered that a prostitute named “Redpants” was a composite character. Clay Felker, editor of the magazine at the time, said he removed an explanatory paragraph from the piece because “it got in the way of the flow,” a decision he later said was a mistake.

In the “Saturday Night” piece, which appeared five years later, drawings were used rather than photos, and the story carried the disclaimer: “Everything described in this article is factual and was either witnessed by me or told to me directly by the people involved. Only the names of the main characters have been changed.”

Mr. Felker last week declined to comment on Mr. Cohn’s statements.

The artist James McMullan, who painted the drawings from photographs, said he was never allowed to meet Vincent. “Nik would shuttle people into another room to interview them,” Mr. McMullan said. “People mistakenly believed that the picture of the handsome kid was Vinnie. It was not.”

When the movie was released in 1977, a half-dozen people claimed that the Tony Manero character was based on their lives, Mr. Cohn said. Asked if the millions of dollars that someone might have been entitled to may have influenced his claim that his character was fictitious, Mr. Cohn said: “Absolutely not. Nobody got a dime.”

Mr. Cohn continued to write for New York magazine. In 1983, he was indicted on drug trafficing and conspiracy counts for the importation of $4 million worth of Indian heroin. He later pleaded guilty to a lesser charge in exchange for his testimony. He was fined $5,000 and given five years probation.”

posted by @ 1:41 pm | 0 Comments

Tuesday, December 9th, 2003

Today’s the big day in San Francisco–we’ll find out if the youth wave breaks left or right and pushes Matt Gonzalez or Gavin Newsom into office. For analysis, check John Nichols on why Clinton supports Newsom and why Gonzalez is important to the Dems’ future.

Most importantly, get out and vote yall…

posted by @ 7:47 am | 0 Comments

Monday, December 8th, 2003

Writing A Book, Part 1

WRITING A BOOK, PART 1

OK, now I’m realizing I’ve been holding out on yall w/regards to the book-writing thing. So let me go there, and do this shit. It’ll be kinda be like therapy for me and maybe it’ll help a lot of yall to get your own asses in gear.

Diversion: I’ll admit straight up that I have pretty strong opinions about this (e.g. this Da Capo-foot-in-my-mouth-but-still-happily-bird-flipping-cuz-what’s-more-hip-hop-than-talking-shit episode). The idea of representing is still like religion to me. Most of what’s getting out there on hip-hop in book form (and in canonized form) is still crap and written by non-hip-hop-gen heads. (That’s changing, but this is another post for another time.)

My thing is that the faster we can all get our shit out there, the happier I am in general. Then we get to a different set of problems, but at this point, we won’t be there until early 2005.

Back to the plotline.

First the basics on the book:

It’s called Can’t Stop Won’t Stop (duh) A History of the Hip-Hop Generation. “A” being the most active word in the title.

It traces the emergence of the hip-hop generation from roughly 1968 (and before that, in the Bronx) to 2000-2001. The book wasn’t meant to be a strictly music book. I wanted to write about graf and b-boying and DJing and activism and geography and the War on Youth and Public Enemy and Jesse Jackson and the Nation and etc. etc.

Main thing is I figured I couldn’t really write about C. Delores Tucker without writing about gang peace treaties, and vice versa, couldn’t talk about Herc without talking about Marley and couldn’t talk about Marley without talking about cultural capitalism and globalization and couldn’t talk about globalization without talking about localism.

That’s kinda the way my head is wired. Undisciplined, as the academics might say. And maybe the whole thing is a little loose. Hopefully Monique, my editor, will let me know soon.

Anyway, so the book opens from hip-hop and moves through culture and politics and all kinds of stuff as a way of getting a handle on who we be. But instead of doing it academic-style (read: unreadable), I wanted to make it accessible. I settled on writing it in a twisted narrative nonfiction format.

I took a lot of inspiration from Brian Cross, whose whole idea for It’s Not About A Salary was basically: Fuck all these folks who want to come in and speak for hip-hop headz, they can do it themselves. I think that’s the same motivation behind Yes Yes Y’all.

But at the same time, with oral histories you often lose the context. You get wrapped up in the details of the stories and sometimes gloss over the Big Themes and glide past the Big Questions.

I love Bakari’s book–and here’s why–but I’m more a history nerd these days so I wanted to go left in a different way. Plus my homies wouldn’t read it if it were a series of Jeff rants. And bottom line, hip-hop history is gotdamn interesting!

There are so many twists and turns and ironies and tragedies and victories and drama that I often wonder why there aren’t more hip-hop history nerds. If you read the books that are out there on hip-hop, they all reference the same two books for hip-hop history–Toop and Hager. Those books have deservedly become the Old Testament of hip-hop history, but for anyone who’s actually done a little bit of work–ask Fabel or Jay Smooth or Cheryl Aldave or Reggie Dennis, the list goes on–there’s a helluva lot of ground that hasn’t been covered by those two books. Again another rant for another time.

So in the end, I kinda took a Lorax approach. Collect the stories and put together a roughly chronological narrative that has an arc and a purpose. And down with the Once-lers!

OK so what was I trying to do in this post? Oh yeah, I was gonna talk about how this all began.

So it was the end of 1997, we had this big SoleSides pow-wow up in Lake Tahoe. Lateef’s mom had a cabin that we could rent and we were s’posed to be talking about how to blow the shit up more in 98. Truth was, we were all dead broke and exhausted, for a lot of ironic and tragic reasons I don’t need to get into, and maybe no one more than I.

It was kind of symbolic. Everyone was already there the day I drove up to Tahoe in my tiny little Honda Civic, right into the worst blizzard of the season. I fucked up in trying to put the chains on myself and tore up the outside of the car and got soaked in the snow. It’s bumper to bumper at the summit and I’ve been driving 8 hours, I’m freezing and tired and I rear-end a pickup. By the time I got to the cabin, the front hood was about three feet high and rising (Honda bumpers are literally made of fucking styrofoam), the anti-freeze had completely leaked out, and I was froze to the bone.

That night, after a long hot shower and dinner, we sat down for a meeting. They said that they had come up earlier, talked it out, and decided to shut down the label. I was shocked. But it made perfect sense. In fact, ending SoleSides liberated me. I mean, I sucked as a label manager. My only experience to qualify me as a indie label manager was that I had led a bunch of protests at Berkeley during the 80s, knew community organizing theory, and been a college radio DJ for about 7 years. That was all good until the late 90s, when hip-hop got to be big biz. I had definitely reached the outer limits of my abilities. If I had any talent, it was in writing and shit. And I hadn’t begun to explore the outer limits of my abilities there no way.

So a couple days later, I got a tow truck to take my car back to the Bay and sat in the cab and on the long ride back I thought about the whole SoleSides experience and everything. The only logical conclusion was go for what I knew, to ease myself back into writing, and to imagine something bigger than I’d ever done. The book came out of that.

The thing that I realized in writing the book–especially the last 5 months of putting together the first draft–is that every morning I was standing at the outer limits of my abilities. It was like I was outside the comfort zone as soon as I fired up the computer. That was exactly where I wanted to be, but it was also the scariest thing in the world.

Now I realize that lots of people will think the book sucks, probably including some whose opinion really matters to me, but I’m pretty content knowing that there wasn’t much more I could do at this point in my life. So if I’m destined to be the Matt Doherty of hip-hop books, it’s all good.

Right now Monique is going through 700 freaking pages. I don’t envy her. But I await her machete cuts with no worries at all. It is what it is. My car is intact. I can pay for diapers and mortgage. Praise Herc and Bam and hip-hop.

OK, back to the deadlines. More down the line when I feel like it…

posted by @ 8:29 am | 0 Comments

Saturday, December 6th, 2003

Damn. That panel was FI-YAH! Thanks to everyone who came out, all the folks who took the class, and to all the panelists. Most of all thanks to Media Alliance and Kristina Rizga for putting this all together. The bad news is that I don’t have any time to transcribe the hotness (if anyone wants to, I’m down to talk). The good news is that it came off so nice we’re talking about doing a longer class in the late spring.

posted by @ 9:15 pm | 0 Comments

Friday, December 5th, 2003

Sam Chennault and Oliver Wang are having a really interesting glass-half-full/half-empty discussion about the state of music journalism inspired this Miami Herald article by Evelyn McDonnell of Rock She Wrote fameand the Da Capo thing. Also check Jay Smooth’s blog for more commentary on the topic. Come on out to the panel on Saturday. It’s gonna be pretty timely.

posted by @ 1:13 pm | 0 Comments

Friday, December 5th, 2003

IF YOU’RE NOT A TERRORIST WE’LL STILL SCREW YOU

Muslim chaplain and Army Captain James Yee is free and out of Guantanamo, but the he Feds are charging him with adultery and possession of pornography–just to mess with his family and prevent him from becoming a cause celebre.

From the article (buried far from the front page): “Captain Yee’s supporters say the government has charged him with adultery and keeping pornography — a fairly unusual move by the military justice system — to save face and trump up what has always been a weak case.

“He was defamed and smeared and accused of being a spy,” said Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Washington advocacy group whose Seattle chapter was in close contact with Captain Yee’s relatives during his detainment. “Then all of sudden, they’re not even sorry. They’re saying, `You can go now, and for good measure we’ll throw in a few charges to further damage your reputation.’ It’s a very suspicious scenario that developed.”

Military officials would not comment on the accusations by Captain Yee’s supporters, saying the proceeding starting at Fort Benning on Monday, to determine whether Captain Yee should face a court martial or whether the charges should be dropped, would answer any questions. ”

My money is that the charges get dropped. Quietly. With no comment.

posted by @ 11:34 am | 0 Comments



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