Sunday, December 28th, 2003

Wow, Complaining Works

WOW, COMPLAINING WORKS

The virtues of Internet time. A month ago I was a ranter, now I’m officially in da club. I’ve won the quickest sell-out sweepstakes. What am I blathering about?

Here’s the email address to send your nominations for Da Capo’s best music writing of 2004: bestmusicwriting04@yahoo.com

You can send as links, Word or Acrobat Reader documents. Step up and rep dunnie. We’ll see what we get 12 months from now.

BTW here’s Jason Gross’s Favourite Scribings for 2003. Again, leans a little rockist and mainstream (no Murder Dog or Wax Poe nominees), but you don’t have to.

My final, done-on-ample-sleep, carefully considered, vetted, and lovingly edited but no less artery-busting rant will be out in the SF Bay Guardian soon come. Thank you SFJ for talking sense into a mad cow.

The NY Times critics best of 2003 lists hit today, and there’s also an entertaining convo on the music that sucked. Altho LB wasn’t listed–a big stunna, but I guess that’s just me and my navel prolly–the lists were worldly (as they usually are) and K even repped the diggers with a shout tothe Hollertronix mix cd.

BTW always feel free to holla if you’re an alienated (or even comfortably adjusted) working music journalist writing about non-rock, non-hip-hop, non-electronic genres, you know, bhangra, salsa, merengue, African, Latin, Arab, Cantopop, etc. Let’s make the link…

Undying Underdog Love to Cal and Hawai’i ballers for making me money this past week. (Timmy) Chang Power in 2004!

posted by @ 1:02 pm | 0 Comments

Monday, December 15th, 2003

CAN WE SEND STEVE SCHOTT TO BALTIMORE INSTEAD?

There is no joy in Miggy-ville tonight. We don’t need Foulke and Lilly. We’ll miss T Long and Ramon. Good riddance to Jason and Johnny. But you’ll never be not be an A, Miggy. Awwwww fuck.

posted by @ 8:14 pm | 0 Comments

Monday, December 15th, 2003

A LITTLE FRESH AIR, A LITTLE INTERNATIONAL TRIBUNAL

Like Saddam, I spent most of my year in a hole in the ground. But you still get music down there. Here’s a first stab at fave tracks of the year. Not ranked, because I’m egalitarian.

Antibalas-“Che Che Cole”

Beenie Man-“Row Like A Boat”

Beyonce-“Crazy In Love”

Beyonce and Mary J. Blige vs. 50 Cent-“In Da Club” Mp3 remix

DJ Frane-“In The Garden”

Elephant Man-“Pon Di River Pon Di Bank”

Elephant Man-“The Genie Dance”

Jay Z-“Dirt Off Your Shoulder”

Kelis-“Milkshake”

Alicia Keys-“You Don’t Know My Name”

Alicia Keys with Rakim and Nas-“Streets of New York”

Lil Jon-“Get Low (Merengue Mix)”

Lil Kim-“The Jump Off”

Lifesavas-“What If It’s True”

Ludacris-“Stand Up”

Lyrics Born-“Calling Out”

Lyrics Born-“Do That There”

Missy-“Pass That Dutch”

Outkast-“Prototype”

Vybz Kartel-“Sweet To The Belly”

Worst song of the year I still have to listen to everyday: Lumidee-“Uh Oh”. I object to this because the loop of Diwali cares nothing for dynamics, Lumidee is mad pitchy (can’t afford a vocal synthesizer?), and she says Puerto Ricans invented the riddim. In Brooklyn, those are fighting words. Just like America it sucks but I love it.

posted by @ 3:00 pm | 0 Comments

Saturday, December 13th, 2003

THE MODIFIER IS BOGLE! IT’S BOGLE, I SAY!

Shameless self-aggrandizement part 47. Here’s the first meaty beaty big and bouncy review I’ve done in months. It’s on Missy in the Village Voice. More lunacy-pure lunacy-a soon come. And I guess early 90s JA dances named after Caribbean revolutionaries aren’t listed in the dictionary. People, that has to change.

posted by @ 11:05 pm | 0 Comments

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



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