Polka Madre y La Comezon, Andrew from Portland's Polka/Punk band from Mexico city are coming to tour the east coast. They'll be on the cape around the end of this month- I'm setting up shows for them in Wellfleet and Provincetown. Check their myspace page for info, and I will post the finalized dates here when I get them sorted. Ahuevos!

Jason Forrest a.k.a. Donna Summer a.k.a. Cock Rock Disco records is offering a free downloadable sampler of his stable of his way-left-field electronic artists. It includes the cut-and-paste noise-hop of D.C.'s Food for Animals, and a whole slew of d.i.y. internet wunderkind producers like Dev/Null, Vorpal and Terminal 11. A couple of my favorites are the sexy italo-disco-funk of "Mardi Gras" by Audiogarde and the song by Pisstank, which has such a horrible title I wont reprint it. The song itself is an unabashadly cheezy tribute to mid-nineties Drum and Bass and Happy Hardcore. I think they had to give it the atrocious name just to show that they are postmodern, because the song itself could pass for a blend of 1992 DJ Venom jungle with 1998 DJ Venom happy hardcore. It's the kind of thing jaded music nerds can enjoy just as much as glue-sniffing Vietnamese gayboys playing online games at 3 am in an internet cafe in Saigon. You're equally garanteed to like something on this sampler and not like everything- sort of like the statements that come out of Jason Forrest's mouth.

Oh, and the Venetian Snares track is called "I've really lost it because this shit is starting to sound like a half-assed Fatboy Slim ripoff with a 12-year-old's sense of humor" How can you go wrong?

A curiosity I've had while watching the World Cup these past weeks (that is to say obsessively, in bars, with a midafternoon beer in hand, missing work) is "what language is spoken on the pitch"? What language do the referees speak, and what language are the players speaking when they contest bad calls beside the usual illustrative hand gestures?
Maybe it's a nationalistic steak that made me assume that English must be the equalizing tongue out there, or maybe the unlikelihood of finding a officiator fluent in both, say, Swahili and Swedish for a particular match. Here are a few articles that address the question but don't exactly put it to bed.

Does the World Cup Have a Lingua Franca? from Slate Magazine

What is the Language of Dissent from WorldCupBlog

The basic idea of both is that the referees are culled from all over the world but must pass a test of written and spoken English. Yet neither of these articles adress all questions- like, how do the players know what language the ref will speak? Do they do research on them beforehand so they can talk shit properly?

And (he turns again to his imaginary reading audience), if you're interested, I have picked a club to support for the finals after watching a dozen games as a curious but impartial observer. It's (Sorry, Giorgio) France.
I find something romantic and star-shot about their offensive play. Maybe it's just those chic white and nautical blue uniforms that reflect that sunkissed sailor/precocious spaceboy/petit prince aesthetic that the French hold so dearly that some consider it gay (hey, I didn't even mention Tintin). Maybe it's because they have the most multiracial team of any I've seen out of Europe, which many frogs resent despite their success. Maybe it's because I imagine the celebration parties there as wine-soaked affairs replete with giant sweating wheels of Brie, seared foie gras, and a larger swell of applause for the presentation of a perfectly executed creme brulee than that of the winning goal.
I don't know what France's official World Cup song is (they all have them, they're all garbage expect for the "Soca Warrior" jam from Trinidad and Tobago), but here's my choice for a rallying anthem, if only to take some wind out of their billowing trois coleurs and put their asses back on solid ground where the match will be won. The song is "FranSSe" by Monsieur R, a French/Congolese rapper who has nothing but contempt for his adopted home. R was recently brought before the French Parliament on charges for inciting riots after the melees of last year. This song was blamed for stoking the flames of immigrant rage, plus just generally offending everyone. In the tradition of the classic "le Monde de Demain " by MTM, the song drowns out it's own legitimate political discourse with an incendiary, obnoxious chorus, this one being something like "France is a whore, you've got to use her up for all she's worth. Treat her like a slut." Enjoy the video featuring French pornstars frigging themselves on the hood of a jeep whilst draped up in the French flag.


Mr R - Fransse on Vimeo

If France could gets it's head around patriotism like that, along with the fact that it is now a multicultural salad bowl, a slum and a shrine, a champion and a whore, then I would be sippin on the Dom with them.

p.s. Zidanne is an animal and their defense is logical and everywhere. Murder.

In solidarity with the models of Milan...

my records are on strike

and so is WHITE ANIMAL
until they start paying me.

I'm not even finished reading this thing and I'm ready to give it a solid reccomendation.
Remember the summer after Godspeed You Black Emperor's Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennae to Heaven came out and sometimes you would be playing at a gathering or even by yourself and you had to turn it off because it was just too much? Not depressing nessecarily, just too bittersweet, too heavy, intense.. too much.
A few times in reading Another Bullshit Night in Suck City by Nick Flynn I've had to put it down for the same reason. It wasn't that it was bumming me out, it was just too rich with emotion and meaning, I needed time to digest. And I didn't want it to be over too quick.

Flynn has an amazingly unsentimental way of recounting the traumatic events of his life. Unsentimental, but also free of tough-guy posturing. Another Bullshit Night.. is like a great personal zine, but written by a poet with the benefit of a professional editor. He somehow turns the threads of American dysfunction he finds in his own life- alchoholism, heredity, failure, and self destruction, into full-bodied literary themes.
But this isn't just some therapy-induced literary colon cleansing. It's also a great read and very engaging story. I would compare it to Mykal Gilmore's writing about his experience living in the shadow of his brother, Gary Gilmore (see the book Shot In The Heart), in terms of using intellectual disconnection to relate the tale of a very messy family story.
I'm not just saying this out of my own home-team preferences. In the book Flynn talks about living in Provincetown harbor on a boat called EVOL, talks about living in an abandoned strip club in Boston's combat zone, about seeing the Pixies and minutemen at the Middle East, about speding a drunken night searching for a mysterious man named Crowbar... a man who was something like an uncle to me and my brother growing up.
These are all locational references I can relate to as well as the ongoing tradicomedy of living with an eccentric alchoholic father and the genetic implications found therin. Yes, reading Flynn's book is like having a drunken conversation at a Truro beach jag with a particularly compelling wash-a-shore, but it's the diamond prose that makes the book a lasting experience.

Yeah, I know that mash-ups are so 2002, but DJ BC is still bringing wit and intelligence to the idea. His Summertime Mash-Ups section is filled with hot, clever new tracks which reflect skill, a great ear and a sense of humour. Who knew he was a masshole? I reported last year that DJ BC was from Prague. I'm not sure where I got that idea, but on his new website it's clear that BC is in Boston, with a residency at The Independent in Somerville fridays called Mash Ave. The Summer Mash ups link will take you straight to such Mp3s as Pete Rock and CL Smooth vrs. Donovan, Buju banton Vrs. Stevie Wonder, and Snoop vrs. The Flaming Lips (and Will Ferrel as Goulet!). Use them to nice up the dance this summer.

So, if you are as all about NPR in your car as I am, you may have heard this report on the BBC world service about the Bird Flu dance that is spreading in the clubs of Abidjan, Cote D'Ivoir. On the radio you could hear snippets of the bird-flu song which was created by an artist called DJ Lewis, and it sounded hectic! So I wanted to find a link to it for this site.
Here's the problem- Although tons of sites are linking to BBC story and commenting on the phenomenon, I couldn't find one that had a link to the actual song, or better yet a video for it. This seemed strange to me and then more offensive as I went over it. All these people want to have a good cubicle chuckle about the crazy Africans, but no one wanted to hear the actual song? Like it was assumed that the song would be garbage.

This isn't the first time I've seen Ivoirian music dissed in print- in the awesome book Nine Hills to Nambonkaha, author Sarah Erdman has nothing but respect for the culture of Cote D'Ivoir, her home for two years... except the music. She describes the dance music from Abidjan as noisy repetitive casio beats and says at one point she was "desperate to get away from the screaming atari whine of the music". Casio beats? Atari whine? Sounds awesome!

I was also weirded out to see that very high up on the list of Google hits for "Bird Flu Dance" was a white power message board where someone had put up a link to story. This seemed kind of strange and ominous. If I wrote "Bird Flu Dance" on the Hollertronix message board, it wouldn't even rank. But this board, run in the same way, had big pull in the rankings. What's up with that?

Anyway, I tried to find some media relating to the Bird Flu dance, and this is what I came up with- a video of a kid showing off a completely different version of the bird flu dance! This one is based on a Jamaican dancehall song that predates the African version by several months. So, did DJ Lewis bite the bird, or was it just something in the air?

My man Sharkey from Clockcleaner gave me a copy of the album "Electric Lucifer" by Bruce Haack over a year ago but I just finally got around to listening to it last week. You have no idea how facemelting this shit is.
Released in 1970, "Electric Lucifer" was composed by Bruce Haack and performed on electronic synthesizers that he built himself out of cheap parts he bought on Canal Street. Haack is mainly known as a composer of bizarre childrens music, especially since the release of the Dimension Mix tribute album where artists such as Beck and Stereolab cover Haack songs to raise money for autism research.
While some might argue that all of Haack's music would be unsuitable for children, "Electric Lucifer" is squarely intended for adults. In fact I don't think that hardly anyone is old enough to listen to it. My girlfriend Genevieve is so terrified by the record that she won't let me play it when she's in the house.
Thats because this is extremely weird electronic psych filled with unsetlling noises and tones and all filled with acidhead messages about God, the Devil, war, technology and unicorns. And dragons. Haack studied psychology, which shows out well on tracks like "Program Me", but what can explain the rest of his lyrics, which read like the back of a bottle of Doctor Bronner's soap?

"Lucifer -- I read that after the war you and your angels were sent out of heaven to Earth. Most of us like it here but we don't believe in war. Our newborn are beginning to understand mistakes of the old ones. Maybe the Angel People will all unite. The key is Powerlove"

Basically it sounds like if Kraftwerk composed the music for an evil robot circus and got Phillip K Dick, a late-era Phillip K Dick, when he was really off his shit, to be the singing ringleader after dosing him with speedy acid and locking him in a closet with only a pen light and a bible for 4 hours.
Haack was definitely on to something, though. There's a kind of mind-blown sense of duality here that rings quite true for me. And right around the same time L Ron Hubbard was building an entire religion based on ramblings even more far-out than Haack's. Haack was also quoted many times in the 60s and 70s that in the future most music would be made by computers, and that's when he would find his fame, when music would be "shared electronically" for free, obviating the need for record companies. What you know about that?
Theres a good Bio of Haack here, but I couldn't track down any Mp3s for you. Best to get a copy of the whole album to listen in sequence to hear the "story" unfold.

WHITE ANIMAL... droppin' jewels since february 2005.
Check the archives.

Trap Door is a new "international mystery pysch mix" on Dis-joint records. I'm not sure what the legalities or moral issues are with reprinting all this shit without credit, but hey, hot fire is hot fire. And I do deem it to be so after listening to the sound samples here.
I myself have a potential "South American Mystery pysch mix" to be made once I get all this wax I've bought down here on the plane. Which will be in exactly 48 hours. Contact White Animal to pre-order your copy now.

WHITE ANIMAL BOOK REPORT

In my dwindling last days of leisure in Bolivia I polished off two books while sitting by lake Titikaka that I figured were worth mentioning. Both of these books came from a gringo book swap in Copacabana, and both of them came with summary blurbs that would normally frighten me off. They were, respectively, something like:
"A young married couple struggles with the soul-sapping nature of the suburbs."
and
"A young Montreal jew discovers his vocation as a poet."
The previous, from Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates, I decided to give a chance because of the adulation all over the back cover by people like Kurt Vonnegut and Tennesee Williams. The latter book, The Favorite Game, I was curious enough to pick up strictly based on the name of it's author, Leonard Cohen.

REVOLUTIONARY ROAD by Richard Yates

"In our early youth we sit before the life that lies ahead of us like children sitting before the curtain in a theatre, in happy and tense anticipation of whatever is going to appear. Luckily we do not know what will really appear." Schopenhaur, from Of The Suffering of the World

Revolutionary Road opens with the rise of those very curtains, and the show is not pretty. Literally it is the premiere of a second-rate community theatre play somewhere in the woodsy suburbs of Connecticut that marks the beginning of what turns out to be the history of one very bad year in the life of the All-American family. April Wheeler is the star of the show, and her husband Frank is sitting in the audience, biting his knuckles for her. She appears in the first act as a shimmering stage beauty, but as the show wears on and starts to fall apart around her, Frank is horrified to watch her "dissolve and change into the graceless, suffering creature whose existence he tried every day of his life to deny". Things start to get bad after that.
Richard Yates´ parable of the destructive powers of suburbia seems so iconic that it's hard to believe that it was "lost" for so many years. Recently it has had a revival thanks to famous supporters like Vonnegut, as well as it's forewords's author Richard Ford, but for decades after it was first published in 1961 it was virtually forgotten and overlooked by all but a loyal fan base, mostly composed of other writers. In his forward Richard Ford describes invoking it's name as a kind of "secret handshake" amongst initiates.
The general consensus you get from quotes about and reviews of book now is "at least as good as The Great Gatsby", which is certainly the review Yates was shooting for when he wrote. Much is comparable in the two books, from the tone, the general leanness and lack of excess in the prose, the framing, and the use of what amounts to a small social anecdote to convey something sweeping and universally wrong with the American way of life.
The tone of Revolutionary Road is somewhat acidic and overwhelmingly negative, as if every aspect of modern life was corrupted and beyond repair, and yet the scary part is that nothing Yates describes seems artificial or forced. In fact, the whole story seems natural and, to an alarming extant, accurate.
The genius of the book is not that it is an indictment just of suburbia or mediocrity, but also of the innately American assumptions the people in it have about their intrinsic worth and potential. They have grown up believing, as most Americans do, that they could achieve greatness, that they were better than most. Confronting their essential mediocrity is what sends them spinning off into destruction. Revolutionary Road is not about how the suburbs can destroy those who are unaware, it's about people who know better and can still cannot escape.
It is in this way that I say the book is iconic. The story and the way it is spun seems to have informed, consciously or not, much of the pop cultural discourse about surburbia since it was published in 1961. You cannot watch a movie like American Beauty after reading Revolutionary Road and see it as anything but an homage to the book, and a dumbed-down or at least sugar-coated version at that. Road does not make heros or martyrs of it's rebels- April and Frank Wheeler think of themselves as rebels (they met in Greenwich village and had a love affair in Frank's grotty apartment when they were young and Frank fancied himself a "Jean-Paul-Satre-type"; April dreams of moving to Paris), but Yates portrays it as a false, self-important rebellion. And because Road was written before the hippie movement had taken hold, there are no counterculture cartoon characters around to tell everyone how to free their minds, unlike in American Beauty.
Well, actually, there is a character like that in ...Road, but in keeping with it's 1950's mythology framework, he is not a hippie guru but more of a "holy fool"- a paranoid psychotic who seems to be the only one in the book capable of speaking the truth. This fits in nicely with the intellectual, Freudian view of postwar America: that everything was so repressed that "blowing your top" was the only sane thing to do. This theme runs throughout Salinger- that craziness was the new word for sanity in 1950s America. In ...Road, the clinically insane character is the one that the Wheelers can identity with the most, but it the end he is the only one who can see through their hypocrisy. Neatly (as most everything is handled by Yates here), he is locked up for good after that by his repressed Mother, martyred for the truth that no one wanted to hear. Later, this kind of mythos of the iconoclast became a bit stale, but here in an early incarnation it is effective.
Ford suggests in the forward that you seek out the comedy in ..Road, and I tried. The humor I did find I find was black as can be. It's the kind of bleak, self depreciating humor of the suburbs later echoed in things like The Graduate, White Noise and The Ice Storm. It's the kind of stuff that makes me really excited to get back to the states. Genevieve, you want to move to Connecticut?

THE FAVORITE GAME by Leonard Cohen
Have you every heard the song "Brother with an Ego" by Cody Chestnut? It's lyrics are as follows-
"Sexy Bitches that I Fuck with my Big Black Penis/
Think that I'm a Motherfucking Musical Genius"
I don't think that Cody knew he was paraphrasing Leonard Cohen's main thesis from The Favorite Game when he wrote that song. Of course, Leonards phrase was slightly different, something like "Sexy shiksehs I shtup with my big Semitic schmuck/ Think that I'm a brilliant poetic little fuck". The Favorite Game is a laundry list of Cohen's early conquests, and a history of all the poems they inspired. The publishers and the author of the book's afterword would have you believe that this is no autobiography, but the similarities in the story and the age of the author make it difficult for me to think it is anything but.
The Favorite Game, written in 1963 before Cohen had achieved international fame, is the story of Lawrence Breaveman, a diminutive son of an affluent Montreal Jewish family. Lawrence is a fledgling poet with musical talent and an obsession with sex and spirituality. I don't think I need to recount Leonard Cohen's background.
As a novel, The Favorite Game lacks a lot in narrative arc and dramatic development, but as it is written by Leonard Cohen, there is a lot of beauty in the prose. Often, though, I found myself wishing the prose would get over it's own beauty, like I wished Laurence Breavman would get over himself.
It's also a little hard to have your narrator describe himself doing things like needlessly dissecting a frog, watching a man kill at cat and not stopping it, and hypnotizing and virtually raping a family friend and try to portray them as poetic or important. I could accept these things, along with his consistently poor treatment of women, if he ever just chalked it up to immaturity and ego. But throughout his tone is self-aggrandizing and somewhat pompous.
I liked the book better in it's third part when Cohen turns his gaze on Shell, who seems to be his favorite of the seven or so women that The Favorite Game is about. When Cohen brings his keen insight to someone other than Breavman, the result is a touching and complete portrayal of a human being.
This brings us to the main problem of the book- I can accept the fact that the words "jew" or "jewish" and "Montreal" are found on every page, but no mention of those wonderful bagels that put Montreal Jews on the map!
Leonard Cohen once famously said "The situation between men and women is irreparable". After reading The Favorite Game, you might be prompted so say, as I did, "No, Lenny, the situation between YOU and women is irreparable." I said it to a Bolivian man who just happened to be walking by, which was confusing for both of us.

SHINDIG PUNK ROCK RADIO was a radio show that I listened to religiously during my freshman year in high school in Rhode Island. The was broadcast on WRIU from the University of Rhode Island by men definitely too old to still be students there. I started listening around 1994, midway though SHINDIG's ten year run. It was hosted by Liam Lunchtray and Kevin Shindig, along with a rotating cast of goofballs such as Richard "Chicago" Borges, "Father" Mike, members of the FIDs and many others.
For me at 12 years old, discovering their world of punk rock, cheesy humor and nerdy obsessions with things like The Misfits, Kiss, Star Wars and Coca-Cola gave me hope for life after 15.
I started calling in and making requests and comments every week with my friends from junior high and soon I was friends with guys from SHINDIG. This led to hanging out with them, appearing on the show and going to see the F.I.D.s way more times than would be considered logical.
I went to quite a few other shows with Liam and Kevin- Billy Childish, Guitar Wolf, The Pist, The Misfits (after which there was drunken party at my Mom's house while she was out of town. Sorry, Mom). They also introduced me to tons of great music. Their playlists ran the gamut from East Bay pop-punk and early youth-crew straight edge to snotty garage and more East Bay pop punk. And a smattering of crust and thrash, Kiss and tons of rediculous promotional carts.
I started compiling a downloadable "Ultimate Shindig mixtape" awhile ago without considering two things: 1. Legal downloadable MP3s are rather difficult to find these days. Most of the links for Mp3s on google take you porn or gambling sites run by Chechnian gangsters. 2. The guys from Shindig are big enough nerds that they must have audio record of their 10 year broadcast somewhere online. And lo and behold, many early SHINDIG show are available for download now on MYSPACE. Most of these are from a period before I started listening (I was probably still listening to Stone Temple Pilots or something). I still have a box of poor quality Shindig tapes from the 95-96 period in basement somewhere that I may unearth at some point. Until then, here's a list of some of my favorite songs from Shindig (notice the conspicuous absence of KISS from this list) some of which are downloadable and some of which you will have to do the legwork yourself to make your DIY SHINDIG mixtape. But really, any SHINDIG tape without usage of the words "Gonad", "Mothereffer" or "Toolhole" is severely lacking.

Jawbreaker- Busy (an obvious choice)
Sewer Trout- President of the Anarchist Club (severly underrated jokey East Bay pop punk)
Freestone- Bummer Bitch. (story here)
Spitboy- The Threat (Lesbian Feminist rage never sounded so good)
G/I/Z/M- Endless Blockades for the Pussyfooter (There's is nothing I can say about this song, so I'll take a moment for an aside about G/I/Z/M. Yours and my friend Sharkey told me that when he was in Japan touring with 9 Shocks Terror kids in the hardcore scene would not talk to him about G/I/Z/M. Apparently Sakevi is so down with the Yakuza and such a violent psycho himself that if you so much as mention their name (not even in a negative sense) you will get the shit kicked out of you. Sharkey tells me that Sakevi owns a store near Shinjuku station and sells the only official G/I/Z/M t-shirts for like 50 US a pop. Another store in another city was selling bootleg shirts and had their store smashed up along thier faces, I believe is the going rumour amongst "Jiggers".)
Registrators- No Situation (More Japanese fun. I was looking for "Pogo Machine", but this had to do)
Iconoclast- I like you less than apple pie (A classic. Compare this raging slab of discontent to the eyeliner-wearing MTV pin-up boys they call "emo" these days)
Assfactor 4- Sometimes I suck (more ripping proto-emo-core)
DYS-Wolf packk (Don't Ya Gimme no Shit!)
Crucifix- Another mouth to feed
Hey Shadow- The Humpers (Here Montreal's The Humpers effortlessly conjure up their world of Leather Jackets, Poutine, and being Dopesick on St. Cathrine)
Fifteen- Petroleum Distillation , Inspiration (live) (Real Audio files) (I list these two but I could have put basically anything pre-LUCKY. I think Shindig was single-handedly responsible for my adolescent obsession with Fifteen.)
Homomilitia- Multinational (I wish I could have found an Mp3 of this. Truly fucked up, distorted crust-core from Poland about the evils of Coke and McDonalds. I think)
Born Against-9 Years Later (Real Audio File) (If listening to Born Against doesn't make you feel like you are 16 again and really need to go overthrow the government, you are officially dead)
The Queers- Wimpy Drives thru Harlem (On the SHINDIG myspace page Liam comment "Why did we ever like the Queers?". This may be a valid question if you are referring to "Don't Back Down" or something, but I don't see what's not to love about this infantile, racist pile of post-proto-punk from the Granite State. Now why we ever liked The Donnas is another matter)
J Church- Your Shirt (actually, I don't like this song! But they certainly do. I was looking for the song "Racked", which is the best hangover song ever written)
Judge- New York Crew (Oh, Yes)
New Bomb Turks- I Wanna Sleep in Your Arms (just a streaming clip, sorry)(NBT's bring their over-caffeinated (or possibly methinated?) brand of garage core to a classsic Modern Lovers song. Indispensable)
and of course...
SAVE THE CHILDREN! (a spoken word message from Sam McPheeters and some other dude from the Vermiform records "Feer of Smell" comp. You really must listen to this. It will change your life. "Learn the Ancient Ways!")
"Preposterous Tales in the Pub With Ken MacKenzie" I couldn't find the Mp3, but here's a transcript of the lyrics to give an idea of what we're dealing with. Imagine it sung/spoken in a cockney accent accompanied by cheesy casio and the ambiance of a British Pub...

"Hello, Ken! Well, here we are again. Another Friday night. I heard someone singing about you on the radio. Well, what can I get you? That's two light bitters then. Before you start, Ken, let's keep it clean.

I went out with a famous DJ's sister's friend,
I was on Crackerjack at the age of ten (oh really?)
And I saw the Sex Pistols play down the Hundred Club (yeah, we all did)
And I spent New Year's Eve at Sensible's Den.

Preposterous tales (now then, now then),
Preposterous tales (now then, now then),
Preposterous tales in the life of Ken Mackenzie,
Preposterous tales (now then, now then),
Preposterous tales (now then, now then),
Preposterous tales in the life of Ken Mackenzie.

Well, you're drinking fast tonight, Ken. Well I've been a bit off my beer since you gave me that homebrew. What did you put inside it? Neat alcohol? I like a strong beer, Ken, but that was ridiculous.

I lost a thousand pounds playing brag last night (come off it, Ken),
I flew to Amsterdam to start a riot (oh really?)
And I once saw the Palace score four goals away from home (oh yeah?)
And I've won every game of Trivial Pursuit I've ever played (you've never played me, Ken)

Preposterous tales (now then, now then),
Preposterous tales (now then, now then),
Preposterous tales in the pub with Ken Mackenzie,
Preposterous tales (now then, now then),
Preposterous tales (now then, now then),
Preposterous tales in the life of Ken Mackenzie.

Same old stories, eh Ken? Ken's drinking heavily again. Nothing changes. Is it my round again? I thought I got the last. How much money did you bring out with you? I've got me cashpoint card if necessary. If necessary?! So come on, let's have some more yarns.

I once ate six Mars bars in half a hour (did you Ken?),
While working on a site I unearthed a bomb (oh didy you Ken?),
And I once had a shower with two American girls,
(What, at the same time, Ken? Ah, that's preposterous!)"

Thank you, SHINDIG, for introducing me to things like this. To quote Billy Madison, "I am now stupider for having heard it."

WHITE ANIMAL INTERNATIONAL HU$TLING

whuchuknoaboutdat? whuchuknoaboutdat?

I've found my first Bolivian black metal band. They are from right here in La Paz. They are named after the most evil and fearful thing in the universe- Dr. Frasier Crane's wife from CHEERS-- LILITH! Downloads from their albums are available here! According to them, Lake Titicaca, which I am heading to tomorrow, has mystic healing properties. Maybe I should pick up one of those dried llama fetuses you can buy in the Witch's Market here before I go, in case any mystical shit goes down.

Pasame La Botella (streaming on radioblogclub here) by Match and Daddy is a bit of reggaeton/soca crossover fun party action from Panama. I heard in the club last night, it can mix into reggaeon, soca and old school ragga sets- expect it from the White Animal soundsystem this summer. I figure if I play it for 9 parties in a row at the tenth people will actually dance to it. (some might even have it on their myspace page next winter- Etta "I wanna be your STD", I'm looking in your direction. Besos)

Last night when I came back to my hotel room here in La Paz, La Virgin de las Sicarios (Our Lady of Assassins) was on cable- sin subtitilos. Watching it in Spanish and only understanding 10 percent of the dialog was a different experience than the first time I watched it in Tucson, Arizona, with translations, in a room full of apathetic teenage junkies. This time, the visual elements stuck out more- how the weird Dr. Who look of HD video brings you into the film and makes it all the more disturbing, the shocking bursts of violence and how they pop off like fireworks as in Breathless or, yes, even Fireworks, the clumsy visual symbols and heavy-handed religious allegories that are obvious even without understanding the verbose dialog.
If you haven't seen Our Lady of Assassins, I recommend it, though I can't claim it will make you sleep well at night (except maybe drifting off mentally repeating the mantra "At least I don't live in Medellín, Columbia"). It is a morality play set in an alternate universe of morality where Uzis, Nikes and sportbikes are more important than human life and where even the "well educated" and religious can buy into the delirious nihilism of complete destruction.
Like the early novels of Brett Easton Ellis, Assassins... takes us behind the scenes of spiritual degradation and casual evil, then hits us with an almost Dosoevskian moral theme. And like most of Easton Ellis, it's also sardonically and misanthropically funny. Even with out verbal reference I found myself laughing at the film´s star Germán Jaramillo looking like a silent-movie straight-man, shrugging as his teenage companion wastes another after another of their fellow Columbians.
The nearest film I can think of to compare it to is City of God because of it's home-grown cast and shocking violence, though with it's bargain basement DV look, Assassins.. is actually the rawer of the two. And considering it's central of image of a sexual relationship between an older man and a teenage boy, the film must be completely unpalatable to a large part of the huge international audience that City of God found.
Perhaps even more shocking than City..´s closing disclosure that it had all been based on a true story is learning that Assassin..'s main character, author Fernando Vallejo, shares a name with the controversial author of the novel La Virgin de los Sicarios. Although both Vallejo and the films director Barbet Schroeder claim that it is largely fiction, one wonders of much of Assassins.. is true and how much of it's reproachable antihero exists in the real Fernando Vallejo.
Moreover, how much of Schroeders motives behind making the movie were moral outrage and how much his own pervy voyeurism. In a great interview from BOMB magazine by Ken Foster, Schroeder is quoted as saying the sexuality in the the film is "by nature and essence, innocent". This is the kind of explanations you might expect from Larry Clark about his kiddie-pornish tendencies, or perhaps more accurately it sounds like NAMBLA apologetics straight out of Hakim Bey. Here's a telling excerpt from the same interview:

bs- (Schroeder) The first person I went to in Medellín when I was about to cast was the person who introduced the real boy to the real writer a few years before I was there. I went to meet him, and said, "Well, do you have another one?" (laughter)

The issues of author/subject and art/reality are adressed directly in Assassins.., and in a postmodern twist they have leapt right off the screen. Schroeder admits that many of his young actors who had been involved in street crime before have taken their paychecks from the film and gotten into more trouble with the law. Like City of God's director Fernando Meirelles (who also experienced his former actors using his studios money to dire results), Schroeder says he can't be forever responsible for his charges. But once Schroeder paid an underage street kid to act out sex acts and street violence, isn't he just as culpable as Asassin's moraly tortured protagonist?

Almost too late, I met Chapa from Tacuman, Argentina (thats not him in the photo, it is Argentine rockers Dragonauta. Chapa is a hard man to find a photo of online) and discovered the Argentine stonerrock scene. Genevieve and I saw Chapa on the subway in Buenos Aires. He was wearing a MonsterMagnet "Spine of God" T-shirt, and Genevieve said in her non-spanish "Me Gusta Monster Magnet.. mi favorita!". It turns out Chapa spoke perfect english and started to tell us about Argentine stonerock.
The first surprising thing he told me is that NATAS (with more info here ), the group who released the awesome desertrock album Del Mar on Man's Ruin records years ago are actually from Argentina. They have since changed their name (due to legal pressure from some white-trash rap-rock band of the same name from the US) to LOS NATAS, and according to Chapa, they have only gotten better, with a sound that has expanded to include doom and pyschadelic elements. There is much audio evidence of this on their website's built-in audio player. Los Natas have kind of become the father figure to an emerging heavy music scene in Ar., playing shows regularly supported by some other up-and-coming acts.
Such as the awesome Dragonauta. Here are some audio and video samples-

Medley from their split with Abdullah
Dragonauta- Hijo Del Diablo
Dragonauta- the Superchrist
TOMEGAPENTAGRAM (video)
Dragonauta- Latargo Sabado (video)

Poseidotica, who offer a few very short clips of
paralexis
and tantra

and
Buffalo
Buffallo- Rio Arriba
The Wizard (live Black Sabbath cover, naturally)
Rio Arriba (video)
Playa Tortuga (video)

The Argentine metal, punk and stoner scene is covered by Noiseweb Argentina, and the national and international Metal scene is reveiwed in Jedbangers

I have plans to possibly visit Chapa in Tacuman, so I may have some more inside info soon. Chapa has 4, count em, 4 weblogs (en espanol, claro) sobre musica y vida. Aqui-
Goodbye Sober Days -
Reveiws From Hell -
Modernrockblog -
Killerweblog

Disfruta la rock!

Here's a streaming mix by Dj Monk One off of WBAI. Some great rare funk starting out the set which lead into tons of old school and instrumental hip hop. Awesome except for the DJ host clown who breaks in now and then to say "DJ Monk One on the wheels of steel." Dude, don't say that.

Free up some hard drive space!

I've stumbled across tons of music resources recently while trying to find rare punk mp3s. Here's a truncated listing.

Killed by Death.org- this is a streaming radio page for Killed by Death, the infamous LP series that has rereleased material by literally hundreds of obscure, forgotten, and purposfully buried American punk bands from the late seventies and eighties. The KBD PUNK STREAM plays garage, snotty rock, and sloppy punk, seventy-seven style punk, and idiotic teenage punk from the basements and garages of the past. The KBD HARDCORE STREAM plays 80's thrash, early straight-edge, and rare songs by the legends of hardcore.

The KBD.org links section is stocked with rare punk and miscellaneous Mp3 blogs,-

Something I Learned Today's front page features Tar, the Proletariat, the Beguiled, a Minneapolis area HC comp from the early eighties feauturing Husker Du, and the Chosen Few.

Middle Aged Youth's archives focuses on 80's hardcore like Wolfpack and the great Albany Style hardcore comp, while the metal section includes the original Morbid Angel demo and songs by Injustice, the 80s death metal band of "rappers" Ill Bill and Necro! The Mp3s expire after a while, so get on there soon.

Strange Reaction has a great indexed archive of random punk 7"s, some of which he has no info about besides the liner notes. You might recognize some the names from your local hometown scene when you were 15.

Dressed for the Bomb is a well layed-out blog filled with the rarest of unsung punk and rock.

CRUD CRUD has this to say about itself: "...a tour through the stacks of records, demo tapes, etc. that surround me. No recycled MP3s, CD tracks, or reissues here. Average price paid for the records below is $3. Very few I have spent more than $5 on. You also will get a few book jackets from time to time. I present to you some of my favorites. It keeps the guilt of hording this crud distant." This not so much punk as thrift-store weirdness, exotica, and rarities along with exhaustve articles on each selection and reflections on the joys of finding gold in stacks of worthless records.

Each of these blogs has a links lists of other Mp3 blogs, so that within a few hours you could have a collection of Mp3s of songs that record collectors have spent lifetimes trying accumulate.

Speaking of record collectors, I can't leave out everybody's friend Harry Balls', who has really been putting a lot of work into his Youtube page . There you will find punk, garage, mod, freakbeat, hardcore, soul and psych videos and live performances. I don't even know how he finds all this footage, but it's good to know that non-self-destructive/antisocial pursuits have been occupying at least some of his time down there in Florida.

South of Gilman street is a streaming radio/music database project chronicalling the east bay punk scene of the 80s and 90s. It features a streaming radio station with a request feature. There aren't enough users on there to clog up the works, so that means you can instantly listen to your choice from the discographies of bands like Jawbreaker, Operation Ivy, Crimpshrine, Filth, fifteen, etc.

The Love Song.org has a small batch of music that they consider to make up the development of the "emo" sound- means the list starts strong with artists like Moss Icon, Hated and Iconoclast and ends poorly with drama club anthems by Braid and Promise Ring.

A TUDO DOMINADO is a short digital video film about the Funk scene in the Rio favelas. Cheezy production, a litle too much talk and not enough funk, and blatant overuse of the video "scratching" effect, but it's still well worth a watch if you are interested in the music or the scene.

Looks like our friend Clennan in Provincetown has a radio show on the local "wingnuts and bad music" community radio station WOMR Thursdays at midnight, streaming here. From what I know of him, I'd expect quite a bit of Casio, Noise, and Fagbeat.

Here are a couple mp3s from this is ska argentina to warm you up for this feauture...
Alton Ellis- I've Got a Date (alternate version
Doreen Shaffer- Nice Time
I met Selector Lucho from Upsetting Hi Fi soundsystem at a greasy fast food joint on Ave. Scalabrini Ortiz north of Palermo, Buenos Aires. We started talking by making fun of all the 16 year old straight-edge hardcore kids that were passing us on their way to a show around the corner. Meanwhile we were splitting Quilmes after Quilmes and taking about Jamaican records. Lucho brought me to a bar near-by and for a brief evening he initiated me into the rarified world of ex-skinhead rudeboy Argentine reggae DJs who have been collecting Jamaican records forever.
They say things like "soundsystem" and "in the dance", they call dubs "versions", the DJ is the "selector" and the singer is the "deejay" or "toaster". They think that things like Bounty Killer should never be called "dancehall" beacause dancehall is a style that existed only for about 6 years in the eighties with dejays like U-Roy and Half Pint. Basically they are living in a different era in a different culture on a diferent continent, and it's pretty awesome.
Lucho probably new more about riddims, studio one, and the golden era of ska, rocksteady, reggae, rub-a-dub, and dancehall, than anyone I know. He has appeared on the same stage as Lee Perry, Mad Professor, and Mikey Dread when they came to Argentina. He has thousands of Lps. In fact, he told me that when he dropped the 12" version of Mikey Dread toasting on the Clash's "Bankrobber" dub, Mikey couldn't believe it because even HE didn't have a copy of that.
Lucho and his friends we're some of the coolest most down to earth people I met in Buenos Aires. Maybe it was just because we could bond over music (not just reggae, but punk, power pop and 80s, all of which they knew tons about), but they seemed much more honest and cool that almost any of them portenos we met in other, trendier parts of the city.
If you are ever in Buenos Aires, check this is ska argentina for upcoming dances. They also have an Mp3 section, and for streaming radio check Butambaba, an Argentine site which has 5 channels and lots of info (en espanol, claro), or of course Rockers on 88.9 ERS from Emerson college in Boston, which has (usually) great Jamaican music from 4-8 every weekday.

Low-Budget has posted a promo mix for the Popoff Shack party at the Metro in Philly (download here). Some serious partytronix action on there- little bit of everything. 1 hr

Came across some flicks of graff by someone you may know. I don't think she's figured out how to rotate images, though (i helped her with this one).

SXSW REPORT... from Mendoza, Argentina

I may not be at South by Southwest right now, but I can write about it anyway! Isn't that what being an opinionated loudmouth is all about?
From the looks of the line-up, the festival is once again offering to the public both some of the best music the underground has to offer and some of the worst crap that agents and publicists can try to repackage for the "streets" (Jamie Cullum?!!).
One surprise is the wide assortment of hip hop both ig'nint and not as well as DJ features. I'm pretty sure that this brand of music was completely overlooked before this, certainly the "chopped´n´screwed" variety native to the festival´s home state of Texas was. But this year Houston rap is suddenly "art" and featured prominently. Who could have predicted that?
So, for those of us who are on different continents, or who are just indifferent (who wants want to wade through the mobs of drunken self-important indie rockers anyway?), there is the SXSW website, where quite a few of the more unknown artists have posted up Mp3z of their music. I'll save you the trouble of sloging through the hundreds of bands listed and re-up some of my picks of worthwhile listens. Click on the link to see a brief bio and option to stream or download.

A Hawk and a Hacksaw
Apathy
Atmosphere (some of these are total no-brainers)
Awol One (another case in point)
Baroness (!!)(Are literally going to blow some hipsters asses out.. much worse than those Texas wet burritos)
busdriver (do I really only like rap?)
Brian Jonestown Massacre (I know this isn't NME, but... it's a good song.)
Caural (only because he's Etta's boy)
Cephalic Carnage
Deadboy and the Elephantmen
Dengue Fever (60's Khmer Style, Mothrafuckas!)
FACEDOWNINSHIT...wait, yes you read that right...FACEDOWNINSHIT. (Had to write it twice for all you haters who couldn't believe your eyes. Listen to the song. Dudes need a major label contract. Relapse can't contain them)
Gerbils
The Gossip
Jean Grae
Holy Fuck
(Danny Black's) Healthy White Baby (just cause they are Genevieve's boys).
Helmet (fucking Helmet?)
Ross Hogg (Hollerboard represent)
Jedi Mind Tricks
Lady Sovereign
ladytron
Lucero (just becuase they cover "Kiss the Bottle" by Jawbreaker)
Magnolia Electric Company (maybe Vice was right in describing it as "at best a passable imitation of 'Harvest Moon' era Crazy Horse", but this is the guy who wrote "Farewell Transmition", so I got to think that great things can come out of him)
Municipal Waste
The Plimsouls (The PLIMSOULS?!)
Spankrock
Stinking Lizaveta (ok... now I do want to be there.)
Tarantula A.D.
TTC(pour les filles, TTC, connard!!)
Visionaries (2MEX)
Weedeater
XIU XIU (I don't like this stuff, but.. make up your own mind)
Zombi (fucking rule!)

Remember, this is only the artists that presented Mp3s- some of the best acts at SXSW did not like--
Tilly and the Wall and Jason Forrest (who are playing the same show!), Kid 606 and friends, 2MEX, Ramblin´Jack Elliot, Roky Erikson (?? isn't he dead?), Spoon, Immortal Technique, Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings, Jucifer, k-os, Nebula, Devin the Dude, DMBQ (still playing after the death of their drummer Chino?), Drop the Lime, Drunk Horse, Eagles of Death Metal, Echo and the Bunnymen, Grand Buffet, Hellacopters, The Go Team, Black Heart Procession, Blockhead, Circle, Cut Chemist, etc.

So what did all this sifting teach me? Well, it taught me that I have something against singer-songwriters, especially those that have their name in the title like "The James Lohannan Project". This immediately tells me that this will be earnest old-sad-bastard music that you might hear on your radio alarm clock first thing in the morning on NPR and might make you not want to get out of bed, but rather stay home and kill yourself.
And sorry, but I also hold a grudge against the nondescript American (or British) ROCK band who just plays "rock and roll", like "three chords and a dream" and tours around and drinks beer and sounds like the Beatles or the Kinks (but not as good). And has a stupid name. Its like "hey, man the name doesn't matter, it's all about just playin' like you mean it". The only problem is that you are boring and sound like everything else. And your name puts a stinky cloud over your whole aura. In fact, there were so many bad band names on the this list I feel I must elaborate.
Did they really run out of ideas for band names? I thought it was bad in the alternative rock era with atrocities like "Deep Blue Something" and "Sponge", but things have gotten worse. Emo, bad poetry, and new-wavey Art School leanings have brought out the worst in rock nomenclature. So here we go.

WHITE ANIMAL'S TOP 23 WORST BAND NAMES AT SXSW

23. Dashboard Confessional
22. Coach Said Not To(If he "Said Not To" name your band that, he was a pretty right-on dude. Maybe if you had listened to him, you wouldn't have gotten kicked off the team, and had to learn to play bass.)
21. Red Jumpsuit Apparatus (no ideas, guys?)
20. A Cursive Memory
19. Dot kom (rappers are not excluded)
18. Man Man (in fact, most bands from Philly have awful names)
17. The End of Fashion
16. The Foxymorons (they're probably nice guys, but...)
15. The Glass Family (I love JD Saliger, too but.. how precious can you get?)
14. GoGoGo Airheart
13. Kris Kristofferson (just kidding! seriously, Kris, dont hurt me)
12. The Guggenheim Grotto
11. Hurts to Purr (I mean, thats sad and all, but it doesn't make me want to listen. Do you forever want to be known as the band who's name translates to "My Pussy Hurts"?)
10. The Jai-Alai Savant
9. The King Of France (HA! There is no king of France. You Idiots! They have a prime minister or a dictator or something.)
8. They Shoot Horses Don't They (no, that was a crappy 70s movie... does this have something to do with Kristofferson?)
7. Leather Uppers (if they really were gay, they'd be called Leather Poppers, but they're not. They´re wannagays)
6. Sistas in the Pit (Im pretty sure theyre not joking)
5. The Number Twelve Looks Like You (are from Kearney, NJ. They should stay there)
4. Quien es, Boom! (only people who´ve never been to France would fetishise their lanuage)
3. The Boy Least Likely To
2. Sailboats Are White (Dude are you shitting me?)
1. Swollen Members (I just hate them anyway.. maybe i am biased)

There is a another trend I've noticed in this list. Bands seem to have come around to the fact that IRON MAIDEN and BLACK SABBATH were kind of the end-all be-all of naming your band. So, we have a slew of dagger-sharp, skull-scary band names which can't possibly really describe the bands which they grace. So we have:

WHITE ANIMAL's TOP 10 TOUGH BAND NAMES (which the band couldn't be be tough enough to enhabit)
10. Metal Hearts
9. The Sword
8. Bible of the Devil
7. Black Furies
6. Crystal Skulls
5. The Deaths
4. Die! Die! Die!
3. Midnite Snake
2. Skullening
1. Bad Wizard

OK, and now you're wondering, what are WHITE ANIMAL's top picks for BEST band names at SXSW? Why don't you get a life? Why don't I?

WHITE ANIMAL's TOP 5 BAND NAMES(of bands I've never heard of)

5. Sasquatch
4. Genghis Tron
3. Genitallica
2 Tight Phantomz
1. Goblin Cock

The other day Genevieve was telling me about Art Bell , her favorite syndicated radio wingnut who she used to listen to late at night on long road trips in the midwest while he vindicated the beliefs and perhaps encouraged the delusions of his probably insane callers. They would phone-in with comments like "NASA put microphones in my teeth because I know about the chupacabra!", and he would calmly reply "Ah, yes, the chupacabra. Of course they don't want people to know that it is really a reverse engineered alien clone made from an alien which crash landed in Puerto Rico."*
After she'd told me all about her man Art, I hipped her to my favorite radio freak-Grandpa Al Lewis , (yes, the guy from The Munsters, you fool) who was the reining king of radical left wing nutters on WBAI, Brooklyn free radio. That night I Googled his name on a whim, to see what was up with Grandpa Al. It turned out he had died a month ago before.

The tribute page for Grandpa Al (notice I don't use the quotation marks- he insisted on it as his real name) from the staff of WBAI is sometimes touching, sometimes hilarious. The first fond remembrance starts

"Yes, I do credit him (he insisted that we do) for my reading of William Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, and I feel that I have a better understanding of just what is happening in these United States at this present time."

What a sentimental eulogy! But Grandpa Al wouldn't have it any other way. He was an avowed New York Jewish leftist freak. He would advocate rioting in the streets, violence against police, and the overthrow of the government. He was like my Dad with a microphone. Jay Lawrence, who introduced me to Al, had a favorite story that Al would tell constantly about his time as a de facto bodyguard for W.E.B. Dubois in the height of the Civil Right conflicts-

"I had to make sure that nobody messed with William Edward Burghardt DuBois. So, as we say in them old westerns, you know, we goin’ round up a posse, somebody’s gotta ride shotgun. Well, Al Lewis rode shotgun. And I always said, man, any mother's son put his foot on that running board knows he's the running board. I want to know if he could swallow the 45 that go right in his mouth. That's it."
(from an interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now!)

he would claim that this made him a black activist akin to the Panthers or Black Guerilla Family.
Al was a freak of another sort as well- a regular at porn conventions in Las Vegas. He was a dirty old man, memorably caught in the act of hitting on female Daily Show correspondent Beth Littleford while she was covering a sleazy beauty pageant that he was one of the judges of. This side of his public persona isn't mentioned on the BAI page. I would be interested how his colleagues, or indeed Al himself could reconcile his revolutionary ideals with the billion dollar porn industry. Perhaps he thought of himself as a perfect mix of Abby Hoffman and Screw magazine founder Al Goldstein.
Not that any of this is meant to demean him. I wish that more celebrities had the balls to be as outspoken as Al Lewis. If Alec Baldwin would just come out and say "Go out and throw a bomb at a cop!" instead of appearing in psuedo-subversive tripe like Fun With Dick and Jane, I would like him a whole lot more.
So, please pour out a little and find out more about your boy Grandpa Al Lewis.

*I didn't just get this idea from nowhere, it's based on a widely held and whispered about belief in P.R.- that the US Government has a secret bunker under El Yunque, the revered and feared jungle in the center of the island where locals refuse to go after dark. Any Puerto Rican will tell you never to go off the path in El Yunque and never to stay overnight. The realistic and practical will say that there might be fugitive rapist degenerates hiding out in there. The mystical might talk about El Yunque's holy significance in the pantheon of Santeria, how it shouldn't be disturbed lest Chango might send some snakes after your ass or something. The superstitious will tell you simply that there are "G-G-Ghosts!" about. And a surprising amount of people will tell you about strange late night noises heard by locals. Noises coming from inside the mountain. And mysterious lights appearing to rise up out of and return to the dense jungle at the heart of El Yunque. The more credible of these types will suggest that maybe the Air Force has some prototype aircraft lab down there. A special breed of Boriquas, though, will tell you about the UFOs that the government has there, and aliens which they are experimenting on, some of which escaped and created the Chupacabra (thats "Goatsucker" for the uninitiated) story which has become famous throughout the world. Like everybody didn't know that already.

A guy who was staying at Chacra de Cielo, the organic farm we stayed at in El Bolson showed us his copy of the book The Rebel Sell: Why the Culture can't be Jammed. He assured us that the book "cant be bought in the States" as if the NWO Lizard People Illuminati (see here) were trying to suppress it, but actually what the book proposes is quite apposite to all that conspiracy stuff. In fact, what the authors suggest is that there is no Conspiracy (capital C), and never was. There is no "system" and no "spectacle".
Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter are young Canadian academics who have been though the modern activist scene and come out with some bad tastes and original ideas. For them, the main flaw in modern revolutionary thought began when it's focus changed from "helping the common man" to "freeing the common man from his mental slavery". This change of ideals became even more convoluted, they suggest, when it then became "before you can free others' minds, you first must free your own." This shift is relatively new development, and didn't really take hold until the 60's.
According to the book, this was the decade that the whole democratic progressive activist movement was really subverted by people who confused hedonism for revolution, sexiness for political clout, fashion for progress. While real strides were being made on a grass roots political level for human and civil rights, posers who were more concerned with looking the part and getting laid were claiming their great victory. Then, they write "...(contrary to rumor) the hippies did not sell out. Hippie ideology and yuppie ideology are one and the same. There simply never was any tension between the countercultural ideas that informed the '60s rebellion and the ideological requirements of the capitalist system."
They go on to say that the "counterculture" is a hoax that's been played out ever since. Sure, the "revolution" wised up and turned it's back on the hippies, but because none us of us, punks and anarchists etc., ever questioned the fundamental "us vs. them" paradigm we haven't moved forward. We are still suckers for the sexy image of the martyred revolutionary, and we still think of ourselves as fighting against a "system" that is somehow "brainwashing" everyone into being complacent. Sure punks hate hippies, but how far have we really come from Pink Floyd's "Break down the wall!" to Youth of Today's "Break Down the Walls!"?
The book's main target is the new "counterculture"- Naomi Klein, Micheal Moore, the "culture-jamming" trend spearheaded by Adbusters magazine and the antiglobalisation protest movement. Each of these are approached directly, but the theme is that they are all based on a single fallacy- that everyone is brainwashed by "the spectacle" and all it will take is some creative publicity stunt to wake them up.
Once you start thinking about things in these terms, it's hard to stop. Yesterday, as usual, the anarchists and socialists and commies were having a huge rally around the 9 de Julio and Plaza de Mayo, pounding drums, yelling slogans, waving banners. Genevieve was walking home near all this when a young "revolutionary" took a fat stack of flyers that he was supposed to be distributing and threw them up behind him. Unfortunately he was standing in a crowd of people and Genevieve was standing right behind him and caught the whole stack in her face. Then he walked off without apologizing. When she got home and described the carelessness and cluelessness of this kid and his stupid Rasta hat, I thought about The Rebel Sell.
The idea of this undoubtedly middle class suburban kid, littering the world with pamphlets which he may not even understand, and hurting someone in the process makes my blood boil. Is his self-righteous revolutionary ejaculation more important than another person walking down the street without getting literally hit in the face with his adopted ideology? Maybe it's because she was obviously "brainwashed by the system" and needed to be woken up out of her complacency. This must have been obvious to him because she was just walking by and not on the other side banging a gong and waving a red flag. But, of course, if everyone was over on the other side of the street, there wouldn't be anything to get worked up about anymore. If everyone was on the other side, that's the side that wouldn't seem as appealing to little revolutionaries anymore.
Just the fact this young firebrand would wear a Rasta hat (and lets make the safe bet he had Che patch on his person somewhere) shows that he has no problem with advertising an ideology that he couldn't possibly fully understand. Let us remember that liking Bob Marley and being a fire-and-brimstone Battyman-hating Rasta are NOT the same thing, and that thinking the Zapatistas look cool in their anarcho-ninja outfits is not the same as understanding Mao.
As you can tell, I thought The Rebel Sell was inspired and thought provoking, but I also found it somewhat infuriating. The tone is consistently arrogant and often didactic on subjects that scholars have been discussing for years. In the first chapter alone they blast through Frued, Marx, the hippies, situationism, punk, hip hop, workers struggle, autosugestion in advertising, even the movies American Beauty and Pleasantville.
All this slapdash coverage laced with snide commentary is bound to stumble, and it often does spectacularly. About the role of alcohol as a state sponsored stupefacient they say that the government "has fought against alcohol again and again" citing prohibition, and that "the claims made about LSD in the sixties are the same made about absinthe in the 20s". What prohibition, a social movement of the early twentieth century, or absinthe, a NARCOTIC (not just a form of alcohol) has to do with modern alcohol consumption I have no idea. And on the idea of Marihuana as a mind-expanding substance they simply say that no pothead could help with any revolution because "anyone who has ever spoken with a stoned person knows they are they most boring people in the world to talk with." Funny? Yes. But incredibly dismissive. I guess Terrence McKenna wasted his whole life work looking into this and we should just move on?
Another problem with the book is that it is so clearly aware of it's itended audience that it often seems insular. I understand that Heath and Potter are trying to reach the same college-age readers that lapped up No Logo and Adbusters, but they shouldn't exclude others. For example, they patiently take you though the theories of Frued and how they are regarded today, then turn around and drop references to "The infamous rave scene in the Matrix 2" totally unexplained. Sorry guys, but not all of us consider The Matrix trilogy to be a great cultural milestone (i.e. we're not all baked Canadians).
Overall the book is quite hilarious and quite worth reading. The best are it's respective trashings of American Beauty (it's the pot smoking counterculture vs. the sexually repressed gun toting facists all over again!), Easy Rider (self-indulgent white potheads liken themselves to black civil rights activists by being martyred in the deep south!), and Alanis Morrisette (she sings "thank you, India" as if the whole subcontinent will wave back and say "You're welcome, Alanis!"). These are worth the price of admission alone. I just hope those Evil American Imperialists will let this WMD over the border from the land of freedom and liberty to the North... (order here).

Punk on YouTube!

At this point I'm just stealing other people's ideas. For you. Here's a bunch of links to YouTube joints, punk and otherwise, worth checking that I collected off the Low Budget forums. Im a biter.


Bad Brains 79- Sailin On (live)
Bad Brains- Attitude
Can- Paperhouse
Serge "drunk french pervert" Gainsbourg and Whitney "I don't smoke crack, Bums smoke crack... I Smoke Weed!" Houston on French TV"
FEAR Live on SNL
Husker Du live on the Joan Rivers Show
Kraftwerk- Autobahn
Minutemen- King of the Hill
Minutemen- Corndog intro, 3 songs

(And heres some dirty south for the fuck of it...
Lil Wayne- Shooter (Katrina Footage Video)
Juvenile- Hustle

And some more punk from your boy Harry Balls. Check his You Tube page for more Powerpop, hardcore, Trashrock etc --

Crime live at San Quentin
Void- Who ARe You? (live 1983)
Beastie Boys- Holy Snappers
Pagans- Dead End America

G and I have been reading Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer which is about those fucking nut cases the Mormons. Really, you have no idea how crazy this shit is. Basically Fundamental Mormonism is a club for men with beards who like to talk and write things like it's from the Bible like "As thou sayeth the righteousness of the kingdom of the lord, and so it came to pass" and then they claim that it came directly from god. It's like if some guys really liked the book Get Shorty and then spent 200 years imitating Elmore Leonard's prose style and claiming that he wrote it. Oh, and if Elmore Leonard never existed in the first place. And if it was all an elaborate exuse for raping 13 year old girls and having tons of wives that you treat like livestock.
You have to read the book to get the creepiness of it all. And an amazing point that he makes is that the Bible and the Quoran are no more beleivable than the Book of Mormon, they were just written so long ago that they are more difficult to contest. Mormonism is basically just like any religion in it's infantile form. That it is modern and transparant enough for everyone to see it for what it is- a giant hoax created by a charismatic con man and carried on by desperate and crazy people is the main difference between it and our established religions.

Click link only if you're from P Town

That's Provincetown, you chiefs. Portland Oregon is not called P-Town. If anything it should be called P-Land

Listen or Download the the Rub crew White label mixes on myspace here

My book recomendation for the this and any other month is The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy. Read an excerpt here or Have Brad Pitt read it for youIt is really one of the most devastating and beautiful books I've ever read. Few books are as appalling or eerily visionary, maybe the >The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kozinski, and fewer are as naturally stylized, maybe the best of Hemingway. This was my first taste of Cormac McCarthy's prose, and from what I've heard it's probably the best place to start. Anyone struggling with the Spanish dialog used liberally can find translations aqui. Read the book and enjoy the rosy glow of man's separation from god in a brutal and desolate world

My father, the "very colorful Truro resident" was interviewed by the Provincetown Banner last week. Can't find the full version online, but lets just assume it was so censored as to be unintelligable, and fill in the blanks with our imagination as to what was said and possibly screamed.

I know all you drunk metal dudes are having none of it, but I heard the new Opeth album "Ghost Reveries" the other day and you know, I don't hate. Opeth have gradually changed over 10 albums from a gravel-throated black metal beast to a melodic symphonic rock group. Yes, "Ghost Reveries" sounds like prog-influenced easy listening. Yes, it sounds a bit like Queensryche (where's my umlaut button?). It sounds nothing like the soundtrack to a good cathartic church burning. But this is all ok.
Maybe it's because I was listening to it at 2000 meters while watching the sun set over the glacial peak of Mount Tronador through big bay window at Refugio Otto Meiling. That day G and I had hiked 6 hours up the mountain getting gnawed on my swarms of horseflies. Now we were drinking cold beer at a refugio at the base of a massive glacier and "Ghost Reveries" was playing on the soundsystem. It was thrown in for sunset, right bewteen Dido and Rod Stewart. And no one batted an eyelash. It´s that soft. And as the orange setting sun blinked over the blue peak of tronador one last time I thought I heard a shelf was falling off a glacier nearby. But it was just a sound effect on an intro to a song. Epic shits.
I wanted to feature an Mp3, but Opeth are bigger nerds than you and probably are on the Wi Fi on their tour bus all day, making sure no one's downloading their music. It's not about propriety, it's just that they dont want you listening to their epic shits on an inferior sound format like mp3.

Matt Gross, a friend of G and I just had an article about Cambodia published in the NY Times Travel section. It's about the recent upcropping of luxury hotels in Cambodia and around SE Asia, which will be handy for all y'all thinking of dropping a grand on a hotel room next time you visit the cheapest place in the world. Keep your eyes peeled for an article I'm working on for the Times about what it was like to have scabies.

Heres a recap of the hottest shits of 2005. Just a quick roundup of mixes you could be listening to. Instead of whatever else you´re doing, which is pointless.
RADIOCLIT are my best friends in an Argentinian internet cafe right now. They´ve been kind enough to put all their DirtySouth/ Grime/ Electro/ Fagbeat/ ChoppednSkrewed/ Radiobullshitmixes on disk for download or stream - especially cop their Lemon red series radio show, their 2nd official mixtape CAREFUL;CLITCLIT and for a quick preview, hear Dizzee Razcall get the Bjork/Vitalic treatment when he gets mashed up with French electroshite Chloe and end up with perhaps his first song worth hearing twice! Dont hate dudes because they're French!
Then there´s the powerful Certified Bananas from the mighty state of Rhode Island who haven´t changed anything, still bringing dope mixes and exclusives. Youve already heard them mash Joanna Newsome with Tego "I swear I saw him buying crack once near La Pearla in San Juan" Calderon, but hows about "Marquee Moon" by Television mashed with that filthy "My Neck, My Back..." song (download)? Or how about not?
And of course there´s the man so omnipresent and zeitgeisty that he's like the even more white version of Pharrell, Diplo with some live shit coming straight from where all the best parties are at: The Guggenheim Museum. Parts one and Two streaming here Thats right, here´s some exclusive mixes from that bastion of all things indie and gutter: AOL MUSIC (diplo page here). Many strikes against it? Yes, but peep the new Yeah Yeah Yeahs RMX, lots of Electro funk, the Percolator, and tons of Baile with at least one Smiths sample. Ignore "My Hump". Thank you.
And if 2005 isn't doing it for you, take the way-back-machine to 2004 and finally cop Diplo's "Piracy Funds Terrorism" (download) . Harken back to an innocent time when America fell in love with a young MIA and the "do you hear me now" guy taught us all to smile again. More than just a genius way to get into MIA's pants, "Piracy..." was a dope mixtape featuring some hot fire blends and exclusives like Lil Vicious on the Galang rhythm and Cutty Ranks on the "Drop it Like it´s Hot" rhythm . Save it for your "Totally 00's" party in a couple years.

shhhhhDONT TELL NOBODY IN THE GHETTO

The HOLLERBOARDS are dead.. long live the "HOLLERBOARDS".shhhhhhhhhh

Right now im obsessed with this cover of "All Tommorow's Parties" by the velvet underground done live by Iron and wine and calexico. I'm pretty sure that its better than the original.
Im just liking on the idea of covers in general. Any band that doesn't play at least one cover live are obviously pretensious pricks. When we saw Iron and Wine and Calexico live in Detroit they played "All Tommorows Parties", plus "Positively 4th Street" by Bob Dylan. I haven't been able to find a copy of that (I think it may have been a once only deal, as afterwards Sam said "Well, those things are fun to try. Sometimes they work and sometimes... not.") but on this live set from NPR they play "Parties", plus "Always on my Mind" by Willie Nelson and "Wild Horses" by the Rolling Stones (admittedly a kind of obvious choice, but they do it nice). Plus on that page are the Calexico and Iron and Wine sets. They are all good except for the annoying NPR nerds who talk during the breaks.

The hunt for rare Argentine Beat/Pysch/Garage LPs is officially on as of todays visit to the San Telmo saturday market.  San Telmo is the oldest section of the city, hence it has the highest percentage of overpriced junk shops.  But the Saturday Market there is a good place to find old records, if not the cheapest.  I made a few scores, including an LP by these chiefs, The Gipsys.  The picture on mine is even funnier, the one guy looks like the kid from Rushmore doing a "stoned Argentine rocker" charcter in one of his plays.  I also got an record from Los Gatos, the mainstays of Argentine beat, plus some compilations from ALTA TENSION, the 60s TV Dance Show.  They appear to be mostly bubblegum, with a smattering of rock by bands like La Joven Guardia, Kano y Los Bulldogs (nothing to do with grime), and Los Iracundos and its all on rainbow colored vinyl!  The vendor also pretty much forced me to buy a mint copy of something called Los Naufragos, which he insisted was excellent.  I have no idea, as I have no record player here.  Anyway I got out of there having spent little more than 10 US so I guess I only got partially fleeced.  Next Im going to find out where the vendors get their records, then its on.

WHITE ANIMAL INTERNATIONAL HUSTLING

Sonar 2006.. in Buenos Aires!

Thats right.. they've just anounced that they will be having a Sonar electronic music festival here in Buenos Aires in early March. The same one that I narrowly missed in Barcelona last year that featured 2 many Djs, MIA, Diplo, Subtle, Beans, Mouse on Mars etc. and I'm not missing it this time. The line/up hasn't been announced yet but I'll post it when it comes out. And you know it cant be anywhere near as expensive as it was in BCE. Yeeeah.

The other night Georgia went out in Puerto Iguazu to find the "Brasilian club" where only Brasilians go. We ended up walking forever to the "Tres Fronteras"- a high spot on the Argentine side which overlooks the river and the coasts on the Brasil and Paraguay sides. We found the club, but they wanted 15 pesos to get in! Highway robbery! So we went and hung around the overlook point with a bunch of other cheap locals. Walking back by the downstairs area of the club, though, I noticed what the DJ was bumping. Hard and dirty baille- total Favela style. We had to suck it up and go in. We bought a big Quilmes and stepped to the strobelight-addled dancefloor. The Dejays rocked the most hardcore Baille for like 5 songs. People were into it, but I felt like I was the most stoked. Looking around, it was mostly light skinned, middle-class looking Brasilians. Some were grinding a bit, but none of the full-on sex acts I´d heard of this music inspiring on the dancefloor. Then the DJ switched to sunny Brasilian pop. Now the dancefloor got swamped and people started cheering. I was crestfallen. As the music degenerated from Brasilian pop to typical Buenos Aires techno, It occured to me that maybe baille was not the music of choice for this crowd. It's more that this style has become popular amongst hipsters around in the past year or so thanks to DJs like Diplo. Now that this crude, base music is becoming recognized by music critics and afficionados everywhere, middle class light skinned people in Brazil must feel obligated to listen to it for the first time, if only as a point of national pride. This music of the Favelas, by and for black Brasilians, is the new hot shit and Brasilians who would have scoffed at it a year ago now feel obligated to dance to it in the club. So we had to eat our 15 pesos and listen to Depeche Mode remixes. OK.
Man, all this makes me want to go to Brasil. We mave have to suck it up once again and pay the 100 US for a visa. Fucking American government for screwing it up for us. Whats new?