What I Did On My Summer Vacation (part 2)

(photo by Shaun Bloodworth)

For fans of forward thinking electronic music the end of summer was overshadowed by the announcement that Mary Anne Hobbs would be leaving her radio show on Radio 1 after 14 years. I could carry on endlessly about how important this show has been to me personally and to the music I love. In recent years the focus on Mary Anne has deservedly centered around her championing of the Dubstep scene. However, for me it was in the years leading up to Dubstep’s emergence into wider recognition in 2006 that MAH was her most vital. The electronic music landscape was pretty bleak circa 2004 - 2005 and after her hero John Peel passed away Mary Anne’s Breezeblock was one of the only places you could hear fresh new sounds on a regular basis.

The blow of Mary Anne’s departure was softened somewhat by the series of climatic headline mixes lovingly assembled by some of her favorite producer/DJs. In particular the mix by Shackleton and the final mix by Kode9 and Burial were outstanding. Both mixes manage to be challenging, uncompromising and yet extremely intimate. They were the absolute best examples of what made the show such a special institution all theses years. You can d/l the final shows at the excellent CoreNews mix archive.

Two particular club nights stand out from the past summer. The first was Demdike Stare at The Bunker. On a night that saw a disappointing, technical difficulty hampered , live set from the Caretaker and the Mike Huckabee playing amazing edits from a reel 2 reel, the Modern Love boys stole the show. Taking the crowd from fathoms deep beatless meditations to hard driving, big system techno and back again with a spattering of exotic percusion and Turkish Psych thrown in for good measure. At points, when the bass opened up, the sound rattled all of the club’s duct work adding a layer of accidental percussion to the proceedings. Brilliant.

The other big night out was the mighty Dub War’s 5th anniversary. 5 being a sacred number for any Joe Nice fan you knew the place was going to full to bursting the shouting and stomping masses. Mala DMZ was joined by “secret guest” Skream for an extended b2b set of bass-bin destroying bangers. If you have seen either selector before (and if you haven’t I advise remedying that quick like), there were few musical surprises. But for once, in a club night that prides it self on being ahead of the bass music curve, it was all about straight forward celebration. Even serious technical issues could not keep the vibes down as all had come to skank it up until dawn.

As far as home listening, the last year or more has seen a fertile ground develop along the margins of the UK’s various bass/urban music scenes. Making things even more interesting is that many of the new sounds have more in common with classic U.S. dance sounds than Dubstep or UK Garage. Case in point the Juke and B-more influenced Work Them by Ramadanman, close sibling to the unstoppable anthem Footcrab. Other housier summer vibes were provided by Jam City's wonderful Ecstasy (refix) and Space Dimension Controller’s epic The Love Quadrant.



One of the best showcases for these various developing sounds has to Kode9’s DJ Kicks contribution which came out at the Summer Sostice and has been a touchstone for me all season.  Drawing from a wide pallet of cutting edge bass music, it’s Kode9’s attention to the essential low-end groove that unifies this mix, creating a whole that is far more than the sum of its tracklist. Other shining examples of a unified groove theory have been recent mixes from Oneman, Ben UFO and Ramadanman (who has to be the hardest working man in bass music at the moment)

What I Did On My Summer Vacation (part 1)

Despite efforts, the blog has fallen into a classic summer lull. Oddly, the lull was not borne of my annual “I’m too drunk in the sun to type” excuse. The oppressive heat and lack of funds moderated my summer shenanigans somewhat this year. That doesn’t mean there weren’t great times and enlightening cultural experiences but these things were less frequent and more intimate then in summers past.

This being the first day of autumn, I thought I would play catch up and hash together a random list of cultural morsels that nourished me through the summer heat.

If summer 2010 had a recurring iconography it was cephalopodic in nature. The cultural interest in all things tentacled transcended the previous subcultural preoccupations with Tentacle Hentai (yeah, I’m unwilling to dig for link there) and Lovecraft's Great Old One Cthulhu into a quirk of the zeitgeist more abstract and harder to pin down.

Personally the main agent of this tentacular assault was China Mieville’s excellent novel Kraken. Kraken is an immersive work of urban fantastic. Set in modern day London, it’s plot centers around the theft of the preserved specimen of a giant squid from the British Museum an act that exposes a hidden culture of peculiar cults and practitioners of esoteric arts that thrives beneath the city’s surface. My absolute favorite moment in the novel is an argument that breaks out between an evil animate back tattoo and The Sea (minor spoilers: The Sea always wins). Appropriately, I read the novel on the beach and with plenty of The Kraken: Black Spiced Rum. Kraken Rum is tasty tar-flavored (in a good way I swear) liquor that awakens a peculiar form of nautical madness in he who dare partake of the sweet black liquid (also it makes a wicked Dark & Stormy).

I’m not usually one for summer movies, but I thought Inception was as good, if not better than, the hype. You couldn't say that about a lot of movies this year. I also really enjoyed The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. I think both films re-purpose the classic big Hollywood thriller. Inception brings the metaphysical subtext to the forefront and uses CGI shock and awe to find new methods of insight into the internal life of its characters. Dragon Tattoo takes the exhausted 1990s suspense thriller (think cleverly titled Morgan Freeman / Ashley Judd vehicle based on novel by famous author) and scrubs it clean of cliche and patronizing sentimentality. The film actively works against your generic preconceptions, thereby knocking the viewer off guard and opening up space for her to be thrilled and terrified again.

On Netflix, I was recently hypnotized by The Red Riding Trilogy. The pace and texture are absolutely engrossing but it is so very bleak. I feel like I haven’t quite figured out what makes it such an enthralling experience yet. I’m trying to get up the bottle to watch it all again.

The best thing on television this summer has yet to come to the US. Moffat and Gattis Holmes for the 21st century, Sherlock, is one of the most intelligent and exhilarating pieces of television in recent memory There is a wonderful mix of original Holmes spirit and mythology with invigorating modern narrative and visual styles. The acting is first rate, you cannot take your yes off of Cumberbatch’s Holmes for fear of missing some lovely nuance and yet Martin Freeman, as an Afghanistan veteran Dr. Watson, more than holds his own, adding depth to a show that could easily become one dimensional and shticky. Sherlock premieres on PBS in the US end of October. I cannot recommend it enough.

I also love Brian Cox’s new science series Wonders of the Solar System. Cox’s excitement for science is wickedly contagious. The show does a amazing job of moving from the very small, personal and even mundane to the unfathomably large. Wonders is the perfect title for the series. When at it’s best, it instills in you a palpable feeling of wonder for the immensity of the universe that you may not have experienced since you were a child.

I don’t read many comics these days. The shelf space for non-super hero, original pulp comics has shrunk considerably but there are still a few wonderful gems to be discovered. Best of the lot as far as I’m concerned is Brandon Graham’s King City. Graham’s world building vision and attention to minute detail generate a thoroughly immersive alternate reality. There is an energy and a surreal flavor to KC that reminds me of classic Milligan and McCarthy books from the 80s. While the visual style re-purposes manga and European influences into something totally unique.

Ba and Moon’s Daytripper is personal favorite as well. Daytripper manages to be both narratively light and nimble and still pack a very powerful and personal emotional punch. I think this is the product of both the creators unique visual storytelling abilities and the ingenious narrative device that hinges the individual stories together (I’m not going to spoil it for you, you’re going to have to read it yourself)

The full color, Marvel published, return of Casanova has been a joy. If possible, i may love the book more now than the first time around. My friend J.B. Love’s Boondock Saints two-parter with BS’s creator Troy Duffy, In Nomini Patris is a filthy, fast paced, romp, that takes the condensed essence of what makes the films so much fun and adds a fine layer of depth to the Bros. MacManus mythos (the title returns with another limited series, The Head of the Snake,next month . Some serious grime and grit can also be found in Kody Chamberlain’s Sweets, an atmospheric crime procedural set in New Orleans. With two issues out so far Sweets lured me in with gorgeous art and a subtle narrative pace and then left me wanting more. Thankfully the next issue is due out in a few weeks.

[I’m going to put a pin in here and pick up tomorrow with the summers best music.]

High End Contrast - Murakami and Anslem Reyles

Gagosian's 24th street gallery is currently host to a striking contrast in contemporary art styles. The majority of the gallery contains a solo show titled Monochrome Generation by German artist Anselm Reyle. The show contains many over-sized, expensively fabricated sculptural elements made of shiny chrome and affixed with led lights. I'm sure are these destined for a life sparkling up the lobby of some faceless multi-national finance company.

The wall pieces created from found objects are slightly more inetersting but the selection of objects, bits of machinery, chain linkage, and bottle caps, is pretty uninspired and the homogenizing nature of the monochroming process removes any of their life and interest. The uninspired spectacle is capped off with a haphazard pile of hay bales constucted of silver tinsel that appear to have escaped from the Christmas party in Less Than Zero. Though Calrygirl and I did get a kick out of the lone bale found in a separate room under plexiglas as if it had to be quarantined from the others for anti-social behavior. Over all the collection yields little more than a cluttered gallery full of tired design objects whose only remarkable features are gloss and scale. The experience left me not only unengaged and uninspired but repulsed and in a strange way personally offended.



Tucked away the gallery's front room, in striking contrast, is Takashi Murakami's Picture of Fate: I Am But a Fisherman Who Angles In the Darkness of His Mind, a large enchanting mural based on the China-Lion mythology of Japanese Buddhism. Murakami is no stranger to audacious fabrications with big price tags. He is one of the most succesful artists in the world has over the top shows up in seemingly every major city at the moment. But in contrast to the pop and shine of Reyle's work this single painting, given a room of it's own to breathe, is intimate and inviting.

The layered detail work of the painting's background, the result of the melding of classical techniques with cutting edge technology, would be remarkable on it's own. The color pallet is soft but vibrant and closer inspection yields meticulus detail. The main image does what Murakami does best, entangling the adorable with darka nd severe. It teases our intimate reactions and desires until we are left pondering the sublime. The cartoon skulls, a hallmark of the Murakami visual lexicon, here in a massive pile carry both the weight and comical inevitability of our mortality. Their comedic/grim dicotomy as striking an image of death as the fierce/adorable lion cubs are symobls of youth and rebirth.

Double J Guest Post

While most contemporary conceptual art has as much connection to the old masters as a Hannah Montana pop hit has to Beethoven, many of the young artists in the underground draw inspiration from the history of western figurative painting not simply in content but with the fine attention to detail and composition the arts establishment has typically rejected over the last few decades.


I have a guest post up at the fabulous Just Jen blog wherein I riff on underground art and the work of Simpkins, Early and James Roper.

If you are not reading Jen's blog on the regular I suggest you remedy that sharpish, especially if you, like me, enjoy a little smart discussion on art and culture but don't have the time for snobbery and ego stroking.

Pixu: The Mark of Evil

From the team that brought us the Eisner winning "5" (sans Rafael Grampá, whose Mesmo Delivery for Adhouse is an absolute must read) comes the captivating horror comic Pixu: The Mark of Evil. I fell in love with this book in its original two volume, self published format but I have to say the people at Dark Horse have done a wonderful job with the new hardcover collected edition. As an art object it is a thing to behold.

Pixu is set in an ageing apartment building that is infested/inhabited/possessed by a mysterious demonic force. Each of the four creators takes tells the tale of one set of tenants whose lives begin to weave together as the action progresses. As a work of horror Pixu is more in line with an atmospheric Asian horror film than a classic all American slasher. There are gore and guts here but they are abstracted and not the primary source of terror. Instead Pixu revels in the unseen. The "mark of evil" from the title is just that, a spreading amorphous void, an erasure, that creeps across walls and seeps through floors, an unintelligible abstraction that appears to both nurture and be nurtured by the dark secrets held by the buildings inhabitants.

The real strength here is a delightful lack of explanation. Pixu has no mad doctor to soliloquise about the specific details or archaic history of whatever demonic force is at large. There is no Rupert Giles, no recordings from Prof. Knowby. In the end it is only the confused and convincingly imperfect characters who drive the story. It is their downward spiral of frantic irrational behavior and horrific violent actions that gives the story its bite.

With all four creators primarily known as illustrators the visual storytelling on display is a cut above. Though each artist has their own distinctive style there is a very cohesive aesthetic sto the book as whole. A serious emphasis is placed on mystery and atmosphere in the the heavily shadowed and textured panels. This is heightened further by a very deliberate pacing that subtly builds suspense toward a nearly over the top climax. One of the best parts about Pixu is that though it is akin to some of the great Asian suspense and horror films one could not imagine it in any other form than comics. In that these young artists have done something a bit special in a time of comics for the sake of hollywood hysteria.

Cory Doctorow's Makers to be serialized on tor.com

"We’re not the only ones. Technology has challenged and killed businesses from every sector. Hell, IBM doesn’t make computers anymore! The very idea of a travel agent is inconceivably weird today! And the record labels, oy, the poor, crazy, suicidal, stupid record labels. Don’t get me started. "

“Capitalism is eating itself. The market works, and when it works, it commodities or obsoletes everything. That’s not to say that there’s no money out there to be had, but the money won’t come from a single, monolithic product line. The days of companies with names like ‘General Electric’ and ‘General Mills’ and ‘General Motors’ are over. The money on the table is like krill: a billion little entrepreneurial opportunities that can be discovered and exploited by smart, creative people.

from chapter one of Makers by Cory Doctorow



Cory Doctorow's next novel, Makers, is being serialized on Tor.com ahead of it's publication in October. The first of the novel's three originally appeared in serialized form on Salon in 2005 under the title Themepunks . Tor plans to re-post those chapters followed by the rest of the novel three days a week starting yesterday and continuing in to the fall. They have also added very cool illustrations to each chapter from the folks at Idiot Books that will combine in the end to form a giant mosaic.

I absolutely loved the novels first section when it was up at Salon and am looking forward to reading the rest of the book in this serialized format (and than most likely re-reading it as a novel). The novel, or at least the first section, follows a team of hardware hackers immersed in a sort of makers' revolution along with the journalist who finds herself caught up in the events. This post-industrial revolution is comprised of lone cells of entrepreneurs re-purposing the cast off remains of a waste heavy consumer society into new, wonderful and obscure inventions and possibly reigniting the innovation and manufacturing spirit of American society in the process. The driving engine for this change is a rogue CEO, Kettlewell, who delivers the quote above and is determined to retool global industry by micro-funding thousands of individual teams of inventors across the country.

In 2005 the themes and setting of the book were the product of squinting in to a desperate near future. In the current cultural and financial climate however, the story should read as reports from an optimistic version of the present. As always Doctorow shines in making tech/geek gibberish enjoyable to those less fluent in its vernacular. Here he manges again to create a fiction based on complex and serious serious ideas that has at its heart wonderful characters and their very real struggles and triumphs in an age where technology and its effects on daily life are in a maddening state of flux.

It will be interesting to see how the serialization of the book will go over. There have been a few flavors of this return to the dickensesque serial and to my knowledge none have met with massive success. However, the synergy between the themes in the work and the innovative way its being promoted and published make this a perfect candidate for this new twist on a very old format. It certainly doesn't hurt that its written by one of the pillars of the commons and the internet.

Stray Thoughts: Dad Sold Crack Here

The standard image of New York City is of a buzzing hive filled to bursting, sidewalks full of bustling humans and streets clogged to capacity with honking stop/start automobiles. These are, to honest, very genuine urban experiences but there are many others. There is a very special flavor of meditative solitude that comes from discovering a place or a moment that the city dwellers have abandoned or discarded even if momentarily. Walking an empty Brooklyn street alone near dawn can be a singular experience. A moment shared with the sleeping masses tucked away in the surrounding buildings but simultaneously yours alone. In these moments a trick of the light, an odd angle or viewpoint, an introspective state of mind, can unearth peculiar details and hidden treasures from the detritus of a landscape you may travel through every day. To me Rachael Noel Fox's photo book, Dad Sold Crack Here, captures these moments with a revelatory eye for their bittersweet beauty.

There are very few people in the photos Rachael's collected here and they are rarely the focus of the image. The people that do appear are often distracted, asleep while endlessly waiting or walking speedily out of the frame. Instead what is on display are the remains and resonance the city's inhabitants leave in their wake. Skillfully captured here they are perhaps more revealing than portraits could ever be. Here imperfect patterns rise from the faces of apartment buildings and strike out against the starkness of the sky. Worn brickwork, asphalt and concrete all track the movements of their inhabitants and the passage of time in delicately etched abstractions. Entrance ways for churches, hospitals and nightclubs stand un-entered, there haunting memories and kinetic potentials left intact. Common sights of industrial warnings, forgotten advertisements for phantom products, graffiti both intimate and magnificent all co-mingle across the landscape. Each is reshaped in equal measures by the ware and grind urban progress and reborn in equal glory by the gentle touch of the camera lens.

Some of my favorite images in the book are of alleyways, narrow crevices, forgotten corners and other abandoned spaces that have been reclaimed by a resilient natural element whether it be water, plants, flowers or of course cats. The various cats, along with one rather brazen pigeon, are the primary visible animal presence in this collection. This seems rather fitting to me, as I have always felt that city cats, particularly bodega cats and strays, are really the keepers of the forget places. They know of secret spaces and hidden treasures that, lost in the steam and noise of progress, may have gone untouched by humans for generations, at least until someone with an inquisitive eye and camera at the ready follows one down an alley and into the cities neglected heart bring them back for us all to see.

Buy Dad Sold Crack Here.

Also check out the Rae Fox tumblog for a daily fix.

Stray Thoughts on Rebirth of a Nation

I finally manged to catch the theatrical version of Paul D. Miller / DJ Spooky's Rebirth of a Nation at MOMA last night and at the end of the day it seems like a missed opportunity for Miller. To be fair I'm going to assume that the performance piece is significantly more free and interesting then the stultified for dvd version we saw. The inane voice over and ham-fisted introduction and prologue sections really hurt the overall product. The narrator is either pointing out what is blatantly obvious or making intelligence generalities or overreaching inferences. The project was to remix the original silent film in order to draw out and deconstruct the racial supremacist imagery and ideology embedded in it. If you need to explain to the viewer what they are seeing, or draw out connections to the present day, then it project has failed and should have been taken back to the editing room. I'm not certain Miller's film isn't capable of standing on its own feet, it probably is, but in this presentation it's never given the chance.

Once you get through the intro and tune out the intermittent narration things get better. The score, the work of Spooky in collaboration with Kronos Quartet is pretty haunting and subtle. It works best when it is counteracting the action on the screen, creating moments of still anticipation where there would be dramatic builds and feelings of emotionless syncopated progression where the original film would have crescendos. That said, I really wanted there would be more slicing, dicing and re-contextualizing of the original film. I wanted further use of the digital effects which appear so sparingly and with such little conviction or courage as to render themselves ineffective. It's only in the climatic five or so minutes that the "DJ as Director" lets rip and begins using focusing and perspective effect in connection with the inserted digital graph lines to deconstruct the nuanced textures of race and power at play within the scenes. If the entire piece was worked over in this manner I think it would be much more provocative and insightful. Instead the film reads more like a paired down and re-scored version of the original than a insight fueling deconstruction.

What's most interesting to me about Griffith's original Birth of a Nation is that it's really the first American movie blockbuster. the film is encoded in to the very core DNA of the US Summer Blockbuster and main stream film as a whole. Griffith's stylistic tricks used to elicit extremes of emotion in large audiences are part of movie history and I don't believe you can separate those theatrical devices from the sexist, racist and classist ideologies that underpin the film. I wish I had and encyclopedic knowledge of film, because I'm certain one could trace many of the racially charged shots in Griffith's film throughout the history of movies. That idiotic/menacing black-faced grin repeated endlessly throughout Hollywood's cannon right up to the present day. I think that would be more telling, more informative to the present moment, than the timid deconstruction that has ended up on the Rebirth DVD.