- NPR wrote a piece just in time for “Dilla Day”, about the legacy of the late James Yancey.
Why J Dilla May Be Jazz’s Latest Great Innovator.
“Dilla’s reach stretches way beyond hip-hop: For one, he’s recently cast a long shadow over contemporary jazz. He never belonged to jazz’s inner circle, but since his death in 2006 from a rare blood disease, his legacy has helped pull the genre back into kissing contact with modern popular music.
The jazz world today finds itself swamped with young talent eager for reinvestment in the discourse of contemporary culture. The shift has roots that run in a lot of directions. It’s a reaction to the neo-traditional revivalism that capped the last century, and to jazz’s withered commercial infrastructure in the wake of the 1990s CD bubble. Add to that the simple fact that millennial jazz musicians grew up listening mostly to hip-hop, R&B and rock.”
- Women In Video Games (Damsels In Distress…), put in similar situations over and over andoverandoveroverover.
- Relatedly, The Hawkeye Initiative is pretty brilliant in calling out mainstream superhero shit for their years and years of blatant misogyny and sexism.
- I’m super digging the idea of Brian Wood writing an all female X-Men team. I haven’t been dedicated (“cared” is probably what I really mean) to an on-going X-Men book since Joss Whedon’s Astonishing, so perhaps Brian and amazing artist Olivier Coipel can bring mutants back into my life. And let’s be real… the females of the X-Verse are in a lot of ways more interesting and rounded than the men. At least when they’re written well and not drawn as pieces of meat for drooling, way too old fanboys.
- Local (to me) rap group Atmosphere recently announced a new “Welcome to MN” tour. But that’s not what I wanna share. What I wanna share is the song they’ve created with each of the opening acts on the tour, it’s called “It Ain’t The Prettiest”:
- I got Mixed Blood Majority tickets this morning, along with Cecil Otter’s first solo show in some time. MBM is a super group of sorts, at least when it comes to the Twin Cities music scene. The group features vocalists from both No Bird Sing and Kill The Vultures, and production from Doomtree‘s Lazerbeak. Pretty excited, as all three members are some of my favorite local musicians. Here’s the latest thing they threw up on their Soundcloud page:
If you preorder their album right now you’ll get the album, a shirt, a poster, and a random CD from either of their other bands for just 12 bucks (without shipping). Good deal.
It was a real pleasure just so sit and talk with you. I listened very carefully to what you had to say about this compelling history, and I’ve since read the script and found it in all the detail in which it describe these monumental events and in the compassionate portraits of all the principal characters, both powerful and moving. I can’t account for how at any given moment I feel the need to explore life as opposed to another, but I do know that I can only do this work if I feel almost as if there is no choice; that a subject coincides inexplicably with a very personal need and a very specific moment in time. In this case, as fascinated as I was by Abe, it was the fascination of a grateful spectator who longed to see a story told, rather than that of a participant. That’s how I feel now in spite of myself, and though I can’t be sure that this won’t change, I couldn’t dream of encouraging you to keep it open on a mere possibility. I do hope this makes sense Steven, I’m glad you’re making the film, I wish you the strength for it, and I send both my very best wishes and my sincere gratitude to you for having considered me.”
Our attention isn’t boundless. Our time is finite—even as we try to extract value out of every second (we don’t have time to waste). We cannot respond to every utterance, click on every link, read every post. We have to choose even as the possibility of something else, something wonderful, lures us to search and linger. Demands on our attention, injunctions for us to communicate, participate, share—ever shriller and more intense—are like so many speed-ups on the production line, attempts to extract from us whatever bit of mindshare is left.
- The newest music on my family’s label (Black Lantern Music) is from a guy called SJ Mellia. Here’s a little taste off the album:
- The candidaite in Maine who likes World of Warcraft… yeah, apparently she’s getting attacked for it. The Maine GOP party has written: “In Colleen’s online fantasy world, she gets away with crude, vicious and violent comments like the ones below. Maine needs a State Senator that lives in the real world, not in Colleen’s fantasy world”. This is a new level of stupidity and uselessness.
- Nazi Buddha ‘Came From Outer Space’. Which isn’t the official title I guess; it’s just the one to get you to click on the link. It works. Turns out this ancient Buddha statue, discovered in the 1930′s via a Nazi organized archeological dig, was carved some 1000 years ago out of a meteorite that crashed to the Earth’s surface some 15,000 years ago. This has Indiana Jones written all over it.
Also from the BBC:
- Hubble Telescope Captures One of the Most Extraordinary Views of Universe to Date. The image comes from a result of astronomers pointing the Hubble towards a very specific patch of sky for around 22 days. Letting in 500-ish hours of light to the scope. It captured around 5,500 separate galaxies, including the farthest it saw, UDFy-38135539. Just to give you an idea, that galaxy is over 13 BILLION light years away. Which is of course so mind-blowing it is almost incomprehensible…
- Hey I made a new remix! It got a little dark… yeeeaaaahhh sorry about that:
Just to give you an idea of how different it is, here’s the original:
- Mikey Mictlan of Doomtree has a new album out. And he’s offering it up for FREE (but give him a few bucks, eh):
My new record is finally up and available! It is my third full-length under the Mild Maynyrdguise, and I’m very proud of it. Again, it’s called “Hills RunRed” (which is the name of one of the first spaghetti westerns, but I liked the “red” theme too). I had been chronicling my process of concepting and creating it on this blog, but you probably didn’t see that… and I’m really awful at trying to describe it, so I’ll let the other guys in Black Lantern Musicsell the concept for me:
“I know what you’re thinking, there’s not enough Wild West themed narrative sample based electronica concept albums that are as I just described but manage at the same time to not be cheesy in any way. Well the ever adventurous Mild Maynyrd, who hails from the other side of the pond so is very possibly a cattle rustling gunslinger himself (though I couldn’t confirm either way as I value my life), has cooked up ‘Hills Run Red’ for Black Lantern Music to remedy this! Its a peach, its a trip, and it tells a ripping yarn too.”
I thought that was pretty funny. Anyways, yeah it’s a bit of a risk. Of course. Just trusting that people have enough patience to get through one track (they’re each longer than 16 minutes) is itself a risk. But hey, I’m super proud of this thing and I think it’s very unique. Though I know I can still do better. This is the cover:
Here’s the embed:
It can be streamed for free, or bought for the price of a Gatorade here: Mild Maynyrd Bandcamp
- Fascinating article — via NPR — about one of the risks of the new Air Traffic Control system the FAA is trying to implement around the country. The next generation of ATC is based in GPS and internet, as oppose to radar and old-school communications systems. In the past airplanes used transponders that interacted with ground based radar stations sprinkled around the country. With NextGen, aircraft will eventually be forced to have a GPS transponder system called ADS-B (Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast). It supposedly works great: fast (with taking out the simple act of compulsory reporting points and having the A/C’s basic information always verified controllers have that much more time to deal with more pressing matters), reliable (GPS gets down to tens of feet with it’s accuracy), and efficient (taking out all the formality and making it automated).
But as this article points out, every system has its weaknesses. In dry runs, several hackers have already been able to corrupt the system, including inserting aircraft (an ADS-B signal) that isn’t really there. Of course, this is why we have dry runs, to hash these things out.
- I have posted another single from my upcoming album on Soundcloud. It comes out Monday, and I’m super excited to share it with people!
Downtown, Ramallah is bustling. The city’s commercial and geographical center is shaped like a starfish, with five arteries meeting at Al Manara square, a plaza surrounded by four concrete lions, each said to represent one of the families who originally settled the city. Every day, the city’s population more than doubles in size; villagers from the surrounding area arrive to buy and sell goods. Fruit and vegetable vendors—mostly young men from northern Palestine—hawk Israeli carrots, dates, tangerines, and eggplants. Coffee sellers with red fezzes on their heads pour Arabic coffee from elaborate silver vessels. Teenage girls peruse shop windows. Money-changers shift eagerly outside of a juice bar, and buses and shared taxi cabs roll in and out of the central station.
- Really insightful post from my guy PEESHE (over in Australia) about using the MPC for live shows. Specifically the MPC2000XL. Number 5 is something I always try to remind myself of. This is where he blogs now, mostly. What an excellent collective site. Dang. Beautiful design.
- And speaking of collectives, the new Minneapolis/St. Paul collective F.I.X. (“F to the I to the X”) is giving away three free albums in one nifty package until their debut collective show Friday the 17th: No Bird Sing’s “Theft of Commons”, Kill The Vultures’ “Ecce Beast”, and Kristoff Krane’s “Hunting For Father”. The last I’ve spoke of on here before. Probably multiple times. It’s an awesome album. The other two are as well. And hey, the shit is FREE. Here’s the Bandcamp stream:
- Hey, independent comics retailers/press… wanna know a good way to not sell your shit? By ripping on any of Warren Ellis’ friends in the public net-square. This includes blogs, Facebook, in this case Twitter. His wrath will be swift and severe. And I’m betting his site gets more views than yours. Not to mention that is just being an asshole. Saying that shit on Twitter.
The social, cultural, and political turbulence chronicled by such off-radar newspapers as Rat Subterranean News, Screw, San Francisco Oracle, East Village Other, Black Mask, and Los Angeles Free Press, to name only a few, is commonly overlooked in mainstream histories. As a result, what often remains is the same scattershot of familiar imagery from the late 1960s/early 1970s that’s lingered in the nation’s collective memory: hippies dancing with flowers in their hair at the Monterey Pop Festival during the Summer of Love; Timothy Leary at the Human Be-In at Golden Gate Park in 1967, urging the Haight-Ashbury crowds to “Turn on, tune in, drop out”; U.S. military tanks on city streets during the race riots in Detroit and Newark; the rise of the Hell’s Angels as the new American outlaws; and the Kent State University shootings and Mary Ann Vecchio’s haunting scream.
- Well, I was whoring myself out yesterday on Facebook (not Twitter, for some reason) so I might as well do it here too. Heh.
The record I’ve been working on is now completely finished, it is called “HILLS RUN RED“. Mostly Electronic, though the break-beats and turntablism of Hip-Hop remain. A Western, built from 3 tracks and clocking in around 53 s0me minutes. It’s a long, draining album, with a narrative arc and even some Bob Dylan sampling. I know I can do better, and I will, but it’s probably the best thing I’ve ever done. I threw a single up on Soundcloud yesterday. It’s called “Dawn Rider”:
“Perhaps she was the perfect symbol for a girl in the process of growing up: the endless drama, life on the edge, the self-improvement, the search for Mr Right – and the Mr Wrongs. But however tragic her story and seductive her gaze, the Marilyn saga seemed suddenly rather narcissistic – another set of unseen photographs revealed, another conspiracy theory put forward, another re-evaluation, another anniversary. Perhaps as I reached the age she was when she died, we parted company. Now I couldn’t compare myself with her any more, and had to get on with real life alone.”
From the street, the two decomposing bodies were nearly invisible, concealed in an overgrown lot alongside worn-out car tires and a moldy sofa. The teenagers had been shot, stripped to their underwear and left on a deserted block. They were just the latest victims of foul play whose remains went undiscovered for days after being hidden deep inside Detroit’s vast urban wilderness — a crumbling wasteland rarely visited by outsiders and infrequently patrolled by police. Abandoned and neglected parts of the city are quickly becoming dumping grounds for the dead — at least a dozen bodies in 12 months’ time. And authorities acknowledge there’s little they can do.
“You can shoot a person, dump a body and it may just go unsolved” because of the time it may take for the corpse to be found, officer John Garner said. The bodies have been purposely hidden or discarded in alleys, fields, vacant houses, abandoned garages and even a canal. Seven of the victims are believed to have been slain outside Detroit and then dumped within the city.
You know, digging into all these old Westerns and looking at the history of the American West, the American Wilderness, has some context here. People find it fascinating and dangerous: the unexplored country of the unknown, terrifying and exciting in its desolation. Part of the reason why marshal law and crime ran so rampant was because of that desolation, it’s easier to kill someone who’s done you wrong in the middle of nowhere, rather than haul them to the nearest town where who knows if there’s even law enforcement, much less a jail. But I find vast blocks of inhabitable, abandoned urban waste and decay probably more frightening. This article explains that parts of the city aren’t even viewed by police anymore, they don’t even roll through. But even if they do, there’s so many crevices and nooks in an urban environment, people can basically do whatever they damn well please. Perhaps if this keeps happening, and happens to other major metropolitan cities, these deserted cities will become the new American West. Desolate but claustrophobic city-scapes, where anything goes and anyone who remains is forced to police themselves. Scary stuff.
