In Serbia a lot of people hate me because they want to westernise, not understanding that the western world is bipolar, with very good things and very bad things. Since they don’t have experience of the west, they even believe that western shit is pie.–Emir Kusturica

Despite my predilection for hiding in my room events overran me recently, out into the Richmond and in front of what used to be the jock-lite Last Day Saloon and has now become the yuppie-lite Rockit Room. True there was a birthday to celebrate and true two people had invited me but I was a little shocked at how readily I had consented to being taken away from my room. Maybe the mood was just there, perhaps the moon was in a special phase– I dunno. It may have been because two Serbian/Rom style bands were playing.

Years ago I dwelled in a dank little hovel called Leather Tongue which was so similar to the dank little hovels I hid away in on purpose that I kept going. It didn’t pay well and it didn’t help any minor mental issues I might have had but it did introduce me to plenty of movies I would never have chosen to hunt down and rent on my own. After renting it out to hip Mission scum a thousand times I checked out “Black Cat White Cat” by Emir Kusturica which drilled into my mind and deposited some of the most flamboyant images ever captured on film as well as some of the most scintillating music ever, er, captured on film. If Fellini had been into carnies more than circus freaks and was thrilled by saturated colors (and been Serbian) it would have been his movie. I travelled back in time a couple of years and caught his earlier festival success, “Underground“.

Last year at a different job I was hawking shit on eBay when I pulled the soundtrack to “Underground” from a bin of CDs. My hands were shaking and I played it on the office stereo. Then I played it again and again until I was quite certain that everyone was going to kill me so I had my boss price it out. Not in the store’s computer– Argentinian release so it’s $1.99… Awesome! To this day I think this is the only CD that I have danced to with another person. Waiting for my ride to The Rockit Room I played a couple choice cuts and bobbed around while finishing my roommate’s beer.

The first band of the evening took their identity-crisis cues from Hector Babenco’s depression-era drama “Ironweed“, glorifying the hobo/drifter lifestyle by not bathing and playing guitar, a washboard and a bass made from a washtub, broom handle and a single tightly wound length of twine. The kids, friends of the birthday girl, ate this up and had skipped their showers special for the event. I tried not to be bothered by this and watched them play but wondering what to expect from the next two groups in the bill.

Zoyres was a quartet: full kit, tuba, clarinet/sax and trombone. Fascinating shit, ultimately danceable and exactly what I was hoping for. It’s weird how the tuba took over where the bass would be and the trombone player kicked ass playing with a brash style reminiscent (tho probably because I can only name two others: my dad and Labamba from the Conan O’Brien show) of Don Drummond. The Brass Menazeri was even more bombastic with nine members, three tuba type instruments, accordian, clarinet, saxaphones and trumpets along with two drummers (a hand bass and a couple rack snares) and vocals. Both are local and I would recommend you check out either if your local is the Bay Area.

So the evening went quite well even tho the drinks were horribly over-priced, most of the attendees living as caricatures running around like sugar-addled, snot-nosed brats and my getting home past my bedtime. I should just stop here…

But it makes you think, don’t it? So far as I could tell everyone in these bands were American born and bred but both bands played distinctly Eastern European (with some Klezmer mixed in) gypsy music with no obvious Americanization taking place. It’s as authentic as The Dropkick Murphys but somehow entirely less offensive. Hell, the opening band, The Inkwell Rhythm Makers, co-opted not only their music but their dress and shtick from impression of a time long gone. Does America, appropriate outside culture so readily and so completely that there’s no bothering with integrating it with our own? Or do we just not really have any cultural identity not relating to commerce so we borrow heavily from places that have more than a couple centuries under their belts?

Ysabella Dolfin wrote in her blog:

Watching local access Asian TV
In Japanese. A cooking show. I have no idea what any of the ingredients are… but I recognize ground beef and some type of musrhoom. I am getting the feeling they are cooking “American” food. But they are serving it over rice with sliced fresh spinach. The theme song is some kind of Japanese rap music.

Now that’s a proper culutral mish-mash– anything the Japanese have done since 1945 has basically been one form of cocktail or another. Pop music, art, fashion, day to day living, advertising, food… it seems that every aspect of Japan has been touched by America and has incorporated, in the most fucked up way possible, the source material by taking what they think they understand and dumping tradition on top. Hell, the Japanese advertising industry has essentially become the hallmark of the Japanese approach to international relations. Why are we so fascinating to them? Cowboys? The independence of owning your own car? Where the hell is our culture out in the world that’s not a McDonald’s?

PS- my efforts to make these pictures integrate into this post have failed but I’m sick of the second one disappearing so I’m gonne give up. Deal with it.

[2] Comments

Thirty years of working just to put food on the plate. Once you went to Paris but the place wasn’t that great.

Before the European adventure became a right of passage for recent college graduates visiting Paris seemed to be strictly a behavior of the ultra-rich, idealistic artistes and Joe-Schmo working-man after securing a good percentage on a mortgage and a decade straight of enduring helpful suggestions from the wife about how to blaze through the meager savings desperately accrued through hard labor and drinking the cheaper beer. Most never made it across the Atlantic and it’s a wonder that Hawaii hasn’t become the island version of Las Vegas. (more…)

[4] Comments

Many of you will have seen one or both of these two clips. Still, the quality of design here demands another golf clap.

The first makes a graphic reality of middle-school teachers’ dreams. It is the cartographer’s logic summarizing Middle Eastern geopolitics.

This second is a similar paired down mother-google-earth, time lapse map of US conflict. Or rather, an atlas. The US interests are astonishingly global.

It is worth more as an education on forgotten violence, than as a tacky face-off between political parties for fewest war fatalities.

Other inclusions about Secret CIA Prisons, the Retaking of Fallujah and Intelligence footage are jolt to the preferred mood. The viewer, me, was accustomed to the tone of the aforementioned, mildly apolitical forays into mappage.

Check out the rest of the site. I can’t work out whether it is the creation of socially motivated researchers or entrapment by a government agency, but I like it…

Another impeccably designed map. Satisfyingly simple, like a venn diagram.

There’s also a belter about religions’ roles in all the comedy we call humanness.

Good Night and God Design.

[2] Comments

I apologize in advance for a second consecutive post that is again heavily youtube reliant.

However, if you take 18 minutes out of your day, please do so for this collection of three clips … that means you, Dave Cohn … brew a cup of tea if you need to multitask.

In introduction, although I want George to do his own talking, George Galloway is an old school socialist that was expelled from the Labour Party in October 2003 when a party body decided that statements he had made in opposition to the 2003 invasion of Iraq had brought the party into disrepute. He now leads the Respect Party and is Respect Party’s only representative in the British Parliament. He is a vehement opponent of Bush, Blair and the Invasion on Iraq. He also hates certain western media conglomerates, or rather … all of them.

Because the British could not handle Galloway’s inflammatory and unapologetic rhetoric, the Americans came gunning for him. Whilst he was fighting a legal battle against London’s Daily Telegraphfor reporting on questionable and biased accusations against Galloway of accepting bribes from Saddam Hussein, Galloway was facing the same baseless inquiry from the US Senate!!!!

To be fair and balanced, although I wouldn’t Galloway’s comments about the media and Bush, Galloway is not the perfect politician. He made the mistake of being a contestant on Celebrity Big Brother. Don’t you think he used a palatable chat and millions of viewers to cleverly convey his political agenda?

I think the closest America has had to a politician like Galloway was James Traficant but then he was corrupt liar and Galloway is not.

No Comments

It’s been my intention to get a “to-do” list together but as of yet I only remember when I actually find the time and patience to write in my journal and review the latest failings… Been off track a good solid month by now; I’ve run the gauntlet of the holiday season not much worse for wear but still reeling from a variety of events and circumstances which required an easing of my ritualistic everyday existence… I’m a creature of habit but when times demand my flexibility I somehow find a way to loosen the noose and roll with it– finding a way to tighten the noose back up has proven to be a bit more elusive…

What’s embarrassing is that it didn’t take much to rip my schedule apart… Christmas is technically only one day out of the year and as my family lives halfway across town there’s not even any requirement that I take time off work, book travel arrangements and figure out how to pack a suitcase so that all my presents fit coming and going… Maybe I felt more pressed because I’ve recently taken on a fifth shift at work and suddenly I have to get shit done on two days when I used to have three… Nothing can be more taxing than finding yourself aimless in the aisles of a store you would never choose to patronize for yourself wondering what you could possibly justify as a caring and thoughtful gift… If anyone was keeping score in the family I’m the clear loser but in the end I did find the time to get the bare minimum for a continued loving familial relationship… Just…

New Year’s provided more of a challenge for my day to day as there were suddenly a lot more people in town who I would love to spend time with except I don’t have the time… Fortunately the bulk of everyone who was in town are all friends with one another so quality could be found in quantity but I still needed to flip my schedule around and started showing up at work at 9:30 instead of 10:30, or 12:00 or 1:00 as per usual… Making time for the out of towners bears the cost of putting off the people who live in town who you see more frequently but still not as frequently as anyone would like and so after everyone leaves again you’re suddenly booked for two weeks catching up with the people you’ve just been neglecting… In between quick bites and cups of coffee you’re expected to do laundry and make dinner and buy groceries and then it’s sleeping pills and whiskey to make sure you fall asleep early enough to wake up early enough to make it to work early enough so you can leave early and do that thing you planned on doing after work…

Instead of spending your lunch hour writing in your journal keeping track of what’s going on and how you feel about it you’re taking half hour lunches and feeling tired all the time… At some point it should be possible to reassert the normal order of events and find some sense of balance but here we go with another week coming in early and dealing with all sorts of surprises…

God I wish for a toggle that worked both ways… I think I’m pretty good about flipping when I’m travelling but then I come back and it takes me a month to recuperate from a week away… When you’re out of town you know that you can’t run home to eat a sandwich so you’re going to have to drop ten bucks on a meal… You don’t understand how to make your way from point A to point B so there’s no walking and you’re spending money on subways, cabs, buses or kicking down for gas… It’s like you’re another person entirely– who’s this spendthrift going to museums like they understand culture? Who’s this posh bastard drinking pints of premium at the bar?

Then you get home and you’re scrounging to make up for lost time, lost work hours, fighting the disorienting effects of not being away… It’s almost impossible to make dinner suddenly and you’re waiting in line across the street for a falafel… Laundry becomes and alien chore and don’t even think about trying to get up early to get to work early or sitting down for an hour and writing in your journal…

And for some reason I think if I just get this “to do” list pasted on the wall I’ll look at it everyday while I get dressed and it’ll wrench my little brain back into shape… This cog turns here and this piston pumps and suddenly I’m back on track getting shit done, being productive, feeling settled and managing my time… Then maybe I can get around to all those projects I’ve been trying to keep straight in the back of my mind that should have been on the list for months or years…

[3] Comments