BEST MUSIC WRITING – READING

housingworks

On Monday November 2 I’ll be participating in the BEST MUSIC WRITING 2009 launch party in New York City – a night of readings hosted by Greil Marcus. It goes down at SoHo’s fantastic Housing Works Cafe, 7pm. Afterparty at Puck Fair around the corner.

Along with yours truly, there’ll be eight other authors from the anthology reading, with a bit of audience Q&A thrown in. I like it when critics get out and speak their words in public.

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Monday, November 2, 2009, 7pm
Housing Works Cafe
126 Crosby Street, NY
Free (books to donate highly encouraged)

Featuring:
Greil Marcus, Guest Editor

and 2009 Contributors:
Josh Eells, Charles Talyors, Jace Clayton, Nick Sylvester, Carrie Brownstein, Jody Rosen, Paul Ford, William Hogeland, Jesse Serwer.

NEW YORKER FEST

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This Saturday I will speak at the New Yorker Festival, as part of a panel on The Music Biz: Remixing the Industry. It ain’t cheap, but with folks like lifelong industry uber-insider Danny Goldberg, Downtown Records boss Josh Deutsch, and bassist Melvin Gibbs in the mix, discussion should be lively.

I mean, there are only a few more years where we can actually sit down and talk about ‘the music biz’ with ‘record executives’ and such, so let’s make the most of it. And/or help the sick patient die faster.

R.I.P. OiNK.

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Later this month I’ll be performing in Copenhagen, and so many things are happening in November that my subconscious mind won’t let me think about it yet.

FREE GOWANUS GUACHARACA

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it goes down today, Wednesday Sept. 16 – I’ll be spinning an all-cumbia set at the Treehouse party. Free! It’s a gentle evening for the 9-5 set; I start around 10:30pm, so show up early… It goes down at Littlefield in Gowanus, alongside Treeboy, Gamall, and Raspberry Jones.

When I say all-cumbia, I mean it! Material you can find in many many places, such as Mexican shops in Brooklyn, Chicago, Los Angeles, Atlanta, etc., or via online stateside shops from Discos El Papi & Barba Azul. The point is, cumbia is close. So this set will contain no crunk cumbia, no ‘cumbia digital’, no bloggy remixes.

Expect current Mexican cumbia sonidera, with an emphasis on tracks that shout out Nueva York, like…

[audio:https://negrophonic.com/mp3/Formula_5-LaCumbiaMaestra.mp3]

Formula 5 – La Cumbia Maestra (a re-post but hey)

…alongside more classic material from the 60s 70s & 80s, like:

[audio:https://negrophonic.com/mp3/Andres Landero-Canto a Cartagena (Betty Ochoa de Anillo).mp3]

Andres Landero – Canto a Cartagena (written by Betty Ochoa de Anillo)

And be prepared for potentially cheesy sad love songs, like:

[audio:https://negrophonic.com/mp3/Los_Star_Boys-La_Culpa.mp3]

Los Star Boys – La Culpa (“we had problems, the blame goes to both of us”)

…and, darker still, songs about death:

[audio:https://negrophonic.com/mp3/LUCY GONZALES Y SU COMBO ORENCE – LA LEY PODEROSA.MP3]

Lucy Gonzales y su Combo Orence – La Ley Poderosa

Great lyrics on this one, “The Powerful Law”. I have cumbia songs about Satan, but I don’t play those in public. On a tangentially related note, Spanish uses the same word for eschatology and scatology!

In closing – come through, come early, and enjoy this last one, an instrumental about the Lone Ranger’s scraper (in which we hear the sounds of his horse), from a DJ presumably named after Keanu Reeves’ character in The Matrix:

[audio:https://negrophonic.com/mp3/D.J. Neo-Guacharaca del Llanero Solitario.mp3]

DJ Neo – Guacharaca del Llanero Solitario

TREEHOUSE!

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my alter-ego, Jace Clayton, will be performing a free ‘special all-Cumbia set’ in Brooklyn a few Wednesdays from now. Gowanus guacharaca! September 16, Treehouse @ Littlefield. An all-cumbia set is the sort of thing that only makes sense in my hometown, so come on through…

eflier

BROOKLYN WE GO SOFT

this Friday, come join us @ Glasslands in Brooklyn for another installment of the Dutty Artz party, New York Tropical.

Expect cheap dutty fun, populated by healthy pterodactyls and pansexual tiger cubs. We like Glasslands because it’s on the edge of things. I’ve been out of town for the last 4 or 5 of these, am looking forward…

Fri. June 26th BROOKLYN

music by: DJ /rupture. Matt Shadetek. Geko Jones. Lamin Fofana.

Glasslands, 289 Kent. williamsburg $5 before 11pm, $8 after.

WHAT WAS THE HIPSTER?

[oldie but a goodie: Hipster Olympics!]

 

What Was the Hipster? An Afternoon Panel. Saturday, April 11, 2009, 2pm – 4pm. The New School University, Theresa Lang Center, Arnhold Hall, 55 West 13th Street (btwn 5th & 6th aves), 2nd floor.

Mark Greif (n+1)
Jace Clayton (dj/Rupture)
Christian Lorentzen (Harper’s)
+ Special Guests TBA

This event is FREE, and promises to be fun. Audience goading heckling participation is strongly encouraged. Format is: Mark, Christian, and myself will each present a 10 minute essay, then we open things up to general debate. The whole shebang will be published in pamplet form later this year.

Who was the turn-of-the-century hipster? Who is free enough of the hipster taint to write the hipster’s history without contempt or nostalgia? If you’re openly excited about a hipster symposium, are you still allowed to attend?

I will be discussing: thick Mexican mustaches, my aversion to hipster antipathy, what lusting after a drug dealer’s 16yr old daughter in the Peruvian jungle has to say about hipsterism, and the internet.

ANTICIPATORY MIXING

This month I am spending more time in transit (airplane, bus, taxi, car, subway) or waiting for transit than in my apartment… Nettle @ Brandeis was a blast — a very full schedule too. Bostonist review of live show .

threefifthsofnettle

[three fifths of Nettle @ an impromptu concert, from W&W flickr]

Filastine, who joined us on percussion, plays in Boston tonite. Free!

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thanks to all who ordered K-K-Kumbia. there’s been a bit of a lag, but CDs will be sent off today if they havent already gone out.

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& elsewhere, my dutty associates have been upping mixes nonstop, all in prep for a party we are throwing with weekend. I’ll be in D.F. but the rest of the gang is uniting @ Glasslands in Williamsburg for:

and here are the various mixes, all of these DJs will be @ the Dutty ARtz party this friday:

Matt Shadetek – Get Drunk & Lose Your Phone

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Kingdom – mix 4 Lower End Spasm

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Geko Jones – La Nueva Guaracha

STRAND + MONDOMIX CHART

quick reminder that I’ll be speaking alongside Jedediah Purdy @ the Strand tonite, in a discussion moderated by Mark Grief, editor of n+1. Says Mark: “Audience participation is very much invited. Do you want to know why it’s better for Jace to deliberately hand his music over to bootleggers with names like ‘Vampiros’ than go through record distributors? Or why Jed, liberal stalwart, seems in his new book to be telling everybody to go read Edmund Burke and Adam Smith?

Strand Bookstore, 828 Broadway at 12th Street, THURSDAY, MARCH 12, 7 PM.

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And the kind folks at Mondomix asked me to put together a chart of current global hotness. They found some nice youtubery to accompany my writeup as well..

LANGSTON RUPTURE

THEY ASKED ME AT THE PTA
IS IT TRUE THAT NEGROES——?
I SAID, ASK YOUR MAMA.

aym logo

a few weeks ago, WNYC invited me to make a piece responding to one of the 12 ‘chapters’ from Langston Hughes fantastic 1961 poem, Ask Your Mama. I’m a fan of his work, so it was an honor to step inside his words. I chose part 8: “Is it True?”, a powerful piece about Moe Asch & Alan Lomax & unknowability & suburbia, among other things…

The results can be heard streaming here, and will be broadcast on WNYC 93.9fm today and tomorrow, along with an interview (in which I make the claim that Ask your mama? is the central question of black existence).

Ask Your Mama (also check Horn of Plenty performed by Beans)

part 8 poem text

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