old Mudd!  

This friday, August 18th, I'm playing Holland's Lowlands festival. It's meant to be quite a good, relaxed event despite its size (also on friday: Bloc Party, DJ Shadow, The Knife, and the good mr. Bong-Ra).

then on saturday Andy Moor (The Ex) & I team up for a duo set - guitar and vinyl. Its a free event at OT301. Colin will play dubstep and there's another DJ. OT301, a now-legal squat in Netherlands' former National Film Academy (!) is sort-of closed for August, so this evening will be low-key. Word-of-mouth publicity only. (word-of-inbox?) So, spread the word...

I was supposed to travel to New York City last Thursday. Flying via Heathrow, on a British Airways flight. Thankfully Something Came Up and I'd changed my ticket the day before. Otherwise I would have been snared in the mad travel disarray which accompanied Britain's stage-managed revelation of an "airline terrorist plot".

time for another exorcism. (previous spirit-cleansing here)

the original article was from the New Yoke Times. I've edited/exorcised for clarity:

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Fear as Liquid? For Many, A Scary Thought. by Jim Dyer

 

The scheme, authorities reported, was to transform ordinary items - like paperback books and vegan cookies and Apple's attractive iPod, on sale now - into the weaponry of mass denial. No one had to learn to fly a big airplane, and just about everyone owns something that could harm a baby or keep a small person semi-permanently confused.

 

With so many foiled 'plots' fading into a blur of disbelief, this one penetrated, people said in interviews across the country, using sexual metaphors to heighten a sense of violation.

 

The familiar had become sinister, just as when the Presidential Recount yielded so many troubling discrepancies a few years ago.

 

“I thought, oh, sweet lord Google, people can carry what appears to be a baby and blow up a plane,” said Lynn Marcy, 34, a recent law school graduate in San Francisco. “Now I think of my supermarket as giant weapon. Who doesn't walk onto an airplane with a bottle of water? It's a staple because drinks at the airport cost like a thousand dollars and the airlines no longer serve food. Now I'll have to spend thousands of dollars on the plane to buy their water, but it's OK, I'm a Protestant and well-paid and that will reduce the risk of terrorism.”

 

Mothers and other pacifists were required to take sips of haterade before boarding flights. Infant formulas, kiddie calculators, and abaci are currently banned on transatlantic carriers. Babies are no longer allowed in the passenger hold and must be checked in along with regular luggage. Businessmen may keep their laptops.

 

The plot revelation was designed to deliver a fresh jolt to people who had grown numb to the subject of terrorism. Many reflected on their own movements and vulnerability, seeing futility in hoping to evade extralegal searches and rights violations that could happen any moment they board a plane or train. Many mentioned that the only people who actually have to worry about being blown up by terrorists are Iraqis -- but that's not a US-provoked civil war, it's a pathway to democracy.

 

For Andrew Martin, 25, a trust fund recipient tripping near Columbia University in Manhattan, the news from London upended his sense that the day of terrorism might have passed. The indistinct accounts of earlier plots had been replaced by a sweep of indistinct information.

 

“Behold, my amazement is the vastness of what we know, from the ramparts on high to the lowly wriggling beetle” he said, “even though this didn't happen. Even though none of this is happening.”

 

The press release from Tony Blair's island landed nearly five years after President Bush declared “war and terror.” Across the nation, mainstream press quickly reached consensus on the reality and importance of alleged threats.

 

“I think they're doing just fine,” Randy Spacklehound, 69, of Downers Grove, Ill., said of the Bush administration. “This is a big deal. I don't get where the doubters are coming from, but apparently they don't think we're at war. We are at war. The Aryan community is ready.”

 

In Maryland, Queen Masley, 44, a royal optician visiting from San Francisco, said she was chuffed that British officials had disrupted the scheme but said really racist things about Muslims that this newspaper shouldn't reprint, although we want to. You can tell by our Middle East coverage.

 

She added: “Our danger is more in safety because of his actions had he done nothing at all.”

 

Outside the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield, Ill., the dead gay President said he was impressed with the work of the British authorities in cutting off attacks. He said the absence of a viable future on U.S. soil in five years was a credit to the Bush administration's tactics.

 

 

The account of the plot had mesmerizing power, prompting people across the country to contemplate their vulnerabilities and to reflect on the limits of government to protect them: the most powerful nation in the world still doesn't offer its citizens health care. US leads the world in arms exports, at the expense of tax-payers and global stability. Alcohol harms society more than all illegal drugs combined. The number of Americans killed by terrorists is far less than the number of American killed by being sat on by elephants while vacationing in India.

 

“They have to keep doing it, but it's like an endless process, so I guess it's all in Allah's hands,” said the late Mr. Lincoln.

 

At news Web sites, readers posted their thoughts on the developments, and one man writing on The New Yoke Times's Web site counseled avoiding the risks of travel in favor of the pleasures of home.

 

“I really do not understand why anybody would want to go anywhere,” Bill Threshold wrote. “The world is filled with barbarians. Stay home. Watch TV. Download porn. Drink beer. But most of all - watch TV.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

-from Rheim Alkhadi's wonderful new webwork, My Lover In Unequal Parts. Narrative strands of loss and love cocoon found photographs. in the mag ArteEast (Andy Warhol in a War Zone). Rheim has been sending me fantastic elliptical mail-art pieces for awhile.

 

Still, in this moment I have a small window to the sea.

 

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G. Ebog brings it with a Very High Quality Top 10 List:

 

They Came Before the Matrix: Black People and Science Fiction

 

Black Magic in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction... Esoterics in the Land of Cotton...

Substance D: Imaginary Drugs for Imaginary Ghettoes...

 

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GET GREETED WITH HEAT

 

S.L.A.B. equals southwest Houston's Slow Loud and Bangin' crew (Trae, Boss, & JayTon, Q Stone on production). The screwed-and-chopped version of their recent album The Anthem is some exquisite triphop... Why don't more people call the Texan screw sound 'triphop' -- out of respect for Portishead, DJ Shadow or whatever?

 

Time to reevaluate/resuscitate the term because this thugged-out psychedelia is precisely that -- hiphop hallucinatory and downshifted. Bassy, liquid, viscous. Low-slung, drug-friendly, sublime. Made in a city where summer heat bends perspective, brakes linear ambition. Gracias a Quieto for the tip-off.

 

Check the instrumental intro track

 

S.L.A.B. - The Anthem intro

 

or the gun ballad

 

S.L.A.B.- Get Greeted With Heat

 

 

the likely hero is producer Q Stone. they distinguish their chops and downpitches and edits as SLABed (instead of calling it screwed-and-chopped), and the distinction is fair: their treatment really bumps these tunes into something special. released by G-Maab.

 

broke up with my foreign car, fell in love with a Cadillac

 

SLAB's Trae just released a fine new album called Restless. A perfect storm hits the track Cadillac: SLAB MCs, Paul Wall, Three Six Mafia, a screwed sample about man-car love, and a loooow-octave synth bassline applying inertial drag. The lyrical content may be an unexpected byproduct of Texas-led jingoism and US steel protectionism. Like Slim Thug's Diamonds, it's a powerful eruption of screw philosophy into mainstream audio thought.

We Can Detune You.

 

you can download the radio edit over at Trae's MurdochSpace page. you can download the album version right here. Everyone lounging comfy in their k-hole and or codeine sleeping bag may as well nab the screwed-and-chopped version, seven-and-a-half minutes of sunken avant-garde.

 

(there are record collectors, yes. but is it possible to have mp3 collectors? digital weightlessness and the ease of delete suggests otherwise.)

 

 

 

 

& while we're talking rap, Floodwatch offers an interesting, informed take on mp3 blogging, doing close readings of rap meter and flow. 'Autopsy of a verse' he says. Check it: examining Brand Nubian's All for One using an interpretive approach most folks would associate with poetry criticism/analysis. It's cool, expanding the language for discussing hiphop. Imported slang and other verbal 'i'm hiphop' signifiers are optional.

 

 

"when was the last time it rained?"

"March"

"when was the last time it was even cloudy?"

 

the bowling alley above the sky in Barcelona is open for business, rumble and downpour, precisely on the eve of our lil rooftop get-together. No, seriously, when was the last time it rained?  Who upset the rain gods?  

more soon, on haterism and Houston viscosity and -- very exciting -- bootlegged Rupture clothing / accessories.

I've been bootlegged, therefore I am! illicit Rupture merchandise takes things to a whole new level. I feel more real. He feels more real.

mainly though, i've been swimming uphill thru August-time Spanish bureacracy -- anyone who has done that knows that it leaves no time or energy for anything else.  Another 3-hour queue, with no seating? No problem!

whatever I could say about the ongoing devastation of Lebanon is mostly being said by Wayne here and here, further echoed by his links (informed comment was new to me). That several close friends are Lebanese only amplifies the feelings of depression, outrage, powerlessness, and guilt (exactly how many dollars of my U.S. taxes have directly funded bombs & all the other war machinery ravaging a people -- Lebanon's a diverse country -- and its infrastructure? not a rhetorical question: i want to know).

 

 

 

i feel a phantom nostalgia for "wars" which were wars: poor young men dressed up in uniforms going to agreed-upon places to try and kill each other, as commanded commandeered by their governments, while their wives or girlfriends or boyfriends stayed at home, in black&white, baking pies and knitting and waiting for television to be invented, so that they could turn it on and watch Fox News or CNN and slip into the hypnotic databath of a 24-hour news cycle which is repetition which is the only way to get someone to believe something they wouldn't otherwise believe -- by repeating it over and over and over again -- which is why those men stand outside the big subway stops in London with microphones and a battery-powered speakers, droning on and on about religion, their religion, their version of religion, these men's voices hard and clear above the growl and mutter of human traffic, too tired to speak with any pizazz. They sound like exhausted anchorpeople. They are trying to broadcast a 24-hour news cycle about eternal life, so you have to respect them for that. Faith is the hard thing.

 

 

 

 

 

Desperation comes easy. Just turn on the TV. Friends reruns. Mel Gibson drunk: an event worthy of international coverage. Here in Europe, footage of dead Lebanese kids. Iraqi carbomb wreckage. On repeat. Day in, day out. Turning into reruns. People don't talk much about reruns: what's there to say? It's already been said. We like premieres. Us. The stars keep shining. People. Things keep exploding. Commercial break. Coca-Cola, electric razors for women, the station advertising itself then its news, this brand of margarine is the very best for your family. 4 out of 5 dentists are civilians.

 

 

 

hope is repetition counterbalanced by love, which is the close-up thing, the under-the-covers whisper thing, shared heat and pain, which is the opposite of the aerial view, the smug top-down worldview, figures in the distance, the way a bomb understands its target, mapped, the armchair Weltanschauung.

 

 

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My nightly news repeats itself. I know the script, now: the continuing destruction of Lebanon and its people (especially children) surpasses my understanding and leaves me wanting for words to express my outrage. Since I didn't have the words I borrowed them from someone else. It's neither chorus nor repetition though, this is my news, our news, we read and think and doubt and act and hope to find it, to change it?