Talk Dirty on the Radio

I love Republicans. Every once in awhile their true religion--spelled with a capital "$"--takes precedence over all the Christer hooey they pretend to embrace for the votes. So while I fundamentally disagree with the proposition that capitalism==democracy, I figure sometimes it's preferable to the alternatives.

Feeling Safer? 4

"We have no intention of deploying something that doesn't work, but what the definition of 'work' is, is terrifically important."

- Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, 2001

Sounds like Republican for "It depends on what the meaning of 'is' is."

Dames!

"“There’s nothing I love more than women, but they’re really a lot different than they’re portrayed. They are far worse than men, far more aggressive, and boy, can they be smart.”

- noted feminist/genius Donald trump

Feeling Safer? 3

Sure looks like we're getting our $10B a year's worth out of this stuffed turkey.

Nine Scalias

Or nine Clarence Thomases--take your pick. N-joy those reproductive, religious, and civil liberties while you got 'em!

Feeling Safer? 2

With the cakewalk in Iraq behind us, doesn't a story like this just get your patriotic heart pounding? "Constant process of refreshing contingency planning throughout the world," right.

Here's What Google Thinks of You

Amaze yourself. And compose Whitman-esque found poetry while you're at it!

Rock and Roll Quote of the Night

"Could someone please crank the crap out of my guitar? I need to feel it all the way down to my Fallopian tubes."

Rachel Flotard, Visqueen leader, rock Valkyrie

Feeling Safer?

Wow, this turkey plus Star Wars--al-Quaeda hasn't got a chance.

Republicans vs. the Bible 1

Get "em all annulments, quick!

Mark and Barb Go to the Movies

Napoleon Dynamite (dir. Jared Hess) In the history of humankind, a timeless story line is the hell of being young, and this zero-budget movie brings something all its own to the genre. Think Welcome to the Doll House, only animated by a what-the-hell sweetness instead of rage. Napoleon is my kind of annoying outcast misfit. He accepts the everyday sadism of jocks and cheerleaders who look down on him and rough him up and, almost in spite of himself, collects a posse of like-fated souls: a soft-spoken Mexican ladies' man and a young woman who goes takes glamor photos in her home studio, sells Guatemalan friendship bracelets door to door to pay for college, and calls Napoleon on the phone to tell him he's a "shallow friend" and she doesn't need the bust enhancement cream she thinks he sent her to feel good about herself. Right on! Mark's review: ***½

Sunny Saturday Tunage

Sunny and mild in between big rainstorms. As I pay bills today am listening to KALX from UC Berkeley. Perfect, raggedy-ass punk rock show. I know I've said WFMU is the best station in the world, but KALX is on the shortlist for best on the West Coast. I love radio in the Bay--seems like everywhere you drive you get some low-power radio signal playing something interesting.

Annals of Computer Security

I'll tell you what--biotric-based security won't arrive a minute too soon.

Saving the Democrats

My God--you mean people in Red States might actually vote for someone who called out their economic interests first? Someone please page the DLC! (Oh, wait...)

How privatized Social Security might look

Put it in the mattress, folks! (Sent here by Talking Points Memo.)

Fearless Leader's Role Model

I love this guy! Marching his country out of the swamps of Social Democracy and into the new dawn of the Ownership Society (aka "I Own It, Got A Problem With That?"), Syl is the guy Bush Jong-Il has wet dreams about becoming.

I Love This

Almost two years and 1,100 dead Americans into his stupid, my-dick-is-bigger-than-Saddam's-and-so-is-my-daddy's war, orchestrated (in the free-jazz sense of the word) by the SecDef in whom he's expressed unqualified enthusiasm, Bush Jong-Il finally "gets it." D'oh!

Folk Singer!

While we're on the subject of WFMU--tonight I heard a great song, "Hauling In the Slack," by this band, another of the many artistic outlets for the most artistic Billy Childish. Reminds me of what Shane MacGowan must have sounded like before he settled on Charlie Parker as a life model.

Free Radio lives

Wanted to shout out to the weirdest, best radio station. Smile WFMU Jersey City, NJ, I'm looking atcha. Play it here (or here if you're on a Mac), put a big bemused grin on your face.

Annals of Linguistics

Stoners rejoice.

Social Security Reform

A grand idea. Thx to TNR, who got it from Political Animal.

A Brief History Of Dub

Anymore people call all kinds of crazy music "dub." But as a style of music, it originated with the practice of Jamaican record producers who put out a song on one side of a single and put out the instrumental from that song on the other side. DJs loved the "dub" side because they could chatter and chant and yell and sing and whoop over the track (cf: U-Roy, Big Youth, I-Roy, Tapper Zukie, Prince Jazzbo, and dozens of other rap ancestors).

Meanwhile producers began to play with dramatically remixing the instrumental sides, dropping instruments in and out of the mix, pushing signals through big walls of reverb and canyons of echo. In the hands of King Tubby and his disciples (Scientist, Prince Jammy), the mixes became more and more expertly remixed into a whole new type of music: music with huge rhythm tracks in which the development wasn't so much in the variety of melodies (pretty limited, though amazingly fecund, in reggae) as changes in the instrumental textures over time.

One influence on the sound was the fact that Jamaican studios were pretty primitive. Tubby's records sounded amazing because he was an audio engineer. Lee Perry's, on the other hand, sounded like heat waves rising off bubbling pavement on a Kingston street because he bounced the maximum number of tracks a 4-track board could bounce after running them through a phaser and an echo unit. Signal degradation was a key part of the sound. (For that matter, signal degradation and its interesting effects make a neat metaphor for Lee Perry's very colorful career.)

Another influence, one common to a lot of musicians, was drugs. In much the same way that gobbling acid (or trying to recreate the audio feeling of doing it) fueled bands from the Beatles on down to try out a lot of new sound colors, the copious amounts of top-quality weed that Jamaican musicians smoke have a lot to do with the disorienting, grooving effect of dub--as Bob Christgau said, getting baked improved the sound of Burning Spear because it's likely Spear himself enjoyed a chalice or two while recording the album.

So dub has gone through a trillion filtrations and permutations. It's a whole way of doing music that caught on really, really big in the late Eighties and early Nineties when hip-hop mixers based big portions of sets around breakbeats and mixed different records on top. Dub went digital with the rest of the Jamaican market around then. Meanwhile, roots crews sprung up all over--Brooklyn, England, Europe. Digital recording was easy and (compared to outfitting an analog studio) cheap. Anyone could sample, and with samples you could do what the DJs did without messing around with turntables and crossfaders.

Meanwhile, roots dub kept developing in Brooklyn, mixing with hip hop, recombining. Dancehall grooves were a lot faster, more synthesized, more fragmented, more jerky (more "new wave"), but at the same time you heard toasting (DJ rapping) over American drum loops (on the American side, by people like KRS-ONE). Swingin'! Conversely, someone like Bill Laswell, though using very modern technology, sticks pretty close to straight-up rootsy dub music.

And of course the methodology of dropping crazy snippets of theme songs, movie dialogue, song lyrics, and soul music breakbeats into and out of looped rhythm grooves because the way most electronica producers in any style (house, jungle, trance, techno, downtempo) worked as a matter of course. It's also provided context for what Miles Davis' bands from 1972-75 were working on: long grooves, shifting textures conducted by the guy doing the mixing (aka Miles), solos rising out of the bed of rhythm instruments and falling back.

So in a certain sense, "dub" describes a set of musical procedures in somewhat the same way "punk rock" does. About half the music I do qualifies. The point is to keep textures changing over the beat. The digital tools I use, SoundForge and Acid (now from Sony Media Software), make it easy to pluck out little bits of music and use them out of order, recontextualized, in the same way editing a film creates effects from the contexts and juxtapositions of shots. But it also provides a sense of structure and order, which helps balance all the craziness.

Punk Rock 2

One thing I remember from the 70s and the 80s: resistance to authoritarian assholes in power makes for good pissed-off rock and roll. Tonight while I'm wrapping Christmas presents I listen to KPFA Berkeley, hear a bunch of youngsters making a great noise.

Remember When?

Ah, nostalgia--and the Nineties are beginning to seem as golden as the Sixties must have to the Seventies!

Punk Rock 1

Here is the genealogy as I see it.

Johnny Thunders is the founder of punk rock. He inspired Johnny Ramone, who just revved up the drill guitar a little faster. Steve Jones nicked his whole guitar style.

Iggy is the founder of (90s-00s) stoner rock, grunge. Think Queens of the Stone Age, Mudhoney, Krautrock, probably at least inspiration for Black Sabbath who inspired everybody in Seattle who formed a band in the mid-late eighties.

Mark Goes To The Movies

Overnight (dir. Mark Brian Smith and Tony Montana) Another entry in a genre I call "fiascodocumentaries" (cf. Hearts of Darkness, Lost In La Mancha, E-Dreams, Metallica: Some Kind Of Monster) , this one about a hard-ass Boston bartender who brings his posse/band to L.A. , sells a screenplay, gets a big deal to direct the resulting picture, and promptly turns into an egomaniacal asshole who alienates everyone around him, including his bandmates and best pals. If you're not a film geek, you'll be bored beyond belief. If you are, and you want to see why people like Quentin Tarantino turn out the way they do, you'll definitely have a few laughs watching this knucklehead get bitch-slapped by Hollywood's finest. Mark's review: ***

erika.net freeform internet radio

One of the great, great DJs on the Web. I get lost for hours.

They Just Don't Make Junkies Like they Used To

Rush Limbaugh. I mean, who wants to do the same drug as some overfed, unlaid right-wing toady? I can just picture Rush scratching his nose and explaining his anti-immigration policy to the maid he bought his shit from. Buying Dilaudid from your maid -- does it get any more Republican?

- Jerry Stahl, author of Permanent Midnight

Whole interview is here. (You'll have to watch one of Salon's ads or subscribe to read it.)

What I Learned From Bob Dylan

A song doesn't have to go from point A to point B on a straight line. Big chunks of the story can drop out of it. People forget details or make them up or tell them in the wrong order. Everybody's version is different. You're likelier to get a movie than a story: continuous snapshots at discrete instants in time. Those images (and sounds and smells) are the story--that and what you use to fill in the blanks.

Sweet

I'm feeling it.

R2D2 -san

Beats talking to the wall! Or the kids!

Uh, G'Night, Mate...

Australia is a proud country that we could all learn a lot from.

Mark Goes to the Movies

Alexander (dir. Oliver Stone) If movies like Natural Born Killers and U-Turn looked like Oliver Stone edited them while on a crack binge, Alexander looks like they're feeding him a boatload of Valium post-rehab. After a 15-minute sequence where Alex and his dad Philip wander around a cave looking at scratched-on pictures of myths and heroes, (and several with Angie Jolie, playing Alex's mom, talking with what sounds like a Hungarian accent and playing with dangerous snakes) you get the idea this movie's not going to zip along too fast. I also wish it had the courage of its big, gay convictions--the only time you see two guys kiss, they're both shit-faced drunk. But this film will join Cleopatra on double- bill all-night camp marathons worldwide (coming to a midnight movie near you). All the guys wear eyeliner (except those nasty, smelly Greeks), Colin Farrell looks cuter than a bug as a blonde (though his voice is a little too shredded to be heard over the noise of battle), and Jared Leto--mmmm. If your style is post-Cobain soulful hollow-blue-eyed blonde waif, you'll be in heaven. Mark's review (stupid points): ??

National Treasure (dir. Jon Turtletaub) Dumb, dumb, dumb. Like a Jerry Bruckheimer movie is going to quote Derrida? But inoffensive (you can take mom and kids over 10!), and the scenery is lovely, especially Diane Krueger (with her cute-as-a-basket-of-kittens Saxon accent!). Mark's review (stupid points): ??