That weapon will replace your tongue. You will learn to speak through it. And your poetry will now be written with blood.
Discovered the amazing A Tribe Called Red at the Beat Nation Exhibit at the Vancouver Art Gallery today. Bear Witness’ video work blew me away. Extra points for sampling Jarmush’s DEAD MAN.
Red Skin Girl (ATCR Remix) by A Tribe Called Red
I’ve spent the past couple of days scouring the web for encomiums for MCA. I think I’ve been in search of a piece of writing by someone much smarter than me that could encapsulate what the Beastie Boys meant to me and my generation (whatever that means), but I’m starting to get the sense that this thing I’m looking for does not exist. It can’t. The thing I want to read most in the world right now is too high a demand to make of something as constrained as language. Even this, what I’m writing right now, feels stilted and forced, and completely unable to be up to the task of paying Adam Yauch the tribute that he’s due.
The first Beastie Boys record that I remember buying was Check Your Head. From my perspective at that time, License to Ill and Paul’s Boutique were these sort of historical relics, things that I would later go back and unearth after falling deep into the Beastie Boys rabbithole. My obsession with the band quickly became all-consuming. My friend John and I didn’t give a shit about much other than playing lacrosse, trying to build woofer boxes to throw in the back of our cars, buying records and going to shows. Always going to shows. We would often make the hajj from our suburban enclave to Fell’s Point in Baltimore to hit our go-to record spot Soundgarden. It was the most likely place that we could come across an issue of Grand Royal, or a weird Japanese Beastie import that had that cut of Skills to Pay the Bills and a picture on its cover of some kid wearing ear goggles with a word balloon coming out of his mouth that read, “Yo ma! What are they givin me?” These were ciphers to be treasured and scoured for hints about what the Beasties were talking about, what they were into. That was the thing about the band that burned our brains the most. Everything had layers, everything had references to things we didn’t understand, or was suffused with inside jokes that we didn’t get but wanted to, desperately.
The Beastie Boys were like a code ring that helped us unspool the details of everything that was cool and good in the world. When you lived in the suburbs in the pre-Internet days, finding a window into any kind of urban subculture you thought was dope–graffiti, hip-hop, skateboarding–was kind of like hitting the lottery. The Beastie Boys were always that window, always leaving us a trail of breadcrumbs to the next thing we needed to learn about: Lee Perry, Mark Gonzalez, Rammellzee, Jimmy James, Chevy Impalas, mulletheads, the Biz, Spike Jonze, Futterman’s Rule, dookie chains, skull snaps, Toulouse Lautrec, Dick Hyman, Mannix, Mike McGill, Les McCann, Grand Royal, Groove Holmes, Triphammer. Fucking everything.
I can pretty much trace my political consciousness in a straight line right back to the 1994 VHS Sabotage release, which featured a short documentary about the plight of Tibet as its coda. That short doc was the reason I joined Students for a Free Tibet, went to anti-WTO protests in D.C. as a 21-year-old,and inculcated a pretty intense case of idealistic self-righteousness. But it also turned me on to the DIY scene in D.C. that had grown out of Fugazi/Dischord, the Campaign to End the Death Penalty, women’s rights movements and Tibetan Buddhism. The Beastie Boys are the indirect reason that I linked up with the Independent Media Center when I moved to New York City, which eventually led me to the doc stuff that I’m into right now.
I found out about Yauch’s passing on Friday at lunch from a coworker, a girl who’s probably in her mid-twenties. I was dumbstruck. I knew Yauch was ill of course, but the last thing I heard was that he was responding to treatment and that it was going well. I went back to my desk and spent the next few hours surreptitiously reading whatever I could find on the web about his illness and passing. I started trading texts and emails with old friends. It was our own dislocated digital mourning session. Now that I’m older, I feel like I finally have a fuller appreciation for just how amazing the art that the Beastie Boys turned out was, considering they were signed to a major label for most of their career. They’ve always been a blueprint for how things should get done, and I’m still learning lessons from them, especially from Yauch’s reinvention as the head of film distribution outfit Oscilloscope Laboratories. Take your work seriously, but not yourself.
I know Yauch was heavy into Tibetan Buddhism, so it feels weird to say rest in peace. I don’t doubt that Yauch is one step closer to bodhisattva status, or moksha, or mukti. However you’d like to say it. In Vedic thought, there is only one ultimate reality-truth. It is Brahman, the source of all spiritual existence and phenomena. We are all it. Someone wrote this on a tribute page to Yauch. I can’t think of a better way to say it: “When a bodhisattva leaves the world, one should not be sad for them. One should feel sad for the world and for their friends and family because they/we have lost an invaluable resource, a bright light in a dark world.”
I don’t know what’s worse: getting blown up in nuclear war or having a 7-11 on every corner.
I love this track. The footage is from the doc-in-progress TOUGH BOND by the art/activist collective Village Beat out of LA, about a group of kids in Kenya who huff to get by.
Finito murders the track.
Maysles Cinema in March will be hosting two screenings of Mark Good’s VIGILANTE VIGILANTE, a doc about graffiti and vigilante buffers who like to go over throw-ups, tags, burners, pieces etc. I know very little about Good, other than that he worked on THE MOST DANGEROUS MAN IN AMERICA about Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers (and which I haven’t seen), and the doc B.I.K.E., which attempted to document “underground” bike culture (essentially Black Label NYC from what I understand, and again, which I haven’t seen). The market is saturated with graffiti docs at this point, and I’m not sure I’ll soon see one that was as thought-provoking as Banksy’s EXIT THROUGH THE GIFT SHOP. But, judging by the well-edited trailer, VIGILANTE seems to be aiming for a different tack than most graf docs by focusing on buffers. The trailer also reminded me of the Matt McCormick tongue-in-cheek short THE SUBCONSCIOUS ART OF GRAFFITI REMOVAL, although VIGILANTE appears to be less a cinematic essay than a traditional narrative doc. I think it’s interesting to consider that, at least in NYC, graffiti is so ubiquitous that it essentially becomes “visual noise,” as it’s described by one of the buffers in the trailer. I recently started attempting to take photos of random bits of graffiti that I encounter in NYC, partly to force myself to stop and engage with it as art.
The Awl listed this as its top online video of 2011. Made me wonder if video game screen caps constitute found footage. It’s a good watch.
© Copyright 2012 | Gorilla Face | Theme by Columbia, MO Web Design | All Rights Reserved
