Fort Tilden Massacre

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HudMo

DMC finalist to glitch hop phenom. Something in Glasgow’s water. Hudson Mohawke bangerz. Dig.

Never State What Can Be Implied

It is as though the entrance to Plato’s cave were sealed off and all we can see behind us, casting shadows on the wall, are the figures on the parapet. These figures, though, are not the world of historical reality. They are themselves there in order to cast shadows; that is their function and reality. Nothing else exists behind or beyond them; the only other thing are the shadows that make up a circular implosion of image and reality, signs and what they refer to. Reality has been constituted by and for the shadow-play it entertains. We can no longer say that there is some structure or concept for which the figures on the parapet are an imitation and the images on the wall but copies of this copy. All metaphors of depth and abstraction, of “higher” or “deeper” levels of meaning and reality collapse into the endless surface of simulations and simulations of simulations.

Intriguing as these assertions are, I do not accept them.

NERD THE FUCK OUT

Abstruse Goose

La Terreur

I had resisted writing anything about Andrew Joseph Stack, the guy who flew his plane into the Austin, Texas, I.R.S. building in a fit of rage over some kind of retarded tax problem. Abhi over at Sepia Mutiny already essentially summed up my reaction to press coverage that danced around calling dude a terrorist. Soon after the “criminal incident” occurred I got half-drawn into a conversation with some friends regarding just what terrorism means anymore. A violent act inspired by political ideology, carried out by a person without alliance to an internationally accepted nation-state? Or an attack by someone whose intent is simply to spread terror? After thinking about this for a minute, the research nerd part of me kicked in and I started googling Stack’s name in tandem with the word “terrorist.” The most prominent return I got at the time yielded an excerpt in which the hyperbolic Ayn Rand-dick rider and Dick Cheney-fluffer Glenn Beck agreed that Stack was a “domestic terrorist.” (He does so around the 1:20 mark)

Yeah, that’s how fucked up this situation is, people. I AM AGREEING WITH GLENN BECK. Feel free to punch me in the face the next time you see me. (Of course, Beck managed to sandwich his approval of Stack’s description as a terrorist in between suggestions that Stack would fit in well as a political adviser to Obama. The fuck?)

Language is malleable, and change in use dictates change in definition, as much as dictionary editors would like to think otherwise. The Stack incident seems to me to be anecdotal proof that the U.S. media seems intent on reserving the descriptor “terrorist” for brown skinned people with Muslim sounding names. The real world effect of the trend is that consumers of that media have come to apply the word “terrorist” almost exclusively according to racial categories. I’ve experienced the result of this in the years following 9/11, having been told several times that I “look like a terrorist” when I have a beard. Look, I’m not so naive to expect that people are not going to make assumptions about me based on my appearance. But why they feel the need to so freely express that prejudice to my face is just fucking baffling. And it’s especially hilarious when people tell me I should shave my beard, the subtext of the comment being that I should change my behavior so that they would be more comfortable with a version of me that seemed less threatening to them.

At the risk of sounding racist, I’ve noticed that this sort of comment has come exclusively from white people. But I feel for you, white people. Colored people have been dealing with this whole “I-could-be-a victim-of-a-violent-death-or-beating-due-to-the-ignorance-of-some-dumbass-at-any-moment” shit for their entire lives (See Amadiou Diallo, Abner Louima, Rodney King, Sean Bell, Vincent Chin, etc.). This “new” reality is a sea change in the way the world works for you, and has understandably got you bugged. Just promise me that you’ll try to understand that the way you feel when you see a turbaned, bearded brown man on the Q train is probably the same way a young black or Hispanic kid might feel when they see the NYPD.

So what triggered this poorly written jeremiad? The film My Name is Khan, which I caught last night at a screening at the AMC on the Forty Deuce with Sheba and Nina. The movie is about a Muslim man (played by Bollywood megastar Shahrukh Khan) with Asperger’s Syndrome whose adopted son is killed in a hate crime attack in the suburbs of San Francsico. Rejected by his Hindu wife, who blames her son’s death on her decision to take her husband’s Muslim name, he makes it his mission in life to meet the president and tell him that his name is Khan (the character’s name is also Khan), and that he is “not a terrorist.”

Aside from the predictable plot, terrible acting and misplaced Bollywood-esque glossy cinematography, the film also relied on a “mammy” stereotype and had Khan’s character ignorantly nickname a young black character as “funny hair Joel,” in a reference to his afro. The movie’s emotional scenes were subsumed by a saccharine score, and elements of the plot stretched my suspension of disbelief beyond the breaking point. (Khan’s son suffers a classic high-school beatdown during his death, but the killing blow comes from a soccerball that hits him in the stomach and ruptures his spleen. I swear, I’m not capable of making this kind of shit up.) But maybe I’m being to harsh on the movie. As films go, it was a terrible one. As Bollywood films go, it was probably the equivalent of Citizen Kane. Its overall message was one intended to bridge the cultural gap between Muslims and Hindus in India, while shining a spotlight on the sort of racial/ethnic/cultural profiling that brown people, and Muslims specifically, are forced to suffer in the U.S.

In a strange incident of art informing life, Shahrukh Khan was stopped by the TSA while attempting to enter the U.S. and questioned for an hour because his name had raised flags, an event that mirrored a scene in his already completed movie. But it was hard for me to feel too much sympathy for a guy who shills for bullshit like this:

“The hypothesis, which seems to me the most fertile, is that the news and truth are not the same thing, and must be clearly distinguished.”

-Walter Lippman

Everything is Transient and Finite, Existing in the Medium of Time

Today at work I queued up David Bowie and listened to every album of his that I own in alphabetical order for like seven hours. Aladdin Sane → Space Oddity. But I still couldn’t get Das Racist’s “Rainbow in the Dark” out of my head. Video directed by Jordan Fish. Track murdered by Vazquez and Suri.

La Sierra Maestra

“How do you inspire and organize for hard work over many hungry years an illiterate mass quite different in its conditioning and past from, let us say, the immemorially productive people of China? For after the music of the revolution dies down, everybody still has to go to work.”

-I.F. Stone, October 20,1967. From his introduction to Guerrilla Warfare by Che Guevara.

Purple Drank

Last night I caught a rare screening of the Lil Wayne doc The Carter at UnionDocs. The film was followed by a Q & A led by Victor Vazquez–one-half of the inimitable rap duo Das Racist, as well as one-fifth of the band Boy Crisis (which I’m pretty sure is some kind of ironic high-concept art project)–with The Carter director Adam Bhala Lough.

The movie left me feeling somewhat conflicted about the approach that Lough used in documenting Wayne, as well as my reaction to it. A substantial amount of ink in the music press has already been devoted to Wayne’s addiction to codeine-laced cough syrup, a drug that famously claimed the lives of DJ Screw and Pimp C of UGK. So I went in wondering if I was about to witness the portrayal of Wayne as a tragic mad artist on an inexorable death march. But Lough’s film instead was rife with levity, and I found myself several times laughing at Wayne, along with most of the crowd. After catching myself doing this a few times I started questioning Lough’s intent–I wondered if the audience’s reaction troubled him. I wondered if he was worried that he had inadvertently constructed a gross caricature of Wayne through selective editing, turning him into a clown. I wondered how reductive the Lil Wayne “character” shown in the film was. I think it’s dangerously easy for a filmmaker to fall into the trap of choosing to include all of the entertaining bits of footage, without considering how reflective of “reality” the end product is.

I’m not trying to criticize Lough for his approach. I think he really wanted to present what he considered to be an objective documentation of Wayne’s life. And maybe he succeeded in that. But the life presented to the viewer is a cloistered one, with Wayne shown largely either on stage, on his tour bus or in one of his hotel rooms. It goes without saying that humans are enormously complex, and attempting to capture the infinite facets of an artist as complex as Wayne might just be a fool’s errand. Still, I commend Lough for trying.

In other hip-hop news, a couple of weeks ago I downloaded a great Beatles/Wu-tang mash up titled Enter the Magical Mystery Chambers. I’m guessing Apple Record’s litigation squad finally managed to scare Tom Caruana, the producer behind the album, into taking the album off of his site, because it’s no longer available. (Dig the art direction for the download though. So dope!)

The exercise will, of course, draw inevitable comparisons to Danger Mouse’s Grey Album. But Caruana expanded the palette of his source material well beyond the White Album, going so far as to include samples from orchestral arrangements of Beatles tracks. The end result lacks some of the bugged weirdness of the Grey Album, but is still stacked with great production and is definitely worth a listen. Now all you have to do is find it somewhere.

FUCK YOUR ART INSTITUTION

I would like to cordially invite you to a screening of some work I’ve completed as a member of the inaugural UnionDocs Collaborative Project. Along with Robbie Wilkins, I created a piece on the nature of Online Persona. It will be screened as part of the Collaborative’s larger work, Inductive Thread.

WHEN: Feb. 20, 2010 @ 8 p.m.

WHERE: The Museum of Modern Art, Theater 1, 11 W 53rd Street, New York, NY (The entrance to the film theater is separate from the entrance to the museum)

TICKETS: $10, available at the MoMA box office, but not online as far as I can tell.

Yesterday we got the chance to rehearse the piece at MoMA. I blatantly stole Robbie’s excellent and always cleverly edited “My Week” video series idea to create this short documentation of my day:

Abstracted Deaths

My friend Jay, a game design consultant, recently wrote a fascinating piece on the nature of the spoil-sport, and the useful role that the archetype can play in challenging the accepted norms of a society or culture. My favorite anecdote from the post involves a student who “beats” a game by refusing to play it.

All play moves and has its being within a play-ground marked off beforehand either materially or ideally, deliberately or as a matter of course. Just as there is no formal difference between play and ritual, so the ‘consecrated spot’ cannot be formally distinguished from the play-ground. The arena, the card-table, the magic circle, the temple, the stage, the screen, the tennis court, the court of justice, etc, are all in form and function play-grounds, i.e. forbidden spots, isolated, hedged round, hallowed, within which special rules obtain. All are temporary worlds within the ordinary world, dedicated to the performance of an act apart.

-Johan Huizinga