Four Electric Ghosts

At the end of Four Electric Ghosts, originally uploaded by jstheater.

Performance shot of Keith + Mendi Obadike’s fantastic Afropop-rock ghost story musical which closed Saturday night at The Kitchen. I’ll post a full review later.

 

My Life in the Bush of Ghosts

At the end of Four Electric Ghosts, originally uploaded by jstheater.

Performance shot of Keith + Mendi Obadike’s fantastic Afropop-rock ghost story musical which closed Saturday night at The Kitchen. I’ll post a full review later.

 

Back home to Mali

After two weekends on the road, I’m back to some domestic tranquility with the art educator, two rambunctious dogs, and my record collection. First up: Amadou & Mariam’s Welcome to Mali. I slept on this duo for awhile: the way they got introduced to world music audiences seemed too cute by half: boy meets girl at the school for the blind, and the rest is history.

My bad. Their music is as gorgeous and driving as the best that has come out of Bamako. The opening track of the album, produced by Blur’s Damon Albarn, is a kind of amuse bouche, foregrounding Mariam’s voice against a “spookily disembodied … musical landscape” that somehow obviates the tired “fusion” label. This isn’t your father’s Graceland, but two fine musicians working confidently with a range of collaborators, from Albarn to Somalia’s K’Naan.

Also caught Extra Golden a week or two ago live in New York. You heard it here first: benga is the new black.

 

Back from Seattle

Top Five EMP 2009 moments

5. Learning the original lyrics for Big Rock Candy Mountain from Graham Raulerson.
4. Learning from Fred Maus that the proper response when handed that “Time’s up” slip of paper is: “You’ve got to be kidding me!”
3. Being upstaged by my own video clip of Kalup Linzy singing in the bathtub: I’m pretty sure that got bigger round of applause than I did.
2. The resonances between Maureen Mahon’s paper on Ronnie Spector, Diane Pecknold’s on Linda Martel and Karen Shimakawa’s on Enka sensation Jero. They all spoke to how racially mixed bodies, or just bodies singing in the ‘wrong’ genre, open up necessary, transnational and comparative historical  conversations about race and the music industry.
1. Disagreeing with everything David Thomas said … and hanging on to his every word.

 

It’s A Mighty World

Odetta, who lived sang at the March on Washington, lived to see a black man elected president, but didn’t quite make it to sing at his inauguration, will get a much deserved tribute Thursday night at Princeton University. The line-up looks stellar, and deservedly so. Odetta was an irreplaceable icon of civil rights and musical history.

Tickets are Still Available (FREE, FREE, FREE!!!) – Call 609-258-9220 to Reserve Your Tickets for Tomorrow’s Show!

 

Cosmic Emptiness

The Onion, as usual, called it:

Obama Depressed, Distant Since ‘Battlestar Galactica’ Series Finale

Obama told aides he feels "like a cylon without a Resurrection Ship."

The president isn’t the only “mutt” grappling with the earth-shattering consequences of the series’ final revelation of our hybrid genesis as a species.

I had my say a couple days back. Over at Koreanish, Alex Chee puts it this way:

To celebrate the Battlestar Galactica finale, my friends make a Battlestar cake, which we eat as the ship falls apart in the last episode. On Facebook and Twitter, paeans of grief float by in the comment feeds. Many of my friends still wonder, why did I feel anything, even when the show disappoints so much at the end. But we were experiencing a collective emotional projection. In the only place we’d found to do it.

…Near the end, I expected to be over-identifying with the half-cylon, half-human hybrid child, Hera. She is implicitly half-Korean (Grace Park plays her Cylon mother, and Tamoh Penikett is her father, a white man). But it was always the plight of the Cylons, who resemble humans almost exactly, that stuck in my head more. Their experience was more familiar, like the experience of being of mixed heritage, in America and in Asia both. Either hidden, because people assume you are like them, because of your appearance. Or, if you are ‘found out’, cautiously tolerated and viewed constantly as an imposter. And never as quite human enough to be “just” human.

Being gay has also been like this.

Someday everyone will be like you, I remember someone saying to me as a child. About my mixed ethnicity.  I think that’s why I liked science fiction so much. The idea that in the future, that feeling would go away. I keep checking to see if it’s here, and I think it almost is. When William Gibson wrote a realist fiction novel, that increasingly seems to me the sign that Cyberpunk would be the new social realism. Which I think it now is.

Gimme a piece of that!

 

Ron Tavel, 1936 – 2009

Jack Smith study of Ronald Tavel (Left) and Joel Markman

Ronald Tavel, doyenne of 60s underground cinema and progenitor of the Theater of the Ridiculous, is no more. Playwright, novelist, and Andy Warhol collaborator, (most famously on The Chelsea Girls), Tavel was living in Bangkok, where he had just completed a novel manuscript. He passed away enroute from Berlin, where he had been attending a conference on fellow queer cine-auteur Jack Smith. Also in attendance was world-reknown blacktress Vaginal Creme Davis, who starred in an impromptu 1991 production of Tavel’s queer clasic, The Life of Juanita Castro; she has a reminiscence on her blog. Michael Feingold’s tribute on the Voice website is followed by some choice reminiscences in the comments as well. At the other end of the spectrum, the tacky Richard Johnson speculates on Page Six of NY Post that Tavel’s death was caused by black magic. To paraphrase Tavel himself: we have gone beyond the absurd: we are now absolutely preposterous!

More on Tavel at his website, and at Art and Popular Culture, Jahsonic’s fabulous and rich trove of internet intelligence I just stumbled upon in looking for other tributes to Tavel.

Self Portrait

 

Shuffle Mode

“And then you told me that my pain entertained …” — Stew “Working the Wound”

I’ve always thought Gnarls Barkley’s second album, The Odd Couple, was the most slept on record of 2008. So when, inspired by Guillermo E. Brown’s song “Shuffle Mode” to do just that this morning while walking the dog, and having “Blind Mary” from that very LP spin up as the second tune, I got to thinking again about the class I just taught on hip hop, and how I kind of missed the mark and why.

We talk about hip hop misogyny but in the very limited way it always gets discussed: either defensively or reductively. And I think we took at face value the gangsta front of current hip hop, without thinking about how artists like Cee-Lo fit into the mix of what is more than just a particular genre, but a whole culture, even a way of life. We are used to thinking about female singers like Mary J. Blige and even Erykah Badu as hip hop, but male singers are still classed as R&B or Pop.

Or were prior to a certain notoriously vocoder-heavy album from hip hop’s current crown prince. If most critics followed Kanye down the rabbit hole of his misogynistic self-pity on 808s and Heartbreak, it was in part because his resort to singing seemed to admit a male vulnerability back into the rap that all the braggadocio had tried to disavow. If his masochistic display caught on so well, it was not only as the hipster’s alternative to Lil Wayne, but also because Kanye’s brand of narcissistic display cannily reconciled male abjection with the ever-compelling image of the fly guy onamove.  Love Lockdown always reminds me of Lisa Stansfield’s Cole Porter cover,  Down in the Depths (on the 90th floor) from the original Red, Hot + Blue album. Reclining in glamorous deshabille in posh, plush surroundings is one way of admitting your “softer side”; but its hardly a radical reimagining of gender roles. That’s probably why 808s was both so popular and critically acclaimed.

When he sings on “Heartless” of “the coldest story ever told” about a man “who lost his soul to a woman so heartless” its sounds like the fairy tale that is, complete with “Dr. Evil” a.k.a. the Wicked Witch.

When Cee-Lo goes into similar Grimm’s Brother territory on “Surprise,” the effect is far more chilling:

Now the ending to every story is most enchanting
Now whether its heaven or hell I wear it well
Please forgive me for rambling
I just wanted ya’ll
To know that I don’t know it all
So when that big o’l smile ends up
Being just a disguise

Don’t be surprised …

Can you imagine Kanye admitting to the actual vulnerability of “not knowing it all”? But that’s the starting premise of Cee-Lo’s compellingly unsettling performance of masculinity on The Odd Couple. The video for “Run” hits it perfectly: Dangermouse’s addictive beats set the body rocking hard enough to withstand the sheer anguish of Cee-Lo’s lyrics. Run, he’s a natural disaster …

But this isn’t just a “tears of the clown” act. It’s also another way of imagining desire between men and women outside normative heterosexuality. Take Blind Mary:

She has never seen the sunshine
Yet she’s getting along just fine
She’s not staying, she’s just passing through
Hey, do you mind if I follow you?

[Chorus:]
I love, Mary!
Blind Mary, marry me
I love, Mary!

I heard a voice say catch me if you can
Before you know it I was holding her hand
It’s harder to imagine than understand
How she knows exactly who I am

She’s my friend, she doesn’t judge me
She has no idea I’m ugly
So I’ve absolutely nothing to hide
Because I’m so much prettier inside

The thing I love about this  song is how it binds male abjection to love for — rather than contempt and hatred for — women. Cee-Lo turns a cliche (inner beauty) on its head by showing how the society that ostensibly extolls it actually continues to stigmatize the blind and ugly. The whole theme of the album — running, following, catching up, moving on — are perfectly summed up here in a singular, heterotopic love.

Blind Mary isn’t a song about (f)ugly pride or disabled rights. It’s about the glamor of certain folks who have figured out how to live in a different sort of ordinary, and how their example, in itself, calls us out from our limited self-conceptions into a different way of being. An odd couple indeed.

The requisite trip to YouTube turned up a couple covers of this tune, to my surprise, the most affecting for me is this by Durand Bernarr. At first its a little American Idol, what with all the melisma. I’m simultaneously compelled and jarred by seeing this world-weary song resituated in the emotive utopia of the teenage bedroom idiom. But as I stay with it it gets better, and when the video segues to a dub version Bernarr performed out in a club, an environment which makes him seem both older and cooler, I have a feeling I would have loved to have been there to hear it live.

Here’s a young woman singing the song. love that the reason she gives is “cuz I know ain’t nobody else ever going to sing it.” That’s so brown punk!

 

If it Don’t Fit

 

Gecko on an Accordian

OK given my own accordian-playing past (see above) and nacho-eating present, I kinda have to post this.