State of Place

An interesting thing I spotted - a geographer (by trade, though I'm not sure of her degree/background) who left the academy to start a 'space consulting' small business, called State of Place, to advise cities and urban planners.  Someone needs to get her to come to Tampa and do a Hell's Kitchen-style intervention on the sprawling disaster of this city.

http://urbanimprint.com/about/state-of-place/

IT'S OUT! Blown Horizonz: Incidental Notes on Psychedelic Noise, Abstract Rap, and Other Music That Will End Your Mind

Note: I'm now blogging at Blownhorizonz.com.  It's more attractive, and it focuses more on cool stuff like music and fiction.  Check it out!

It's coming, it's coming, it's here.  Collecting over a decade worth of writing about mind-boggling sound, Blown Horizonz strips away the insignificant fuzz and takes you to the deep dark places where music can remake you, remake us, remake our whole society into something bigger, weirder, and more free.


I feel like out of all of the press I've received for this record, that your review is the first one to truly understand where I was coming from and what I was trying to accomplish.
-Dylan Ettinger

Enclosed please find a check representing the payment for your piece selected for Best Music Writing 2010. On behalf of Daphne Carr and all of us at Da Capo, I want to express our deep regret that necessity unfortunately required that your piece be cut from the collection.
-Jonathan Crowe, Editor, Da Capo Press.


Noise is the imperfection that shows us that the world doesn’t have to be the way anyone tells us. Because what is perfect is dead - If some bit of studio-processed pop manages to have a spark of actual artistic life, it is a fluke, a monstrosity, an inexplicable anomaly. The sunzabitches even managed eventually to get the vibrational frequency of ‘grunge’ into a studio processing unit and started making songs in which the distortion sounded careful and clean. It always happens, capitalism recouping some pretty and successful version of a chaotic failure that initially captured attention by being spectacularly WRONG and exciting everyone thereby.

I have witnessed on record and in life an ethical noise, an aesthetic refusal of what we are told to call ourselves, new tribes traveling nomadic routes that short-circuit convention. They were able to do what they wanted and face uncertainty and not panic, which to me seemed as magical and unlikely as Clint Eastwood gunslingers facing down imminent murder without blinking. As much as I’d looked for the darkness, I still carried with me and maybe always will a certain suburban-normal fear of instability, and I looked at the way they lived and I envied it but didn’t feel it was mine to have. I imagined into them some sort of purer unmediated relationship with experience and desire. I wanted that noise to enter the substance of my life, but I could not let go of what was clean and safe.

When something appears simple and clear we are easily deceived into thinking we understand it, and as soon as we are thus deceived we might as well be dead. Confidence and clarity are the end of change and possibility. Noise presents us with an impenetrable barrier and tells us only that we must confront that blank wall and make sense of it ourselves. What we find when we truly face the irrational is inevitably some version of ourselves and what we believe and what we want, truer than what we ever could have seen if we’d been staring at a crystalline Technicolor projection of another person’s dream.

Noise is the sound of not knowing the future, of not needing or wanting anything. Noise takes us to Interzone, to interrogate the black meat, to ask questions about just what is this world we live in, and how can we or should we change it. It forces us to think about change because it shows us that anything Anything ANYTHING is possible. When we confront the blank barrier of the unknowable, the absence of order and meaning, we can admit that we know nothing. 



Blown Horizonz is available FREE in a variety of formats from Smashwords for the next week (9/13-9/20). 

Sneak Peek: Blown Horizonz Cover

 

This is preliminary (and I'm hoping it'll be eventually replace by something done by an actual professional) but I'd say for now it's looking pretty solid.  Feedback welcome!

At In Media Res: Sonoda Kenji's The Sakura of Madness

This week, as part of hip hop cinema week at In Media Res, I've curated a few clips from the infinitely interesting Japanese film Kyouki no Sakura.  You can catch the clips and my commentary here.

Beall's List of Predatory, Open-Access Publishers

There was a time when you just got solicitations for turning your master's thesis into a poorly-edited vanity press book.  Now you can get trolled for a conference presentation and bait-and-switched into a page fee in the several hundred dollar range.  This list of predatory journals might help you avoid a serious waste of time . . .

Beall's List

Mass Media: Enemy or Tool? Workshop video from Food Not Bombs World Gathering

Enjoy the lush view of my backside as I talk about media structure and how opposition media workers can use it for their own ends.  Things get interesting towards the end when Vermin Supreme drops by!

In Media Res Hip Hop Cinema Week: Aaron Sachs on Beat Street, Wild Style, and Multicultural Hip Hop

I'll have a piece up as part of this series later this week, but for now I want to plug my friend Aaron Sachs' contribution.  Head out there and contribute to the conversation!

Hip-hopsploitation: Representing 1980s Hip-hop in Wild Style and Beat Street