The Incredible Blog

Sorry I didn’t post this earlier. Unfortunately, Anjali and I often end up with a disproportionate amount of attention, but you gotta give it up for our Atlas partner E3. Atlas wouldn’t even exist without E3’s inspiration, and the name “ATLAS” is fully the responsibility of his wonderful wife Tracy. E3 has only inspired me more and more the longer we DJ together. We are now in our fifth year of being DJ partners at Holocene. Here’s to E3, Tracy, and Adila, the newest addition to their family.

IK

I just could not get that excited about preparing for this month’s Andaz. And that scares me.  It scares me to think that my parties or my DJing could ever become routine. I’ve seen it happen to other DJs who realize how easy it is to please people and coast through gigs. I don’t want that to ever happen, so it concerned me that I was content to idle my time away at home rather than absorb myself in preparation.

Sure, I listened to plenty of bhangra and Bollywood music in the weeks leading up to Andaz, but that is absolutely typical. Yes, I spent hours researching the latest Bollywood soundtrack releases online as well. In this process, I learned to my dismay, that itunes does not have a comprehensive selection of new filmi soundtracks. In fact, I wasn’t able to find a single legal mp3 site with a comprehensive selection of current Bollywood soundtrack releases. Seeing as how I would just as soon never play mp3s, why do I care? Even though I only use mp3s when absolutely necessary, I sometimes cannot source something any other way, and sometimes a Bollywood soundtrack will be released in the days right before Andaz, and there will be no way to order it and have it shipped in time for my performance.

What about buying it locally? Yeah right. India 4 U is the only Portland store that consistently carries new filmi soundtracks. They get some amount of new filmi releases, but often they don’t get particular soundtracks until weeks or months after I want them, and rarely finding myself in SE Portland, I often miss the good soundtracks that do come in, because the few copies that arrive will sell the same day. All the Indian stores in the West suburbs have long since stopped carrying filmi CDs. The exception is Apna Bazaar, and they will occasionally get in a few CDs (and I mean just a few), but they are hardly a source to be relied upon. The stores up in Vancouver, Washington will have some bootlegs of relatively recent bhangra releases, but they don’t have any sort of contemporary filmi selection. Certainly not the latest releases. So, yeah, buying filmi locally is hardly a reliable option. I know this from many years of wasted trips all throughout the greater Portland metro area futilely searching for recent releases to play at rapidly approaching gigs.

Because in the past itunes has had several soundtracks I needed immediately, I got the impression I could rely on them for all my last-minute filmi needs, but sadly I found that they didn’t carry any of the new soundtracks I was looking for. It seems that they have the products of certain labels, and not others. I also couldn’t find these soundtracks on any other legal mp3 sites. Of course I know that as much as I place importance on having the latest-latest, the truth is that I won’t get requests for anything that recent. I was obsessing about not having the new Pritam Race soundtrack that just came out, but the movie itself will not even come out until late March (soundtracks come out in advance of Bollywood movies to generate interest, in case you didn’t know), so its not like people have seen it and want to relive the songs on the dance floor. In the same way, there is little need for me to be so obsessed with the bhangra releases from the last few weeks. I have tons and tons of new bhangra CDs to listen to from recent trips to NYC and Seattle, but knowing that the Panjabi attendees at Andaz are only going to request Jazzy B, Lehmber, and possibly Diljit, I don’t feel a lot of pressure to burrow into the mountains of recent bhangra CDs, because the ones I’m most interested in, or have received the most attention, I’ve already absorbed, at least superficially.

In the hours before the gig I tried to muster some enthusiasm for listening to a bunch of new music, but let me say it again, I know what people are going to want to hear: the Hindi-speakers are going to want to hear stuff like “Dard-E-Disco,” “Bhool Bulaiyaa,” “Soni De Nakhre” etc., if not older songs like “Kaja Re” and “It’s the Time to Disco,” and the Panjabis are going to want to hear Jazzy B and Lehmber. Its hard to get excited about pushing myself to discover all sorts of obscure songs at the last minute, when I know what people will be in my face requesting all night. As it turned out, the most recent request of the night was “Soni De Nakhre” a song that came out more than eight months ago. So much for my imagining that people would be hoping I could play something from the brand new Race soundtrack.

Having said all this, at one point during the February Andaz a Panjabi man did ask Anjali why we weren’t playing “new” songs.  I found this amusing, because most of my selections were either the latest bhangra songs or the latest filmi songs. This is the tricky thing about playing “new” music for people. They don’t want new music they have never heard, they want “new” music that they recognize as being new, because they have already heard it. So when I am playing the latest songs, many people don’t know them yet, and so they are simultaneously wishing we would play the “new” songs, which means the less-new songs that they are already familiar with. At one point in the night Anjali felt like I was playing too much filmi, and then she corrected herself, and said too much filmi that people don’t know yet. Funny, that on the one hand I am apparently not playing “new” songs, and on the other I am playing songs that are too new.

Diljit is currently one of the biggest Panjabi singers from India. I brought and played his new Chocolate CD, and shortly after playing it, I got a Diljit request for “Daka”, which, honestly, not paying that much attention to Diljit song titles, I assumed was from his new album, but no, it was actually from his last CD. Which is fine, nothing wrong with requesting an older song, often times the new album by an artist is not as good as his last one, I just found it funny that I went to the trouble to order Diljit’s new CD from Canada in time for Andaz, only to have requests for last year’s release. Even though “Daka” is a very slow bhangra song typical in pace of most Panjabi requests, and not at all appropriate to the pace that I was currently playing, I may have humored the requesters, except that I had just played Diljit, it was the end of my set, and really pushy, aggressive people are not the ones I enjoy pleasing.

So why do I try to please people who are often obnoxious, irritatingly insistent, and belligerent, instead of the kindly people dancing and having a good time? The squeaky wheel gets greased. Not always, but often as a DJ, you just want the assholes in your face to leave you alone for awhile. Of course you play one request, and then the same people are back in your face again, treating you like their personal jukebox. I hate to break it to you, irritating requesters, but often what you want is not going to work for the majority of the crowd. Panjabis mainly request slow, slow, slow bhangra tracks that are just too sluggish for non-Panjabi dancers. Hindi-speakers commonly want abysmally-cheezy songs with horrendous Hinglish lyrics, that if I play them, will have the non-Hindi speakers in the crowd asking, “Why the fuck is he playing this shit?” If I play some sick-ass “Desi beats” as they are known in the UK, many of the Portland-residing Desis, Panjabi-speakers and Hindi-speakers alike, respond, “What the fuck is this? Where’s my Jazzy B/song from the latest Sharukh-starrer?” They may be called “Desi” beats, but it is often the Portland goras who respond the best to the 2-step and drum’n’bass beats.

Well, what about the people who don’t speak Hindi or Panjabi? Non-Desis rarely get in my face except to request “Mundian to Bach Ke,” a big filmi song from the last five years with a singable English chorus, or something that I have played before with a very obvious hip-hop sample. Or they will want me to go back to playing “Indian” music (meaning bhangra as opposed to filmi) as was the case with a gori larki at the last Andaz, who wanted me to go back to playing “traditional” music. She wrote a very sweet note to me after I had begun a filmi-house set, asking that I please return to playing “traditional” music. Traditional? Like Dr. Dre? Contemporary bhangra like we play at Andaz is very much a product of computers, synthesizers, software, sequencers, drum machines, turntables, and yes, some Panjabi folk instruments, or often samples of Panjabi folk intstruments. It is a music that has roots that are hundreds of years old, but the current manifestation is very much a modern technological creation, and not simply “traditional” music. We could play ethnographic folk recordings of rural bhangra at Andaz, and it would hardly be what people expect to hear from us when they are on the dance floor. Much contemporary filmi has a very electronic sound, but it would be foolishness to think that current bhangra is any less electronic or modern. Anjali sees the irony of a gori larki hoping to change the music, intently writing a note, while right behind her, throngs of Desis take to the stage to delight in filmi techno. Some of the goras may dislike the fimi, thinking that bhangra is more “Indian,” while unbeknownst to them, many Desis at the party complain that we play bhangra because it is not real “Indian” music like filmi.  I have watched some groups of Hindi-speakers in attendance make fun of the bhangra; to them a backwards regional music.

Of course not all Hindi-speakers despise bhangra, and not all Panjabis clear the floor when filmi comes on. Fortunately there are all sorts of Desis that like to dance to bhangra at our party, and fortunately not all Panjabis run to the DJ booth to request Jazzy B the second a filmi song if played. I am not complaining about the majority of the wonderful people who attend our parties, I am only complaining about the narrow-minded people in attendance who harass me at the DJ booth, who can’t understand that I am attempting to please hundreds of people from all sorts of backgrounds, languages, cultures, and expectations, and not just their annoying ass.

I like the people who don’t get in my face. I like the people I never see at the booth far more than the people that come to make a request. The people that come to the booth 99 times out of a 100, are requesting a super-obvious song, that Anjali and I have either already played, are planning on playing, or had no intention of playing, and were actively avoiding it. Requesters often assume we don’t know what we are doing, and we don’t know what they want to hear, but believe me, we do. Both know what we are doing, and know what different factions of the crowd want to hear. There are very, very few surprises on a request sheet.

Regular readers of The Incredible Blog are no doubt thoroughly bored by this familiar rehashed litany of complaints, repeated ad nauseum in my Andaz posts, all complaints I’ve whined about a million times. What was utterly unique about February’s Andaz, and not something that is a source of complaint at all, is that I played a solid half hour of Telegu soundtrack songs during my first set. I have never played a South Indian set at Andaz before. Normally I would play a bunch of downtempo Bollywood songs, some new, some vintage, but I really wanted to put my new Tollywood discoveries to use. And they worked. The wild flights of percussion actually had people dancing from the beginning of the night. In fact, when I played my first bhangra song it brought things down, seeming so slow and lumbering by comparison, and with a poorly-handled abrupt transition to Panjabi music, I managed to momentarily lose the dance floor. Of course “losing” a dance floor so early in the night, when there normally wouldn’t even be a dance floor, is hardly a noteworthy entry in my history of clearing dance floors.

I’ve always been open to the idea of incorporating more South Indian popular music into the Andaz party, so don’t be surprised if you hear more of my Telegu discoveries in the future. And who knows, maybe I’ll find some Tamil stuff to be excited about as well, unlike some of the really cheezy pop stuff I’ve tried to wade through in the past.

Oh, and I had to watch a few minutes of a Matrix sequel on youtube, in order to see what a woman was trying to tell me at the end of the night. She was thanking Anjali and I for our service to the community and comparing the gathering of the tribes feeling of our party to the Matrix dance scenes set in Zion. She felt like our party was a place where everyone, no matter who they were, from whatever walk of life, could come dance and be themselves. While I appreciate her positivity and compliments, at the center of the maelstrom, I often feel like Andaz is less like a gathering of the tribes, and more like a conflagration of warring factions.

Fortunately, no one wars with each other, just with the DJ.

Thank you to everyone who came out to dance. It was great seeing so many friends. If you wondered what in the hell I was doing during my time in the DJ booth, know now that I was trying to please everybody, and admittedly, myself as well. It can get messy sometimes. When I feel pulled in so many directions, it would not surprise me at all that everyone has their own opinions as to what direction I didn’t go far enough in, and what direction I never should have gone down at all.

Yours,

IK

The foreword to Merengue : Dominican Music and Dominican Identity by Paul Austerlitz is written by Robert Farris Thompson and ends with the following quote:

The message of merengue, like rap, mambo, samba and dancehall, ultimately may boil down to this: Subvert the threat of a posthominid future with collective honesties of sweat and motion.

You were hoping I was going to fuck things up at Atlas and you were going to be able to read a long juicy post, didn’t you?

As I was posting in my blog in the hours before leaving to perform at Holocene I could feel myself bringing on the jinx as I wrote my final words questioning whether I was going to be able to maintain my streak, or commence a performing downturn. Fortunately the results of the jinx were mostly comic and not horrific.

I spent several days before Atlas trying to cram as much music as possible; trying to learn as many new exciting songs as I could in an attempt to play a set that would be totally fresh for me. I listened to piles of Telegu soundtracks, new reggaeton releases, I caught up on the career of Magic Juan, and I went through many of my Balkan compilations. When preparing for a gig there are a number of strategies to entertain. I often have piles and piles of music sitting around that I haven’t gotten around to absorbing properly, many albums that I have never even listened to once. I have albums I have given a cursory listen, and maybe I even took some notes, but in order to feel comfortable playing it out I need a more thorough review. There are many albums that I have been taking to gigs for years, but they rarely get played, because it has been far too long since I refreshed my memory about why I started bringing them in the first place. I am often most obsessed with listening to the music that I have never played before, because I am tormented by the idea that there are hundreds (if not thousands) of great songs in my collection that I could be using for dance floor devastation, except that I haven’t ripped off the plastic and discovered them yet. Often scanning through as many un-listened to albums as possible will occupy so much of my time that I will arrive to the gig with lots of new (or at least new to me) albums freshly annotated, but once I am on stage, I am more likely to play something I am familiar with, than something I only half-remember from a few hours before. I will often end up wishing that I had spent more time re-learning albums that I already know are brilliant, that I don’t play as often as I should, rather than searching through endless haystacks for some hypothetical needles that I optimistically hope to find.

I was exhausted Saturday night and Anjali and I decided to take a nap. Unfortunateley I felt like I was just drifting off when the alarm went off, and caught at the worst possible point between waking and sleep, I could neither fall asleep or wake up, and simply laid in bed groggy and miserable until Anjali brought me some chai. We barely made it to the club in time to help set up as E3 began playing his first songs. He missed last month’s Atlas due to Atlas occurring on the same day as his child’s due date. This month he played a long two hour opening set so he could get back to his wife and their newborn. He started off playing some great old atmospheric (Middle Eastern and North African?) vinyl recordings before moving into some dubstep around the time that a crew arrived to dance before 9:30pm. At one point it wasn’t even 10pm yet and E3 was banging out the slamminest uptempo set of Funk Carioca and a Baltimore Club-styled remix of MIA’s Paper Planes. Anjali and I were in the Green Room and it sounded so slamming that we assumed the place was already raging. No, just E3, who needed to do what he needed to do, even if the dancers (who were dancing tango at a halftime pulse) weren’t ready for it yet. Once he moved on to Sangtogold’s “Creator” and material about 40bpms slower (French hip-hop and such), the dance floor quickly filled up.

When I was on stage getting ready to take over from E3 around 10:50pm, I was feeling unsure about myself and definitely not in the zone. As I crouched down to examine my record crate I heard a riiiip as I split the seam in the crotch of my pants, and watched my boxer-swaddled jewels drop down between my legs. Oh boy. Here I was in a three piece suit, trying to look presentable as a performer, and now my crotch is blown out moments before I am to begin DJing. Well, I guess I would have something to write about in my blog. There was no covering in front of the DJ table, so I was completely on display, on stage in the back room four feet above the crowd. I figured people could probably look right up into my crotch hole. I thought about going over to the mic and flaunting my mishap rather than trying to hide it, but I decided against beginning my set that way. Instead I focused on making sure that I would do everything I could to play new songs I was excited about, and not dip into the more familiar stuff I often fall back on. E3 was playing something break-y in the 130 bpm range, and while I had plenty of stuff in that range to play, I wanted to slow things way down for my start, which is a contrary position that I have adopted often at Atlas lately for my first song. Shortly after bringing it waaay down for a reggaeton opener, and playing a few more in that vein, I then, for who knows what perverse reason, decided to go from 90-some bpm reggaeton to 180 bpm meren-ton. What? And then, as if that wasn’t perverse enough, I feel like I then did another back and forth, returning again to some 90 bpm reggaeton and then back again to lightspeed merengue. I often feel that I DJ like a mechanical bull and I am doing everything I can to buck people off the ride from one song to the next. This is ironic, because as Anjali and I watched the crowd dance to E3’s set they seemed like hesitant newbies, who really weren’t up on the Atlas trip. Oh well. That hardly stopped me. I did manage to play mostly all-new songs for me, which was challenging, and often made me feel like I was off my game. My only concession to the crowd was playing “Mauja Hi Mauja” and “Dard-E-Disco” for the filmi-loving Desis in attendance. (I stuck in “Nach Le Soniye” from Dus Kahaniyaan as well at some point, either at the end of my first or second set.)

It seemed that with my coat covering my back, and the pants cloth in front laying closed, that perhaps the crowd wasn’t aware of my ripped-open crotch-seam. Despite this, I kept toying with the idea of approaching the mic throughout my set and relaying my busted-out-crotch story. Since people often tell me how serious I look, and since I was dressed imperiously in a three-piece suit, I figured I could really surprise the crowd, get a laugh, and maybe some sympathy (for my wildly-careening set) by relaying my mishap. Before playing the last songs of my set and turning things over to Anjali I decided to give my comedy routine shot. As I am attempting to address the crowd from the microphone I realize that people aren’t getting it so I announce what happened twice. My blown-out crotch is actually pretty well hidden by my suit coat and so I attempt to tug at my crotch to somehow separate the pants cloth and show demonstratively what I am trying to share with the crowd. No dice. Not from the front, anyway. It was still too well-hidden. I would have had to pull up my suit coat, turn around, spread my legs and bend over to truly show off my split crotch. Well, I only wanted to surprise the crowd (what DJ shows off their wardrobe malfunction?) and possibly get a little sympathy for a very off-kilter set, not present my hindquarters to the crowd. Anjali yells over that no one can hear me. Great. I am talking unintelligebly into a too-quiet microphone and tugging at my crotch in front of a room full of (now stopped and waiting) dancers. I did finally get a few cheers when I explained that my mishap put me in a mood to fuck with people, and as is my wont, I thanked the crowd for letting me fuck with them. Who knows if anyone actually heard a word I said. Anjali kept insisting that there was a woman in the front directly below me who was probably the only person in attendance that got it.

I then started up “Good Morning (Devi Mix)” one of my new transcendentally-ridiculous Telegu discoveries, and am surprised at what felt like a completely flat, if not unhappy, response from the crowd that hardly seems to change as the song plays out, except for the few delirious seconds of percussion riot that is the climax of the track, where there was some hooting from the crowd, so at least some people got it. I then leave the stage and sheepishly make my way through a room that probably has no idea why I was on the mic tugging at my crotch.

I soon realize that the club is packed. PACKED. Stuffed to the brim; an effort in patience to try to move between rooms. Anjali tells me there was a line down the block and a half hour wait to get in. Great. Thanks to all of you who came out to dance.

Anjali started off with some reggaeton and the Pitbull anthem, and eventually was blowing up the club with Panjabi garage, drum’n’bass, and hardcore bhangra with a Khaled song and a Cornershop obscurity thrown in the mix. Our plan was to switch off after roughly an hour. I was then going to play another hour, and Anjali would play the rest of the night. I knew the crowd was not going to know this, and I assumed that many people would be none too happy to see me retake the stage, and would not realize that they would get another chance to see Anjali. I stood by the stage and debated what to do. Both rooms were going off, with not only two separate packed dance floors all grooving to Anjali’s set, but also dancers on both the front room and back room stages. Even though it was time to switch off I remained to the side of the stage watching the dancers and wondering when I should approach to take over. It was a typical moment where it would have been easy for me to just let Anjali keep playing and not break off what she had established with the audience.Stages filled with dancers, Anjali in a groove, and I’m wondering what good can be achieved by me forcing her off the stage and performing my scheduled slot. I decided not to be a defeatist, so I let Anjali play a little longer, and then I got on stage to start my set.

In these situations I can either try to match her vibe as closely as possible, bhangra for bhangra, Asian garage for Asian garage; play something complementary but different, or as I often choose to do: play something completely different. In this case I ended up starting out with MIA’s “Ten Dollar” and then Myriam Faris (Arabic trance pop that I have been listening to and enjoying a great deal lately). I wanted to get around to playing some Balkan music since that was not a base I touched in my first set, and that is where I went next, and stayed for quite a few songs, ending that phase with “Romano Hip-hop” by Gypsy.cz. Sometimes I see people jumping up and down and I realize how much certain quarters of the crowd appreciate the Balkan sound, but despite how long I worked that vibe, I didn’t necessarily get that sense of ecstatic appreciation this time.

One thing that is tough to determine from the back stage is how certain songs are being received by the entire crowd, since there is an entire room of dancers that are out of view of the DJ stage. There were times during Anjali’s set when I was standing where I had a view at both dance floors, and I would hear her switch a song out early, because it wasn’t working too well in the back room, but I could tell from my vantage point that the front room was loving it. Often the front room (and stage) were far more packed with riotous dancers than the back room, but all the DJ can go by to judge the crowd reaction is the back room, which can be very misleading. Then again, there were hundreds less people in the club when I finished my set at 1:30am than there were when I went on after 12:30pm, so maybe the lack of interest in my selections I sensed in the back room was shared by the entire crowd. I also played some reggaeton, more Don Omar, Johnny Prez, and Magic Juan, threw in an Akala DNB remix, and Swami’s “Ching,”. At one point there were a cluster of people grinding onstage to DAM. I’m not sure what the Palestinian hip-hoppers would think about that.

This was the first Atlas in history where I didn’t play a single bhangra song in either of my sets. True, I played a Swami DNB song with Panjabi vocals, and I played a Bollywood number sung by a Panjabi singer, but neither remotely qualify as bhangra. It seemed to me like the height of the night was when Anjali finally started dropping some bhangra half way through her set, so maybe I shot myself in the foot by trying to do something different. Its not that I am any less a passionate fan and promter of bhangra music these days, it is just that not a lot has been coming out lately that has excited me very much, and that is saying something, as I have been buying dozens and dozens of new bhangra releases lately. Since the 2006 release of the Repazent album by Specialist and Tru-Skool I don’t think anything has come out even close to that quality, which is ironic, because when Repazent first came out, I thought it was a merely a retread of the best moments of their Word Is Born album. I’m still listening to tons of bhangra music, but after being underwhelmed by a lot of recent major releases: Sukshinder Shinda, Dr. Zeus, Aman Hayer, I am dipping into things from the past that I have so far overlooked or neglected. You can believe that as I discover more hot shit, you will definitely be hearing Panjabi music back in my Atlas selections.

After I did a good job of massively thinning the crowd, Anjali went on with some Bollywood oldies, a chutney soca set, some Sean Paul songs, and then a long bhangra set followed by some Khaled and Rachid Taha. The Desis were running the dance floor (and the stage) and no one wanted to leave, even after Anjali stopped playing at 3am. It was a really magical atmosphere: whenever there was a lull in the music during Anjali’s set the crowd yelled and screamed and egged each other on for more yelling and screaming. I was fortunate enough to be able to take it all in, sitting on a couch and watching, with my legs pressed tightly together.

IK

2/09/08

For a while now I have been very aware of how little I have been writing about our parties. I wrote a very brief “thank you for coming out” post about our Atlas 4 year anniversary, and I wrote a post about the Junk to Funk after-party. That party occurred November 17th, and I have not posted about a party until February 8th, when I finally finished up my account of our New Year’s Eve party. I wrote nothing about our awesome five year anniversary at the Fez Ballroom where we were fortunate that more than 400 people took time out of their Thanksgiving weekend to come celebrate with us. I wrote nothing about our December Atlas, nothing about our Seattle gig, nothing about our December Andaz show with DJ Rekha, and nothing about our January Atlas and Andaz either. Sometimes I would begin to take a few notes about a party, but then I would lose interest and never get back to it.

This blog is often like a diary that I only choose to write in when I am feeling low. It is as if I set out to chronicle only the troughs of my DJing life. Because truthfully, the last several months of gigs (we’ll ignore the Seattle Curse for now) have been amazing. Huge (if not astoundingly huge) crowds, good vibes, raging energy levels, and, on top of all that,  I have  been relatively pleased with my performances, even in terms of technical matters, which have consumed more of my energies lately. So, a series of great, great parties, and I can’t be bothered to write except for documenting the one party that gets shut down by the cops, and the one that seemed to experience a premature disintegration after a long, awkward start. See a pattern here?

If the party goes well and I feel good about my performance, I write nothing, or at most a brief note thanking people for coming out. If the party goes poorly or has some serious problems, I choose to document it in epic detail. Paints kind of a skewed picture, don’t you think? I would love to write up our absolutely great parties. I would love to write up a set of mine where I thought I performed well. Or would I? Apparently not. Maybe I will get around to posting (or even fleshing out) my notes from some of those great parties. Maybe not. I hope tonight is a great party where I perform well, but after so many months of feeling good about my performances I get worried that a downturn might be around the corner. If so, I’m sure you’ll hear about it.  I will hope for the best.
Love,

IK

Anjali and I had a very unusual New Year’s Eve party. We had approached a number of clubs early on about throwing our New Year’s event, and the wonderful Seann McKeel of the Cleaners at the Ace Hotel wanted to confirm with us first, while the other clubs were weighing their options, as it were. After we had confirmed with the Cleaners, all of the other clubs got back to us saying that they wanted to confirm us for New Year’s. -Nah, sorry, we’re already committed.- There were even attempts to try to outbid the Cleaners for our services. That’s a funny one: you aren’t sure that you want us, and then you want us so bad you try to drag us away from someone we’ve already committed to? Hmmmm. What’s that about? My skepticism tells me it has more to do with money than a commitment to our artistic vision.

The primary challenge with having our party at the Cleaners was that because it is a bare event space, we were going to have to bring in our own sound system, and decorate the space from scratch ourselves. This is a lot more work than just showing up at a club and performing. Especially when our DJ crew usually consists of just the two of us. The plan was that guests of the Ace Hotel would be allowed free admittance to our party, and everyone that had paid for dinner at the Clyde Common next door would be given free admittance as well. Because the space has such a limited occupancy, and because all these guest slots were to be given away, we felt forced to charge $20 at the door in order to make it financially feasible for us at all. This was not an easy decision for us to make. We were leaning towards $15, but after expenses, we would have made so little money that it simply wouldn’t have been worth the time and effort to throw a New Year’s party at all. We are not like many DJs who have high-paying tech jobs and throw lavish parties with their disposable income; this is our job, and we need to make some money doing it. We work damn hard and spend a great deal of our lives involved in the process of throwing parties and taking care of everything that goes with that. While we are happy to DJ benefits and do sometimes volunteer our services in the name of a good party, when we are throwing our bread-and-butter parties, we simply ask for fair compensation for the time and money we put into doing what we do.

$20 is twice what we have ever charged for a party before, and it was a little unnerving for us. We knew that in other cities all the New Year’s parties were typically $40- $75 at the low end of the scale, but Portland has always been a very cheap city. There were other parties in Portland charging $20, but these parties were the result of large-scale efforts involving large budgets, dozens and dozens of people, huge warehouses, several different stages, and multitudes of performers. By comparision, Anjali and I were simply offering ourselves and our music collections at a small event space downtown.

Since we needed to hire people to help us work the event, we were fortunate enough to secure KC of former Fez security fame to work our door. We were happy to work with Seann at the Cleaners, and Charlie Hodges of the Clyde Common. As far as actually putting the party together and promoting it, we were on our own for the most part, until fortunately on the day of the party, we were blessed to have our friends Tessa, Jean Luc, Toby, Sonia, Carmen, and Emmett help us decorate the space and get ready for the party. Thanks also to E3 and Ken for the sound system additions.

We were concerned about having the DJ set up on the floor, and taking up that much more floor space from the dancers, as well as making us highly vulnerable to drunken New Year’s requesters and soused patrons intent on rifling through our music collections in a search for some elusive song. Much to our delight, the maintenance staff at the Cleaners were kind enough to build us a DJ crow’s nest on an upper landing above the crowd. We’ve never done a good job of branding ourselves at our parties before, and Anjali took the time to make giant red glitter letters spelling out our names to hang from the DJ booth. This was, ironically enough, possibly the worst party we could choose to initiate a branding campaign, as we shall shortly see.

We weren’t sure if our party would get any media attention at all, but we were fortunate that it got listed in several papers. The Oregonian went so far as to write it up as one of the top ten New Year’s events for the city, even running a picture of Anjali with the article. The timing of this listing was ironic, because we first saw it after having returned from a woefully under-attended gig in Seattle. We went from playing a city where we are still mostly an unknown quantity, to our home town, where the state newspaper proclaims our upcoming party as one of the best in the city. It is a very instructive experience to be unknowns abroad, and big hypes at home. It keeps everything in perspective and keeps one humble, as if I had any problem maintaining a state of humility. Or humiliation.

After spending all day with our friends getting the space ready for the party, we realize once the sun went down that there was one major flaw to our plan. The Ace has tall floor-to-20-foot-ceiling windows on all sides. There are window shades that go from floor to head height, but no shades to cover the tall upper halves of the windows. Once the sun had gone down and the street lights came on, it was apparent that so much artificial light was going to flood the room that it made the space that we had tried to light warmly and dimly, a very brightly lit space. We had never noticed this before because all our time in the space planning how to decorate it was spent during the day, so we never saw how the outside light was going to affect the space at night. Oops. Major oversight on our part.

In my experience, bright lights are a major problem for a dance party. Some people (Anjali included) like to dance in bright light, but most people prefer the anonymity of dimly lit spaces. I have watched many dance parties only take off once the lighting was reduced from a too-bright level. (In fact, if you ever find yourself playing any sort of role in an event that is supposed to involve dancing, and people aren’t dancing, try lowering the lights.) At this point it was too late to do anything about it, as there was no time remaining to plan a way to attempt to cover up the upper portions of the windows. We were simply going to have a very brightly lit dance party.

People started very slowly arriving after 9pm. We had just had a huge sold-out party at the Fez with DJ Rekha a few days before, and our friends were convinced after seeing how successful that party was, that our New Year’s party was going to quickly sell out once the doors opened at 9pm. As it was, that didn’t happen until some time after 11pm. Anjali had stuck a Bollywood DVD in the projector, and as people arrived, they began sitting around the edges of the space and watching the movie on mute while I DJed from the crow’s nest. As people continued to arrive the benches along the walls got fuller and fuller, and it was like some weird sitting party, where we play a movie on mute, and simultaneously play a soundtrack of our devising. Not exactly what we were shooting for with our New Year’s party.

When I sent out press releases for the party, I didn’t mention anything about what genres we were going to be playing, as I wanted us completely free to play whatever we might be feeling, and whatever might work best with the crowd that was going to show. In all our promotions, whether online, or on fliers, etc., we never hinted at what type of music we were going to play. The press decided for us, and every article described how we were going to be playing bhangra and Bollywood. Now, it can be a wonderful thing to be strongly associated with particular sounds, but when it is only a part of what Anjali and I are able to do musically, it can feel like a straight jacket at times. I was planning on bringing a lot of hip-hop, Latin music, Balkan music, etc., but after seeing how the party was constantly listed as a bhangra and Bollywood party, and since my phone was ringing off the hook with questions from curious older Indians asking about the party, I figured I should just give in and stick to Indian music.

At one point I had suggested to Anjali that I wanted to play other things, and she said, “Be prepared for a mutiny.” I assumed that she was warning me away from doing something different, but after she began her set at 10pm at the Ace with Nicole Willis and Mary J. Blige, I soon learned that she wasn’t advising me what to do, just issuing a proper warning. Her first set showed that she wasn’t at all concerned with how the party had been listed, or what people might have been expecting, she was going to do whatever she wanted to. People steadfastly refused to dance, and Anjali noticed that people were not drinking, just sitting and waiting. People finally began to dance when Anjali unleashed the bhangra and started playing Specialist & Tru-Skool. It was probably 10:30pm at this point, and after a long awkward start, not a moment too soon, the party was finally rolling to the sounds of modern dance floor bhangra. I think a crucial factor is that as people began dancing and the place got hot, the upper windows all fogged completely over, greatly reducing the amount of street light illuminating the space.

I took over from Anjali at 11pm and I had a unique opportunity to reflect on where I was at after 7 years of professional DJing. Anjali and I (along with DJ Peregrine and The Nick) threw a New Year’s party at the Medicine Hat in 2000. We wanted a super-cheap, house party-styled event, and we insisted on only charging $3. In fact, when we arrived at the Medicine Hat to set up, the then-owner threatened to not even open the doors unless we charged at least $5, even after the party had been promoted and listed as being a $3 party. Thanks to the graceful intervention of Chantelle Hylton, who was then the booking agent for the space, the doors opened without a hitch, and with only a $3 cover. Here we were seven years later charging seven times as much, or at least one dollar shy of seven times as much.

I vividly remember taking over the decks from Anjali at 11pm on New Year’s Eve 2000, and steeling myself to take the crowd all the way to the top by midnight. In a set that was typically eclectic for her at that period, Anjali had been playing things like: Asian underground, Bollywood, bhangra, Glam, a remix of the Sleeper cover of Blondie’s “Atomic,” the Timelords and such in her opening set at that party, and I remember feeling that people were not where I wanted them to be by midnight. I was going to have to play some super party tunes in order to get people fully rocking and ready for a midnight blast-off. I remember being satisfied at the time that I managed to achieve just that, and here I was seven years later at 11pm on New Year’s Eve wondering if I was any better of a DJ than I was then. Had my abilities improved at all in seven years? Was The Incredible Kid of 2007 a better DJ than The Incredible Kid of 2000?

I actually felt like a worse DJ. I used to have so much confidence in my abilities. I used to think I could rock any crowd, anywhere, any time. Now I think I am lucky to be able to rock portions of particular crowds at particular times, and in particular settings. I feel like there are millions of crowds I can’t rock, and billions of people I could never please. One thing had changed in all those years, in 2007 my arsenal was limited by choice to only Hindi and Panjabi songs, whereas in 2000 I was playing Jurassic 5, Meat Beat Manifesto, Rob Base and DJ EZ-Rock, Le Tigre, you name it. Anything I thought would make the crowd move. Anything to rock a party.

For my New Year’s Eve 2007 sets I stuck to playing mostly filmi, with some bhangra thrown in. Being directly above the crowd I was amazed at how clearly I could hear people loudly singing along to the Hindi lyrics, especially when the song would drop down to an a cappella. Hearing the singing juiced me and kept me inspired in my DJing. It made me feel like there were some people down there who appreciated what I was doing. This is significant, as I often feel like the majority of the people in the crowd hate my guts and everything I do.

When it was several minutes from midnight I handed things over to Anjali. I have my reasons for dreading New Year’s Eve countdowns. Maybe if I had an atomic clock it would be a different matter. Or even a watch that tells the seconds. As it is I am lucky to know roughly what minute it is. That is all my cellphone tells me. At our New Year’s Eve parties I am afraid that there are people with highly accurate timepieces in the crowd that will revolt if I don’t do the countdown on the exact right millisecond. The places I have DJed for New Year’s Eve usually don’t have a television on the dance floor, so it’s not like I can let the TV tell me when I am supposed to celebrate.

“Well,” you might say, “Why not just get a timepiece with the seconds for your New Year’s Eve countdowns?” I guess it never seems that important to me until it is near midnight on New Year’s Eve and I realize I am terrified to start a countdown that is not 100% accurate. When we celebrated New Year’s Eve at the Fez in 2005, I was so petrified about getting the timing off by even a second, that I never did a countdown at all. I got on the mic and yelled several times before and after midnight, but nobody could make out what I was saying and people just cheered and cheered. Five minutes after midnight one of the staff at the Fez told me to do a countdown. I explained why I hadn’t done one, and she told me to do one anyway; that it doesn’t matter when the countdown happens, it just needs to happen at a New Year’s event. Like I said, I never ended up doing one.

The best countdown I have been involved in was at the Medicine Hat where we had the help of a TV to tell us when to start, and hours upon hours of blowing up balloons paid off, when an imaginatively jerry-rigged collection of tarps stuffed with the balloons was successfully tossed off the balcony and dropped into the crowd, who rapidly began popping all the balloons in an orgy of noise and destructive celebration. Thanks to DJ Peregrine and The Nick for all that effort.

Knowing how paralyzed I am by New Year’s Eve countdowns, you would think I might have planned ahead this year, but naaah. Since I knew Anjali would be taking over at midnight I laid it all on her shoulders to do whatever she wanted.She had really wanted to play Blaqstarr’s “Shake it to the Ground” (with vocals by Rye Rye) at midnight. She had been announcing her intentions for days. Given the likely nature of the crowd, I thought that this was sheer folly, but I’m not going to try to stop Anjali from doing what she wants to do, even if I postulate that something might not be the best idea. Although it was not quite midnight, Anjali decided to play that song as her first number. It definitely stopped the crowd in their tracks, being so different from what I had been playing for the last hour. A large portion of the crowd definitely remained confused for the duration of the song, while some pockets of the younger and hipper attendees began to get into the booty bass, and throw themselves into the fast new groove. As it comes up on midnight, Anjali shuts off the music and readies her megaphone.

Now, this megaphone was a Christmas gift that I had ordered for Anjali, after she had spent a long time fantasizing about having one to use at our gigs. We have problems at both the Fez and Holocene with massive feedback whenever we try to use the mic, no matter if we try turning down the stage monitors, or adjusting the EQ on the mic, or anything else. In addition to this, Anjali was really into the visual and sonic element of the megaphone, as well as the characteristic megaphone siren. The model I ordered for her was twice as powerful as most megaphones, and the distributor claimed that it was the same model that is used by police departments throughout the United States, and is used by the military in Iraq and Afghanistan to clear the streets. I really appreciated the irony of utilizing the exact same tool that serves as an instrument of violent oppression and control, in the service of musical ecstasy, liberation and abandonment. Now because of the exceedingly high power of this particular megaphone, it is covered in warning notices about ruptured eardrums, and I had read reports of the megaphone being audible a mile in the distance. I wondered how easy it might be to shatter 20-foot windows. We were very concerned about not overdoing it with the megaphone, and having our New Year’s attendees fleeing the club with blood gushing from their ears. Because of the volume of the megaphone, we weren’t about to test it out at home, and we never took the time to test it at the club. In fact, Anjali had never really practiced with the megaphone at all, since receiving it as a Christmas gift.

Anjali lifted the megaphone mic to her lips, and an indecipherable squealing began. I was a few feet away, and I couldn’t really make out what Anjali was saying, so I can only imagine what this all might have sounded like to the crowd below. Anjali then began the countdown and I heard nothing coming from the crowd below. They’re not getting it, I realized. I started shouting out the countdown along with Anjali at the top of my lungs, and the other celebrants up with us in our DJ crow’s nest began shouting as well. We were all armed with handfuls of sequins with which we planned to shower the crowd below at midnight. As we reached the end of our countdown I leaned over the balcony to toss my sequins and I was shocked to see an entire room of people intensely glaring up at the DJ booth with palpable hostility. I was startled to see -not cheering and clapping and yelling and joy- but a sea of hostile, angry faces gazing up intently. I still threw the sequins anyway, but I was stunned that this was the sight that greeted my eyes at midnight on New Year’s Eve at my own party. I leaned back into the booth, did some toasting, and tried to take it all in, brain searching for a reason for this hostility.

Were we that off on the countdown? Is that why people were so angry? I checked my watch. Even after the toasting it was only 12:01am, so if we were off, it was certainly by less than a minute. Had people heard countdowns and cheers from neighboring parties before we began our countdown? Is that why people were so upset? Maybe people were expecting more. An exploding rocket ship, perhaps? Except for some last-minute help, Anjali and I had basically thrown this party ourselves. What kind of budget or crew did people think we had? Maybe for twenty dollars they expected a lot more. Maybe a handful of people in the VIP balcony throwing sequins was the single lamest midnight moment ever for the people in attendance.

The hostility was so intense, that it has stayed with me ever since. Here we were, throwing the most expensive party we have ever hosted, and the attitude of the attendees at midnight was anger? Something was not right. Since then we have wracked our brains trying to understand what had happened. Unfortunately the only people we have had the opportunity to ask about the party were either celebrating up in the DJ’s crow’s nest with us (and none of them had any memory of any hostility, and all of them had a great time, but they were all partying in the friends and family VIP, so they had a very different party experience than the crowd below) and the people working the event (who all thought it went great and was a smashing success). Anjali and I were the only people to sense the hostility, and so we alone are left to try to sort through it and understand it. There has been some conjecture that people were simply caught off guard, having no idea that it was now midnight. It is true that when Anjali picked up the megaphone at midnight that that was the first time we had addressed the crowd all evening. Maybe we should have announced fifteen minutes until, ten minutes until, etc. No one had any memory of champagne being distributed despite the advertised free champagne toast at midnight. Now, anyone that approached the bar got their free champagne, but from what Anjali and I have heard, it doesn’t sound like anyone went through the crowd handing out champagne glasses, which we, perhaps erroneously, assumed would happen. Maybe all the anger came from people who were having midnight sprung on them, as it were, who had been given no heads up about going to the bar to get their champagne. Not knowing that the champagne was not going to be distributed, it never occured to us to get on the megaphone in anticipation of midnight and announce to the crowd to line up at the bar to get their toasts. Was that the source of the bad vibes, a lack of a midnight toast? Was it the low-budget approach to a midnight moment? Was it the radical change in music followed by silence and a squealing megaphone?

After the countdown, Anjali then put on Swami’s “Electro Jugni.” I’ve been playing that song a lot too recently, but this crowd was, for the most part, not ready for this sort of sound at all. Still not wanting to be pigeon-holed, Anjali then chose to play a series of hip-hop and dancehall songs. At this point the crowd began dispersing. People were simply turned away from the doors when the event had sold out, and no line was created, so when people began leaving after midnight, there was no one to take their place. Everyone that left created a hole in the party that would never again be refilled. Eventually Anjali began playing bhangra, and an energetic circle of Panjabi dancers that formed did not stop many people from continuing to file out the door, deciding that they had had enough. Eventually even popular bhangra songs were failing to move the crowd, even the Panjabis in attendance. A crumpled request for “Captain Bhangra Da” had been thrown up into the crow’s nest, but unfortunately not found and deciphered until after the party’s end.

I took over again at 1am, and played until nearly 2am, though this was hardly necessary, given how quickly the club had cleared out in the hour after midnight. Was it because it was a Monday night? Was it because Anjali felt like going in a very different direction at midnight, avoiding the more traditional bhangra and Bollywood that was expected, and that I had played to warm up the crowd? Was it because the crowd was not much of a stay-up-late-and-dance crowd, and more of a “Microsoft-y” crowd, as one of our crew described it?

That is one factor that everyone we’ve talked to has agreed on, it was a weird crowd. Whereas our regular crowd showed up in the hundreds for our Andaz party a few nights before, they largely ignored our New Year’s party and left us with a crowd that was possibly the result of our significant publicity in the Oregonian and who knows what else. When the Oregonian says that you are playing the “epicenter of hippitude” there is some probability that quite the opposite will occur.

I certainly don’t mean to dis anyone in attendance, or bite the hands that so graciously feed me, especially when you were all so gracious as to spend $20 to share your New Year’s evening with us. Nor do I mean to throw the early disintegration of the party at the feet of the crowd, when if I did not think that I had any culpability in the matter as a party-thrower and DJ, I would not have been so particularly obsessed with how this party went down so as to find it worthwhile to take several months to try to get down my account of it. Any comments I am sharing about the perceived nature of the crowd are simply because they were so consistently repeated by the friends in attendance we have queried, and certainly do not refer to you, Dear Reader, who happened to be in attendance, since no crowd is a monolith, and all crowds are composed of different tribes, cliques, factions, subdivisions, dyads, and various individuals. Especially a sold-out New Year’s Eve event. Thank you to everyone who attended, and all of those who helped us with the party, and my apologies to all of those who were potentially frustrated in your attempts to rock harder and party longer.

Yours Truly,

IK

2/8/08

Thanks to Anjali’s suggestion, the two of us went to see Bikur Ha-Tizmoret (The Band’s Visit) which opened the Portland International Film Festival’s 31st year last night. The Israeli director Eran Colirin was in attendance and he opened the movie by announcing how many drinks he had already had before getting on stage. He has had a career in Israeli television and Bikur Ha-Tizmoret is his debut film. Having lived in Egypt for a few years as a child, I was curious to see a film about an Egyptian police orchestra visiting Israel to perform at a cultural center.

None of this is real. Eran made it up. He created the idea of an Egyptian police orchestra playing classical Egyptian music like Oum Kalthoum because at football matches Eran wondered why all countries played the same “horrible, American military” music. “Why didn’t Jamaica play a reggae song, or Egypt an Oum Kalthoum song?” So the whole concept is made up, and it is scripted, acted, and directed to perfection. The orchestra is already stranded when we first see them, even if they haven’t realized it yet. The band ends up in an imaginary small Israeli desert town, and they have to make the best of it until the next morning.

Because of politics, none of the actors playing the Egyptians are actually Egyptian. Instead the soulful Sasson Gabai who plays the conductor Tawfiq is an Iraqi Jew. The uber-hottie, Chet Baker-obsessed, Haled is played by Saleh Bakri, son of Arab Israeli actor Mohammed Bakri. All of the Jewish and Palestinian actors portraying Egyptian police musicians had to learn the Egyptian Arabic dialect, since even the actors who spoke Arabic spoke other Arabic dialects. They all did masterful jobs, and had me thoroughly convinced that they were an Egyptian police orchestra, the type of which has never existed outside of Eran Colirin’s idealistic imagination. This imagination reaches an emotional climax in the film for me when Dina (fully embodied by Israeli actor Ronit Elkabetz), the cafe owner who looks over the stranded musicians asks Tawfiq, “Why does a police band play old Om Kalthoum songs,” and Tawfiq replies, “You may as well ask a man why he has a soul.” Boom. Sasson Gabai has the most achingly-soulful eyes, and a quietly magnetic presence.

Tawfiq’s final hand motion is the whole point of the film according to the director.

Film Center after-parties at the Portland Art Museum can be a hideous affair, as Anjali and I know from having DJed one in 2003. The sound in the sunken ballroom is awful. It is certainly up there with the worst Anjali and I have ever sounded, and to top if off, since we were bringing and loading in all our own equipment, including refrigerator-sized Cewin Vega speakers, Anjali and I got lazy and didn’t bring any turntables, records, or back-up CD player. So while I am onstage in front of hundreds of people the right side of my DJ CD deck eats a disk that gets wedged inside the machine behind the tray so that the tray won’t close. Great. I didn’t even have a single mix CD to play, so I put on a compilation with three second songs between tracks and hid behind the DJ booth in abject humiliation. It took Anjali an eternity to return with another CD player, and by that point the evening was totally ruined for me, if it hadn’t already been by how inescapably awful our music sounded due to the terrible acoustics of the room. The songs I knew and loved sounded horrible. If I had never heard Bollywood and bhangra music before, and I attended that event, I may well have decided it was the most ear-piercingly awful music ever.

At this year’s after-party Eran Colirin was stumbling around, and ended up shutting the party down, taking over the stage after Brothers of the Baladi and “singing” and “playing” guitar to a small and enthusiastically interactive audience including movie critic Shawn Levy on percussion. Far more bacchanalian than anything that occurred at Anjali and my performance at the PIFF all those years ago, so I have to give credit where credit is due. I can’t really comment on Brothers of the Baladi since they suffered from the same miserable acoustics that hampered us all those years ago. We at least had giant speakers, while Brothers of the Baladi were playing through a tiny 10″ or 12″ PA system that was farting, cracking and distorting from being overdriven. The percussion solos sounded nice, when the rest of the band wasn’t overpowering the PA system. This year at least a temporary dance floor was installed, and it worked, with many people actually dancing, as opposed to at our appearance, where people who tried to dance gamely shuffled their feet on thick carpet.

We made sure Eran (thanks Jamie Lee!) was slipped an Atlas flyer, so since he is in town through Sunday, we’re hoping he stops by to check out the party. Should be fun. Hope to see all of y’all in the Portland area up in there.

IK

The following still is the beginning of one of the funnies scenes in the movie, set in a roller disco, consummately acted and directed to comedic perfection.

The Band’s Visit (Bikur Ha-Tizmoret) was Israel’s submission for the Oscar but was denied by reason of language for not being Israeli enough.  According to Eran there were Oscar guys sitting with tally counters totaling how many English, Arabic, and Hebrew words were spoken by the characters in the movie.  Eran said it didn’t worry him, that his job was to achieve truthfulness in his work, and someone else’s job to count words in a movie.

1/29/08

When I first started posting in my blog in September of 2005 my first request was for anyone with any info on Telugu and Tamil film songs to please hit me up. Much thanks to Kumari and Toddhu and Jacques for forwarding me some items of interest. I have been obsessed with finding the musical gems of South Indian cinema ever since I got a fair hit of the genre while watching cable in Indian hotel rooms in the Spring of 2004. At the time Anjali and I were buying carton loads of Hindi and Panjabi CDs and records, but in the areas of Central and North India we were in, the music stores did not stock any South Indian CDs. Even though I was finding a lot of exciting Hindi and Panjabi music, it all seemed tame compared to the absolutely unhinged South Indian percussion fests I was watching on cable. I actually didn’t know if the movies I was watching were in Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam or Tamil. I just took a stab in the dark and figured that since the Tamil and Telugu film industries were the biggest in South India, then the movies I was watching were probably Tamil or Telugu. I could be completely wrong about this deduction, attempted solely in order to simplify my musical search.

Since then I have bought the few Tamil and Telugu soundtracks I have come across, though I have held off on a massive internet search/buying spree. From what little I heard, I determined that it was the Telugu stuff that I was really after. It may be that I just haven’t heard the right Tamil stuff yet, but the Telugu stuff I managed to get my hands on featured the percussion-riot elements that I hungered for.

When Anjali and I recently played in Seattle, we didn’t have time for shopping the Indian stores in all the outlying areas, so we focused on Bellevue, and hit the jackpot when we discovered Mayuri Food & Video. They had a huge selection of Bollywood CDs, some bhangra, and lo and behold, a rack of Tamil and Telugu soundtracks. I was a little overcome, having never seen more than a few before, and here was a rack of choices. I decided to focus solely on the Telugu soundtracks. I picked out 16 or so, and wavered entirely a few times, putting them back, and then picking them up again. I was already spending a lot of money on Bollywood and bhangra, and here was a totally unknown quantity. Would I like any of the music? Would it be a bunch of syrupy ballads? Would there be any dance songs? I decided to put my money where my musical obsession was, and I picked them all up.

I am much better about picking up stacks of music, than I am methodically and attentively listening to every last piece of music I buy. Would I manage to get around to listening and absorbing all this music? I got focused over the last couple days, and dedicated myself to listening through everything I bought. I figured if I found a song I liked every disk or two I would be doing OK, and it was worth the investment. Much to my surprise I found track after track of percussion-heavy, pop insanity. There were rave keyboards, house and techno beats, lots of surprisingly heavy metal guitar, gloriously intertwining female vocals, and sick sick sick percussion. Break after break after break. If you are a music producer who uses samples, I would highly recommend a serious investigation of Telugu soundtracks. If you want some crazy tribal percussion a la MIA’s “Bird Flu,” you just got my major tip on where to look. I have been so consistently amazed and astounded by what I am hearing that I find myself fantasizing about becoming an all Tollywood DJ. I haven’t felt that way since Anjali first introduced me to bhangra in 2000.

I am still 99.99999% ignorant about Tollywood film music, but I really want to deepen my knowledge beyond the handful of soundtracks from the last couple years I managed to acquire. I was hoping that Tollywood was a smaller industry than Bollywood just so I wouldn’t drown in the enormity, but according to the wiki, there are 240 Telugu films released annually; about three a week. I’ve got my work cut out for me. If anyone wants to provide any helpful input at all, it would be greatly appreciated.

IK

theincrediblekid@disinfo.net

1/26/08

I bought Anjali the Persepolis books by Marjane Satrapi several years ago. I’m always eager to get her hooked on comics, and I don’t expect her to develop a Grant Morrison fascination any time soon. Despite my curiosity, I only looked at them a bit, and never committed to reading them all the way through. Anjali did, however, and went on to read all of Ms. Satrapi’s other comics as well, becoming quite a fan. She’s been waiting for the animated film version of Persepolis to hit Portland, and was so eager to see it that we saw it opening night after watching Sedotta e abbandonata down the street.

Having only glanced at the original Persepolis comics I had some idea of the story that was going to be told and what it was going to look like, but not where it was going to go. I really liked the way the look of the comics was transferred to animation. I appreciated the black and white look, and the simple yet affectionate renderings. I thought the film worked very well visually, both in humorous scenes of Marjane as a Bruce Lee-obsessed child, and in brutal scenes of tanks rolling over the land, and mass executions of dissidents. With a few simple lines, the characters come alive, especially Marjane’s mother, her grandmother, and her Communist uncle Anoush.

Unfortunately the movie could’ve used more clarity in the narrative. The changing politics in Iran were presented episodically, and not all that clearly. At one moment the enemies of the Shah are the toast of town and the next they are being executed by the new revolutionary government. Wait a minute, I thought revolutionary governments executed the friends and sponsors of the previous government, not their enemies? Why were Iran and Iraq at war? Granted, the events are presented from the point of view of a little girl, but I was often confused as to what exactly was happening politically, and why. Khomeini is never mentioned, and the new government is primarily presented in the form of speeches praising martyrs, and culture police insisting on head scarves. I don’t believe the Islamic nature of the revolutionary government is ever directly referred to, only the government’s opposition to music, alcohol, and uncovered women. I was glad to see the devious actions of the CIA, USA and Britain in Iran highlighted and condemned. I’m glad those parts weren’t forced to the cutting room floor by Sony, the distributor of the film.

Not knowing where the story was going, I was surprised to see it turn into a series of relationship disappointments with men. When the movie ended, I was like, “Huh, that’s it?” It didn’t have a powerful narrative, but was more a series of events, that don’t build or lead anywhere in particular. I often felt like episodes were included because they were “dramatic” and showed the Iranian government in a bad light, but they didn’t necessarily affect me, or add to the greater story. They were just something “dramatic” that happened to Marjane, so in the movie they go. I found the tone surprisingly self-pitying and maudlin at points. I thought those were sins verboten to memoirists. These scenes are not the result of the horrors of war, or a repressive government, but the result of crushed hopes in failed relationships.

There was a lot of comedy in the film as well. Marjane comes off as a very precocious, very feisty child, quite a contrast to her weepy, depressive older self. I like the film’s presentation of Marjane’s early childhood flirtation with communism, and her adolescent embrace of the heavy metal sound, and then the punk subculture. The film’s depiction of her relationships contains some humor as well, especially how her vision of a lover changes drastically from before and after his betrayal.

The movie uses the framing device of the older Satrapi waiting in an airport, and reflecting on her life up until that point. I thought that the movie would eventually do something with this framing device, and the narrator’s present circumstances. Here she is, she’s in an airport, she’s leaving Iran and off to France (I think, Anjali and I were slightly late to the film so this supposition could be wrong), she’s thinking about her life. What is all this leading up to? Apparently the whole emotional thrust of the framing device is that she is never going to see her grandmother again. I only realize now that that was the point, because while watching the film, when she mentions that she never saw her grandmother again, it felt very flat to me. The scene simply did not have the emotional effect on me that I believe was intended, as much as I can appreciate the sensuality of Marjane’s memory of jasmine blossoms falling out from her grandmother’s breasts.

IK

1/26/08

Anjali and I saw Sedotta e abbandonata, Pietro Germi’s follow-up to Divorzio all’italiana, at the NW Film Center last night. We were a few minutes late, and I can only imagine how much we missed, because in Divorzio all’italiana the main character presents all the characters and the entire set-up in the first few minutes in a voice-over. I realized deflatedly a few minutes after we found our seats, that just because this was Germi’s follow-up to Divorzio all’italiana, and just because the film featured many of the same actors, did not mean that it starred Marcello Mastroianni. His magnetic presence was sorely missed, for he managed to add a real lightness and diabolical charm to the evil events presented in that film, whereas Sedotta e abbandonata is much darker and bleaker for his absence.

The movies are very similar in that they both deal with the Sicilian concept of honor, the importance of maintaining appearances or being devoured by the society, and the twisted nature of the patriarchal penal code, which runs roughshod over the lives of women in the society. In Sedotta e abbandonata a young girl is seduced and made pregnant, and the only culturally-acceptable options offered by the society are for a family member to kill the seducer in a fit of passion at your family’s loss of honor, or to force the girl to marry her seducer. But what if the girl doesn’t want to marry her seducer? What if the seducer does not wish to marry the girl because she is no longer a virgin, never mind who is responsible?

Sedotta e abbandonata is dark, dark, dark. It is billed as a comedy, and it is not that it is without comic moments, but the overall mood is oppressive and depressing. Comic touches include failed suicide attempts, the naive dreams of young girls compared to the harshness of reality, and a father who will do anything to preserve his family’s honor, whether that means beating his daughter, locking her in her room without reprieve, sending a son to jail, or condemning a daughter to a loveless, and no doubt abusive, marriage. The “happy” ending is painfully sardonic, and drives home the point that in Sicily, if you are a woman, you are at the mercy of the men and the demands of their culture and misogynistic penal code.

“It is the man’s right to ask, and the woman’s duty to refuse.”

Dark.

IK