The Incredible Blog

  • Divorzio all’italiana

    1/20/08

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    Anjali and I saw the brilliant Divorzio all’italiana AKA Divorce Italian Style by Pietro Germi this weekend. I am largely ignorant of Italian cinema outside of a college viewing of Ladri di biciclette (The Bicycle Thief). Anjali had the interest when she saw that the Northwest Film Center was showing the film and I acquiesced, only to be utterly surprised at what an ageless, biting comic masterpiece the movie is. Marcello Mastroianni is brilliant as the lead character Baron Ferdinand “Fefe” Cefalu who desperately wants to be free of his mustachioed, mono-browed wife, Rosalia (an excellent performance by Daniela Rocca) so he can be with his 16-year old first cousin Angela (Stefania Sandrelli). Marcello is irresistible, if detestable, as the dastardly husband who we first meet eyeing up a young girl on a train. The movie finds satirical humor in (and offers a scathing critique of) the darkest aspects of Sicilian society from culturally-demanded and pardonable uxoricide to the acceptability of sexually assaulting your domestic servants. In 1963 the movie recieved Academy Award nominations for Best Director and Best Actor in a Leading Role, and won Best Writing, Story and Screenplay – Written Directly for the Screen.

    For those in the Portland area, the NW Film Center is showing Pietro Germi’s follow-up film Sedotta e abbandonata (Seduced and Abandoned) this Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, the 25th-27th of January, 2008. I am eager to see it, and highly recommend checking it out based on seeing Divorzio all’italiana.

  • Andy Palacio is dead. Long live the Garinagu!

    1/22/08

    I found out yesterday that Andy Palacio had died. The man who did more than anyone else to bring Garifuna language, culture, and music to the international stage had “a massive and extensive stroke to the brain, a heart attack and respiratory failure” which caused his death on January, 18th 2008. Andy’s music was always too mellow for me, but while his particular take on Garifuna music is not my cup of tea, I greatly respect the man for working so hard to raise awareness of Garifuna language and culture, especially among his own people. When I saw him perform last summer his passion to share his culture, and his largeness of spirit shone through loud and clear, enrapturing the Portland audience. While I can’t be anything but sad that such a wonderful man is no longer walking the earth, hopefully his death will bring much more attention to the Garifuna people and their music, so that his mission in life can be continued in death.

    IK

  • Crumb Speaks

    1/17/08

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    I remember being spooked when I looked at Jeremy Pinkham’s collection of Robert Crumb’s Weirdo comics back in high school. At the time I was a full-on superhero comic fan, and the “dirty” Robert Crumb comics seemed redolent of fire and brimstone to my young Christian sensibilities. Once I got some college in me I was far more open to exploring underground comics, and I picked up whatever Robert Crumb comics I could find. I read a lengthy interview of his in the Comics Journal at some point in the nineties and found it fascinating and unbelievably hilarious. When the Crumb film documentary came out in 1995 it was like deja vu, because Crumb had already so effectively introduced me to his family and their idiosyncracies in his interview. It was like, “Wow, no matter how bizarre his descriptions, they really are just like he said they were.”

    Recently I discovered a collected edition of Crumb’s interviews with the Comics Journal. I tore through it, finding it absorbing and provocative, whether I agreed with Crumb’s particular points of view or not. He certainly lays his cards on the table. I found that book so engaging, that I then happily discovered another collection of interviews with Robert Crumb put together by an ex-coworker of mine, D K Holm, entitled R. Crumb Conversations. This book does not duplicate any of the Comics Journal interviews from the other collection. There is a lot of repetition, however, of Crumb’s history, ideas, and opinions, but not enough to keep me from reading interview after interview.

    Crumb believes that the artist has no responsibility to society, other than to express the uncensored contents of their subconscious. He feels that artists should not be constrained by corporate bodies, public opinion, political ideologies, or good taste. Crumb loathes the era of mass production, and pines for a time that he feels ended after the 1930’s, when people were more individual, and not as controlled by the corporate-owned mass media. As much as he has very passionate ideas about what is wrong with society, he doesn’t feel like it is his place to offer political solutions in his art. Without offering solutions, he certainly spends a lot of time bemoaning what is wrong with the world in his comics.

    We certainly don’t agree on music, for as much as I can appreciate 78’s and early recorded American music, I definitely don’t share his aversion to modern music. I can understand his rejection of formulaic and mass-marketed crap, but with the increasing availability of digital music tools, anyone can create music and make it available, in a way that wasn’t possible 90 years ago. Crumb is so interested in the artistic creations of the individual, but I don’t think he could see past the electronics to see that it is now easier than it has ever been for an individual artist to create works and mass-distribute them without corporate or governmental interference.  Not that corporations and governments aren’t trying to interfere, but currently they are losing ground to chaos.  This may be a brief window in time, a temporary autonomous zone, soon to disappear, but for right now, opportunities abound to foist your individual vision on the world.

    IK

  • Can’t Stop Won’t Stop

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    I finally got around to reading Can’t Stop Won’t Stop by Jeff Chang. When it came out everyone hailed it as the greatest hip-hop history book ever, but I had read so many different hip-hop histories by that point, I felt like, what can be in here that I haven’t already read dozens of times?

    A lot, I now know.

    The important words to consider on the cover of the book are A History of the Hip-Hop Generation. Note that it doesn’t say a history of hip-hop music, or a history of hip-hop. This is Chang’s attempt to write the story of the hip-hop GENERATION. There is only a brief period in the book where the narrative is following hip-hop parties, and DJs, and record releases. The book is far more concerned with what historical, economic and cultural currents led to the formation of what we now call hip-hop, and what has happened to our nation since this culture has gone from a South Bronx phenomenon, to a world-wide phenomenon.

    Every other hip-hop history book I have read begins something like, “The South Bronx was a bombed-out shell, taken over by gangs, then Kool Herc started DJing breaks records, and hip-hop was born.” Even though Kool Herc wrote the introduction to the book, his story doesn’t appear in Can’t Stop Won’t Stop until page 67. Preceding that is the story of how the Bronx became the bombed-out shell the other hip-hop histories describe, the story of the Bronx gangs that the other books only mention briefly, and the Jamaican roots of hip-hop. The only other hip-hop book that sticks out in my memory as extensively exploring hip-hop’s Jamaican roots is The New Beats by S. H. Fernando.

    Even though it took me several years after its release to get around to reading it, I am getting in line (late and definitely not last) to sing the praises of Can’t Stop Won’t Stop just like everybody else.
    IK

  • Want Bollywood Vinyl?

    Eric over at

    Mississippi Records

    4007 N Mississippi Ave
    Portland, OR 97227
    (503) 282-2990

    got in a bunch of Bollywood vinyl last week from a Toronto warehouse buy. Lots of sealed copies. There will be plenty more coming as well apparently. Anjali and I got there a week late (thanks for the grapevine tip, Monkeytek) and still managed to find some new records for our collections. It’s not everyday that a stash of Bollywood vinyl like this shows up, so take advantage if you can.

    Peace,

    IK

  • Time to get Un-ill

    I have been experiencing the worst illness of the last 20 years of my life over the last month, and despite wanting to write things here for your delectation, I’ve had to focus my energy on details surrounding our upcoming Andaz show with DJ Rekha, and our New Year’s Eve celebration. Despite all I have done on those fronts so far, 90% of the work is still ahead of me, so I am not sure how much I will be able to write here in the near future.  Going around postering and flyering in the freezing cold doesn’t sound like a lot of fun, but we have to do everything we can to get the word out about these shows.  I hope all of you in the Portland metro area are planning on coming.

    Peace,

    IK

    PS Anjali and I are playing Seattle this Friday the 21st of December.  We rarely play Seattle, so if you have friends in the area, tell them to come on by.  Thanks.

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  • I Have America Surrounded

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    11/27/07

    I have been sick as a dog for over a week now. Miserable nights filled with intermittent sleep, and days filled with no energy and a general malaise. Other than a few bowls of soup and some oranges, I’ve been fasting this whole time. For those that know me, and use the word “legendary” when describing my appetite (which is everyone that knows me), you realize just how awful I must feel. I’ve had a fear of having to perform a big show while sick since Anjali, DJ Peregrine and I DJed the Medicine Hat for New Year’s Eve 2000. So of course I was as sick as I have ever been at a performance while DJing our five year Andaz anniversary at the Fez Ballrom last Saturday. Anjali posted some photos our friend Sarah Race took over on her blog. Maybe I’ll write about that show later. It was epic, and I want to thank everyone who came down on Thanksgiving weekend. Sorry to all those that had to wait in a line outside while the club was at capacity.

    What I want to write about instead are the books I’ve been reading while I have been sick. The one bright side of my illness (other than my rapidly falling weight -too bad fat and muscle both go at the same time while fasting) is that while I haven’t had energy to do anything else, I have had the energy to read. I’ll start with the last book first: I Have America Surrounded : The Life of Timothy Leary by John Higgs. The title comes from a Leary quote where shortly before his death in 1996 he was asked about Richard Nixon famously referring to him as “the most dangerous man in America,” to which Leary replied “It’s true. I have America surrounded.” Always a joker. Or was he joking? His influence has certainly permeated America and the world in few ways most people could imagine. I’m writing this on a computer right now. Whether you are reading this blog post on a computer running Windows or a Mac, you wouldn’t be doing so without the influence of LSD-25. Don’t underestimate the fact that Bill Gates tripped on acid at Harvard, or that Apple’s Steve Jobs told writer John Markoff that “taking LSD was one of the two or three most important things he had done in his life.” Silicon Valley has always been awash in acid, read John Markoff’s What the Dormouse Said : How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry for the full story.

    Consider the fact that any time you listen to a cohesive album by a pop or rock artist you are listening to the fruits of LSD. Before the Beatles produced Revolver and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Brian Wilson produced Pet Sounds, all under the influence of LSD, albums were nothing but collections of singles and filler tracks. LSD inspired popular musicians to start thinking of albums as cohesive artistic statements. It also inspired Bob Dylan to ditch folk music and go electric. So if you have favorite albums in your collection, as opposed to favorite singles, you can thank LSD. If you just have MP3s on an iPod, well, we are back to LSD again, thanks to acid-inspired CEO and co-founder of Apple: Steve Jobs.

    While people might readily admit LSD’s influence on the last 40 years of popular music, they might not realize the important role it has played in modern developments in math and science. In molecular biology it inspired the discoveries of two Nobel Laureates, including Francis Crick’s realization that DNA had a double-helix shape. Kary Mullis, winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize in Chemistry said “I think I might have been stupid in some respects, it if weren’t for my psychedelic experiences,” and “Back in the 1960s and early ’70s I took plenty of LSD. A lot of people were doing that in Berkley back then. And I found it to be a mind-opening experience. It was certainly much more important than any courses I ever took.” Chaos mathematician (or dynamical systems theorist, if you prefer) Ralph Abraham says ““In the 1960s a lot of people on the frontiers of math experimented with psychedelic substances. There was a brief and extremely creative kiss between the community of hippies and top mathematicians. I know this because I was a purveyor of psychedelics to the mathematical community.” Richard Feynman may have been “embarrassed” by it, but he too experimented with LSD. Since Timothy Leary did more to publicize and encourage LSD use than any other human alive (he estimates that he was responsible for “turning on” seven million people) you can’t factor him out of the influence that LSD has had on the world we live in, whether most people remain ignorant of this influence or not.

    What is so grating is that while LSD has radically changed the landscape of contemporary life, it is thought of as nothing other than the inspiration for a bunch of mythical “acid casualties.” Bill Gates, richest man in the world, an “acid casualty?” Multiple Nobel Prize winners: acid casualties? The co-founder and CEO of Apple/Pixar an acid casualty? I guess being an acid casualty is not such a bad thing. LSD is seen as something a few freaks did in the 60’s; they all jumped off buildings or went insane – end of story. Timothy Leary was a deluded madman who convinced young people to throw their lives away, and he ended up an acid casualty himself. Or so goes the standard mainstream American media narrative. A recent Leary biography Timothy Leary : A Biography by Robert Greenfield has attracted a lot of media attention seemingly because it is a hatchet job that takes none of Leary’s ideas seriously. Meanwhile John Higgs excellently-written and highly-readable Leary biography receives scant attention, seemingly because while it is not at all uncritical, it actually takes the man’s influence and ideas seriously. I am sad that it is given short shrift in favor of a tabloid biography. I thought it was an excellent book, totally gripping and something I had a hard time putting down. I am especially happy that it takes the time to explicate Leary’s 8-Circuit Model of Consciousness. Two of my favorite books -Robert Anton Wilson’ Prometheus Rising and Antero Alli’s Angel Tech : A Modern Shaman’s Guide to Reality Selection– are dedicated to explicating Leary’s 8-Circuit model. I am also happy that the book discusses Leary’s radical S.M.I.L.E. concept and his promulgation of the Panspermia hypothesis.

    Timothy Leary lived a fascinating life. Kicked out of West Point AND Harvard. In fact, he was the first faculty kicked out of Harvard since Ralph Waldo Emerson. He’s in good company. For possession of less than 14 grams of marijuana he was sentenced to 20 years in prison. Fortunately the psychological profile test he had to take to determine whether he was a flight risk or not was designed by himself 14 years prior when he was Director of Psychology Research at the Kaiser Foundation Hospital. Acing the test, he was assigned to a minimum-security prison that he promptly escaped from with help from the Weather Underground. Then he lived the life of an international fugitive, spending some harrowing time in Algeria battling wills with Eldridge Cleaver who headed up the Black Panther embassy there. He ended up back in American prison sharing a wall with Charles Manson after being recaptured in Afghanistan. Yes, he was released after several years by working as an informant for the Feds, but history has shown that he intentionally told them a lot of unhelpful information that didn’t result in a single conviction. My only criticism of the book is that it dedicates 205 pages to the years 1959 to 1975, and only 26 pages to the next 21 years of his life. True, he may not have been an international fugitive then, or the leader of a worldwide psychedelic movement, but I still would have appreciated more information about his final decades.

    I saw Timothy Leary on a lecture tour in Eugene, Oregon. I am going to guess this was in the Spring of 1993. Because Tim was such an LSD evangelist it was hard not to stare at the aged figure on stage and search for signs of LSD damage. He was a little “spacey” and not as sharp and fast as I expected from the books of his that I had read previously. Ken Kesey was with him and it was possible that they were both really high. Tim talked a lot about Socrates, and that both of their messages had always been “know thyself,” which he kept repeating. At the time he was into computers, the internet, raves, and Psychic TV. In fact Psychic TV (or some people affiliated with them) had designed psychedelic visuals for his lecture. They were standard early 90’s “trippy” digital imagery and did nothing for me. He would stop and start the visuals throughout his talk sometimes stopping just to stare at them as he wanted us to do as well. He claimed that raves were just going back to the Greeks who used to stimulate their minds with sounds and visuals. Hmmmm. As much as I admired the man, his books, and his ideas, I was very underwhelmed and disappointed by his appearance. His books from 10 years earlier seemed so focused and bright, filled with daringly next level ideas. His venerable personage on stage seemed unfocused and hazy, with little in the way of ideas other than “know thyself. ” The question and answer period involved Kesey tossing a basketball with a built-in microphone around the crowd. I was disappointed when someone asked about the Masons, and Tim shrugged it off saying he knew nothing about Masons, as if it was a silly and irrelevant question. At the time I thought that he was just not being forthcoming with his knowledge. I had read a lot of Robert Anton Wilson’s explorations of Masonic history around that time, and knowing he and Tim were friends, I just thought Tim was being disingenuous and ducking the question.

    Was Tim as acid casualty? Or just an old guy, who wasn’t as sharp as he used to be? Or was he just high? Watching youtube interviews of Tim shortly before his death he appears a lot sharper than what I saw on stage that night in Eugene. I think he and Kesey were just having too much fun before the show, probably. I don’t regret seeing the man speak before he died, but I much more appreciate his early psychedelic instructional films where he plays the Acid guru. William Burroughs said, “It may be another century before he is accorded his rightful stature.” In no way am I asserting that the man was without flaws. Tim was far from perfect. It seems much more than coincidental that both his first wife and his only daughter committed suicide. He was clearly a bad parent. Many people in the psychedelic movement criticized his very reckless and public promotion of LSD to any who would listen, and his love of personal fame and celebrity. Tragically, his ex-wife who helped him escape from prison spent 23 years in hiding because Leary had given her name to the Feds. In an interview with Paul Krassner, John Higgs says, “Leary was too complicated a figure to dismiss as either a saint or a moron, as many people try to. He’s probably the best example of the “trickster” archetype that the 20th Century produced, and his ambiguity is key to understanding him.” For good or ill, Leary profoundly affected all those around him. As Hunter S. Thompson trumpets on the back of Higgs’ book, “Tim was a Chieftan. He stomped on the terra, and he left his elegant hoof-prints on all our lives.”

    He certainly left his hoof-prints on mine.

    IK

  • My brother deserves the credit

    So, whether he believes it or not, I had always intended to give my brother the credit, even before he wrote me in reference to my Rakim show review. You see, I owe my reverence for Rakim to my younger brother. I was not one of those people who were first introduced to hip-hop through hearing “Rapper’s Delight.” In fact, I never heard that song until I found the 12″ at a thrift store during college. I had no idea of the significance of that song when I found the 12″, I just thought, “Whoah, look at these early hip-hop singles at this thrift store.” (Including “Action” by the Treacherous Three!) My first introduction to any of the hip-hop elements came from my awareness of break-dancing in the early ’80s. I think I missed out on the bulk of that early national explosion due to the fact that I was exposed to zero hip-hop culture in Columbia, Missouri, up until I moved in the Fall of 1983, and when I arrived in Portland, it seemed like it was on the way out of popular taste. I remember the kids that wore parachute pants would be made fun of when I moved to Portland in time for seventh grade.

    My first awareness of rap dates to the first explosion of Def Jam artists like Run DMC, the Beastie Boys, and LL Cool J. Like most white boys of the right age and stage I went crazy for the Beastie Boys, playing Licensed to Ill to death. The funny thing is, my first awareness of them came from my punk/skater friends who only listened to hardcore, because the “She’s On It” video had caught their attention. In late 1986 I first caught their “Fight for Your Right” video and shortly thereafter created a dub of a dub of Licensed to Ill courtesy of my friend Dan Hutt. (You can trust a pastor’s son to keep you up on cultural developments such as the Beastie Boys.) I played the dubbed cassette to death that Winter, and by the Spring when the album had become ubiquitous at my high school, I was already over it, and critical of all the mainstream devotion, like any good budding elitist.

    When I taped an early episode of “Yo, MTV Raps!” a few years later, the only criteria I had to judge what I saw, were the aforementioned Def Jam artists. When I saw the video for Eric B. and Rakim’s “Microphone Fiend” I thought Rakim was lame. No energy. No enthusiasm. No shouting. Up until that point all the hip-hop I HEARD, had a shout at every phrase on the very last WORD, if there wasn’t shouting at the end of every LINE, then it didn’t seem to me like a very good TIME. I shelved the tape and forgot about it. A few months later my brother came to me and said, “You know, I’ve been watching that Eric B. and Rakim video and I think you should watch it again. It’s really good.” I sat down with him, watched the video again, and this time I had a moment of clarity. I now understood that Rakim was -flowing- and that there was no need for him to be shouting anything. My aesthetic appreciation of hip-hop was completely transformed. Thanks, Bro.

    When my brother suggested going downtown to buy some Eric B. and Rakim and Kool Mo Dee tapes, I was game, as I was always super-broke, and up for him using his money to buy some tapes that I could devour as well. While I did listen to the Kool Mo Dee tapes a fair amount, it was Paid In Full that I realized was a straight-up classic as I spent my time listening to even instrumental tracks like “Chinese Arithmetic.” When I heard Follow the Leader I was sold from the opening bars. “Microphone Fiend” probably comes closer than any other to a hip-hop song that I have (mostly) memorized word for word. (To this day, there are parts of that song where I just can’t figure out what Rakim is saying. Of course now I could look it up on some (possibly somewhat accurate) lyric site, but such a thing didn’t exist back in the ’80s. -I just did, and there were a lot of mistakes in the transcription, from what I could tell.-)

    What is so amazing about my brother convincing me to re-evaluate an artist that would go on to be such a major icon for me is that my brother and I have often been at complete odds in terms of the music that we listen to and appreciate. There was a period when I was listening to anything I deemed alternative (pre-corporate Alternative Rock) and underground, and my brother was a huge fan of Pink Floyd, the Moody Blues, and the Who especially, to such an extent that he was buying atrocious Roger Daltrey and John Entwistle solo albums. To be fair, he was listening to the Ramones as well, and that is one other major credit I have to extend to him. After I heard about the Ramones in high school I bought Rocket to Russia, and while it was catchy, it was too edgeless and poppy, and didn’t do much for me. It was my brother who first played me their debut album, which upon my initial listen I realized was brilliant. Our different musical appreciation trajectories have continued on their separate paths: while he has recently appreciated a lot of modern rock, I don’t listen to any of it or find it of the slightest interest to me. Meanwhile you can be assured that he is not listening to any international music, like I spend 99% of my time doing. Quality hip-hop appreciation is still probably one of the only areas of musical appreciation we still have in common.

    Here’s to my brother.

    IK

    My  brother responds:  “Rest assured, other than a few Pete Townsend albums, my current collection is free of all other Who solo projects. ”

  • New Year’s Eve finally confirmed

    Dearest citizens of Portland and outlying communities,

    Anjali and I have finally confirmed our plans for New Year’s Eve.  We will be rocking the Cleaners at the Ace Hotel from 9pm-2am.  This will be quite a treat for us, as we will be working with Anjali’s childhood friend Seann McKeel, and Charlie Hodge, who we first worked with back when he helped open Holocene.  The capacity is quite limited for an Anjali and The Kid party, so things will probably get very crazy.  We’ve got a lot of work between now and then, but I am committed to making sure that we will be hosting a party well worth attending.  Hope to see you there.

    IK

  • Random Citizen gives us some shine

    Random Citizen over at Metroblogging Portland conducted an interview with Anjali and I in honor of the five year anniversary of our Andaz night at the Fez Ballroom.  Thank you, Random Citizen.
    IK