The best new CD I have heard recently is Boy In Da Corner by Dizzee Rascal, a 19-year old black British rapper. (Thanks to Simon Reynolds’ blog for turning me on to this–his extravagant praise of the album is altogether justified). Now, I’ve been skeptical in the past as to the Brits’ ability to rap (last year’s much-hyped Original Pirate Material, by Mike Skinner, aka The Streets, struck me as a big bore). But Dizzee Rascal is something else again. His vocal delivery, or flow, is as wide-rangingly expressive as any hiphop MC I have ever heard; despite my prejudice against British intonations, I was immediately blown away. His lyrics are violent and bleak, about life in the slums, but totally different in mood as well as detail from American so-called “gangsta rap.” They combine toughness, vulnerability, cynicism, hopelessness and a grim determination to get on with it. This is as “real” as anything by 50 Cent, but twenty times smarter and more affectively powerful. And there’s not an ounce of the self-congratulation that has been the unfortunate defining characteristic of most mainstream US hiphop since Biggie (and that reaches its extreme point with Jay-Z). As for the music–Dizzee Rascal is his own writer and producer– it samples a wide range of stuff, most of which I can’t quite identify; it has the rhythmic propulsion of the best UK garage, but it’s harsh and dissonant and stutteringly percussive in ways I haven’t heard elsewhere. There are also odd, off-kilter choruses and refrains, and several songs feature brilliant boy/girl call-and-response arguments. All in all, this is an amazing album, and I hope it gets released in the US soon (though I’m not holding my breath expecting it to be a hit here).
The best new CD I have heard recently is Boy In Da Corner by Dizzee Rascal, a 19-year old black British rapper. (Thanks to Simon Reynolds’ blog for turning me on to this–his extravagant praise of the album is altogether justified). Now, I’ve been skeptical in the past as to the Brits’ ability to rap (last year’s much-hyped Original Pirate Material, by Mike Skinner, aka The Streets, struck me as a big bore). But Dizzee Rascal is something else again. His vocal delivery, or flow, is as wide-rangingly expressive as any hiphop MC I have ever heard; despite my prejudice against British intonations, I was immediately blown away. His lyrics are violent and bleak, about life in the slums, but totally different in mood as well as detail from American so-called “gangsta rap.” They combine toughness, vulnerability, cynicism, hopelessness and a grim determination to get on with it. This is as “real” as anything by 50 Cent, but twenty times smarter and more affectively powerful. And there’s not an ounce of the self-congratulation that has been the unfortunate defining characteristic of most mainstream US hiphop since Biggie (and that reaches its extreme point with Jay-Z). As for the music–Dizzee Rascal is his own writer and producer– it samples a wide range of stuff, most of which I can’t quite identify; it has the rhythmic propulsion of the best UK garage, but it’s harsh and dissonant and stutteringly percussive in ways I haven’t heard elsewhere. There are also odd, off-kilter choruses and refrains, and several songs feature brilliant boy/girl call-and-response arguments. All in all, this is an amazing album, and I hope it gets released in the US soon (though I’m not holding my breath expecting it to be a hit here).
PS: Dizzee Rascal was stabbed by an unknown assailant a couple of weeks ago, but apparently he will be OK. This is a sort of 50 Cent-esque “realness” that we really do not need…
Well, I finally saw 8 Mile. I have to admit that it’s pretty good. Eminem’s low-key charismatic screen presence, and the gritty camerawork showing Detroit, make up for the hokeyness and predictability of the plot. Still, it’s a film that raises more questions than it answers…
Well, I finally saw 8 Mile. I have to admit that it’s pretty good. Eminem’s low-key charismatic screen presence, and the gritty camerawork showing Detroit, make up for the hokeyness and predictability of the plot. Still, it’s a film that raises more questions than it answers…
Continue reading “8 Mile”
I am a sucker for “true crime” books, and Aphrodite Jones is, to my mind, the true mistress of the genre; she does for crime reporting what Jerry Springer does for live television. So I was excited to read Jones’ new book, Red Zone, about the incident in San Francisco a couple of years ago where a woman was mauled to death by a pair of attack dogs belonging to her neighbors. I wasn’t disappointed. As always, Jones delves into the sleaziest and most sensational aspects of the case. She focuses especially on the fantasy menage a trois – maintained through letters, photographs, and drawings – between the lawyer couple who raised the killer dogs and the white supremacist prison inmate who was their legal owner. It’s never clear how much of this was just pornographic fantasy on the part of the three, and how much involved actual incidents and practices – up to and including bestiality – but Jones insinuates where she is short on concrete facts, effectively maintaining a feverish atmosphere for her portrayals. The dog owners come across as arrogant megalomaniacs without a shred of remorse, whose fanatical self-righteousness ultimately leads them into a state of absolute delusion. Jones’ writing, as always, is itself deliriously non-linear, piling on minute details in no comprehensible order until the reader feels lost in a labyrinth of amazement and stupefaction. Her prose style combines the hyperboles of yellow journalism with the plodding repetitiveness of a befuddled court reporter. Occasional sentences take my breath away, they are so brilliantly off: “”To Ana, animals were the only real perfection of nature” (243); “Noel’s act was really quite good, so the prosecutor decided to pull out all the ammunition, to wipe Noel’s charming smile away” (259). I could never myself invent, nor find in even my worst students’ papers, “bad writing” that resonates in quite this way. Aphrodite Jones is a genius of misbegotten prose. Do I need to reiterate how much I love this book, both for its content and its style?
I am a sucker for “true crime” books, and Aphrodite Jones is, to my mind, the true mistress of the genre; she does for crime reporting what Jerry Springer does for live television. So I was excited to read Jones’ new book, Red Zone, about the incident in San Francisco a couple of years ago where a woman was mauled to death by a pair of attack dogs belonging to her neighbors. I wasn’t disappointed. As always, Jones delves into the sleaziest and most sensational aspects of the case. She focuses especially on the fantasy menage a trois – maintained through letters, photographs, and drawings – between the lawyer couple who raised the killer dogs and the white supremacist prison inmate who was their legal owner. It’s never clear how much of this was just pornographic fantasy on the part of the three, and how much involved actual incidents and practices – up to and including bestiality – but Jones insinuates where she is short on concrete facts, effectively maintaining a feverish atmosphere for her portrayals. The dog owners come across as arrogant megalomaniacs without a shred of remorse, whose fanatical self-righteousness ultimately leads them into a state of absolute delusion. Jones’ writing, as always, is itself deliriously non-linear, piling on minute details in no comprehensible order until the reader feels lost in a labyrinth of amazement and stupefaction. Her prose style combines the hyperboles of yellow journalism with the plodding repetitiveness of a befuddled court reporter. Occasional sentences take my breath away, they are so brilliantly off: “”To Ana, animals were the only real perfection of nature” (243); “Noel’s act was really quite good, so the prosecutor decided to pull out all the ammunition, to wipe Noel’s charming smile away” (259). I could never myself invent, nor find in even my worst students’ papers, “bad writing” that resonates in quite this way. Aphrodite Jones is a genius of misbegotten prose. Do I need to reiterate how much I love this book, both for its content and its style?
China Mieville gave a reading tonight, as part of the Clarion West series of summer readings in science fiction/speculative fiction. It was quite a treat: China read a chapter from his as yet unfinished new novel, which I am happy to say is set in the fabulous and tragic city of New Crobuzon, twenty years after the events of Perdido Street Station. In a not-yet-published essay, my friend Carl Freedman writes about how Mieville is a great urban writer; he gives an almost Dickensian or Joycean sense of the currents of city life–even though his city, unlike Dickens’ London or Joyce’s Dublin, is entirely imaginary. The background textures of city life were an important part of the power of Perdido Street Station; the subsequent novel, The Scar, though set in the same world, drew us away from New Crobuzon to a very different kind of city, interesting but not as rich (I mean the city was not as rich; the two novels, I feel, are equally rich, in their different ways). China said he hoped to have the novel finished by the end of this year, if not earlier, which would mean a publication date of about a year from now, summer 2004. It was nice to get a tantalizing glimpse of it, while we are waiting.
China Mieville gave a reading tonight, as part of the Clarion West series of summer readings in science fiction/speculative fiction. It was quite a treat: China read a chapter from his as yet unfinished new novel, which I am happy to say is set in the fabulous and tragic city of New Crobuzon, twenty years after the events of Perdido Street Station. In a not-yet-published essay, my friend Carl Freedman writes about how Mieville is a great urban writer; he gives an almost Dickensian or Joycean sense of the currents of city life–even though his city, unlike Dickens’ London or Joyce’s Dublin, is entirely imaginary. The background textures of city life were an important part of the power of Perdido Street Station; the subsequent novel, The Scar, though set in the same world, drew us away from New Crobuzon to a very different kind of city, interesting but not as rich (I mean the city was not as rich; the two novels, I feel, are equally rich, in their different ways). China said he hoped to have the novel finished by the end of this year, if not earlier, which would mean a publication date of about a year from now, summer 2004. It was nice to get a tantalizing glimpse of it, while we are waiting.
According to Business Week (v ia Gizmodo):
“This Thanksgiving, America’s 147 million cell-phone users will indeed have something to be thankful for: On Nov. 24, we’ll all finally be allowed to switch carriers without having to change our phone number. It’s the chance consumers have been anticipating. Now, without any inconvenience, we finally will be able turn the table on wireless carriers that have been torturing us for years with dropped calls, inconsistent customer service, and complicated price plans that require an advanced degree in comparative analysis to comprehend. ”
I’ve never quite understood this reasoning. Because the biggest cost and difficulty in switching wireless providers is not having to change your number, but having to buy a new phone–since most mobile phones are locked to a single service provider. Buying unlocked phones is prohibitively expensive; while providers subsidize the cost of phones locked to their networks, usually only the cheapest models are provided actually for free. So it does cost more than it should to switch providers, even if the number stays the same.
According to Business Week (via Gizmodo):
“This Thanksgiving, America’s 147 million cell-phone users will indeed have something to be thankful for: On Nov. 24, we’ll all finally be allowed to switch carriers without having to change our phone number. It’s the chance consumers have been anticipating. Now, without any inconvenience, we finally will be able turn the table on wireless carriers that have been torturing us for years with dropped calls, inconsistent customer service, and complicated price plans that require an advanced degree in comparative analysis to comprehend. ”
I’ve never quite understood this reasoning. Because the biggest cost and difficulty in switching wireless providers is not having to change your number, but having to buy a new phone–since most mobile phones are locked to a single service provider. Buying unlocked phones is prohibitively expensive; while providers subsidize the cost of phones locked to their networks, usually only the cheapest models are provided actually for free. So it does cost more than it should to switch providers, even if the number stays the same.
Maurice Dantec‘s new novel, Villa Vortex (in French only) is a stupendous book of over 800 pages, brilliant and obnoxious, exhilarating and exhausting, radical and reactionary–all of this in ways that are difficult to disentangle, or even to describe coherently. The book starts out (after an introduction in which the narrator informs us that he is already dead) as a kind of police procedural, a cop investigating various gruesome serial killings, against the backdrop of world events from 1989 (the fall of the Berlin Wall) to 2001 (the bombing of the World Trade Center). The cop has more philosophical ruminations than is usual for a police procedural–way too much Eurocentric whining about the decline of Western Civilization for my taste–but for a while it doesn’t seem all that unusual. But then, as the book proceeds, we get all sorts of unexpected genre shifts, strange discontinuities, and many amazing and wonderful individual passages (I especially loved the chapter where the narrator, strung out on methedrine, is hallucinating on Omaha Beach, where the Allies landed in 1944, thinking about, not only the carnage of that invasion, but of Hiroshima, Nagasaki as well, and beyond World War II of burning oil wells in Kuwait after the first Gulf War, and so on). After that, there are all sorts of metafictional twists; the narrator comes to think he is really a character in an unwritten novel by a French journalist-photographer who died in Sarajevo covering the Bosnian war; we get more and more paranoid formulations of the narrator’s general thesis about the “suicide” of Western Civilization (of which 9/11 is only the confirmation–Dantec sounds a lot like Baudrillard in places, despite his apparent dislike of Baudrillard). And then–the narrator is killed (as foreshadowed at the start of the book) with over 200 pages left to go; and that’s when things really get crazy, as the writing of the book itself is dramatized within the book as a messianic act capable of undoing and inverting history, by means of a comic book science-fiction narrative that combines the visceral experience of video games with theological speculation mixing Maurice Blanchot with the Kabbalah, with the 2nd-century Church Fathers Iranaeus and Origen, and with crackpot theorizing about the mystical powers of the DNA “meta-code.” Whew. On one page I will be blown away by the sheer excess of it all, and the weird, unexpected connections Dantec keeps on making; then, on the very next page, I will be irritated by inane rants about the evils of technological domination in the modern world, or about the need to stand firm with America in its fight against international terrorism. All in all, I’d say that Dantec is taking some very particular gripes he has that are parochially exclusive to France in the 1990s, and blowing them up to world-historical proportions. I’m also disappointed that Dantec seems to have dumped Deleuze (who was the main philosophical influence on Dantec’s previous book, the brilliant , and also apocalyptic, Babylon Babies, which I wrote about earlier), instead, the key philosophical figure here is a French writer I know little about, Raymond Abellio, but who seems to have made a bizarre synthesis between phenomenology, on the one hand, and a Gurdjieff- or Rudolf Steiner-like mysticism, on the other. (As far as I’m concerned, it’s hard to decide which I find more boring, phenomenology or Gurdjieff/Steiner/etc). In short, Dantec is “too French for his own good” (as Pauline Kael, I believe, once said of Marguerite Duras); in spite of which, Villa Vortex is filled with much that is audacious and wonderful. (Not to mention that, in the French context, there’s a lot to be said for a book that takes, as one of its key allegorical images of evil, the architectural monstrosity that is the Mitterand Library).
Maurice Dantec‘s new novel, Villa Vortex (in French only) is a stupendous book of over 800 pages, brilliant and obnoxious, exhilarating and exhausting, radical and reactionary–all of this in ways that are difficult to disentangle, or even to describe coherently. The book starts out (after an introduction in which the narrator informs us that he is already dead) as a kind of police procedural, a cop investigating various gruesome serial killings, against the backdrop of world events from 1989 (the fall of the Berlin Wall) to 2001 (the bombing of the World Trade Center). The cop has more philosophical ruminations than is usual for a police procedural–way too much Eurocentric whining about the decline of Western Civilization for my taste–but for a while it doesn’t seem all that unusual. But then, as the book proceeds, we get all sorts of unexpected genre shifts, strange discontinuities, and many amazing and wonderful individual passages (I especially loved the chapter where the narrator, strung out on methedrine, is hallucinating on Omaha Beach, where the Allies landed in 1944, thinking about, not only the carnage of that invasion, but of Hiroshima, Nagasaki as well, and beyond World War II of burning oil wells in Kuwait after the first Gulf War, and so on). After that, there are all sorts of metafictional twists; the narrator comes to think he is really a character in an unwritten novel by a French journalist-photographer who died in Sarajevo covering the Bosnian war; we get more and more paranoid formulations of the narrator’s general thesis about the “suicide” of Western Civilization (of which 9/11 is only the confirmation–Dantec sounds a lot like Baudrillard in places, despite his apparent dislike of Baudrillard). And then–the narrator is killed (as foreshadowed at the start of the book) with over 200 pages left to go; and that’s when things really get crazy, as the writing of the book itself is dramatized within the book as a messianic act capable of undoing and inverting history, by means of a comic book science-fiction narrative that combines the visceral experience of video games with theological speculation mixing Maurice Blanchot with the Kabbalah, with the 2nd-century Church Fathers Iranaeus and Origen, and with crackpot theorizing about the mystical powers of the DNA “meta-code.” Whew. On one page I will be blown away by the sheer excess of it all, and the weird, unexpected connections Dantec keeps on making; then, on the very next page, I will be irritated by inane rants about the evils of technological domination in the modern world, or about the need to stand firm with America in its fight against international terrorism. All in all, I’d say that Dantec is taking some very particular gripes he has that are parochially exclusive to France in the 1990s, and blowing them up to world-historical proportions. I’m also disappointed that Dantec seems to have dumped Deleuze (who was the main philosophical influence on Dantec’s previous book, the brilliant , and also apocalyptic, Babylon Babies, which I wrote about earlier), instead, the key philosophical figure here is a French writer I know little about, Raymond Abellio, but who seems to have made a bizarre synthesis between phenomenology, on the one hand, and a Gurdjieff- or Rudolf Steiner-like mysticism, on the other. (As far as I’m concerned, it’s hard to decide which I find more boring, phenomenology or Gurdjieff/Steiner/etc). In short, Dantec is “too French for his own good” (as Pauline Kael, I believe, once said of Marguerite Duras); in spite of which, Villa Vortex is filled with much that is audacious and wonderful. (Not to mention that, in the French context, there’s a lot to be said for a book that takes, as one of its key allegorical images of evil, the architectural monstrosity that is the Mitterand Library).
My friends Michelle and Jaime took me to see El Vez, the Chicano Elvis impersonator. It was quite wonderful and hilarious; El Vez channels Elvis, but at the same time he alters Elvis, messes with him, “Mexicanizes” (or “Mexican-Americanizes”) him. The show is quite an extravaganza, with costume changes, male strip tease, rewriting of Elvis’ lyrics, etc. There’s the Quetzalcoatl costume; but there was also the black vinyl look, the East LA gang look, even the S&M look with a tall dominatrix. I can’t say anything about the cultural significance of El Vez’s act, that hasn’t already been better said by Michelle Habell-Pallan. But I can testify that the set was a sheer, high-energy delight.
My friends Michelle and Jaime took me to see El Vez, the Chicano Elvis impersonator. It was quite wonderful and hilarious; El Vez channels Elvis, but at the same time he alters Elvis, messes with him, “Mexicanizes” (or “Mexican-Americanizes”) him. The show is quite an extravaganza, with costume changes, male strip tease, rewriting of Elvis’ lyrics, etc. The picture here shows El Vez in Quetzelcoatl costume; but there was also the black vinyl look, the East LA gang look, even the S&M look with a tall dominatrix. I can’t say anything about the cultural significance of El Vez’s act, that hasn’t already been better said by Michelle Habell-Pallan. But I can testify that the set was a sheer, high-energy delight.
As far as I know, there are only five countries in the world today that are backward enough, or corrupt enough, to have hereditary leadership (I mean actual, effective leadership, not kings or queens as symbolic figureheads) today:
North Korea (Kim Jong Il, son of Kim Il Sung)
Congo (Joseph Kabila, son of Laurent Kabila)
Syria (Bashar Al-Assad, son of Hafez Al-Assad)
Indonesia (Megawati Sukarnoputri, daughter of Sukarno)
United States (George W Bush, son of George Bush).
As far as I know, there are only five countries in the world today that are backward enough, or corrupt enough, to have hereditary leadership (I mean actual, effective leadership, not kings or queens as symbolic figureheads) today:
North Korea (Kim Jong Il, son of Kim Il Sung)
Congo (Joseph Kabila, son of Laurent Kabila)
Syria (Bashar Al-Assad, son of Hafez Al-Assad)
Indonesia (Megawati Sukarnoputri, daughter of Sukarno)
United States (George W Bush, son of George Bush).
Today I visited the Colossal Colon. It’s a forty-foot long tunnel, representing a human colon; you can crawl through it, and see all the diseases to which the colon is subject, culminating in full-blown cancer. I had to go because I am hereditarily predisposed to be at a high risk for colon cancer; but mostly because of the sheer perversity of such an anal representation. And indeed, though the purpose of the exhibition is high-mindedly educational–to warn people of the medical risks, and urge them to get tested for colon polyps or cancer–it really best works as a bizarre piece of participatory installation art. Somehow I erased my photo of the entire thing, with me entering it at the upper (intestinal rather than anal) end; so instead I have put up a photo of the repulsive interior.
Today I visited the Colossal Colon. It’s a forty-foot long tunnel, representing a human colon; you can crawl through it, and see all the diseases to which the colon is subject, culminating in full-blown cancer. I had to go because I am hereditarily predisposed to be at a high risk for colon cancer; but mostly because of the sheer perversity of such an anal representation. And indeed, though the purpose of the exhibition is high-mindedly educational–to warn people of the medical risks, and urge them to get tested for colon polyps or cancer–it really best works as a bizarre piece of participatory installation art. Somehow I erased my photo of the entire thing, with me entering it at the upper (intestinal rather than anal) end; so instead I have put up a photo of the repulsive interior.
Another ludicrous scientific study (via Metafilter) showing that it’s possible to “prove” nearly any pre-established thesis, as long as you extrapolate from a small enough sample and generalize wildly without any sense of context: ” Satoshi Kanazawa, a psychologist at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, compiled a database of the biographies of 280 great scientists,” and discovered that almost none of them continued to do important work once they got married and had children. Well, it is often said (though I have no idea whether this is more than an anecdotal observation) that scientists, in particular do their best work when they are young. If true, this may have to do with the energy of youth, or with a fresh mind free of preconceptions, or who knows what else. In any case, certain creative endeavors (discoveries in mathematics, perhaps) seem to be done best at a younger age, while others (writing long novels?) seem to be done best by people who are older. As for marriage and children, it is obvious that the higher the age, the larger percentage of people will have been married and have had kids. (Not to mention that, as I am experiencing daily, having a small child consumes a great deal of your time, energy, and attention, unless you are a complete pig who leaves it all to your partner, or so rich, as well as indifferent, that you can hire servants to do all the work for you). But these are mere trifles for Kanazawa. Not only does he take his database of scientists (chosen according to what criteria? we are not told in the newspaper account at least) as representative of the larger category of “creative genius and crime” (!), but he further concludes that the reason for the alleged fall-off in creativity after marriage and having children is that “a single psychological mechanism is responsible for this: the competitive edge among young men to fight for glory and gain the attention of women. That craving drives the all-important male hormone, testosterone. After a man settles down, the testosterone level falls, as does his creative output, Kanazawa theorises.” I suppose Kanazawa considers the testosterone/creativity link to be so obvious that it does not need to be tested, or even explained. Yet another case of a “social scientist” who wouldn’t understand culture and society if they bit him on the ass.
Another ludicrous scientific study (via Metafilter) showing that it’s possible to “prove” nearly any pre-established thesis, as long as you extrapolate from a small enough sample and generalize wildly without any sense of context: ” Satoshi Kanazawa, a psychologist at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, compiled a database of the biographies of 280 great scientists,” and discovered that almost none of them continued to do important work once they got married and had children. Well, it is often said (though I have no idea whether this is more than an anecdotal observation) that scientists, in particular do their best work when they are young. If true, this may have to do with the energy of youth, or with a fresh mind free of preconceptions, or who knows what else. In any case, certain creative endeavors (discoveries in mathematics, perhaps) seem to be done best at a younger age, while others (writing long novels?) seem to be done best by people who are older. As for marriage and children, it is obvious that the higher the age, the larger percentage of people will have been married and have had kids. (Not to mention that, as I am experiencing daily, having a small child consumes a great deal of your time, energy, and attention, unless you are a complete pig who leaves it all to your partner, or so rich, as well as indifferent, that you can hire servants to do all the work for you). But these are mere trifles for Kanazawa. Not only does he take his database of scientists (chosen according to what criteria? we are not told in the newspaper account at least) as representative of the larger category of “creative genius and crime” (!), but he further concludes that the reason for the alleged fall-off in creativity after marriage and having children is that “a single psychological mechanism is responsible for this: the competitive edge among young men to fight for glory and gain the attention of women. That craving drives the all-important male hormone, testosterone. After a man settles down, the testosterone level falls, as does his creative output, Kanazawa theorises.” I suppose Kanazawa considers the testosterone/creativity link to be so obvious that it does not need to be tested, or even explained. I suppose, as well, that he doesn’t think women are capable of high-level creativity. Yet another case of a “social scientist” who wouldn’t understand culture and society if they bit him on the ass.