Juiceboxxx and Mabson Live in Echo Park

I think it was the Summer of 2009. I bought one of those flip cams. Quickly lost the flip cam. Just grabbed my big hiking backpack to go to the mountains with Owen. Found that flip cam. There were some good shows on it.

This is big, bad Juiceboxxx with L.A.'s own Kyle Mabson live at someone's apartment in Echo Park. I think it was a going away party. Someone was moving on.

My Heros Are Falling Down

Every year people die. If we didn't die our world would be a hopeless clusterfuck. Too crowded. It's already too crowded, imagine if God didn't systematically dump inventory. This year however, 2010, a lot of my musical idols dropped. Some of these people were old or sick or both. That's not too sad because who wants to be old or sick or both? Some were young and left us with the feeling that they could of contributed more.

This isn't really fair of us because their lives belonged to them or God or both. Sometimes, when an artist's output affects us in an important way we begin to feel like we have some sort of dominion over their art or their lives or both.

We don't.

Here's a list of musicians, who affected me, that passed on all in one year. I will list them in order of the importance of their art in my life. But who am I, really?

1. Gregory Isaacs



Reggae and other music from Jamaica influenced my musical pallet quite a bit. Jamaican Riddims were among the first genre I experimented with as a young child. Gregory Isaacs is widely considered one of the greatest Reggae singers of all time. When asked who his favorite singer was in an interview, the great Robert Nesta Marley replied "Gregory Isaacs, Mon" I would agree with Bob on this one. Bless up, Gregory. Rest In Paradise



2. Ari Up



Front-woman for the uber-seminal Post Punk outfit The Slits. Her music was smart and fun and ahead of it's time. I can't think of a modern Punk-ish outfit that wouldn't fairly count Ari and The Slits among their influences. If they don't count Ari and The Slits among their influences their probably some shitty band on a shitty label and if they died they wouldn't get mentioned on this blog.



3. Peter "Sleazy" Christopherson



Sleazy was a founding member of Throbbing Gristle. Their label was Industrial Records. Industrial they were, maybe the first Industrial band. Can you imagine a world where Throbbing Gristle never existed? Me either. Besides his extensive musical accomplishments with Throbbing Gristle and subsequent bands, Sleazy was an amazing graphic and performance artists. In many ways Sleazy was responsible for the look as well as the sound of Industrial music and to a certain extent, the genres of Noise and Techno as well. Fanni and Genesis are still around. When they go it'll be pretty close to over.



4. Captain Beefheart



I'm sure this was a big one for a lot of people. I don't have to tell you that Van "Captain Beefheart" Vliet was a prolific rock musician with a career that spanned a quarter decade. I was never a fanatic but I am of the odd and the Captain was nothing if not odd. Jay-Z rapped once that no one else but he was "so Pop and so hood at the same time". I would argue that Captain Beefheart was so mainstream yet so weird at the same time. I'm not sure a truly avant garde musician, the way Van Vliet was, could obtain the type of success in this day & age that Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band have enjoyed.



5. Eyedea




Eyedea was a rapper from Minneapolis. He was white. Both of these things would have sounded strange in the 90's but Eyedea and his production partner Abilities were such proficient MC's (along with Slug of Atmosphere and the rest of the Rhymesayers crew) that the Twin Cities are now synonymous with dope, usually white, backpack rappers. He won Scribble Jam in 1999. That was the first I heard of him. He never really let up. Their weren't too many Indie rappers in the aughties that matched the success of Eyedea and his buddies. Again, I wasn't a huge fanatic but I took this one especially hard. I think it was because Eyedea (real name Mikey Larsen) was so young. His cause of death was a mystery for a week or more before it finally surfaced as an accidental drug overdose. Opioides, in all their forms, cause nothing but death for many and misery for all. Please don't do them.



Lena Horne, Teddy Pendergrass and Eddie Fisher also died this year but I'm not going to write about them.

Circles Toddler

I grew up in this town and left when I was pretty young. I definitely romanticized my childhood and romanticized the desert. I especially held fondly to the images of my neighborhood which was bordered by the freeway on one side and a large park on the other. My friend lived across the street from me and her mom was a drug dealer. They were a nice family and I spent a lot of time there. Everyone in the neighborhood called her "Ms.T" even though her real name was Theresa. She had a group of men that were loyal to her because of her influence in the crystal meth trade. They served as a sort of goon squad and would do her bidding. She carried a hot pink gun that wasn't made of metal but rather molded plastic. The gun was plastic but it was a real gun. It fired real bullets and the bullets weren't made of plastic. The casings were metal and the projectile itself was made from lead alloy like any bullet fired from a metal gun.

Because of her goon squad and because of the pink pistol, Ms.T wasn't the person to cross. One time an associate of her's fell out of her favor. She had the men who were loyal to her pick him up on the ruse that they were going to go to a local bar. They took the man to the desert in Ms.T's car and shot him 3 times in the chest and the head and then buried him. When they returned, Ms.T asked if he was 6 feet under. "We put him a lot further down than 6 feet" one of the men said. It wasn't until 3 days later that the man finally dug himself out and found his way back to town. I saw him at Mike's Deli, which wasn't really a deli but a liquor store. A lot of us from the neighborhood would hang out around Mike's, so I wasn't too surprised to see him there. I asked him how he managed to get out of the hole and back to town. He said he dug his way out and walked back across the freeway and into the neighborhood. He confirmed that he was in fact a lot deeper in the earth than 6 feet. His hands were still caked with dirt to his wrists from his grueling resurrection and the bullet holes in his chest and his head were still plainly visible. I told him I was sorry about what happened and I was glad he had found his way back home. I couldn't stay to chat too long because I was on my way to work and I had a long walk ahead of me.

I worked at a bargain super-store called MacFrugals. Before that it was called Pick 'N Save. Nowadays it's called Big Lots. It wasn't a very good job and that may be one of the reasons I left so young to try my hand at big city living in Los Angeles.

I just came back about 3 months ago. Nothing too exciting was going on in the old neighborhood and I grew bored quickly. I went Downtown to see if there was anything stirring. I passed Circles Records which was a hopping record and tape store when I lived here the first time. Circles had since closed and the building was pretty well boarded up. I found a door that looked like it could be breached easily so I wrestled with the knob and found my way in. Once inside I saw that there were a handful people, maybe 20, who had taken up residence in the abandoned record shop. I talked to a nice man that seemed to me to be the leader of the lot. He told me that they had been there for several years and a couple of babies had even been born in the squat and the babies were now toddlers. I saw a Circles toddler playing with a Transformers toy on a yoga mat that had been fitted with sheets and was apparently being utilized as a makeshift bed. I asked the man why they had decided to live inside of Circles Records. He told me they had chosen the location because the vinyl record, as a medium, was dead. I knew he was wrong about vinyl being dead, but I decided there was a possibility that he was right about a lot of other things.

inspiration

Nacho sent us this video hoping we could draw inspiration for backgrounds in our recent BLOK photo shoot. inspiration indeed.

Directed by Eric Wareheim Music by Flying Lotus Silverlake's definitely in the house

his video below contains some explicit cartoon scenes, flashing lights and is FOR OVER 18's ONLY.


Directed by Eric Wareheim (Tim & Eric) in association with Warp Records and Warp Films. Music by Flying Lotus. Co Directed/ Animation by Devin Flynn. Co Directed/ Edited by Eric Fensler. More info at dancefloordale.com

Tiny-Baby Ginger Dawn

It was the 1980s and the absolute height of the inter-continental political phenomenon known as the Cold War. The Berlin Wall was still in place and we, as a nation, we're unaware that the U.S.S.R. was on the verge of collapse while America continued to play catch, to ride the school bus, to pack sandwiches for lunch.

It was 1987 and I was a tiny-baby ginger. I was living in suburban Phoenix and i was absolutely terrified of the Ruskies.

I would have a recurring dream, the only one I can remember, where I would wake up to a ruckus in front of my house. I would look outside my bedroom window and see tanks rolling into my cul-de-sac. As I brushed the sleep from my tiny-baby Ginger eyes I would focus on the writing painted on the exterior of the tank, it was not our own, it was Russian.

I was fucking scared and it had more than a little to do with this popular teen film.

racehorse charlie

Today I took a drug test. The process of peeing in a receptacle is funny enough but the truly amusing aspect of this whole experience lay in the written material that accompanied the test.

There was a list of illegal drugs that would trigger the test. It read as a list in 3 columns.

In the 1st column was the proper name of the drug or the active ingredient in the drug. In the 2nd column was an arbitrary abbreviation that the drug testing company assigned to each intoxicant (column 2 was really unnecessary) The 3rd column...well the 3rd column was a list of "street names" for each drug; euphemisms that would hip parents and square authority figures to the vernacular of the stoner adolescents or burn-out employees so that everyone was on the same page.

I don't know who decided on the "street names" but they were apparently flown in on a time machine from the pages of a Beat-era William Burroughs novel. I have never heard most of these names used before, in fact I'm pretty sure that if these slang terms were ever legitimate they applied to pharmaceutical drugs that were long out of production by 1979.

The 3 columns read as follows:

Marijuana THC pot, grass, weed, dank, ganja, bud, hydro, zig zag
Cocaine COC coke, racehorse charlie, yeyo, blow, nose nachos, hooter, crank
Methamphetamine MET crystal, speedballs, crank, speed, glass
Amphetamines AMP speed, gaggler, black beauties, beanies, pep pills, lid poppers
Ecstacy MDMA E, XTC, X, disco biscuits
Opiates OPI gun powder, morphine, smack, H, corage pills, horse, bomb, heroin
Phencyclidine PCP angel dust, rocket fuel, wack, ozone, fry
Benzodiazepines BZO downers, tranks, benzos
Methadone MTD done, fizzies, chocolate chip cookies, juice, water
Barbiturates BAR barbs, birds, red devils, yellow jackets, block busters
Oxycodone OXY oxy, killers, OC, oxycotton


BTW, my test was negative on all counts :)


not MY kid...


drug test results that Ian MacKaye would be proud of...

Melodica King and the World's Best Island

Back in the day if a friend had a birthday, a friend i liked a lot, I would always get them one of several Trojan Records 7" box sets. Vinyl box sets are fucking cool, especially when they're 45s.

I would do this regardless if that friend was a fan of Reggae or Jamaican music. I aways felt like my friends who didn't appreciate Reggae just didn't understand it.

Me, myself have always had a minor obsession with the soundz of Jamaica. How could so many prolific artists and so much musical and recording innovation come from one, tiny, isolated Caribbean Island.

And, as if I need to tell you, Jamaica's hella gummy, so these pioneers in the audible arts were bobbing and weaving rude boys and manipulating reel to reel recording in grass huts. Lee Perry, legend goes, burned his own studio down twice. Incinerating with the structures his master tapes, never to be recovered.

Also, anyone familiar with the early days of UK Punk, knows that Reggae was the sound track to the seminal Roxy crowd, with Don Letts leading the charge.

One thing's for sure Augustus Pablo is the melodica king, Lee Perry is the main Upsetter and Trojan Records is the business.