Def Jux DVD / Earplug / Flavorpill

This one is for Johnee.

I subscribe to way too many e-mail newsletters, and spend way too much time paging through them. I've got to cut cutting out ones that are low on the signal-to-noise ratio.

One that may or may not make the cut is Earplug, "a twice-monthly email magazine
dedicated to electronic music in all its incarnations". No idea how or when I ended up
on their website. In fact, I get not only Earplug, but also Flavorpill, which is a good weekly e-mail about interesting cultural happenings in your metro, and Boldtype, which is their literary newsletter. It's all sort of hipper than thou, but still good for info.

The latest had a short review of a new Def Jux DVD. I've never really gotten into that sort of hip hop, but I know Johnee is (or at least was). Scroll down in this issue.

Greg Tate and the Village Voice

I get the weekly e-mail from the Village Voice, and the latest issue is a 50th anniversary special. Looks like it's filled with a number of essays worth reading, but I had to start with, and may not get to much more than, Greg Tate's "License to Ill: Black journalism in the pages of the 'Voice' ".

Tate begins with recollections of reading Stanley Crouch in the Voice in the late-70s, telling him out in the hinterland what was happening in the metropolis. That hit me, because a teenage me, living out in the hinterlands, was somehow inspired to get a subscription to the Voice. And the writers I most remember reading were Greg Tate and Nelson George.

It was through the Voice that I read about hip hop, Public Enemy, Spike Lee--the zeitgeist of the mid- to late-80s. It was because of reading the Voice that I saw "Do the Right Thing" on the big screen at Har Mar Mall that hot summer that it came out, that I bought copies of "It Takes a Nation..." and "Fear of a Black Planet" on cassette tape. (I even bought the 12" of "Fight the Power", which I've got to dig up.) I read about De La (I remember taking to school the 1989 Pazz & Jop issue in which "3 Feet High" came in #1) and Tribe
(they gave "People's Instinctive Travels" a mediocre review--I wonder if it was Christgau?). I saved those couple years worth of Voice issues at my parents' place for quite a few years afterwards, every once in a while revisiting the music reviews, Tate's and George's essays.

At the time I even had pipe dreams of moving to NYC and working in alt-journalism. But I am no Greg Tate. I chose the UofC over Columbia, math over writing. I still haven't made it to NYC, though lately the idea has been rekindled.

Speaking of Greg Tate, I've been saving one of those weekly Voice e-mails since January, with the intention of posting the link to another essay of his. I got the impression that this one created a stir in that subset of the hip hop world that thinks and writes about
the culture:

Hip-hop Turns 30: Whatcha Celebratin' For?
Rethinking the populist art form, this "marriage of heaven and hell, of New World African ingenuity and that trick of the devil known as global hyper-capitalism"
By Greg Tate

That's relief--I can finally delete that e-mail.

But seriously, read the piece when you get a chance. No one write like Tate. How about this:

Hiphop may have begun as a folk culture, defined by its isolation from mainstream society, but being that it was formed within the America that gave us the coon show, its folksiness was born to be bled once it began entertaining the same mainstream that had once excluded its originators. And have no doubt, before hiphop had a name it was a folk culture--literally visible in the way you see folk in Brooklyn and the South Bronx of the '80s, styling, wilding, and profiling in Jamel Shabazz's photograph book Back in the Days. But from the moment "Rapper's Delight" went platinum, hiphop the folk culture became hiphop the American entertainment-industry sideshow.

Or this:

The fact that hiphop does connect so many Black folk worldwide, whatever one might think of the product, is what makes it invaluable to anyone coming from a Pan-African state of mind. Hiphop's ubiquity has created a common ground and a common vernacular for Black folk from 18 to 50 worldwide. This is why mainstream hiphop as a capitalist tool, as a market force isn't easily discounted: The dialogue it has already set in motion between Long Beach and Cape Town is a crucial one, whether Long Beach acknowledges it or not. What do we do with that information, that communication, that transatlantic mass-Black telepathic link? From the looks of things, we ain't about to do a goddamn thing other than send more CDs and T-shirts across the water.

I'll leave it to you to read the incendiary last half of the piece.

Speaking of the Voice and alt-weeklies in general, this screed by Jeff Chang ended up in my inbox as well. I haven't read it, but thought I'd post the link: "Eulogy For The Alt-Weekly"

I still got to do that August Wilson post...

Drezner's tenure decision

juniorcopper, thanks for posting that post from Eric Zorn's blog about Drezner.

(Does Zorn have a UofC connection? He does have a connection to the math world--his grandfather is the Zorn of Zorn's Lemma. I remember reading a column he wrote about his grandfather which must have ran when we were in HP--just around the time I was sitting in White Hall and learning Zorn's Lemma.)

Somehow I missed the news about Drezner's tenure decision, even though I'm subscribed to his RSS feed. Just tonight came across two of his posts which discuss it. The first one was titled "So Friday was a pretty bad day..." and the 2nd "Seven days later..."

It's amazing that he was blogging about this a day after getting the news. Here is a nice quote from the first entry:

"[How are you feeling? Are you bitter at the U of C?--ed.] I’ve felt better. And -- duh -- yeah. That said, I will miss the students. The undergrads have been wonderful, and the grad students have been razor-sharp. At the moment, my biggest regret about all this is the knowledge that I’ve taught my last class at the university."

Extra Action

Did one of you LA cats say you saw David Byrne at the Hollywood Bowl last June? If so, did a group called the Extra Action Marching Band open for them?

I'm hoping to catch Extra Action tonight at this street festival in the Tenderloin. They sound like quite an SF kind of thing. From their site I ended up at their Yahoo group, where a message from last June said that that were going to open for Byrne, and that they'd played with him a number of times before.

Heading out of the office soon--first going to walk down to Amoeba on Haight St, to catch an instore performance by Blackalicious. Then downtown to the TL for the street festival.

As I pimped via e-mail, get on upcoming.org. It's what convinced me to check out this street festival tonight. You can see my upcoming events on my user page. I even got jiggy with the html and incorporated upcoming's badge into my steadyblogging template--that inspired me to add a flickr badge too. So now my upcoming.org events and a random selection of my flickr photos get published on steadyblogging.

I brought my camera with me today, so look for some photos of Blackalicious and Extra Action to show up in my photostream soon.

Have a good weekend. I plan to.

a solve-everything tax?

As always, there's plenty to talk about: the Miers nomination (let's get the e-mail dialogue up here), the baseball postseason, the upcoming Iraqi constitution referendum. Amidst all that, I didn't want August Wilson's passing to go unremarked. I saved the NYT obit and also this appreciation piece. I just started reading the obit this morning on the bus. I'll post my own perspective on Wilson and his work this weekend.

The other NYT piece that I read on the bus this morning that caught my attention was this Tierney column. Some of his stuff has been annoying, but some of it seems reasonable. More evidence, I suppose, that I'm moving to the center on stuff, leaving behind the leftism of my youth. In particular, I'm moving towards Tierney's position of being distrustful of "big government", and beginning to think that market-based solutions often make more sense.

(Whether this is a cause or effect of me studying finance and economics for the first time is unclear to me.)

In particular, tell me what's wrong with his "modest proposal to fight global warming, save energy, cut air pollution, ease traffic congestion, reduce highway fatalities and, while we're at it, reform Social Security": a "Solve-Everything Tax" of 50-cents per gallon of gas, with the proceeds going to private (or personal, if you will) retirement accounts.

Granted, I'd rather see the proceeds of such a tax go to public transportation. But I'm finding I'm not a priori opposed to the personal retirement accounts idea. Heresy.