The Death of Rock(s)

So my mate 'Dangerous' Dave and I are walking uptown through Soho yesterday and I says to him, "Do you know about Rocks In Your Head? It's a record shop I just wrote a blog post about - let's go, you'll dig it."

Two blocks later and this is what we find.


Vultures picking over the carcass of my favourite neighbourhood shop. Bastards.


Turns out Rocks In Your Head had been here for 28 years! Now the name makes more sense; it's very 1978. More details were stuck on the front door behind flaking red bars.


So technically it's a case of 'RIYH is dead; Long live RIYH', but I had a big old swear about it at the time.

It made me think about the cold truth that while occasionally the Valley of Serendipity can bring us cats and monkeys and Japanese body art, it can also be a complete downer. Like when you write about a place you love and it closes down the next day.

Puppets of the State

V for Vendetta + C for Cookie = F for Feckin' Funny



via bb.

Can I get a little extra Snoop with that?

I was having a wee look at Wired's music blog and was tipped off to the news that Snoop is writing his first novel. I honestly don't want to speculate about what this might entail. But the funny part is that the Fark photoshopping contest today was "Give it a cover". Here are my two favourites:



Can't seem to get links to work, will sort it out soon.

Taking The Streets to Snooptown

I just listened to The Streets' 'The Hardest Way To Make An Easy Living' straight through. I bought it this afternoon from the last remaining record shop in Soho, a narrow grubby place on Spring Street that has no business still being there. Rocks In Your Head, as it is gloriously named, is filled with scruffy stacks of vinyl, weird DVDs and a tall shelf so overstuffed with (actually good) books on music that they have a tendency to fall from it when you pull one down to look at - a literary Jenga, if you will. And they stock any CD that I'm likely to want to listen to, including the last two Streets records that I bought there.

I love The Streets. In too many ways to write them all out. Just trust me.

So I'd read that the third one was going to be about Mike's disillusionment with fame and fortune, and I was already a bit apprehensive. Now that I've listened to it, I'm more optimistic. Most of the beats are as unsanitary as the floor at Rocks in Your Head - no wonder it's called 'grime'. And he can still pack observational truths into single lines with maximum efficiency. It'll take months of listening to pick up every nugget, but I'm looking forward to it. And I'm pleased to report that 'Two Nations' made me laugh out loud, the last line here especially.

Two nations divided
By a common language
And about two hundred years of new songs and dancing
But the difference is language
And just the bits you got wrong
'Cause we were the ones who invented the language, oi

...but we love Biggy, Johnny Cash and Stevie Wonder
It's no Biggy we got no cash and its no wonder
'Cause I'm proud we gave you people like John Lennon
Even though you shot him as well

In the song Mike tells of being at a Nas gig in the UK when a gun is fired (I don't know the backstory on this one). Strangely enough, in '98 or '99 I went to a Snoop Dogg gig in a London club under a railway station (I think it might have been called 'The Tunnel'), and a gun was fired there as well. Turned out it was no 'Biggy' either - Snoop's a trooper after all and came back out five minutes later to finish the show.

Speaking of Snoop, I can now kill an extra bird with this stoner. Introducing the JamesbMartini YouTube Channel. My first offering is a video I took of the D-O-Double-Gizzle at a one-day festival last summer. I put it up as a test video last week and left it alone for a bit, and it's been watched 268 times already. Shizznit!

'Snoop confuses the lighting tech at the Amsterjam in New York, 2005.'

F*x News

Likkle Scotty McLennan quit as White House Press Secretary a few days ago. It is, admittedly, a pretty thankless task covering this administration's arse. But Scott was a little too handy with the old "I can't comment on an ongoing investigation" when pretty much all of the senior WH staff is under some kind of probe, and especially when he could and did comment on various matters that made the B*sh pimps look good. Anyway, today his replacement was announced, and it's Tony Snow. Who is an anchor for Fox News, possibly the single most effective propaganda outlet ever created. Another nail in irony's flag-drapped coffin. As Josh at TMP says, "It's hard to know quite how to riff on the Tony Snow appointment since the joke sort of tells itself and it's hard to improve on that."

For my overseas readers who don't see Fox News, here are a couple of good examples. First, the upside of civil war:

Say whaaaaaat???

They've also been pushing the disgusting and self-defeating "torture is justifiable" meme hard ever since Abu Ghraib broke, which may or may not also be an example of synergistic cross-channel marketing with "24" on the Fox Network.

I'd also merely add that if there is any justice in this world or worlds beyond, there will be a special Abu Ghraib-esque place waiting for R*pert fucking M*rdoch.

There's more than one way for a cat to skin up

The Golden Virginia tobacco, the hint of Rizla... someone's gone to a lot of care to make a 'catnip' joke. (The kicker is that this is actually a .gif that has the wee blighter rolling it and pushing it over to you, but for some reason I can't get blogger to accept this. This is a pity, so I reserve the right to repost if I sort out the technonsense).I was wondering how naughty it might be to post this, but then I remembered that Puss in Boots in Shrek 2 is also busted for possession of 'catnip'. So I'm just following Dreamworks' precedent.

And besides, wouldn't it be a better world if there were more mellow hungry cats than insane machine-gun-toting ones? And those sniper kittens are just lethal.

Pyramid news

I'm intrigued by pyramids to the extent that they make me start to think silly things. That aliens of some sort might be involved. Yes, alright, they may be among simplest structures it's possible to build, but there's something else going on here. The latest in mysterious polyhedric structure news is the excavation of tunnels under what is possibly the oldest pyramid yet discovered... just outside of Sarajevo. Whaaaaaaa??? Via memepunk:

"In Bosnia, 20 Miles northeast of Sarajevo, archaeologists have uncovered what they believe to be an Aztec style step pyramid. Not only is this the only pyramid ever found in Europe, but this may be the oldest pyramid in existence. It's possible [it] could be in excess of 12 thousand years old. Until now the oldest pyramid was thought to be the one in Hellinikon, Greece, dating back to 2,720 BC.
"Initially, the idea of an antediluvian pyramid in Bosnia was a fringe theory met by skepticism. 'This is total nonsense. It’s impossible. There was no high culture in this region at that time capable of building something on this scale,' said noted Bosnian archaeologist Enver Imamovic. But new evidence, including sophisticated linear anomaly satellite scans have proved that a giant hill in Visoko, Bosnia does in fact contain a massive man-made structure. It remains to be seen exactly who built them, as no civilization is believed to have had the means to do so at the time that they were built."

I've been up a handful of pyramids in my time, including Teotihuacan in Mexico and Tikal in Guatemala, on the left here (check out this destination360 site for some VR movies of the site). Of course we know Tikal has a connection to space travel - a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, it was the Yavin 4 Rebel Base in Star Wars. And it has monkeys which, while not strictly relevant, makes it a cooler place that it is already.


Anyway, aliens are at least as likely to be in some way responsible for these globally dispersed buildings as an advanced civilization centered in Antartica that scattered after a poleshift in 10,450BC that sent their country to the pole (it's all in Fingerprints of the Gods). And calling it coincidence merely displays a lack of imagination.

Sweary preachers

Cable Public Access preachers are a dime a dozen in the US, but one that says “I come in the name of Jesus, bitch!” and “The devil is a motherfucking liar!” is one to highlight. Add the P-Funk soundtrack and the waterfall background and we're really getting somewhere special.



Via dv, but I see it's getting lots of YouTube hits too. It's kinda long, but there are some sweary gems in there: "Who created your ass?"

Again, I'm reminded of Bill Hicks. This is from memory:
"So what do y'all think about women priests? [cheers from crowd]. I think it's fine, you know, women priests, So now we have priests of both sexes I don't listen to. Fuck it. Give me a priests with four balls and eight titties, I don't care. Give me a hermaphrodite one. Give me one with gills and trunk, I might go to that sermon."

Birth notice

Stephen Jr hatches!

My boy Colbert is a new Dad. Stephen Jr the bald eagle hatched at San Francisco Zoo yesterday. Tonight Nyx and I went to a taping of the Colbert Report, and we saw the birth notice. I'll post it tomorrow. The video from yesterday's show (stay with me) is here, tagged 'Stephen Jr hatches'. Congratulations!

And there's intrigue in the backstory: the offer to name an eagle after Stephen was apparently unauthorised, but in a sweet way. From the SF Chronicle (and with a bonus genuine Bond non sequitur, no less!):

"The offer letter came from an enterprising volunteer who e-mailed Colbert's Webmaster. The outcome -- so much jolly publicity -- has been terrific, so congratulations to her. But, ummm, did she really have the right to make the offer Colbert couldn't refuse? "We had a little internal discussion about that,'' said the zoo's Alexander Winslow. "Bless her heart. Her heart was in the right place.''

And what if she had sent the same offer to someone a little more controversial than Colbert, say Howard Stern, or perhaps even Bill O'Reilly? Winslow laughed. The bird will be identifiable forever, but chances are it won't ever know its name. Identifying tags on the eagles' legs have numbers only; 007 might be a moniker the eagle could really enjoy."

Eh?

War can be fun too

Americans love war re-enactments - where you dress up and recreate historic battles and the like - almost as much as they love the real thing. As a past-time they're also ripe for some good piss-taking: witness Cartman's efforts to win the Civil War for the South. Believe me, there are people who still dream for this to happen in real life.

Here's a highly amusing film of the Marvel Superhero Secret Wars Re-Enactment Society. Look out for Thor's store-bought hammer and the Hulk's dexterity problem caused by fat fingers.

Rummy Update - Penguin Edition

Even hollow-point fact bullets and truth-tipped rounds have no effect on him. The bubble is that powerful.

Old Squinty remains on the boil for now - B*sh issued a statement of support from his Easter hols, so it may have legs yet. Here are a couple of this week's highlights, and it's only tuesday night.

He was a guest on R*sh Limbaugh's show yesterday and pushed the so-ironic-my-head-might-pop 'war critics and US media are dupes of terrorist PR committees' concotion again. Choice quote: "...Zarqawi and bin Laden and Zawahiri, those people have media committees... They are actively out there trying to manipulate the press in the United States. They are very good at it."

Speaking of R*sh, I recommend Bill Hicks' take on the fat evil one (go here and scroll down a little until you hit "Speaking of Satan..."). I'm looking into a way to embed some mp3s up in this crib, if it happens I'll get Bill to christen it.

I picked up this gem from Atrios, excerpted from today's Maureen Dowd column in the NYT:
"[Rumsfeld] didn't worry about the culture in Iraq," said Bernard Trainor, the retired Marine general who is my former colleague and the co-author of "Cobra II." "He just wanted to show them the front end of an M-1 tank. He could have been in Antarctica fighting penguins. He didn't care, as long as he could send the message that you don't mess with Hopalong Cassidy. He wanted to do to Saddam in the Middle East what he did to Shinseki in the Pentagon, make him an example, say, 'I'm in charge, don't mess with me.'"

That's pretty surreal. But then only a fool ignores the military threat posed by penguins.

Ask a Minja

New Ask a Ninja is up. This time the question is "Are there ninja midgets?"
Yes, there are. And they're "cute and deadly", like Ninja-Ko.
Also a bonus question about snakes on a plane.

Sweary research

I was browsing some wikipedia entries on swear words for the post below, and learned something new. Is it true that James Blunt is now rhyming slang in the UK? I hope so...

Sweary law

As I've previously made clear, I dig the sweary. And god knows a little legal analysis is just the extra spice needed to get a really good swear on. This is the abstract to a law paper titled 'Fuck' (via always fucking good boingboing).

This Article is as simple and provocative as its title suggests: it explores the legal implications of the word fuck. The intersection of the word fuck and the law is examined in four major areas: First Amendment, broadcast regulation, sexual harassment, and education. The legal implications from the use of fuck vary greatly with the context. To fully understand the legal power of fuck, the nonlegal sources of its power are tapped. Drawing upon the research of etymologists, linguists, lexicographers, psychoanalysts, and other social scientists, the visceral reaction to fuck can be explained by cultural taboo. Fuck is a taboo word. The taboo is so strong that it compels many to engage in self-censorship. This process of silence then enables small segments of the population to manipulate our rights under the guise of reflecting a greater community. Taboo is then institutionalized through law, yet at the same time is in tension with other identifiable legal rights. Understanding this relationship between law and taboo ultimately yields fuck jurisprudence.

I suspect the last person to use the words 'fuck' and 'jurisprudence' in that order was probably this chap.




The backstory: Supreme Court Justice and all-out conservative nutter Antonin Scalia was recently pictured giving the 'vaffanculo' gesture - right after a special mass for lawyers and politicians in a church, no less - to a Boston Herald reporter who "asked the 70-year-old conservative Roman Catholic if he faces much questioning over impartiality when it comes to issues separating church and state. 'You know what I say to those people?' Scalia replied, making the obscene gesture and explaining 'That's Sicilian'." Scalia later wrote in a letter to the Herald's editor that the gesture was not obscene, and quoted from the Luigi Barzini book, The Italians: "The extended fingers of one hand moving slowly back and forth under the raised chin means 'I couldn't care less. It's no business of mine. Count me out'." However, the freelance photographer that got the pic said Scalia had also uttered "vaffanculo" and then added "Don't publish that". Good summary at wikipedia.

I know at least one or two Italians might read this. Any input?

Parenting Skillz

My friend and colleague in the spy game, Agent Archi, sends me a powerpoint fwd that you might have seen. It's titled "What happens when your father is a graphic designer" and begins with this image:

Already pretty funny, but then Dad proceeds to graphically rework the picture of his own baby into other characters including Hulk Hogan, a member of Kiss, Shrek and Pei Mei here from Kill Bill:



This is all well and good. But there's also these ones, which frankly gave me a bit of the willies. It's one thing to have a 'mad Marine' baby...


... but when you turn your own child into Hitler...

...surely you've crossed some sort of line. Excellent work, sicko-graphic-designer-Dad! Any current and would-be fathers reading this take note: the bar is set - can you rise to the challenge?




Mission File Addendum: Turns out a little browsing reveals an entire "Crazy Mean Baby" subculture out there (link has sound). There's a good Malcolm from Clockwork Orange, the inevitable B*sh one, and many more besides. So maybe the original Dad didn't make his own kid into Hitler. But he is responsible for turning his own kid into a blossoming sicko Internet meme, so top work anyway!

Oh, is it Easter?

It has always amazed me how little fuss is made over Easter here. It's bewildering that, with such a God-bothering population as this one, what is ostensibly the single most important event in the narrative that structures their entire belief system goes largely unremarked. For the most part schools and businesses stay open, the TV isn't plastered with Easter specials and promotions, and the one aspect of it that everyone can relate to is a seasonal synthetic foodstuff called Peeps. I learn from boingboing that Peeps are not only flame-retardant, but there is now such a thing as a Peep Show.



The chocolate rabbits up top are from an old friend in Hong Kong who, as I recall, was partial to a Peep herself.

Oh yeah? Well here's 29, beeyatch

I took this picture at a building on 2nd Avenue at 46th Street this afternoon. The sign was between two doors, opposite which was a line of surprisingly comfortable benches I'd stopped at. I've always had an issue with surveillance - jeez I even actually read 'Discipline and Punish' and Bentham. But there's something so comic about the overkill on this one. Video and audio? 28 or more cameras? Why don't you stick one in my pants?

Now that I take pictures more or less at will while tooling around New York, I'm aware of being a part of a fully distributed surveillance apparatus. So is everyone with a bloody phone. I think it's worth exploiting this fissure in the old power dynamic. Feels good.

My fighting style is 'fist of incompetence'

Donald Rumsfeld, Rummy The Squint, Destroyer of Worlds, Mangler of Sentences, Nemesis of Reason, He Who Should Really Really Be Out Of A Job By Now, has been taking some heat over here recently. Via Reuters:

"A recently retired two-star general who just a year ago commanded a U.S. Army division in Iraq on Wednesday joined a small but growing list of former senior officers to call on Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to resign.
"I believe we need a fresh start in the Pentagon. We need a leader who understands teamwork, a leader who knows how to build teams, a leader that does it without intimidation," Maj. Gen. John Batiste, who commanded the Germany-based 1st Infantry Division in Iraq, said in an interview on CNN.
"In recent weeks, retired Marine Corps Lt. Gen. Gregory Newbold, Army Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton and Marine Corps Gen. Anthony Zinni all spoke out against Rumsfeld. This comes as opinion polls show eroding public support for the 3-year-old war in which about 2,360 U.S. troops have died."

And yet he's still there, talking the most egregious bollocks on a regular basis. Last month he was blaming the media for "exaggerating" civilian death tolls and falling for sophisticated terrorist media strategies, and that's why public opinion has turned against his pwecious widdle war. From the Washington Post via Kos:

"We do know, of course, that al-Qaeda has media committees. We do know that they teach people exactly how to try to manipulate the media. They do this regularly. We see the intelligence that reports on their meetings. Now I can't take a string and tie it to a news report and then trace it back to an al-Qaeda media committee meeting. I'm not able to do that at all."

The cojones on the old boy are gigante, no? But they should be, since of course he is a master of 1000 fighting styles, among them:

White Cobra Fist


Spider Hand Technique


Drunken Temple Boxing

and the very gangsta Fist of the West Si-eed!


The fighting styles compilation is a couple of years old, but Rummy's piss-taking is way older than that. Other pics from googleimages. (On a side note, the Matrix pic is from a right-wing website that used it without irony. Which, ironically enough, is now ironic.)

Gancho... Capitão Gancho

I found out tonight from a Brazilian spectator at saturday's batizado that my name was called out as "Capitão Gancho", which is indeed Portuguese for Captain Hook. Good to know. I'd heard a previous report from an American friend that she might have heard "Capitão Grande" (pronounced 'granji'). I wouldn't have gone a bundle on Captain Big.

So wikipedia tells me that "It is said that he was Blackbeard's bosun, and that he was the only man Long John Silver ever feared. He wears an iron hook in place of his left hand, which was cut off by Peter Pan and eaten by a crocodile; the crocodile liked the taste of him so much that it follows him around constantly, hoping for more."

Sounds tasty. What else?

"The symbolism of Peter Pan's fight with Captain Hook (traditionally played by the same actor as Wendy's father), combined with Hook's fear of time in the form of the ticking crocodile, possibly hints at Jungian subtext."

Crikey. Ok, so he has depth. And?

"It is hypothesized that Captain Hook was modeled after the famous English captain Christopher Newport. Both were dark-haired captains of dubious pasts, and both were missing their right hands which were replaced by metal hooks. Newport commanded the ships that landed the settlers at Jamestown in Virginia. He also seems to have a distinctive similarity to Bartholomew Roberts (pictured left), especially regarding his choice of clothes and his impeccable manners..."

A stylin' international man of mystery, indeed. And of course an easy hallowe'en costume...

Simple pleasures: cats and monkeys

Cuteoverload and Stuffonmycat had these pics up within a day or so of each other. These chaps live in a special inter-species bonding zone in the valley of serendipity.





And this is great - I know some cats like being carried around, but this just seems lazy.







And I had to throw this one in because I dig mash-ups of all kinds, so this fits the theme of the post, and because of the look on the wee blighter's face.

From henceforth you shall be known as...Capitão

So it's official: JB is a capoerista - codename Capitão. Which, bizarrely, is short for the longer Capitão Hook, the name Contra-Mestre Caxias (my master) bestowed upon me on account of my bandana. This must be a Brazilian thing, since the other regular bandana wearer in the group is a woman given the name Pirata.

New York City's 2006 Capoeria Brasil Batizado (pronounced ba-chi-za-dou) took place at the 63rd Street YMCA on Saturday. There were a few dozen capoeristas in attendance including black cords (rope belt) from Rio and Bahia, and all-colour cords from groups around the five boroughs. There were also at least a couple of hundred spectators. Caramba.

The ceremony kicked off with berimbao-led music followed by the high cords playing in the roda, the circle made up of other players who sing and clap along with the music. (On a sidenote, I like that it's called 'playing' rather than 'fighting'.) Then there was a Bahian dancer. Then it was the turn of the new kids to be inducted, and I was called up first. There was some banter about my name in Portuguese, I got Capitão Hook, and then it was cartwheels into the ring with Mestre Balao. We played for about a minute, before he took me down with a totally sweet scissor-flip-type move.



The pics are from a wee movie that Nyx made (thanks for representin', you raposa). The longer flickr set from the roda is here.

Ask a Ninja

I came across Ask a Ninja about a month ago, and I've waited patiently for the right moment to put it up here. Tonight's the night because (i) the latest episode is a cracker, and (ii) I've been in training the past two nights for the capoeira batizado on saturday. That event - where play with a black belt, get 'baptised' and given a new name - will be reported fully on the weekend. For now, I am kompletely k-nackered and must rest my grumpy legs.

So the deal with Ask a Ninja is that people write in with questions for a Ninja, who answers them in short movies that are podcast from the site. As you will see as you see some of the older ones, there's a swift evolution in production values and some good running gags. Moreover, there's a bunch of fan films made in tribute to the Ninja in question, which go from sweet to funny to terrible. But there's a wealth of amusement to be found at your leisure. My personal recommendation is "can I teach my dog to be a ninja."



(Sometimes the films can be slow to download from the main site, but they're also on YouTube, which I've noticed runs faster.)

Joyful noises: Gorillaz at the Apollo

Gorillaz are in town this week playing five shows at the Apollo in Harlem, or rather "the world famous Apollo Theatre", which is what everyone who works there calls it.

I love this band, including the 'doesn't actually exist' aspect of it. I still play the first record pretty regularly, and it stands up every time. 'Demon Days' has been on medium-heavy rotation since it came out. And ever since I first sang along about having "sunshine in a bag" I'd wondered if I'd ever see them live, and if so, how the hell would that work?

I saw Gorillaz in New York when they came here with the first album (2002-ish?). The whole stage was covered by a multi-panel screen and the musicians, who were backlit, stood behind a goal-shaped white screen at the bottom. The audience never saw Damon's face at all, but I recognised his dancing. Some people around me in the crowd were very "what the hell is this?" but I had a great time, primarily because the songs are so good.

I only found out about the Apollo Demon Days shows nine days ago. Of course it was sold out, but to my surprise and delight I won an ebay auction for tickets last tuesday. So Nyx and I went up to 125th Street tonight to see the show. I had an idea of what to expect because the opening gig on Sunday had been widely reported as a "flop" because the video systems hadn't worked. But this guy went to Monday's show and gave it a rave, so I was ok.

Anyway, in short, it was a good good time. The stage was crowded with 14 musicians and singers, including a sizeable string section and Damon sitting at a piano at the back. De La Soul went crazy during 'Feel Good Inc', Roots Manuva hammed it for his track, the Harlem Gospel Choir was fantastic, and Shaun Ryder was exactly the same as he's always been - which is to say he looked like he was going to fall over at any second. 'Demon Days' the album was performed in sequence, with one new song and that Ibrahim Ferrer track from 'Gorillaz' as a tribute because the old boy popped off last year. I'd hoped Damon might sprinkle a couple of older tracks into the set, but that wasn't the idea. That's ok, he gets to do what he likes; that's the whole point of the band. And the songs really are that good.

So hurrah for Gorillaz and ebay!! All the pics are from my phone (and I got a tap on the shoulder from a world famous Apollo Theatre staff killjoy in the process).