Wax Poetics, the National Geographic of record collectors has released a 10 minute documentary on the funk combo East of Underground. Six drafted service members stationed in Germany made up the band. They tied for first place in a talent show performing tight covers of funk and soul tunes. They recorded in a radio station. Only a couple copies of the record were pressed by the Army. The vinyl was discovered, coveted and then shared thanks to a re-release by Wax Poetics in the late 2000s.
–> Lewis Hitt, the guitar player is the only band member who has come forward. He provides some cool insights. I liked his story about the lead singer’s Afro and a visiting general.
–> Given that Hitt implies that most of the songs were chosen because the band was critical of the war in Vietnam, it is interesting that the Curtis Mayfield cover:”(Don’t Worry) if there’s Hell below, we’re all gonna go” gets a four minute video accompanied by helicopter gunship footage.
I rode my bicycle for a couple of hours today. It was beautiful. Respect to all the cyclists.
I tend to be a safe cyclist — obeying the traffic rules. In New York City a guy got a ticket for riding outside of the bicycle lane. Which seems out-of-control bogus to me. In my community there aren’t enough bike lanes to get you everywhere you need and the bike lanes are often blocked. You occasionally have to deal with traffic, and they write a whole section of laws for cyclists to do this safely.
If you drive an automobile or a bicycle, you should know what these laws and rules are. And if any of you know me, I am not generally an advocate of rules and laws.
It seems to me like the ticket for being outside of the cycling lanes represents some of the short-sighted anti-bicycle sentiment in our society. The notion that the bicycle rather than the car is the nuisance.
So Casey Neistat, the cat who got the ticket made a video of him scrupulously following the absolutist cop advice. Yowza! Watch til the end, it’s worth it.
Folkstreams.net offer an intriguing collection of documentary films, mostly centering on rural knowledge, folk traditions, and music. Reflecting on the 1993 sixteen mm film “Dance for a chicken: Cajun Mardi Gras:”
–> Good articulation of Mardi Gras in rural communities. I enjoyed the lens on different towns and their radically distinct traditions.
—> Documentary filmmaking includes a certain voice, and it is interesting to observe the frame-makers who constitute the narrative structure of the documentary through the representations they choose. I think the of the narration and visibility of the film creators increases over time (this footage is at least eighteen years old). The discussions about blackface, cultural appropriation (the film includes a fragmented scene of rural white-identified Mardi Gras celebrants dressed up as indians driving through a Native American reservation), and gender provide valuable time-contextual artifacts vis-a-vis the film itself.
–> There is a dialogue about Mardi Gras, and this film is an attempt to broaden the image of drunken costumed revelry. It is quite good on the historic traditions, unpacking the coded imagery, and iconography.
–> I feel bad for the chickens.
–> At the end of the film they discuss the impact of rural Mardi Gras traditions evolving as fewer people engage in actual farming life. It’s a good place to start thinking about the impact of economic changes on ritual experience.
This is a really nice reflection on the technology company’s relationship with the It get’s better campaign. Savage is particularly eloquent about the ways homophobia limits the ability of gay teens to see happy gay adults. He argues that the It get’s better campaign, through youtube, circumvented barriers and actually got to people.
Dan Savage gives credit to the support and sponsorship of google, who created a commercial video for the project and have helped to publicize the campaign. Google, Obama and other higher profile participants joined without compromising the message and the sincerity of the videos. Check it out, you’ll enjoy the discussion.
And this morning the SF Giants became the first major league team to make their own It get’s better film. I appreciate that they speak for the whole organization. Nice work. Culture change in process.
And the standout best It get’s better video comes from the Cincinnati Rollergirls.
The question of national amnesia – the defensive forgetting to avoid traumatic national history — strikes me as central to the condition of humans in this era.
Getting at what you (or someone else) has forgotten is a rough path filled with the potential for hurt feelings and self-defensive justification.
British national service and colonialism send a young man (the film’s creator and narrator McWilliams) to Kenya where he photographs the people and the scenery of the land. It isn’t simple. He doesn’t simply travel back to get that souvenir connection at the end of his days, instead he layers his own admittedly faulty memory with the films and images of Kenya under colonial rule. A Mau Mau forest fighter is given healthy space to describe the politics of the time from the militant perspective, and a colonial governor gets screen time. Both contribute to the sense of deepening — counter forgetting, marking in space and time.
This film helps to get at the process of forgetting/obscuring. I also points at the potential for uncovering and exposing those pieces missing.
Honestly, I can’t recommend this film enough. It is up on the National Film Board website in full for a few more days.
Lets get the obvious out of the way: Jadakiss is a great emcee. Lets also give him kudos for heading to Swaziland to do a show promoting awareness about HIV (see first comment).
But dang, this film is so colonial it could have been scripted by Teddy Roosevelt.
1. The first half of the film is boring footage of Jadakiss hopping airplanes, walking through terminals, and lamenting about how far Africa is. We get it, Africa is a long distance away and you are putting yourself out by traveling so far. Of course, in the traditional versions of this travelogue narrative (see the Vice travel shows, or When we were kings) the travellers face difficulty in their transit, Jadakiss and his crew slide through sanitized airports.
2. The perspective on HIV in Africa is pretty simplistic. The overloaded fear statistics are so heavy-handed that no one could ever imagine doing anything about them. At one point the film claims that if HIV transmission rates continue to climb in Swaziland, all adults will be dead by 2020. That’s right, nine years from now, every single grown-up in an African country will be dead from HIV transmission.
3. The only hope, is of course, Jadakiss. Obviously, the solution to AIDS in an African country is a solitary rapper without any significant recent pop hits.
4. The exotic other-ness of Africa is central to this video. From the vagueness of going to somewhere-in-Africa (the film clip says Jadakiss is going to South Africa, he himself admits at the front end that he isn’t sure where he is going before showing us the ticket to his flight to Johannesburg.) In fact Jadakiss is performing in the Kingdom of Swaziland — a landlocked dictatorship with strong state control whose primary export appears to be children for slave labor and sex slaves (according to the C.I.A., who y’know, might not always be on the up and up). The royal family of Swaziland get’s a representative in African garb. What is interesting is that Jadakiss still wants to play this like he is Jay-Z going to the garden. Flashing in a convoy line of luxury automobiles, Jada’s grin is visible from a satellite. There are a few seconds of presumed African poverty filmed out of the racing automobiles as Jadakiss heads for the resort for his show.
5. Despite this charity event being about HIV positive Africans, the film sticks with the representations of wealth. The camera lingers around Jadakiss’s luxury suite while he explains, “the king laid out something . . . for the other king.” There is no discussion of AIDS, African AIDS, or the conditions in Swaziland that make it hard to fight the virus (maybe like dictatorships). No Africans speak or narrate into the camera.
6. Sadly, there isn’t even a show clip of Jada rapping! I guess this is just the first episode. I look forward to the next colonial day dream from a Western emcee. At least one where we get to hear some rapping!
One of the best takes on African hip hop comes from Patrick Neate, who authored Where you’re at. In his chapter on Johannasburg, the white-identified Neate is talking to Mizhif, a Zimbabwean/US/South African hip hop TV host. Mizchif reflects on the recent visit from Dead Prez:
“Dead Prez left so much conflict amongst heads, it was hectic. They had said that the cover of their album (a sepia-touched photograph of black women waving guns above their heads) was from the Soweto Uprising. But it wasn’t. Actually, as a Zimbabwean, I know it was from the chimurenga. (Neate FN95: Chimurenga is a Zimbabwean (Shona) word meaning struggle. It is specifically used to refer to the war of independence.) No one had guns at the Soweto uprising except the cops. So before Dead Prez even got here, people had a beef about that. Then they cam on YFM and they were just preaching their revolutionary stuff, ‘ don’t rely on the man,’ that kind of thing. At the time kids were calling in going, ‘yeah, I feel you man. Fuck white people.’ But the minute they left everyone was saying, ‘Who are they to come to South Africa and tell us about our struggle?’
“It’s difficult because there’s already so much conflict between people here because the focus of the rest of the world had always been on Soweto. But there’s been struggle all over; every township had struggles from Soweto to Guguletu.”
I ask Mizchif what he thought, personally, and he laughs. “I just thought it was funny because the Dead Prez show was half-and-half, white and black. Because who has the money and the transport to go to a show like that?”
I think back to the Mos Def gig in London, a performance to the self-consciously conscious. I mention it to Mizchif and he shakes his head and smiles.
“Really it’s just typical of Americans. They have such a stereotyped view of Africa. When I was at high school in New York, my father ended up coming to teach our Social Studies class because, when I took the worksheets about Africa home, he was absolutely disgusted. Yes there’s a rural Africa and a poor Africa and AIDS in Africa, but there are modern and urban and rich sides too.” (117-118).
Thanks to the folks at Waxidermy and Gorgomancy, we have the surveillance camera film about the 2010 assassination of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh. Worth a viewing.
Update April 2012. The Gorgomancy link is down, but the video is available from youtube in three chunks. Here they are.
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Life of refinement 