Jesus Loves Me, This I Know

This is an altar in America's oldest house, New Mexico, taken in June of 2006.

The Native American Church is a syncretic religion, formed in the late nineteenth century, combining the practices of psychedelic shamanism with Christianity. The cactus, Peyote, is ingested and allows the participants to talk directly with Jesus.

Jesus Loves Me is a traditional Christian hymn, reworked by Everette Red Bear and Sandor Iron Rope of the Native American Church. It's drum, rattle and a two part harmony and is sung in a mixture of languages.



Chief Quannah Parker, the father of the movement, once said, "The White Man goes into his church and talks about Jesus. The Indian goes into his Tipi and talks with Jesus" In this sense, the lyrics: "Jesus loves me this I know, because the bible tells me so," when sang by Red Bear and Iron Rope, take on almost satirical meaning. To people who talk directly with Jesus and can experience his love first hand, what use is the bible?

Brick Lane Beigel Shop


photo taken by Elisa in London

Photos of People Doing Things

A protestor outside the White House on the international day against torture.
An anti-Zionist Hasidic Jew protesting the Walk With Israel rally in Boston. Note the hundreds of riot police.
Gay Pride, Vancouver
Hare Krishna oxe driver and oxe during the Hare Krishna parade, Vancouver.
The Roma Band, Boston's North End
Torture victims, Washington DC
Dutch Headbangers, Utrecht
Krishna devotees, Vancouver

GIRL TALK/THE BEATLES/NEW ORLEANS PHOTO

I took this picture in an abandoned elementary school in New Orleans. It had floated from the stage and landed in the aisle.

I've been listening to Girl Talk on repeat since I got Nightripper last night (two months late, I know). My friends sometimes tease me for frenetically tapping my fingers against my leg, desk, wall, wherever I am. Girl Talk is as close to a manifestation of that nervous energy as possible. The sampling is, I'm pretty sure, five deep at times and takes from most pop genres of the last five decades. I'm not sure if it works as dance music, exactly, he doesn't let you get into the the rhythm before changing it, but more as an audio art collage. In a way, this saves Nightripper from being just another hipster dance mixtape.

Girl Talk also confirms what I've been thinking about pop music for a while now. I used to think the ideal mashup (don't laugh) should take diverse samples and create an original composition fundamentally different from either of its parts. This way, the more obscure and manipulated the source material, the purer the final composition is. I realise now that this approach is naive and leads to indulgent music (DJ Shadow come on). The brilliance of Girl talk is that the listener, (if she/he's anything like me) should recognize every sample, triggering a sense of nostalgia which the DJ then subverts by mixing in other samples and topping it off with some booty rap. It's about recontextualising familiar sounds and phrases and just blowing your head off. Some purists might call it lazy, but there's nothing lazy about composition on this level. It's post modern music, where DJ meets composer meets computer and I can't stop listening to it. It's like that 22 year old itch in my brain is finally getting a vigorous scratching. Eventually it'll get raw but right now it's such a relief.

Girl Talk - Overtime
Girl Talk - Smash Your Head

My friend Marco Extended Drum Solo sent me what he thinks is George Martin (the Beatles producer) trying his hand at a mashup. From the latest Beatles release:

The Beatles - Within You, Without You/Tomorrow Never Knows

And finally here's me fooling around in garageband:

The Swords of Righteousness Brigade - Bad Luck

Propaganda I Love

Propaganda I Love:
After dinner with the former Iraqi minister, she gave me a wonderful video on Kurdistan entitled "The Other Iraq, Share the Dream." I haven't watched it yet but i say it's wonderful because the cover has a little girl in the middle of a mountain valley holding some sort of luminous orb. Here's the corresponding website:

The Other Iraq

Another propaganda site that I'm really digging these days is the response to Hubert Sauper's horrific (but also wonderful) documentary Darwin's Nightmare:

darwinsnightmare.net

It's a thinly veiled creation of the Tanzanian tourism ministry (or whatever) and aside from the hilarious attack on Sauper which completely misses the point it's a well designed site with links to fishing industry sites. The best part is the attempt at user generated content where you can post photos, ideally of Tanzania's natural wonders but also anything that might slander Sauper. Some savvy researcher has managed to find photo evidence of Sauper's links to both Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein.



Here's the real site:
darwinsnightmare.com

ps HAPPY BIRTHDAY ELISA!

SANTORUM!

Rap Music

In The Conciousness Industry Hans Magnus Enzensberger writes:

"Too often the champions of inwardness and sensibility are reactionaries. They consider politics a special subject best left to professionals, and wish to detach it completely from all other human activity. They advise poetry to stick to such models as they have devised for it, in other words, to high aspirations and eternal values. The promised reward for this continence is timeless validity. Behind these high sounding proclamations lurks a contempt for poetry no less profound than that of vulgar Marxism. For a political quarantine placed on poetry in the name of eternal values itself serves political ends."

There's a movement within Rap that seeks to judge contemporary black music according to a set of aesthetic and thematic values known as "keeping it real." In the world of these Hip-Hop Heads (as they refer to themselves) everything is judged by how closely it can approximate the so called "Golden Age" of rap, roughly the decade spanning the mid eighties and early nineties that saw what was essentially an African-American folk style from New Yorks' outer burroughs become the dominant pop-music style in North America. It eclipsed Country as the highest selling genre, I think, in 1998.

Within this "Backpacker/Hip-Hop/Neo-Soul/Purist" culture there is very little room for experimentation

As many of my friends know, I sometimes listen to Rap Music. I can't stand anything, however, that attempts to be cerebral or concious or anything less. Have you ever wondered what people listen to in Baltimore ?
Government Names
Vancouver

Writing, Africa, and the Edmonton Oilers

This is a picture I took of a ceramic cat and a bowl of my neighbour's tomatoes. Don't they look tasty?
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I was setting the room for the Edmonton Oiler's the other day: I put up the tables, polished the silverware, put on the three layers of tablecloths (the silencer the underlayer and the overlayer) and was just starting to set the tables when Hans walked in the room.

"No butterknives!" he bellowed in his Austrian accent.

"wha, am I doing something wrong?"

"No no, you're fine but those hockey guys. They don't like the little knives. No little forks or spoons either. Two big spoons, two big knives and two big forks. They got big hands theees guys. If you give them little knives they just throw them in the corner."

"That actually happens?"

"Ya of course, everytime. And no coffee either. They're on diets theees guys. And take away the butter too, that's verbotten."

"So do they, like, throw the mugs into the corner too?"

"No, but they complain."

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So yeah, that's one half of my incredibly! exciting! life! The other half you can find out about by reading Streethawk Magazine, or more specifically, articles I write for Streethawk Magazine like my recent review of The Pink Mountaintops concert at the Plaza.

I had an incredible idea the other day. I should go to Africa. Eva just got a job in Ghana, Danny is in Namibia, Munya is in Zimbabwe and Laura and Verashni are in South Africa. In fact, I have more close friends on "the dark continent" than, well anywhere. If I could save up all this winter and just not pay my student loans I could probably afford it. I'm sure there's other, more productive, ways of going there (like volunteer NGO type work) but I don't have the faintest idea about how to do that.

Read Verashni's article on South African Women's Day in The Mail and Guardian.

See Laura's Photos from inside a South African special forces helicopter.

The following picture is a recreation of the jungles of Africa taken in my mother's garden.

SHOUT OUT OUT OUT OUT OUT and other thoughts.


If you can find me in this picture you win a prize.

I got really angry at this concert at the large contingent of fucks who stood in front of the stage and refused to dance to the dance music. I also got really freaked out at the cellphone company who had branded the event as some sort of VIP promotion bullshit. Otherwise, I haven't danced that hard since returning home to Vancouver. Holy Fuck were also especially good, if a bit anticlimactic.

I've been to a few shows recently: The DFA, The Pink Mountaintops, TV on the Radio, I've been playing squash and i've also been working... In fact, I almost threw coffee in David Emerson's face yesterday. I mean, how often do you find yourself standing in front of the most hated man in (BC?) politics with with a full pot of fresh coffee. At the last moment the enslaving logic of Capitalism kicked in and I merely set the pot on his table. Like you'd expect, Emerson has the mannerisms of a mafia boss. He was in a working lunch with a bunch of provincial transportation ministers and obviously loves being the big-man in the room. I hate him: my Conservative member of Parliament.

In other news, has anybody else noticed the startling thematic similarities between Brokeback Mountain and Paradise Now. I'm thinking that would make a good blog post but I'm too numb right now from working overtime to do it.

Also, I bought my ticket for Bonny Prince Billy in November. Sometimes I get scared I might die first and then my life would have been in vain.

Streethawkmagazine.com is something a friend of mine started up. It's pretty much the only site to go to for Indie/decent music news and criticism in Vancouver. Go there.

The New Camera,

My dad has a new camera and it's absolutely ridiculous. These were the results of me fooling around on Thanksgiving. It picks up the smallest detail and is super easy to use.

Flickr is great! Doesn't Iraq just look like so much fun. WIsh i was there now.

Cut the sleeves off your lumberjack shirt and drive to San Francisco. Shop at the Haight-Ashbury Gap. At the house in Oakland we ate plum preserves and talked about god. Stopping at the Taqueteria the grandmother stared at me as I ate my barbecued pork ribs. Was I doing it wrong?



In Los Angeles, big beautiful cars go very fast. Echo Park. The Watts towers are in Watts. USC=The University of South Central. Wealth is in the hands of the white elite. Bleach bottle blonde, "today we wear flats, skirts and a white top." Shantytown USA has sheet metal roofs and chickens in the front yard. We ooh'd and ah'd over the screenwriter's couch but never called her back. "That's the armory" he said. "During the riots a few years back it was nice to know it was there."

"I mostly listen to, like, melodic hardcore."

The Burbank Ikea. Laurel Canyon. Mulholland Drive. The Santa Monica Freeway, the I5 and Rosecranz boulevard. Two hours in traffic. LA's only Reggaeton and Hip-Hop station!

"I just wish you would treat me right, the way I treat you because I love you"

"Yeah you tell him girl. Carlos, if you're listening, this song's for you."

A Typical Weekend in the Pacific North West