Humming Urban Stereo is DJ Jeereen, a Korean who seems to be among the first of his countrymen to grasp the poker-faced kitsch approach to pop music that makes certainJapanesebands so hip. “Banana Shake” is a ridiculously charming ditty that seems to be about exactly what you’d think. You can find more Hus music at their MySpace page and at this fan MySpace page, and you can read a bio at KBS World.
“Mr. Firefighter” is a rare glimmer of hope for the continued existence of one of our favorite Korean bands, Spooky Banana, whose CD we picked up in a cool record store on Daehagno (College Street) in Seoul based entirely on how much we dug the name of the band. Apparently the song has found its way onto a recent arcade release of the video game Pump It Up, which is a Korean knock-off of Dance Dance Revolution.
This seems like about the right time to bring your attention to So Called, a Jewish DJ whose So Called Seder is an astonishing blending of weird old Jewish recordings and performances by a range of fashionable musicians — Killa Priest of the Wu Tang Clan, Trevor Dunn of Mr. Bungle and Chassidic ragamuffin Matisyahu the most prominent among them — into a powerful if gestural retelling of the Haggadah. (MP3s can be found at Brooklyn Vegan.)
Despite the strenuous efforts of modern Jewish movements to sanitize the story of Pesach (Passover) into a parable of universal liberation, I find the traditional story — told for at least the last thousand years — to be quite different: a specific narrative of a specific war in which a specific oppressor is overthrown and his land laid waste. Indeed, much of the emphasis is on a detailed recounting of how severely the Egyptians are brutalized:
Rabbi Yosi the Gallilean said: How do you know that the Egyptians were stricken by ten plagues in Egypt, and then were struck by fifty plagues at the sea?
In Egypt it says of them, “The magicians said to Pharaoh ‘This is the finger of G-d.’ At the sea it says, “Israel saw the great hand that the L-rd laid against Egypt; and the people feared the L-rd, and they believed in the L-rd and in His servant Moses.”
Now, how often were they smitten by ‘the finger’? Ten plagues!
Thus you must conclude that in Egypt they were smitten by ten plagues, at the sea they were smitten by fifty plagues!
Rabbi Eliezer said: How do we know that each individual plague which the Holy One, blessed be He, brought upon the Egyptians in Egypt consisted of four plagues?
For it is said: “He sent against them His fierce anger, fury, and indignation, and trouble, a discharge of messengers of evil”: ‘Fury,’ is one; ‘Indignation,’ makes two; ‘Trouble,’ makes three; ‘Discharge of messengers of evil,’ makes four.
Thus you must now say that in Egypt they were struck by forty plagues, and at the sea they were stricken by two hundred plagues.
Rabbi Akiva said: How do we know that each individual plague which the Holy One, blessed be He, brought upon the Egyptians in Egypt consisted of five plagues?
For it is said: “He sent against them his fierce anger, fury, and indignation, and trouble, a discharge of messengers of evil”: ‘His fierce anger,’ is one; ‘fury,’ makes two; ‘indignation,’ makes three; ‘trouble,’ makes four; ‘discharge of messengers of evil,’ makes five. Thus you must now say that in Egypt they were struck by fifty plagues, and at the sea they were stricken by two hundred and fifty plagues.
In a beautiful track on the Hip-Hop Haggadah, a woman sings in a plaintive voice, over and over, “When Moses was in Egypt land / Let my people go.” But what is truly haunting is her very last line as the roiling track comes to a close: she trails off with, “At night I’ll kill your firstborn son …”
That’s not liberation. It’s murder. Pesach is a holiday that remembers the brutality of war while insisting that sometimes the innocent must be tortured and killed for the sake of a greater cause. It’s a celebration of victory, but also a remembrance of deep suffering by all the parties in the conflict. It’s a stark reminder that the journey to the Promised Land begins with darkness, rivers of blood and the bread of affliction.
I am definitely in the Buffy fan camp, but I am currently working my way through the series and haven’t yet seen the musical episode, which is two seasons ahead of me, so no spoilers please. Indeed, our most recent episode, Hush, is kind of the musical episode’s opposite: super-creepy floating dudes known as The Gentlemen steal everyone’s voices. This is one of the scariest episodes in the series, capturing the flavor of an actual nightmare.
When I first came to New York City in 1993, it was a very lonely place for me. That bitterly cold winter, I didn’t know where to go or how to meet anyone to go with me. I would take the train down from my Columbia dorm to what I thought was the cool part of town, getting off the 1/9 at Christopher Street and wandering back and forth along Bleecker in search of a local music scene, my feet freezing in my inadequate jungle-warfare combat boots. I felt dwarfed — dwarfed in my father’s oversized wool Canadian-navy greatcoat, dwarfed in this huge, thrumming city that promised so much but seemed to keep its promise at a distance, always receding.
Against the crushing anonymity and isolation, I remember discovering and then treasuring the mystery of COST/REVS. These graffiti stickers were everywhere pasted to the backs of street signs and WALK/DON’T WALK signs (back when they still had words instead of today’s pointillist icons). At first it was just those two words, stacked up on each other in block capitals:
COST REVS
Then they started getting blasphemous: COST SAVES, GOD saves COST, COST IS RELIGION. And then there was the phone number, which it took me months to bother writing down and calling. When I did, I got a rambling, incoherent voice message whose content has long since escaped my memory, which in those days was anyway frequently impaired and clogged with details about Apuleius and archivolts.
What I found so amazing about these stickers was the spectacular human effort that had gone into putting them up. They were everywhere, all across town, on sign after sign: thousands of them. And this was no vast collective effort, like putting up the Brooklyn Bridge. This was the dedicated work of one or two individuals, who for no obvious reason felt like altering the environment in which we all lived. It was human and passionate and sort of sad in its uselessness, but beautiful in its dedication and persistence.
For me, those tags are a marker of a particular time. Finding pictures of them online is surprisingly hard, but that was the moment just before Internet ubiquity, and the Internet is weirdly bad at archiving the time just before camera-phones. It was the era of Giuliani’s battles with East Village squatters, of Newt Gingrich, of a world without Kurt or Jerry. A couple of years later, I would be on Sven’s rooftop on the Lower East Side, watching the Fourth of July fireworks exploding over the Lenin statue on Red Square and talking about how New York City was the seat of empire. But that was in the future. REVS/COST helped me get through those confusing, lonely first years in the big city.
Today Gothamist posted a YouTube video of REVS at work on more recent projects. My favorite quote: “I’m into the individual spirit, anybody who does things in a solo way, like Ted Kaczynski, Mother Teresa, Jesus Christ.” REVS’s identity is still unknown, but at least now you can read about him in Wikipedia.
So I got a package today at work — a battered-looking manila bundle, excessively taped — from my grandfather, Stan Winston. It contained precisely the following, in precisely the following order:
A copy of Áegis Living, the newsletter from his retirement home (slightly creepy motto: “People live here”), with the “Recent Activities” article highlighted, reading as follows: “We had a well-attended Halloween Party with the Spiral Mystics band playing oldies but goodies. Many of the staff and residents were in costumes. New resident [and the Palaverist’s grandmother] Shirley Winston and her husband Stanley accompanied the band with percussion instruments. Stanley has also started a percussion class on Saturday afternoons, which has become very popular.”
Four photos from the abovementioned Halloween event, including one of my grandmother looking ancient and one of my grandfather and an attractive young black woman in standing side by side and drumming intently on a pair of mounted bongos.
The first issue of GNAOUA, which according to Wikipedia was “a magazine devoted to exorcism introducing the work of Brion Gysin, William Burroughs, Harold Norse and other members of the Interzone,” published by Ira Cohen in Tangier, Morocco. The inaugural issue includes several works by William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsburg.
An issue of Cyril Connolly’s magazine Horizon from February 1949, consisting entirely of The Oasis by Mary McCarthy, described on Amazon.com as “a wickedly satiric roman a clef about a group of urban American intellectuals who try unsuccessfully to establish a rural utopian colony just as the Cold War is setting in and fear of the atomic bomb is reaching panic proportions.”
Elizabeth McNeill’s Nine and A Half Weeks, apparently a first-edition hardcover from 1978.
Male/Female Language, by Mary Ritchie Key, a cross-cultural exploration of differences between male and female uses of language; also apparently a first edition, this one put out by Scarecrow Press in 1975.
In an interesting and laudable development, South Korea has decided to start teaching units in its elementary schools about mixed-race Koreans and overseas adoptees.
“Children in multi-cultural families get disadvantages and unfair treatment due to their accent, physical appearance and culture upbringing. We need to teach children that discrimination against or contempt of biracial people or overseas adoptees is wrong and that we can get along with children from an international marriage,” said Kwon Ki-won, head supervisor of the ministry’s curriculum policy division.
As the article points out, the number of biracial students in Korea is still incredibly small — well under 10,000 — but this will be a growing issue as Koreans continue to move abroad while maintaining links with home, and as interracial marriages continue to increase. I don’t think Korea will ever be an immigrant society like America, nor should it be, but the Koreans will have to come to an understanding of what it means to be Korean that is not wholly centered on race and native understanding of the language. This is a step in the right direction.
The only Bong film I’ve seen is the brilliant Barking Dogs Never Bite, a richly textured dark comedy that captures contemporary Korean life better than anything else I’ve seen or read.
From what I hear, though, his subsequent films, Memories of Murder and The Host, are supposed to be great as well. The Korea Society has more information on the films.
Probably none so far, says Slate’s Explainer. Which seems like sort of a shame, really. Yet another reason to encourage more private-sector space exploration. (“May I explore your private sectors, Comrade Cosmonaut?”)
So have you heard about the bizarre panic over a guerrilla marketing campaign for Cartoon Network’s Aqua Teen Hunger Force (ATHF)? Looks like they hired a couple of guys to scatter around Boston blinkies depicting one of the Mooninites flipping the bird, and this led to a major bomb scare.
After the two artists were arraigned, they gave a hilarious press conference at which, on national television, they insisted on talking about hairstyles from the seventies.
I do recognize that these ads were genuinely scary to a lot of people and that the city of Boston spent a lot of money making sure they weren’t bombs (Ted Turner has promised to cover the expense). How do we know that terrorists won’t use some goofy design as cover for their deadly devices?
On the other hand, this incident points out the absurdity of living in constant fear of terrorist attacks that happen only rarely, and typically in ways that are meant to elude detection until it’s too late. While Boston’s finest spent the day cleaning up glorified Lite-Brites that were intended to sell a TV show, how many containers came through our ports without any oversight at all? How many illegal guns crossed state lines?
And more importantly, how many terrorist attacks have actually been thwarted by people reporting the glaringly obvious? I know that if I see something, I’m supposed to say something, but is that helping? The only case I can think of is that of Richard Reed, who tried to light his foot on fire in an airplane full of people.
In the meantime, this is probably a good moment for my friends who make blinkies and throwies to lay low. Of course, knowing these particular folks, they’re probably already working out schemes to send New York into utter panic over little flashing doohickeys.
And it should be noted that the Boston response is not the only one possible. In Seattle, the incident failed to cause panic. From the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:
“To us, they’re so obviously not suspicious,” said King County sheriff’s spokesman John Urquhart. “They’re not suspicious devices or packages. We don’t consider them dangerous.”
Frank Bruni of the New York Times today reviews Porchetta, the new Smith Street eatery that replaced Banania, and gives it one star, along with a mix of praise and complaint. We haven’t tried it out yet, but I have to say that the decor goes past the funky to the spazzy, which hasn’t lured us in. Considering today’s review, I feel like I should try it, but also that I should be ready for disappointment. (You can peruse the menu here.)
In other neighborhood food news, Smith & Vine, the excellent boutique wine shop with the unbeatable $10-and-under table, is moving to bigger digs nearby:
As of the first week of February 2007 (the year of the pig!!), Smith & Vine will be relocating to our new home at 268 Smith Street, directly across the street from Chestnut Restaurant between Degraw and Sackett.
Now we know this sounds crazy, but in the end, it’s gonna rock! We will have a private tasting room and much more space for you to browse and take your time while you shop.
If we don’t see you before, then stop by and check out our new digs.
Also be sure to check out their sister store, Stinky Brooklyn, where they can recommend just the cheese to go with your newly purchased wine.
Humming Urban Stereo: Banana Shake (YouTube)
Frank Bruni of the New York