Belated Review: Nas - Life Is Good

This is Nas' best album since I Am. That beat. Those raps. Holy crap.

This first track sounds like a John Woo movie. Holy crap. This is too much. Just listen to these words.

PS 111 had free lunch
Embarrassed but managed to get a plate

We was kids hungry
Mom's working, I was famished
She getting home late

How could I not succumb
How could I not partake
Fifteen I got a gun
Sixteen I robbed a train
Licked off a shot for fun
What's got inside my brain
A hustler's job ain't done, til he becomes a king

Good Music That Everyone Should Hear: Ghost Mice

If you've never heard of folk-punk, Ghost Mice are an excellent gateway drug. They're ineffably sincere, full of heart, they sing with conviction and yet they write songs about dumpster diving and Dungeons and Dragons. Make no mistake - they aren't limp-wristed geek panderers, they're all out punks. Acoustic only, yes, but the DIY ethos shines strong.

Chris Clavin, the guy who leads the band, is over 30 years old but still manages that adolescent, nasally wail that I have come to cherish as a throwback to my friend's teenage bands - full of hope and piss and vinegar. He sings about things of importance - anarchy and institutionalised brutality, childhood and child-molesting priests, all of it with the same earnest, untrained voice.

One other thing that you should know: Chris Clavin heads the stalwart Plan-It-X Records, a beacon to folk-punk and independent music (not that crap you heard on NPR or Pitchfork, but actual shipping-out-LPs-covered-in-crumbs-from-their-basement independent.) Their roster is extensive and has some excellent releases, almost all of it worth listening to.

If you're interested, get a hold of their splits - releases in which they perform on one half of the album and another band does likewise. I could recommend their split with Andrew Jackson Jihad, another excellent folk-punk band, and their split with Saw Wheel - admittedly not a huge fan of Saw Wheel, but the Ghost Mice side redeems it. Also, required listening: their album The Debt of the Dead. It's one of their fuller sounding albums, and has some excellent songs.

If you like them so far, you can buy their super cheap releases here. If you don't like them, then listen to Cementville from start to finish and then change your mind because you are wrong:

Historical Story - Innovation

Link to screenplay

Artist's Statement

Writing a script surrounding a historical event can be a tricky process. What we take for granted today - commonplace gadgets, vocal nuances, and such - could be completely out of place or even nonexistent in the world of a couple decades ago. However historically incorrect that may be, in some instances old and new have been interwoven successfully, like Baz Luhrman's Romeo + Juliet (1996).

For our screenplay surrounding the history and possible controversy over the invention of the ballpoint pen, we were happy to keep the setting in the postwar 1940's. The time period isn't only correct for the emergence of the ballpoint pen, but it provides an interesting era of Caponesque mobsters and hitmen. Since the 1940's is saturated with the hatred and despair of war, it can be argued that the method of killing for sometimes little to no purpose had become more brutal. Think of Bonnie and Clyde's notorious run as criminals and killers, and multiply that by at least 10, because their number was up in the mid-30's, and by then they had done a lot of damage. 

The reason we felt justified in collaborating on a violent script surrounding the invention of the ballpoint pen was because we wanted to show how senseless conflict can be and how ridiculous our reasons can be for starting a conflict that will result in the loss of innocent lives. Just like Laszlo - our inventor - says, "But it is just a pen, it is no master weapon!"

The graphic novel, After the Deluge, addresses a question similar to this when the refugees of the flooded "bowl" were treated with neglect and even hostility from military groups who should have been passing out water and food instead of training their gun barrels at them - the cycle repeats itself.

Over all, we hope that our script doesn't gratify and entertain more than it makes a valuable point, because this is an important topic to address: What justifies violence? And who really has the right to decide when or if it's okay to disregard and even threaten innocent people's lives? 

By Daniel Tu and Gina Thompson

Genealogical Artifact - The Little Prince

The Little Prince is one of those rare books that grows with you. I read it when I was 12, waiting for my mum who had gone to the temple. Not wanting to leave me at home, she brought me with her and told me to bring something to occupy myself with - I took a small stack of books and some paper and pens. The Little Prince was one of those books - a crappy Chinese bootleg copy that had a stilted English translation and a glossary of English terms in the back. I read it voraciously, and finished it a few hours later, somehow in my bedroom at home, without noticing. It was so different - it felt as if Exupéry was speaking to me as a peer, and as a child. There was a mutual understanding between myself and the author, and I remembered that.

The second time I read it, I was a teenager. The image of the prince leaving his planet by way of migratory birds was one that held special significance for me - the need for an escape, discounting intoxication, was of great relevance to me at the time. I tried to follow his lead and let myself recede into my own thoughts, creating worlds and people and stories. This helped me through many problems that appeared, at the time, to be insurmountable.

The third time I read it, I was a freshman. I missed my home. I was tired. I felt an urge to go through it once again, but the copy I had grown fond of was in my parent's study in Melbourne. I spent hours researching the translation I remembered - the new mass-market paperback released a few years ago was abhorrent, the interpretation gauche, the words cold and soulless. There was a website documenting all the different Chinese bootlegs of the book, well over 100 of them - I gave up finding an exact copy. I turned to Katherine Woods' classic version, capturing enough of the original's poetry while still keeping a literary English tone. It was not what I was used to, but it had to do. I found an old copy of it on eBay, with colour illustrations and the original 1943 translation. I bought it for five dollars. When it arrived, I left it on my desk for quite some time and read it intermittently, focusing moreso on my schoolwork. It had the same beauty and the same emotion, but I was too tired, too busy to devote any attention to it. The characters were still just as relevant, the illustrations still just as sincere. I suppose I had just grown old.

Artist's Statement

The Little Prince is still my favourite book, and will likely remain so. I wanted to contact my parents about the book whilst writing this, but forgot to and ran out of time - I had to stew over these things myself, and I feel like it helped me achieve the tone I wanted. With this essay, I wanted to create an atmosphere of nostalgia and also discuss the concepts of growth and deterioration - the structure is quite obvious in this regard and the object itself is an excellent embodiment of these ideas. That's what The Little Prince is to me, essentially: a yardstick of my own growth and development as an individual, guarding against my own Baobabs and learning the value of my own planets and volcanoes.

There is one thing to note, though - when I finally read it the third time, it was just as potent. I was busy, sure, but I still felt the same things and understood the plights of the characters in a new, more mature sense.  I wrote that last line in order to discuss the feeling of deterioration and loss, but in reality, I feel like I have not grown old, nor do I expect to within this lifetime. The Little Prince is an excellent book that grows with you in the most remarkable ways, but keeps you rooted to your childhood, and that is why it is significant to me.

Good Music That Everyone Should Hear: Ethiopium

The story goes that Oh No (younger brother of legendary producer Madlib) found a crate of rare Ethiopian records, ranging from funk, jazz and obscure psych rock - and flipped them into hip-hop beats. The album samples widely and well, and the beats have just the right amount of menace and bite - something that Oh No does spectacularly, and that feels quite unique to him.

The theme of the album seems to be pretty skin deep, but there's a mild discussion of music as a primal, shamanistic medicine similar to the opiates used by Ethiopian villages. That's not really the focus, though - the most important thing is the beat, the way the music makes you feel "good," much like an opiate. Form, function, etc. Very good music and very impressive. I mean, listen to the drums on this last song, and you'll get it.

Process Piece - Wet Shave

Artist's Statement

Initially, Camlyn and I wanted to discuss the idea of industrialisation and convenience as a deteriorating force on the modern individual. We looked for a way to discuss this through sound and sound only, ultimately settling on a comparison between shaving with a disposable razor and taking the time to perform a traditional wet shave, badger-hair brush and all. However, due to time restraints and other factors, we settled with just presenting the wet shave on its own strength, neglecting the comparison and contrast. I feel that this was the better choice, and although we arrived at it serendipitously, it tied into the message quite nicely.

The conversation is one of tradition, of quality, of patient appreciation. With a traditional shaving kit, you have many different parts made with considerable craftsmanship - the old steel Gillette handle, the Derby razor blades, the badger-hair brush and ceramic soap bowl, the Pinaud Clubman aftershave - all of these are essential in delivering a good shave. To find them all and learn to use them well takes considerable time and effort, and mastering the wet shave is a long process with plenty of nicks and cuts along the way. The end result, however, is a steady hand, a close shave, and a priceless feeling of satisfaction. We tried to communicate this through the recording - the instruction and preparation for the shave are the majority of the piece, with the intensely gratifying sound of a hot razor taking stubble as the closer. This is only two minutes long, but we tried to take the months and months of practice and growth and represent it aurally in a condensed microcosm, and I think we did it quite well.

Thick Description

I'm sitting in a Panda Express, and I am unhappy.

An obese man is filling his cup with soda. The troughs of meat are exhaling upon the sneeze guards. There are seven couples seated around the room, and two groups of friends - one of which is seated outside. All are white. The men cooking the meat are both white, cropped blond hair on one. The two girls working the counter are Hispanic. There are pandas plastered on everything, and a sign made of thick neon tubes declaring the word "DRINKS." I see a man in a sports jersey at the counter, choosing his meats. Phrases like "Surf 'n Turf" and "WOKSMART" are printed on little plastic tags above the troughs. My family has a wok. My dad carefully seasoned it before I was born, turning the speckled carbon steel into a dark, thick black, mottled nest - the type that would last forever. When he went to Taiwan for a family emergency, he came back with photos of the night markets - vast crowds of stalls in a sea of glossy blue tarpaulin, pale fluorescent light rods hanging over men wearing baseball caps and cheap watches. All of them huddled over woks, pans, piles of food and piles of ingredients.

Right now, at this moment, I am sitting in front of a styrofoam clam-shell full of meat and rice. Several of the couples have left, and the cashiers are beginning to clear tables. A woman is staring at her phone, which came from the other side of the world, from a factory where fourteen men leapt to their deaths. A smiling panda holds a shrimp on a fork and is captioned in adorably, calculatedly broken English, proclaiming the advantages of shrimp which can be had for a dollar more. I sit in my chair and hear the obese man tell his friend that chopsticks are stupid and useless. Cartoon pandas recite broken phrases, factory worker suicides become a punchline to a cruel joke, a man flies over a city and two hundred and fifty thousand japs are turned to ash. The meat is old, and the rice is stale, and I sit and I eat, still unhappy.

Artist's Statement

I chose Panda Express because, to me, it is an excellent flashpoint that compels thought regarding race and culture, and because it is so banal - fast food with pseudo-oriental trappings aggressively aimed at white American patrons. I feel out of place in the restaurant, and wanted to communicate that feeling through this piece. I juxtaposed descriptions of the heavily Americanised assembly-line food service and descriptions of the chaotic and fluid night markets of Taipei in order to create this sense of unaddressable longing, and to highlight the triteness of the contrived enterprise.

I focused mainly on details, and tried to avoid voicing my own thoughts too overtly - the introspection, hopefully, comes from the dwelling on places and things and events. I feel like it is still easy to understand and to read, but this is an attempt at subtlety on my part and may have fallen short - I am unhappy with how obvious I am being but cannot presently articulate myself in a more satisfactory way - the pitfalls of a novice artist.

My main goal was to communicate the emotional impact Panda Express has on me and how I regard it against my own frame of reference, and I feel like I have accomplished that. I am satisfied with this piece but I am sure that more consideration and observation would have given me more to write about.