this is real and not for play, twitter, vote Obamaway

Ti$a - Vote Obama

[via The Rap Up]

Why didn’t Obama Twitter the news of this video?? LoL. He’s got his account set to follow everyone that follows him. Brilliant! and how flattering: Barack Obama is following me! hahaha! No doubt it’s an aide that reads & sends the messages, but still, interesting use of technology. And fun video :~j

pressurizing the local

The band was in-between songs and there were still tables open when I walked in to the Dragon Upstairs last Saturday, just behind a group of retiree-aged hipsters. “C’mon in,” boomed a voice from a dimly-lit corner; the band gestured for us to do the same. I gamely follow a white-haired man in a pin-stripped fedora into the intimate, match-box sized club.

Ideas from the class reading bopped around inside my head:*

Stressing and pressurizing the local as a site of “critical resistance” posits a more dynamic way of imagining the relationship of a region, nation, and globe in which difference is not subsumed nor reified but circulated and affirmed” (Wilson 14).

I side-stepped the bell of a trumpet held close and low, nodding to the band while snaking past the potentially expectoration-flecked front line, to the raised seating area where Rowen, Miki and Hank sat holding court at the best table in the house.

It was only the second time I’d met Hank, the owner of both the Dragon Upstairs and Hank’s Cafe, another live music venue downstairs in the same Nuuanu Street building. Last year was the first time we’d met, I’d interviewed him for an article for Hawaii Luxury magazine. He’d impressed me with his charisma and passion for music. I’d sat at the bar drinking chardonnay, asking questions and scribbling notes for my story. Eventually he leaned in and spelled it out: “I want Hawaiian jazz.”

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The Grouch - Artsy

This is a fun video from a poet of hiphop, hot off the front page of youtube. It reminds me not to accidentally turn into too much of a hippie and to take time to nurture art regardless :~j

$1.99 download on iTunes

The Grouch myspace

flower drum song, the musical

I’m always down for a live performance. Regardless of event type, seeing things live always adds a new dimension to appreciate, be it a baseball game, stand-up comedy routine or concert of any genre. Last week, I experienced a Broadway style musical, Flower Drum Song on an extended run at Diamond Head Theatre. These performers are working it, singing, dancing, acting… they have my full respect. Having a live, mini-orchestra there was also unexpected and fun.

This youtube clip of a 2006 performance looks like someone snuck it in the theater. Minus the thong(!) it is very much like what we saw at DHT. (The last minute or so appears to be some… thing… else….. perhaps was under the recording?)

The dailies of course loved the show. They love everything that’s locally produced; it’s the CODB in Hawaii. (see comments) Me I’m not really a “musicals person” (and yea those are “scare quotes”). LoL. But I tried to put that aside since I was there for a class assignment to think about the performance in terms of the reading we had done the previous week in a book by Coco Fusco called English is Broken Here.

The task was to consider what Fusco would say about the Flower Drum Song performance at DHT. As concerned as she is with Latino/a issues, I do not think Fusco would speak too directly to the content of a supposedly reappropriated (re-reappropriated?) performance of Asian otherness in a United Statesian* style in the illegally occupied Kingdom of Hawaii. But that’s an admittedly presumptuous guess.

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Nirvana live at Pink’s Garage in Honolulu 1992

I was always kinda sick I missed this show. What you can see of the crowd in the flashes of light looks crazy. This is “Negative Creep” off their first album, Bleach.

Nicole Willis and The Soul Investigators

Anasarca at Asita Recordings points out that the closing music on a Current TV show featuring the inimitable Wax Poetics magazine(!) is a funk band from Finland called Nicole Willis and The Soul Investigators. She messaged me:

“I just thought you might be interested in this band, if you haven’t heard of them already. They bring a brand of Finnish funk that is both joyous and soulful. It’s really easy for these new funk bands to sound cheesy but they definitely overcome that. Also look for Didier Sound Spectrum it was an older release from the 90’s that recently saw a reissue. More amazing funky Finnish music.”

No I hadn’t heard of them, thank you for the recommendation, girl!

Here goes the video for “If this ain’t love (don’t know what is).” Yea it’s a few years old, but this can bump all summer long.

Turns out Nicole Willis is originally from Brooklyn (with a solid musical resume), but has apparently studied in Lahti, Finland and blogged about her schoolwork, including philosophy essays and paintings she’s done?! I’m listing to the songs on their myspace and it is enticing me to order their album for real… oh look, here’s a link!

Sigur Rós ‘Heima’ musical documentary

Saw this Icelandic group at Hawaii Theatre and have been respectful ever since. I’m only seven minutes in but wholly impressed with ‘Heima’ by Sigur Rós. Visiting Iceland was something like this, I wish.

[youtube video no longer available]

UPDATE 3/18/08: Boooooooooooooooooooo @ them removing the video after it was splashed across the youtube front page for DAYS. >:-[ And their myspace is all bragging about being the first artists to have a full-length doc on youtube. I guess one could actually buy the damn thing, but I really don’t like this bait and switch. If it is an officially sanctioned release on the interweb, it should not go away. IMHO.

Coppé at Next Door in Honolulu

Coppé of Mango and Sweet Rice records played in January at The Next Movement at Next Door in Honolulu. It was wonderful to catch her live again, only the second time I’ve seen her in Honolulu. A former island resident, Coppé passes through on occasion, though clearly(?!) not nearly often enough.

To my ears, much of what Coppé does has a trippy underwater electronic hallucinatory feel to it, but she’s prolific and collaborates often, so no single description (no matter how packed with adjectives) does her music justice. That night at Next Door, for example, it was her glitchy, part-Japanese take on the jazz-pop standard “Fly Me to the Moon” that had me swooning.

In this clip she talks about her performance, new album, influences and being well-received in Europe. The video (and the interviewer!* ugh) are not the greatest but… well, whatever… Coppe’s spark still shines.

As I’m loading this on youtube, I see that Dark has uploaded some videos he did for her songs and I’m reminded that he was supposed to do visuals for her show. For whatever reason, his work didn’t make it on to the screen that night. It’s too bad, they would have added a lot.

Dark’s videos to two of Coppé’s song are included below.

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every midnight is the start of a new day

Wrote about a great spot that Rowen has been telling me about for over a year, The Dragon Upstairs. The piece came out okay. But the place itself is very cool and a must-do in Honolulu, if you appreciate jazz even a little bit.

I submitted one more story to HI Luxury, and I’ve enjoyed working with them. The staff I’ve talked to seem like fun, intelligent people. Hopefully someone as sparkly-prosed, literate and in-the-know as myself ;~j takes the nightlife entertainment writer position and that door will close for me.

I’m also resigning quadmag.com, my pet project of the last ten years. I will always represent for that site, but I’m officially retired. (I’m living the dream! retire by 30 haha.) We’d love to see it keep going, but with TeN in San Francisco and Lance in Portland, it’s been hard to keep the momentum and these technical lumps are demoralizing. I’m just done.

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Barack Obama- Yes We Can

This is my favorite political propaganda, ever. It brought a tear to my eye the first two four times I watched it.

I wanted to post this on QuadMag, but we are having a serious database problem over there that has crippled the site. Booo. But there was an impassioned supporter of Ron Paul in the forums, to whom I would like to say: for all his ideas and genuine system-shaking-up, Ron Paul could never be as cool as Barack Obama. I think this video proves that hehe.

Apparently there is some background on the video at dipdive.com, but their servers seem to be overwhelmed right now. Text of the speech/lyrics follows.

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get up, a-get, get, get down

Updated the list of articles to include the October/November issue of HI Luxury magazine, which has a piece by yours truly called “Get Up & Get Down: Happy hour and more at the Hanohano Room.”

This magazine impresses me more and more with each issue. Unfortunately the band was not correctly identified in the caption; Maria Ramos and Deshannon Higa of grOOve.imProV.arTiSts are decidedly not Son Caribe(!). I’ll have to try to make that up to them. The photos again are by Chris McDonough, and those are my unmanicured fingers holding the electric blue cocktail on the main page.

complaining as an artform

Why are there so many ways to make a simple, hard-boiled egg? Ice baths and timers, are they really necessary? Then when I find the perfect recipe, why do I tell it to my sis wrong, when she’s just trying to eat?

And why did my guestbook, attract so much comment spam? Every day a dozen messages about sex fetishes and drugs, when all I wanted was a place for fam to show me love. (I had to kill it.)

I’m not sure if singing about these minor irritations would really make me feel better, but apparently some folks in Finland feel it does.

Another clever Finnish invention: complaints choirs. Anyone who wants to can join the choir and submit complaints. Then the gripes are set to music and performed for fellow citizens and videotaped to post on the internet. [Source]

Here is the Helsinki Complaints Choir in action.

Apparently the concept is catching on in some other parts of the world, but the complaints of the Finns are just hilarious to me, especially the ones about public saunas and why our ancestors didn’t chose a sunnier part of the world in which to settle.

Thanks to my wonderful sister for listening to all my complaints, and not being mad even tho I made her mess up half a dozen eggs. :~j

R.I.P. Lucky Dube

South African Reggae Star Lucky Dube Killed in Attempted Car-Jacking