Saturday, April 11, 2009

HEALTH/TOO MUCH LOVE


I fucked up my first DJ gig pretty bad. The night came to a head in the club offices after the squall's back was broken and the sweat stains on my homemade "We Are Not Your Friends" t-shirt had dried up. I actually handed my cell phone to the floor manager to take a picture of me and my friends huddled around an overpriced bag of medium quality cocaine we'd emptied out on the office desk. If I could blame it on my youth, I would, but those excuses are reserved for folks with the tenacity and good sense to actually grow up and become adults.

Anyway.

Listen guys, this should be pretty fucking obvious, but if you are going to go through the trouble to release a dance remix of your single, do not put it on a fucking 7" record and make it barely three minutes long.

Thursday, February 19, 2009

DJ MIX 2.20.2009



"TROPICAL PUNCH"

1. project sandro - blazer 
2. naum gabo - spessivitseva 
3. dolle jolle - balearic incarnation 
4. hot chip - over and over (maurice fulton) 
5. gatto fritto - invisible college 
6. goldfrapp - a&e (hercules and love affair remix) 
7. black dice - smiling off (dfa remix) 
8. moodymann - answer machine 
9. the avalanches - since i left you (cornelius remix) 
10. airy dun - cockney wide boy 
11. patrice baumel - roar (midnight energy edit) 
12. capricorn - 20hz (optimo edit) 
13. discoedine - tom select 
14. brodinski - oblivion (noob remix) 
15. daedalus - for withered friends (death set reset) 
16. surkin - next of kin (todd edwards re-kindled mix) 
17. tanlines - new flowers 
18. air france - collapsing at your doorstep 


Monday, February 2, 2009

NEW AVENGERS: BREAKOUT!



This shit ruled so hard. Say what you want about what Bendis' Avengers books eventually turned into, but the opening arc on New Avengers was near-perfectly executed. Everything about this issue just got me completely fucking psyched for this book. 

The first thing we see is lame-duck Spider-Man villain Electro. Mark Millar had recently used him to great comedic effect in his run on Marvel Knights Spider-Man, and Bendis ran with that sleazy, diminutive characterization here. A consistent strength of New Avengers is it's ability to use characters from all corners of the Marvel U as bit players, adding color to the storyline instead of unecessary plot elements. In the past, writers would feel like it was necessary to justify Electro's involvement in the storyline by bringing up shit from his pointless, forgotten backstory, or saddling him with some kind of new modus operandi that eats up page time and confuses the plot. Here, Bendis cuts right to the chase - dude needs money, so he shows up for six pages to do what he needs to do to get the money. We don't need to know anything more about Electro than that he is a douchebag in a suit with pretty self-explanatory powers. 

Owing to the success of his less conventionally comic-booky runs on Ultimate Spider-Man and Daredevil, Bendis has complete free reign here to dedicate page space to character interactions and jokes instead of overly complex plot lines. A common criticism of dude is that his books are too talky, but it's the character moments that make this book shine. Marvel at Captain America and Iron Man eating bagels together on the railing of a S.H.I.E.L.D. helicarrier, talking wistfully about old times. Bendis masterfully manipulates our emotions, often knowing exactly what to emphasize for the greatest impact. When Captain America reaches his hand out to Spider-Man after a helicopter crash, it's a splash page that we see from Spider-Man's point of view. In any other case it's an odd scene to dedicate so much page space to, but here it works beautifully, because we as readers want to see as much of it as possible. We want it to be a splash page because that's how fucking happy we are to see Captain America again. 

The first arc serves as a set-up to two of the major storylines of the series so far. Though Secret Invasion as a proper mini-series was sort of a letdown, it's still endlessly fascinating to look back and see the clues that Bendis had been leaving since the first issue. When Wolverine first runs across Jessica Drew in the Savage Land, he attacks her, because he doesn't recognize her scent. Years later, when she's revealed as a skrull, a nation of nerds slap their own foreheads. DURRRR. 

The lineup of New Avengers featured, in a line-wide effort to introduce more new characters in their books, a little known dude called The Sentry who'd starred in his own fifth-week event written by Paul Jenkins a few years before. The Sentry was the perfect MacGuffin for the first arc - even if you HAD read the Sentry mini, you had no idea what to expect from this book. Bendis integrated him beautifully into the Marvel Universe - he gave you just enough details during the first arc to satisfy you, still laying the groundwork for a future storyline. All you knew about him was that he was this incredibly powerful superhero who was imprisoned, for some reason, in a Maximum Security prison for killing his wife. 

What little you saw of the Sentry in action was tantalizing and fascinating - his one major action sequence involved him forcefully dragging Carnage into space and then ripping him in half. Marvel was a viscerally exciting place at this point in time - there were new characters and new concepts everywhere - though Cap, Spidey, Luke Cage, Spider-Woman, and Iron Man were familiar faces, you'd never seen them in situations like this before, and you'd never seen them all together. New characters like the Sentry were undiminished by years of continuity, and not beholden to any existing corner of the Marvel U. It wasn't just Spider-Man playing in the FF sandbox or The Avengers playing in the X-Men sandbox. It was a totally new place, which drew from the richer tapestry of the complete Marvel Universe. Within six issues, you had Foggy Nelson from the Daredevil book, S.H.I.E.L.D. political intrigue, the Savage Land, and Luke Cage beating up Electro outside a Bistro in Massachussetts. 

Normally, this kind of interaction between the disparate spheres of Marvel was limited to What If? stories and alternate futures. But here it was - instead of a bunch of wildly different and wildly insular books, the Marvel U felt like a living, breathing, cohesive thing. It was awesome.

Sunday, February 1, 2009

AVENGERS DISASSEMBLED




The last gasp of 90's Marvel. In order to promote what Marvel wanted to publicize as a major event, Avengers Disassembled became a crossover of sorts, where every major title that didn't have mutants in it had "disassembled" tacked onto it's title in an effort to shake up the flagging core Marvel heroes line. Few of these tie-ins interacted at all with the main Avengers Disassembled storyline - Mark Waid was wrapping up his flimsy, Saturday morning cartoon run on Fantastic Four, Captain America was killing time until an imminent relaunch written by Ed Brubaker, and Thor was in the midst of an epic Ragnarok storyline written by Mike Oeming, one of the few well-liked dudes in contemporary comics who can reliably be expected to care about that kind of shit. It was a mess. 

The core Avengers storyline started where the hated Chuck Austen had left it. The Avengers had undergone their most successful recent incarnation some years before as an insular, retro team book under Kurt Busiek and George Perez. After a long period of playing second fiddle to the X-Men books in storylines like The Crossing, Busiek's solution was basically to just abandon trying to integrate the Avengers into the larger Marvel Universe. In "The Avengers", Avengers characters fought Avengers villains in Avengersy places. Even books that were nominally part of the Avengers family, like the original version of the Thunderbolts, were left out in the cold. As the quality of writing sunk from Busiek to a larval Geoff Johns to Chuck Fucking Austen, all of the Avengers-related books became isolated continuity backwaters, full of outdated concepts and convoluted storylines that were hopelessly separate from the Marvel books that people actually gave a shit about. 

So at the beginning of Bendis' run, we have a bunch of B-List characters sitting around a swimming pool making small-talk. The remaining heavy hitters - She-Hulk, Hawkeye, and the Wasp - are basically sitting around wondering aloud who they haven't fucked yet. Whether this is idle Bendis banter or a needling commentary on the incestuous and repetetive nature of the Avengers books, it sets the stage pretty appropriately. One minute we've got a bunch of whiny, pampered brats drinking mojitos in their mansion, the next minute, BOOM. 

Jack of Hearts, a character no one gives a shit about, quickly shows up and explodes, killing off the second Ant-Man before anyone knows what to do. Ant-Man 2 was one of those ill-conceived attempts to replace an established silver age hero with an "everyman" type who was supposed to be more relatable. Like "Thunderstrike". Ant-Man 1 was a brilliant, quirky, and emotionally conflicted scientist who invented cool stuff every time he appeared on-panel. Ant-Man 2 was a struggling single father who resorted to burglary to make ends meet and somehow ended up in an Ant-Man costume. Good fucking riddance, Ant-Man 2. You were lame. 

Crazy explosions and strange happenings abound, as sinister figures lurk in the background promising to destroy everything the Avengers stand for. Hawkeye blows up trying to take down an imaginary Kree Starship, Nick Fury shows up to yell at some people, and the culprit is eventually revealed to be the Scarlet Witch, whose reality warping powers have been loosed on the Avengers as the result of a long-running plotline to convoluted and dull to explain here. At the end of it, Hawkeye's dead, the Vision is dead, the Scarlet Witch is in a coma, Iron Man is a disgraced public figure who's lost most of his fortune, and Captain America is suddenly left feeling purposeless and alone. 

An elegant finale issue in the ashes of the Avengers mansion mostly featured Beast and Iron Man waxing nostalgic about the better days, a setpiece which dovetailed nicely with Grant Morrison's successful portrayal of beast as an aging intellectual, bored to tears by all the horror and catastrophe of the X-Books, and doing all he can to preserve the last remaining embers of the wit and spirit that defined his time with the Avengers some years before. The Avengers themselves were basically convinced to admit that they'd become a pretty pointless excercise at this point, and were thus encouraged to go their separate ways.

Tuesday, January 6, 2009

RYOJI IKEDA




The only real memory of skateboarding I have is the night I wandered away from a hotel room in Phoenix and found a skate park. There must have been over a hundred kids there. The air was hot and dry and everything was lit super-dramatically by those big lighting towers they have in baseball parks. Girls with really nice legs let them hang off of stone platforms. They had really white teeth. My mom came and found me sitting on a bench with my face in my hands watching it, and then she yelled at me for going off on my own. I felt ashamed.

Sometimes I think I'm never going to understand the world because I never learned to skateboard.

Sunday, January 4, 2009

GOLDFRAPP/ANIMAL COLLECTIVE




imagine if steven spielberg or someone got really into electro house and made a movie about it

like a really sappy, melodramatic 24 hour party people

and it starts out with uncle alkan playing blue monday for his nephew erol, telling him to look at the EQ lights

the camera closes in on the EQ display as the intro drums play

but the synth never comes

as the camera closes in, an orchestra swells dramatically over the drums

and the camera zooms in on the lights

until they're blinding

and suddenly they're not eq lights at all

we're in a club 20 years later

as wild british youth dance fervently

to erol's mashup of blue monday and can't get you out of my head

Wednesday, December 31, 2008

ALAN LICHT/DONNA SUMMER



The Old Victrola is a 40-minute noise piece, recorded live, in which Alan Licht loops the sustained vocal note from the bridge of "Dim All The Lights" by Donna Summer and plays guitar over it. Here's a cliff's notes version you can play in DJ sets. If you play this to a crowded room, you are either a genius or a moron, but either way, you're my hero. <3