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Tommy T
Tommy Tompkins' extreme measures
About Tommy
As an emancipated minor he left the East Coast and Ivy League for California where he fought the law, with predictable results. He worked as a letter carrier, autoworker, cabbie, and songwriter, and spent two decades working in the alternative press, In August, 2004, he traded that position for a loft in Los Angeles. He is currently teaching theater, creative writing, and journalism to high school students in the Northeast San Fernando Valley.
He won a Sundance Arts Writing Fellowship and is about to graduate with an MFA from the Antioch University's MFA program in creative non-fiction. He loves the work of Jose Rivera, Rappin' 4-Tay, Soren Kierkegaard, Philip Gotanda, Suzan-Lori Parks, Esther Phillips, Denis Johnson, Tony Kushner, Hisaye Yamamoto, Naomi Iizuka, Paris, William Maxwell, John Coltrane, Walter Mosley, Too Short, Prince, and Exene Cervenka.
He is especially fond of his seven Abyssinian cats, commuting against the traffic flow, and certain controlled substances. He was born without mid-range responses, and has led his life accordingly.
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TOMMY T
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About Tommy
Tommy Tompkins has been on full alert for most of his adult life, looking for art endowed with sufficient power, wisdom, courage, and grace to save a struggling humanity from itself...
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About Extreme Measures
Extreme Measures comes at you at a time when, as a society, we are experiencing a kind of aphasia; language has been so distorted by corruption of aging institutions and the commercial pressures of an all-consuming, popular culture that our range of motion -- our ability to feel, to dream, to rage beyond the toothless dictates of media and capital -- has been critically circumscribed.
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Me:
2extremes@earthlink.net
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The Reading List
Q: How many Bush Administration officials does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A:None. There is nothing wrong with the light bulb; its conditions are improving every day. Any reports of its lack of incandescence are a delusional spin from the liberal media. That light bulb has served honorably, and anything you say undermines the lighting effect. Why do you hate freedom?
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Cheap shots, anyone? Hell yes, like shooting fish in a barrel - Crosby, Stills, & Nash, to be exact in "Second Time Around," my weekly reissue column in the San Francisco Bay Guardian.
The successful selling of Crosby, Stills, and Nash as one of rock's first "supergroups" was, above all else, a marketing triumph. The insipid folk trio with a penchant for predictable three-part harmonies were packaged as a brilliant, innovative rock band and sold, no questions asked, to a generation that would go on to make history for a consumerism as voracious as its perceptive powers were small...
Read on, please...
Crosby, Stills, and Nash
Greatest Hits (Remastered) (Rhino)
I would have rather been in California than anywhere during those days, and in fact I was in California. Nevertheless, though my ass moved, my ears were another story. Take the O'Jays, for instance, whose blue-collar soul music helped me forget about CS&N's lame folk music.
The core of the O'Jays – Eddie LeVert, Walter Williams, and William Powell – had been together for 14 years when they had their first big hit, "Back Stabbers," during the summer of 1972. Their career had gyrated everywhere except up when they joined forces – for a second time – with Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff shortly after the songwriting-production team formed their label Philadelphia International...
O'Jays
Essential O'Jays (Epic/Legacy)
The flurry of reissues may be proof the music industry is dying, but it's produced a few sublime moments, like the "Deluxe Editions" of the Wailers' Burnin' and Catch A Fire. This piece, titled "Wailin'," ran in the Bay Guardian with Jeff Chang's take on the new Trojan Records box, "This Is Pop.".
DURING SO MUCH rain, one – or, in this case, two – bright spots really stand out. Ever since the birth of Napster and the gloomy end of days for the music business, the reissue industry has been going full tilt. It makes sense on both sides of the commercial exchange. For the labels, there's very little overhead and practically no guesswork; deliver Al Green with a couple of mysterious "alternative takes," perhaps a previously unreleased cut, and remixing or remastering – another mystery...
San Francisco Bay Guardian Wednesday, November 10, 2004
Brian Jonestown Massacre: And This Is Our Music
Pitchfork Media, July 19, 2004
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Sites I like...
L.A. Observed
HipHopMusic.com
TomDispatch.com
Danyel Smith's Naked Cartwheels
Then It Must Be True
Davey D’s Hip-Hop Corner
Pagan Moss Sensual Liberation HQ
Different Kitchen
War in Context
Cursor
Virtual Library For Theater and Drama
Jeff Chang's Can’t Stop Won’t Stop
Usounds Internacionale
Maud Newton
Paris's Guerrillafunk.com
Silliman's Home of the Hits
Negro Please
mp3s please
Boondocks
Oliver Wang's The Pop Life
American Samizdat
Sasha Frere-Jones's SF/J
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