Monday, May 31, 2004

“What about truth?” (Eddie) “What?” (me) “The truth. What happened, for real. In your life. You gonna tell it?” (Eddie) “Oh. Mostly, I guess.” (me) “You gotta go there or people won’t read it. The blog just won’t work.” (Eddie) “Yeah, well, they’ll think some other things if I do.” (me) “Let ‘em.” (Eddie) “You think?” (me) “Yeah.” (Eddie) “Maybe.” (Eddie again) Eddie and I were sitting in the Lake Merritt Diner in Oakland and I was telling him about extreme measures -- blog, column, and book, one size fits all. Eddie wanted to know how extreme things were going to get when I put them down for all to see. In particular, he was referring to Spanish lessons, which is our name for what happened during the year of our lord 1982 when Jesus -- Consuelo A’s brother -- disappeared through the carnivorous jaws of the California prison system. His uncle Alberto had to come up from the state of Durango, in Mexico, to run the family business. Alberto didn’t speak English, which meant if a person wanted to do business with him, that person better know how to speak Spanish. In his line of work, you didn’t have much choice; you do a little business here, a little there, and next thing you know you -- or, in this case, us -- were doing business every day, or else. The conversation turned toward extreme measures, and he asked if I planned to serve up a reasonable representation of things as they really were. People say they want the truth, and not to worry, they’ve got your back. Then, when it hits the fan, they’re nowhere in sight. It’s the oldest story in the books, and the one I’m writing has a potential problem or two when it comes down to facts. You could call it a memoir, but only if you agree that facts are flexible, tilting one way sometimes because life didn’t cooperate, and the other way sometimes because it did. Which is to say that even if you’ve got no problem telling the truth, other people might have a problem hearing it. Take, for example, the problem of flying under the influence, as nearly happened last December, when -- as reported in the Dec. 21, 2003 issue of The Guardian -- a pilot for Virgin Airlines was hauled off a plane about to leave Washington’s Dulles Airport for London. I was glad they nabbed the guy, definitely. But the truth is that although I fly a lot, I had never before considered whether or not the guy behind the wheel could see straight. Since then I’ve thought about it a lot -- which is to say, every time I board a plane, until I get off. There’s a certain irony in this, since as a veteran of six years in San Francisco’s taxi cab wars I could have been rightfully accused of flying on any number of occasions, a state of affairs that might have suited the pilot but was against the law for a cabbie. I ran that by Eddie, and he said, yeah, like when you ate the brownie. He was talking about New Years Eve 1981, when in lieu of a tip, one fare gave me a professionally wrapped marijuana brownie. Glued to the wrapping was a label with a company logo stating the ingredients and probable strength, along with the maker’s name, and several endorsements. I laughed when it came over the seat along with the money I was owed, put it in my briefcase, and an hour later -- when I ate it to cut the edge off my appetite -- I’d quite forgotten it had any special powers at all. Later -- although I can’t say how much later -- I picked up a fare in Diamond Heights, and was idling at a light, preparing to glide down Clipper St., and over into the Castro district. I looked out and was struck by the quiet that had floated down feather-like during the night and settled on the city. Across the Bay the sun was about to crest the dark smudge of Oakland’s hills, and I could see a handful of tankers anchored beyond the shoreline in water so still the surface stretched out like a mirror. My mind wandered as I stared, a reverie that was interrupted when my passenger tapped me on the shoulder. “Is there something wrong?" (passenger) “What do you mean?” (me) “We’ve been sitting here for almost ten minutes." (passenger) “You feel like driving?” (me) “Slide over.” (passenger) I’ve thought about that night a few times recently -- I didn’t charge the guy -- each time the pilot of the deep pink 747 releases the hydraulics and bounces a plane down the runway in the opening moments of the trailer to Soul Plane, the movie by Jesse Terrero, starring Snoop, Method Man, Kevin Hart, and Tom Arnold. The pilots (Snoop and Meth) might or might not be under the influence, but we’ve seen this movie before before, and frankly I don’t think we need to see it again. Erin Aubry Kaplan could have but didn’t mention Soul Plane when she wrote about the speech Bill Cosby gave at a gathering of Important Folk in Washington, D.C.. The assembled had wanted Dr. Huxtable to make them feel good about the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, which ordered the desegregation of public schools. Cosby showed up, but he didn’t cooperate. And as she put it -- grammar be damned -- “I ain’t no punk,” so she went on to write that the abysmal state of blacks in public education isn’t exactly the state that people were dreaming that Brown would usher in. ”The great thorn in the side of the black middle class that we curse in private but never in public for fear of denigrating the whole race -- a very valid fear, by the way -- is the hopeless intransigence of the lower class. It’s not just that folks don’t have money; Lord knows blacks, even the biggest conservatives, don’t blame each other for that. The anger is about people’s willingness to be niggers. Cosby’s fellow comedian Chris Rock brought this up years ago in his now-famous dialectic about loving black people but hating niggers -- those who felt license to live the low life, to openly scoff at education, brag about doing prison time and generally sabotage the nobler efforts of their own people at every turn. Rock exaggerated to make a point, but it was well taken among blacks that I know. Yet he knew that a big part of the problem was that American culture, as usual, minted the current image of the truly authentic Negro, and expects blacks to live up -- or down -- to it. He knew that American culture still views educated or well-spoken blacks as almost an affront to the get-down soul, to the purely instinctual that dictates everything from basketball to bad English to breaking into violence, that we all know and love (and sometimes fear -- but that’s another story)." Ironically, Soul Plane was noticed -- and then passed over -- last February in a piece by Kate Sullivian in the Weekly about a handful of black film professionals who’d just made Fronterz, a dig at the whole “urban” genre, wherein some of the scripts offered to the faux rappers have names like Bitta Chocolate, The Adventures of Doo Doo Brown and Soul Patrol. “That’s true to life,” says Belcon. “It can never be just Love and Roses, it’s got to be Money, Love, and Chocolate Roses. I swear to God, there was a script that came out a couple months ago called Soul Plane -- like Airplane! but with brothers.” “My friend in New York is a brilliant actor,” adds Pressey, “and he booked a recurring role on a series. There was a holdup at NBC; he got called into rehearsal, and they’re like, ‘We had to give the role to someone else.’ They wouldn’t tell him who. And then he saw in TV Guide that Eve got the role. It’s just epidemic.” Co-producer Miles Presha jumps in: “How come there’s no rock stars getting in movies?” “It’s okay if people pop up once in a while,” Pressey continues, “but Busta Rhymes in Finding Forrester…The work is being compromised. It’s an insult. You put 20 years of training into this, and [the rappers] just walk in. If they’re brilliant and don’t need to go to class, fine, but they’re not. They suck.” Suck or not, Soul Plane is airborne, and more than a few bloggers are trying to shoot it down. Kamau of The Black Hand Side had this to say: “I cannot even begin to properly expound upon the level of Black ignorance embodied in the upcoming Hollywood release, "Soul Plane". All I can say is, just say NO...” There’s a lot more – including a review at Paris’s Guerillafunk.com’s Thought Box by Shiesty that ends like this: "Do yourself a favor and send Hollywood a message at the same time. Miss this flight. And if you happen to be in the barbershop and they're stupid enough to be playing a bootleg of the movie a month before it hits theaters (while there's a dozen kids watching intently), ask them to shut it off. Like I should have.” Which is to say, we’re all part of this mess. posted by TommyT @ 5:04 pm | Permanent link

Friday, May 28, 2004

Until a minute ago I was all over a small slice of The Big Picture, where Barry L. Ritholtz offers insights and observations on “the intersection of technology, media, and entertainment.” But it’s Day One around here, and I’d like to offer some thoughts of my own regarding music and the Internet, although I plan to keep them earthbound. I can spit theory like E-40 spits game, but at the end of the day the impulse to log in, hang on, and flip out flies close to the ground – give me entertainment or give me the car keys. That’s the future embedded in the Web’s orderly geometry – you can’t argue with zeroes and ones, and when it comes to music (and at my house, it always comes down to music), no one wants to argue. We’ve seen the future of rock and roll and it’s name is iTunes, Real, Morpheus, Kazaa, Grokster, Limewire, wi-fi, P2P, cable hookups, DSL, and broadband – something like that. “Industry shady it need to be taken over,” according to Jay-Z, and you’ll get no argument from me: Music is alive and well but the music industry is dead as a doornail (a lawsuit is just a fish flopping in a dirty bilge). A story: years ago, I was one-third of a power trio - legends in our own minds, onstage and off. We'd roll in from the Island, through Ramones territory, into the Village to score something that would make us forget that home was a long way from coolsville; like it or not – and we didn’t -- we were headed back to Babylon, a notch on the LIRR timetable, nothing biblical in those parts, for real. Our trips to the city were fruitless; we were marked men, suckers from the ‘burbs and the hustlers could spot us a mile away. They’d swarm, offering aspirin as acid, and nickel bags of oregano, bundled to resemble dope. We’d drive back to the 'burbs and smoke, and sooner or later we’d admit defeat, put the oregano in the spice rack and dream of better days. I’d explore a universe beyond suburban sprawl, the wild, a forest so remote and a silence so profound that I could hear the beginning of time. Or something like that. (I had a melodramatic streak in those days.) If I’d had my way, just when time was about to stand still, a symphony of soul would pour from fabulous speakers hidden in the trees (hey, it was my dream), Marvin Gaye, and Jimi, The Temptations, Sam and Dave, The Blues Project, the Rascals, and Sly Stone, “total sound” as the old hi-fi advertisements called it. I kept that one to myself, and soon I moved West. One day, I walked into the Good Guys stereo store and damned if that dream hadn’t came true. The Sony Walkman was as good as anything I’d dreamed up, and for years, I took mine everywhere. No surprise, then, that I’m waiting for what my friend Tim Quirk – co-founder of the band Too Much Joy, and editor-producer at Real networks -- calls the celestial jukebox. Check this - I’m not afraid to represent: “Late one night many years ago, while stumbling through a pedestrian tunnel in the New York subway system, I saw these words, scrawled in black marker upon the grimy white tile wall; “Mick is sex.” “Mick” was Mick Jagger, and in the still young world of rock and roll, he embodied the raging sexual currents that burned so hot and wild that they threatened to consume Western culture. Or so it seemed, which is the same thing. Today, Mick is just another empty seashell, left by the tides on an anonymous private beach. A parade of new royals have since taken their turns on the throne, but none more worthy than the current occupant. Sex has deserted flesh and blood and taken up residency in a thing, the thong of digital devices, pure techno-sex: the plastic white housing of Apple Computers’ fabulous iPod.” CD fetishists can have their jewel cases. I want to grab music straight outta cyberspace. I like sounds that come from nowhere. You can’t trip on nowhere, and it doesn’t crowd your shelves. I want to listen, not hold. Quirk wrote an article that I edited at the San Francisco Bay Guardian a few years ago called “The Boring, Beautiful Future.” He was wide-eyed in those days – not just a believer, but a disbeliever in those who wouldn’t believe: “Because the revolution has just begun and nobody has a clue how it's going to end, there's a heady atmosphere of hope, fear, and greed swirling around everyone jockeying for position in this space. Some people insist that digitally distributed music will shift the industry away from long-playing formats like LPs and CDs and move it back to a single-track orientation (I've heard folks say we're returning to the days of 45s, and I've heard others say it will be more like the days of sheet music). Some people mutter that the changes will be deeper and more severe; they foresee piracy becoming so pervasive that no one will be willing to buy music anymore.” His thinking at the time was gospel – in the Bay Area anyway. When the dot.com crash came, the back-enders laughed and said “told ya’ so,” and the R.I.A.A. hired a bunch of suits to enforce the law: square wheel = good, round wheel = bad. But progress is progress, and a wheel’s gotta roll; Quirk was right, give or take a dream. Today, he’s no longer wide-eyed, but he’s definitely wise, and he’ll tell you about it if you give him the chance. Recently, Quirk and I filled the ears of San Francisco Magazine’s Kevin Berger, who wrote about it in “I, Pod”: “No wonder CD sales have tanked in recent years and the record industry has lost hundreds of millions of dollars. Kids have fled to Kazaa, which lets them download the one Britney Spears and one Jay-Z song they want for free. Buy an album? Like, whatever.” When it comes to the future of music, the gulf between those who know and those who don’t is enormous. If you’re wired, you can’t believe you’re reading this – or more likely you saw it coming and stopped. Relax, already; this is for folks over 30 who live off-campus or outside the Bay Area. Some people do, believe it or not, and CNET – which pulled MP3.com from the ashes, has turned it into an outpost for the uninitiated. It’s worth checking out for the primer on digital downloading. With that, well, “hello goodbye” as someone once said. Back soon. posted by TommyT @ 12:07 pm | Permanent link