Stay Fly
by Lee | Filed under Audio, Reviews, Video
XXX – Western Magazine Award Nom’
by Lee | Filed under Art, News
A profile of the artist Aurel Schmidt that I wrote for the visual arts magazine Border Crossings won a Manitoba magazine award earlier in the year and is now up for a Western Magazine Award. After I wrote the article, Aurel was chosen to appear in the 2010 Whitney Biennial — and a lot more articles on her work followed that announcement. But I can only claim to know of her amazing work before every other writer because she began her life as an artist here in Vancouver and lived half a block away from me when she started doing the infamous zombies. I had already written an introductory essay for her first show of abstract paintings at Anti-Social a year or more before that…
Canadian Literature reviews The Man Game
by Lee | Filed under Reviews
Jae Slym – East Van MC
by Lee | Filed under Audio, Video
Vancouver has a few scarce rappers, more now than back in the day. But wowza, we got one MC named Jae Slym. I don’t know anything about Slym, just happened on him after being linked to a MHS vid, Jae Slym might live next door to me, for all I know, he might be living in Bad Manors, but sounds like Slim’s from the down in the Dirty, like an East Van repping Young Bleed. His YouTube tracks are banana nuts. He’s the best rapper I think I’ve ever heard from East Van. Has he bro’d down with the — slightly-less qualified– Money Hungry Syndicate? Is Slym working with Babe Rainbow yet?
( props to Mount Pleasant kickin it: Lil’ Joe Hizzle!)
Nardwuar vs. Drake
by Lee | Filed under Audio, Video
When I hosted a radio show on CiTR 101.9 FM, UBC’s college radio station, it was Nardwuar who taught me how to use the reel-to-reel machine. I was starstruck by him then, 1994. He recorded some gobbledeygook on to the reel – in a kind of Nardwuar version of speaking-in-tongues. Actually he was doing a classic music trope — backmasking. He showed us how to reverse the playback on the reel-to-reel so that his voice was revealed to be saying quite clearly, “My cat Cleo is the best cat ever.”
It’s Friday afternoon and right now Nardwuar is on the radio. But here’s his beautiful interview with Lil’ Wayne’s favorite Canadian, Drake.
Laurie Spiegel on Concerto Generator
by Lee | Filed under Audio, Video
A master of space and place improvising…
Abstract Comics
by Lee | Filed under Art, Audio
Steel Pole Bathtub is my favorite noise rock band from the 90s. Dale Flattum aka CC Nova, did visuals for his band and their other project, Milk Cult, which took the sampling and industrial crunch of their rock outfit and made the kind of music Flying Lotus might like if Milk Cult came out today. In 1993 I went to San Francisco by Amtrak with my friend Seven Brothers, and found some of CC Nova‘s comics in an underground paper I picked up at a Haight bookstore, as well as bought his two latest albums, Miracle of Sound in Motion, and the Milk Cult soundtrack for Love God (best weirdest soundtrack ever recorded?). When I moved to Vancouver the first album I bought at Scratch was C.C. Nova’s Dispatch, a collection of his Satanic vinyl & masking tape experiments. I also found SPBT’s e.p. Lurch on vinyl when I moved to Vancouver. It came with a comic book featuring Flattum’s art and that of some others, including Satan Lee. I have the comic in front of me now. It’s kind of a noisy mix of horror comic tropes, Bay Area punk ‘zine and vinyl insert collage tactics, and a toss of Fluxus fuckery.
A while back I went looking to see who else on the internet has this old comic book, and came across Andrei Molotiu‘s blog attached to his Fantagraphics book Abstract Comics. AC is doing an amazing job covering off almost every size, shape, and concept that artists have employed to rethink the panel form. And the blog features some hi-res scans of the centrepiece of the Lurch comic book, Dale Flattum’s black ink garble narrative treatment of “Hey You.” And there’s so many others surrounding Flattum’s work on the blog that are worth checking at Abstract Comics. It’s become one of my favorite sites.
Here’s a couple more examples from the Lurch comic that I’ve scanned from my own copy… Read the rest of this entry »
Seven Brothers – The Sinch mp3
by Lee | Filed under Audio
Brand-new tune by Northern Canada’s Seven Brothers — ‘The Sinch’: Very oily synths like sour squeaks of metal on metal as Deepwater beats explode in concatenated blasts, spewing out toxic snares and buckets of compressed kettledrum. Making it look easy.
I promised Conrad Black next week I will drop the classic 7 Bros tune ‘Winnipeg Exodus.’
download Seven Brothers – The Sinch mp3
Let’s All Be Neighbours on Will Wright Street
by Lee | Filed under Non-Fiction
Found
by Lee | Filed under News
Found on Yahoo. ‘Conjugation’ was originally published in Border Crossings issue 96, and appears in Journey Prize: 18.
Horrors of Malformed Men
by Lee | Filed under Video
Trailer for a Japanese film featuring legendary founder of Butoh dance, Tatsumi Hijikata
Words Without Borders
by Lee | Filed under Fiction
I was talking with my class last night about Juan José Saer’s enigmatic short story ‘Baked Mud’ in the anthology Words Without Borders, and there are two more short pieces of his translated into English online at their site. I am fascinated by Juan José Saer’s writing. I’ve read all there is translated in English — very little, that is — my favorite is still the novel my aunt recommended, The Witness. Hardly any of his books are translated, about four of the over twenty he wrote. He is less well-known than say, Roberto Bolaño or Javier Marías, but so far as I can tell, he is their literary equal.
Anyway, it reminded me to go back and look again at the Words Without Borders website and immediately I went searching for my favorite story there, one that I remember reading not that long ago, when Herta Müller won the Nobel Prize last year. This is her story ‘On Packing,’ which recalls the life of a woman at the time of her sexual awakening, under the oppressive watchful eye of the Romanian secret service, Securitate, and communist leader Nicolae Ceauşescu.
I also noticed this story in the Guardian about the head of the Securitate which is kind of bitterly amusing, as he admits he was spying on Müller and tapping her phone and intimidating her, but thinks she’s a paranoid delusional because she over-reacted to their tactics, which he considered lighter compared to some of the others they spied on.
Another wonderful story I found online at the Guardian which mentions Romania’s communist dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu, is by the great Hungarian novelist Laszlo Krasznahorkai. It is called ‘Something is Burning Outside’ and features a strange visitor to a writer’s retreat near a remote crater lake.
Babe Rainbow’s Lindsay Lohan remix mp3
by Lee | Filed under Audio
In tribute to her iron vacation, Warp Records‘ first-ever Vancouver signee, Babe Rainbow, just sent me his draggy spooked remix of Lindsay Lohan’s tune ‘Stuck’ and the match is pretty hellish hot. Babe Rainbow will premiere the remix at MoMA’s Warm Up Show on July 31st, so if you are near the five boroughs around that time, check him out. Update: Just learned the track also appears on this free Triangle mixtape with a few other mean-muggin’ witch house artists remixing Lohan. Incarcerated Babefaces.
download ‘Stuck’ – a Lohan remix by Babe Rainbow
Brandon Vickerd’s Dead Astronaut
by Lee | Filed under Art
I was recently reminded of a reading I gave a few years ago when the artist David Poolman was curator of the Forest City gallery in London, Ontario and he invited me and Sheila Heti down there. At the same time as our reading was an exhibition by Brandon Vickerd. It was this crazy mechanical kinetic sculpture called ‘Champions of Entropy’ that used animal bones and antlers and weird jittery engines. I checked out Vickerd’s website recently and was totally blown away by this recent piece, Dead Astronaut, that he’s finished and is showing in Ontratio right now. It’s made of poplar, it’s meticulous and hardcore, it’s sci-fi and real life, it’s a real space odyssey of a piece.
Tassels
by Lee | Filed under Audio
Vancouver is always a place to go for weird noise of all variety. I’ve been a fan of weird Vancouver noise for fifteen or twenty years, since the days of when I could see Chanchre and Pork Queen play live, anyway. But the city is fresh again — it freshens up every year with new crucial groups — and right now with a storm of strange ambient noise music, beat-making, post-dub nightmare, lo-fi bedroom recording weirdos. Noise has been a city staple for decades, yes, definitely, punk and improv and onkyo and feedback, but it’s been a while, or maybe never, that Vancouver has had really super-solid laptop artists. But that’s starting to happen. I’m really big into Babe Rainbow, and his CBC playlist of local music covers a great deal of the most mindblowing stuff like Calamalka, Myths, Basketball, and Tassels. I’m also getting into the creepy vinyl tapeloop simplicity of all that Tassels is doing. At first I misspelled it. But I am feeling Tassels. Reminds me of CC Nova’s stuff for Milk Cult or a funkier Philip Jeck. A few nights a week I see Tassels live because the composer plays soccer outside where I live, and I know him as a photographer and writer as well. Tassels. Click on some Tassels for links to his tunes. Tassles.
Dipset Reunion will be Reality TV
by Lee | Filed under Audio
download the reunion of Harlem’s favorite sons, about the best anthem thing Cam’ron, Jim Jones, and Juelz Santana have ever dropped. Gossip of contract negotiations aside, this is healthy fun, stupid ridiculous, with beats bolstered by the creative frenzy of producer Araab Muzik
download The Diplomats new single ‘Salute‘
Toxic Rain
by Lee | Filed under News
Sometimes there’s a leaky car up the street. I’m not sure this is the case in the video posted here.
Canadian Notes & Queries Is Not The Enemy
by Lee | Filed under Fiction, News
I love Jeet Heer’s rebuttal to André Alexis’s essay ‘The Long Decline’ printed in Walrus magazine regarding the state of the critical literary review in Canada. Here we have two of Canada’s best critical minds stewing over the relative value of serious book reviews versus snarky slams or pat applause. The debate is worth a look, and John Metcalf’s obscure journal of letters Canadian Notes & Queries is strangely considered Ground Zero to both arguments. The magazine just got redesigned by Heer’s colleague in the comic world, Seth. Time to subscribe!
Attaché Gallery in Colour Magazine
by Lee | Filed under Art, News
William Gaddis interview
by Lee | Filed under Video
My friend the Montreal author John Goldbach tipped me off to this clip from a rare William Gaddis interview on YouTube. In it, he talks about the idea of writing from a sense of indignation. The clip is from a half-hour Q&A you can buy and download from the Roland Collection for a measly couple dollars. Roland Collection has many many more videos like this one with not a few other hugely famous authors. But William Gaddis, he was almost as reclusive as Thomas Pynchon and had ten times the brainpower, so far as I can tell from reading them both, so this seems extremely unique that we have access to such a long video interview with him. And considering it’s not a reading but an interview and there’s so little else available with him speaking on the nature of writing, I am really eager to watch this. Unfortunately, I can’t because the full video is not Mac compatible!
