Circles

there is going to be an intermission within these stories for the time being. nothing permanent. I'm just looking for a new way out and I think I have finally come full circle with this particular story. don't get left behind.. the past, though reflective, can be subconsciously intrusive. try not to get caught up in it all.

http://myfriendadam.tumblr.com/

July 4, 2011 // 00:46

I've been keeping a notebook

"It all comes back. Perhaps it's difficult to see the value in having one's self back in that kind of mood, but I do see it; I think we are well advised to keep in nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were. I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be..."

--Joan Didion - On Keeping A Notebook, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

The Great Wall of Los Angeles

The Great Wall of Los Angeles, located in the Tujunga Flood Control Channel in Valley Glen (San Fernando Valley), is the longest mural in North America as well as the largest monument of interracial harmony in the world. This panel of the wall memorializes the struggles and injustices imposed upon Japanese Americans in California during World War II. Designed between 1976-1984, The Great Wall is currently experiencing a massive restoration project. Keep it tuned... the world is changing before us!

Social and Public Art Resource Center, Venice, CA:: http://www.sparcmurals.org:16080/sparcone/

Save LA Murals Campagin:: http://www.savelamurals.org/now/index.php

Coheed and Cambria - The Second Stage Turbine Blade

goodmorning sunshine... awake when the sun hits the sky............. .. . ... . .

The Movielife - Jamestown @ Chain Reaction 2003

The Movielife - Forty Hour Train Back To Penn (Drive Thru Records 2003)

The Movielife, Long Island legends throw down at southern california punk staple Chain Reaction. This footage captures a pivotal and yet rare instance of the Movielife's spontaneous and enigmatic live performance. They were a band without precedents that sent forth an attitude and a sound unique to the perceptions of pop/punk at the time. Jamestown will forever be a classic among hardcore enthusiasts of the DIY punk culture of the early 2000s. Fuck the fame... I'm going out on top!

On The Road (7)

God was gone; it was the silence of his departure. It was a rainy night. It was the myth of the rainy night. Dean was popeyed with awe. This madness would lead nowhere. I didn't know what was happening to me, and I suddenly realized it was only the tea that we were smoking; Dean had bought some in New York. It made me think that everything was about to arrive--the moment when you know all and everything is decided forever. (Kerouac, 128)

On The Road (6)

Just about that time a strange thing began to haunt me. It was this: I had forgotten something. There was a decision that I was about to make before Dean showed up, and now it was driven clear out of my mind but still hung on the tip of my mind's tongue. I kept snapping my fingers, trying to remember it. I even mentioned it. And I couldn't even tell if it was a real decision or just a thought I had forgotten. It haunted and flabbergasted me, made me sad. It had to do somewhat with the Shrouded Traveler. Carlo Marx and I once sat down together, knee to knee, in two chairs facing, and I told him a dream I had about a strange Arabian figure that was pursuing me across the desert; that I tried to avoid; that finally overtook me just before I reached the Protective City. "Who is this?" said Carlo. We pondered it. I proposed it was myself, wearing a shroud. That wasn't it. Something, someone, some spirit was pursuing all of us across the desert of life and was bound to catch us before we reached heaven. Naturally, now that I look back on it, this is only death: death will overtake us before heaven. The one thing that we yearn for in our living days, that makes us sigh and groan and undergo sweet nauseas of all kinds, is the remembrance of some lost bliss that was probably experienced in the womb and can only be reproduced (though we hate to admit it) in death. But who wants to die? (Kerouac, 124)

On The Road (5)

The radio had been fixed and now he had wild bop to urge us along the night. I didn't know where all this was leading; I didn't care. (Kerouac, 124)

On The Road (4)

He was out of his mind with real belief. "And of course now no one can tell us that there is no God. We've passed through all forms. // You see how long ago? Everything is fine, God exists, we know time. Everything since the Greeks has been predicted wrong. You can't make it with geometry and geometrical systems of thinking. It's all this!" He wrapped his finer in his fist; the car hugged the line straight and true. "And not only that but we both understand that I couldn't have time to explain why I know and you know God exists." At one point I moaned about life's troubles // "Troubles, you see, is the generalization-word for what God exists in. The thing is not to get hung-up." (Kerouac, 120)

Inside the [HEAD]phones / June 2011

All I bleed are smiles

Best Interest - Camera Shy But Still A Star (Best Interest, 2006)

The Movielife - Forty Hour Train Back to Penn (Drive-Thru, 2003)

Coheed & Cambria - The Second Stage Turbine Blade (Equal Vision, 2002)

Immortal Technique - Revolutionary Vol. 2 (Viper, 2003)

Flying Lotus - Cosmogramma (WARP, 2010)

Inside the [HEAD]phones / May 2011

While I'm alive I'll feel alive, and what's next I guess I'll know when I've gotten there

Why? - Alopecia (Anticon, 2008)

Radiohead - In Rainbows (Radiohead, 2007)

Cold War Kids - Mine Is Yours (Interscope/DGC, 2011)

Incubus - Alive At Red Rocks (Epic/Immortal, 2004)

I am free -- with the wheels between my feet

Original Skateboards, 2009

[chances are I've posted this before. But it's certainly worth a few more reposts]

What Downtown LA Would Like Without Cars (VIDEO) | Planetizen

What Downtown LA Would Like Without Cars (VIDEO) | Planetizen

video made by 3 Cal Poly Architecture students -- rep!!

Daytripper

//Daytripper (Vertigo Comics, 2009)

I'm a stranger, someone left me for dead

new found glory - don't let this be the end (not without a fight, epitaph records, 2009)

Inside the [HEAD]phones / May 2011

The windy season makes me think...

Dengue Fever - Cannibal Courtship (Fantasy, 2011)

Nuggets - Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era, 1965-1968 (Elektra/Sire, 1972)

Moby Grape - Grape Jam (Columbia, 1968)

The Chambers Brothers - The Time Has Come (Columbia, 1967)

The Entrance Band - The Entrance Band (Ecstatic Peace, 2009)

Incubus - Monuments and Melodies (Epic, 2009)

Inside the [HEAD]phones / April 2011

but I don't gotta say a word I just flip em' the bird and keep going I don't take shit from no one

Dengue Fever - Cannibal Courtship (Fantasy, 2011)

Eminem - The Marshall Mathers LP (Aftermath, 2000)

Jay-Z - The Blueprint (Roc-A-Fella, 2001)

Eminem - Recovery (Interscope, 2010)

see, I'm a poet to some

Going Through Changes

On The Road (2-3)

They were like the man with the dungeon stone and the gloom, rising from the underground, the sordid hipsters of America, a new beat generation that I was slowly joining.

[Kerouac, 54]


Boys and girls in America have such a sad time together; sophistication demands that they submit to sex immediately without proper preliminary talk. Not courting talk--real straight talk about souls, for life is holy and every moment is precious.

[Kerouac, 58]

Haunted -- the echo of Mr. Whittier

and the recorded echo, it echoes. An echo of an echo of an echo. // Echoing, until a voice from far away, from behind the sun, says:

"You're playing to an empty house. // Listen to yourselves--you're so busy telling your stories to each other. You're always turning the past into a story to make yourselves right. -- our culture of blame -- It never changes. People fall so in love with their pain, they can't leave it behind. The same as the stories they tell. We trap ourselves. // Some stories, you tell them and you use them up. Other stories... // Telling a story is how we digest what happens to us. It's how we digest our lives. Our experience. You digest and absorb your life by turning it into stories the same way this theater seems to digest people. Other events--the ones you can't digest--they poison you. Those worst parts of your life, those moments you can't talk about, they rot you from the inside out. But the stories that you can digest, that you can tell--you can take control of those past moments. You can shape them, craft them. Master them. And use them to your own good."

[Palahniuk, 380-381]


If we can forgive what's been done to us... If we can forgive what we've done to others... If we can leave all of our stories behind. Our being villains or victims. Only then can we maybe rescue the world. But we still sit here, waiting to be saved. While we're still victims, hoping to be discovered while we suffer. Would it be so bad? To be the last two people in the world? Why can't the world end the same way it started?

[Palahniuk, 383]

On The Road (1)

Now I wanted to sleep a whole day. So I went to the Y to get a room; they didn't have any, and by instinct I wandered down to the railroad tracks--and there are a lot of them in Des Moines--and wound up in a gloomy old Plains inn of a hotel by the locomotive roundhouse, and spent a long day sleeping on a big clean hard white bed with dirty remarks carved in the wall beside my pillow and the beat yellow window shades pulled over the smoky scene of the railyards. I woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn't know who I was--I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I'd never seen, hearing this hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn't know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I was scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost. I was halfway across America, at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future, and maybe that's why it happened right there and then, that strange red afternoon.

[Kerouac, 15]

RUN TO THE HILLS

ANALOG Skate Team (Australia)

Inside the [HEAD]phones / March 2011

so I picked myself off the ground and fuckin' swam 'fore I drowned

Eminem - Recovery (2010)

Jay-Z - The Blueprint (2001)

Warren G - Regulate...G Funk Era (1994)

Eminem - The Marshall Mathers LP (2000)

Talkn' 2 Myself

Detroit: Where Music and Community Development are One

Loyalty is something that can never be replaced. As we move forward into the technological future of social networking and impersonalization, we may ultimatley lose ourselves. The very fabric that once held communities so tightly knit together, may dissapear. The City of Detroit, now alone more than ever, can represent the essence of man in the world we live in today. The subject that refused to crumble. The man who fights till the death--arms linked in communion with the very people that make him, him.

Through the height of our country's industrial and manufacturing prosperity, the City of Detroit came to life. During World War I and World War II, its facotires and assembly plants produced the largets amount of military air crafts and fighters. During the automobile era, the City flourished as our nation's people demanded the need for a vehicle. Now, with the recession that we face, the City of Detroit has struggled more than ever. Rising unemployment rates and a decline of social services and aid from the federal government. What happens when the people who once believed in us leave? Who do we become when those that said they would be there through the thick and the thin move on? We stand strong. We stand together.

It is important that we do not forget the places we come from. The places that make us who we are. The places that we call home. And it is important that we do not forget the people that makes those places what they are. Planners and urban designers spend too much time focusing on the finer things in life. They are the fairweather friends that live at the top. But where are they when we need them the most? When planning and community organizing are needed the most. In this day and age, we must learn to grow from the bottom up--without the help of the higher authorities. We are the people that make life happen--and we are the people that will bring us back from the rubble of despair.

Detroit, stand up. You will return.

Marshall Mathers' (Eminem) "Letter to Detroit"

DIGITAL JOURNAL ARTICLE: http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/304459

The Starting Line - Somebody's Gonna Miss Us (DVD)

This video is footage taken from The Starting Line's DVD release "Somebody's Gonna Miss Us." The DVD was released in a compilation package with live concert audio recording as a farewell album to their fans.

The Starting Line - Something Left To Give

Jack's Mannequin - Drop Out - The So Unknown @ The Viper Room, Los Angeles (10.10.08)

Jack's Mannequin performing "Drop Out - The So Unknown" from their second full-length studio album The Glass Passenger (Sire Records, 2008).

Goldenwest [Through My Eyes EP]

Droppin' March 22nd! Keep em' peeled!

track listing:

1. Always a Party

2. Evaporate

3. Californicate

4. Through My Eyes

5. Talkin

6. Don't Stop (Sun Drop)

7. Superfuturelove

album teaser:

News from under The Apple Tree

Jay Adams, Tear Drop circa 1976 //Glen E. Friedman//

Hey Everybody -- Stone and The Kid have some big news for you all!

We are throwing together a Greatest Hits Compilation of our favorite cuts from our "Sounds of a Unified Struggle" series. For those of you that missed it, Sounds of a Unified Struggle was our way of celebrating and acknowledging influential African American Soul and RnB musicians from the 50's 60's, and 70's. The compilation will be an excellent way to catch up on what you may have missed out! We also have a digital recording of our February 7th show. Personally, that was my favorite edition of Sounds of a Unified Struggle so I am more than excited to share it with you folks!

We also have a digital recording of our show last night (3/7/11): The Shark Tree. The Shark Tree was our surf rock/beach fuzz jam fest for KCPR's Shark Week III. During Shark Week, every show on air will be dedicated to shark/beach/ocean themes. Be sure to tune in and check out what all of the other crazy DJs at the station are throwing down this week! It should be a blast! Here is the track-listing for The Shark Tree:

The Shark Tree (3.7.11)

GILLIGAN'S ISLAND THEME SONG
The Surfaris - Wipe Out
The Japanese Motors - Single Fins & Safety Pins
Wavves - King of the Beach
The Growlers - Sea Lion Goth Blues
JAWS MOVIE TRAILER
Weezer - Surf Wax America
Surfer Blood - Swim
King Khan & BBQ Show - I'll Be Loving You
The Soft Pack - Parasites
The Ventures - Hawaii 5-O
CLIP FROM THE ABYSS
The Trashmen - Surfin' Bird
Jan & Dean - Surf City
The Hondells - Little Honda
The Chantays - Pipeline
The Darlings - Eviction Party
PIRANHA 3D MOVIE TRAILER
Ronny & The Daytonas - G.T.O.
Feist - Sea Lion Woman (Live at the Trabend Sessions, 2007)
SAMUEL L. JACKSON - DEEP BLUE SEA SPEACH
The Beach Boys - Barbara Ann

Because The Kid and I love you all so much -- and are extremely grateful for your support during our MTV Woodie Award run -- we are passing out the Sounds of a Unified Struggle Greatest Hits Comp and both show recordings for FREE! All you have to do is send us a message with a song request and we will be sure to get you a copy!

Remember tune in Monday nights from 7-8pm for a fine selection of Psychedelic Garage and Old School Soul gems!

LISTEN LIVE: http://kcpr.calpoly.edu/music/live.html

[[Dr Stone & The Sinister Kid -- out]]

transmission [from the satellite heart] over.

Haunted -- the memoirs of Tess Clark

"Mrs. Clark says, Sometimes it seems that we spend the first half of our lives looking for some disaster. And she looks down at her straight-out-chest--a look made almost impossible by her enhanced lips. As young people, she says, we want something to slow us down and keep us trapped in one place long enough to look below the surface of the world. That disaster is a car crash or a war. To make us sit still. It can be getting cancer or getting pregnant. The important part is how it seems to catch us by surprise. That disaster stops us from living the life we'd planned as children--a life of constant dashing around." -- C. Palahniuk, Haunted, 2005: 134

In Living Color: Entrance, Sleepy Sun, Slang Chicken

Back in the summer of 2009, I made the long and unknowingly silent journey out into the Pasadena Hills where the city of Eagle Rock is so elegantly nestled. As I entered what appeared to be a renovated church, I discovered what I was once afraid to find: the self. The sounds that reverberated between the walls of that holy space and into my mind were unlike anything I had ever experienced in my previous life. This story can only be retold through the collection of photographs that isolate precious moments of the evening.

The Entrance Band, Sleepy Sun ('Embrace' Record Release Show), Slang Chicken

Guy Blakeslee of The Entrance Band

"For me, the actual experience of playing is going somewhere and sending something back out to people from a place that they are not in that I'm in." (Interview with Steven Preston, June 6, 2010)

Full interview here >> http://www.thecoachellavalleyartscene.com/2010/06/30/interview-the-entrance-band/

The Entrance Band - Silverlake Jubilee

The Transplants - Tall Cans in the Air

"Tall Cans in the Air" is the 2nd track off of The Transplant's self-titled debut album released on Hellcat Records in 2002. The Transplants is the quintessential hip-hop/punk rock super group of the previous decade--exemplifying everything that the southern california, low-rider, punk rock mentality is. The Transplants are: Tim Armstrong (Rancid, Operation Ivy // guitar, bass, vocals, synth, production), Rob "Skinhead Rob" Aston (Expensive Taste // vocals, scratching), and Travis Barker (Blink 182, Box Car Racer, TRV$DJAM, Expensive Taste // percussion).

Into the Hole

Into the Hole (2/02/2011)

Yume Bitsu - Into the Hole

Marisa Anderson - Clouds

Why? - Torpedo's or Crohns

Elliot Smith - Waltz #2

Flying Lotus - 1983

Agent Ribbons - I'm Alright

How to Dress Well - My Body

Dirty Projectors - Stillness is the Move

Orange Juice - Felicity

Laura Veirs - July Flame

Simon and Garfunkel - At the Zoo

The Flaming Lips - Abandoned Hospital Ship

John Wesley Coleman - Get High Babe

Stars - Soft Revolution

Leonard Cohen - So Long Marianne

Entrance - Silence on a Crowded Train

Sun Ra - The Sun Myth

Jackson 5 - I Want You Back

iLLy's style

Illy is a female artist in the Etnies Skateboards community. I found this drawing on the Etnies Blog at [http://etnies.com/blog/2006/1/31/meet-ily-the-etnies-girl-of-the-month/]. Pretty dope!

Inside the [HEAD]phones / February 2011

Art Blakey - The Jazz Messengers (1956)

Cold War Kids - Mine is Yours (2011)

A New Found Glory - Nothing Gold Can Stay (1999)

Incubus - Monuments & Melodies (2009)

VA / Wheedle's Groove: Seattle's Finest in Funk & Soul 1965 75 (2004)

Martha & The Vandellas - Live at the 20-GRAND Detroit, Michigan 1967

Kanye West - The College Dropout (2004)

Handsome Boy Modeling School - So... How's Your Girl? (1999)

Sister Saves

Sister Saves: winter 2010

Gomez - See the World (How We Operate, 2006)

Fruit Bats - The Ruminant Band (The Ruminant Band, 2009)

Feist - I Feel it All (The Reminder, 2007)

Jenny Lewis - Next Messiah (Acid Tongue, 2007)

Conor Oberst - Souled Out!!! (Conor Oberst, 2008)

The Dodos - Ashley (Visiter, 2008)

Cold War Kids - Dreams Old Men Dream (Loyalty to Loyalty, 2008)

Cold War Kids - Robbers (Robbers & Cowards, 2006)

Stars - My Favourite Book (In Our Bedroom After the War, 2007)

Birds Fled From Me - Resisted (Deeper Lurking, 2009)

Conor Oberst - Lenders in the Temple (Conor Oberst, 2008)

Cassino - Maddie Bloom (Kingprince, 2009)

Sleepy Sun - Ooh Boy (Fever, 2010)

TV On The Radio - Tonight (Return to Cookie Mountain, 2006)

Aushua - Sister Saves (No Harm Done EP, 2008)

Death Cab For Cutie - Bixby Canyon Bridge (Narrow Stairs, 2009)

"and the silence, it became so very clear"

"Cold War Kids Move Toward the Big Time" -- Los Angeles Times, February 3, 2011

Making peace with a city that they long defined themselves against

A few weeks ago, the members of Cold War Kids did something they felt was long overdue. They moved to Los Angeles.

The quartet had long lived on the outer orbits of L.A.'s cultural life — a studio in Long Beach, a stint based in Whittier, college at Biola. Life on the fringes suited their musical and lyrical interests. Cold War Kids' early songs were an untrendy mix of barroom blues-punk populated by a fictional cast of alcoholic dads, trips to the E.R. and (literal) dirty laundry. Somehow it caught on among L.A's demimonde in the mid-'00s, though not without scorn from snarkier corners of blogland, and made them unlikely KROQ staples and darlings of the respected major-indie Downtown Records.

But the band still seemed purposefully and necessarily set apart from L.A.'s indie elite, geographically and psychologically. But that's changed. Between tours, they'll come home to new Los Feliz and Silver Lake homes, and to an unlikely peace with a city that they long defined themselves against.

"Moving up here was the best thing I've done lately," said bassist Matt Maust over breakfast at Mustard Seed Cafe, an urban-quaint red brick restaurant in Los Feliz. "We used to live on one of the main drags in Long Beach and now I have this back house where I walk out and exhale deeply and it's so, so quiet."

The recent move coincided with a shift in their goals for the band. Its 2006 debut, "Robbers & Cowards," documented life on society's edges, and its cryptic 2008 follow-up, "Loyalty to Loyalty," was a collection of half-remembered fever dreams from the road.

But its new album, "Mine Is Yours," released on Interscope Records last week, is a relatively easygoing and hook-savvy record about the trials and pleasures of domesticity that could introduce Cold War Kids to a very different audience. It will make skeptics feel entirely justified in their scorn, longtime fans impressed with the band's advancement and attention to songcraft, and make new audiences hoist beers and kiss someone.

It also comes after one of the more difficult periods in the band's life. "Robbers & Cowards" had a genuine hit in the minimalist dub vamp "Hang Me Up to Dry," and they enjoyed the wind of a breakout new band at their back. For "Loyalty," the Kids worked quickly in the studio to document the things they believed their band was built on — fussy but precise rhythmic interplay from bassist Maust and drummer Matt Aveiro, Jonathan Russell's echo-laden single-string guitar riffs and Nathan Willett's voice, rooted in classic soul and character-driven lyrical vignettes.

In hindsight, though, the band members say they rushed the record and left many song ideas unrealized. Though their audience grew, they paid for their haste with some poor reviews that chipped at their faith in how their band worked.

"A lot of our good ideas went unfinished. Nobody was there to tell us, 'This is good, but it could be better,'" Willett said. "A song like 'Dreams Old Men Dream' was a great idea that we picked before it was ripe."

For "Mine Is Yours," they made a point of upending that routine by decamping to Nashville for months on end to work with Tom Waits' and Modest Mouse's producer Jacquire King, arriving with dozens of song fragments and their only rule being that every idea was on the table — except hastiness.

The band had believed its recordings should essentially be documents of its often searing live dynamic, with each instrument speaking for itself and the songs written around the clamor. Under King's guidance, however, they pored over effects, tried out new elements like drum loops and programming on tracks such as "Sensitive Kid," and took pains to write their most immediate melodies yet. It's a record rooted in well-crafted songwriting and production more than the dank desperation of a warehouse practice space.

After a time of creative turmoil, Willett also turned to more intimate and classic spheres of subject matter for his lyrics. His old songs seemed haunted by the things chasing bluesmen for decades — the devil, booze and disappointed women — along with nods to literary heroes such as Nabokov and Joan Didion.

But those fictions didn't make sense with these new sounds, or with the truth of their lives as a successful mid-career rock band. So the long-married Willett wrote about what he saw — old friends on the brink of divorce, couples in too deep to quit but riven with old wounds, and the tough joys of making a life with someone.

"We were watching a lot of Cassavetes films, and he had said that there's no more fascinating subject than men and women together, and for me to admit to that was a real 'a-ha' moment for me," Willett said. "My friends were all getting divorced and turning 30, and for the first time I wanted to write about the people around me."

The album is generally optimistic about love, but like in any relationship, old attachments come back and cause trouble. Much of the early criticism lobbed at "Mine Is Yours" comes from the specter of Kings of Leon, whom producer King shepherded from big-in-England underachievers to arena-filling megastars.

Although there will likely never be anything approaching the Tarzan alpha swagger of "Sex on Fire" in Cold War Kids' catalog, it's not entirely coincidental that King's ear for taking flinty, pop-adjacent blues-rock and spit-shining it for big stages had its appeal for the quartet.

"Sure they want that [commercial success], but with them the art is always first," said King. "I hear a lot of talk of them cleaning up and going mainstream around this record. The goal wasn't to find a top-40 audience, but to have worked on classic songcraft and productions. It's not bad if you want to say something that connects with a lot of people."

Whether "Mine Is Yours" kicks Cold War Kids from the Wiltern into the Greek Theatre will be determined this year. They've severed many of their outré bona fides in pursuit of something bigger, and arguably harder.

For now, though, Cold War Kids have had enough of running from the perpetual warmth and commercial possibility of Los Angeles and all it stands for. Maybe embracing it is the most dangerous thing they could have done.

"People think you need to be uncomfortable to make art. You don't," Willett said. "You first have to be comfortable to really let yourself be vulnerable."

august.brown@latimes.com

Copyright © 2011, Los Angeles Times

Interplanetary Travelers [1.26.11]

The Essex Green - Sixties

Sleepover - Peace Buds

Toro y Moi - Thanks Vision

Eero Komstoinen & Co - Near but Far Away

New York Ska Jazz Ensemble - Filthy McNasty

Chicago Afrobeat Project - Chupacabra

Sun Ra - Interplanetary Travelers

De La Soul - Jenifa Taught Me

J. Dilla - Workinon It

Chaweewan Dumnern - Lam Toey Chaweewan

Thao and the Get Down Stay Down - Geography

Neil Young - Walk With Me

Kigali Y Izahabu - Invura Yaranka Geyi

Pink Floyd - Welcome to the Machine

The Pixies - Broken Face

Death From Above 1979 - Cold War

No Bunny - Ain't it a Shame

Sushi 4004 - Fantastic Plastic Machine

Gilbert Deflez - L'Agonie Instrumental

The Fugees - ..........

The Apple Tree Sessions: The Sounds of a Unified Struggle

Bring your soul and an open mind

The Sounds of a Unified Struggle is a special installation to commemorate African American old school soul and RnB musicians. Dr Stone and The Sinister Kid will be providing the rhythms every Monday night in February from 7-8 pm on KCPR 91.3 FM.

January 31, 2011

THE ENTRANCE BAND - M L K

JIMI HENDRIX - Fire

THE OLYMPICS - Rainin' In My Heart

CHUCK BERRY - Johnny Be Goode

THE MARCELLS - Blue Moon

J.J. JACKSON - Down, But Not Out

THE CHAMBERS BROTHERS - Uptown

SAM & DAVE - Soul Man

THE TEMPTATIONS - Ain't Too Proud to Beg

PATRINELL STATEN - I Let a Good Man In

THE APOLLAS - You're Absolutely Right

MARY LEE WHITNEY - Don't Come a Knockin'

SAM COOKE - A Change is Gonna Come

BOB MARLEY & THE WAILERS - Get Up, Stand Up

February 7, 2011

DEE DEE SHARP - Mashed Potato Time

THE OLYMPICS - Good Lovin'

THE ESQUIRES - Sadie's Ways

ARCHIE BELL & THE DRELLS - Tighten Up

JOHNNY WOODSON - I Wanna Be Near You

JIMMY JONES - Mr Fix It

THE ESQUIRES - Come On, Come On

THE MIGHTY HANNIBAL - Get in the Groove

SCORPIO - Ninety Nine and a Half

CHUCK BERRY - No Particular Place to Go

CHUCK BERRY - Rip it Up

RAY CHARLES - The Right Time

THE RIGHT TRACK - You Destroyed My Soul

J.J. JACKSON - But It's Alright

THE MARVELLOS - Why Do You Want to Hurt the One That Loves You

THE DRIFTERS - There Goes My Baby

THE MARVELETTES - Here I Am Baby

ARETHA FRANKLIN - RESPECT

February 14, 2011 - Valentines Day Special

MILES DAVIS - Bye Bye Blackbird
LINDA JONES - Hypnotized
THE TEEN TURBANS - We Need to be Loved
LITTLE JERRY WILLIAMS - I'm The Lover Man
BOBBY BENNET - Soul Jury Pt 1 & 2
CURTIS MAYFIELD AND THE IMPRESSIONS - I'm the One Who Loves You
SMOKEY ROBINSON AND THE MIRACLES - Shop Around
MARTHA REEVES AND THE VANDELLAS - Honey Chile
THE INVINCABLES - Heart Full of Love
THE MARVELLOS - We go Together
WALTER FOSLER - Your Search is Over
MILES DAVIS - Tadd's Delight
THE INTRUDERS - Cowboys to Girls
TOWER OF POWER - You're Still a Young Man
THE DELFONICS - La La Means I Love You
THE ENCHANTERS - I Wanna Thank You
The Apollas - Lock Me In Your Heart
Barbara English - I've Got a Date

February 21, 2011

The Capitols - Cool Jerk
Johnnie Taylor - Who's Making Love
Wilson Pickett - Land of 1,000 Dances
Otis Redding - Try a Little Tenderness
Bobby Taylor & the Vancouvers - Does Your Mamma Know About Me
Gladis Knight & the Pips - Midnight Train to Georgia
Billy Butler & the Enchanters - I Can't Work No Longer
Gene Chandler - Good Times
Major Lance - The Monkey Time
Artistics - Patty Cake
Walter Jackson - It's All Over
Al Green - Love & Happiness
Michael Jackson - Man in the Mirror
The Primettes - Tears of Sorrow

February 28, 2011

THE PSYCHEDELIC ALIENS - Hijacking

THE 5TH DIMENSION - Puppet Man

THE FOUR TOPS - I Can't Help Myself

SAM & DAVE - Soul Man

ARCHIE BELL & THE DRELLS - Tighten Up

MARTHA REEVES & THE VANDELLAS - I Promise to Wait my Love

TEEN TURBANS - We Just Need to be Loved

LORRAINE ELLISON - Try (Just a Little Bit Harder)

THE 5TH DIMENSION - Save the Country

BILLY BUTLER & THE ENCHANTERS - I Can't Work No Longer

GENE CHANDLER - Good Times

MAJOR LANCE - Monkey Time

THE PSYCHEDELIC ALIENS - Gbe Keke Wo Taoc

THE INVINCIBLES - Heart Full of Love

IKE & TINA TURNER - Finger Poppin

FRANKIE LYMON & THE TEENAGERS - Portable on my Shoulder

JACKSON 5 - The Love You Save

BEN E. KING - Stand By Me

Mine Is Yours

Picasso don't premeditate, he just paint

"Mine is Yours" is the third full-length studio album by Long Beach natives Cold War Kids. The album was produced by Jacquire King (Kings of Leon, Norah Jones) and showcases a much more expansive, explosive, and atmospheric sound. Willett's lyrics paint a love story of passion and forgiveness. The album contains elements reminiscent of both Loyalty to Loyalty (2008 - Against Privacy, I've Seen Enough, Dreams Old Men Dream) and Robbers and Cowards (2006 - Passing The Hat, Robbers, Red Wine Success). Mine is Yours is a giant leap for the Kids towards a grown and polished sound--not to say that they are parting ways with their unique blend of blues and punk.

Mine Is Yours (2011, Downtown, V2, Mercury, Interscope)

Produced and Recorded by Jacquire King

Mine is Yours

Louder Than Ever

Royal Blue

Finally Begin

Out of the Wilderness

Skip the Charades

Sensitive Kid

Bulldozer

Broken Open

Cold Toes on the Cold Floor

Flying Upside Down

COLD WAR KIDS

Matt Aveiro (percussion)

Nathan Willett (vocals, guitar, piano)

Jonnie Bo Russell (guitar, piano, vocals)

Maust (bass)

The Orange Eats Creeps (6)

I get the sinking feeling that I'm gonna be here forever. I traced into the sky: f-o-r-e-v-e-r... In this world, there's no edge, no junctions or seams, just endless rounded corners -- the sanded contours of hell--

Summer ticks away What have you been up to lately?

[Grace Krilanovich, 144]

The Orange Eats Creeps (2-5)

There is a myth up on The Highway That Eats People that there's one way in and one way out. There are actually many ways in and many ways out--the trick is to pick the road that leads out and not ever deeper. Which path leads to the gauzy powder image of the woman--the one with white crepe shadows wrapped around her body and a skull where her face should be? She fills her nights flying low over the woods, the murderers' cabins, and under the bridge where the bodies were kept (not "found"), flying around and down the spiral path that corkscrewed down down to the center of the woods, until she came to rest and lay in the middle of the highway, splayed across the road like a fallen bough-- There she ceased to exist except as two enormous black holes for eyes.

[Grace Krilanovich, 97]


When a sleeping cat's paws twitch it's dreaming of running away from you. You know, these are weird times, marked by a nonspecific dread that rests in nights of brown fog at the center of my bones. Everything in this life is determined, a machine fueled by the tones emitted by digging a fresh grave. Horrific events are set in motion in this occupied territory, activated by movement, but I can't stop moving...

[Grace Krilanovich, 105]


That autumn it went like this: We? No: I.
I walk alone and I am the last one.

[Grace Krilanovich, 110]


I thought of forgotten rooms, of walls collapsing in old apartment buildings, accordion-like, disappearing into a crevice in the dark. One day my house mom went into one of these collapsed rooms and found grey grass sinews itching their way through cracks in the floor, filling the room with tufts of itchy vegetation. They grew and spread into the elaborate lace-like fans and dusty cobweb looms before wilting into flakes at first sign of morning. All of these memories made up some survey of the make-believe life I led as only a kind of version of living. I made myself remember: crime scenes are kind of ruin too.

[Grace Krilanovich, 115]

Resurrection of Siqueiros's "America Tropical"

La Plaza

NEWS FROM LATIN AMERICA AND THE CARIBBEAN

« Previous | La Plaza Home | Next »

'America Tropical': A forgotten Siqueiros mural resurfaces in Los Angeles [Updated]

September 22, 2010 | 9:34 am

A significant artwork from the Mexican muralism movement has sat unseen for more than 70 years, whitewashed soon after it was completed to mask its political content, on a second-story exterior wall of a historic building in Los Angeles.

David Alfaro Siqueiros, like his Mexican contemporaries Jose Clemente Orozco and Diego Rivera, traveled and painted north of the border while Mexican modernism flourished and grew an international profile in the early- and mid-20th century. He lived in L.A. for about seven months in 1932 and was commissioned to paint a mural on the old Italian Hall in the Olvera Street district. Siqueiros was asked to paint something celebrating "tropical America," part of efforts by a booster named Christine Sterling to transform the Olvera Street area into something like a stereotypical Mexican village.

The resulting mural, "America Tropical," scandalized L.A. elites who were perhaps expecting lush foilage and colorful birds. The centerpiece of Siqueiros's mural depicted an Indian peasant with an eagle -- symbolizing American imperialism -- bearing down from above. The mural was whitewashed, and Siqueiros was later deported from the U.S. after his visa ran out.

Siqueiros traveled on, and the mural was largely forgotten for decades.

Earlier this month, ground finally broke on a project that will see conservation of the mural and construction of an adjoining visitor center. The project, conceived as far back as the 1960s and expected to be completed by 2012 or 2013, will help fill in a key chapter in the long history of cultural and political exchange between Mexico and the United States, particularly in Los Angeles, professor and muralist Judy Baca notes in an essay for PBS.

Siqueiros experimented with a new technique while painting "America Tropical," reinterpreting the fresco approach on wet cement. He also seemed aware that the commission was an opportunity to "create a work of revolutionary character." Christopher Knight, art critic at The Times, elaborates atCulture Monster:

Siqueiros, of course, was profoundly influenced by Italian Renaissance frescoes -- he made studies of Masaccio's early 15th century Brancacci Chapel in Florence -- as well as by the fervent industrial motifs of early 20th century Italian Futurist painting. And he was partly inspired in this by the urging of Dr. Atl -- Gerardo Murillo -- the spiritual guide of Mexican Modernism, who had studied at the University of Rome. So a politically trenchant fresco of a crucified Indian peasant painted on an upstairs wall of El Pueblo's Italian Hall doesn't seem a stretch.

Author and professor Ruben Martinez, writing in our Opinion section, describes an intriguing family connection to Siqueiros' mural on Olvera Street, and argues:

During his stay in Los Angeles, Siqueiros, a lifelong revolutionary, absorbed the political moment. He painted on behalf of indigenous Mexicans, then as now among the most oppressed and rebellious of Latin America's peoples — and, by extension, Mexicans in America, then as now a disposable labor force that doubles as scapegoat in troubled economic times.

Interestingly, Martinez writes that during the era when his grandparents played music in a restaurant downstairs from where Siqueiros worked, some Olvera Street employees "were paid to assume 'sleepy Mexican' poses in shaded corners." (La Plaza believes it, but just can't imagine it.)

There are a variety of upcoming events and exhibitions in L.A. related to Siqueiros's work in southern California, including the exhibit "Siqueiros in Los Angeles: Censorship Defied," at the Autry National Center museum. The Getty Conservation Institute is performing the painstaking conservation work on the mural, as seen above, and shouldering $3.95 million of the $9 million overall cost.

-- Daniel Hernandez in Mexico City

[Updated at 12:06 p.m.: A previous version of this post used the term restoration instead ofconservation regarding work on the mural, and did not specify that the Getty Conservation Institute is contributing only $3.95 million of the overall project costs.]

Photos, from top: A man identified as Robert Bredecio, an assistant to muralist David Alfaro Siquieros, stands before the completed "America Tropical" mural. (Credit: Getty Conservation Institute); a view of "America Tropical," partly whitewashed. (Credit: PBS); Leslie Rainer, a Getty project specialist, working on "America Tropical." (Credit: Getty Conservation Institute)