Straight up: all us AZNs talk like dis alla time, yo. It be jus’ like kickin’ wit’ my Moms and Pops at their crib from Sunday dinner, dawg.
(Note: Heavy use of the “N-word” in the hip-hop context by a salaryman and his family. It’s a 13 megabyte video in .asf format, which means you’ll need Windows Media Player to see it.)
This one goes out to Wes, who loves the White Stripes (and even my accordion cover of Fell In Love With a Girl).
You’ve probably heard of the White Stripes — the two person lo-fi band with the garage-rock sound and catchy tune with the Lego video — and their latest album, White Blood Cells. The band is made up of two members, Jack and Meg White, whose relationship to each other has been purposely kept secret to add to the bands mystique — are they brother and sister, or husband and wife, and estranged ones at that?
(The latter option is correct: Jack and Meg were married — “White” is actually Meg’s family name, Jack’s is “Gillis”. You can take a look at their marriage licence and divorce certificate if you don’t believe me.)
You might not have heard of Redd Kross, a much-loved but not-quite-heard-of alt-guitar-rock band who’ve been at it for over twenty years. I first encountered them in 1993 when they released Phaseshifter (which opens with the damn near-perfect track Jimmy’s Fantasy) during the Great Grunge Era, when I was a DJ at the engineering pub at Queen’s University.
The White Stripes have a slightly different sound from most rock bands because something’s missing from the sonic space: the bass guitar. Jack plays power chords on lead guitar and Meg drums; the lack of bass gives the band an interestingly sparse sound. Prince did the same thing with When Doves Cry — there’s no bass in it either — and Peter Gabriel made his album Security (the one with Shock the Monkey) sound interesting by not using cymbals.
While the White Stripes sound good on their own, Steve McDonald, leader of Redd Kross wondered what White Blood Cells would sound like if they had a bassist. The end result of this pondering is Redd Blood Cells, in which he took the original tracks off the album and added a track with his bass playing. The Stripes have given this project their blessing, and you can download the MP3s for your legal listening pleasure (hurry — they’ll only be available at the site until August 26th).
I tip my hat to McDonald for his excellent bass playing and restraint (his playing complements the original tracks, rather than relegating them to the background) and Jack and Meg for letting him go ahead with the project. In the current climate of the recording industry, this is a nice little spot of sunshine.
If you’ve been reading this weblog lately, you’ve probably noticed that the page loads rather s-l-o-w-l-y. The blame can be laid squarely at the comments system; I’m using enetation’s system. I’ve been very unhappy with its glacial pace, the regular unavailability of comments and the fact that you can’t format your comments with HTML. I think it’s time to switch to another system. Anyone out there know of a better system? (As of this writing, comments are off-line — again — so you might be better off just e-mailing me instead.
The other technical problem I’ve had is with Blogger, the service that I use to create and maintain this weblog. A number of old entries have simply vanished. If you were to go to the archives page or look one up, all you’d see is a blank entry with a timestamp (here’s an example, and it was a really good entry, too). I back up my site regularly, which means that it’s very unlikely I’ve lost any entry permanently, but it’ll still take some time and effort to get those lost stories back online.
enetation is a free service, and I can hardly be expected to raise much of a fuss whenever it doesn’t work. However, I’m a Blogger Pro paid subscriber, and I was expecting better.
Perhaps it’s time to move to Movable Type, the blogging software to which a large number of A- and B-listers have migrated. Unlike Blogger, you run Movable Type on your server, which means that you have considerably more control over it and can also back up the database. Movable Type also has a comments system built-in, along with many other goodies. I just wonder what kind of work I’ll have to do to move my existing Blogger-based entires over if I do make the switch.
I’d just like to put in a good word for “Smokeless” Joe Sacco, owner of the fine oyster and beer bar known Smokeless Joe (125 John Street, just a little bit south of Chapters and the big downtown Paramount Theatre, phone 416-591-2221). When I was feeling like crap a couple of Fridays ago, he gave me a couple of free pints of stout. Joe, you’re a prince.
Pan con Queso at the Lava Lounge (507 College Street West). A Latin band worth checking out.
Rooftop party. Someone named Carol — a friend of my friends at the Promise party crew — is organizing this one. It’s on the rooftop of the Queen Street West clothing store called XOXO, near the corner of Queen and Soho, which is acroos the street from the Black Bull tavern (the one with the large patio across the street from the parking lot beside the BamBoo club). I don’t know who’ll be DJing this one, but I’ve been to an earlier rooftop party at this venue and the DJs were fantastic. You’ll also be treated to an amazing view of the city. The party starts at 11:00 p.m. and runs until the wee hours; you enter the party by going down the alleyway beside XOXO and up the fire escape (I love parties where you have to enter via the fire escape).
Cherry Beach Sound System. The nice folks at promise are hosting yet another free dance party at Cherry Beach this Sunday, from 2 p.m. until 10 p.m.. They’ve been holding these all summer, and they’ve been a lot of fun.
This week’s featured DJ is Blissom, a.k.a. Steph Lefrancois, who’s come to Toronto for the week from France. A veteran DJ from a number of Promise parties over the past couple of years, he makes percussive jazzy breakbeat-ish house music for Spot Recordings. His DJ sets cover a lot of musical territory, from african rhythms to jazz to latin to house to techno. This is expected to be his final performance in Toronto for a good long while.
Getting there by car:
Go east on Lakeshore Boulevard until you’re just past Parliament Street. Turn south down Cherry Street all the way to the parking lot at the end. The beach is west of the parking lot; just follow the music.
Getting there by bike:
Just follow the Martin Goodman bike trail east of downtown until you hit Cherry Street and turn south. Follow Cherry Street to the parking lot at the end, then turn west and follow the music.
Other stuff:
The bad weather backup plan: If the sky’s looking grey that day, call the emergency update line at (416) 323-0361.
In response to the story about the Houston mass arrest incident, Cory Doctorow wrote in with these lyrics from Leadbelly’s Midnight Special:
If you ever go to Houston
You better walk right
You’d better not stagger
And you’d better not fight
‘Cause Sherriff Benson will arrest you
And carry you on down
And if the jury finds you guilty
You’re penitentiary bound.
Thanks, Cory!
According to this story, at 12:30 a.m. this past Sunday, Houston cops descended on a parking lot and arrested almost 300 youths, charging them with criminal trespassing. Of note are the facts that it was a parking lot for a K-Mart that is open 24 hours a day and that the lot adjoins Sonic, a drive-through restaurant that was also open at the time.
The people arrested say that they were simply shopping at K-Mart (they even showed the officers receipts for their purchases) or eating at the restaurant. They even arrested a 10-year-old girl who was having dinner with her father at Sonic and took her to juvenile detention. Many of the arrested pleaded guilty to the charges because they didn’t have the money to post bail and didn’t want to spend another night in jail.
As for the cops, this follow-up report says that the raid — which was supposed to be about stopping drag racing — “went to Hell in a handbasket”. One supervisor remarked that “There are all those kids now, who have a criminal record, and don’t deserve it.”
A friend of mine down in Texas informs me that he’s not surprised. He says the Houston police “are notoriously stupid and corrupt” (apparently their prosecutors are slime, too.) They’ve been known to do things like bust everyone on Westheimer (a popular street in Houston) with no probable cause. He also told me of one particularly shocking incident where drunk off-duty officers out of uniform and in an unmarked car tried to pull someone over — the situation devolved into a gunfight, killing the woman they pulled over.
The captain in charge of the raid, Mark Aguirre, has often broken from the Houston Police Department’s policy many times in his 20 years of service. Perhaps this is the incident that will get him tranferred permanently to meter maid duty or just drummed out of the force.
I’ll bet that MP3s of the old Body Count song, Cop Killer, are making the rounds in Houston right now.
Corner of Yonge and Dundas, circa 1991.
For the most part, my own personal experiences with police have been good. When I was going to Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, some “townie” broke into our house and made off with our ghetto blasters. By the time we’d called the police, they’d already hauled the little punkass off to jail and recovered our stereos. More recently, when someone stole my Honda CR-V two years ago, the Toronto police found it in less than 48 hours. The perp smashed the window to get into the car and left it parked outside his house with the window still broken.
There’s only one bad encounter I’ve had with any Toronto cop, and as luck would have it, it’s an amusing story.
It was the summer of 1991, and I had a job working for Mr. G.’s auction house. I hated working for Mr. G., but I needed the money to pay for school for the fall. I’d been kicked out of Queen’s engineering school the previous September (appallingly bad grades), but on the strength of my computer science marks (which were always good, even when I was operating at maximum slack) I had negotiated my way back into the school under double-secret probation.
I told my folks — who’d paid for my first go-round at higher education — that I would cover my tuition from that point on. A co-worker at my Monday-to-Friday job told me that I could make extra cash at Mr. G.’s operation, and three weeks into the job, I had grown to despise it.
Mr. G. ran a scam that only looked like an auction. He had a warehouse full of overstock bought from suppliers and retailers at a serious discount; most of it were cheap low-quality items such as off-brand walkmen, shoddily-made luggage, ugly ceramic lamps and “Swiss Army” (more like Taiwanese Navy) knives that fell apart after about three week’s use. He’d hold an item up for bidding and wait until the bid price was high enough to allow him to make a profit; the item would often go at a 400 to 600 percent markup. The highest bidder would get the item, but then he’d say “I have a few more of these items at the same price…who else wants one?” It wasn’t an auction; it was a discount store with bidding. He even planted shills in the audience to force the bid price higher.
Mr. G. was also a bigot. He paid me more than my co-worker T. because T. “was a gook who couldn’t speak English.” Mr. G. was one of those people who said “ever since we came to this country, we’ve had nothing but trouble from the immigrants.”
“He’s Laotian, not Vietnamese, Mr. G.” I said, “so technically, gook isn’t the right term. Maybe slope is the slur you’re looking for.”
“Ha, ha, very funny,” he said. “For a goy, you’re almost all right. Now get back to work.”
When we got paid, I gave T. a cut of money so that we were paid evenly. T. and I did the same work and while I could’ve always asked my folks for money, T. was here on his own with a family to support.
At that time, Toronto still had Sunday closing laws; it was actually illegal for most stores to be open on a Sunday. You were exempt from this law if you closed up shop on Saturday, but Mr. G. ran 7 days a week. On one particular Sunday, a cop strolled into the store while I was watching the front door.
The cop looked at me with a grin and said “Hey, Hop Sing! I need to have a word with you.”
Hop Sing from Bonanza was played by US-born Victor Sen Yung.
(For those of you who are a little behind on your Pop Culture Studies, Hop Sing was the Chinese cook for the Cartwrights on the TV series Bonanza.)
My first instinct was to counter by calling him Barney Fife (the sheriff’s deputy on The Andy Griffith Show, played by Don Knotts). I bit my lip, because the last thing I wanted to do was get a cop riled up, especially when I was working for a fraudulent operation that was open illegally. The TV references must’ve triggered the television plot memory centre in my brain, because I suddenly remembered a plot from All in the Family where Archie was riled that a Polish immigrant couldn’t be arrested because he couldn’t understand the Miranda rights being read to him.
I did what seemed like a good idea at the time: I used my best fake Oriental accent..
“We’come to Mistah G. auction! You rike buy some-a-thing?” I said, doing my best Long Duck Dong from Sixteen Candles.
“Hop Sing,” said the police officer, slowing down and pronouncing…each…word…very…slowly… “I need to speak to boss man. He is breaking the law by opening on Sunday. Sunday bad. You savvy?” If I ever find this guy’s address, I’m leaving a flaming bag of horse manure on his doorstep on Hitler’s birthday.
“Yessah! I get Mistah G. right away!”
I went over to Mr. G. and told him about the cop. He had a five-minute conversation with the cop and got off without being charged. I still don’t know what he said.
As the cop was about to leave the store, he turned to me and said “Thanks, Hop Sing!” with a laugh.
I replied using my regular, white bread North American accent. “Hey, officer!”
He turned around, surprised.
“Any time you want, just drop by and I’ll make sure you get a nice discount. And by the way, the name’s Joey.”
He frowned, shooked his head, and stormed out.
Don’t mess with us Filipinos, we know many ways to cook a pig.
I popped my cassette recording of Body Count’s then-new album into my walkman and fast-forwarded to Cop Killer.
