November 2004

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The Wire

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Great interview feature in the Baltimore City Paper

http://www.citypaper.com/news/story.asp?id=3336

 

 

http://www.pastemagazine.com/action/article?article_id=947

Posted by Peter S. Scholtes at November 29, 2004 8:54 PM

 

First Avenue Dance Nights

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From the First Avenue's Black Tuesday Page at Complicatedfun.com:

 

This just in my email (December 2, 2004):

 

For Immediate Release

First Avenue�s Dance Night Schedule

For further information Contact: 612-338-8388

As you may or may not know First Avenue has long been known for their Danceteria nights that began in the late 70�s.

The year�s go by and music progresses, and we have changed these nights to coincide with the times. Music is a personal experience for each and every one of us. It is in our lives every minute of everyday whether we realize it or not�the muzak of your morning elevator ride, the hum of your computer, the clang of the railroad signal; all of it is music to someone�s ears.

It is important to us that we offer a safe, comfortable, entertaining environment for our customers to trip the light fantastic. We welcome all walks of life here at First Avenue, as music is our life and is to be experienced with others.

We sincerely hope that you enjoy our danceable offerings, and encourage your feedback.

LeeAnn Weimar

Marketing Manager/First Avenue Nightclub

 

Thursdays Beginning December 2^{nd, 2004 Main Room:}

RITMO CALIENTE

A Celebration of Latin Dance

$3.00 Before 11:00pm

$6.00 After 11:00pm

Women free until 11:00pm

College ID free until 11:00pm

Doors: 9:00 pm

The Hot Rhythms of Latin music fill the Mainroom every Thursday with the sounds of Salsa, Cumbia, Reggaeton, Latin Hip Hop, Merengue, Rumba, and Sonidera.

Salsa Dance Contest Weekly.

Cash Prizes: $50.00 1st Place/$25.00 2nd Place/Tickets 3rd Place

Winner to compete in upcoming finals!

 

Thursdays Beginning December 2nd, 2004 VIP Lounge:

THE BUNGALOW

With VERB X and THA BIG O

$3.00 Before 11:00pm

$6.00 After 11:00pm

Women free until 11:00pm

College ID free until 11:00pm

Crossover: $2.00

Doors: 10:00 pm

A Reggae/Hip-Hop formula that is the closest thing to a New York rooftop party as you can get.

 

Fridays Beginning December 3rd, 2004 Main Room:

THE ENERGY LAB

With VERB X

$3.00 Before 11:00pm

$6.00 After 11:00pm

Women free until 11:00pm

College ID free until 11:00pm

Doors: 9:00 pm

A weekly celebration of music, dance and visuals centered around the urban contemporary landscape featuring Hip-Hop, Reggae and R & B from the old and new schools.

 

Fridays Beginning December 3rd, 2004 VIP Lounge:

MIRROR BALL

With PD SPINLOVE & ROY FREEDOM

$3.00 Before 11:00pm

$6.00 After 11:00pm

Women free until 11:00pm

College ID free until 11:00pm

Crossover: $2.00

Doors: 10:00 pm

Studio 54 hits the VIP Lounge. An intimate setting for an evening of true Disco Music. From Last Dance to Le Freak.

 

Saturdays Beginning December 4th, 2004 Mainroom:

BA-SIK

Featuring:

12/04: theDEVIOUSone & Josh Thomas

12/11: Amir (live) & JoBot

12/18: Jeff Dubois & Dave Shaw

12/25: Christian James

$3.00 Before 11:00pm

$6.00 After 11:00pm

Women free until 11:00pm

College ID free until 11:00pm

Doors: 9:00 pm

An napenthe production

An electro-dance revolution featuring electronic new wave sounds for the masses.

 

Saturdays Beginning December 4th, 2004 VIP Lounge:

THE LIVING ROOM

With SHARIN� BEATZ

$3.00 Before 11:00pm

$6.00 After 11:00pm

Women free until 11:00pm

College ID free until 11:00pm

Crossover: $2.00

Doors: 10:00 pm

Sharin� Beatz spins the vipper with strong house music.

Versatile music enthusiasts only.

Posted by Peter S. Scholtes at November 26, 2004 4:51 PM

 

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Posted by Peter S. Scholtes at November 25, 2004 1:49 PM

 

Never trust anyone over 20

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Lisa Olsen and Alex Darveaux at the Garage in Burnsville, photographed by Jayme Clifton Halbritter

For a complete guide to all-ages clubs in the Twin Cities, check out Complicatedfun.com/allages (and send me your own suggestions). You can read my article on all-ages music in today's City Pages (the always fun Picked to Click issue). Here are more photographs of the TC Underground and the Garage taken by Jayme Clifton Halbritter.

DJ Elex and Ariel at the TC Underground in Minneapolis

Orikal at the TC Underground in Minneapolis

ABEC at the Garage in Burnsville

 

Heather Hedges, Jake Mehr, Danelle Hendrickson, and Alissa Nemmers at the Garage in Burnsville, photographed by Jayme Clifton Halbritter

 

I need your anecdotes. What were the most memorable, important, or just plain weird moments in Minnesota music, 2004? I need your stories, favorite live moments, epitaphs, and gossip for a 2004 timeline in City Pages. Check out last year's version, then take a half hour this week and slap your own memories into an email (addressed to pscholtes at citypages dot com) by the end of the day this Monday, November 29. If I use your writing, you'll get money and credit. If I don't, I'll owe you a favor. And you still might get credit.

Peace, unity, love, and Thanksgiving stuffing,

Pete

Posted by Peter S. Scholtes at November 24, 2004 2:31 PM

 

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I need your anecdotes

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What were the most memorable, important, or just plain weird moments in Minnesota music, 2004? I need your anecdotes, favorite live moments, epitaphs, and gossip for a year-end timeline. Check out last year's version:

http://citypages.com/databank/24/1202/article11754.asp

Please take a half hour and slap your own memories into an email by the end of the day next Monday, November 29. If I use your writing, you'll get money and credit. If I don't, I'll owe you a favor. And you still might get credit.

Thanks, and happy Thanksgiving,

Pete

Posted by Peter S. Scholtes at November 22, 2004 6:17 PM

 

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Posted by Peter S. Scholtes at November 22, 2004 1:09 PM

 

TC Hip-Hop Links

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Here's a full page of links about all things Minnesota and hip-hop: Complicatedfun.com/hiphop

Posted by Peter S. Scholtes at November 22, 2004 1:00 PM

 

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Posted by Peter S. Scholtes at November 20, 2004 2:19 PM

 

Africa in Minneapolis

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AFrica in Minneapolis

 

 

DJ Nite Nurse's weekly celebration of African music/food at African Music Exchange

 

forward to folks who would enjoy the same.

Cheers,

Rachel (Nite Nurse)

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- Original Message -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Subject: AME this Friday night!

From: "Mankwe Ndosi" <mndosi@hotmail.com>;

Date: Thu, November 4, 2004 10:49 am

To: mndosi@hotmail.com

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

African Music Exchange - this Friday night, and every Friday, at the

Global Dish 8pm -midnite, 4016 Bloomington Avenue South, Mpls come by for

dinner -kick ass spicy greens, fish, ugali, jollof rice, plantains,

sambusa's,and more. Come to play along - bring an instrument- a

listening ear -and bring a mouth ready for conversation.

DJ Nite Nurse serves up music from the continent around the world for

your listening pleasure belly dancing by Shadia around 9:30pm musical

sets throughout the night

Posted by Peter S. Scholtes at November 19, 2004 5:22 PM

 

Thank you for talking to me, Africa

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On Saturday, Minnesota Film Arts begins its essential three-film retrospective at the Bell (in Minneapolis) on the cinéma-vérité documentaries of Jean Rouch: "Slippages of Fiction," running Saturday, November 20 through Sunday, November 28. If you have to see only one film, make it next weekend's rarely screened Chronique d'un ete ("Chronicle of a Summer"), one of my favorite movies of all time. But I'm going to all three, and recommend that anyone interested in West African culture do the same. Here is a complete schedule, including my own reviews of Conversations With Jean Rouch and Chronicle of a Summer, with links below.

Moi, Un Noir (1958) Saturday November 20 and Sunday November 21 at 5:15/7:15/9:15 p.m. at the Bell

Here's the Minnesota Film Arts blurb:

'The best French film since the liberation.' - Jean Luc Godard.

Oumarou Ganda, aka 'Edward G. Robinson', is a veteran of Indochina whose father disowned him for losing the war. Now unemployed on the streets of Treichville, Abidjan, he is one of the unlikely heroes of Rouch's pioneering masterpiece. One of the earliest examples of a drama documentary (dubbed 'ethnofiction' by Rouch), the young Abidjan slum dwellers who star in this film play themselves but create their own adventures. Preceded by Conversations With Jean Rouch (2004).

Here's my review of Conversations With Jean Rouch:

Though his influence on Scorsese, Godard, and Warhol helped shape the look and feel of modern movies, Jean Rouch never became a comparable figure of American popular culture. Which might explain why this godfather of cinema verite, who established the camera as a highly mobile instrument of provocation (eventually making way for Roger Lodge), never became the subject of a major documentary himself. (Though here are some docs on him worth tracking down.) This half-hour collection of interviews videotaped by his friend Ann McIntosh between 1978 and 1980, and hastily assembled after Rouch�s car-accident death in February, provides some revealing raw material for any potential future bio-doc. Screening as part of Bell Auditorium�s rare Rouch retrospective, Slippages of Fiction (and preceding 1958�s Moi, Un Noir), the short won�t make much sense to anyone unfamilier with his work. (Along with clips of Rouch�s films, one longs for subtitles translating his heavily accented English). Still, Rouch was a magnetic talker. Before he began filming his ethnographic portraits in West Africa in the early 1940s, he served as a military engineer assigned to blow up the bridges he�d been trained to design. In the film, Rouch describes his quixotic mission to bicycle across France destroying any bridge he found. And as the interviews suggest, the unimpeded advance of the German army against the supposedly great French one proved to be his dissilusionment with anything the camera could not prove. Rouch�s great subject became the fiction of the real, and anyone interested in that shouldn't miss this.

Jaguar (1954-1967) Monday, November 22 and Wednesday, November 24 at 7:15 & 9:15 p.m. at the Bell

Here's the Minnesota Film Arts blurb:

Three young men from the Savannah of Niger leave their homeland to seek wealth and adventure on the coast and in the cities of Ghana. This film is the story of their travels, their encounters along the way, their experiences in Accra and Kumasi, and, after three months, their return to their families and friends at home. The film is part documentary, part fiction, and part reflective commentary.

Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin making 'Chronicle of a Summer' in 1960, walking through the Musee de l'Homme

Chronicle of A Summer (1961) Friday, November 26 through Sunday, November 28 at 7:15 & 9:15 p.m. nightly (with 5:15 p.m. matinees Saturday & Sunday) at the Bell

Here's my review in the forthcoming City Pages:

"Are You Happy?"

Is there a film with more lasting grace and influence than 1961's Chronicle of a Summer? Is there a classic as rarely seen? From its enduring obscurity, you'd think this cinéma-vérité landmark were hopelessly stranded in place and time. To be sure, directors Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin turned their handheld camera on a photogenic cityscape--Paris circa 1960--that could poster any dorm room: the endless stairs and cobblestone streets of 1956's The Red Balloon multiplied by the emerging cool of the youth culture. (Among other things, this movie is an advertisement for the beauty of smoking.)

Yet Chronicle of a Summer remains fresh, so high on its ideas that you can inhale its fizz across four decades. The idea was to film a variety of French citizens--some friends of the filmmakers, some merely pulled off the street--and to ask them the same question: "Are you happy?" The picture that unfolds is almost musical in structure: As prelude, Rouch and Morin recruit a proxy "interviewer" on camera, discussing the very concept of the film with her. Exchanges and arguments ensue of differing moods and settings, often with the cordless microphone in view, and one or both of the directors participating onscreen. Then the coda: Lights coming up on a movie theater, where participants have just watched everything we have seen so far. With an effect that's still jarring, the interview subjects argue among themselves about whether the emotional responses elicited from them were genuine or acted.

"Part of it was very boring," says one, leaning forward testily from his seat. "But the rest of it was quite indecent."

"Part of it was very boring. But the rest of it was quite indecent."

That scene is like a freeze frame of cinema at the precipice of "reality" media--and it captures the discomfort and thrill of anyone who suspects that what you see is not what you get. It was with this philosophy that Rouch, who died in a car accident in Niger earlier this year, provided the tectonic shift beneath the French New Wave with his ethnographic 16mm films documenting the tribal rituals of West Africa in the 1940s, '50s, and '60s. Rouch utilized film technology for mobility rather than smoothness, liberating the camera from the tripod, utilizing synch-sound wherever he could, and cutting as it suited him. He also appeared onscreen among his subjects, a tactic that Pennebaker, Leacock, Drew, and the Maysleses would have fled as a form of contamination.

What Rouch did was destroy the illusion of an unseen eye. Where his Russian predecessor Dziga Vertov sought to record events, Rouch had no problem with creating them. And even as his techniques pass on through Godard and Warhol into MTV's The Real World, the former military engineer's layered skepticism about "reality" and "fiction" was lost. Documentaries today would benefit--both morally and commercially--from Rouch's insistence that the camera is always an instrument of provocation, never just, or even, an objective observer.

Rouch's generous spirit found a compliment in the probing questions of fellow anthropologist Edgar Morin, whose most evident delight in Chronicle of a Summer is sparking a verbal shitstorm at the dinner table over the question of Algeria. Much as the recent rerelease of The Battle of Algiers felt prescient this year as the war in Iraq ground on, Morin's simple questions about whether events in another country can feel urgent and real to Parisians are worth asking again amongst ourselves. (It helped that Rouch counted African immigrants among his friends and invited them to hang out with the whites, whose own stories emerge from the exchange. At one arresting turn, an Ivory Coast native asks if a Jewish woman's concentration-camp tattoo is her phone number.)

Like all bad fiction, the pale contemporary imitations of Chronicle of a Summer regard actual life as not worth noticing--and, by subconscious extension, not worth living. Within a brisk 85 minutes, this movie inverts that philosophy. Alive to the world, Rouch and Morin let a bikini model on the beaches of St. Tropes anticipate the bored male observer near the end. She delivers her reproof with a laugh: "Boredom comes from within."

Safi Faye driving in Paris in Petit à Petit (1968-1969)

 

More Jean Rouch links:

 

Discuss Rouch here

Ciné-Ethnography, the 2003 edition of the book by Jean Rouch published by the University of Minnesota Press

An incredible Jean Rouch tribute site full of links and photos

Jean Rouch: Cinematic Griot

Rouch tribute at the Keywords blog

An item at IndieWire

A Low Culture piece

My interview with the great nonfiction filmmaker Heddy Honigmann, who adores Rouch

My tribute to Rouch on this blog earlier this year

An interview with Rouch

 

The Rouch retrospective is sponsored by The Alliance Française de Minneapolis/St. Paul and KFAI-FM (90.3 in Minneapolis/106.7 in St. Paul)

 

Check out DJ Nite Nurse's weekly celebration of African music/food, African Music Exchange, every Friday at Global Dish, 8:00 p.m. to midnite, 4016 Bloomington Avenue South, Minneapolis.

 

 

Living my life like it's Golden...

 

 

Former S.U.S.P.E.C.T.S. rapper Golden performs Saturday at the Uptown Bar (Minneapolis) with Adjoining Separatists, mashup master Cheap Cologne, and Out of Bounds. $5. 9:30 p.m. (Golden goes on second, so come early.)

 

10:15 p.m. Out Of Bounds

11:00 p.m. Golden

11:40 p.m. Cheap Cologne

12:25 p.m. Adjoining Seperatists

(DJ Paul-Z spinning between sets)

 

Check out my recent City Pages review of Golden's excellent The Local Mixtape, an article that also includes reviews of lesser-heard/must-hear releases by Contac and Los Nativos.

 

Posted by Peter S. Scholtes at November 19, 2004 12:35 PM

 

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Crucial Jamaican music links at ComplicatedFun.com

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Dance the Ska instructions in Italian

 

 

More ska, boogie, mento, reggae, rock steady, and dancehall links at Complicatedfun.com/Jamaican

Posted by Peter S. Scholtes at November 18, 2004 8:02 PM

 

Rolling rolling rolling

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Minnesota RollerGirls at Cheap Skate in Coon Rapids a few weeks ago, photographed by Tony Nelson

"I've only completed a couple of rounds when Michelle Will/Led Debby swoops in from behind and swats me on the ass. I've been initiated."

-- Lindsey Thomas, rolling with the RollerGirls in today's City Pages. (Here's the MN RollerGirls' blog. See also the Texas RollerGirls and the Lone Star Rollergirls. Roller derby: Yet another good idea from Austin, TX.) Check out these posters from the controversial benefit shows. Here are more photos for the story taken on a different night (sans Lindsey Thomas, unfortunately) by Tony Nelson:

Check out more articles by Lindsey Thomas by clicking on her old Weezer fan club ID:

Posted by Peter S. Scholtes at November 17, 2004 8:33 PM

 

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Hip hop is doomed, but hip is forever

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MF Doom photographed in 2003 by Eric Coleman

 

MF Doom performs an early-evening, all-ages show at the Quest in Minneapolis tonight (Tuesday). Click here and scroll down to listen to RSE Radio's two-hour special on MF Doom from Saturday night (it's only up for two weeks, so click now). Doom released his latest album on the Minneapolis label Rhymesayers Entertainment (click there for the imprint's new web site).

 

Here's Jon Dolan on Doom in City Pages last week, and last Wednesday's interview in Pulse. Here's my cartoon of Madvillain from earlier this year, based in part on my 2001 interview with MF Doom. Here's the Madvillain web site at Stone's Throw. Here's LifeSucksDie, who've covered MF Doom better than anybody--Doom subsequently appeared on his interviewer's, Fog's, debut album. Here's my 2000 article about the old-school/new-school convergence that Doom and RSE have pushed a few steps further: In the Company of Flow: New York's old-school b-boys meet the sons they never knew they had. Here's a complete links page for TC hip-hop. Welcome to our scene, Doom.

 

 

Professor Longhair photographed in 1977 by Michael Goldberg. Not in Hip: The History. Not hip-hop. Probably not hip. But cool as shit.

White-boy/b-boy John Leland writes the history of hip in America

John Leland did for hip-hop journalism in the late 1980s what Public Enemy and Boogie Down Productions did for hip hop--he blew the conversation open. Writing in Spin, he gave rappers a new platform and called them on their bullshit, offering broader appreciation in return. At Newsweek in 1992, he used the Sister Souljah controversy as an opportunity to tell white readers what rap fans already knew: that racial divisions in America were deepening, and kids of every color were consuming the divide as entertainment.

Leland is one of the few white guys who writes about race as someone who moves freely between cultures. In Hip: The History (Ecco), his first book, he describes a man who might be his precursor: Carl Van Vechten, a onetime music critic for the New York Times, where Leland contributes today. Van Vechten's "ubiquity above 110th Street in the 1920s inspired the Harlem songwriter Andy Razaf to pen the lyric, 'Go inspectin'/Like Van Vechten,'" writes Leland. The parties that Van Vechten used to throw on West 55th Street were great meetings of high and low culture, black and white New York. At one bash, Bessie Smith "collared the opera singer Marguerite D'Alvarez, who had just charmed the room with an aria, and advised, 'Don't let nobody tell you you can't sing.'"

Cab Calloway photographed by Carl Van Vechten, January 12, 1940. Dizzie Gillespie stabbed him in the ass.

Leland himself provided inspiration for (hostile) lyrics in Public Enemy's "Bring the Noise," and he has a prickly relationship to black music, a consuming passion I share. His Hip is the history of an ideology I didn't know I had. It begins by citing slang expert Clarence Major to trace the origins of "hip" to the verbs hepi ("to see") or hipi ("to open one's eyes") from the West African Wolof language. Looking to slave narratives, the book finds evidence that hipping was a language of covert enlightenment among Africans, a code that fascinated their European captors. In-the-know attitudes had existed as long as humans had been aware of knowing anything. But "hip" was something new: Staying one step ahead of whites meant speeding up the process of adaptation and reinvention, renewing the code continually. The same dynamic persists today as a global capitalist phenomenon we call "youth culture."

Leland tracks the development of hip with attentiveness and range, weaving Jewishness, the Stonewall riots, and grrrl power into his bohemian rhapsody. He describes six "hipster convergences," beginning with the literary supergroup Whitman/Emerson/Thoreau/and Melville in the 1850s--the "O.G.'s" who championed individualism and the beauty of the American vernacular. The Harlem Renaissance, the Beats, bebop, drugs, punk, and dot-coms follow. Along the way, the book traces the long history of blacks and whites holding up mirrors to each other in the blues and in minstrelsy, in rock 'n' roll and in hip hop. That communication across the abyss, Leland says, is the story of America.