The Stranger, Seattle's Only Newspaper: Charles Mudede

Pretty Patterns Made By Bike Activity

Charles Mudede — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 09:02:42 -0700

We must worship bikes at every opportunity...

Summary of five million bicycle journeys made in 2010/11 in central London as part of the Barclays Cycle Hire scheme. Origins and destinations of each journey recorded and animated along a curved trajectory.

Experiments in Bicycle Flow Animation from Jo Wood on Vimeo.

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The End of Ben?

Charles Mudede — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 08:34:15 -0700

Did you read that? Not the thing about Ben Bernanke leaving at the end of his term but that it's costing the US $85 billion a month to keep the market alive. Meaning, the whole market has in essence been nationalized, but it continues to act as if nothing of the kind has happened, as if it's still just all about what in truth it has never been about: investors, entrepreneurs, and the American freedom way. And the state presently has no idea how or when it can even denationalize the fucker.

But let's be real about this: Any bank or company or market that's too big to fail means it has reached the condition of nationalization. If the state cannot survive your collapse, you are in fact a state-supported entity. If you are small enough not to be of vital importance to the state, then you can properly claim to be a privately owned concern.

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Sao Paulo and the Right to the City

Charles Mudede — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 07:35:24 -0700

At the end of May, protests in Istanbul erupted because capital wanted to transform a public space, a park into another shopping center. And now this...

Absolutely jaw-dropping photo of the massive protests in Rio pic.twitter.com/NWcgsDsbRq #Brazil
— Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) June 18, 2013

...because of this:

The spark for Brazil's escalating protests was a 2 June increase in the price of a single bus fare in Sao Paulo from 3 reals ($1.40, £0.90) to 3.20 reals.

Authorities say the rise is well below inflation, which since the last price increase in January 2011 has been at 15.5%, according to official figures.

But why not reward people for using public transportation and punish people for using cars or helicopters...

There are ways to beat the commute. Rush hour in São Paulo,Brazil, features the same gridlocked streets as many big cities, but theskies afford a brilliant display of winking lights from the helicoptersferrying the city’s upper class home for the evening. Helipads dot thetops of high-rise buildings and are standard features of São Paulo’sguarded residential compounds. The helicopter speeds the commute, bypasses car-jackings, kidnappings—and it prettifies the sky. “My favorite time to fly is at night, because the sensation is equaled only in movies or in dreams,” says Moacir da Silva, the president of the São Paulo Helicopter Pilots Association. “The lights are everywhere, as if I were flying within a Christmas tree”

From McKenzie Wark's new and excellent book The
Spectacle of Disintegration.

The one fact that must not be missed is that these protests are occurring at the end of a long period of exceptional economic expansion for Brazil. The country now has the 5th largest economy in the world.

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Cap Hill Is Becoming a Little Like What?

Charles Mudede — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 13:17:07 -0700

The local rap legend Spec One...

...has this to say on Facebook about the current state of Cap Hill:

Now is that real talk? Is that even fair? And what exactly separates us from them—the B&T types? And if it is so, why is it a bad thing? Maybe Specs is not saying it's a bad thing. Maybe he is just making an observation, pure and simple.

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New Shabazz Palaces Video!

Charles Mudede — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 11:43:37 -0700

Directed by Joris Grelet, the video is for a track, "An Echo from the Hosts that Profess Infinitum," that rocked the British dubstep scene...

Every time I hear that imbira sequence by Tendai Maraire (SB's percussionist), I'm transported to an African cinema that has yet to hit the screens (a thriller with something like a black secret agent). One day it will happen, one day we will see a black agent pursuing an enemy of the black state down a busy black African street.

Quick note: On July 13th, Shabazz Palace will perform at Sub Pop’s 25th anniversary concert in Georgetown.

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Something Rubbing Against Your Penis

Charles Mudede — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 08:40:39 -0700

The emperor writes:

"Like seeing roasted meat and other dishes in front of you and suddenly realizing: This is a dead fish. A dead bird. A dead pig. Or that this noble vintage is grape juice, and the purple robes are sheep wool dyed with shellfish blood. Or making love—something rubbing against your penis, a brief seizure and a little cloudy liquid.
Perceptions like that—latching onto things and piercing through them, so we see what they really are. That's what we need to do all the time—all through our lives when things lay claim to our trust—to lay them bare and see how pointless they are, to strip away the legend that encrusts them."

The American sings:

Yes, that's all there is. But tell me one thing that's more than this?

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Many Humans Have Chimp-Like Feet

Charles Mudede — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 08:33:44 -0700

How did I miss this story? A study found that 1 in 13 humans have chimpy feet...

Like chimps, humans have joints in the middle of our feet. But our ligaments are stiff, keeping our feet rigid. Our rigid midfoot likely acts as an efficient lever to propel us forward as we walk. Chimps have soft ligaments, making their feet more flexible for grasping objects and branches.

In the new study, Boston University anthropologist Jeremy DeSilva and occupational therapist Simone Gill tested the midtarsal flexibility of 398 people, as they walked around barefoot at the Boston Museum of Science. They filmed the participants' feet up close and discovered that 32 of them (about 8 percent) had midfoot flexibility characteristic of a midtarsal break. These people also exhibited elevated pressures on the sides of their midfoot as they walked, and had significantly flatter feet than the people without the midtarsal break.

The owners of the chimp-like feet didn't know that there was anything different about their feet and didn't actually appear to walk differently. But the differences were obvious to the researchers when they looked at the close-ups of the feet as they unrolled while walking.

The thinking is that these kinds of tree feet are popping up more and more in the human population because they do not present any disadvantages in our social, cultural, and natural environment. Efficient walking is no longer a matter of life death for humans.

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After Chimerica: Tianhe-2 Is the Fastest Supercomputer in the World

Charles Mudede — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 07:56:02 -0700

BBC:

A China-based supercomputer has leapfrogged rivals to be named the world's most powerful system.

Tianhe-2, developed by the government-run National University of Defence Technology, topped the latest list of the fastest 500 supercomputers, by a team of international researchers.

They said the news was a "surprise" since the system had not been expected to be ready until 2015.

China last held the top rank between November 2010 and June 2011.

Tianhe-2 is twice as fast the second fastest supercomputer in the world, which is located in the country whose once mighty science program was crippled by a delusion that has persisted for over 30 years. This delusion sees the market rather than the state as the source of technological and scientific innovation. A society that has no illusions about the importance of the state is a society that will rule the near and far future.

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Our Man in London: What's Packing the UK's Dance Floors

Charles Mudede — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 11:27:32 -0700

This is my brother-in-law, Mark Macdonald...

He lives in the great city of London, he has worked in the music industry, he has a good ear for a good dance tune. The list below is what he calls "10 bits that are currently tickling my fancy":

1. Zomby 'With Love'

2. My Nu Leng 'Contact'

3. Chubba 'Moody'

4. Terror Danjah & Champion 'Sons Of Anarchy'

5. Gold Panda 'Half Of Where You Live'

6. L-Vis 1990 'Ballads'

7. Boards Of Canada 'Tomorrow's Harvest'

8. Stylo G 'Soundbwoy'

9. Chris Malinchak 'So Good To Me [DJ Zinc Remix]'

10. Rhye 'Open'

If you like this post, let him know. I want Mark to supply us a list once a month.

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Temporary Greatness

Charles Mudede — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 08:56:19 -0700

This is my favorite piece of architecture in Seattle right now....

It's the Yesler Terrace Steam Plant. It rises over the ghost of Seattle's last utopia. When the scaffolds go, so will my love for it.

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Short Film Friday: Put a Comedy on It

Charles Mudede — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 08:39:59 -0700

This week’s short film is “Put A Rainbow On It,” a fine piece of comedy by two local directors, Sid Jordan & Selma Al-Aswad, who are members of the group Reteaching Gender and Sexuality. We all know that the rainbow flag stands for gay pride. But is the flag enough? Or, more worrying yet, is it in danger of becoming meaningless—what you get is just the flag as the beginning and end of gayness? Inspired by Portlandia's "Put a Bird on It" skit, the short provides answers to these questions with intelligent and expertly timed wit.

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Snow Falling on Students at Roosevelt High School

Charles Mudede — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 08:18:32 -0700

This Seattle Times story does sound like a scene in a novel:

Students and parents are still talking about the 25-minute address [the award-winning author David Guterson] gave Wednesday evening, which upset some members of the audience so much that they heckled Guterson from the stands at Memorial Stadium, and tried to cut his speech short by clapping before he was done.

“It certainly was an intelligent talk, but the overall tone was very, very negative,” said parent Diana Brement.

Some thought Guterson’s message was that students would be unlikely to ever find happiness.

“He had very odd references,” said senior Dexter Tang. “He referenced marijuana use for one. He talked a lot about his death. ... Something along the lines of metaphorical death. About dying inside.”

The hecklers — a handful of parents and one student — yelled at Guterson to be more positive, to stop speaking, to stop ruining the graduation.

If the school wanted an uplifting or wacky speech, then they should have picked the author of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood.

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The Hiphop List That Made 206 Butthurt

Charles Mudede — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 13:29:00 -0700

Mike Force

On May 23, the NYC-based hiphop magazine XXL dropped a bomb on the 206 called "The New New: 15 Seattle Rappers You Should Know." No one saw it coming. It simply fell from the sky and exploded on us. The people at the magazine certainly had no idea they had dropped anything like a bomb on anybody; they thought it was just a nice and harmless love letter to a city that provided the latest, biggest name in hiphop: Macklemore. So why did "The New New" do more damage than good to Seattle? The answer is easy: Some felt there were names that should not be on the list, and others felt there were names that were missing from the list. The net effect of these feelings? Hella hate.

Not too long ago, while writing at my favorite joint, the Station on Beacon Hill, I overheard some rappers (I will not name names) who were not on the list say things like "I know they are cool, but why are they on the list? They don't even rap," and "You can call me a hater, but what's wrong with hating sometimes—it's being real. I want to hate, and you want me to hide my feelings? That's not happening."

The Hiphop List That Made 206 Butthurt

Charles Mudede — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 13:29:00 -0700

Mike Force

Gun-Crazy Country: Next Is St. Louis

Charles Mudede — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 12:55:57 -0700

Have the dead in Santa Monica been buried yet? If not, it looks they will be followed to the grave almost immediately by the bodies of yet another mass killing, this time in St. Louis:

(CNN) — Multiple people were shot Thursday at a St. Louis, Missouri, business, CNN affiliate KTVI reported, citing police.
The conditions of those shot were not immediately known.
The shooting occurred inside the Cherokee Place Business Incubator

What Marx once said about capital (“it comes dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood...”), can be said about the NRA.

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Shakespeare in the Park Meets 206 Hiphop in Sam Lachow's New Video

Charles Mudede — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 12:21:18 -0700

Inspired by the play that contains one of my favorite lines in all of literature: "...never, never, never, never, never!"

Coming together in the video: Swords, pretty ladies, men with brave hearts, summer trees, a slamming beat, and Sam Lachow discoursing on the state of his hiphop career.

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South Seattle Watch

Charles Mudede — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 09:04:02 -0700

After passing the huge East African event he is heading to, I passed a party packed with Southeast Asians. And shortly after that, I watched a large number of Mexicans pouring out of a church. It's just like that in my neck of the woods.

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Apple Did Not Make That

Charles Mudede — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 08:33:48 -0700

But let's go back to a story, which had some heat at the end of last month:

Apple set up some Irish subsidiaries a mere four years after it was founded. Foreign sales, which account for 60% of Apple’s profits, are routed through these Irish subsidiaries and taxed nowhere. How is this possible, when the intellectual property that supports the value of Apple’s products is in the United States?

Apple has an Irish holding company with no operations or employees at the top of its foreign operations. This company also serves as a group finance company. Apple Inc., the U.S. parent of the whole group, pays U.S. tax on the investment earnings of this company. Otherwise, the holding company pays no tax to any government, and has not paid tax for five years. It claims tax residence nowhere.

To understand the real meanness and damage of this kind of tax evasion by a major American corporation, I ask you to listen, if you have the time, to the whole of this exchange between the standard pro-market economist John Kay and the brilliant economist Mariana Mazzucato—or, if you don't have the time, to listen to just five minutes of it after the 58:53 mark...

The meat of Mazzucato's matter:

"I assume all of you have an iPhone in your pocket—every single technology that makes your iPhone smart and not stupid was funded by the state..."

A private corporation or the market can not afford to develop such technologies from scratch. The risks are too great, the resources too small for the market to build the kind of intellectual infrastructure and knowledge institutions that provide a strong foundation for the creation of products sold by computer corporations like Apple. But despite having clearly benefited from taxpayers' money, these same corporations do everything in their power not to make a meaningful return on the massive social investment (the general intellect) that brought them and their profits into existence. What's worse, they are even eroding these public infrastructures and institutions by depriving them of substantive funding.

The same goes for Google:

Where would Google be today without the state-funded investments in the internet, and without the US National Science Foundation (NSF) grant that funded the discovery of its own algorithm?

That said, buy and read Mariana Mazzucato new book Entrepreneurial State. It will change (or at least improve) your understanding of the relationship between public and private investments—the former is the base of the latter, and not the other way around.

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50 Rocks that Stone

Charles Mudede — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 16:38:06 -0700

And you don't stop...

@mudede @strangerslog - 50 Asians who rock- 50 flowers that rock- 50 rocks that identify as stones- 50 pasta dishes that weep- 50 pens
— Jose Bold (@josebold) June 12, 2013

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After the Pulse: Ireland Paints Fake Shops on Empty Shops

Charles Mudede — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 16:22:31 -0700

In Seattle, we have turned some of our empty shops into temporary galleries. In Northern Ireland...

Local councils... have painted fake shop fronts and covered derelict buildings with huge billboards to hide the economic hardship being felt in towns and villages near the golf resort where G8 leaders will meet this month.
Northern Ireland's government has spent £2m (€2.3m) tackling dereliction over the past two years, the environment department said.
Some buildings have been demolished and others have been given a facelift in an attempt to make areas more attractive.

And what is this really about? To show that the cruel, mean, unfair austerity program is actually working...

Austerity has failed everywhere it's been tried, not least in Northern Ireland.* Budget cuts at home have hit domestic demand just as budget cuts to the south have hit foreign demand. (Whether it was 2010 or 2011 or 2012 or 2013, Very Serious People were convinced, just convinced that the Celtic tiger had reinvented itself as the austerity tiger — just give it a few more months! — and every time they have been wrong). On either side of the Emerald Isle, deficit-cutting hasn't been a path to prosperity, except of the Potemkin variety.

Just look at Fermanagh. That's the Northern Irish county where the G8 is set to meet in June — and where the economy isn't quite up to the image of "austerity success story". You see, there are shuttered storefronts all over the place, and that's no good. After all, you wouldn't want British Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne to talk up fiscal rectitude against a backdrop of bankrupt businesses...

To conclude: What do I mean by The Pulse? I mean this:

"They used to say one nuclear bomb can ruin your whole day. It was sort of a joke, until the June morning those terrorist bozos whaked us with an electromagnetic pulse from 80 miles up. You always here people yapping on how it was all different before the pulse. Land of milk and honey blah, blah, blah, blah with plenty of food and jobs and things that actually worked. I was too young to remember, so, whatever.... The thing I don't get is why they call it a depression. I mean, everybody's broke...but they aren't really all that depressed. Life goes on."

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Fleeta Partee's "This Is Hiphop" Proves Jake One Is Still Running Things Around Here

Charles Mudede — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 12:39:29 -0700

Here is the video, "This Is Hiphop"...

The track features local rappers Yirim Seck, Jarrard Anthony, and John Crown—all are in excellent form, all know when to enter, what to say, and when to exit. As for the beat, which is by Jake One, it's just plain dope—the piano trinkle, the hearty drums, the bottom in the bass.

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Ron Paul Fears the Government Will Do an Osama on Snowden

Charles Mudede — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 07:55:08 -0700

Fox News:

Former Rep. Ron Paul (R-Tex.) told FOX Business Network that he fears the U.S. government may try to assassinate the whistleblower who leaked information about National Security Administration surveillance programs to the media.
In an interview with FOX Business on Tuesday, Paul said he was worried that someone within the U.S. government might try to use a missile to kill Edward Snowden, the 29-year-old who has been the source of information about two top secret NSA programs.

Ron Paul is nuts, his supporters are nuts, and you should do your best not to end up in the same foxhole with their kind. True, NSA's power needs to be checked, but I'm far more terrified of the ideology of individualism than I'm of any kind of secret agency. Even the Chinese "artist" Ai Weiwei sees the whole business as an attack on the sacred ideology of American individualism:

I lived in the United States for 12 years. This abuse of state power goes totally against my understanding of what it means to be a civilised society, and it will be shocking for me if American citizens allow this to continue. The US has a great tradition of individualism and privacy and has long been a centre for free thinking and creativity as a result.

Americans tend to be weak for this sort of stuff. But here is the real deal, real matter, what we remain with when the babble has been boiled away: In the early 00s, when the FBI were, for the purpose of detecting terrorists and drug dealers, given power to monitor bank accounts and activities, they found almost no terrorists but instead rampant mortgage fraud. The FBI actually went public and warned the government and press of this financially dangerous situation in 2004, but the government and public did nothing about it. I kid you not. Nothing:

WASHINGTON (CNN) — Rampant fraud in the mortgage industry has increased so sharply that the FBI warned Friday of an "epidemic" of financial crimes which, if not curtailed, could become "the next S&L crisis."
Assistant FBI Director Chris Swecker said the booming mortgage market, fueled by low interest rates and soaring home values, has attracted unscrupulous professionals and criminal groups whose fraudulent activities could cause multibillion-dollar losses to financial institutions.
"It has the potential to be an epidemic," said Swecker, who heads the Criminal Division at FBI headquarters in Washington. "We think we can prevent a problem that could have as much impact as the S&L crisis," he said.

Not one arrest was made, no whistleblowers were hiding in exotic cities, no public outrage about their banking business being monitored by the Feds.

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Drinkinng with Charlse Mudede

Charles Mudede — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 04:00:00 -0700

Remembrance of a Past Romance by Charles Mudede

Ghosts are not to be found in the country, but in the city, because nothing retains the memory of a dead person or a past event like a building. And so the worst thing that can happen to a ghost is the destruction of a building—when it is gone, all of its ghosts go with it. I had this on my mind when, last week, I walked into LloydMartin, a restaurant/bar on the first floor of a relatively new brick building (a developer's idea of a sound investment of his/her capital) that replaced an old brick apartment building that once housed a woman I dated 18 years ago. The 7-Eleven that supplied our love affair with condoms and cheap beer is still across the street from where her living-room window once stood.

Her name was Laura, we first met at a bus stop in Belltown, we went on a date on Capitol Hill the following week, and the affair, which lasted for four months, mostly happened in her apartment. Our breakup was not painful because neither of us really fell in love. Eventually, she moved to another city, and all that remained of the romance was the apartment itself. The ghosts of our lovemaking would be reanimated every time I passed it. But this time around, there were no ghosts because the building is gone, and the one that replaced it, called the Gilbert Apartments, has no place in my past, in my memories.

Though there's nothing remarkable about the Gilbert Apartments as a whole, LloydMartin is indeed a very special space. It's small, it's dominated by dark wood, and it has a simplicity that I wish more restaurants aspired to. The place looks great without making a lot of fuss. While drinking there (at happy hour, an excellent glass of white wine costs only $5), I had a number of small plates, all of which (pork pâté, pork belly with fried egg, roasted asparagus) were as perfect as I care for food to be. I also enjoyed the modern jazz streaming out of the speakers behind the bar and some of the conversations that drifted to my ears ("Yes, I agree," the lady says, after taking a sip of her martini, "it's hard to find a good property manager these days"). LloydMartin is not cheap, but the food is excellent, and the space is handsome.

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The Hiphop List That Made 206 Butthurt

Charles Mudede — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 04:00:00 -0700

XXL Magazine's "15 Seattle Rappers You Should Know" Has Brought Misery and Madness to Our City by Charles Mudede

On another occasion, I ran into Blak, one of the best rappers in the Town and a member of Black Stax, a group that made XXL's list. When I congratulated Blak for getting the national attention that he and his partners (Jace Ecaj and Felicia Loud) deserve, I was surprised by the frown that he put on his face and the troubled words that came out of his mouth: "You know, I almost kind of wish I wasn't on the list—you won't believe the kind of hate that's out there. It's more trouble than it's worth." I have to say something about Blak: He is really one of the great human beings of Seattle. He is profoundly intelligent, intensely sensitive, very perceptive, and generally positive. So to see him all down like this about a great piece of publicity for his crew meant that things were really, really rotten in Denmark. (I later even heard someone, who again will remain unnamed, state that Black Stax made the list because their trumpeter, Owuor Arunga, tours with Macklemore.)

"Macklemore and that XXL article is making people crazy," Rob Castro said to me on the back porch of the Station on another day. Castro is the current bassist for Nite Owls, a former member of Grayskul, and the producer behind Black Stax's masterpiece "Like These." "What does 'New New' even mean? You know? People are bugging over an industry list, and that's all it is—it doesn't say anything about Seattle but what the industry thinks about Seattle. We got to get over that. There is this rapper I know and really respect, but the other day, I had to yell at him to stop talking about that list. I mean yell: IT'S JUST A FUCKING LIST! But he wouldn't back down. And you know what's even more strange about it? He hadn't even read the post, but he had to argue about it."

Facebook was also on fire. Barfly, former member of the once-much-admired Saturday Knights, founding member of Oldominion, and a rapper in Nite Owls, posted on his Facebook page: "There should be a '15 Rappers From Seattle' list released every day. You could power the city with all that butthurt." DeVon Manier, who runs Sportn' Life Records (the label that discovered and houses Fly Moon Royalty), posted on his Facebook page: "...and the whining continues"; Ezra Crowley commented on the post: "Rappers need to stay off the internet." And, if you go to the comments section of the article that started all of this grief, you will find these words: "If you ever wondered why Seattle rarely gets national attention for hip hop—scroll down and watch the crabs in the bucket." I did not scroll down. I live in the 206; I'm already in the bucket.

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We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks: Manning Wins, Assange Loses

Charles Mudede — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 04:00:00 -0700

We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks: Manning Wins, Assange Loses by Charles Mudede

There are winners and losers in Alex Gibney's documentary about WikiLeaks, the website that changed the world. One of the winners is Bradley Manning, the soldier who provided WikiLeaks with the footage of Americans gleefully shooting civilians on the streets of Baghdad. Though the doc does portray him as something of a freak—a young man who randomly threw hissy fits in the office where he downloaded secret information, who was deeply lonely, whose sexual identity was complicated—at the end, it is Manning who pays the heaviest price for helping to expose state secrets. He is locked up and may never be allowed to see another free day in his life. Indeed, no one on earth expects that what happened to former White House adviser Lewis "Scooter" Libby (his short sentence, 30 months for leaking the identity of a CIA agent, was commuted by G. W. Bush) will ever happen to Manning.

One of the losers of the doc, however, is the famous founder of WikiLeaks and an early citizen/celebrity of the 21st century, Julian Assange. Assange begins well enough, but as the documentary progresses, we begin to see him slip into the kind of madness that has fame as its source. Now, though there are problems with this unfavorable portrayal (many of which you can read at WikiLeaks.org; look for We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks: The Annotated Transcript), we must not act like Assange is a perfect human being. No such thing exists.

It is best that one leaves this film, which also happens to be entertaining (it's built like a spy thriller), with two understandings. One: No individual in WikiLeaks should have been more important than WikiLeaks in the first place. Meaning, even if Assange did not commit a crime, even if he was set up in Sweden, his private world should never have become one with the world of WikiLeaks. Two: We live in an upside-down world, where unofficial criminals like Donald Rumsfeld are free and official ones like Lewis "Scooter" Libby never serve time. Yet Assange and Manning have lost their freedoms.

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Pieta: A Profoundly Philosophical Loan Shark Thriller

Charles Mudede — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 04:00:00 -0700

Pieta: A Profoundly Philosophical Loan Shark Thriller by Charles Mudede

Here is what the main character, Lee Kang-do (Lee Jung-jin), of this profoundly philosophical film does every day for a living: He wakes up, visits the cluttered workshop of a man who has run out of time on a debt he owes to a loan shark, and demands repayment immediately. If the debtor cannot return the loan (and the astronomically high interest on that loan), Lee forces him to deliberately injure a limb with a drill or press or metal hole punch or whatever industrial piece of equipment dominates the workshop and later collect the money from an insurance policy. The injury must be bad enough to permanently cripple the debtor. This, as you can see, is not a job for a human with a soul. It’s a perfect job for a guy like Lee, who is as cold as a fish, never smiles, lives alone, and masturbates not because it’s pleasurable but because he has to—no one in their right mind could ever love/fuck/kiss a man as cruel as him. One day, a woman claiming to be his mother (Lee was abandoned as a baby) enters his life and begins to follow him. The woman is in her mid-40s, has a sad but pretty face, and is clearly drifting on a sea of some deep emotion. The third act of the film reveals what that emotion is and its terrible consequences. If you are not stunned into silence by the closing scene of this film, you are even more heartless than Lee.

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NSA? No, You Should Be More Worried about the Person Sitting Near You

Charles Mudede — Tue, 11 Jun 2013 14:17:47 -0700

These are the motherfucking times...

A husband allegedly bragging about cheating on his wife has been publicly shamed on Facebook, after a train passenger overheard his conversation.
The picture of the man, who had been traveling on a train from Philadelphia with friends, has since been shared more than 183,000 times since a Pennsylvania mother posted in on Wednesday.
'If this is your husband, I have endured a 2 hour train ride from Philadelphia listening to this loser and his friends brag about their multiple affairs and how their wives are too stupid to catch on. Oh please repost...' Steph Strayer wrote on Wednesday.

Is any of this true or not? Too late—the cat is so out of the bag.

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Brothers From Another Just Rocked My World in a Supermarket

Charles Mudede — Tue, 11 Jun 2013 13:42:03 -0700

Now this is what I call hiphop...

Raps as fresh as the veggies in the produce area, beats as bubbly as the sparkling wine, and all the while a wonderful sense of lightness—a hand full of $2 bills, a packet of peas as a cellphone, the reference to Turbo's broom dance.

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The Art of Dub Music: Portland's BSI Records Returns as ZamZam Sounds

Charles Mudede — Tue, 11 Jun 2013 12:32:00 -0700

POLYGON PRESS
World-class dub in beautiful, hand-printed packaging.

Back in the late '90s, Portland became an unlikely node in the global circuit of dub music. For those not in the know, dub is a derivation of reggae that came into prominence in Jamaica in the mid-'70s, whose key innovative feature at the time was the transformation of a recording studio into an instrument. Over the past four decades, dub (which strips a tune down to the bones of bass and drums, submerging these elements into a twilit sea of echoes) has gone through many mutations (the most recent of which is UK dubstep) and spread to the four corners of the world. The reason why Portland was one such corner is BSI Records, a label that was owned by Ezra Ereckson, Tracy Harrison, and Josh Derry. BSI not only housed and distributed some of the best dub in the business (Henry & Louis, Jah Warrior, Alpha & Omega), but also represented the Northwest's only dub band, Systemwide, and its leading dubmeister, Alter Echo. Things fell apart in 2004 when the collapse of a European distributor left the label with thousands in unpaid debts. The death of the label was terrible news for dub in general and also for Portland, a city that at the time desperately needed more diversity in its music scene.

Late last year, the ghost of BSI rematerialized as ZamZam Sounds—a label run by pretty much the same people (Ereckson and Harrison) that distributes many of the same bands (Alter Echo, Alpha & Omega, Henry & Louis). But this time around, the label is much more of an art project than a straight dub distributor. BSI had the feel of a commercial project, whereas ZamZam has the feel of a gallery whose world-class dubs are packaged in some of the most beautiful covers out there. "At its simplest level," Ereckson wrote to me recently, "ZamZam Sounds really grew out of my wife Tracy's and my desire to make records again. Running BSI Records and doing all the art and design together in the late '90s into the '00s was a colossal amount of work, as in those days we were able to sometimes sell several thousand copies of a release on CD and vinyl. With Josh Derry, aka Alter Echo (and partner Jason Lohr and publicist Ryan Michie), we were building something we actually thought we could make a living at. [When that didn't happen]... it took many years to get over that, both financially and personally. We said many times that we would never get into the label game again."

The Art of Dub Music: Portland's BSI Records Returns as ZamZam Sounds

Charles Mudede — Tue, 11 Jun 2013 12:03:00 -0700

POLYGON PRESS
World-class dub in beautiful, hand-printed packaging.