Month: February 2006

I’ve always wanted to drop a variety of madness at one of DJ Puppet’s Booty parties up in the hood in North Portland. This Thursday, March 2nd it will finally happen. I’ve always appreciated the chaotic energy of the Booty parties and with some subwoofer power brought in for the occasion I will be eager to rock the tin shack with some heavy stuff. Since Mr. Kevin Sampsell has not thrown a “Booty Call” reading/dance party for some time I’ve been sitting on a lot of the nasty stuff waiting for the right crowd to rock it to. Whether it’s Baile Funk, Old-School Miami Bass, Reggaeton or Baltimore Club; the nasty stuff is the fun stuff.
BOOTY HOMEPAGE

IK

PS I found out that with Northwest Film Center guests our last Andaz had well over 600! people. Crazy.

So, I have a laptop that likes to act up occasionally and delete things I’m in the middle of writing, like say the blog post I was just in the middle of composing. Arggh. I’ll recap. I’m quite tired. Anjali and I DJed Andaz on Saturday and I am feeling the 5am bedtime for sure. I learned it is the second day after getting no sleep that is the worst. I’m currently in the midst of listening to a huge stack of Arabic CDs I recently ordered to catch me up on the latest stuff for a Lebanese wedding I will be DJing. My collection of Arabic music is already quite large, but I can be quite obsessed about making sure I have all the latest and greatest for particular gigs. If you are at all interested in Arabic music I highly recommend you check out www.maqam.com. They are the US’s largest distributor of Arabic music and there are sound samples for just about everything. Chadi helped me enormously in putting together my order.

Andaz was as crazy as it always is these days. It’s quite something to get used to more than 500 people showing up at our parties. We weren’t happy with the sound and I was tinkering with it all night so I hope it didn’t interfere with anyone having a good time. I guess the bass is never big enough and the drums never hit hard enough for me. I want the music to HIT. HARD. When I’m playing music that not everyone is familiar with it becomes really important that the sound is heavy enough to move people. The more people are familiar with a song the less important the sound quality is because people can just ride the wave of familiarity and nostalgia.

I had a fun time at the Ghetturista we did at ACME the other week. It was good to hang out with DJ Blackmarks and hear Anjali play nasty things like T. Waters “Throw’d Off.” The sound there is a million times better now that they have the two ENORMOUS bass bins. That soundsystem can now easily handle all my favorite bass-heavy musics. I would love to go back there and drop some more of that low, low stuff.

Anjali and I did another episode of our KBOO show. Since it is on fourth Sundays it often falls on the day after Andaz and we are wiped out and less than optimally coherent. We had a good time but we are still getting used to hosting the show together. It can be tough to talk on the air together without stepping on each other’s toes or leaving awkward silences. It’s not as easy as it might seem from listening to your average blabbing radio hosts.

I went to my first Black Metal show in more than a decade last night. Actually, probably my first any-kind-of-metal show in the last decade. My friend leads L’Acephale and I had the pleasure of checking out their show at the Ash Street Saloon. My ears were already fried from Saturday night when I woke up Sunday and realized that their show was happening in the evening. Well, my ears were fried in all new ways after getting back from their show last night. High-pitched guitar shred creates a very different ear-ringing than a booming dance party. My ears got to experience the whole range of ringing and whooming and screaming. Good show guys. Nice and ceremonial and emotional and intense. And 4-inch spike arm gauntets! Nice.

Thanks to Lady Connie and Stylus 503 Anjali and I will have to spend the day digging through the crates for loveless/heartbreak records for Valentine’s Day at the Gotham Tavern. Unfortunately I don’t have some of my adolescent favorites at the moment, but there will be plenty of sadness to go around regardless. The trick will be to see how many lonely records I can find for the dance floor. We shall see.

IK

We just had a great night at Atlas with our special guest DJ Collage. Nice to bring some futuristic dancehall style down to Portland. Collage has so much great energy and it was nice to bring him down to share the love with Portland. Thanks to everyone for coming out and making it such a slamming night. Look for a DJ Collage CD to hit some time in June.

IK

PS Here’s the poster for posterity.

So, after writing last that I hoped the series would end satisfyingly Mr. Pena confided that he thought it went downhill with the fourth book. Well, fortunately I don’t agree with him. It kept the suspense up throughout and I kept thinking “When is it going to get bad?” Well, the ending may not have had a sledgehammer impact but it was appropriate and clever in playing on the many different meanings of “sleeper.” I’ll probably go back and read the whole thing again at some point. I ended up very sympathetic to Holden Carver even though he is a man who can feel nothing. Maybe that’s where the sympathy comes from. Good work Ed and Sean. Looking forward to your future projects.

IK

So, thanks to an Amazon.com customer review I learned that Sleeper actually follows Brubaker’s overlapping book, Point Blank. Fortunately Powell’s had a used copy so I plowed through that one. Very drunk, very violent “superhero” with memory problems. I’m glad I read it after reading so much of the Sleeper story because a lot of things were surprises to me in that storyline that would have had much less impact if I had already read Point Blank. I’m curious if Sleeper will be the end of Lynch, Tao and Carver or if some version of at least Tao and Lynch’s struggle will continue. Man, Brubaker has come a long way from slacker stories. Who says the mainstream is all bad for people?

So, thank you to Mr. Pena I am three trades into the Sleeper series by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips. I remember Ed from back in his “Lowlife” days and actually met him in Seattle way back when through the esteemed Mr. Pinkham. Back then he was all anti-superhero/mainstream comics so it’s funny to see him writing just such comics for Marvel and DC these days. He’s even next up on Daredevil. I’m curious to see where he takes DD post-Bendis.

I didn’t like the superhero elements in Sleeper when I first started it. I thought they were distracting from what could have been a good straight forward double agent/black OPs story. Three trades in things seem more integrated and part of a whole. I’m hoping the payoff at the end will do it for me. The ending of the Bendis DD run didn’t really do much for me. It didn’t seem like an ending or a new beginning but just a continuing story now handed off to someone else. I’ll go back and read a long chunk of it again at some point. I find that it is much easier for a writer to keep me interested and reading than it is to really blow my mind with a satisfying ending. Here’s hoping Mr. Brubaker has something quality in store for me.

Okay, so I wrote the following post when I first got back from the gig and I was PISSED. I want to say right here that I don’t intend for this to reflect negatively on the sponsors or the many fabulous people who worked the event. The sponsors were very cool in hiring us for the event, it is just unfortunate that so many of the attendees strictly wanted over-heated swill for their dancing pleasure. Blanca was a very professional soundperson. Michael and the staff of Typhoon were very friendly and helpful in securing the few available vegetarian options for the beleagured DJs. Thank you to our friends and fans for softening the blows of the ungrateful crowd.

Now I am fully capable of playing nothing but easily recognizable, 70’s, 80’s, and top 40 hits, but that is not what we were hired to do. We were supposed to play our usual Indian sound with perhaps some other international music thrown in as well. I expected the crowd to mostly request disco, 80’s, Kanye West and 50 Cent and I called that one 100% (Actually 50 Cent was never specifically requested but Luda and Ying Yang Twins were). DJs have the special opportunity to deal with the most aggressive and the most aggressively unhappy people in the room. Despite a full dance floor a DJ can always count on some unhappy person telling them to do something completely different. At this charity event we were fortunate enough to deal with a constant stream of them. PS all of my digs at Ronald McDonald are at his namesake chain of “restaurants” and not his “houses” of which I am admittedly ignorant. If you want some information direct from the houses go to their website: www.rmhc.com

******Pissed off post-gig venting follows******

Anjali and I just got back from DJing a charity event. It was a benefit for Ronald McDonald Houses of Oregon and Southern Washington. I’m totally ignorant as to what Ronald McDonald does for kids other than feed them poisoned beef. And hoodwinking Hindus into eating beef tallow. Where’s Mangal Pandey when you need him? Anyway, the crowd was mostly as bad as I could possibly imagine. A night full of ignorant shits making lowest common denominator requests for songs of which they are overly familiar. Bunch of fuckin’ sheep. Well, a lot of them now know how much they hate Indian music, if they could even figure out that that’s what Anjali was playing. I have a word for these events. I call them shitfests. No offense to the sponsors who were hip enough to hire us and thought that maybe their crowd was hip enough to dig us. Don’t get me wrong, there were people there excited to see us and very complimentary. Unfortunately they were drowned out by the many insistent requesters of top 40. Anjali was playing the DJ Aqueel remix of Kaja Re and some old white dude came up and asked for something more modern. Modern? Anjali had to explain that the song was from 2005. What a shitfest. A lot of money was raised, so hopefully it won’t go to feeding sick children cattle forced into bovine cannibalism by agri-business. Much respect to Anil and Prasenjit for representing. Thanks to Shayla and Connie for reminding me that it was a fabulous view and pointing out the carved melon flower centerpiece. Respect to the Latina who requested Reggaeton. Reggae-reggae-tony. Oh yeah, the last song (Sangra Vibes “Darshan Kuriya De”) was for me. And just to prove it I completey cleared the dance floor with it. So yeah, it was for me. Fuck all ya’ll.

IK out