The Happy Policeman

This will be my farewell post. I ain't saying why cause it ain't none of your business, but let's just say I won't be available for comment.

I figured the best way out was to cut my losses. So...

...anyhow, I owed Jon Santos $3000. If that ever gets paid now, it'll be a miracle. A posthumous one. Sorry about the money, Jon, I wish I could have paid for that logo, but I never made that kind of money again after failing that one time. It was all down hill from there. As you of all people know. I just never could do it.

I owed Brad Simon from Berry College $2750. Same deal. SF Pleasuredome's Ty Dakota $2000. Eli Hyman from Charleston, SC, $1500. Marty Kahnle, you I owed the world, and it killed me.

And that's it. Lights out.
I finally got around to it, calling it a day. Sleep is for pussies.

The History of The Hip-Hop, Part I ('86 - '93)

Full disclosure, I'm was born in 1965, I grew up in Florida, and me and what became hip-hop ran into each other by accident while I was working at a record store and being a teen DJ at Roseland and Feathers teen niteclubs. The dancers - carrying rolls of linoleum - turned me on to the music. They TOLD me to get these records, so I did.

At age 42, I am not fronting. That's just how I got into hip-hop. And this is my take on it. (And I relied on Wikipedia for most of the links.)

There are several hip-hops. They may be controversial, but I think it's kind of a secret.

They have to do with epochs.

The first epoch is pre-hip-hop. It starts in '78 and goes to '82. This is RAPPER'S DELITE era.
No one even called it hip-hop. This is mostly singles (featured in countless Best-Of collections, but two of the best albums include:

Kurtis Blow - Kurtis Blow
Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five - The Message

The second epoch is HIP HOP. Still no hyphen, and lots of people are still not calling it hip-hop ("Rap," it's called mainly, as in "I hate rap," which was so popular to say that people wore it on t-shirts.) This second epoch started in '83 and goes to '86. There is a lot of Adidas-wearing going on, and there is still lots of fun and lots of dances.

Run-DMC - Run-D.M.C.
LL Cool J - Radio
Whodini - Escape / Beastie Boys - Licensed to Ill

(***Yet my faves from this epoch are...)
Malcolm McClaren - Duck Rock
Afrika Bambaataa & Soulsonic Force - Planet Rock
Mantronix - The Album

The next era is what I call POST-HIP HOP. It is short. It is '87 to '88. The money has now got big. Nightclubs are filled with attitude now. Everything gets different. Intense. But some tracks still are too great to resist, and the dance floors at still filled.

Big Daddy Kane - Long Live The Kane / Kool Moe Dee - I'm Kool Moe Dee
Eric B & Rakim - Paid In Full
Biz Markie - Goin' Off / 2 Live Crew - Is What We Are

After the above, hip hop ceases to be just fun. True, good music continues to come out, but the idea of hip and hop has become commodified, and there is big money being made and the big corporate record companies have smelled it out. And dancing is considered dorky. (Great.) Anyhow,...

...a real schism occurs in hip hop now. One, HIP-HOP (now being capitalized, and with the all-important hyphen), includes some of the strongest studio material recorded.

The other, RAP, is about wanting to be dangerous.

HIP-HOP '87 - 90
bonus early ('86): Salt-N-Pepa - Hot, Cool & Vicious
A Tribe Called Quest - People Instinctive Travels And The Path Of Rhythms / De La Soul - 3 Feet High and Rising / Jungle Brothers - Straight Out The Jungle (***all 3 are one unique ste)
Beastie Boys - Paul's Boutique
Digital Underground - Sex Packets

RAP '87 - 90
Public Enemy - Yo! Bum Bum Rush The Show
Boogie Down Productions - By Any Means Necessary
...and, of course...
NWA - Straight Outta Compton / D.O.C. - No One Can Do It Better
*bonus pre-'87 albums: Ice-T - Rhyme Pays ('86) Too $hort - Raw, Uncut, and X-rated


Based on all of the above history and ground-breaking, the ROCKSTAR epoch begins, '91 to '93.

Cypress Hill - Cypress Hill / Dr Dre - The Chronic
Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy - Hypocrisy Is The Greatest Luxury
Wu-tang - Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)
X-Clan - To The East, Blackwards


At which above point I'll cut it off at...because I know you know the rest. :) But that's it, that's my take on hip-hop's epochs, and around '86 "hip hop" is over. It then becomes the two separate (although similar) forms, Hip-Hop and Rap, at which point I became more interested myself but stricly for "academic reasons" (although at the time, I was unaware that that's what I was doing, studying hip-hop.)

BTW, in '94, Bay Area "Mobbin' music" changed everything, in particular (believe it or not), E-40 and The Click's Down and Dirty.

[And incidentally, never buy the big label re-releases of any "Bay Area" rap music, as the samples are all removed or changed; Go to or contact Rasputin's or Amoeba's in Berkeley, and buy the originals.]

Then, in '95, The Fugees' The Score changed the world.

And that's my take on The History of the Hip-Hop World, Part I.

To be continued...?

Captain Outrageous' Car

I called Sherry, Captain Outrageous' girlfriend, last Friday, when I found out that he had had a stroke followed by a heart attack. When I spoke with her, she told me he was brain dead. That said it all to me. "Captain Outrageous is brain-dead." Wow, real poetry.

She said (also) that being at the hospital was not the hardest thing. She said that the hardest thing was being in bed alone the night before." Wow again.

And then she said, "But his car says it all." His car, I asked? "Go look at the back of his car, read what's on his trunk," she said, "Do it now. It's worth it."

So I did. And I snapped the above picture with my $10 digital camera. Here's what it reads....

LIFE'S JOURNEY IS NOT TO ARRIVE
AT THE GRAVE SAFELY IN A WELL
PRESERVED BODY BUT RATHER TO
SKID SIDEWAYS TOTALLY WORN
OUT, SHOUTING: HOLY SHIT WHAT A RIDE!

Captain Outrageous' Wake Procession

Captain Outrageous Wake

*Above pieces recorded by Captain Rick Dostal/public domain.

Outrageous Saturday

Well, my good buddy pop artist Captain Outrageous died.

He had a living will, and the plug was pulled on his (brain-dead) body on Saturday. But before he died, seeing as I am in good with (ex-)KING of Key West, I had the day declared Outrageous Saturday, and went about spreading goodwill and cheer by telling and sharing Captain Outrageous stories.

And this is how I looked.

Pastor Donnie's New Myspace Page

Is this a real page, or a copycat fake? We'll see. But here it is because this is the latest.

The New Autocrat

From today's Skruff:

New York Nightlife Assassin Runs For President

Former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani entered America's Presidency contest this week, applying to become the Republican nominee for next year's election.

The notoriously puritanical anti-club zealot declared 'I'm in this to win' in an interview with Fox News and stressed his conservative credentials on the right wing TV network.

His candidacy could have dire implications for American club culture, given the devastating impact he had on New York nightlife during his Mayoral reign between 1993 and 2001.

Veteran club promoter/ DJ and label chief Andrew Price relocated his Satamile Records to San Francisco last year after 20 years in the City and directly blamed Giuliani for destroying its once great alternative music scene.

"New York City is dead, Mayor Giuliani killed it and 9/11 buried it. Giuliani came up with the 'Cabaret Law' idea, making it illegal to dance in clubs unless you have a special license, which cost a fortune and many famous clubs were shut down because of this law," Andrew told Skrufff contributor Katrin Richter.

"The Giuliani administration closed down the underground institutions and systems that educated and cultivated knowledge about new music. This is part of the erosion of culture that the politics of New York have played a large part in."

As well as running Satamile, Andrew promoted over 400 events in Manhattan, presenting acts including Adult, Auteche and Luke Slater, though predicted such acts are unlikely to be welcomed ever again.

"What killed New York were the conservative politics that Giuliani used to 'Clean up the city'; their idea of cleaning up," he said.

"They don't want creative cultural pools of music and art, the want money, and real estate development. All the large alternative parties that go off get shut down, promoters are threatened with arrest or arrested. Basically the cultivating grounds for new and different things musically or for the arts have been shut down or have become too expensive to use," he added.

New York legend Frankie Knuckles, who made his name DJing in the late 70s at the notoriously hedonistic gay sex club the Continental Baths, told Skrufff last year he'd 'never felt more disconnected from New York City' though was less willing to put the blame entirely on the Mayor.

"It's not just Giuliani that made it disappear, the club scene pretty much killed itself," the house pioneer suggested.

"When things go to the extreme in these places and there are drugs around as well it just puts a death on everything. It makes it impossible for anything that could be great to really succeed because sooner or later it will catch up with itself. That's exactly what happened. When Giuliani tried to set the wheels in motion to restrict anything that had to do with vice or nightclubs and clubs, the scene faded out," Frankie added.

"It's now either gone or it's been shut down so far underground that unless you know who's doing what you'll never know how to find it."

Giuliani's zero tolerance policies saw a 50 fold jump in cannabis arrests from 720 a year in 1992, to 33,471 a year by the end of his tenure, though also reduced street crime, as Arthur Baker recognized chatting to Skrufff last year.

"Put it this way; if you had money, or a family or more of a middle-class lifestyle then you loved Giuliani because he succeeded in cleaning up the city. But if you were living in The Village (Greenwich Village) and you wanted to go out and party then you hated him," the electro icon pointed out.

"I don't live in New York anymore but when I go back it seems like a nicer safer environment," he added, "Even before September 11."

Captain Outrageous

Captain Outrageous is a good friend of mine. I saw him yesterday afternoon here in Key West at the coffee shop, and then he left, walked down the street to his gallery, and had a heart attack followed by a stroke, leaving a husk that is now in the hospital in Miami. He's the best. And now he's brain dead, so I guess he's about to be what people call dead. I love him. He's my favorite artist on Key West island. Even if he is dead.

Anyhow, so I did some real googling and came up with these links. I especially like the movie. Won't you spread the word that Captain is the best artist on Key West, even if he is dead? Who knows? Maybe he really is alive!

Captain Outrageous movie.
Captain Outrageous Gallery.
Captain Outrageous Art History (with slideshow).

The New Irreverence

My new ex-girlfriend - who is now an avid reader of howtorockstar, and has been paying attention the Donnie Davies play-out I have been pointedly outlining (here and here and here) - is brilliant. While I was researching the background of the Singularity and Lateral Thinking as part of my defining Singulateral for her this morning, I began to explain the concept of Po. As in, Provocative Operation.

A Po (rhymes with 'go') is an "idea which moves thinking forward to a new place from where new ideas or solutions may be found." So far so good. If anyone is interested in how good ideas come about, then obviously learning of Po's helps us to better understand the process from getting from one place - the challenge - to another - the solution.

Here's where it gets interesting and relevant. It seems that for the correct Po to be formulated or unveiled, that a number of Po's must be presented and sorted through, most important, silly ideas. Even more interesting is that unless the silly ideas are considered and processed that the subsequent good ideas are left undiscovered.

How this is relevant to us is that after I had pointed this out, my new ex-girlfriend says to me, "Like Donnie Davies."

Wow. Uh, yeah. That's right. Exactly like Donnie Davies. And exactly like $trick9.

And that's the point I have been intuitively aware of with this material, and why I have been showcasing it here, and stressing in emails to my peers and colleagues the significance of the material. We need these alternative (bad) ideas presented in the right spirit, ie sincerely, in order to see our way clear to the good idea.

Why? Why? Why...do we need a good idea? Because that's how all of us who are not bad people are going to get out of this mess we are in, and move into a future that is as fantastic and fun as we want it to be. In other words we have to go through the bad (well-conceived) ideas to get to the good (well-conceived) ideas.

I know George Bush is the wrong idea. And I know Dick Cheney is an insane unhealthy criminal warlord. But do I hate them? Oh, no. It's why I came up with the "102 Reasons To Love George Bush" list. Someone else being bad evil or hateful is their problem, but if they think I am going to hate the bad evil or hateful, well, that's incorrect. Hate is a bad investment of energy. Too expensive, and too self-hurtful.

All the people who have been dedicated to censoring the two artists Donnie Davies and $trck9, who are both presenting two obviously genuinely bad but genuinely well-conceived ideas, are missing the point. But my guess is that it doesn't matter, that one way or another pretty soon everyone of us who prefers happiness and joy over fear and anger are going to have good reason to celebrate life and dance again. You see, there are many ways that our current world situation/predicament can go, and inevitably an event will instigate this motion, and - very noteworthy - there are a lot more than one way that can be the right way.

And that's what I mean by singulateral. It's a juxtaposition of the concepts that belong to the Singularity and lateral thinking: Singulateral.

Worldwide, we will get to the right way because there are so many ways to get there. We just haven't been giving the silly ideas enough credibility, and after five years of post-9/11 fever, I am more than ready for the return of silliness. I mean, does anyone remember how great 9/10 was? I do. I was surfing. "9/10 forever! Remember fun!"

So bring on the New Irreverence, and let's put a whole lot more sacred cows out to pasture!

BrainFood Gets Donnie Davies

Well, it took me an hour, but at Chaz' livejournal blog, I found the following letter from BrainFood, the service provider for the Donnie Davis site. Very exciting stuff. (Incidentally, for the record, I'd say Chaz Antonelli is hatefully against Donnie Davies.)

-----Original Message-----
From: Donnie Davies [mailto:donnie@lovegodsway.org]
Sent: 05 February 2007 20:00
To: ChazAntonelli@yahoo.com
Subject: Response for direct inquiries to Brainfood about Donnie Davies


Hello,

You have correctly discerned that Brainfood provides services to the Donnie
Davies project. We are providing this explanatory letter to people that fail
to get the joke to the degree of directly contacting us or, in some cases,
illegally attempting to disrupt our system services.

The site is indeed a hoax. Donnie Davies and his ministry are a cartoon of
forces at work in America that we feel are destructive to the Nation's moral
compass and the integrity of community spirit. We do not condone the practice
of demonstrating at the funerals of America's fallen soldiers and we do not
subscribe to the belief that gays and/or lesbians should be rounded up and
placed in death camps. We perceive these views to be disgusting and
anti-American. We also recognize that America must be tolerant of dissent to
preserve our Liberty and our way of life. The Donnie Davies project was
created as a mechanism to electronically excite protest, ignite discussion
and seed key phrases that would alter search results we view to be strategic.

Everyone is a critic and everyone will always have an opinion about how things
could be done better. We weighed the situation very carefully before we
entered into this because we knew that a certain amount of confusion was
necessary to provoke sufficient discussion. Before our campaign, searching
Google for the phrase "god hates fags" returned unadulterated hatred
slandering our soldiers, our country and the GLBT community. We have now
provided a message that people can hopefully laugh at. We believe meeting
hate with more hate only increases hate. Comedy has a fighting chance of
diffusing the situation.

For myself, personally, I got involved with this project because of Alan
Turing. Alan was the scientist who designed the world's first computers in
order to break the encryption used in Nazi submarines. He was a hero. After
the war he was imprisoned for being gay. You can read more about him here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_turing

That is our story. We regret if we have caused you emotional harm. We
understand that this explanation may not suffice and that you may view our
enterprise as misguided or malign. We felt otherwise and we acted. Supporting
us, whether you believe in us or not, is part of being American.

Best regards,
Team Donnie Davies

--
Get behind Donnie Davies today!

For the record, I support this viewpoint, and I feel that being against it misses the point that the point is making.

Donnie Davies Web Response

Thanks so much for the support, everybody. I tell you what, mysterious electronic attacks, phone calls from untracable numbers that claim to be the U.S. Postal Service offering to deliver lost packages and an enormous amount of hate mail is enough to make any Minister shrink from God's mission. But I tell you friends, we cant let ourselves be intimidated by the influence of a few well placed psychopaths. Liberty is the foundation of this Nation Under God and the people have the right to chose their own messages and have the right to read them as well.

Some people might think this is some kind of this is some kind of organized conspiracy against the message of the Westboro Baptist Church. I didn't realize when I wrote my song that it might compete with their message. I mean, I was utterly clueless to that. Now that the DJs keep asking me about it I had to think about it and I think people in America have a right to chose their own message. Thats not the same thing as censorship. No one has a right to utterly control what you see, what you hear and what you think. Thats fundamentally anti-American and you should fight it with a resolve that strikes to the very core of your being even if it risks everything you have, otherwise America risks losing everything it is and should be.

First MySpace deleted my account and now they have deleted the account of our band. First they censored me and now they've censored people I'm connected to. If you are a MySpace user, dont allow this. Every one of you who believes in the Freedom of Expression, whether you like our song or not, needs to step up to bat. This is the time. Now.

...via The Stranger's blog.

BTW, here is Joey Oglesby's Myspace page.

Joel Ogelsby aka Donnie Davies

"My hat's off to Oglesby. Brilliant. His video exposed the bigotry of the Christianists in a way that no documentary, speech or op-ed ever could. Sometimes it helps to stare into the abyss. This was one of those times."
- comment found on JoeyMyGod.com

Here is the lowdown on "The Bible Says" video star Donnie Davies. He's actually Joey Oglesby, according to Joey.My.God, a blog by some other Joey. Reading the updates, one of the links leads here. [WARNING-"Acting!"]

However, according to a link found in the comments section of that blog entry, Donnie Davies is in fact none other than Colby Stark of the band Glass Gypsies (fronted by Bowie-esque leadman Bobby Conn).

This link leads to another possibility (which leads further along leads to the improv troupe, B.R.O.T.O.R.).

And if you think it's over, well, think again.

To the readers of this blog, I am standing by my directing of attention to this inanity. These antics are different than a hoax, and this whole package is more than a commentary on current events. This, my friends, is where it's all being played out. Stay tuned? Heck, all of us are the show!

Web 2.0 Video

Last night, I spent the night with my new ex-girlfriend. She called me up, and invited me. Then she read me the funny story about me having dumped her. Then she watched Sex And Lucia while I watched her. Then we went to sleep.

Now I'm woozy. I never get any sleep at my new- ex-girlfriend's house. He bed is like a large flat oven-mitt, and the busy surroundings make me sleep too lightly.

But that's cool. I mean, she smells so good. And now I have some of that wrapped around me. But I'm still woozy. Girls have that effect on me and my reality. All of you Girls. Grils, too.

Anyhow, here is an especially couth video I picked up off of boingboing this morning. If you know about these sort of things, you can't help but get breezy from it.


Web 2.0 Video

Jon Santos' Resurrection

My girlfriend, who continues to go unnamed, and I have broke up.

You see, I live a high-profile professional life. Subsequently, my personal life is my own, and the two remain separate from one another. But an acquaintance of mine with whom I have a professional relationship with bumped into my girlfriend and I, and got introduced, and then one thing led to another, and she and I got invited to have Valentine's Day dinner with the professional acquaintance and his wife.

The next thing you know, she and I are split up. And that was that.

I miss my girlfriend. I miss having someone so beautiful around, so sexy in her special way, and all the signature smells of a beautiful woman who cares enough to naturally take care of herself - the lotions, and cremes, and oils, et al.

And most of all, I miss the chance that I had met someone sweet enough for me to spend some time with, some months and years and decades with. You see, she didn't just look good, she looked good next to me.

And graphic designer Jon Santos has a new book out. It's called Resurrection. And the short film below is an interpretative reprentation of his for "global warming."

Ice On Chystie
a film by Jon Santos

Cartoon Marketing Ignites Bomb Scare

The cartoon may be ordinary, but these young artists' comments are extraordinary.

Whether or not they are using their fifteen minutes is yet to be seen, but regardless, while the affair itself was nauseating to me, these two by taking the piss out of it, made my day!

Link to video.

Batman Chalk Art

This is chalk artist Julian Beever. He's pretty famous and all, but this piece is something else. Superheroes, art, perspective. Is this ain't pretty, what is?

Julian Beever (via Audio Vomitorium).

Oom-Ra

This makes so much sense to me. As much as anything, really.

Star Trek's White Rabbit