Blogcritics Author: Jason Malikow

Announcement: Short-content feeds

Phillip Winn — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 12:00:00 EDT

Sunday, August 26, 2007, marks the switch of all Blogcritics.org article feeds from full-content to short-content. This is the result of several converging factors, and is unfortunately a permanent decision (as permanent as any decision can be on the web, that is). We are aware of all of the reasons that this is a Bad Idea, and we are aware that some of you will be quite upset about having to click on something to read the free content, and we're sorry. Unfortunately, despite great effort, full-content feeds are not currently economically viable. Two other factors are involved: full-content feeds have resulted in an unprecedented level of content theft, with BC content appearing on many websites, usually spam sites, without attribution or permission. This duplicate content causes a cascading set of problems, not the least of which is that search engines generally aren't favorable to duplicate content, and don't always guess correctly. Finally, our RSS advertising partner is strongly in favor of short-content feeds. We hope that you'll continue to subscribe to BC via RSS, and when an article grabs your eye, it's only a click away, still free on the BC website. Thank you for your understanding.

CD Review: Beans - Only

Jason Malikow — Sun, 26 Mar 2006 05:25:40 EST

Beans, aka Mr. Ballbeam, "the Ornette Coleman of this rap sh!t," has something completely different for you: 10 tracks of back and forth and back again collaboration with jazz greats William Parker (bass) and Hamid Drake (percussion). Rich enough for repeat listenings, clean enough to turn those repeats back to back, this one's going on your iPod and your work computer.Only is wall-to-wall laid back basslines, crisp and sharp percussion, and a lot of smart arrangements. Nothing overpowers; every instrument, effect, and lyric is given space to breathe, to express itself. Themes arrive, are developed and played with, expanded and strippped down. I want to say that it's stylish in a cocktail hour kind of way, but without the cheap showiness of what you hear in hotel lobbies these days. There's serious depth and quality here.As a whole, the album moves in an arc, not in terms of speed, but in terms of intensity and tension. Some of these songs are very tense, tightly controlled. You get the sense of a live session, with the freedom of improvisation and the thrill of seeing a group on the edge. A couple of highlights: "118" is midtempo but Beans delivers his edgy, snarky lines at full speed for the first half of the track. There's an eruption, enivornmental sounds and a wandering synth line, another eruption. Half cool jazz instrumental, half uptempo hip hop. Alternating lines, jazz and hip hop sharing the same space, going back and forth. "56" starts off with a midtempo duet between Drake and Parker. Not only does Beans drop by the jazz house with some lyrics, but he brings his own looping beats. It's not back and forth, like "118," but it's a blend, a medley, a real concert.Overall, a fluid, laid back record that's smart enough to keep in your permanent collection. Very different from Beans' earlier solo records, like 2004's Shock City Maverick or his work with the late, great Antipop Consortium. If you know the older stuff you get to hear an interesting new side. Instead of cutting edge hip hop, Only is a true dialogue between hip hop and jazz. Keep an eye out for it, join the conversation.

Jason Malikow studies critical theory and American literature as a PhD student in the English Department at Northwestern University.

Review: off-centre by Meat Beat Manifesto

Jason Malikow — Tue, 18 Oct 2005 07:32:38 EDT

2005 continues to be a banner year for fans of electronic music pathbreakers Meat Beat Manifesto. June saw a tour the United States and Canada in support of their At the Center record, released in May. A second leg of the tour is being booked now, for late autumn and early winter (check out confirmed dates and connect with other fans at the Meat Beat Tour site). And in stores on 25 October, a supplement to the At the Center release, the off-centre 12" and CD5. Like At the Center, off-centre is part of the Blue Series of releases by Thirsty Ear Recordings. Over the past five years, the iconoclastic Blue Series has garnered significant and widespread critical and popular attention with its commitment to the polyvocity of contemporary jazz. This new collection from Jack Dangers and company pushes against the stale boundaries of both jazz and electronica, bringing a new technical complexity to the former and deeply felt grooves to the latter. Track Listings:12": Side A. Wild (Rmx) Dummyhead Stereo Side B. Prime Audio Soup (Live) Shotgun! (blast to the brain) (Live)CD5: Wild (Rmx) Postcards Maintain Discipline Dummyhead Stereo Shotgun! (blast to the brain) (Live) Prime Audio Soup (Live)The CD is packaged in a standard jewel case; art provides a link with At the Center through the repetition of the spiral motif. Liner notes are minimal, but do include instruments and equipment used and recording notes for the live tracks (from the 22 June 2005 show at the Metro in Chicago). What's most important here is the music, and the music does not disappoint.From the At the Center sessions, the previously unreleased tracks extend Meat Beat's marriage of up-front percussion, deep, heavy grooves, and jazzy melodies. As with the full length, these songs are all instrumentals, with flute and organ pushing the high end. The (beautifully recorded) live tracks present most of their studio counterparts, but highlight the space allowed for improvisation and extension in a live setting. None of that canned DATronica here: turn your stereo's volume up loud enough and you can almost hear the machines getting a workout. Off-centre will find a warm home in the collections of longtime Meat Beat Manifesto fans, but it will equally reward new listeners. If you caught them on tour in June, or if you will see them in the end of the year, the live tracks are especially worthwhile. If you only know them from the studio version of "Prime Audio Soup" that appears on the Matrix soundtrack, you'll find a mellower and more introspective side of the group here. And if you're new to "jazztronica," or are looking for a progressive direction, something deep and cool, you'll want to give off-centre a good long listen. It's the real deal.

Jason Malikow studies critical theory and American literature as a PhD student in the English Department at Northwestern University.

CD Review: Nekromantix - Brought Back To Life Again

Jason Malikow — Mon, 10 Oct 2005 19:16:30 EDT

Brought Back To Life Again serves up 14 tracks of the great Nekromantix sound: full speed ahead punk-inflected psychobilly with generous abuse of Kim Nekroman's stand-up coffin bass and a strong sense of humor. The original songs have been remastered ("digitally corrupted" says Kim in the liner notes) and the resulting quality is very high. Previously clouded fills and backing vocals are brought up and sharpened in the mix. Equally important, none of the warmth of the original album (recorded on tape) has been lost in the new transfer to digital. As my neighbors can attest, this CD does not suffer at all when cranked to 11.Album reissues are a tricky facet of the music business. Anyone familiar with the endless repackaging of the same washed-out and washed up classic rock albums decades after the original release date can back me up on this. Ostensibly this is to provide "new" material for the collector or to offer the uninitiated a popular and comfortable and safe entrée into the music.On the other side of the equation we, the collectors and the fans old and new, sometimes get a great new-old release that reminds us why we spent all those weekends flipping through dusty used bins and passing around lo-fi copies of copies to each other. I'm no music biz insider, so I couldn't tell you why the classic 1992 Nekromantix album Brought Back To Life went out of print. But I can tell you that the reissue of the album on Hellcat Records is going to rekindle that old flame and spark more than a few new fires. It's in stores on 11 October 2005, just in time for your Hallowe'en parties and those long winter nights.Of course, we can't have a reissue without some extras thrown in. And I would be cynical about this being just another gimmick, but the bonus material is well worth checking out. First up, "Intro (Original Intro)" is an unsettling bass and ticking clock lead into "Bloody Holiday." The third track, "Monster Movie Fan" has an alternate ending, a slow clicking screaming fade, which sets up "Driller Killer." Closing down the album is "Nekrofilia (Organ and Bell Version);" the addition of the Hammond-esque piano line holding down alongside the bass adds a nice depth to the song that isn't as apparent in the 1992 release version. As an artifact, the packaging itself is a significant revision. "Floating heads" on the front, and purple and black art throughout the 3-panel Digipak is echoed on the CD itself (shiny black and purple). Very cool.Overall, Brought Back To Life Again adds enough to the original release to make it a must have for the serious Nekromantix and psychobilly fan. New listeners will find an accessible point of entry into their extensive catalogue. After several line-up and label changes, Nekromantix has continued to grow and develop their sound and style. This reissue not only documents a specific moment in time, but also reveals a connection between their other albums and throughout their history. Nekromantix is writing new material right now. If it's half as good as Brought Back To Life Again they've got another instant classic on their hands.Ed/Pub:LisaM

Jason Malikow studies critical theory and American literature as a PhD student in the English Department at Northwestern University.

Book Review: God Jr. by Dennis Cooper

Jason Malikow — Thu, 8 Sep 2005 20:39:01 EDT

Violence, trauma, and death are among the subject matter most favored by our best contemporary writers, and most frequently returned to by those writers. Reexamining these ideas from an untried perspective, Dennis Cooper's God Jr. (Black Cat) may be his strongest book yet."I wanted Tommy's death to last forever. That's all." (44) So says Jim, narrating God Jr., published in August 2005. This is the issue at the center of the text, a grieving father's search for meaning and healing in the wake of his son's accidental death. This is still a Dennis Cooper novel, however, and so a subject too frequently rendered in the pastels and sepias of greeting card sentimentality is incisively and honestly explored. The result is not a comforting, feel good story but rather a harrowing look into mourning, generational difference, and emotional trauma.One of Cooper's greatest strengths as an artist is his mastery of a form and style which is fully Spartan. Of course, we do not mean merely that the prose is clean and spare (which it is), and we certainly do not see it as reductionist (which it is not). In addition to their ruthless economy, Cooper's words and lines and exchanges of dialogue reveal a deep and muscular power. Cooper's prose has always been carefully disciplined, which cast a particular detached - almost clinical - view on what would otherwise have been gratuitous scenes of sex and violence. Yet the strength of the author's hand managed the strength of the prose so completely that what dissent past reviewers had been able to summon was quickly dispensed with. For Cooper was never a part of the 1980s "Brat Pack" novelists who sought to paint New York red with blood - the blood of rival's corpses or the blood of a coked-out nose. At the core of Cooper's project has always been a strong emotional resonance which is the counterpoint to the physical realities in his texts.Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, as his contemporaries were plunging into the shallows of literary celebrity, Cooper broke new ground with his "George Miles Cycle," a series of five (six, if one includes 2004's The Sluts) novels which took as their overt subject sex, violence, and violent sex, post-Stonewall. Concerned with the social and cultural status of a particular subset of fetishists, the cycle examines, in part, their resistance to the mainstreaming of a bourgeois and "straight-safe" queer identity. And while work remains to be completed on the subject, certain passages late in the cycle suggest that if their resistance was successful, and if AIDS was not to claim the lives of these characters, their own appetites, fantasies, and violence may have been the end.The plot, briefly: Jim feels responsible for his son Tommy's death in an accident that costs the former the use of his legs (and so his job, and so his marriage). Jim descends into a self-admitted insanity during his subsequent attempt to know his son through a video game which obsessed both son and father in turn. There is more, of course, but God Jr. weighs in at 163 pages and is widely available. If you haven't yet, you really should.In God Jr. Cooper continues to discover death (as he did in My Loose Thread, the novel which followed the conclusion of the George Miles Cycle), yet the focus is not physical but mental, emotional. Death renders Cooper's characters "abstract." The dead are removed from the living immediately, but reserved at an unresolvable distance; the living know the dead in a form greater than in memory yet less than in physicality. They can communicate, but "apparently, dead people can't enunciate." (131) So says the "psychic" brought in by Tommy's mother, Bette, to help her know her son in her loss. Jim seizes upon a different course."The Childish Scrawl," the third section of God Jr. and the most emotionally powerful, is an allegorical and too-stoned walk through of Tommy's favorite video game. As Jim takes on the role of the Bear, the game's hero, his interaction with the other characters reveals his raw emotional state at believing himself to be his son's killer. Here the parallels and ideas explode: between father and son, Father and Son, Father and children, hero and supporting cast, and citizen and excommunicated individual. What we are immediately aware of, and what remains with us long after the end of the novel, is that a significant change in perspective is required to come to terms with the ideas Cooper has set forth.God Jr. is thoroughly the work of Dennis Cooper. But it is not a Cooper that we recognize from the George Miles Cycle. Our author has matured in myriad ways. With this new direction comes a need to move beyond the traditional examinations of his work and begin exploring the emotional and spiritual questions and ideas with which Cooper is grappling.

Jason Malikow studies critical theory and American literature as a PhD student in the English Department at Northwestern University.

Book Review: The Evil Queen by Benjamin L. Perez

Jason Malikow — Sat, 3 Sep 2005 02:30:09 EDT

"Everyone in Hell is a literary critic," says Mephistopheles in his prologue to The Evil Queen: A Pornolexicology, by Benjamin L. Perez. What are we to make of this statement? Talisman, prayer, abuse? None or all of the above? And then some? Does it requires a literary critic—or a reader with the deep knowledge of a critic—to come to terms with this text? The depth and breadth attempted by Perez are fascinating, though the speed at which he moves through his self-proclaimed piece of "transgressive fiction" can be trying. Nonetheless, the text is a significant positive addition to a genre too often inundated with cheap and meaningless prose.While written in English, The Evil Queen is equally at home in French, German, and Latin (translations are provided as an integral part of the text, offering a bit of language instruction for the reader alongside the Eunuch, central character and servant to the Evil Queen.) This serves to point out the limitations of each language, and indeed an early page offers a vocabulary list in the traditional strengths of each continental language; the ordered and rational Latin, the sensual and studious French, and the muscular, technological German. Perez's deep interest in language is reaffirmed with each discrete segment of the text, which progress in a generally linear manner according to the three major parts of the book: the Crucifixion, the Resurrection, and the Ascension and/or Descension. A glossary completes the text and provides references in four languages, as well as scientific and religious-theoretical terms. In these individual segments, sometimes a fragment, sometimes a few pages long, the Eunuch serves the Evil Queen in every possible capacity, graphically and carefully catalogued by Perez. The formatting of these segments plays an important role in a reading of the text, imposing a pace and rhythm that owes as much to contemporary poetry as it does to hypertext.Yet at this point of its highest ambition the text does not always retain its unity and integrity. Perhaps we can look at these moments as a success, in that they illuminate the limitations of the written word, regardless of language. As a group, however, they reveal the over-eagerness of the text to be "transgressive" without providing a sufficient reason for being so. In these moments, The Evil Queen becomes vulnerable and presents the reader with an unnecessary challenge. The accusation most frequently leveled against transgressive authors from Georges Bataille to Dennis Cooper is that their work tends to the confrontational simply to be confrontational.The validity of this claim has yet to be proven in Perez's case, though one imagines that with such skill as is displayed in The Evil Queen, and with such a demonstrated love for the theory and practice of language and writing, his future work will be that much stronger. Perez is a bright new talent worth keeping an eye on, and The Evil Queen is a promising achievement. ed: JH Edited: PC

Jason Malikow studies critical theory and American literature as a PhD student in the English Department at Northwestern University.