Happy Birthday!

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My father contemplating the takeover of Los Angeles.

Happy Birthday to my father who taught me the love of music, the joy of life and how to drive stick shift!


Ruben and the Jets

My father can be heard singing on this song with the band he was part of Ruben and the Jets. I need to upload the songs that feature his vocals like Dedicated to the One I Love. And yes, my parents were friends with Frank Zappa and I went to Moon Unit’s birthday party but I was just a baby and I don’t remember anything.

Favorite Song(s) of the Day: Falling Fruit

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James Blake – Limit To Your Love

I just heard this song yesterday and I was like seriously, what just happened? When the dubstep bass kicks in at about a third of the way, it really does feel like some kind of an earthquake. It’s totally unexpected but in the best possible way. A rumble that matches the uneasiness of the lyrics, reminiscent of the tension that underlies all social relations causing them either to unravel or recombine in unexpected ways. Blake’s ability to fit in varying emotions into even the smallest bit of phrasing creates a song filled with all sorts of intensity, just the kinda thing one should expect from a good love song. Thanks to the producers who were careful with the construction of this track and didn’t make it a saccharine, everyday-ish ballad.


Jape-Floating

This song is verging on the cliché, the kinda declaration of universal love the hippies co-opted and ruined. The kinda cliché Crimethinc regurgitated from the texts of Situationists and Eduardo Galeano. Jape dodges cliché and instead, it finally feels like the real thing – the perfect antithesis to Blake’s Limit to Your Love’s “maps without oceans.” It’s about what’s beautiful in love and it’s possibilities for creating new worlds within the context of knowing deep down we are are all rather insignificant.
“We laid by the river, we looked at the stars. I said how tiny we are girl, how tiny we are…It feels like floating…”

Favorite Video of the Week: Marian

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The Sisters Of Mercy – Marian

“In a sea of faces, in a sea of doubt
In this cruel place your voice above the maelstrom
In the wake of this ship of fools I’m falling further down
If you can see me, Marian, reach out and take me home…..”

A soundtrack for the dark days of winter.


Nouvelle Vague – Marian

Slightly more upbeat but still melancholy.

Secret Disco: ESG

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ESG-UFO (original version, slightly sped up)

Oh, you thought the whole Secret Disco thing was over, eh? Not yet. I’m hoping to wrap it up by the end of this year and I still have a few more entries. For now, there’s this well-known and heavily sampled song by the Brooklyn family known as ESG. As far as I know the fast version is the original and the slower version was the one favored by break-dancers and hip-hoppers.


ESG-UFO (33 1/3/slow version)

Amen break in full effect!

For a list of songs using UFO samples, see here.

Favorite Song of the Day: Bogus Totem Summer

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Two guys from Glasgow, Scotland made this song. A song which I really enjoy. They didn’t make this video though.
I was in Glasgow for a week once in March, it was cold. I saw a Rangers-Celtic game on St Patrick’s Day in the university pub where pints of Guinness went flying across the room when the Celtics tied Rangers. I was told by a crying drunk Celtics fan “Ya don’t understand the passion!”
The next night, a drunk Glaswegian guy talked to me for like fifteen minutes at a rave at the People’s Palace, a museum for the working class of Scotland. For fifteen minutes in a glass house surrounded by palm trees that grow out in the open here in Los Angeles, this guy went on and on and I did not understand one single word he said but nodded my head like I did until he finally yelled “Yuh doonut unduhstand a single wud I’m saying!” I’m sorry, I replied. There were so many things I didn’t understand in Glasgow like Branston pickles, for instance.

People do lots of drugs in Glasgow…when they’re not drunk. In Glasgow was the first time I met poor White people. My friend (who went by the name DJ Loco, do you know him?) said I was from Mexico because he didn’t like Americans. Someone asked me how I spoke English so well. I would not recommend eating a burrito in Glasgow unless you like white rice wrapped up in a cold flour tortilla.

This is what they sound like.