Wow its been a while

Well basically, it's been a while since any of us blogged anything on here. But I know for me personally it's a good time for me to start to. So i will. Anyways I have been cool. The band I'm in (B.B.U.) is doing good. The world is still a tragic place as we are all witnessing in Hondorus.
But there is always hope for a better day. So in the near future we will try to keep this blog more updated and insist on boring you with our lives. In Peace and Struggle
Iola

People on the Border Have Beef, Should Chill.

In a fitting room at GhettoWorld fashions..

It's a touchy subject down there.

Because I'm in Thesis-Induced Hibernation...

small smiles make my day.

Eli From The Class Of 2005. Recognize & Realize.

I Know You Seen Me in the Videos...

I'm famous. Look, they keep putting me in XLR8R. Seriously, because I have written for this publication for like 6 or 7 years, I have been a featured contributor like three times already. But they keep coming back for more!! Last time this little punk ass local nightlife photographer whose-name-I-will-not-mention got his hands on a copy and lectured me on how the picture was not flattering, and how I don't know how to hold my face for a camera. So this time around I used a more professional pic that another, less-punk-ass nightlife photographer friend of mine took. Just when you're feeling good about yrself, along comes Jarrett Spiegel to kick yr self esteem in the nuts. He e-mailed this to me today. Obvies, he has too much time on his hands.

Got Body if You Want it...

Though I haven't been following (or covering) much rock these past two years, I started hanging around some of my indie rock friends again recently and they took me to see The Prairie Cartel a couple weeks ago. If you are looking for the next local band-to-watch, I'd wager this is it, unless you count my friend Bill's awesome noise rock band, These Are Powers, who split their time between here and brooklyn.

At any rate, The Prairie Cartel will play tonight at Outdanced! (Funky Buddha Lounge), which is $5 cover ($3 if you RSVP), and will be worth every penny when you hear them play "Homicyde," a funk-rock track that derails at the end to an absurd chant, "homo / homo / homo / homo." If you can't make it tonight, they also spin a DJ set Thurs. night at The Burlington.

Since I'm making this post all about plugs, I'll also mention here that my friend Damon of another local band you should know, The Eternals, is also spinning a DJ set Thurs. night at Danny's. If I am lucky, he will bring the "No Diggity" record, b/c he knows that is my jam.

If I Could Show You, You Would Never Leave It

I flew to Minnesota in Feb. to drive around town with Slug for 8 hours, see all the places he grew up, the coffee shops he wrote in and listen to the new album in his basement. Read all about it in this XLR8R, which you can download here.


And in tribute to one of my favorite rappers of all time (no homo), a lil throwback:

The Abusing Of The Rib

I wanna follow the footprints across my lovers stomach
I wanna call out her name before i plummet
I wish i had a map of the terrain so i could step around the landmines
avoid the beasts under the bed that read they bedtimes
I wanna find these here so-called treasures
the pleasures, the trinkets, the never ending weekends
acknowledging that I'm still just a piece of the sequense
but seeing this different footprints got me needin to show my weakness
time lies the time zones
I cross them with my eyes closed
memorise the landmarks and learn the cycles
the weather patterns how the seasons effect
the east and the west of each region learning cylces
forget about the fact that
many trails have been tracked
maybe it's a plus that theres a path
if this was some uncharted land i'd have to be a smarter man
willing to travel the farthest to unravel the harvest
and natural resources are unlimited
exploration only requires some desire and initiative
take your time and find the right way to climb
it ain't safe to play games with natures mind

if i could show you, you would never leave it
and if i could show you, you would never leave it

i wanna ride a train up my lovers arm
stop of at the brain
then hop out and find out what's going on
cut through trees and ride through rocks
and synchronise the universal sun down to my watch
i've seen a lot
but not quite as much as her
the top went off the memory and the imagination blurred
but i know she's been put through hell
i can feel it
and i know she's touched heaven as well
trying to steal it
it came on and it taught her a song
it's strung her along and it caught her when the god was gone
now to the break-o-dawn she's tryin to feel that fix
and all the family and friends is tryin to seal them lips
but i ain't dumb
i can hear that train come from miles away
setting obstacles to stop the arrival
i'm gonna blow up that iron in wood rogue
from what i understood those be the aura fits of his survival
my recital another tantrum
because she's highly excitable swinging wings of red nova
happy endings always off to a bad start
addictive voyeuristic to the trackmarks

and if i could show you, you would never leave it

He's a Gemini, So Stay on the Friendly Side...

About the only thing I'm listening to this week is the work of a DJ duo composed of Hadji Bakara, who also plays in the band Wolf Parade, and Rob Squire, a producer I came to know as a teenager as Sixtoo, then making plodding, petulant production that fit peripherally into the backpacker hip-hop genre, but even then was industrially influenced in a way that made it a sort of class of its own. Squire has recently recast himself as Speakerbruiser. He and Bakara are based in Montreal, a city where French electro, British drum and bass, and Caribbean soca and reggae clash as a result of the city's immigrant strongholds and unique cultural history. Squire relocated to the city (he is originally from its rural Canadian outskirts), which is home now more than ever to a burgeoning club rap and hipster party scene that's given birth to senior and freshman acts like Chromeo, A-Trak, Thunderheist and Wolf Parade. His DJ sets -- far from the isolationist (maybe even nihilist) production of his younger years -- are suddenly reflective of that relevance, with playlists akin to those of taste making, party-pleasing DJs, albeit with a unique twist. He and Bakara haven't abandoned the weird industrial palate of sounds: Their sets are composed of mostly original remixes of popular mainstream rap, reggae or indie rap acapellas, but laden with heavy synthetic overlays. Even their version of Justin Timberlake's "My Love" is infused with a dark, futuristic Caribbean flavor, replete with low, elastic, synthetic bass and metal drums. Here's an original remix of a Ghislain Poirier and Face-T track; and here's an extended mixtape.

Mutant Sandwhich

I bought this sub in Decatur, Illinois after a day or so of eating nothing but chips and candy bars on my greyhound bus trip. I told the Subway girls to put everything healthy that they had on it, all of their veggies. There was so much shit on it that they were unable to close it, so they just put another foot long on top and smushed it down to make one mega sandwich that was too big to eat.



Jasson and Mike always argueing about what they're gonna do when they Bin Laden blow up.

"We need to get fine bitches and fat rides"

"No, what we need to do is put our money in savings bonds"

"No! What we need to do is put our songs on WGCI"

Don't Ever Fucking Question That!

I saw Love in the Time of Cholera yesterday afternoon, which is an adaptation of a book of the same name by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, which also happens to my favorite book of all time and, I am fully convinced, a collection of the most beautiful words ever committed to paper. My copy, which is old and yellow and used to belong to my mother when she was young, is too personal for me to loan out. I was so moved by the story that I scrawled love poems of my own in all its margins.

For someone who hasn't read this book, I don't know how the movie will fly. They pulled scenes and conversations and narrations verbatim from the book; Marquez's words are the most beautiful thing about the film, and it's awesome how some things I rushed past while reading here really come to life. Some of the acting is bad, however: Particularly John Leguizamo's painful rendition of Fermina Daza's father. For anyone who has not read this, it's a very complicated story about love that makes you feel like you are in the grasp of a boa constrictor and love that sets you free, sex that helps you find love and sex that helps you escape from love. But it finds its focal point in a lifelong love not realized until the couple is in their '70s, which is very romantic on paper but in film requires a sort of icky old people sex scene that made me cringe.

I think for the first time I realized the soul of Marquez's story, though I have thought I'd found it before and was wrong: Every love is an illusion. It simply depends on which illusions we choose to commit to.

What These Bitches Want from a President?

As if DMX weren't already absurd enough. Now we find out that he has never heard of Barack Obama.

Haaaaahahahahahahahahhaa.

That is all I have to say.

American Scream

On Wednesday, March 19, don't miss Don De Grazia and others read at Columbia College's Story week. When I was 15 years old, De Grazia came to my high school and did a workshop with me and 6 other students. He had just published his awesome novel, American Skin, abroad, but it'd be a couple years before an American publisher would have the guts to pick it up, so it wasn't till I was 18 that I got to read the thing in full and realize how fully rad the man is. American Skin is sort of like a much softer core American History X (it's about skin heads, but not the racist kind -- which is a distinction very important to some kids here in Chicago though I've never heard of it elsewhere) told with the same coming-of-age narrative style as Hairstyles of the Damned, which means that he landmarks it with songs and specifically Chicago cultural geography. If you live in Chicago, you should read it if simply to reminisce about those days when Belmont and Clark was the local Mecca for homeless punks, who would line the streets and alleyways and wait for the youth work vans to deliver brown bag meals a couple times daily. Does anyone else ever wonder what ever happened to all those homeless punks? Did they shape up and get jobs that earn enough wages to move to Bridgeport and Pilsen communal living spaces, or are they just relocated to other cities, where punk culture still thrives? Maybe De Grazia knows.


Weds. March 19

2:30 PM
Panel: New American Voices, Poverty & Privilege
with Junot Diaz, Drown; ZZ Packer, Drinking Coffee Elsewhere;
Colin Channer, Waiting in Vain; Alexis Pride, Where the River Ends;
Don De Grazia, American Skin
Host: Ian Jack, columnist, The Guardian,
author, and former editor, Granta
Harold Washington Library
Cindy Pritzker Auditorium
400 S. State St., Chicago

6:00 PM
Full-Time Faculty Reading
With Don De Grazia, American Skin; Alexis J. Pride, Where the River Ends; and Betty Shiflett, award-winning short story writer
Host: Eric May
Columbia College Chicago
Film Row Cinema, 8th Floor
1104 S. Wabash, Chicago