Trepanation, as the procedure is called, is an ancient medical maneuver that’s been chronicled in 16th-century German engravings and found in unearthed skulls dating back to prehistoric France. Medieval doctors believed trepanation — drilling a hole in a living person’s skull — was a way to get demons out, and early 20th–century neurologists prescribed it as a cure for mania.

In 2007, the very nonmanic French singer-actor Charlotte Gainsbourg sustained a head injury while waterskiing. Persistent headaches prompted her return to the doctors, who, after conducting neurological tests and an MRI, discovered a massive brain hemorrhage that was caused by the accident. The prognosis was serious, Gainsbourg explains: Blood clots, and a small hematoma, had gathered around her brain, “like the one [late actress] Natasha Richardson had,” threatening her life. To save her, the doctors drilled a small hole into her skull in order to release the blood.

The procedure worked, and in coping with the shock of it all, the singer learned that maybe those medieval doctors were on to something. “[My realization] wasn’t that dramatic as the surgery itself,” she qualifies, “but I was very, very close to death. I thought I was very courageous toward life and death, and I didn’t really care, but when it happened, I realized how scared I was.”

A native French speaker, in English, Gainsbourg saunters through sentences, tiptoeing from word to word like she’s crossing a creek one stone at a time. Twenty years passed between the creation of her first and second albums, and she rarely performs live. But then, she’s never had to make music in order to eat. During those two decades she was busy becoming an A-list celebrity in France where, as the daughter of beloved late crooner and mischief-maker Serge Gainsbourg and French actor/chanteuse Jane Birkin, she has been in the spotlight for much of her life. She’s steered that good fortune in fascinating directions. As an actor she’s worked with a long list of esteemed directors: Michel Gondry, Alejandro González Iñárritu, Todd Haynes and Lars von Trier. “I’m not an artist,” she protests. “I’m not even a musician. I can play the piano, but I’m not that good, anyway.”

Still, while getting her MRI and lying in the tube, Gainsbourg started to think about songs. “When I was inside that machine,” she says, “it was an escape to think about music. It’s rhythm. It was very chaotic.”

She stored the memory away, and after she recovered, serendipity put her in the path of Beck Hansen, whom she met at a White Stripes concert in L.A. She and the singer-songwriter had a brief conversation, initiated by their common bond, producer Nigel Godrich (Radiohead, U2, R.E.M.), who had worked on Gainsbourg’s 2006 return to music, 5:55, and three of Beck’s most critically acclaimed records, including Sea Change. Gainsbourg and Beck met again, backstage at a Radiohead show in Paris, which prompted her to explore the possibility of making a new record. She called Beck and was soon working with him in his Silver Lake home studio. Casually, the two began to record, minus any concrete expectations.

“It wasn’t planned that we’d do a whole album together,” she explains, “but Beck was inspired by my accident.”

He worked the instrumentation and co-wrote the lyrics, and Gainsbourg provided the inspiration by explaining what she’d experienced in the hospital. “Take my eyes and paint my bones/Drill my brain all full of holes,” she breathily whispers on “Master’s Hands” over Beck’s lurching guitar rhythms, producing what would become the first track on IRM (or imagerie par résonance magnétique, the French translation of MRI).

In the same session, they recorded “In the End,” a stripped-down acoustic ballad that layers Gainsbourg’s wafting hums and smoky vocals over glockenspiel and strings arranged by Beck’s father, David Campbell. But the sound, as with many of IRM’s string pieces, faintly resembles the sensual, warm string sections of Gainsbourg’s father’s. (Beck, in fact, sampled Serge’s “Cargo Culte” on his track “Paper Tiger,” on Sea Change.) “I think they use strings in an entirely different way,” she says of her father’s propensity to use arrangements as a punctuation, as opposed to the Beck family’s more atmospheric runs.

Finally, Gainsbourg and Beck pieced together “Heaven Can Wait,” a poppy piano-driven stomp that would become IRM’s first single. (Its bizarre, wonderful companion video is by Los Angeles director Keith Schofield.) When these initial songs were complete, Gainsbourg and Beck parted; he needed to finish his own album and she was working on film projects, most notably her shocking, award-winning performance in Lars von Trier’s Antichrist.

As she let those initial sessions breathe, the singer decided she wanted more and asked Beck if he’d do the whole album. The phone call didn’t surprise the musician. He’d been continuing to write music with Gainsbourg in mind, and in the next 18 months, they built IRM’s stylistically disparate but impossibly cohesive vision. So she returned to Silver Lake.

“[Beck] wakes up with a new idea every day,” she says. “Beck wrote all the music and most of the lyrics, but I was reacting to what he was doing. I could have continued forever, but we stopped when the album made sense.”

The function of IRM, like that of the machine that inspired it, was to penetrate her head, Gainsbourg explains. “It was a chance to look at memory and looking into the brain in a more abstract, more poetic way.”

The album avoids the kitschiness of Beck’s genre chop jobs and funky electro-soul breakdowns but maintains his style throughout. Like the best producers, he helps Gainsbourg to speak for herself.

“My creativity comes out with others,” she acknowledges. “That’s why it is such a pleasure to be involved with Beck. I can’t do anything on my own. I like the idea of entering someone else’s world. I find more freedom inside someone else’s work rather than being completely free, and able to create anything.”

Yet, with the album complete, Gainsbourg faces a new obstacle: her first-ever American tour. Since that first time she sang with her father 26 years ago, on the notorious hit single “Lemon Incest,” she has rarely performed live. She says her father and mother, actress and “Je t’aime … moi non plus” singer Birkin, only performed after many years of commercial success. “My mother was my age when she went onstage,” she says. “She had about 10 albums by then. Even then, I saw her terrified backstage.

“It’s very disturbing, in a way, to put yourself out there. One side of me wants to be daring and wants to do it, and to be able to do it. Another part says, ‘You don’t know how to do anything.’ ”

By Drew Tewksbury

from LA Weekly, January 27, 2010

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Machine Project presented an improvisational music class throughout January that was based on experimental “game” by visionary jazz innovator (and antagonizer), John Zorn. Cobra, as Zorn named it in 1984, is a complex systems of cards, hand symbols, and, yes, hats that signal various actions to be performed by a musical group. No musical experience necessary (which was good for this West Coast Sound correspondent, whose only lessons in bass playing came from sitting in front of a 1990’s boombox) and a wide swath of abilities and instruments showed up. From upright basses, trumpets, and bassoons to tambourines, accordions, and ukuleles, each class created a different dynamic as musicians brought various instruments through the door. How would the trombone interact with melodica? What kind of duet involves a bass guitar and a jaw harp? What happens when two accordions attack? In Cobra, chaos and beauty could coexist.

The first sessions featured pianist Rory Cowal, who taught guided improvisation through unconventional techniques. He instructed musicians to play along to a sentence he read from a book, and selected two musicians to musically complement and antagonize each other. Then musician and composition doctoral candidate, Isaac Schankler, led the Cobra sessions, first teaching a simplified version of Cobra, then acting as prompter.

Schankler stood at the front of the room with a table of various cards. He held up a “Pool” card, and without any communication, instruments began to chime in. An accordion oom-pahed, while a vocalist whistled or gurgled, then a saxophone’s skronk would raise up the volume, and suddenly drop away as Schankler signaled for a cello solo. The cellist plays a slow melody for twenty seconds, then Schankler motions for one loud note from all instruments. The piece is over.

Later Schankler introduced the notion of guerrilla tactics, where musicians in the group could overthrow him, and become the prompter.

Do you play along or create something new? Do you stay safe or take a chance? Does your instrument define you? How do you get your voice heard? Who drowns you out?

Cobra’s rules are complex; John Zorn encourages accidents, misinterpretations, and mutations, but the lessons are simple:

-Know when to start

-When a system is failing, tear it down and start again.

Try Cobra on for size.

By Drew Tewksbury

from LAWeekly.com Jan 27, 2009

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 Text and Photos By Drew Tewksbury

Reblogged from L.A. Weekly’s Style Council, Jan 28th, 2009

Twenty-three years ago, a cinematic meteorite slammed into the American landscape. The 1986 DIY film was Heavy Metal Parking Lot and it portrayed nothing more than its namesake; the unruly Schlitz-drinking, ape-drape-adorned metal heads meandering in a Landover, Maryland parking lot before a Judas Priest concert (with opening act, Dokken, of course). The VHS tape became a veritable cult classic, rumored to have been passed around locker bays and garage-band tour buses alike. It was a strange view at a largely unseen America and nearly anthropological look at the North American metal-enthusiast in the wild. With every cut-off jean jacket, wizard-emblazoned Camaro-hood and Aquanet-infused hairhelmet, Heavy Metal Parking Lot yanked up America’s skirt, revealing to the world the secret of what it was like to be a real kid in the 1980s.

Last Saturday, in the spirit of Heavy Metal Parking Lot, I set off deep behind the Orange Curtain to witness Monster Jam, the truck-smashing, car-crashing showcase of undersized trucks with oversized wheels, in an attempt to become the male Margret Mead of 21st century monster truck culture. Twenty-three years ago, I met my first monster truck fans. I still remember the monster truck fans of my youth, that same era which spawned the metal frenzy and pro-wrestling hero worship (for examples, see The Wrestler). I thought of those kids on the playground with dirt under their nails and Cheetos stains at the corner of their mouths. The ones with the moms who smoked menthols at soccer games and dads who drank straight from beer pitchers at Pizza Hut.

Where were they now?

The parking lot, perhaps?At least that was the plan. The perimeter of Angel Stadium quickly proved otherwise as the hopes for Dodge Ram vans with aluminum-foiled windows vanished in lieu of F-150 dualies. With a huge set of pendulous truck balls.

This wasn’t the parking lot I had in mind.

Gone were the charcoal Weber grills that reeked of lighter fluid and burnt hot dogs. Instead, goateed dads helmed hi-tech BBQ consoles, slowly roasting sausage links and sipping Coors light. Gone was the guy smashing a 40-oz in the street or high schoolers drinking Goldschlager from airplane bottles. Instead, young moms in Ugg boots and hoodies chased their kids who tore around the parking lot in Escalade Power Wheels.

Young dads in Volcom socks sat with their sons on the tail-gates of Silverados. Like the Disney-owned stadium, complete with food court flotsam of Panda Express and Ruby Tuesdays, Monster Jam was destruction for the whole family.Rock ‘n’ roll minus edginess to the power of homogeny.

Although the aesthetic anarchy of the Heavy Metal Parking Lot may be gone, perhaps the need to make fun of everything has disappeared with it. Perhaps there in the Monster Truck Parking Lot, a new set of rules was forged for the 21st century.

Was this the decay of ’90s snark? The death of Irony? A new era of authenticity in the burgeoning Obama age?

Not quite.

It was just big ass trucks and big dangly truck balls.

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She was jailed for a day, but would not be deterred. “I didn’t care how many times they would catch me,” she says. “I wouldn’t ever go back to my house.”

Hernandez left Mexico City on a Wednesday. Five days later, she had crossed the border into the United States and found employment at the garment factory where her sister worked. Hernandez was 17 years old then, and for the last fifteen years, has labored in garment factories and sweatshops in Los Angeles. She says that some employers treated her well,
while others forced her to work in unsanitary conditions, locked her in, denied her water, and refused her access to the bathroom. Once again, enough became enough.

This is not a story with a happy ending; one that wraps up neatly with the bad guys being punished and the underdogs prevailing. We are catching up
with this story, in media res, as the 21st century dawns and the gears of globalization restructure how we manufacture and distribute goods. But at the human level of this transition is Lupe Hernandez and millions of women like her.

As Hernandez says, her story is “muy, muy típico.” According to a recent study by the Pew Hispanic Center, there are an estimated 12 million undocumented male and female workers in America, today. “Immigrants come to this country and we think that there are a lot of jobs,” Hernandez says. “Well, there are many jobs, but they’re jobs of exploitation.”

For many undocumented people in Los Angeles, garment work provides entry into this underground economy, offering those who don’t speak English, or with little work experience, a quick way to make some money. But for those who work in the sweatshops, their efforts are anything but lucrative. Around 67 percent of Los Angeles factories that produce clothing pay their employees less than minimum wage, according to a study, in 2000, by the U.S. Department of Labor. But this is no secret. It is tacitly understood that the people who make the products that Americans consume, including, and especially, the clothes we wear, are probably exploited and underpaid, but we look the other way. After all, the backbone of the American economy was forged by slavery and a model of capitalism that bases its structure on the fact that somewhere in the line of production, someone is not being paid, or is being paid very little.

It’s what U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, in 1933, called “the race to the bottom,” a global economy, where employers in an unregulated market continually lower their employees’ wages in order to stay competitive, which would cause their competitors to lower their workers’ wages in response, and so on. This plummeting of wages could then reach a theoretical zero point, where employees’ pay would potentially fall to zero.

Stories about sweatshops don’t often appear in the mainstream media. Why cover sweatshops as “news,” when they’re the norm? During the era of Progressivism, Jacob Riis’s photographic reportage of the tenements on New York’s Lower East Side, at the turn of the century, and Upton Sinclair’s novel, The Jungle, opened our eyes
to the plight of the lower class. In 1995, sweatshops re-entered the media’s viewfinder when authorities discovered an apartment complex of nearly seventy Thai garment workers, some who had been enslaved for up to 17 years, in the sleepy L.A. suburb of El Monte. The workers were housed in an apartment complex, with ten people packed into a room built for two. They worked eighteen-hour days, surrounded by barbed-wire fences and armed guards, as they sewed clothes for some of the biggest retail chains in the country. The media coverage of this human-rights violation reinvigorated the anti-sweatshop movement in Los Angeles and brought awareness to the embarrassing revelation that some retailers were manufacturing clothes without concern for the people who did the backbreaking work. And for those at the top of the retail chain, it seemed that blissful ignorance and denial was de rigueur.

When Spanish filmmaker Almudena Carracedo first came to the U.S., she couldn’t understand how one of the richest countries in the world could still
use sweatshop labor in the 21st century. She set out to make change by documenting the lives of three garment workers in Los Angeles. What was supposed to be a short project turned into last year’s PBS feature, Made in L.A., which focuses on workers in Los Angeles’ garment district, who are organizing against one of the biggest perpetrators of workers’ rights violations in the city: Forever 21, a retail chain popular among teens for its inexpensive, disposable fashions. “The goal of the film was to show what it was like for people at the bottom,” Carracedo says. “It provides a window into the lives of those who make our clothes, and to humanize their story—to make them not seem like just a number.” While shooting footage of a garment workers’ protest, Carracedo approached a woman in the crowd for a quick on camera interview: Lupe Hernandez.

“My mother was paid around a dollar for every dress she worked on,” says Lee, “which
would retail for about $99, so she made about one percent of the garment’s end cost. Keep in mind, this was the seventies, and that’s about the same that workers make today.”

In her documentary, Carracedo traces the evolution of garment workers Maria Pineda, a struggling mother; Maura Colorado, an El Salvadoran who, in eighteen years, hasn’t seen the sons she left behind; and the charismatic Hernandez, as they attend classes at the Garment Worker Center, at the edge of the Fashion District.

The Center is embedded in a small building near Santee Alley—a bustling street where vendors hawk Prada-like bags, Gucci-esque sunglasses, and other faux fashion—and
acts as both a respite from the harsh conditions of the factories and a place to organize
for workers’ rights. The director of the Center, Kimi Lee, whose mother is a Burmese ex-garment worker, understands the hardships and the stress that sweatshops foster.
“My mother was paid around a dollar for every dress she worked on,” says Lee, “which
would retail for about $99, so she made about one percent of the garment’s end cost. Keep in mind, this was the seventies, and that’s about the same that workers make today.”

After three years of organizing boycotts and protests against Forever 21—spreading the word on street corners and filing lawsuits for back wages—the clothing corporation settled the case organized by the Garment Worker Center. Victory, at last. But this isn’t the end of the story; it’s the beginning of a larger battle for the rights and dignity of all workers. Lupe Hernandez is now on the front lines of this fight, working as an organizer for Sweatshop Watch, and helping to educate workers on ways to break the paradigm of exploitative labor.

“The more that I learn, the lonelier I feel,” says Hernandez, in the film. “Ignorance protects you, but I realize I’ve come this far and no one can take that away from me.”

By Drew Tewksbury

from Flaunt Magazine, Issue 92 2008

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Check out the printable PDF of this article

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The girl, with the machine and its pedals, is producing piercing feedback. There are no lyrics and no apparent structure to the music. The deep, warm fuzz of grimy distortion builds louder with every spin of the machine and as the harshness of the screeching feedback swells, the tightly gathered audience watches intensely, covers their ears, or shakes like the congregation at a Pentecostal snake-handling revival.Eva Aguila, who is performing, as she often does, as Kevin Shields (as in the name of My Bloody Valentine’s guitar slayer) is the girl in the middle of the crowd. Aguila pushes the limits of music, challenges the conventions of what music is at all. “Noise music” (like Aguila’s moniker) is a misnomer, for what you hear at The Smell is neither noise nor music. It’s sonic experimentation aimed at the visceral affect—the feeling—of sound, rather than the confines of song structure. It is performance art fighting with technology and expectation. As the distorted screeches and sculpted feedback progress, Aguila’s set begins to feel less like a screwdriver to the ear; it becomes a little comforting, like being enveloped in the warmth and inertia of electric sound waves.

Since 1998, The Smell has hidden itself in the shadows of downtown L.A.’s skyscrapers, as the big-budget venues of Hollywood nightlife provide a distraction for tourists and taste-making poseurs, allowing it to remain an accessible, all-ages venue dedicated to free-form experimentation and the DIY ethic. As such, it is a magnet drawing in kids from the fringe—the faraway corners of Los Angeles County, the myriad towns of the Inland Empire, and the seemingly endless Valley.As with most unique subcultures, the attempt to pull apart, dissect, and categorize the harsh noise scene has seen it dubbed the “new punk,” a middle finger to a music industry that has co-opted, chewed up, and commodified outliers of rock, rap, and even “indie” music genres. But, in essence, noise is really a return to the confrontation that the free-jazz pioneers and the avant-garde once proposed.

Some noise artists speed up the tempo of existing songs until the drumbeats sound like a hum. They have built instruments from guitar parts and old wooden planks only to destroy them onstage. They bark into megaphones so distorted that vocals sound more like a Hendrix guitar line.The harsh-noise scene, of which Kevin Shields is a part, can be described by a more grating sound, while the party-noise scene injects diced-up beats into dense musical mélange. There really aren’t any common themes among artists, other than they are all vastly different, and their songs are mostly irreproducible. But despite its different musical styles, the noise scene is intensely incestuous, with artists consistently collaborating, playing under five or six monikers, or even playing at the same time. Aguila, for example, performs as Kevin Shields—alone, and with others—but is also known as Gang Wizard. The emphasis is on innovation in all forms, and in the overlap between sounds and ideas something new is created. Like the Happenings of the sixties, a noise performance can never be exactly repeated. In our age of infinite digital mimicry permeating nearly all aspects of life, unique, discreet events become all the more important.

When saxaphonist and free-jazz innovator Ornette Coleman recorded The Shape of Jazz to Come, in 1959, his sporadic bursts of dissonant tones, fast runs of unusual scales, and rejection of convention were as hard-core as the technophilic blasting that noise is now. T. S. Eliot’s fragmented epic poem, “The Waste Land,” a pastiche of the everyday sounds of London, cacophonous memory, and modernism thrust upon Europe by the destructive bombs of WWI and deconstructive explosions of artistic experimentation, made it a kind of prototypical noise music. “These are fragments shored against my ruin,” Eliot wrote. And today, noise artists are the Jackson Pollocks of sound; they splatter noise against an invisible canvas and advance technology beyond the point of conventional expression, delving into a world of sonic transmogrification.

Noise is nothing new in L.A. From the late-sixties musical experiments at the Beyond Baroque art space in the thriving psychedelic arts community of Venice to the late-seventies noise-punk explosion at The Masque (home to The Germs and The Cramps) between 1977 and 1979 in Hollywood, Los Angeles has a rich tradition of experimentation and innovation in music. The main difference today is the availability and the access to the noise-makers of the moment. When the L.A. noise scene was young, the primary mode of distribution was pressing records and creating handmade fanzines that would report on noise artists who were way outside the media mainstream. These fringe artists would never make it into Rolling Stone, so the zine was a crucial element of getting images and words out there, no matter how crude the cut-and-pasted Xeroxed pamphlets looked.

Zines were based on proximity and access to sympathetic friends at copy shops, whereas today the Internet plays an integral role in the proliferation of noise. Web sites like IHeartNoise.com, home to Phil Blankenship’s prolific label Troniks, keep the information flowing, with an ease and efficiency that could never be attained before. The listenership has now become global with MySpace, so the relevance of a kid with a Casio keyboard in Missoula is equal to that of any loft-dwelling Brooklyn hipster. East Coast noise bands like Sonic Youth, Lightning Bolt, Black Dice, and Wolf Eyes enjoy immense popularity, and Japanese noise rockers, for example The Boredoms and Boris, are well known for their extreme technicality, but the L.A. scene focuses more on novelty and innovation. Primarily solo acts with an electronica bent, these bands make “party noise” that is sometimes meant to be tongue-in-cheek, and always meant to be fun.

“Noise has always needed some sunshine injected into it,” says Brian Miller, one of Eva Aguila’s collaborators and head of noise label Deathbomb Arc. “This is where the Beach Boys came from. I like to think that L.A.’s contribution to noise is similar to how those guys interpreted rock ’n’ roll.” Some in the L.A. scene take seminal Japanese noise artist Merzbow’s famous adage to the next level, “If, by noise, you mean uncomfortable sound, then pop music is noise to me.”

Steven Cano, who goes by the name tik///tik, makes mangled versions of pop songs and believes his music takes more from the bizarre, eyeball-headed band Residents than strict noise purists. Entombed under layers of distortion squirms the ghost of a saccharine pop song, barely puttinga beat to what might be highly processed vocals, if they could even be called that. Feedback and the crunch of what might be a hundred stompboxes fill in the body of tik///tik’s compositions, but he doesn’t believe that he’s harsh.

“There are relevant and active artists who have been doing this for fifteen-year-plus, says Cano. I’m sure it might be a little sickening for them to see me come into a venue and slam down my multicolored digital gear and sing my Hilary Duff-loving heart out. I feel like I am making art and music, but definitely art and music with a lowercase ‘a’ and a lowercase ‘m.’ In my head, I am kind of making charred-up pop music.”

Unicorn Hard-On takes a similar approach, using highly deconstructed, quasi pop songs as an outline. But, unlike many of the selfproclaimed harsh heads who make irreproducible, rhythmless sonic textures, she utilizes repetition as her musical touchstone.

“Repetition of melody is a signature of mine, and the consistent beat,” she says. “The way I see it, the melodies are the characters and the beat is the background. They give the song a face and a feeling; then I can deconstruct it and tell a story.”

Valerie Martino, as Unicorn Hard-On, is known outside the noise world, follows old-school noise tradition when she releases an album, which comes accompanied by her artwork, a mix-tape, even a mini-zine. “There is a feel I’m going for, contemporary nostalgia, perhaps,” she says. “I’ve had many different kinds of packaging: spraypaint, stencil, screenprint, photocopy, domestic traditional women’s arts like sewing, felting, knitting.”

The art of noise, in many ways, depends upon a kind of visualnoise aesthetic, mashing together commercial iconography, bright (and sometimes annoyingly loud) colors, with a slight emphasis on the design culture of the video-game generation and after. The arts collective Paper Rad utilizes this anti-aesthetic to make videos for established noise bands Lightning Bolt and Wolf Eyes, which their distributor, Load Records, says “make Saturday morning cartoons look like the Nazi-programmed oatmeal of consumer misery.” Like much of the outsider or pixilated pop-surrealist art that is popularized in galleries like 8-Bit, in Los Angeles, Paper Rad uses very basic computer graphic design from the embryonic stage of the Internet. They layer images of Bart Simpson, the Hamburglar, and clip art into a mess of multimedia refuse that we all wish we didn’t recognize. The cover of Unicorn Hard-on’s collaboration with Taiwan Deth, on a seven-inch, pictures a childlike image of a unicorn against swirling purple background. Like Kevin Shield’s cacophonous, gargantuan sound, Unicorn Hard-On’s repetitive beats hollow out a space for introspection within tumultuous waves of sound. The cornerstone of music is a beat: the rhythm.

After all, don’t we become human to the beat of an organic drumbeat—our mothers’ hearts—for nine months before we enter the world? So the innate allure to the beat is no surprise. But much of noise music exists without a beat, focusing mostly on improvisation and the random variations and interactions created between competing machines and the feedback it creates. Out of these seemingly random acts of science, with the noise artist at the helm, there emerges a pattern.

Much as it does in John Coltrane’s “Giant Steps,” the swirling caterwaul of noise begins to take on meaning and structure on a larger scale when perspective can be taken and the relationship between the notes (or absence of notes) is gleaned. It’s like looking at fractals—the infinite repeating patterns within a leaf—or the cell on the hand of the man at the picnic portrayed in Charles and Ray Eames’ Powers of Ten film.

The resurgence of L.A.’s noise scene is not a spontaneous development. The creation of two spaces for noise, Il Corral, near Melrose and Heliotrope avenues, and the art gallery Pehrspace, in Echo Park, is due to the success of The Smell and the explosion of L.A. noise artists like Cherrypoint, Dog Shit Taco, and the masters of party-noise ravesploitation, Captain Ahab.

Il Corral hosts large gatherings of noiseheads for the “Turn the Screws” festivals and an insane event known as “40 Bands 80 Minutes.” Noise promoter Sean Carnage developed the idea for the stunt, about which he made a film, after curating successful, and more eclectic, shows on Monday nights at Il Corral. “I wanted to instigate a situation where I could mix all these people together and get the spirit of the shows I grew up with,” Carnage said.

Carnage, who is 35, grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, where he says the music scene was an intimate community that celebrated the fringe, especially performance art and noise, because there was nothing else to do. In that small scene, he would organize shows based simply upon what he liked. He created the zine U.S. Rocker without worrying what was popular or whether it would create a cohesive environment. When he moved to L.A. four years ago, he was struck by the isolation of living in a sprawling city.

“I was struck at how isolated people were here and how ironic it was that it was a city with so many people,” he said. So he tried to foster a community like that in Cleveland, by putting on DIY shows every Monday.

The shows became packed with noise bands, harshheads, and experimental acts, and Carnage became an indispensable part of the local scene as it organized around him. Then, in 2006, he came up with the plan for “40 Bands 80 Minutes,” for which he would choose his favorite bands who played his Monday-night shows and condense them each into two-minute sets. With a bit of serendipity, Carnage was afforded another opportunity. “The idea was to take a Monday-night show and document it. I really wanted it to be the biggest show of all time. Then, I was recently locked out of a job at a gay network, QTN, which went out of business, so I had a professional TV crew to use, who all had an ax to grind.”

Seizing this opportunity, Carnage had the crew film the entirety of the show, and then completed post-production in seven hours with an editing model that he took from his day job: porn.

The frantically paced DVD chronicles the full eighty minutes, with rough production values that augment the feeling of being there among the dancers and the headbangers. The noise is crisp and clear, and the experience, watching emerging noise-rock talents Health and Anavan, for example, drips with the energy of the live performance, as audience members grab at Anavan’s drummer and singer Aaron Buckley’s hockey helmet. Minutes later, Health’s vocalist, Jacob Duzsik, stabs his microphone at a guitar amp, creating searing feedback and a delightfully noisy new layer. The DVD provides a glimpse into a slice of the community that Carnage helped create, essentially picking up where Penelope Spheeris’ documentary of burgeoning L.A. punkdom, The Decline of Western Civilization, left off, in 1981. But this time, the kids are louder, happier, and having much more fun.

“[L.A.’s noise scene] is very community-oriented and accessible,” says Carnage. “L.A. has so many professional musicians, and the people who are underneath the music industry are really free, open, and unpretentious.”
Carnage is now promoting his Monday-night shows at Pehrspace, an Echo Park gallery that allows him the freedom to develop shows as he wants, breaking down the genres that he says people of the iPod generation are not willing to obey. Venues like The Smell, Il Corral, and Pehrspace are sites of musical cannibalism, where everyone devours new ideas, images, or sounds of roughly the same species and spits them out. These spaces are unmitigated blank canvases, testing grounds for advancing the threshold of the mainstream—creating the shape of music to come.

“With nobody watching the gate,” Carnage says, “you have a tremendous audience that you can build. Like a lot of fringe genres, [noise] is reviled by the mainstream. It’s despised. Luckily, when you’re in a genre that is despised, you get a lot of freedom.”

By Drew Tewksbury

Photos by Drew Tewksbury

Illustration by Lifelong Friendship Society 

Published Flaunt Magazine June 2007

Click here for the Printable PDF of this article with amazing illustrations by Lifelong Friendship Society

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One journalist goes deep underground to understand the mystery and the majesty of L.A.’s first Urban Iditarod
April 5, 2007

By Drew Tewksbury

Last month, in Alaska, journalists joined the elite of the dog sled racing world to watch, mug of warm brandy in hand, as the sport’s best-trained dog teams shot past toward the finish line, slicing a swath through the frozen earth and carving a new path in the history of the Alaskan Iditarod. The 34th annual Alaskan Iditarod took place over two weeks, from March 3 to 15, trekking 1,150 miles in an epic and time-honored race across one of the most stark and beautiful landscapes on earth.

On the same day that the Alaska race began, another journalist strapped on a cowboy hat, affixed a bandanna, and carefully shaved a badass handlebar mustache, preparing for a grueling three-mile race along the stark terrain of West Los Angeles.

This race was the Urban Iditarod and that journalist was me.

Unlike its Alaskan counterpart, the inaugural Los Angeles Urban Iditarod employs an untraditional methodology: The sled is a shopping cart and the dogs are actually people. People dressed like dogs.

Although the Alaskan Iditarod is driven by courage and determination, the Urban Iditarod is fueled by a complete lack of shame and an unrelenting desire to wear floppy ears in public. Some of the best events in L.A. go unnoticed amidst the clamor and glamour of this living city, so, in an attempt to cover this race from the ground level, I embedded myself with Team Bark to the Future as they snaked their Dog-lorean through neighborhoods from Marina del Rey to Santa Monica on this mutant L.A. Marathon.

The Ides of Mush

In a cul-de-sac in Marina del Rey, the energy was percolating like a malfunctioning coffee pot as the teams prepared for the race. Nearly 150 mushers - that’s the sled driver, to you Iditarod newbies - and doggies - they’re actually people - waited for the race to begin. A member of Team Clifford the Big Red Dog chatted with Donatello, a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle, standing near a surprisingly accurate shopping-cart facsimile of the Turtles van. Team All Dogs Go to Hell blasted Norwegian black metal from their stereo while their torches burned a little too high.

Then the race began.

“Mush, mush, mush!” the teams yelled as they quickly turned the corner onto Pacific Avenue, tearing asphalt into oncoming traffic, where they were met with open mouths and wide eyes from bystanders in their condos and carports. Maneuvering off curbs, around stop signs, and carefully staying within lane lines, the teams were off to a swift start. But after an eternity of running (somewhere around mile 0.25), some teams slowed down, while others clutched their hearts with the hand not holding a beverage or pulling the cart.

Luckily, the teams made it safely to the first “hydration break,” at popular watering hole Baja Cantina, where they could regroup, fix their carts, and strategize about what would come next.

This Urban Iditarod was Southern California’s debut staging, with simultaneous races happening that day in Chicago and Portland, as well as earlier races in Brooklyn and San Francisco. With no overarching message or political cause, the Urban Iditarod is meant to be an absurd moment for those caught in its wake.

“It’s just meant to be weird. We want people to look and be perplexed,” said the race coordinator, who preferred to be called Beta Dog.

Using Internet organizing and word of mouth, Beta Dog had a paw … um, hand, in organizing San Francisco’s Urban Iditarod, where the race has been run for more than a decade.

“For those races, we had about 1,500 people show up, but this year the cops were giving us a lot of trouble up there,” Beta Dog said. It was then that L.A.’s first Iditarod was born.

Venetian Stares

“Is this a protest?” a woman strolling along the Venice canals asked, only to be answered by barks and woofs from the participants.

“Is St. Patrick’s Day this week?” an older woman asked a companion, who was narrowly missed by a girl in green with knee-high socks and roller skates.

The questions continued as the teams sacked Venice Beach like Spartan warriors with squeaky wheels and kilts. Actually, that was just the Irish Wolf Hounds team, who yelled “Freedom!” as their kilts flipped up while they attempted the first Urban Iditarod cart-jump off a handy Venice skate ramp. Other teams looked on in awe from the relative safety of a beachside terrace, which served as the next of many hydration stops.

Venice Beach has long been the home to the odd and the wild, but when the race took a turn onto the boardwalk, it made a turn to the weird. The boardwalk was packed like the 405 at 4:30, so the mushers worked their way through the crowds of tourists, most of whom stopped in their tracks, like frightened deer or perhaps a stalled Honda.

Passing the incense stands, tattoo shops, and even that turbaned guitar guy on roller blades, Harry Perry - who unfortunately did not want to follow us while playing the Rocky theme song - the mushers took another break (the last one was not that long ago) to politely commandeer a street performer’s microphone, and lead the unruly gang in a not-so-beautiful rendition of “America the Beautiful.”

Somewhere around the “sea to shining sea” part, it became evident that this race was not just about unbridled Jackass-ery: This was about America. It represents freedom, Jack, and don’t you forget it. This is truly the land of the free and the home of the brave, where men and women dressed like dogs could hydrate themselves openly without fear of persecution; where a bunch of dudes dressed as Beethoven could not be ridiculed for their overly tight leggings or frilly shirts; and where sweaty men in pink dresses can play pool with other gentlemen in drag without reprisal for their beliefs or musky odor.

In the middle of waxing patriotic, a waitress announced, “I don’t really mind the crowd here, but it’s just your smell.” Perhaps Freedom of Stench is something that we’ll have to work on.

Putting This Puppy to Rest

The race continued along the beach and veered onto Main Street in Santa Monica, where onlookers at The Coffee Bean raised a latte and boutique browsers cheered the faux dogs on their course. At this point, the group had picked up some impromptu participants, including a man with questionable dental hygiene who burned sage to either clear some auras, or maybe just clear the air.

The race was near its end as the mushers and day-tripping doggies made their way through the forest of Santa Monica apartment complexes to the strip-mall wasteland of Lincoln Boulevard. Club Nocturnal, formerly known as The Bitter Redhead, was the finish line, and the carts piled up in the parking lot outside as the racers trickled in.

The founder of the original San Francisco Urban Iditarod, a guy named Alpha Dog, had a motto about this race: “Every team wins, except the first team to cross the finish line.” In that spirit, Beta Dog and the L.A. crew announced the winners of the aesthetic categories.

Best in Show went to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, while Best Sled went to Team Lady and the Tramp, with their conversion of a cart to a delicious Italian spread built for speed. The Beethovens and their white wigs received Best Costume, and hometown heroes Dogtown and Z-Boys won the coveted Best Race Antics award.

Somewhere in the far north, a journalist is bearing the cold, carefully retracing the race results as the real dogs barked and howled from Wasilla through the Norton Sea check-in at Unalakleet and finishing at Nome, 1,151 frozen miles later. The drama is high, the feat one to admire, but it’s a safe bet he’s hoping next year’s assignment will have both the heat and hydration of L.A.’s new annual tradition, the Urban Iditarod.

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Inside a Watts housing project, a Pepsi-sponsored recording studio burns hip-hop to disc, and another corporate logo to the face of urban culture.
By Drew Tewksbury

It’s no secret that Los Angeles is a city torn in two. Like any city, Los Angeles is awash with half-truths and half-remembered lies, geographically and ideologically bisected into separate but equally imagined parts: the good parts of town and the bad parts of town.

Wherever you are, there’s an adjacent neighborhood you’re not supposed to go into — a place drenched in the realms of the unknown. For many living north of the 10 freeway, the mythology of these forbidden places becomes a comfortable binary to the lives of the beachside and the high-rise. But it’s easy to forget that these places are real — that these “bad parts” house real, live people living under the smog of media terms like drive-bys, gangs, and the projects. These spaces — these unknown cities — filled with interwoven fact and fiction, become an urban forest delineated by fear.

For many Angelenos, this unknown city is Watts.
It was only a few months ago that Imperial Courts was simply another housing project stoking the hive of gang activity in Watts. With the historic gang treaty of 1992 broken, the PJ Crips of Imperial Courts reanimate as they ally with the infamous Bountyhunter Bloods of Nickerson Gardens against the Grape Street Crips of Jordan Downs.

It’s a lot of names, and a lot of colors, and it’s some bad shit of Shakespearian magnitude.
But on September 16th a story cracked the headlines of local news, reeling Watts in from the media periphery. And this time it wasn’t about violence. In fact, it was just the opposite; it was the other side of the media coin — a human-interest story. After much anticipation and even more bureaucracy, a recording studio has opened inside the red, white and blue cinder block walls of the Imperial Court. The realized dream of Jonathan Hart — a 20-year-old, genuine and ambitious resident — the studio will provide free access to the residents and act as an agent of musical education, job training and emotional release.

“I was born and raised in Imperial Courts, I’ve been there all my life. You can use hip-hop to show how you feel instead of taking it out on somebody, and that’s how I make music; everything that I’ve been through, I throw it in a song,” Jonathan explains.
He’s definitely on the right track.

With the deteriorating funding for arts and music in schools, there are few options for those who want to pursue a career in music or those who simply want to throw styles with their friends. So after months of meetings with city Housing Authority and heaps of bureaucracy, Hart set out to find help with his groundbreaking endeavor.

Hart’s approved proposal was picked up by Benjamin F. Chavis, former President of the NAACP and current president/CEO of Hip-Hop Summit Action Network. Chavis’s HSAN partner happens to be media mogul/hip-hop titan Russell Simmons. As the founder of Def Jam records (a venture that began with Rick Rubin in a dorm room 21 years ago) and current CEO of Rush Communications, Simmons was the right person to go to for all things hip-hop. Together, Chavis and Simmons devised a plan to raise the funds needed for the studio.

And like all good plans, this one involved Ludacris.

It was two years ago that Atlanta rapper Ludacris lost his endorsement deal with Pepsi-Cola following a frenzy of criticism by wary consumers, afraid of more violent and sexually charged lyrics. Simmons and Chavis defended Ludacris and threatened to have the hip-hop community boycott Pepsi. After a heated standoff, Pepsi decided to donate $1 million towards HSAN’s charities for kids, in this case bringing Jonathan Hart’s studio to life.

It’s another rags to riches story, a real live American Dream, and it’s all brought to you by Pepsi.

Oh yeah, and Russell Simmons.
But is hip-hop really the panacea to inner city social ills? Why are Pepsi and Simmons so interested in creating Generation DMX?

Pepsi’s m.o. may be uncertain, but it is certainly not the first big corporation to team up with prominent hip-hop (or basketball) figures for a charitable donation to inner city areas.

In 2002, Sprite began a campaign to refurbish old basketball courts in inner city areas with the help of the NBA (with whom they hold exclusive branding rights). In addition to the creation of these courts, the Sprite logo would be displayed prominently on the backboards. A similar idea was executed by Nike, who built courts iemblazoned with huge Nike swooshes.. On the one hand, these gestures of social responsibility are laudable in their intentions. Yet, it seems that the underlying motives are more fiscally motivated. Bigger than a billboard and with literal heavy foot traffic, both Nike and Sprite’s courts were unavoidable spaces of captive advertising, focused directly at a niche market that has often been alienated by media exclusion and a lack of buying power.

Now, Sprite and fast food chains like McDonald’s have discovered “urban” markets. Ask Destiny’s Child about McDonald’s apple-walnut salad, and if they’re “lovin’ it” as much as their McSponsored world tour. But Destiny’s Child aren’t the only ones eating at McDonald’s. Increasingly, fast food is becoming the food of American poverty. According to L.A. Health Action’s latest policy brief, nearly 60 percent of South L.A. residents are living in or near the poverty line. The vast majority of these people are Black and Latino, many of whom are also victims of soaring obesity and diabetes rates. “It’s unfortunate that the less well off you are in this country, the worse kind of service and food and things you need to live are given to you,” explains rapper Xzibit at the HSAN conference. “It’s about economics more than anything. More than race, it’s about economics.”

The world of corporate charitable donations and “urban” markets have become inextricably intertwined as more corporations focus their advertising to one of the fastest growing consumer groups. Marsha Calloway Campbell, president of the marketing firm Elite Consulting Enterprises, writes in Smart Biz online, “The African-American population is a fast-growing, relatively untapped wealth of marketing opportunities. [They] want to work with companies that give back to the community and have a community presence. They will be loyal if the company is perceived as having a vested interest in this market and their well-being, and if the company is perceived as one that cares and can be trusted.”

Simmons is no stranger to the “urban” markets or Campbell’s slightly reductive reasoning; he was one of the first to define and successfully create hip-hop as a lifestyle as well as a genre of music. In 1986, Simmons brought Run-DMC to Madison Square Garden where they were performing on their sold-out “Raising Hell” tour. The boys from Queens were urged by Russell to write a song about their favorite shoes called “My Adidas,” which not only told where their shoes had been, but also the exact ways in which they were worn. It eventually resulted in a top-five R&B record and turned into a tremendous endorsement deal when Simmons showed Adidas executives the impact of the rappers’ songs. During the group’s performance, Run asked everyone to raise an Adidas in the air. The crowd obeyed and, with one stinky salute, a sea of shell-toes emerged. The executives saw the power of urban aesthetics and the emergence of a distinct hip-hop culture. They signed Run- DMC for a $1.5 million contract and gave them their own brand of shoes featuring their own logo.

Take one lok at this get-rich-quick model, popularized by hip-hop-hero films like 8 Mile and the upcoming Get Rich or Die Trying, and you can see why the projects would want a recording studio. The reality of hip-hop often gets lost in the aesthetic and diluted by the rapper’s symbolic role — they are much more than artists or musicians. Xzibit explains, “I think that we are role models, that we’re just people that the kids look up to more than politicians, more than their teachers, and sometimes even more than their parents. I think that hip-hop has an impact because it’s so visual and so tangible for the inner city.”
Rappers become powerful business people in the realm of entertainment. Some make it on sheer talent and unique style (Kool Keith or Ol’ Dirty Bastard), but many others make it after being groomed as businessmen, label execs or producers (Sean “P. Puff Diddy Daddy” Combs and Master P).

Why is it that a great majority of hip-hop artists get big through the help of high-powered label execs who develop their images, buy their Bentleys, and bring them up from the underground, while these integral players remain invisible to inner city audiences? These are the people with briefcases, ties, and water cooler small talk — not the most exciting image. It would be a strange day to see kids at Nickerson Gardens wearing wingtips and bragging about how their portfolios are diversified like a motherfucker.

But this leaves a gaping hole in the minds of inner city youth, who live unaware of the importance of business savvy in their own success. Recognizing this need for financial education in urban areas, Simmons and Chavis once again took up the challenge, bringing their HSAN entourage to the Wiltern on Sept. 17th — the day after they opened the studios at Imperial Courts — where they held a conference for inner city kids called “Get Your Money Right.” The idea was to showcase black business owners and other financially successful black people in a panel discussion so that young urban kids could visualize a way out of the hood other than just rap. Then again, some members of the panel were rappers. Panel member, rapper, and Pimp My Ride host Xzibit warned of the complexities of change in the inner cities. “You can put on your shoes and walk out of the hood if you want to, it’s about staying out of the hood and empowering yourself and feeling comfortable that you can be somewhere, because if you get beat in the head and told that you are only a certain thing all your life, you kinda accept your position. And being subservient is not what’s up in 2005.”

Many of the audience members hailed from Watts and were most certainly Jonathan Hart’s peers. You could hear them give shout outs to Nickerson Gardens or just simply scream like it was a high-school lunchroom. Some held their heads in their hands only to perk up to see what Xzibit or the D.O.C. had to say. But one of the more insightful comments was made by a financial planner who was stationed at the end of the long table. Although his open-collared Oxford shirt wasn’t as cool as the D.O.C.’s indoor sunglasses, he said,”Looking at the people at this table, I feel like in my life I chose Plan B. But I just now realized that Plan B ain’t that bad.”

There was no response to the man’s comment, other than a guy wearing a Jesus baseball hat standing up and yelling “J-J-J-Jesus” in a G-unit approximation.

It’s definitely not hip to be square in Watts.

So, what’s the answer for Watts? Certainly there are better places to donate money than one music studio in one project. What about the King/Drew Magnet School, which has one of the highest graduation rates in the state? What about the decrepit social services? Conceivably, Pepsi is more concerned with generating future rappers-turned -spokespeople than quenching the thirst of a poverty-free generation.

In the end, it doesn’t matter onto whose tab this studio goes or where the money should have gone. For Jonathan Hart, the should-have’s and the could-haves are meaningless, it’s only in action that the spark for change can be lit. “I’ve been in the projects 20 years. I’m 20 years old, and I’m a positive person. Anything that I can do that’s positive for my community, I’m just trying to get it all together. Whatever I gotta do to get there I’m gonna do it, even if I have to ask for help to get there, I’m gonna do it.”

Perhaps it isn’t about providing new services to this already troubled neighborhood. Maybe it’s about planting a seed of dreams, as unattainable as they may be. Allowing people to have a space aside, where the pressures of the Bloods and the Crips, the marketing and soft drinks, and the politicians and the police are left outside.

To simply have a room of one’s own.

©2005 by Los Angeles Alternative LLC

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