The Professor

With exactly two weeks left until the move to Ithaca, there's no shortage of things to do and people to see in these last daze. I've been finishing up the database of videos here at TimesSquare.com, and found a gem I'd been looking for for months...

It's Professor Eduardo Alvarado, my favorite subway performer. I first saw him in Jackson Heights almost two years ago, and bought a tape of his music for a very reasonable price. It was my favorite tape for several weeks. I love his lo-fi style and from what I can tell he's been doing it for a very long time. Rumor has it that he is quite a smooth latin lover and that he gives dance lessons.

Bootleg from the East

Another goodie from the vault: This one is an exclusive, one of the only surviving videos of the Skratching Sheik in action. In this case, the Sheik took a quick detour from his very busy schedule that year to make a brief appearance in New York. Stopping off at The Tank for the "Comediarock" show, the Sheik paid respects to old stagemate Josh Grosvent with a ten minute set.

Personally, I like the "tape scratching" routine at the end...

An old man pushed me

And here we degenerate into one of the more petty discussions that seem more typical of the blog lifestyle...

An old man pushed me this morning.

I was coming up out of the subway next to City Hall... there was a decent little jam of people making their way up the stairwell... and right as I came out, I kind of squeezed between a couple of people. This was one of those awkward manoeuvers where everyone's walking up the stairs in a dense, almost gelatinous mass and immediately turning left, except for me; I was going straight ahead. My preferred method is to look for an opening and lunge through it as quickly and efficiently as possible, so as to prevent the disruption of traffic. The only other option, really, is to stop and wait until the crowd clears out, which is undeniably the worst thing to do as you'll only get trampled.

So I squeezed through my opening, and the guy I was walking directly in back of intentionally stuck out his elbow and whacked me. I got clear of the crowd, stopped, turned around and gave him the glare for about 15 seconds. He just went on along his way, making grumpy mumbles. One weird thing about it was that I hadn't even gotten in his way; I was, after all, walking behind him... and it made it all seem like he had done it out of spite.

At first glance, this shouldn't seem at all profound. It is, after all, New York. But it wasn't the guy pushing me that struck me as odd. It was that I realized this was the first time this has happened in the two years I've been in New York.

Where the Children Live

A thing I've always struggled with: somewhat of a "jack-of-all-trades" syndrome, wherein I've been so interested in so many different things that I've failed to reach a level of "mastery" within any of them. It used to be worse; things have smoothed out somewhat in my post-college years, where I've managed to become effectively skilled in the field of audio this&that.

Another issue: TOO MUCH EXPOSURE versus NOT ENOUGH to your "input", your "source". If you want to be a good musician, for example, you ought to listen to every piece of music you can lay your hands on, right? I've always felt at odds with this scenario because, for me, artmaking comes very much from a deep-inside, primeval place, a place where the children live. There is a raw kind of naiveté that comes from there, and as an artist I live on the razors edge, with a child-like innocence on one side and a world-weary clusterfuck of overexposure on the other. I always wanted to stay unspoiled. An old mentor named Stuart once told me that too much education will effectively destroy the soul of a poet. It's a dilemma, though, an issue I'm still working out.

I'm so interested in film these days. Yet there are so many classic films I've never seen; I'm "film-stupid" in many ways. Hard to tell if it's a good thing... always left wondering how much is inspired DIY genius and how much is just a cop-out...

Right Makes Might

I'm going through the hard drives and various archives here at the Ranch. You never know what you're gonna find.

Here's a goodie: Last fall, Negativland had a show at Gigantic Art Space. The star attraction, in my opinion, was a rogue animatronic Abraham Lincoln from DisneyWorld. Apparently he was a spare from the Hall of Presidents, but was rejected because he kept flubbing his lines and was subject to sporadic breakdowns and a tendency to gyrate his hips in the most grotesque manner.

I had the uniquely weird pleasure of helping Mark Hosler clean numerous sheets of plexiglass, and documenting Abe's wildly disturbing act on video. I also hung out a little bit with Joe, the guy who engineered Abe, who has a few interesting things to say about Christian robot fetishists. Later I posed for a few quick glamour shots (see below).

PathRhino in da House

So Dave and I started blogging right around the same time, and have discussed the importance of having at least one fellow blogger to check in on your new material. Anything else would be simply unprofessional. With the classic dilemma of "Does anyone out there actually read any of this stuff?", it's nice to know that the answer is "Yes."

Dave's blog is honestly what a blog should be; not a blow-by-blow rundown of "this is what I did today", nor a hip insider "news channel" for the micro-scene of your choice. Not that there's anything wrong with that, of course. But it's refreshing...

The blog entry below labeled "DB#12000018" is in fact a "double blog" entry, in some ways a throwback to our mind-melding experiments from the early part of the year, but that was in another dimension entirely, and I never give away my secrets.

"The Skratching Sheik Didn't Retire; He Just Disappeared"

a requiem for the sheik

Rumors have been floating around that the Skratching Shiek, famed DJ and International Underdog, has retired. Indeed, he hasn't been seen around for quite some time; must mean something considering the Sheik's high profile.

The fact is that the Sheik was rejected everywhere he went. Let's face it; given today's political climate, it just isn't fashionable to run around in a salwar kameez, sporting a pair of dark glasses and a kufiah, and hauling turntables and miscellaneous electronic gear inside of extremely suspicious looking packages. Misfortune seemed to follow him wherever he went, like a sneaking Mercury in retrograde, hovering like some horrifying black cloud waiting to deliver the fateful lighting blow.

Yet it was more than that. It wasn't just some kind of tongue-in-cheek satire; yes, this time there was a true sadness, and dark. Like the young child struck down in the subway, and nobody stepped forward to take control, to fix this situation, to right a great wrong. Instead, everyone turned up the volume on their I-Pods, yapping about the latest reality show.

And... well, shit... maybe they weren't wrong to do this. Maybe the very fabric of reality had changed so drastically that, yes, this was now the right thing to do; maybe they were just trying to salvage their own sanity, god save their souls. Maybe they had already been stomped so deeply into the ground themselves that they no longer had the energy, the will to move forward.

The Sheik once said something like this, and I paraphrase: " I am standing in zoo. And animals is people. And zoo is America".

So of course, I can see him there, standing in some faraway land, looking around and scratching his head, completely confused. He is wondering why he feels like such a stranger in his own homeland. He is wondering why so many things have changed, why the world has seemed to have grown up all around him. Wondering how he was left behind.

And more than anything else, he knows that this has nothing to do with being arab, or a DJ, or a klutz, or even simply a man. It is a distinctly human darkness, conceived by the greatest of dreams but terribly executed, horribly flawed, and marked by the distinctly human tendency to fall down, and get back up time and time again.