Check Your Stuff?

You know the feeling. You're in a bar or a lounge, and you're talking to friends and new people are arriving, and you're greeting newcomers and moving around a a bit, and suddenly you're totally not standing where you were 45 minutes ago, when you arrived, and you're like, Where's my shit? You didn't check your coat and bag, because this is a bar/lounge and not a club proper (where you'd visit the coat check, 'cause you're making a night of it), so when you arrived you just plopped your stuff down somewhere. Uh, now where was that?

You look around and you say "Excuse me for a second" to the people you're talking to. If you haven't had too many cocktails yet, you do realize where your shit is and go retrieve it with no problem. You smile at the strangers who were sitting near your shit and suddenly you feel a little guilty for having suspected these nice people, or people like them, of felonious intentions. And, since you've have had at least one cocktail, you do decide that people are basically honest and, like you, just want to have a good time. As you make your way back to your to the conversation you were having, shit safely in hand, you reproach yourself for your petty, materialist panic and decide to rededicate yourself to Higher Ideals, the key to which, of course, is a genial toast with other fellow human beings-- except that the people you were talking to have disappeared and now you must make your toast with other fellow human beings.

And you think, What the hell? Other human beings it is! And you say hello to somebody new and buy him or her a drink, comfortable in the knowledge that your one-of-a-kind bag and designer coat and expensive phone and precious papers are all right there in plain sight. With the peace that only serving as your own policeman can confer, you chatter on about humanity and brotherhood and stuff like that....

TOBACCO OVERLORDS TRAP NEW TEEN SLAVES-- BUT EVERYTHING'S COOL.

High school students may have made some progress in areas like social tolerance and sexual identity, but as far as smoking goes it's like the 1950s out there. Smoking kills but, hey, it's cool. Seduced by sophisticated advertising and marketing campaigns that are ten times more nefarious than the Bush campaign, yet welcomed into the subconscious, kids are puffing up a storm-- and they're starting early. According to the New York Times, a new study shows that 12.8% of students starting in middle school in the fall were "established smokers." By the following summer, 15.2% of them were smokers. ("Established smoker" means that you've smoked on at least 20 of the previous 30 days and you've had more than 100 cigarettes in your life. Nine percent of kids between 11 and 19 are established smokers.)

Why'd they start? Well, to fit in--and because they couldn't think of any less harmful or more creative ways to do so. Obviously, the enlightened, analytical resistance that challenged racism, sexism and (to some degree) homophobia could still be applied to that blindness-producing, peer-pressure susceptibility we might call "coolism."

Not that we hate smoking. We don't. We just think that if you're gonna be into it, at whatever age, you should embrace and enjoy it for what it is-- a kind of slavery to corporate agendas-- which plenty of people we know do, in a perverse, sickly conscious way (which transforms their smoking an ongoing performance piece of the Ron Athey school).

P4M REVIEW: THE BRUKNAHM PROJECT, VOLUME ONE: URBAN WORLDBEAT

Every now and then, an album comes along that really points the way. The Bruknahm Project, Volume One: Urban Worldbeat is one of those albums. Brainchild of composer/producers Saundi Wilson and Sebastian "SibaGiba" Bardin, with Bruknahm progenitor Guka Evans, the album is as much philosophy as a collection of musical numbers, deftly proving how far forward music today can go-- now that we are exposed daily to rap, reggae, raga, tango, gaelic folk, and moody '60s French film scorage; and, more importantly, now that our taste for and understanding of various kinds of so-called world music has evolved beyond the speciously "exotic."

Cuts like "Lester Left Town" (incorporating trumpet skywriting by Cecil Young and excerpts from an interview with jazz great Lester Bowie), "Loft Session" (with craggy horn abstractions crashing down into deep string thunks), and "Jihad" (pure, pulsing momentum fueled by beat and a woman's chanting) are tenets of faith to be studied and promulgated. But don't get me wrong: The Bruknahm Project is supremely listenable. For me, this album has already passed the ten-listens test and I'm still charting new dimensions. And I think that's because although TheBruknahm Project takes off from a jazz point of view-- Wilson's roots are in jazz; his father was drummer Phillip Wilson-- it goes to a place beyond where those estimable-but-not-always-listenable brainiac-jazz albums often go. The very generous aim of this project seems to be to give pleasure, not to instruct, thank you.