SIGNS OF THE TIMES (PAST)

REVIEW: YMC ESSENTIALS (YOSHITOSHI)

Futures never last, because there are always new ones. But some futures are too delicious to lose, like the lovely ambient dreamworld conjured during the '70s and '80s by people like Brian Eno, Harold Budd, and even Vangelis. What was it that made this world so appealing-- pleasure? peace? opulence? Whatever it was, it inspired a lot of us, including two Swedish guys who hooked up in 1995, Yan (a.k.a. Jan Lutgebaucks) and Cpook-E (a.k.a. Erik Svahn, whose nickname is pronounced "spooky"-- and not to be confused with DJ Spooky, a.k.a Paul Miller). The duo appeared on the scene in 1998 with The YMC EP (Yoshitoshi) and followed up with "candy trance" (my word!) must-haves like The Moody Traxx EP (Force Inc US), The Nu Mood EP (Plastic City), The Satellite Traxx EP (Plackdown Sounds), and Nu Directions (Nepenta).

Now YMC has released YMC Essentials (Yoshitoshi), which looks like a "greatest hits" with new stuff. If you care about the quality of your own future-- at least, the rest of your summer-- you'll want to check it out. The CD is like a midnight drive along a tropical shore road in a glamorous convertible, toward a secret pavilion-- though the banal titles of the album's twelve tracks ("Mist," "Morning Lake," "Phuture Vibes," etc.) barely hint at the transcendent, translucent musical tissue YMC weaves. Primarily beat-driven, these tracks don't bring you to that luxuriously lazy place where Vangelis and Budd often wound up. Instead, they combine today's more forward-pulsing, not-so-eternal energy with several of the higher-consciousness effects that were so prized by "new age" composers and DJs: gauzy, weatherish echos suggesting dimensions beyond the usual three; open hearted, semi-robotic vocals that bypass the conscious mind and go straight into the bloodstream; plus, of course, your standard crystalline glints. The result? YMC gives us a future to live with, for now....

NYC MAYOR RUDY GIULIANI HAS ANOTHER ART ATTACK

New York's most powerful art hater, Mayor Rudy Giuliani, is at it again. According to the New York Times, "disgusting" and "outrageous" is how Giuliani describes a 15-foot photographic depiction of the Last Supper by distinguished black photographic artist Renee Cox. The work, entitled "Yo Mama's Last Supper," on view at the Brooklyn Museum as part of an exhibition of photographers by 94 black photographers, features the artist herself, in the nude, as the Christ figure.

We just came back from the Brooklyn, where we saw the exhibition, which is called "Committed to the Image." It's pretty good, incorporating the work of Anthony Barboza, Martin Dixon, and the great Gordon Parks; you should definitely check it out. You may remember that the Brooklyn Museum was the scene of Mayor Giuliani's last art attack. In 1999 he tried to close the Museum after it debuted its "Sensation" show, because black artist Chris Ofili had dared to use elephant dung as an artistic material in his wonderfully powerful "Holy Virgin Mary."

Like Ofili, Cox says she was raised Catholic and has issues with that, and it makes sense that those issues would be part of what her investigations as an artist are about, right? Art is supposed to look fearlessly at ourselves and the world and bring us forward into a greater understanding of our humanity, right? Well, don't go telling that to Mayor Giuliani. Apparently he thinks art should look pretty and just sit there. Artist Cox's reaction to the Mayor's attack, according to the Times, was, "Get over it. I don't produce work that necessarily looks good over somebody's couch."

Giuliani was raised a Catholic, too, though it's clear that he's in danger of never even getting close to his issues (which include mistaking of sanctimony for reverence, and prudery for decency). Hating shit that can get you to the next level is pretty bad. That's why we think Giuliani deserves our pity more than our anger.

R.I.P. SMOKING BADDY ALEXANDER SPEARS III

Guess who died? Smoking baddy Alexander Spears III, who testified before Congress in 1994, along with a lot of other top cigarette executives, that he believed nicotine was not addictive and didn't cause disease. Of course, nicotine is highly addictive and does cause disease. Spears, who served as both chairman and chief executive of Lorillard, died of lung cancer at the age of 68.

We say that Spears is a baddy, but on the community level the Greensboro, N.C. resident was actually a pretty responsible, socially progressive citizen. According to the New York Times, he served as fund-raiser for the Girl Scouts, the United Negro College Fund, and Greensboro Historical Museum. Spears also served on the boards of the local United Way and the National Conference for Community and Justice, which is dedicated to fighting racism in America. So it looks like it was just his involvement with an evil corporate agenda-- coupled, perhaps, with a huge salary-- that warped the thinking of this basically good man and caused him to counteract his good works with bad ones, like trying to secretly increase the nicotine levels of his cigarettes.

As we've said before, there are lots of great reasons to smoke, but there's no sense in lying about the downside. On Satan's Patented Scale-O'-Sin, lying is definitely worse than smoking.

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.

NUCLEAR ENERGY REDUX: IS ANYONE DEBATING SAFETY STANDARDS?

Ten years ago, when the number of nuclear power plants in the U.S. reached its peak of 110, it looked as though economics alone would eventually shut down the nuclear power industry. Plants were hugely expensive to build and maintain, given government regulations. Then, of course, there was the fact that decades of debate about the safety of nuclear power and the disposal of nuclear waste had soured the public on the fantasy of clean, abundant, affordable power.

But nuclear energy isn't dead yet. In the last decade, almost sixty reactors have, according to the New York Times, "quietly received the [Nuclear Regulatory] commission's permission to increase heat output and thus electric production"-- in other words, deregulation. What that means, given recent electricity shortages and the soaring price of natural gas, is that nuclear power has become more cost effective-- a fact that thrills many planners in that industry. Plants that have strained the bank accounts of their original builder/owners are now being bought by new owners who are making the plants more profitable under today's economy. At the same time, both new and old owners are pushing their plants harder and running them longer between down-times than ever before. The Times reports that one plant "now shuts for refueling every 18 months [while]... in the 1970s and 1980s, it would shut down every year for 60 or 70 days."

The Times also reports that "in the early days, emergency shutdowns came every couple of months of so; now they are so infrequent plant managers remember each one, and every manual shutdown." Which says to us that in an effort to make an economic go of it this time, plant owners are redefining safety-- in their terms, and without as much public input as when this was a burning issue.

We don't know what the safety standards should be; do you? Does anybody know how to re-think the whole issue of safety, when it comes to nuclear power? The point is that there is precious little public discussion of this issue and it's time to get one going again-- especially since our track lights and stereo systems and refrigerators and hair dryers, and the plants that manufacture our cell phones and batteries and cars and sneakers, are using more power than ever. Some nuclear plants are 40 years old and are being re-licensed for another 20 years; parts of their structure are decaying, yet because of computers and new materials used for repairs, owners are saying that plants are safer than ever. One one hand, that may be true. On the other, has anyone solved the problem of disposal of nuclear waste? Aren't we still just planning to cram it down the throat of Mother Earth, even if in some remote spot that's in nobody's back yard? Aren't we still kinda soft-pedaling the fact that's been staring us in the face ever since nuclear power began-- that the waste is the most toxic substance ever known and it stays toxic for millennia?

Reports From The Lush Culture

Sauce Therapy
This Week's Guest Columnist: Lucia T.

This is your week, sauce maniacs-- lush culture's high holy days-- but we want you to get through it with a minimum of suffering, so let us give you a little advice.

- Stick with "goal drinking."
Know where you're going with alcohol, strategically, and pace yourself appropriately for the trip. Starting the party early on New Year's Eve? Maybe you wanna go easy on the distilled spirits until after midnight, when you'll be expected to make less sense. (Note: Make sure any business conversation you need to have with the limo driver is done before you compromise that famously sharp mind of yours.) Going out with someone special? Stay in "drink sync" with your date-- meaning that both of you should try to keep both your consumption at the same pace.

- Avoid any drink with "nog" in the title.
Webster's defines "nog" as "a strong ale formerly brewed in Norfolk, England," but what we're mainly talking about eggnog, consisting of eggs beaten with sugar, milk or cream, and often alcoholic liquor. That shit is so delicious that you can drink too much of it before realizing how sickening it is, so we think you should stay away from it. Also avoid, for the same reason, creamy/fruity liqueurs.

- Never mix, never worry.
Actually, this has been proven untrue, hasn't it? Some people seem to be able to drink all kinds of drinks throughout the night and stay fine, while others stick to their favorite stuff and still get sick. Now that we think of it, we think the rule should be: always mix and always worry (in the existential sense of the words "mix" and "worry").

- Count your drinks.
It's as simple as it sounds: Know whether you're on your third or your fourth, your tenth or your twelfth. Here's why: Over time, you'll get a better idea of cause-and-effect, as in, "I start slurring my speech after my fifth scotch" and "I black out after my eighth vodka." If you're smart, this information will come in handy someday, like when you finally decide to avoid slurring, blackouts, or ARIs (those mysterious alcohol-related injuries-- scrapes and bruises-- you sometimes wake up with). Counting is also a good idea because when your count goes to hell, you'll know you're in trouble.

Before going to bed (or passing out):

- Take two Advils (or three).
Aspirin works well, but we find that Advil works better. This will help keep those tiny blood vessels in your head from squeezing shut.

- Drink plenty of water.
This keeps you from dehydrating, which is one of the bad things that alcohol does to your body. When we're really blotto, we try to drink, like, a gallon of water before going to bed because the first and subsequent trips to the bathroom serve as opportunities for even more water intake, adding a nicely therapeutic program to our sleep cycle.

Favorite moment on New Year's Day: It comes around twilight, at 5 or 6 in the afternoon. After complaining about how much you drank the night before and how nice it will be not to drink today, you reason that since it is a holiday maybe a little drink wouldn't be such a bad idea. And after pouring yourself a glass of something, you discover that it's a great idea....

Reports From The Lush Culture

SAUCE THERAPY
This Week's Guest Columnist: Lucia T.

Advertising's not a bad thing. Neither is alcohol. But given America's puritanical heritage, advertising for alcohol has always been viewed with suspicion by high-ranking pleasure-haters. After Prohibition-- can you believe that anybody ever tried to outlaw liquor? they must have been on drugs to think they could do it!-- beer and wine ads sneaked back into the media, but the hard liquor industry had a tougher time, observing a self-imposed ban on radio and then TV advertising.

Did you realize that ban was voluntary? A lot of people don't. Well, it was voluntary, but happily the ban was dropped in 1996 and ads for vodka, gin, whiskey, and other spirits have been sneaking onto TV. The ads appear on local stations, during appropriate time slots, aimed at appropriate audiences, of course-- meaning late-night, adults-only. According to the New York TImes, more than 100 local television stations in nearly 90 markets have agreed to take Seagram's advertising." The Times also reports that ads for a brand much loved around Platform offices, Jack Daniels, have appeared in Miami, Las Vegas, and other local markets, on NBC, Fox, and CBS, during shows like "E.R." and "West Wing." So while most cable and network TV channels still carry no liquor ads, it's only a matter of time before they all do, nationally, for several reasons:

1) Beer and wine have enjoyed an unfair advantage.
Hard liquor manufacturers have always complained loudly that they're at a competitive disadvantage, without the kind of TV and radio advertising that beer and wine can do, and they're right. Liquor is no "dirtier" than wine and beer. If we associate gin with flopping alone in hallways of inner city, single-room-occupancy hotels and wine with hosting dinner-tables of dear friends on warm, sophisticated evenings in beautifully restored, vintage suburban homes, then it's because we've gotten suckered into a fantasy. The reality is that dissolute alcoholics come from both sides of the tracks and are likely to drink anything.

2) TV needs ad revenues.
Media outlets have never been more strapped for advertising revenue, especially the so-called minority media, which have been misunderstood or overlooked by many advertisers. The spread of liquor advertising is gonna be great for minority media. Sure, racist marketers have traditionally exploited alcoholism (and tobacco addiction!) in minority communities by seducing consumers with "sophisticated lifestyle" ads. But nowadays everybody's waking up to those growing numbers of increasingly affluent (and intelligent!) urban consumers, so it's a sure bet that liquor advertisers have their eyes on the WB and UPN.

3) People like fun commercials.
In print, liquor ads have been pretty creative. In the attempt to get away from the negative "drink and you'll get drunk" message, many advertising creative directors have pioneered genius campaigns, like the famous conceptual one that marketing legend Michel Roux did for Absolut. Can you imagine how much fun a 30-second TV spot for a liquor brand would be if done as a mini film noir or a mini hiphop music video?

Of course, when liquor does arrive on mainstream TV it will be in ads that have been created and deployed with conspicuous responsibility. Models and actors will clearly be over 21 (or over 25, as is currently promised by Allied Domecq, which have TV campaigns for Kahlua, Crown Royal, and Chivas); targetted audiences will also be older; time slots will be late-prime time to late-night. And you know what? I think we'll manage to respond to these ads just as responsibly and not immediately go out and gulp ourselves into a vomit-laced blackout.