September 7th showcased the undergraduate symposium on Frontier Ruckus’s tour, so they outlined the subject of suburban sprawl and relatives with springy bites to an emporium of enthusiastic plaid clappers. Ruckus is at home in a band of five with singing saws and hypnotic, rhyming ostinatos unique to a frontman who studied English.

Yesterday, Frontier Ruckus was playing at The Ark, today in Pontiac and about a month ago in Oklahoma with Shirley Manson (no, relation to the California Manson), Conor Oberst (of course, he is alive), and the Saddle Creek collective… and all of which is dutifully noted on Twitter, which seems to convey the element of the band in that they are straight from the lyrics of The Fall songs.

You know that verse in “Totally Wired” that goes, “You don’t have to be strange to be strange”? Well, allow The Free Kwame to inform you that Frontier Ruckus is strange (without actually being strange) in indie-folk circuits. You will hasten to be informed that at the time publication, no known Ann Arbor band has requested to play The Ark at the polite bequest of a band member because he sought to mark the culmination or continuance of a collaboration with an alumni of the other, nearby public University. Maybe, those were reasons, but reasons not expressly articulated. In effect, the two largest public spaces for the youth were represented at this show in a decorous fashion. Secondly, the band updates their Twitter regularly, banters with their audience (greets parents), and behaves… not like most Michigan bands, though some also talk to or about their mothers.

Strange, perhaps so because it is considering that the other flick relevant to Detroit-Michigan this week is on the subject of Sixto Rodriguez, the self-immoliating protest singer so famous for his anger that it was felt tangentially and fervently decades later in South Africa. Frontier Ruckus has less extreme musical arrangements and showmanship, though the methods of oration (reminiscent of Neutral Milk Hotel or long, extended narratives stemming from Milia’s writing (frequently on the topic of what he described to The Daily as the “mythologization of home”) and applied to sonic backdrops. The writings outline subject manner important to the transplanted young adult: the feelings of statelessness in lieu of a dissipated past, the intoxication, and a display of history as recorded in drunken camera blurs (“eternity of dimming”).

Frontier Ruckus  was hailed with descriptors in The Michigan Daily publication as  ”Michigan, folk Americana” produced by area college alumni (Michigan alumni: David W. Jones). Of all the reviews pertaining Michigan bands, whether it be to introduce the newest addition of Detroit exemplary stylings or for the purpose of synthesizing a regional sound into descriptors, we can’t recall the last time bands played in a lecture-hall-type venue belonging to The Ark, bedecked with the kind of underachieving types that look better in plaid and adopt casual address.

The college-aged assembled and communicated remotely to others on cellphones, but they also bantered with the band. You could say they engaged with the show as musical spectators in attendance. The attendees made comparisons and generalizations. The venue served drinks lit up in the back as memberships enlisted and elegant couples stood around waiting for taps. The staff was merry and formal inquiries of addresses were made, sending cards to drink to distant families (your son or daughter is now a member of this club and that and this, solicitations, etc.). The band noticed the audience. They talked about themselves talking (“It indicates a lot about us… it indicates that we care about you”). The audience-performer dialog set evolved into humor with more jokes exchanged, but only in front rows where you could hear. Despite it being an auditorium, sound without microphones still failed to register completely. Blame the acoustic quieting.

At many points, dialog was exchanged on the subject of the lead singer’s mother (happily in attendance) and her distinctive cough, whereupon one individual (random stranger, not the singer’s mother) took it upon themselves to express their condolences and reaffirm the musicians of their mothers’ love for them. The absurdity continued while a big backdrop sounding like The Band continued during transitions in addition to a few notes from the singing-saw-player-doubled-as-a-trumpeter. Others were moved to address the plasticity of the auditorium chairs, echoing the narrative sentiment of Matthew Milia, the lead singer.

The students were let in with photo cards. While certainly, not all the youth are students, nor are all students youth, but this demonstrates one use of the public space for vetting at a free concert. Historically, a local business leader mentioned that this Michigan town offered free shows for the youth and high school students. You’ll see the old Iggy Pop and other ’70s shows in the public squares and other areas in some of the town’s pictures. In the past five years, you’ve mostly seen individual DJs scratching in front of the libraries or young upstarts churning at being pop stars in the middle square. Sometimes, there have been causes backed with musical scales. Inside and in a stacked auditorium, the venue proffered free popcorn.

The musicality of free shows rebounds with this set as well as recent gratis shows by K9 Sniffies.

This wave of the start-up craze is influenced by the nefarious, web-savvy millennials who name their companies after mid-’90s indie bands.

$25.00 for LOMO film @ the store. Scroll over clique ici on the main page for further direction to the store.

The link below displays a close up of the film. Enjoy.

LOMO Redscale XR Film

Free Kwame is not affiliated with Kommie Kilpatrick, though the band gets a nod from this publication on principle.

This site is for [editorials/ reviews/ definitions].

Michel de Certeau

Backlog

That the text, The Practice of Everyday Life, is one of his more obscure pieces and this seems puzzling. De Certeau is frequently known as an academic whose specialization is considered convoluted. But, a writer once penned that one must envision “the everyday as impenetrable” and “the impenetrable as everyday.” And so let us begin with an examination of De Certeau’s more obscure pieces, The Practice of Everyday Life (Volume II). In this book, we can demystify his writing as it enters the domestic sphere.

De Certeau makes an interesting point about how we preserve the language of food on page 20 of this aforementioned text (see quotation on right).

[If] considered from a bit on high and from afar, the everyday work of cooking seems, in the private sphere, entirely doomed to repetition, a repetition of an archaic structure, a knowledge linked to very ancient social codes, stabilized in old forms of equilibrium, that is, in an obscure and hardly rational medley of preferences, necessities, and received customs.

If you pardon the long quotation, what De Certeau is acknowledging is that society has a history, if not a penchant for gastronomy. The indexing of this field has generated its own discourse, cultural workers, and specifications. The food industry is more akin to an academic structure than the monolithic organization patterns in films such as Food, Inc. suggest.

The application, then, of this body of knowledge is that the meals we consume become part of the landscape. De Certeau and critics are valued for their emphasis on the spatial landscape. If one examines the transformation of spatiality in relation to the restaurant in one small town, one will see that every element of its production informs the mapping of the area around it.

Reviews

Two restaurants to watch this year are Mani restaurant and Jazzy Veggie. Mani restaurant has the kind of atmosphere where the receptionists are well-dressed, the space is encased within open glass areas, and the vibe is more Californian than Midwestern. It feels like you are somewhere else. This restaurant was ranked as the top choice in the local press related to its unveiling. Try any of the pasta.

Jazzy Veggie also deserves an honorable mention in terms of contributions to the local cuisine. Jazzy Veggie adopts a more minimalist approach to public life and cooking. The notables at this venue worth trying are the plantain chips, potstickers and the array of healthy, veggie meat substitutes. The presumed owner is amicable and the selection of materials reflects a host of regional interests.

In this text De Certeau later mentions that food is organized by a language based on the fundamental unit of a recipe. The culinary recipe is defined on page two hundred sixteen of this text as “a question of ‘speaking in tongues…’ saying only what is necessary without forgetting indispensable information, of describing without ambiguity by not skipping any stages, in essence of expressing without equivocation.”

De Certeau hypothesizes that the heart of such language, as mentioned above, and is recounted in a recipe. The recipe is then listed according to the standards of its own language. Lastly, a recipe manages to order instructions in a format that presents its self as lacking in vagaries. Likewise, the assemblage of independent presses flanking the doors to the restaurants speak in another language. They offer their own interpretation of the everyday.

The Man Who Knew Too Much

This scene from Hitchcock was first made in 1936, then remade almost twenty years later. The span of Hitchcock’s life can be traced visually in this piece.

Omega Man

Omega Man opens with a clip of Charlton Heston cruising down the empty streets in a city. His sandy gray hair flies in the wind, his Aviator sunglasses are on, and he whips out a machine gun while lounge music plays.

Today, I would like to briefly focus on their writing on the subject of allegory. After all, if the two writers are interested in ideas, then the substance of an idea would be its allegorical implications. The text, though substantive, tends to foray into the territory of blank verse later in the book. However, at the beginning of the text, the writing is strongly rooted in literary theory. It is at this insurrection of literature and theory that the text has the most potential for canonization within schools of literature.

In the first installment, the two theorists stress is that conceptual work relies heavily on allegorical concepts. This should be self-evident whereby the two following conditions of allegory are met:

1. “The standard features of allegory include extended metaphor, personification, parallel meanings, and narrative.” (13)

2. “Walter Benjamin, Paul de Man, and Stephen Barney identified allegory’s ‘reification’ of words and concepts, words having been given additional ontological heft as things.” (13)

This means that in order for a work to be fostered in allegory, it must have the structures of form related to an allegory. Within literature itself, allegories can be expressed through the styles mentioned in the first point. Secondly, the three authors mentioned are oft-cited as writers who implement the concept of allegory at a level of literary sophistication. In order for an allegory to be fey, it must mirror the ways that words are harnessed in the capitalist literary market.

Roll up your beach towel, put away that spray tan, and get ready for Fall 2011. We anticipate another year of human foible, stunning pitfalls of boredom, and lackluster hype. The snark of the early-aughts has peppered the rest of the media with depressing bouts of cynicism. The hipster fad has drifted to the LA side of things. Their interpretation, let me tell you, is anything but thought-provoking.

The Superficial is an e-tabloid that has witty comments, captions, and continues the endless social dissection of humanity. I skimmed through about five pages of posts until I found a picture that caught my eye: “Lindsay Lohan Hates Mena Suvari Now.” Dania Ramirez, Keith Robertson and Mena Suvari made a music video that spoofed buzz-worthy celebrities like Lady GaGa, Lindsay Lohan and Nicki Minaj.

The video, “Ass and Titties,” is what you would expect by a director like Bev Land. His screenplay for Social Misfits on IMDb employs traditional celebrity rubrics that are used for gaining an audience. The screenplay dates from the early 2000s and features a cohort of individuals. The individual construction that is used is a compilation of the current repertoire of identities available to young Americans.

The preview is unclear and not fully formated into a complex iteration of identity. There’s a certain rigidity to his characters, and granted, it dates from approximately ten years ago. The moral of the story is that social outcasts attend a boot-camp, band together under the authority, and reorganize together according to some sort of principles based on survival of the fittest. The social bond described in the screenplay is self-evident, predictable, and rudimentary. The impression I have of Bev Land is that his work is somehow unfinished, lacking in polish, and authentic on a basic level.

It’s like watching the progression of film captured throughout the duration of a director’s career. As they learn the language of their craft, the vocabulary grows more sophisticated. However, I do not understand why I am supposed to laud individuals simply for trying to exist. The concept of celebrity perpetuates the type of social inequalities that make the idea possible. The belief that individuals should be valued according to an ever-shifting scale is flummoxing.

Films that teach us about diversity by reinforcing stereotypes and commonplace social identities lack creativity. They teach us about social difference, impose order, and maintain the status quo in a fashion that is very similar to religious indoctrination. A person, essentially, acts as a mediator in an effort to impose their social will upon a crowd by influencing their opinions. Social value, or power, is accumulated by generating favorable feedback.

As with early Churches, these communities impose their social values, means of regulation, and custom upon their members. This type of social interaction may not be prized by the social elites or media outlets, but it does serve as a means of communication. No one individual is somehow predominately superior to another.

They might have merely had more resources, which is why I don’t understand the popularity of “Ass and Titties” or the “Lindsay Lohan Hates Mena Suvari Now” phenomena. Lindsay Lohan achieves popularity in the press by virtue of what are deemed her average looks in comparison to the rest of society. This, however, is not a new conversation. As long as celebrities have existed, people have questioned the role of the female celebrity. For instance, many of the comments in the thread on The Superficial are merely people chastising Lohan on her appearance.

On one hand, Lohan is Othered by some as a celebrity according to the industry beauty standards, the way she is treated in the press, and her personal appearance. In contradiction, Lohan is worshiped by others as an example of nontraditional beauty. Her life decisions, like what is seen in the press, form the threads of a classic American morality tale.

You are offered a host of potential identities within a restricted means. Socialization is a process that does not necessarily follow rationality. But, what strikes me about the “Ass and Titties” video is how boring I find this entire process. When people are denied equal stature in society, the entire society suffers in the accumulation of stagnation.

For instance, I’m supposed to watch a video that Celebrity Group A makes about Celebrity Group B merely because they are competing for the same status for the purpose of monetary gain. I am expected to remark that Celebrity Group B is somehow superior to Celebrity Group A. Celebrity Group B is superior based on the fact that they are challenging Group A and urging innovation. It’s not that I don’t appreciate a person’s life craft. It’s that I would constantly be anticipating a Group C.

One of the biggest current voices in the contemporary art world is Jan Hoet, an artist who is prominent in the Berlin scene. He completed his schoolwork at the Academy of Fine Arts (Ghent), then went on to study archeology at Ghent University. He then worked as a professor at Westhoek Academy.

Following this, he was the art director at MARTa Hereford, then an independent curator. The coolest thing Jan did was organize a show in Ghent where the 70 residents opened their homes to have art happenings. He has worked with Amine Haase and was a speaker at this 2009 event, Alte Hasen (Old Hands).

The work at Alte Hasen, particularly this owl, looks textured and has multi-faceted grooves. The owl’s eyes and forefront bore into the spectator. The style is traditionally timeless.

Today, Pensacola artist Dredhead (aka Marcus Ray Walker) dropped the single “I Got So Much Girlz.” In the vid, he is chilling at his house and talking about girls. We see clips of a boy and a girl talking, sometimes. It looks like a younger version of Dredhead replete with bright red headphones.

Walker has been making music for a long time. According to his bio, Walker originally wanted to skateboard, but decided to run with rapping, instead. His beats are laced with tinges of a southern accent. He has long, thick dreds but sports glasses, sometimes. His graphic design on his Youtube site is filled with deep forest green hues. He learned to rap from his father, Marcus Ray Walker Sr.

His bio says that as a child he used to hate the doctor, “so he would try to be a hero and beat them up.” So, he started calling him little proctor, giving him the nickname Dr. Proctor. It kind of reminds me of Dr. Octagon. If he doesn’t become a rapper, he plans on going to art school and studying record productions.

As his bio says, “Will he get signed and take on a major rapping career that his father never got to accomplish? only the future will tell… until then we will leave dat for u to see and find out… ..”

We’ll see.