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... In fact, several artists, promoters, and club owners who spoke to the Express in recent months described two different approaches to nightlife oversight in Oakland. They say genres besides hip-hop seldom if ever receive police scrutiny, while rap — one of the Town’s most prized cultural exports — is subjected to burdensome, costly regulations that critics call discriminatory.

Oakland rappers aside from Philthy, including Birch Boy Barie and Project Poppa, even have the impression that they’re banned from performing in their home city — a prospect that alarms civil-rights advocates.

Ultimately, a band is a group of people with a common taste in songs, and maybe a song is just a way to get a bunch of instruments laughing at the system.

Dan Stewart, Straightjacket Nation

Rank/Xerox’s few releases from 2009-2011 remain secret handshakes in the Bay Area, revered even by younger local artists who might’ve never gotten to see the band perform. M.Y.T.H. proves the adulation is deserved: it’s full of quivering coos, chugging swagger, gurgling synths, and a sense of foggy vertigo. “Zero Hour,” with its hurried patter and cascading chords, matches the manic pitch of those earliest recordings; vocalist David West sputters like it’s all he can do not to retch. [More.]

#rank/xerox

Machine Response, Career Suicide’s first release since 2008 (aside from a prelude EP of the same name that appeared late last year), shows the rewards of their craftsman-like commitment to a familiar form—hardcore not as a template to expand, or as a style to flee, but as a sort of aspirational ideal. ... [T]hough the album careens in expected ways, its delight is akin to watching the staged implosion of a skyscraper: spectacular for its expenditure of energy in the service of wreckage, and no less impressive for occurring right on schedule. [More.]

#career suicide

In early 1979, photographer Jim Jocoy attended an auction at the Peoples Temple in San Francisco. More than 900 of its worshipers had died in a mass suicide-murder which came to be known as the Jonestown massacre, led to their deaths by activist-turned-doomsday cultist Jim Jones. When Jocoy saw some of the followers’ left-behind luggage, he saw a symbol of Jones’ “hollow, empty promise”, and took a picture. “Jonestown, the assassinations – they worked into the fabric of San Francisco, and unraveled its tapestry,” Jocoy says. “It was quite gloomy, that summer of hate, and punk was the soundtrack.” [More.]

Preening Plaza Demo full cassette album Oakland CA 2017 Alejandra Alcala Sam Lefebvre Max Nordile recorded by Jasper Leach at the Salt Lick preeningoakland.c...

#preening #oakland

DOWNLOAD FEBRUARY DEGENERATE DIGEST HERE OR COP FREE AT SYMPATHETIC RETAILERS

#DEGENERATE DIGEST

Arts Advocacy After Ghost Ship: Mutual Aid and Brazen Ignorance

Oakland’s unsanctioned arts venues and homes use secrecy for security and cultural cachet. The trouble, longtime activists observe, is that the insularity instills a sort of cultural myopia: suddenly spotlighted and embattled this past month, many warehouse-dwelling artists neglect to recognize the struggles for housing and creative expression that precede and surround them.

The disaster and its ongoing aftershocks (selective city code-compliance crackdowns and landlord panic or opportunism) spurred a countervailing avalanche of mutual-aid among warehouse residents and sympathizers, including loud demands for legislative relief. But none of the fundraisers this writer found — cumulatively, over $1.5 million dollars in relief funds — explicitly support those businesses neighboring Ghost Ship, which sit smoke-damaged and shuttered by inspectors from the City of Oakland.

Which begs the question: Will the people surrounding the warehouse residences and venues in Oakland’s flatlands — largely low-income people of color disproportionately displaced and subjected to substandard shelter at least since the Black Panthers demanded fair housing in 1966 — benefit from the wellspring of financial support and political will?

My latest on the fire, for SFMOMA’s Open Space. Photo: Elizabeth Holzer.

#ghost ship

A December and January double-issue of Degenerate Digest is out now, featuring artwork by Erin Allen and writings about this garbage, nightmarish Oakland reality in the wake of the fire.

Available for free at the usual local retailers and right here as a PDF.

#degenerate digest

Some of the writings I’m most proud of this year aren’t discrete, linkable articles. They’re projects such as Degenerate Digest, the monthly Oakland events calendar and political column, essays exclusive to other self-published fanzines and tracts, and a monthly reviews column, Terminal Consumption. (The list below also excludes print-only contributions to The Wire and Pitchfork Review.) Caveats aside, below are some of the most maddening and/or fun stories I reported and wrote this year.

1. Fanzines in Vitrines (Open Space) 2. Waking the Spirit of a Disco Innovator (New York Times) 3. After Ghost Ship Fire, Oakland DIY Grapples With a Broken System (Pitchfork) 4. Fifty Years of Limitless Possibility at the Center for Contemporary Music (KQED) 5. Gag, America’s Greatest Hits (Pitchfork) 6. Broken Windows Reveal a Revolutionary Horizon in Joshua Clover’s Riot Strike Riot (East Bay Express) 7. Insurrection - the Board Game? Bloc By Bloc Brings Uprising to Your Living Room (Guardian) 8. Light Field, a New Experimental Film Festival, Promises Conical Visions in a Cave (East Bay Express) 9. The Sound of Broken Rope, David Vassalotti’s Disappearing Act (Impose) 10. Wrecking the Patriarchy with Oakland Reggaetón Duo Las Sucias (KQED)

On the year-end note, here’s my favorite Bay Area releases of 2016 -- still the only list I get really worked up about.

Aerial photos of the Oakland warehouse venue where dozens perished in a fire over the weekend resemble a rib cage parted and relieved of its heart.

“Drained late last century by declining tax-revenue and selective civic neglect, Oakland boasts a constellation of seemingly derelict warehouses, storefronts, and churches. Within many of their shabby exteriors, however, are places of creative invention and possibility. These homes and venues—known by cryptic names rarely recorded in the press—cradle scenes that slip between categories; they’re where as-yet-unnamed subcultures gestate. For non-conforming bodies harassed and abused at other clubs, they’re sanctuaries.”

Me and Max and Alejandra have a new band, Preening.

#preening

T E R M I N A L C O N S U M P T I O N

Plenty of hardcore bands ladle fetid muck atop undercooked riffs and in turn receive undeserved accolades for supposed noisy ingenuity (sometimes, admittedly, here in this very column). But the feral drubbing of The Lowest Form on Personal Space actually involves an impressive variety of squalid guitar tone and added din. This listener was reminded of the sound of glass trampled underfoot and, at the end of the title track, maybe a trash compactor.

Excerpted above is a bit on the latest by Lowest Form, reviewed alongside records by Es, Mommy, Baus, and Mosquito in a new installment of Terminal Consumption.

#terminal consumption

Preening, my new band with Max (saxophone/vocals) and Alejandra (bass/vocals), has gigs. Flyer-less, for now, is another one with Baus and co., 12/30. The other day we recorded an eight-song demo in about two-and-a-half hours. Someone wants to release it in an edition of twenty-five cassettes. It will likely run approximately fifteen minutes.

CONICAL VISIONS

Late one recent weeknight, four local filmmakers connected a fog machine and a 16mm projector to a portable power generator at the mouth of a cave. It was pitch-black except for the dim luminescence of an LED headlamp — until the projector, loaded with a film loop, beamed scratchy circles down the shaft, mist and smoke flickering in the conical field of light.

The filmmakers stood transfixed — gazing from within the cave towards the lens for nearly an hour, murmuring their delight — and eventually one of them said, "I think we're in a portal." ...

There’s a new film festival in town, Light Field.

T E R M I N A L C O N S U M P T I O N

New column covers records by Private Room (excerpted below), Nopes, Worse, and Latishia’s Skull Drawing.

“Desktop Stain” outlines that insidious hallmark of late capitalism, the eroding divide between work and play. I especially like the song’s nod to the quiet terror of workplace “mindfulness,” a very contemporary West Coast flourish: “This time it’s spiritual / the bosses, they smile.” Condemning careerism often feels too general and rote, but “Desktop Stain” warily eyes a specific contradiction: modern offices outfitted with “wellness” fixtures like kombucha taps and yoga mats at a time when wages sag, hours drag, and employment is precarious. Remember, “perks” are about productivity; why leave “campus” when laundry is onsite? Like the album art, it evokes the adaptability of exploitation.

Sam Lefebebvre, In the last couple of months I've been steered to the article you wrote, "Estranged Son Of North Beach," and it appears that you certainly captured the spirit of the time and of subject (3rd person myself). Could we have permission to re post the article on Facebook page, "Destry Hampton & The Wolves From Hell," which has appeared as water flowing through a Viaduct. Let me know, Destry Hampton, Gregory Burke:.

Hey Gregory, sure! Send me a link when you do. It was also published in Maximum Rocknroll. I could help you pick up a copy of the issue if you’d like. You should have my contact. For reference: http://degenerateephemera.tumblr.com/post/137633315794/estranged-son-of-north-beach-destry-hampton

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