I met Gil Scott-Heron at S.O.B.’s, where he played one of his gigs with Brian Jackson. They performed their legendary songs, as if time hadn't past. Prison and addiction had left obvious traces on his face, but his energy was still there. It wasn't just the music though. His old lyrics sounded scarily fresh and up-to-date. I asked him, what he thought about the fact that most of his words from decades ago seem to be still valid (or valid again). Being above mundane journalist questions, he just shrugged his shoulders in agreement and kept on eating his take-out dinner of burger and fries.
But you don’t even have to replace that many names and numbers in his song about the "B-Movie" Reagan administration. Are we just living the groundhog years? The conservative desire to turn back the clock to sometime in the 19th century sure's still the same. That's why even Johnny „Guitar“ Watson’s lamentations about political corruption and middle class decline sound rather current.
Right on! This was the pessimist spin on the new year. Positive one coming up....
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Watch Gil Scott-Heron perform"The Bottle"
When Mayor Bloomberg was still just a billionaire, one of his famous quotes was: "Always pick a fight with someone smaller than you.” So it’s even more deserved that he got cornered by a feisty immigrant from Trinidad. Union leader Roger Toussaint started his fighting stance early. Born one of nine children raised by a single mother in the slums of Trinidad, he was politically active by the age of 11. He was expelled and arrested for writing political slogans like “Free Education Means Free Books” on the walls of his high school. He also joined the movement against the neo-colonialist Brits who were still running the oil-rich island nation of Trinidad and Tobago. When he came to New York he started as a shipbuilder in the Brooklyn Navy Yards. After the Yards closed he worked for the MTA first as a cleaner, then as a track worker, while getting himself through Brooklyn College. In 1998 the MTA fired him for doing union work on company time, but he sued and got his job back. There are a lot of people who don’t like him, because he has expressed to not only fight for his rank and file, but also against the nationwide trend to roll back benefits. Other unions supposedly have watched the transit strike closely.
New York braces itself for a subway strike, which would severely cripple the city. As usual it’s hard to decide between being annoyed about the disruptions of daily routines and old-fashioned liberal glee, that the brave workers of the Manhattan Transit Authority stick it to the man, who in this case is our arrogant billionaire mayor who’s shilling out triple digit million dollar favors to his cronies,while reducing social services and squeezing city employees.
It makes sense then that tomorrow New York might be turned into a Third World megalopolis with the citywide fleet of cabs and liveries being allowed to function like bush taxis, picking up as many passenegers as possible and driving them to their destinations one after the other. That of course has already been the praxis in Brooklyn and Queens for years, with mini-buses servicing all those immigrant communities, where public transportation is sparse.
So we might be stuck in Brooklyn. Tomorrow night we were supposed to go to a fight in the Bronx, which won’t happen in the case of a transit strike. Although this would be the almost exact reverse route the mighty Warriors took in the movie by the same name that’s having a major renaissance with the video game that just came out and Tony Scott shooting a remake. So here's to our glorious borough and vanishing point of the Warrior’s New York odyssey with Roy Ayers' hymn and three Brooklyn bands from around that time (I actually saw Mandrill playing Fort Greene Park a few years back, still razor sharp...).
It’s always fun to get tapped for a list of favorites, since it’s a good way to indulge in a bit of vanity and make yourself sparkle with the help of a few well-chosen cultural coordinates. Hey – most blogs are basically random lists of current faves. Listing your 30 all-time favorite films for a European underground magazine for cinéastes is a challenge of course. You don't want to be too pretentious, can't be too pedestrian. Somehow I ended up listing mostly American films from the 70s and the last five years. Plus a few 60s French films.
"Tirez sur le pianiste" (“Shoot the Piano Player“) was on my list. The signature tune is one of those melodies you'll never ever get out of your head again. Same goes for French jazz piano player Martial Solal’s soundtrack to Godard’s „À bout de souffle“ (Breahtless"). Which is probably the ultimate slacker film - somehow 60s Nouvelle Vague managed to way outcool Hollywood cool on it's own turf. Belmondo using his legendary thumb swipe across the lips to put some sensuality into his Humphrey Bogart idolization. Bogart and Seberg hanging out in her appartment talking forever about seemingly nothing, foreshadowing Tarantino dialogues by 30 years.
One of the best French films ever couldn't make the list though. Mainly because it’s barely ten minutes long. It’s Claude Lelouch’s "Cétait un rendez-vous“, which he shot in one single take one early morning in the summer of '76. There are a lot of legends and myths about the film. Supposedly Lelouch had one roll of film left over from his shoot of "Si c'était à refaire" ("Second Chance“), which he used for a bet. He said he could make the roughly six and a half miles from Boulevard Periphérique to Montmartre in under ten minutes.
So he strapped a camera on his new Ferrari 275 GTB and hit the gas with a admirable disregard for red lights and personal safety. At some strategic intersection he had look-outs posted with walkie-talkies, but mostly he just went for it. He made it in 7:57, just in time for the climactic Montmarte bells ringing in 6:00 AM. After the first screening Lelouch was supposedly arrested, although some sources say that he just got a ticket, that was later revoked by the mayor of Paris himself. There is some debate now, if it was really a Ferrari or a Le Mans Matra 67, an Alpine A110 or even a motorcycle with overdubbed Ferrari sounds. 
I recently watched the documentary "Maestro", which tells the story of the legendary New York nightclub Paradise Garage that opened in SoHo in 1976. The Garage was the place where Larry Levan (pictured below) was laying the fundations of DJ Culture, anticipating House, Techno and the vast jungle of genres created by turntablists around the world. According to the film it was him who created the first continuous breakbeats by mixing two copies of the same record. There isn't much footage from the Garage and it’s predecessors like Gallery, Sanctuary or David Mancuso’s Loft, but it's enough to take you back. Paradise Garage was still open when I came to New York for the very first time. Danceteria, Limelight and Area might have been familiar territory coming from Europe, but nothing prepared me for the borderline mass hysteria on the dancefloor of Paradise Garage.
Fellow Paradise Garage veteran Frankie Knuckles created this type of dancefloor ecstasy later at the '86 Tempo party in Munich and at the Music Factory on the Westside. This would be the moment to start complaining about the current state of New York nightlife, with the Daytona Beach style Meatpacking District and all those bland clubs like Lotus, Marquee and Bungalow 8 filled with „Apprentice“ types shilling out $ 300.- for bottle service to impress their anemic dates. On the other hand this seems to be nothing new.
Not according to Ms. Gladys Knight, who described the feverish ambitions of New York nightlifers already a quarter century ago in her version of the Ashford & Simpson instrumental "Bourgie Bourgie" (which used to be one of Levan's staple songs at the Garage). I also might be a bit too distracted to find out where the real places are. Although - David Mancuso supposedly throws Loft parties again. That of course would be more than worth the effort.
When I interviewed Anthony Swofford (the ex-Marine whose biography was made into the movie"'Jarhead") he talked about this strange nostalgia for the Vietnam War most Desert Storm grunts shared: „In a way the Vietnam War is very romanticized, there’s a somber quality to how it’s considered, because of the many deaths, and, the feeling that it was some kind of a worthless war. But it was a rock ‘n’ roll war, and there were villes outside of every encampment with whores and whiskey, and you were smoking dope, there was heroin, and it was crazy. It was a different kind of lifestyle.“ 
Contrary to Desert Storm: „Our war was very clean. We were in Saudi Arabia, we couldn’t get alcohol, couldn’t get women—it was almost as though we were being punished for all of the fun that the guys had in Vietnam. Not that the war was fun, but the extra-battlefield stuff, the whores, the drinking, the music. There was no music that came out of the Gulf War. We were listening to Jimi Hendrix and the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin.“
This time it’s not the eyes of the reporters, but of the fighting troops themselves that form our perspective. And they do have their own music now. A frontline solider named Big Neal (pictured) has started the first Baghdad based rap group called 4th25 (as in fourth quarter). They have an album out accompanied by a video clip they assembled from a wide array of taped and shot footage. Some of the original footage plus personal frontline photos can be found on their website gallery, which makes the images from Abu Ghraib look tame.
Went down to Tribeca to one of those screening parties for Robert Greenwald's "Wal-Mart - the high cost of low price". His way of distributing documentaries via house party screenings was pretty ingenious. During last years elections he did "Uncovered" and "Outfoxed" and since he could use the mobilizing muscle of the 
Anyway - even though it's not exactly a pleasure to sit through his preachy films, Greenwald manges to show a complete picture of how destructive a force Wal-Mart has become. There is no end - from destroying the communities with the ferocity of neutron bomb (a quote from one of the townspeople driven out of business by a Wal-Mart), to the below-poverty-line-wages to their import quotas making them a de facto bridgehead of the Chinese industry in the US, to dismal health, environmental and cultural politics. They seem to know - about the same time Greenwald's film had it's brief run in the theaters, Wal-Mart launched it's own documentary, that was equally propagandist. Just without the educational value and with all the corporate spin.