WEB ISSUE No. 20

	Feature
	Interview
	Filler
	Sounds
	Gallery
	Livre

PODCAST 14

MUSIC REVIEWS

EARTH MADE OF GLASS

Earth Made Of Glass opens with Jean Pierre Sagahutu, a Rwandan Tutsi, explaining how he survived the genocide by hiding in a Kigali septic tank for more than three months, subsisting on two or three smuggled meals a week. Now, fifteen years later, he is an affable, middle class resident of Kigali with a wife and four young children. But, like Rwanda itself, the ghosts of the gibbering ghosts of genocide still lurk behind this façade of normalcy. Jean Pierre’s entire family was murdered in the countryside, in the same town where his father had worked as a doctor for many, many years, treating some of the same people who would later take his life, and that of his wife and all but one of his children. More...

HEIST MOVIE

"I had the brew, she had the chronic the Lakers beat the SuperSonics"
- Ice Cube in "It Was A Good Day"

When Ice Cube dropped one of the greatest rap songs of all time in 1993, hoops fans in Seattle always skipped over those lyrics, only because Cube had the Sonics losing to our hated Pacific Division rivals in Los Angeles. Sonics vs. Lakers was as heated a rivalry as existed in any pro sport, and we couldn’t stand to be on the losing end of the rhyme or the game. More...

COUNTING THE MINUTES

There is something electric in the relationship between France and America. Perhaps it began in the lifeline France threw those rebellious colonists during the Revolutionary War. It certainly was in effect after in the early 20th Century, when African-Americans fled the stifling racism of their home to breathe freely for the first time in Paris. Fast-forward a couple decades and America is liberating France from the Nazis, keep going and Paris is handing us the deed and title to a nasty little guerilla war in a place called Vietnam. More...

VALLEY OF THE DOLLS

Oriana Small AKA Ashley Blue became famous in the early 2000’s, at least in part because of her unbridled enthusiasm and willingness to do the sort of extreme sex scenes that catapulted “gonzo” porn from obscurity to cash cow. By 2004, Small was under contract with one of the genre’s biggest companies, JM Productions. She soon began directing and starring in her own series, Girlvert and her memoir borrows that title while unraveling exactly how she went from an 18 year old who knew nothing about the industry to drug-addled star, replete with suitcase pimp boyfriend and wrecked luxury cars, and made it back out the other side. More...

SOFT EYES

I saw Mississippi Damned on a whim. Flipping through my On Demand options on a weekday night, I ended up choosing it over something like Eichmann, because I was in the mood for a serious film but not something I where I already knew the whole story. By the time the credits rolled 120 minutes later, I was blown away. Rare is the film this sad, this visceral; equal parts subtle and unsparing. More...

A THOUSAND WORDS

Despite the fact that comics are often discusses in literary terms, as “books” and graphic “novels”, it may be more accurate to describe the genre as existing somewhere between film and literature. An oddly framed type of silent film, perhaps, still images and written words allow the comic book a unique form of narrative that far too often is squandered on serial banality. More...

FIRE IN THE HOLE

Alchemy: The pursuit of a means by which to transform the most humble of materials into pure gold -- a philosophy somewhere in the no man’s land between magic and science. What better way to describe the art of glassblowing, with its furnaces, rods and tubes, than using a form of alchemy? From base sand and primordial fire, the glassblower conjures something that is neither; heavy and thick or delicate as gossamer, practical vessel or ephemeral art. With blown glass, the possibilities are endless. More...

THE HANDS OF DOOM

When you are mining the darkest corners of underground music on a regular basis, you are occasionally going to find something awesome that no one seems to know much about. If you are a music writer, you now have two choices, wait for further information to come out or write about it and admit your own ignorance. I am going to go ahead and run with the latter; Death Grips is either a band, an electronica side-project, a rap group, or a band with a rapper in it. You tell me. Their music may have a genre, but if so, I do not know what it is. More...

NO IDEA’S ORIGINAL

To say we at COOL’EH were apprehensive when we heard about Detroit rapper Elzhi ‘s decision to “re-interpolate” Nas’ 1994 debut Illmatic would be an understatement. This was nothing against Elzhi in particular, but it seemed like a bad idea on multiple fronts and sparked multiple points of debate, not the least of which was “does he have the chops?” After all this is about as close as you can get to a Holy Grail of the genre, an album generally accepted to be the best hip-hop record of all time. A perfect storm of chance and history, whereby a virtually unknown rap savant brimming with hunger and talent is mentored by legends, then turned loose over beats by a Hall of Fame roster of producers, each at the height of their craft. More…

POOP JOKES: FOR HER

Spring is here; good-bye to winter coats and telling ourselves mashed potatoes count as vegetables, hello to sucking in our stomach fat and watching movies that can make both men and the monkeys they evolved from laugh. The new season reminds me that I don't need snow shoes to ride the subway and every movie made doesn't have to be about a stuffy English king who mumbles or about some broke boxer with an accent who's trying to do right by his family but keeps accidentally smoking crack. As I hide my winter scarves and hats in some place I'm sure never to find them again, I feel like saying "Hey Harvey Weinstein! Sometimes I wanna see a movie with a Natasha Bedingfield song in it and yell 'Life is awesome and so is that horrible Natasha Bedingfield song!"

Then I get to theater and tragedy strikes.

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FOOTWORK KING RASHAD HITS EUROPE

FWD is known as the dim East End basement that for the last ten years has incubated UK urban music’s darker and more experimental side. Some argue that it has been the single most important site of UK Garage’s mutation into Grime, Funky and Dubstep. Chicago based DJ Rashad’s set here is the first time Juke and Footwork have been showcased, a genre at once alien to London music and totally at home with its intense vibe heavy sub bass and syncopated rhythmic energy. More…

1999: A RAP VIDEO ODYSSEY

Pre-YouTube, I was one of the many who recorded start-stop VHS tapes of all the video premieres to make sure I could preserve my favorite videos for years to come. With the music video being an art-form that developed from the need for another album promotional tool, after each videos three or four month rotation it was unlikely you would see it again anytime soon. This is quite a different reality from the perpetual permanence of the YouTube-era, so that in mind, let’s revisit the year that changed rap videos: 1999. More…

NICENESS IN THE '90S

In January of 1992 Nirvana was the talk of the free world. Just four months earlier a club owner in Hollywood didn’t know who they were. Their meteoric rise happened right in front of our fact, too. That was the thing. We all saw it happen. The success of Nevermind changed things- expectations mostly. No one I knew seemed more excited about it than John Connors. More...

HOLLIS BROWN THORNTON : www.hollisbrownthornton.com

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RIDER GIRL - BLAQSTARR

Podcast 14 : Teleseen (Free Download) More...