They created their own Kool-Aid reality REDUX, continued from p. 19
activist, and that’s okay. Remix is coming to mean different things to different people. That’s good, because it’s not just a response to corporate and copyright control. It’s a tool to express yourself, using appropriative techniques.”
BEEN THERE, USED THAT
PHOTO BY JH SOUNDS
“Remix owes a debt to people from postcolonial societies,” asserted Patrick Rosal, who had no problem acknowledging the shoulders he stood on. In fact, that’s largely what he came for. Immediately following the festival’s keynote address, “Breakbeat Poetics & the Digital Realm” had the Rutgers-based poet, essayist, DJ and academic paying tribute to DJ Kool Herc. The Jamaicanborn innovator, Rosal noted, laid the groundwork for everything from rapping to the DJ’s cut (multiple copies of a record, aligned to the same section, for use as a sort of callback chorus). “It’s the first technique of the remix,” said Rosal, who likened cutting to “a No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to pose! Kriolta Welt’s bone dry observations accompanied her boxer ’s jab” — the base line connector “Pictorial Anatomy of 007.” to all other techniques. For a chronicle of how Kool Herc’s Bronx beat-juggling that back-crackin’ move [The Suicide] of the printer, printing out the names begat everything from turntabling to that I’d ever seen.” Later, the dancer of the dead.” He recorded the printer, rapping and sampling, Rosal cited Jeff confessed that his game-over display of chopping its raw audio into single wave Chang’s 2005 tome “Can’t Stop Won’t brilliance was the product of improvisa- forms that served as percussive and Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Genera- tion, not intent (his shoe flew off, and he bass sounds over which Filipino artists tion” as required reading that will given worked it into the act). recited numbers that both individualIt was lesson learned for Rosal, who ized the victims and called attention you an education without feeling like an to this day keeps a sharp eye out for to the shocking scope of the event. Anassignment. Peppering the lecture with his own how “the art of the accident” can be other project in the works will layer a poetic raps, Rosal also spoke of the hu- used an instrument to play “the truth recording of bees from the Cloisters and man body as “the fist machine of the told slanted.” scanner sounds over young men of color Excerpts from a work in progress il- interviewing victims of police violence. remix.” For a vivid illustration, he time tripped us back to the Jersey City Boys lustrated that. In response to a politicalAlthough DJ Herc was a frequent Club, circa 1986. Locked in combat with ly motivated massacre that took place touchstone, Rosal traced his own remix a rival crew, one of his b-boys went be- while on a 2009 Fulbright Fellowship to aesthetic all the way back to dear old yond the obligatory display of poppers the Philippines, Rosal printed out a list mom and dad. “My mother constantly and windmills, to score a decisive win of the victims. As heard from the oth- used things in a way they weren’t inby executing “the slickest version of er room, he was “seized by the sounds tended to be used,” he noted, recalling
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how she produced a handful of cooked rice when he ran out of glue, which allowed his Arizona flag classroom project to get back on track. Just as successful, but the stuff of more painful memories, was his father ’s discovery that a bright orange Matchbox track could be used to “beat us in the behind.” Giving due respect to this artful use of a found object, Rosal admitted that, b-boy dance floor injuries notwithstanding, it was his best example of how “remix can be painful.”
FUNNY THINGS HAPPENED IN THE FORUM
Electronic beats gave way to comedic ones, when Rosal’s 11am lecture was followed by a rare daylight “Carousel” display. Curated and hosted by R. Sikoryak, the monthly traveling slide show features a revolving cast of cartoonists and artists reading from their work. This particular edition was downright loopy, while drawing a straight line between the featured authors and the festival theme. Neither the voice nor the steady hand of Sikoryak trembled with guilt, as the “Masterpiece Comics” writer/illustrator did his best uncredited Jack Mercer impression — a necessary conceit, to invoke a certain sailor man whose iconic look and voice were shamelessly cribbed to tell the story of “Popysseus” (Homer ’s “Odyssey” cast with characters from “Popeye”). “I miss me sweet Penelope,” he says in the first panel, leaving the isle of Calypso to reunite with a wife who looks very much (okay, exactly) like Olive Oyl. The long-suffering Miss Oyl was voiced by the next presenter, Kriolta Welt, whose bone dry delivery accompanied illustrations from her “Pictorial Anatomy of 007” — in which familiar scenes from James Bond films were dissected, literally, to reveal REDUX, continued on p. 23
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