My friend Joe is performing at Tonic on Saturday, July 2 as The Wind-Up Bird.  Show starts at 8 p.m., tix $10.  His shit is good, and you can read a blurb of his Mercury Lounge gig on my friend Jeeves’ blog.  From the Tonic website:

The Wind Up Bird: Drawing inspiration from 60’s composers like Terry Riley and Gyorgy Ligeti, Joseph Grimm’s works straddle the line between electroacoustic composition and experimental noise. The Wind-Up Bird has often used violin, pedal steel guitar, horns, marimba, and other instruments; but recent work uses only the singing voice as a sound source for hallucinogenic, surround-sound drone improvisations. The Wind-Up Bird has released four cd’s and toured with the likes of Lightning Bolt, Oval, Mono, etc.

I will say nothing more, other than, I remember playing slightly drunken springtime croquet with Joe et. al. in the courtyard of Jonathan Edwards back in the day.  Good.  Times.

I am not a professional critic, or even a film buff. I know what moves me, and RIZE moved me.

I saw it tonight at BAM with my friend Naoki. Naoki & I used to teach for U.S. Grant in New Haven. I remember going to an elementary school with him in the middle of the ‘hood, the ‘hood that even do-gooder Yalies dare not venture into in the broad daylight. When the fifth graders assembled in the cafeteria, I remember hearing the faint yet familiar noise of faux-Asian-language. Ya know, ching chong and all that (Naoki is also hapa). I responded by introducing us both as teachers from U.S. Grant, a fantastic summer program on the Yale campus, but told them not to worry, not all teachers from U.S. Grant were Asian.

They responded with laughter, and so the presentation began.

RIZE reminded me of that youthful innocent exuberance that so impressed me when I encountered it within the Grant kids. Here they were, with the occasional father in jail and mother smokin’ God-knows-what, but they trekked themselves to downtown New Haven every weekday in the summer for six whole weeks to take math, english, and if they were lucky, spend their afternoons ‘just chillin’ (with props given where props is due to Mr. Angel Falcon). And their teeth hung out with glee, and they worked together to practice a dance routine for the talent show, and they squealed when someone lost a braid after swimming at the Y, and they finally passed out around 1 a.m. when we took their section eight housing asses camping.

God, they were so alive, it was an irrepressible joyous force, a tidal wave of optimism and energy that swept me right up out of my solipsistic sky-is-falling depression and reminded me that yes, shit gets fucked up, but shit happens for a reason and life never hands your ass anything that you can’t handle.

RIZE in a nutshell: krumpin’ vs. clownin’, dance-offs (for all you SNL-watchin’ white folk), and finding pure joy and love in the ghetto when logic dictates that you should feel otherwise. The soundtrack made me want to get up and shake my proud-to-be-a-black-woman ass, and I thought of Rosie Perez in Do The Right Thing, using her body to communicate in a way that words could not (insert some shit about Wittgenstein here).

If you have a chance to catch it, I highly recommend it. If you get slightly nauseous watching home movies, as I do, try and sit towards the back of the theatre or just wait until it comes out on Netflix. And if you really want to watch it ANP-style, eat some green tea ice cream on your way home from BAM, sit up on your friend Naoki’s rooftop in Fort Greene overlooking the New York fuckin’ City skyline, and reflect on the people that you used to be, the person that you’ve become, and finding pure joy and love in your own life, even when logic dictates otherwise.

xoxoANP!