bullfight / where you're at: notes from the frontline of a hip-hop planet

[August 4th, 2004]

^bullfight

Various authors

(Bullfight Media, 126 pages, $8)

Bullfight's Lisa Ko, Ryan Boudinot, Roderick Maclean and Kevin Sampsell appear Saturday, Aug. 7, at Urban Grind Coffee House, 2214 NE Oregon St. 8 pm.

The first issue of Bullfight, a new literary magazine out of California, may at times resemble a good high-school zine, but there are several gems among the otherwise ho-hum short stories, plays, collages, interviews and other works primarily by West Coast authors.

One such standout, Seattleite Ryan Boudinot's story "Written by Machines," concerns a computer nerd who works at Microsoft on special projects and stumbles upon a weird code in a linguistic translator program. He ends up finding out this seemingly random madman code is an incomplete computer program that writes poetry created by a zany, wild ex-employee who is dying of cancer.

Others include "How It Was that I Once Got Suspended for Saying Fuck in Front of a School Assembly" a funny anecdote about just that by Karen Ashburner, and Tom Bissell's "Animals in Our Lives," an odd romantic story that takes place in a zoo between two star-crossed lovers who are trying to make their relationship work.

"Collapse," by local boy Kevin Sampsell, is a demented tale about a guy who struggles with his love for birds while caring for a young mother who is dying. "Harelip and Sputnik," by Dennis Diclaudio, is a play about a couple on a date. The female character is obsessed with her hairy lip to intense extremes. The male character is tortured by issues arising from having been held captive in bubbles and space suits for all of his adolescence so he wouldn't breathe impurities in the air, only to find out doctors had mixed up his medical files with someone else's. Dana Halverson

^where you're at: notes from the frontline of a hip-hop planet

By Patrick Neate

(Riverhead, 274 pages, $14)

Several years ago British novelist Patrick Neate found himself in a Tokyo hip-hop club called Harlem. African men pretending to be black Americans danced with Japanese girls who'd tanned their skin near black and wore their hair in dreads. It sounds like an unusual scene, but as Neate reveals in his lively travelogue, Where You're At, hip-hop culture is global now and has a million different manifestations.

A hip-hop "head" since his early teens, Neate sallies forth to see how these scenes play out the hip-hop mission. He travels to Johannesburg, New York, Cape Town, and Rio, talking to emcees named Herb and bopping his head to South African bubblegum (early '90s disco pop). Along the way he drops references to everyone from Foucault to the Fugees.

Like any expert in a marginalized genre that's gone mainstream, Neate can be tedious. He's forever clocking how five minutes ago a scene is, or else measuring its purity with a gemologist's precision. Still, he has the sense to laugh at this urge--and occasionally he pries his head open to allow a new scene its singular viability. In Tokyo, for example, he comes down hard on that city's bizarre mimicry of American hip-hop. After a few days, though, Neate realizes the Japanese simply interpret hip-hop culture differently than he does.

By the end of this vivid and amusing book, Neate has learned how to embrace this multiplicity. He understands, finally, that the music is going to sound different, depending on where you're at. John Freeman