By Jesse Serwer – NY Times

In the annals of college radio, few programs had a more substantial impact than The Stretch Armstrong Show, or, as it’s more commonly known, “The Stretch & Bobbito Show.” DJ Adrian “Stretch Armstrong” Bartos and Robert “Bobbito” Garcia’s hip-hop broadcast, which aired 1 to 5 a.m. Friday mornings (“Thursday nights”) on Columbia University‘s WKCR-FM from 1990 to 1998, gave Nas, the Notorious B.I.G., Jay-Z, Big Pun, DMX, and the late Big L some of their earliest exposure via in-studio freestyles recorded while all of them were still unsigned and somewhat anonymous. “That show was like a trampoline in some ways—it elevated a lot of artists that were never heard before,” explains Bronx rapper Lord Finesse, a frequent guest. “If you didn’t have a deal and you was on there and you was dope, word traveled. And if the word didn’t travel, the tape damn sure traveled.” [Read More]

Joann Jimenez presents…
¡WEPA!
Welcome to “El Barrio” Afro-House + Latin-Soul

Resident DJs / Producers:
Lou Gorbea (Omi Tutu Productions / Vega Records)  Antonio Ocasio (Tribal Winds)
Randy Montalvo on Congas
Coquito, Cigars, Dominoes, Visuals, Roof Deck

EVERY LAST FRIDAY OF THE MONTH 10PM – UNTIL EVERYONE GOES HOME!
$5 Before 11pm for Everyone
$10 After 11pm with a Flyer/Print or RSVP to: muzikbutrfly@gmail.com
$15 After 11pm with No Flyer/Print or RSVP

Bar 13 – the SECOND Floor w/roof access
121 University Place (off 13th Street – Union Square Area)
NYC, 10003

dailysession will live broadcast Wepa!

By Seth Schiesel – NY Times

You’ve Googled yourself, right?

Like it or not, there’s a digital you out there. In fact almost every aspect of your life is probably reflected in some computer somewhere. You could say that information, that data, has a life of its own. If you have anything to do with modern society, you are no longer a purely biological, analog being.

The idea that a person could be represented inside a computer both thrilled and frightened me when I first saw “Tron” in the summer of 1982, when I was 9 and just starting to get into computers. As incredible as it may seem now, my friends and I would buy magazines that published short programs in Basic code. The ones we cared about were games, and I would enter them by hand into my Commodore VIC-20. Unlike kids today, we had no ability to create films or Web sites. But we could make little games, and we did. [Read More]

By Ben Brantley – NY Times

It was almost exactly 16 years ago that I made my first visit to La MaMa in a professional capacity, as a new theater critic for The New York Times. I’d been there before as a civilian, usually under the influence. (I believe it was where I first saw a foghorn-throated drag queen named Harvey Fierstein.) But even then La MaMa had for me the whiff of another time, the patchouli scent of the 1960s, when downtown theater was longhaired, renegade and rude.

I wasn’t around for that heady heyday of La MaMa, the willful, playful brainchild of Ellen Stewart, who died on Thursday. Yet what I saw in the East Village theater that January night in 1994 turned out to be not only absolutely of the moment but also of the future. It was a rough-hewn, rowdy, dirty little play called“Stitches,” put on by a brother-and-sister team that presumptuously called itself the Talent Family. Their real names? David and Amy Sedaris. [Read More]

By Andy Beta – The Village Voice

William T. Burnett, a bespectacled thirtysomething with parted blond hair and a shoulder slouch befitting a drummer, pushes a handcart stacked four boxes high with vinyl records toward the back of the Thing, the monstrous Manhattan Avenue thrift store where he works part-time, dumping them in a corner already overloaded with such stacks and heading out to grab another load. Burnett is a busy man: He releases idiosyncratic analog dance music under names like Grackle, Speculator, and Galaxy Toobin’; DJs on Internet station Newtown Radio; and runs the Pentatonic Guitars shop in Greenpoint. He also operates his own record label, appropriately titled WT. Not all of these activities are making him money right now.

“Right now, I think I am a couple thousand in debt,” Burnett estimates of his label endeavor, in a drawl reflecting his South Texas upbringing. “But one day I will get back to even.” Lucrative business plan or not, like many local DJs and dance-music producers in New York City, he opted to release the music of friends and acquaintances, and in turn get them to release his own productions, rather than waiting for someone else to do it all for them. [Read More]

By Roberta Smith – NY Times

WHEN I walk through the Museum of Modern Art these days, it sometimes feels as if the place has come back from the dead — even if I’m not always so crazy about the life it happens to be leading. There’s often a confusing, disjunctive quality to it, especially where contemporary art is concerned, as the museum’s programming lurches from crowd-drawing, performance-art spectacles in the atrium to relatively dry and didactic exhibitions in its galleries. But at least there’s a pulse.

The museum feels much, much more animated than it did back in 2005 and ’06, when it — and we — were first adjusting to its slick new home on West 53rd Street. That structure, designed by Yoshio Taniguchi and built at a cost of $425 million, opened in November 2004, and over the next two years it appeared to many depressed MoMA watchers that we were witnessing nothing less than a major museum’s suicide by architecture. [Read More]

By Larry Pohter – NY Times

The Library of Congress has begun taking possession of a huge donation of recordings, some 200,000 metal, glass and lacquer master discs from the period 1926 to 1948 that have been languishing in the subterranean vaults of Universal Music Group, the largest music conglomerate in the United States.

The bequest, which is to be formally announced on Monday, contains music representing every major genre of American popular song of that era — jazz, blues, country and the smooth pop of the pre-rock-’n’-roll period — as well as some light classical and spoken-word selections. One historic highlight is the master recording of Bing Crosby’s 1947 version of “White Christmas,” which according to Guinness World Records is the best-selling single of all time. [Read More]