Dual DMC DJ battles will take place this Memorial Day weekend at the Uptown club in downtown Oakland where, on Sunday, May 26th from 6pm to midnight, both the 2019 DMC Bay Area Regional DJ battle and the national 2019 DMC US Scratch Finals are scheduled to take place. In addition to these two anticipated turntable showdowns, to be hosted by MC of the night BAS One, there;ll also be showcase sets by DJ Quest, DJ Teeko and DJ Shortkut.

Speaking of Shortkut note that the widely revered Beat Junkies and Inviisibl Skratch Piklz member, who is pictured left at Amoeba Berkeley during his Record  Store Day in-store performance last month with his daughter in tow, boasts a back catalog that includes the recommended battle break/DJ tool Mini Wheels 7" single.

In addition to Short, Quest and Teeko's short but intense six minute turntable sets, another celebrated Bay Area turntablist DJ Traps (pictured above left in flyer) will do a much longer, extended party-rocking set for the Memorial Day holiday weekend crowd Sunday who don't have worry about work the next day.
For Sunday's 2019 US Scratch Finals the contestants will include DJ E Money (Boise, ID), Platinum Floyd (Wheat Ridge, CO), DJ Xcaliba (Stockton, CA), The Beat Molester (Seattle, WA), and (previous US DMC Scratch Champion) DJ PROLIFIX from Los Angeles.

                                                                                                                                                #MoviesMusic

Jamaican derived ska music’s second wave and third waves are each the subjects of a double-feature in the upcoming two-week long  2019 SF DOCFEST with the June 9th screenings of Dance Craze: The Best of British Ska...Live! and Pick it Up! Ska in the 90s at San Francisco's Roxie. As such they are among several music history themed documentaries scheduled for the 18th annual San Francisco Documentary Film Festival (May 29 - June 13) that also include a revisionist look at the impact of MTV in the 80’s (scroll down for details). For Bay Area movie goers, a region with historically strong ties to ska, it likely will be the ska documentary double feature that should be of most appeal, especially considering that so many California bands including the East Bay’s Dance Hall Crashers and Fresno’s Let’s Go Bowling are among the subjects of one of the documentaries.

Ska music was born in Jamaica in the 50’s and popularized by the early 60’s with a unique sound that melded elements of calypso and Caribbean mento (Jamaican folk) along with American rhythm & blues and jazz. Among its earliest purveyors were The Skatalites who defined this since called “first wave” of ska. Their album Ska Authentic is a recommended intro to this landmark group.  It is also important to note that, like later ska wave’s links to such political movements as Rock Against Racism, the original first wave of ska was historically linked to the 1962 independence of Jamaica from Great Britain.

By Jon Longhi

Welcome to this month’s Having A Movie Moment With Jon Longhi where I review recent Blu-ray releases.

Melies Fairy Tales In Color, Blackhawk Films/Flicker Alley:
I was less than halfway through my first viewing of this when I realized it was one of my favorite things I own. Many of these films have been released many times before. I already own a couple of restored Georges Melies collections and they look good, but they don't look anything like this. To begin with, my old collections are in black & white, but this new set is in COLOR! These weren't colorized by Ted Turner, no, each and every frame of these films was hand painted. Melies was a genius who just couldn't accept the shortcomings of technology. Sure, film had just been invented and was only silent and black & white, but Melies wasn't about to let those basic facts hold him back. So he had every frame of his movies painted with gorgeous color that reminds one of the French postcards that were contemporaneous to Melies' films. The director had fantastic images he wanted to show so he developed a variety of special effects to show them. Double exposures, substitution splices, time-lapse photography... Melies developed and did whatever it took to make his visions real and the results are just as jaw dropping now as they were a hundred and twenty years ago.

The films are surreal, complex, and fantastic, they create a unique world of magic and wonder. This set is worth it just for the restored version of A Trip To The Moon alone. Melies' loose and fanciful adaptation of Jules Verne's classic novel has long been considered one of the cornerstones of cinema. I've seen the film many times before but this new color version is like seeing it for the first time. The hand-painted frames make the fantastic lunar world even more stunning and psychedelic. But A Trip To The Moon is just one of thirteen films on this set, and others like The Kingdom Of The Fairies and The Impossible Voyage are equally surreal and amazing. There are scenes on this disc that you will find yourself watching over and over because the images are just so timeless and cool. The person who painted Melies' sets is one of the best painters I've ever seen. I kept freeze-framing the films just to stop and soak up the amazing details of his painted backdrops. Labyrinthine cities, dense tangled forests, haunted medieval towns -- his details were just spectacular. The hand-painted colors add another whole dimension to the films. Often they are more than just coloring and actually react to the action occurring on screen. Melies had an influence on every artist who came after him. At times, artists like Salvador Dali, Walt Disney, and Terry Gilliam just seem to be copying him. His influence on the surrealists especially is incalculable, but elements of his work exist throughout pop culture. Some of the most timeless images in film history are in this set. It belongs in every person's collection.

The brand new video for Madonna’s “Crave (feat Swae Lee)” from her forthcoming album Madame X, (pre-order CD & 2LP) unveiled and published to YouTube earlier today and seen above, proves that the 60 year old pop icon looks amazing, for any age! She also sounds great; albeit not really sounding exactly like her old pop singing self but rather like someone channeling the stylings of a contemporary Top 40 singer.  More importantly for the artist, who began her meteoric career back in the early 80’s but has endured a more rocky relationship with critics in recent years, today's unveiling of the catchy "Crave" both distracts and (somewhat) redeems Madonna's controversially disastrous Eurovision 2019 performance over the weekend.