• The Elephants Child: SeneRap, Rap Galsene : Hip Hop SeneGal
  rachel makes an interesting point about parallel discussions happening in other places on the network — "It's really fun when I find discussions in the comments on various African music sites engaging similar questions as the folks at wayneandwax.com and dutty artz." :: this needn't be an elitist convo, no? should i learn french then? (but of course!)
  (tags: blogpost blogosphere debate senegal hip-hop messageboard video)
• :: Exhibitions and Artists – Corona Plaza: Center of Everywhere v.2
  new yorkers! — don't miss miguel luciano's latest, "pimp my piragua," at corono plaza :: "Pimp my Piragua is a multi-media, mobile public art work that combines tropical nostalgia and urban fantasies in a hyper-modified street vendor’s pushcart. Piraguas are cups of shaved ice dowsed in tropical flavors that you can buy from push carts on hot summer days. They are nostalgic symbols of the tropics, recreated by transplanted Latino communities throughout New York. In Pimp my Piragua, a humble pushcart gets remade into a lowrider fantasy-mobile that commemorates the innovations of Latino street vendors while questioning materialist fantasies of attainment."
  (tags: newyork puertorican culture art critique exhibit)
• Theoria › Arendt on Hobbes
  "The Commonwealth is based on the delegation of power, and not of rights. It acquires a monopoly on killing and provides in exchange a conditional guarantee against being killed. Security is provided by the law, which is a direct emanation from the power monopoly of the state (and is not established by man according to human standards of right and wrong). And as this law flows directly from absolute power, it represents absolute necessity in the eyes of the individual who lives under it. In regard to the law of the state – that is, the accumulated power of society as monopolized by the state – there is no question of right or wrong, but only absolute obedience, the blind conformism of bourgeois society."
  (tags: politics philosophy theory critique nation violence)
• Music – The Record Producer Stephen McGregor Is a Reggae Veteran at 18 – NYTimes.com
  the newyorktimes finally gets up-to-the-times and offers a profile of "di genius" stephen mcgregor :: the article does little to illuminate what makes his sound distinctive, and misuses the term "juggling," but good to see the grey goose with an ear to the ground
  (tags: dancehall reggae production digenius jamaica nyt)

videyoga :: (h/t ripley :: spot-on bulgarian ragga riff :: rapidfire cliches, anti-gay 4 authenticitay)