like the moon
Grooming one’s social ecologies is no small task — in the real or the virtual. At least the real is bounded by the unities — you can only see so many people at once — whereas the virtual, with its asynchronous multitudes and embarrassment of data, can easily swamp a surfer. I became acutely attuned […]
Read More →i’m not above indulging in a little year-end retrospection. sorry no links or IDing info — saving things to my “random” folder is a pretty whimsical, willy-nilly affair. hope you enjoy this trip down wtf/ftw lane!
Read More →There is much that might be said about why urban Africans in the Northern Rhodesia of the late 1930s should have been so interested in ball- room dancing and formal evening wear. But the Rhodes-Livingstone anthro- pologists were right about at least one thing: when urban Africans seized so eagerly on European cultural forms, they […]
Read More →You may have seen these here before, but I’m reposting b/c — oddly enough — they’re among my favorite YouTubes of the year (and in lieu of year-end lists, which I just don’t do, a little revisiting seems ok). The first one is even appropriately seasonal. Whattayu think the greatest gift of the holidays izzzzzzz? […]
Read More →It’s that time of year again, even if the incongruously balmy weather suggests otherwise. So, this past weekend Bec & I made another set of black cakes. This time, in anticipation, we started the fruits soaking in black-strap rum and Manischewitz a couple weeks in advance. And man, did they come out sweet. To vibe […]
Read More →Pace this post (see comments for continued convo), thx to Christina — who also wonders how hip-hop’s use of East Asian imagery fits into all of this (I think it leans more toward the I-talian than the A-rab) — for pointing me to three mashup “valorizations of the gangsta” via the dancehall/Mavado’s imagination (both of […]
Read More →How did Bruce Lee ever die? (via) Is anyone feeling a little bit drunk? … Does anyone like drum and bass? (h/t)
Read More →Since last week’s zungu-fest, I’ve had my eyes peeled for similar (semi-)Swahili utterances. And whattaya know, scanning the tracklist for Taliesin’s Apricity mix (which I recommend you listen to — it was a nice soundtrack this past Wednesday, when December actually felt like April), I noticed that the jumpoff track was by a group called […]
Read More →The Best Recordings of 2008: Sasha Frere-Jones: Online Only: The New Yorker i <3 SFJ for sentences like this — "The song is rooted in the jiggling rhythms of James Brown, the motherlode for sampling producers from the eighties, and now entirely irrelevant to any rap being made in New York, Atlanta, Rio, or Miami." […]
Read More →“Arab Money” may not have musical legs to stand on (remains to be seen — I think it’s still climbing up urban radio playlists), but it sure is the talk of the virtual water cooler. Most of my posts and comments on the song & its fallout have been distillations of email conversations with awesome […]
Read More →Wooster Collective: Filippo Minelli's "Contradictions" "what i want to do by writing the names of anything connected with the 2.0 life we are living in the slums of the third world is to point out the gap between the reality we still live in and the ephemeral world of technologies." (tags: art web2.0 critique graffiti […]
Read More →I first stumbled upon Aaron Bady’s blog, zunguzungu, when searching some keywords along the nationalism / imperialism axis. And though lots of his posts have provoked my imagination, from incisive readings of The Wire and The Office to shock’n’awe as modern-day lynching, it was his blog’s title — for obv reasons, if you’re familiar with […]
Read More →since fruityloopy music by multiculti youngstas has become all the rage, i figure i’m sitting on a goldmine, having run many an FL session with kids in boston and lowell, MA and, kingston, JA from 2002-04. one of my favorite students — b/c of his enthusiasm and aptitude — was a lil dude aptly named […]
Read More →how long have you had that scarf? i dunno. two months? where’d you get it? at a second-hand shop in brooklyn. do you know what it is? is it israeli? … it’s middle eastern right? … all the high school kids in brooklyn wear em.
Read More →Mediascape | A Curious Circumstance of the iPod Shuffle | by Bill Bahng Boyer cool click-thru piece by ethnoid bill boyer on the ipod & ipod shuffle & capitalism, subjectivity, etc. etc. :: "As a recovering liberal individualist who once unquestioningly subscribed to the epistemological framework posited by a Western, visually constructed notion of subjectivity, […]
Read More →Bidoun Magazine – Art & Culture from the Middle East | Twilight of the Iron Sheik | By Negar Azimi the story of the iron sheik :: 'An Iranian impersonating an Arab dressed as a Turk, he was part pirate, part djinn, all man. The WWF that Vaziri joined was in the midst of reinventing […]
Read More →would you prefer to listen while looking at an img of what may or may not be a swank Dubai livingroom? You may have heard — or at least heard about — the above, a remix of Busta’s infamous “Arab Money,” featuring Lil Wayne, Akon, Diddy, Swizz Beatz, T-Pain, & of course, Ron Browz. There […]
Read More →"Resisting, Subverting and Destroying the Apparatus of Surveillance and Control": An Interview with Mike Davis | (voices of resistance from occupied london) interview with mike davis about London, LA, and other cities at our strange moment, at times getting downright foucauldian — "So the internet gets to threaten freedom because of the way in which […]
Read More →It was due to serendipity (and size) that my hip-hop books ended up on the bottom shelf. But, boy, was that a good move.
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