Skin Care Adventure

Is Michelle Obama's "Ass" Off Limits? | Critical Noir | Blogs | Vibe.com Mark Anthony Neal — 'Never before has a First Lady's body been subject to the amount of scrutiny and surveillance as is the case with Michelle Obama; she has been rhetorically poked, prodded and groped. Many would have found such a line […]

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Hugs for Tecnobrega

Tecno brega / eletro melody is back on my radar for 2 reasons — 1) Ronaldo Lemos, the Rio-based law prof who’s been hailing the genre’s open business model for years now, has just published a new book about tecno brega and its creative approach to the music biz, Tecnobrega: o Pará Reinventando o Evento […]

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Linkthink #833: Beyond a Boundary

YouTube – Roots Manuva – Again & Again “With this record I was trying to tune into that old Channel One, Studio One aesthetic.” :: roots manuva hits that ball out the park on this lead single (prod. by shyFX?!) :: rodney da realest, u done know (tags: reggae hip-hop cricket caribbean video youtube london […]

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Linkthink #328: Me So Corny

Lives and Letters: The Lion and the Mouse: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker “Stuart Little isn’t Gregor Samsa. He’s Don Quixote, turning into Holden Caulfield.” :: a wonderful little history of a wonderful little book (thx, O-dub!) (tags: book history library newyorker writing academic) colombia_04.mp3 (audio/mpeg Object) a joyful rollicking accordion cumbia via /jace […]

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linkthink#2931: On the Radio

Oxford University Press: Foundation: Joseph Schloss “Based on interviews with many of the dance’s most significant figures as well as on four years of on-the-ground research in New York City, [Joe Schloss’s] _Foundation_ offers the first serious study of b-boying…” :: go joe! this gonna be good (tags: breakdance book academic ethnomusicology hip-hop dance) Der […]

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linkthink #519292: Loosing My Mind [sic]

Shaggy feat Trix & Flix – Feel The Rush | The Heatwave Blog – dancehall reggae and bashment “la cumbia cienaguera” of samim’s “heater” fame (and a hit in its own right in south america for decades) gets yet another odd reanimation via shaggy and the euro 08 football cup :: and round and round […]

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linkthink #5489: Stimulus Packaging

Banned in the U.S.A. (Almost) – washingtonpost.com “What is so unspeakably wrong with saying that justice, secularism, tolerance and equality of citizens — rather than privileges granted on the basis of religion — should be among the values of a state?” (tags: book op-ed middleeast religion government politricks israel palestine censorship) THE VICE GUIDE TO […]

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linkthink #1593: orb-eyed nagimandavah

BOMB Magazine: Ned Sublette by Garnette Cadogan garnette interviews ned about his new orleans book :: knowledge gems dropped left&right (but mostly left, knamean) :: dig the stuff on funkiness toward the end (tags: neworleans book interview caribbean US urban culture race history cuba jazz funk) itwofs.com – chronicles of plagiarism in indian film music […]

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linkthink #3949: Performative Geometries

EBONYJET Culture Page | Dancehall and Doiley Boyz ‘I decided to take these people who are put on a platform within that dancehall space — worship of a don or a “shotta” — a bad man — and peel it down to the very feminine, beautiful men using all of the things that are within […]

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linkthink #3846: Kamikaze Narcissist

The Second Plane – Martin Amis – Book Review – New York Times “The genital theory of history may be novelistically useful, but it is analytically silly.” :: that, and other gems, in a skewering review by leon wieseltier (tags: book review nyt islam middleeast orientalism 911 writing) Guess The Country [30 PICS] – world […]

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Hip-hop Japanthropology & the End of the Jews

Recently I brought two authors to campus to share their work with my class — that’s the only connection between the two otherwise disparate topics in the title of this post. (Hope I didn’t alarm anyone by implying improbable causal relationships.) … 1. The “hip-hop Japanthropology” was c/o Ian Condry, a professor at MIT who […]

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linkthink #566858: Kurdish African Music Video

global media coverage, proportionally (via) Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business chris anderson’s latest :: on the freeconomy (tags: book business commerce free culture tech economics) Neil Gaiman – Neil Gaiman’s Journal the author discusses making (his) books available for free (tags: books blog free culture literature comics) The Charms of Wikipedia – […]

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Adventures in Anachronistic Irony #5593935

Bruce Sterling on Jules Verne’s Invasion of the Sea — Mr. Verne’s latest techno-thriller boldly confronts the menace of Islamic terrorism. He has topnotch chops in technical accuracy, with endearing dashes of broad humor and a keen eye for telling detail. Let me be the first to predict this: someday this French novelist will be […]

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linkthink #5647477

YouTube – RDC Mugen: Homer Simpson Vs. Predator Warrior bizarre mortal kombat-style face-off between homer and predator (tags: videogames predator thesimpsons humor youtube) WikipediaVision (beta) mashup tracking, in real time, anonymous edits to wikipedia via google maps (tags: mashup google web2.0 wikipedia visualization map webapp) Getting to roots of Mexican rock – CULTURE MIX – […]

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If That’s What You Mean

Mark Dery: Have you ever felt, as one of the few blacks writing SF, the pressure to write science fiction deeply inscribed with the politics of black nationalism? Samuel R. Delany: The answer there depends on what your question means. If you mean: Do I feel that, deep within my work, I’ve situated material that […]

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Book Review: Michael Veal’s Dub

As promised last week, what follows here is my review of Michael Veal’s recently published book on dub. It won’t appear in print for perhaps another year, which is a little silly and unfortunate, but that’s how it goes. I see no reason, at any rate, not to share it now that it’s written, especially […]

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Ethnomusicology Meets King Tubby Inna Barnes&Nobles

Been working on a review of ethnomusicologist Michael Veal’s recently published book on dub (it’s called Dub [BUY!]), which I will share with y’all before too long; meantime, as I jot down some excerpts, I thought I’d share some of my favorite passages — insightful thoughts and neat narratives and such. To wit, a nice […]

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Beat Research – Oct 07

As usual, DJ Flack & i&i & special guests will be conducting some weekly Beat Research over at the Enormous Room. Here’s our schedule for the month of October — Oct 1 :: Brian Coleman For anyone interested in hip-hop history Brian Coleman needs no introduction, he is the author of Check the Technique: Liner […]

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Superficial Reflections

“To swing with the rhythms of another is to enrich oneself — the conception of the learning process as dug by Hip is that one cannot really learn until one contains within oneself the implicit rhythm of the subject or the person.” “(And yet crazy is also the self-protective irony of the hipster.” “the nihilism […]

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Talkin’ All That Canon: On Hip-hop’s Jazz

Did I say something about “counter” canons? I think I like “loose” canons better. But the gist remains: that is, if we listen to some genre of choice through the ears of another, it can tell us a great deal about both genres (which is to say, about the producers and devotees of both). — […]

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