Archive for June, 2008

I don’t know how long I’m gonna live in the NY-DC megalopolis - for some reason, I’m thinking those days may be numbered - but while I do, I’m absolutely lovin’ this new Bolt Bus service from Greyhound. Since I’ve been in DC, I’ve spent scads of unnecessary cash because I wanted to be able to use my laptop when I traveled back and forth to Philly. Amtrak kept goin up, but I kept ridin, all because they had plugs. Then I started drivin’ all the time. But with gas prices all ridiculous, I was kinda wantin an alternative. The Chinatown bus was an option, but that basically had the same problems as the regular Greyhound - overcrowded and no amenities. Enter Bolt Bus 2008.

This is travelin right here. I’m writing this post live from the bus. Plugs in the seat and wireless internet ON THE BUS. And it’s pretty cheap. The tickets vary in price depending on how far in advance you buy them, but the other day, I was able to cop a ticket from DC-NY, buying the same day, for $15. Cannot beat it. Absolutely can’t. Especially since I’m on vacation and really don’t have anywhere I’m supposed to be. Bet I’ll be on here at least 2 more times before the summer’s out.

UPDATE

Young! If it wasn’t for the electricity and the wireless, this trip to DC from New York would be murderous. We left at 1500. It’s now 1641 and we’re not even out of the 732 area code. If I was drivin, I’d be beside myself. But since I’m sittin here on the bus coolin out, all wireless’d up, groovin to the i-peezy (have I mentioned that i’m closin in on 16k songs? We gonna hafta revisit that ‘how much is too many’ post) it’s only mildly peeving. Hooray Bolt Bus.

Commenter White English Teacher at Booker Rising took me way back, subtly mentioning the supercomputer Deep Thought, which was constructed to figure an the answer to the Ultimate Question, which turned out to be 42. The Earth, then, was the program which was constructed to ask the Question to the Ultimate Answer. The whole story is recorded in the five-part trilogy (or is it six parts?), kicked off with The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy. That was the first science fiction book that I ever read, but being that it was amazingly off-kilter, it didn’t really feel like reading sci-fi. And I loved it. Immensely. Being that it’s science fiction, it’s mad dense, but I think it was some of the most fun I’ve ever had reading. And that’s saying a lot.

Being on summer vacation has also meant that I’ve had the chance to so some reading for pleasure. In this case, I made a trip to the comic book store and actually bought something. When I first started reading comics it was for the art, but now it’s just as much for the stories. Espeically when a philosophical question is raised. Enter Marvel’s Civil War. Because I’m not still of the mindset to go to the comic store every month, I just sat down and bought the trade paperback. But it’s good reading, and it raises some interesting questions. Of course, the first question I hafta ask is…why the brother had to die? Still. Always. Dag.

At any rate, I’m not gonna go all into the whole details of the series, but suffice it to say that it’s been nice to let the nerd out for a while. I don’t know if he’s gonna be out all summer, or if my trips to the comic store are done for the year. But I know I enjoyed it today.

KG got his ring.

Like I said before, I was halfheartedly hoping for the Lakers, but I’m not at all mad that the Celtics won. In fact, I actually had the opportunity to go to Boston last night, although I didn’t think of it at the time. That would’ve been off the hook.

But thinking about it, does a championship really validate a career? Like, you take all the great players who had the misfortune of playing in the 80’s. In the entire decade, only three teams went to The Finals from the Western Conference: the Lakers, the Rockets, and the Trailblazers. That’s it. And the Lakers were the only WC team to actually win a title in the 80’s. Not like the Eastern Conference was too much more forgiving. Boston, Philly, Detroit. At least each of those teams actually won a title during the decade, though. The point is, there were many, many great players who passed through the league during that time, but only the players on four teams actually got to bring home titles. That doesn’t make them any less great.

Looking at it with players from the 90’s, is Patrick or Barkley any less of a great player than he would’ve been had the Knicks or the Suns won the title? Honestly, in Patrick’s case, I can’t necessarily say it wouldn’t have been. I think that for him, a title would have validated his career in a way that it wouldn’t have for Barkley or Malone, because Patrick’s trip to the Finals (the first one, the one that really counted) came against his only true rival as the greatest center of his generation: The Dream. If Ewing had beaten Dream, all those top-10 lists would hafta be revised. I mean, yeah, the blame for the Knicks’ loss usually goes to Starks for his miserable game 7 performance, and rightfully so, but the truth is that Dream put in the work on Patrick too. So in Patrick’s case, yeah, the title would make a big difference. For most of the rest of those cats, like Barkley and Malone, not so much. They lost to Jordan, Pippen, and the Bulls, but not to direct rivals at their positions. Like, if the Sixers and the Jazz had met in the finals one year, where Barkley and Malone were essentially going head-up, then yeah, the title would make a difference for one or the other. But they were already great players at that point.

Winning a title doesn’t make a player great - Starks would still be streaky, he’d just be streaky with a ring. What it does certify the great ones. And as KG said last night, he is now certified.

From an interview with Ishmael Reed

Reed: Let me ask you about gangsta rap.

Rollins: I like the content of rap because it’s the black experience; what they’re saying is the truth. Not everything—I’m talking about the political stuff, of course. We have to accept that ‘cause that’s what’s happening.

Reed: What about the style, all this mixing and sampling and stuff they do?

Rollins: Well, they sampled some of my stuff. This group Digable Planets did some of my stuff. I heard it in a store. I heard somebody playing some of my stuff.

Reed: How do you feel about that?

Rollins: It’s okay, it’s alright. I just don’t want to be ripped off. I need my money. So I like the political thing and I like some of the rhythms them cats are playing. I can use it. I’m not an old fogy. I think jazz has done so much to bring people together, but jazz is only an art form. You can’t change a society with jazz. The society is still backward on racial matters. I like to be democratic; I have a white boy playing in my band right at the moment. But it’s not a personal thing. I find people personally who are great, but the oppressive society just makes it impossible to be real with people. It always fucks everything up.

The age-old question is how to balance the tension between rights and responsibilities. It plays out in different ways at different times, but right now, I’m thinking about activities that it would naturally seem should be under the purview of the individual, rights, for lack of a better term, versus the laws which seem to restrict our ability to choose our actions. Most often this discussion comes up with the issues of smoking in public places and the fact that I can get a ticket for not wearing a seatbelt. But those aren’t the only implications - or nearly the most troublesome. (While I’m aware that abortion would probably fall under the definition I’ve provided above, there’s a moral component to that question that these examples just don’t have, so I’m not including it here.)

In New Jersey, a man is suing to have his arrest for public intoxication overturned because…well, because it’s against the state law for municipalities to make public intoxication illegal. That hasn’t stopped municipalities from putting laws on the books and from charging people hundreds of dollars, though. What makes it even more troublesome for me, however, is the fact that he got arrested when he was walking home from the bar. So in obeying the law by not driving home, he was breaking the law by walking. I got a problem with that. If it’s not illegal to get drunk, which it’s not, then how is it against the law to be drunk in public, provided that the person is not in the commission of any crime? In other words, if a drunk person busts out a plate glass window, they need to be arrested for destruction of property, not for bein drunk. In a way, I think the same thing applies for drinkin in public in general. Why is it against the law, really? I mean, I understand the thinking that says that people who drink are more likely to behave in ways that will make them a nuisance, but is it valid to arrest somebody for having a high likelihood of being a nuisance, rather than what the person is actually doing?

The other case is just as bad. In Easton, MD, a man was given a citation for being topless in public. There’s not really much else I can say about that. But I don’t suppose they could’ve played this game.

I was rootin hard for the Bulls, but I SO wanted them to win in game 5. If they had, Pippen would’ve gotten the Finals MVP. Cuz up until his back got hurt, he was the one man gang. Matter of fact, I think Phil called him that in one of the post-game conferences. All that notwithstanding, that’s probably THE Jordan moment.

On the other hand, this is probably THE Pippen moment.

Torture of a child is unimaginably horrific. Torture of one’s own child? That’s two steps past unimaginable. And a case like this?

A 5-year-old Los Angeles boy was fighting for his life today after suffering what police called one of the worst cases of child abuse they have seen, allegedly at the hands of his mother and her live-in girlfriend.

Police said the boy had countless cigarette burns all over his body, including his genitals, was unable to open his hands because he had been forced to put them flat on a hot stove, and was repeatedly beaten and forced to sit in his own urine.

And even before it starts, people can miss me with any kinda broader assertions about lesbian parents. The fact that they’re lesbian is no more relevant than the fact that most abusive parents are straight. Naw, that ain’t got nothin to do with this. The simple fact of the matter is that regardless of their lifestyle or background, they gotta go.

It’s a good thing I’m not God. If I was, they would have spontaneously combusted but miraculously never been consumed.

John McWhorter is at it again. He’s continuing his crusade against hip-hop, this time pointing out the limitations of so-called conscious hip-hop. His main point is ostensibly that even “conscious” hip-hop does very little to tangibly improve anybody’s life. Duh. His real main point is, as it always has, that he doesn’t like hip-hop. Bearing that in mind, anything he has to say about it will be to denigrate it, or to give him a more fair hearing, to “correct” those who believe that hip-hop actually has the potential to change things.

The funny thing is that I’ve stopped believing in hip-hop as anything but a musical genre. I stopped thinking anything significant was gonna come of it a long time ago. I think the potential might have been there…possibly, although I’m not really sold on that anymore. Yahmeen, it would be nice to think that there was some genre of music that could move the masses to political action, but the truth is, that was never hip-hop’s main mission. Sure there was some tangential political aspect to it, but it is, and always has been a genre of music. The people who claimed that it was some secret code of communication, or as the great Chuck D once said, the “CNN of the Black community” greatly overstated their case. And this is me talkin: it was Chuck D that first stimulated overtly Black political thought in my mind in the first place. So while hip-hop got me thinkin, I’m still here to tell you that it’s nothing but a genre of music.

Having said that, I’m always kinda dismayed by both sides of this argument. On the one hand, there are the McWhorters and Stanley Crouches who seem to have a hard-on for “debunking” the myths surrounding hip-hop’s political possibilities. They’re quick to talk about what she can’t or won’t do, usually managing a dig at the legitimacy of the form in the process. In the other corner is the “hip-hop-can-save-the-world” crowd. If, the argument goes, hip-hop could just be rescued from its self-destructive tendencies, if we could recapture the energy of the halcyon days of 88-92, when rappers had something to say, THEN we would see something. But that’s not gonna happen. It didn’t happen then, and it’s not gonna happen now.

Overall, I think McWhorter is right in his assessment of the limitations of “conscious” hip-hop. I’m always mystified when I see people who make their living as entertainers preach at me about how bad it is. Yeah, there are some things that go on that are pretty much out of our control. Police brutality is still a problem, and rappers do right to talk about it. At the same time, it’s flat-out disingenuous to act as if the majority of the problems in the Black community are the result of external influences. What we do to us is has a much greater impact than what they do. Having said that, it’s hard for me to co-sign McWhorter’s argument because it’s his argument. I can probably count the number of articles he’s written that hold hip-hop in an even neutral light. He’s never been particularly fond of hip-hop, so unfortunately even his legitimate arguments come off like the studious kid who’s always pointing out why the popular kid doesn’t deserve the attention.

Vanishing - Mariah Carey
Golden Lady - Stevie Wonder
Even When - Debra Killings
Hikky-Burr - Quincy Jones, f. Bill Cosby
All God’s Chillun Got Rhythm - Bud Powell
Too Hot - Kool & The Gang
Until I Found The Lord - Walter Hawkins
She’s Always In My Hair - Prince
Angel - Groove Theory
Wasted - The Gaturs
She’s Lookin’ Good - Wilson Pickett
Shady Lady - Ohio Players
Can’t Fight The Feeling - Norwich Street Express
Funky Beat - Whodini
Bob Scoward - James Brown
Doowutchyalike - Digital Underground

With the possible exception of people in San Antonio and Detroit, I think most people who enjoy the NBA are pleased as punch about the resumption of one of the great rivalries in all sports, the Lakers and the Celtics. To be honest, it was Lakers-Celtics that got me into watching basketball in the first place. I mean, I had watched the Finals before. I remember rooting for the Sixers when Dr. J won his only championship, but even then, that didn’t turn me into a fan of the NBA. I couldn’t have told you anything that was going on during the season. But when I saw the Lakers win the ‘chip in 85, I was more than mildly interested. In large part, that was because the Lakers and the Celtics seemed like inverses of each other - the Celtics were the white team and the Lakers were Black. Needless to say, I rolled with Magic ‘nem.

This year, it’s a little different. The Lakers aren’t the Black team. If anything, the Celtics would be the Black team, since their starting five is all-Black. The Lakers have an international squad going. For me, though, it’s kinda hard not to think of the teams the way I used to 20 years ago. For that, and because they have my all-time favorite NBA player, as well as my favorite of the current crop (that exercise in dry-snitching, notwithstanding), I’m going with the Lakers. But I won’t be mad if the Celtics win, either.