1.29.2011

ARM 18 Minutes of Funk - Chillax

TRACK LISTING:
1. The Joy - Kanye, Jay Z, Pete Rock
2. The Chosen One - OC
3. Never - Diamond D and Sadat X
4. Here It Is - Das EFX
5. Higher Level - KRS ONE
6. Thieves In the Night - Blackstarr
7. Change Gonna Come - Grand Puba
Bonus Beat : Pete Rock

This is that Hip Hop with snares as crisp as ice, melody as plush as snow. Lyrics either thoughtful like the quiet of a smothering snowfall or playful as snowflakes dancing. If Hip Hop means anything to you, you understand you must take the crude with the provocative, the profound with the fleeting. And that's word... life.

1.25.2011

Nassiri vs. Pogo

Want to know the difference between showing and telling in art? Or the difference between a well intended millionaire and an inspired grass roots collective movement? One has probably raised X amount of dollars, the other raised unquantifiable sense of culture.


Perhaps it is cynical to pit these two efforts against each other. But I cannot help to feel that Pogo's work represents a consciousness in our youth that is by design fragmented but nonetheless imbued with a spirit of wonder and respect for humanity.


Watching Nassiri descend from the sky in a hot air balloon, arms wide, clad in impeccable linens is laughable megalomania. By contrast, Pogo finds his cut n' mix copyrighted hijackings being jacked by the corporations that control those interests.

Nassiri's efforts are noble, no doubt.  Maybe it's just a difference in aesthetic maturity.  As Nassiri "borrows" from MJ's colorful pied piper one world aesthetic, Pogo "steals" from the sources that inspire him.  May both of their efforts succeed.

1.23.2011

By the time you read this...

...you will have stopped reading so says somebody.  But I will have not stopped writing, nor will you stop remembering and that's what makes all the difference.

From the words of Edmund Carpenter from his 1970s mash up of photography and anthropology They Became What They Beheld:

"Media are really environments, with all the effects geographers & biologists associate with environments. We live inside our media. We are their content. TV images come to us so fast, in such profusion, they engulf us, tattoo us. We're immersed. It's like skin diving. We're surrounded & whatever surrounds, involves. TV doesn't wash over us and then go 'out of mind.' It goes into mind, deep into mind. The subconscious is a world in which we store everything, not something, and TV extends the subconscious...

Photobucket
Nothing says excitement like a spot graph...