Check The Diagonal

They get it. Come around my way…

Postbourgie’s Friday’s Random Ten is the perfect cap to a week filled with misunderstandings, generalizations and assumptions on the subject of interracial relationships. My basic take on the subject is: if you don’t like interracial relationships then don’t get into one. And that still stands.  But, the posting of LL’s “Around the Way Girl” just sums it all up beautifully for me, they get it.  Its that feeling you get after a long day downtown and you finally step off that train into your neighborhood, your battery is instantly recharged, you’re home.  And so I’m not sure race is the correct dissection point of interracial relationships, it’s culture. We gravitate to what we are most comfortable with because we need, love and appreciate it.

But now thanks to that LL joint, I’m feeling all Spring feverish and homesick for the sounds and people from Uptown.  I want a cold Presidente, and a park bench at Bennett, and I want to hear some merengue tipico and just hang with my people.

More after the jump if you like…

So tell me where you from…

We will be in Georgia 3 full years this June.  We moved here for the house you can buy in the suburbs with grass and trees and a yard, the quality public schools, the safety and the milder winters.  We did get all that, but with a price.  I sometimes lament the fact that in exchange for all the benefit this suburb offers my kids won’t get to grow up in place that is worthy of their being defined by.  I watch folks in our subdivision rocking front license plate covers that shout out our neighborhood and just shake my head.  That’s one of my fears.  This place cannot be allowed to define my children.  They cannot strive to want a license plate of a homogenized suburb to define them like so many of the people around us whose primary goal is to blend in by acting and looking as much like the next person as humanly possible.  No.  Not for mine.

Judgmental much? Indeed.  But understand, New Yorkers are insanely proud and territorial animals.  Any kid from Uptown to Coney Island can tell you why their 12-48 sq block hood is the greatest in the known universe.  And any New Yorker worth his bones can tell you why NYC > anywhere else on the planet. These things are fact.  From pizza to haute cuisine, hip-hop to punk rock, graffiti to MOMA, Denzel to DiNiro to Old Timers Day in El Barrio. NYC is the fount from which all great things flow.  And if you’re still talking you might just get mushed with Yankees Baseball.

Me, I’m from the single most shout out hood in hip-hop history.  While I’ve cleaned up well and graduated to these affluent suburbs for the betterment of my children you can take the kid out of the hood but can never take the hood out of the kid.

Lightening Up

It’s Friday.  Enough of racism and politics and disagreements and inflexibility and preconceptions.  I always just try to start from a point where I happily admit I don’t know shit and absorb from there.  Its served me well my entire career.  Being wrong is the best opportunity to learn.  But my brain needs a break.

More than anything right now, I wish I was in D.R., feeling that sweet sun, drinking una Presidente vestida de novia and listening to this…

Me all 2.0 and ish

After about 6 months of mostly talking to myself on here and enjoying it, I’m going to stick around.  Some of the good folks at Typepad are doing some redecorating for me so I feel more at home.  In the meanwhile I’m testing some of my new connections to Facebook and Twitter.  Interesting live flow going on tonight for the President’s SOTU at Postbourgie.

I’ll be back.

hip-hop pop?

Found Postbourgie recently and really like it.  One of the writers there, shani-o asks a question that depresses me often if I think too long on it; Where is hip-hop?

I’m not sure jazz and hip hop are perfectly analogous, but I wrote all of this to ask a question: I wonder where hip hop is on its trajectory to becoming America’s second great musical art form?

In their comments I wrote:

I don’t know.  I think there was a time in the late 80s, when we could have made a fair comparison of the evolution and greatness of hip hop to jazz.  Can those same comparisons be honestly considered today based on what seems like very little interesting evolution?   As someone with a very old school NYC bias and a deep dislike of Jay-Z I think both the honesty of the art and the trajectory compared to jazz has been hijacked and corrupted by money and corporate America in a way jazz never was.   There are bright spots in today’s hip-hop of honesty, raw expression, artistic talent and freedom, but they are so few and far between that I am left lamenting Q-tip, Hammer won, rap is just pop.

Thinking about what I wrote after the fact…the answer could also be that I am just an out of touch, middle aged, old school hater who doesn’t like where the genre has gone and so won’t embrace it.  I’m from the place and time hip-hop originated and so I tend to be more opinionated than some when it comes to hip-hop.  I do know that there are a few that are still laying down classics for the ages.  Maybe the answer is that there are very few hip-hop artists buried under all that pop struggling to save the art from commercialism and suburbia.  Boy I tell you, I miss her.

Been a long time...

This thing requires that I actually have free time, which I don't.  Heard this again for the first time in a long time this morning and wanted to share....

Update:  You know, listening to Bill Withers this morning made me think of all the Republican War Hawks, and Sarah Palin who seems to have learned how to say the word dithering, who are criticizing the President's careful consideration of his Afghanistan decision.  Maybe if they would have dithered a little and listened to this song below we wouldn't be in the mess in the first place.

Mad Skillz

RIP Baatin

Check The Diagonal

Instead of screaming

Feeling Good!

I haven't read a single word about SCOTUS, POTUS, or Wingnuts and I'm not missing a thing. I'm all about the frosty mug, a good book and some latin jazz tonight.

Tomorrow may never come.

But today is an amazing day. Number three graduated from Pre-K, the weather is perfect. I think I'm gonna grab a book and sit out by the pool and hang with little man. Y'all enjoy your day too.

Big Deep Breath

Morning folks.

Happy Spring!

Spring was a little late this year but it has finally arrived and the weather is nice enough for me to work out on the deck. Happy Spring!

Going back 30 years, with pleasure.

Through the power of Facebook I am feeling nostalgic. Going back is an amazingly wonderful thing. Selectively only the best of what we were is remembered. Enjoy.

The man said grab a sword...

So Ta-Nehesi Coates, the author of one of my favorite daily reads (http://ta-nehisicoates.theatlantic.com/) has said more than a few times that anyone who has an opinion should grab a sword and lay it down. I do and so I think I will. With that I shall proceed...