AWAY MESSAGE.

See you next week.

Party Like It’s 1989

This dude walked in the store, asked for some Mike-n-Ikes and was humming “Walk This Way”….

I looked around, I thought I was bugging out. This was a real Twilight Zone moment, I thought I time-traveled to the 80s …or he was from the past. (Not to mention, I was high flying and juiced on the goose, so I really was unsure about what was happening.) I had to let the camera lens do the viewing. This guy sure had me cracking up though, that delayed laugh that hits three minutes later once the shock and awe wear off. What kind of looks he must get on the street. All I know is that now I’m thinking about me in the 80s, around four or five, loving the peanut butter and jelly that came in the same jar. (They still make that, by the way.) I used to get a kick out of making pb&j sandwiches, one of my first foyers in my chefery. This guy’s hair looks just like that peanut butter and jelly jar.

I heard about and saw the Retro Kids all over the city. They’re like the James St. James and Michael Alig, but using a better cultural/ musical/ fashion era.  And  like the original Club Kids, these guys (and girls, oviously) get into award shows, fashion shows and clubs just because. This guy here is not half as committed as some, it’s a damn spectacle (aka: it’s New York.)

I Can See Your Entire Ass In Those Jeans, Part 5: “Gone Global”

I mentioned Aleppo, Syria in the first post of this series because one of my twitter/ blogger friends, Elaine Z., is from there and all the way on the other side of the world guys are doing the same damn thing and looking just as stupid.  It’s a fashion and societal act of defiance for rebels without a cause-or belts. This is what Elee writes:

I’m a 23 year old girl living in Syria Aleppo, and yes a good looking well dressed fashionable guy can really attract my eye and make me feel blessed to meet him…

But this I don’t understand, it happens here too and in a weird way… Why do guys have to do this, showing all people around him a huge part of his underwear… Those guys really wear jeans 2 sizes larger than theirs real size to make this happen, the pants goes down and Bam, you get blind when you see white boxer with red hearts on, or blue one with yellow bears on!  I saw that lots of times and I went like WTF? The answers came like, “maybe it’s comfy” or “maybe it’s the fashion!” Damn! If it’s comfortable, which I doubt believe, manage to wear a long shirt over it to cover! And/or who the hell told you that it’s fashionable?

All I can say that it sucks and none of the girls around me find it attractive! So please guys, stop doing it for the sake of our eyes!! You’re ruining the beauty of your style with this thing!  Who cares to know what the design is???

I thought Elee’s part about the boxers with red hearts and yellows bears is funny, living in New York, I’ve seen worst. And  yes, I mean worst, let’s just leave it at that.  I often thought to myself, as well, is it comfortable to wear you pants so low, I actually asked somebody before and this is what he said verbatim, “ahhhh, naaaahh, like…you know, it’s coool, you know?…”

NYC Song Of The Week: “El Tigeraso” – Maluca

…Wait, lemme stop dancing first. Just give me a minute…

… … … … …

I could have put this song up for my international post or for hype song of the week, it’s just that good and I would describe it as hype music..but all roads lead back NYC. I have to give shoutouts to Buraka Som Sistema and Le Poisson Rouge for exposing me to this talent, my neighbor from uptown, @MALUCAMALA. I first heard her at a show at LPR, she opened for BSS and she was hot. A good live act.

182nd and Audubon, huh,  sounds more like 177th and Amsterdam, Highbridge Park in the Summer. Cookouts turn into dance parties, abuelo with the piragua cart and the coquito at the bottom. (That’s grandpa, snowcones and frozen coconut and rum drinks for all my unilingual readers out there.)

I can play this track over and over, it just resonates in my head and I just let it keep running. Then twenty minutes later I realize I’m playing a playlist with only one song in it. After one more listen, then I stop.

See more Maluca.  See more Buraka Post.

<<<Last Week’s Song<<<>>>Next Week>>>

Pull Up Your Damn Pants, Fool

See these related posts, written for this series with fellow writers:

• Attractions, Associations, Corporations And Exceptions: Whatever I Can See Your Entire Ass In Those Jeans on Tamika/@CultureFlyy’s blog, www.CultureFlyy.com [12/16]
  

• Excuse Me, Your Pants Are Falling: “…No Child Of Mine” written with Fariyal/@FariyalB and Mateo on his blog, www.Back2GoForward.com [12/18]
  

Twenty-Five And Counting…

I am such the cliche 20-something year old person when it comes to those major life events and milestones. I’m only just now realizing it though. I have a Bachelor’s degree in Architecture Technology and I’m only barely using it. I know what I want to do, but I don’t know what or who I wanna be. Now is when I’m starting to pressure myself to consider my future and my master plan- something I don’t have, by the way. It’s all moving too damn quick and I keep thinking I need more time, I’m not ready. I’m so ready. Am I ready? I’m 25 which means I’m almost 30, then I’ll be 40 in no time… I might as well sign up with AARP tomorrow.. Will I be a 40-something year old man looking back on my 20s wondering where I made that wrong turn, or cursing myself for letting some opportunity slip through my fingers. I won’t be able to answer that then, just like I can’t answer it now. And that’s how I get bummed out, thinking I seriously didn’t do enough with the first half of my life to be thinking about the second half already. It doesn’t really help that some of my high school/college classmates are married business owners with kids already. Now they had a master plan (with color-coded chapters, tabs and an operations manual…)   To all of them: f*ck you and congratulations, now I have to go Nike and just do it…

Such as life, to be continued…

N-Y-Symmetry

These are two pictures I really like for a couple different reasons.

Yeah that was me who stopped; dead in front of you at the top of the subway steps to snap a picture with my blackberry. Shoot, I don’t care, when I see something that needs to be captured, I do just that. The first picture was taken at the 125th Street on the concourse level going down to the platforms. I think what what attracts me to these pictures and photo opportunities is the shape of stairs themselves: they always create symmetrical pictures, which makes your eyes dance around to find the subtle differences. The stairs also create an interesting perspective, it’s the instant wide angle effect- look how small the guy in the white shirt looks even though he’s only about 15 feet away. The second picture was taken from outside of my school…you would think I went to Pothead Academy, or something based on the name, right?.. You wouldn’t imagine how much of a temperature/atmospheric change it is once you get into that shade at the bottom of those steps. It’s drier and like 5 to 10 degrees cooler, with a breeze. But that’s in the summer, it’s probably 5 to 10 degrees warmer now.

Hype Song of the Week “Whip It” – Devo

THIS VIDEO IS SO ODD!!

There are really too many oddities to count,but let me try, you tell me if I missed any. Just the motley crue of characters makes the set up ridiculous on its own: some cowboy and cowgirls, futuristic turtleneck-wearing, flower pot hat musicians, a live-action mannequin and a matronly lady. What’s up with the log cabin and the hay, it’s so obviously a sound stage. The cross-eyed Asian woman trying to shoot a beer can out of a guy’s hand is  hilarious, probably a little because that kind of joke totally wouldn’t fly with in today’s ultra politically correct society. (Americans don’t even use the word fat anymore.) The subtitles are funny too, all #TWSS- worthy. One says, “ride’em cowboy” and the older lady holds  a big bowl of white cream and says “come and get it.” That says enough. The video ends with the drummer, who has been playing with only one drumstick the entire time, runs off the set like there’s a fire, for no reason. Odd.

<<<Last Week’s Song<<<>>>Next Week>>>

I Can See Your Entire Ass In Those Jeans, Part 3: “A HISTORY: Poverty, Booty And Criminal Intent”

SERIOUSLY. Does it even matter what the history is behind this scurge? This fad has had a strangle-hold on the urban community and the society at-large for a generation or two now. This isn’t fashion, style or swagger, this isn’t even acceptable human attire. it should be against the law (wait let me not get ahead of myself…) I don’t want historians to put this trend in the record books as being representative of my era. That would be a blight on my generation- Levi Strauss is turning grave. What would  The Big Book Of History say when the get to dungarees: “towards the latter part of the Twentieth Century urban men explored gravity-defying feats of pantaloonage.  Belts became obsolete because the waistline moved to the thighs and the Penguin Walk was created. This is the trend that catapulted  the Pussy Push Movement of 2018 when a large portion of society’s females turned to Lesbianism out of pure dissatisfaction for what the modern man had become… That might be the scene, as historians look back on this era in a generation or two. I wonder how people are going to describe this trend once it eventually dies out.

You cant describe something without starting at the beginning. After all, how will you know where you’re going if you don’t know where you’ve been. In other words, you have to go back to go forward. Speaking of Back2GoForward, Mateo, friend and guest blogger to the site, gave me some insight on one of the origins of this craze:
When the 70′s heroin epidemic hit, shit got hard, and then 80′s crack wave washed through the hood, it shattered families that were already struggling. Hand-me-downs or HCRP (hood clothing recycling program) became an everyday staple in life. Many children would show up to school not with the latest fashion, but with what their older siblings’ wore for school the year before (sometimes two and three years.) Hence the ill-fitting clothes.

Rap artists in the 90 like Naughty By Nature helped push it into mainstream America, forever changing a once hood struggle into a false movement. Like all things we turned it into a way of being- a universal sign of poverty,  glorified  by people that can’t even relate to true struggle. Just take a look at the older hip hop artist from back in the day: early LL Cool J, Run DMC who were ,at the time, making hit records, they weren’t wearing sagging pants. Along the way we forgot that you can move forward and beyond old concepts and ideas. So here we are in 2009 going into 2010 wearing  two hundred dollar jeans  that don’t even cover what they’re supposed to. Even with the wave of tight jeans I can not understand how those can be worn around your knees.

Haa! Skinny jeans at their knees…that’s so New York. They sometimes buy the jeans so tight, it can’t go all the up.

Random NYC Tip.10 (ATM Vestibules)

Now this really is the oldest one in the book and the easiest to act out: You’re cold, pull out your ATM card and go into an ATM vestibule.

But wait, there’s more. We all know that you can use your ATM card at any bank, whether it’s your’s or not, meaning your card opens the door to ever bank vestibule in the city- 24 hours a day. Yes that does mean you can throw an impromptu after party there once the club dies down at like 3 o’clock in the morning. Just don’t stay there too long, you’re on not-so-candid camera and some (or most) banks have real people on the other side of those cameras, monitoring their vestibules throughout the night and they will call the cops on you.

Having an ATM card, even if it’s for a closed account at a insolvent bank, can be a lifeline for you. A ticket to sanctuary when you just can’t brave the elements anymore. I once ate an entire four-course meal in a Bank Of America vestibule wait out the rain and wait for a bus. Only in New York.  Bank designers are smart, however, you will almost never find an electrical outlet in a bank vestibule because if they did that, it would officially be The Spot and people would never leave.

Obviously this works in any city, obviously.

International Artist Of The Week – Vanessa Paradis – “Be My Baby”

This artist is international, but the song is definitely a throwback and it’s in English, but I like it. It’s from 1992. The real reason why I picked it is because I was trying to have four weeks of French artists: David Guetta, Les Plastiscines, Yelle, now Vanessa Paradis. One of my old bosses first put me on to this song years ago. The is Vanessa back when she was with Lenny Kravitz, long before she became Johnny Depp’s wife and the mother of his kids.

Doesn’t she just look angelic and serene in the whole video, I guess it’s the French sensibility and the black boyfriend. This video has Early 90s Lenny written all over it.

<<<Last Week's Artist<<<>>>Next Week>>>

All I See Is Crotch And Gut…This Ain’t Right!

For every action has an equal and opposite reaction- Sir Isaac Newton.

This is true about anything. Take the MTA for example, you’re tired, it’s been a long day, you see that the train in started to get packed, but you manage to get a seat. A few seconds go by, you get your bearings, adjust the ipod, whip out the blackerry… Then you look up and this is what you see, swaying to and fro on a rocky C train eight inches from your face: Would you rather stand, or is it worth it?