You are an obsession

Best line from Eyedea and Abilities set last night: [Eyedea]: “This next song is a cover of an Aesop Rock song… it’s called ‘Daylight’.” [KIDS SCREAM] “Just kidding.”
Most bizarre line from Atmosphere set last night: [Slug] “Vegetarians who do cocaine deserve to get punched in the face like a bitch.”
Second-most: [Slug] “Throw your hands in the air if you jerked off today!”
Best part of entire concert last night: Grayskul taking it to the hoop for the goths, as their crew Oldominion is wont to do, with 2 medium sized skeleton puppets, two giant TVs playing only static, which were occassionally saluted by emcees JFK and Onry Ozzborn. During the whole set Sleep (one of the three or four best emcees in the entire Cascadia region) and some other dude (whose face was obscured from my vantage point) actually PLAYED CHESS onstage. AND! The chess pieces looked like FANTASY ROLE PLAYING FIGURES. Unfortunately, I wasn’t that into their set; Oldominion production is always weighed down by its dark, orc-fighting, dudes-making-beats-in-dingy-basement tendencies, which can sometimes be awesome and perfect (as with Sleep’s superfast blasts of verse) but when paired with their boggier emcees make everything sorta mono. I gotta give it up to anyone who namedrops Frodo Baggins, though.
Before that I took a class with Huy Pham,veteran b-boy of Portland’s esteemed Moon Patrol Crew, and used muscles I was heretofore unaware even existed. I feel pummelled by the ghost of ReRun. (RIP)
Because I am insane, what follows is a short taped conversation between myself and Huy, about hiphop movie du jour “You Got Served.”
ME: What do you think about films like oh, I don’t know, “YOU GOT SERVED,” that have really cheesy parts, but then have ACTUAL b-boys in them?
HUY: “Yeah, “You Got Served” has Do Knock, Crumbs, Flipz… actually a bunch of my homies are in that movie. But… my little brother actually made a good point about it, he said “Let them go see that movie; it might not in any way portray what our culture is really about, but it may spark their interest, so when they see a flyer for a b-boy event, they’ll wanna come, and they’ll really see what a competition is like.
“That movie is choreographed hiphop dancing. I got a lot of respect for hiphop dancers cause it’s a difficult thing. But for me, to get to the essence of any dance, you have to be able to freestyle it. And not all hiphop dancers can freestyle; it takes a mastery level of that dance form to really create. But with b-boying, you’re stressed to freestyle from the start. There’s a foundation, but it keeps getting built. The moves you make up one day become foundation for someone else to learn, so they can move on.
“With the corporate industry, the way they look at breaking, they’re trying to do the ’80s thing again. A lot of b-boys see a lot of good in it, like with Crumbs, he’s Style Elements, and he’s in that movie. For one, I can understand why he did it; he needs to get paid and probably has a family he needs to cover. For two, people like him are real b-boys they’re putting in this movie. Because he’s a real b-boy, he’s going to exude the essence to the viewers. Interest will be sparked all over the world, and people are going to be curious, going to events only with the idea that B2K are breakers, and they’re gonna come and see the real essence of hiphop, the raw format.
“It’s good exposure for our scene. Not everyone’s gonna like it but if it’s your cup of tea, I’m glad the movie was there to bring you to us. It’s just based on whether or not they’re exploiting. I think they portray it wrong in “You Got Served,” but they’re not exploiting. The format is mildly correct, they have real dancers in there telling them what to do–as opposed to “Breakin'” 1 and 2, where the director was just lost. “Beat Street” and “Wild Style” were the only two movies that were worth anything in the ’80s. Those guys were, like, RAW. They were the grimy cats, the grimy cats for real. B-boys did not dress that goofy!! I think with the B2K movie they gave a lot of creative freedom to the dancers. Like for me, I recognized Do-Knock’s signature steps, his moves that he always hits in like, battles. And I recognized Crumbs’s slow-motion headspins. That’s his move. B-boys out there know it’s him right away. The great thing is that Crumbs is still competing. Kids can go see that movie, and then be able to see him in real life, doing a slow-motion headspin, if they come to a jam.”