February 2008 Archives
This is Alex's (XXXCHANGE) remix for Santogold's "L.E.S. Artistes." I have been dying for it to be out all official like - I put it on my last year's top 10 singles list because A. it is fucking awesome and B. when Alex played it for me right after he completed I made him replay it like three more times. Then I made him send it to me so I could listen to it all day everyday, and I didn't leak it, but I did title it in my iTunes "THE GREATEST SONG OF ALL TIME." I really feel like as a producer, his creativity and brilliance is so off the chain he is going to be one of those people who is still doing dope shit in 20 years - he is a Quincy Jones or Phil Spector of the downtown dance generation (the oughties' answer to Jellybean Benitez?). Don't get it twisted; Naeem is Spank Rock's starpower, but Alex was the creative mastermind behind yoyoyoyoyoetc. And I know that Santi wants to stay doing her new wave dub rock shit, but I am really pulling for a full XXXChange-produced Santogold album.
Also go cop that Kills album he produced, I think he gets a point.
Speaking of brilliant friends, I hope you know that Older Men nee LEMON RED is BACK IN FULL EFFECT. Go visit it and leave nice comments so Chris never again stops blogging. Also please request Lost-related posts. Thanks.
I didn't watch the debates (I was at work until 11 pm!*) but SERIOUSLY??? Um, maybe the press is giving him "preferential treatment" because he is the first candidate that people actually FEEL OKAy about voting for and actually LIKE since Bill Clinton's first run. AND! Maybe "clips of Mrs. Clinton increasingly illustrate the tale of a campaign derailed" because she A. posited herself from the beginning as a foregone conclusion, as if we had no choice in the matter and therefore B. totally overlooked the viability of Obama?
I mean she's desperate, but still... she stays pissing me off.
*I haven't closed a magazine or paper as a senior-level editor since 2004 when I was still arts editrix of PDX Mercury and YO! I forgot about these 13-hour days and last minute art-hunting moments and having to pee for three hours but having so much to do you can't leave your desk and then when you finally get to the bathroom, you realize your eyeliner has been smeared down your left eye since... when? Lunchtime? Was it like that when you did your interview? Fuck... and then reconsidering your whole face-painting game. Well, wow! Closing is exhausting and exhilirating. On the subway home today I was thinking... "THIS IS WHAT I LOVE." And you have to, because there is no time for anything else really. Dear God of fortuitousness, thank you for making me single right now.
Pete and I had a terrific (and funny!) interview with Re-up Gang's Sandman and Ab-Liva* today. Watch for the video up at the sugar shack sometime soon but one interesting moment we didnt catch on camera was sandman, positing that the aftermath of Obama's hopefully imminent election will be akin to Y2K - everyone's hoping it goes down smoothly, but even still people are very fucking afraid of the aftermath. The aftermath not being like "oh it will be bad" if he is elected but more like "oh the non-Obama folks in the country will wig the fuck out" - more like the uncertainty is frightening. I think he was alluding to the fear that someone will try to harm Obama if he makes it like that. Still, B-Rock is the unstoppable. As you will see, at one point Sandman, a Pennsylvania resident, looked straight into the camera and with grave face and gravel voice, was like: "I CANT WAIT TO VOTE." That's April 22 for PA, in case u didn't know.
LET US KEEP DOING THIS!
*A Major Figga! My favorites.
Hot Abs, I forgot, is out of town doing dance workshops and choreography or something, so we had a sub who taught us a really great dance to "Low." But even the interminable soda-pop-fizz of T-Pain did not put a damper in the Mary J Blige "Just Fine" running dance-class obsession streak - wherein it was literally the NINTH WEEK OF DANCE CLASSES BY DIFFERENT TEACHERS THAT MADE US DANCE TO IT. Lord, dear ol' Lord, I AM TIRED of this shit. Dear GOD OF RIAA, PLEASE MAKE MJB DROP ANOTHER SINGLE ASAP. THX.
On the way home Devin the Dude's "Broccoli and Cheese" came on the iPod - which is definitely one of the funniest rap tracks ever put to wax, and certainly the best-ever mournful acoustic hip-hop joint about a dude getting no play, that permutates a rapper's manatomy with a vegetable: "my dick's so clean you can boil it with collard greens." Too funny. However, it makes me think of two disturbing things: A. visualizing Devin's dick and B. visualizing Devin's dick like it's a snausage.
snausage smoking cigarette
With all brain-juice funnelling into my new post, where I am HBIC partly because I am the only BIC and partly because I am so fuckin H, time for anything but work-related typing is rarer than your fatty toro. And, much of said typing would be either redundant or completely boring for anyone but the nerdily magazine-obsessed. But I do have a few things to say. First off, this Friday's FADER radio was one of my favorites ever, because we played all music related to our Africa issue (mostly hiplife from Ghana, lest any deans and/or peens deem it necessary to take my specificity to task and/or publicly renounce our friendship - LO mfin L!). It's possibly the happiest FADER radio ever, and Peter Macia told excellent stories about his trip to Ghana for the hiplife story, most of which ended in Pete's partaking of the kush and forgetting his own name.
In anticipation of Oscars, I watched Gone Baby Gone to see if Casey Affleck has a fighting chance, and he does a terrific job as a Dorchester P.I. tryna find a missing little girl amid a cop scandal while dealing with larger ethical issues, but even for Lahane the storyline is pretty rote blue-collar noir aka Departed much? Mystic River, etc. It's nice to see Amy what's her face and Michael K Williams outside the Wire tho and do not get it twisted, I would rather see a semi-tired storyline about cops and ethics than a semi-tired storyline about two unlikely bumbling yet adorable lovers a la Fool's Gold, which I couldn't even watch for free on the internet at my most desperate for escapism.
Happy birthday to Huny and Jazzbo both and I'm sorry I didn't hit up either of your parties.
More after this afternoon's dance class with HOT ABS.
I have been driven to the ass-edge of loco by the amount of dance classes I've attended in the past two months wherein the teachers (or students) insist we perform our routine to Mary J. Blige's "Just Fine." The song is wonderful, yes, and is super-fast for maximum cardio and super-empowering for extreme face contortions / FEELING within the choreography but like yo, has there been no music released since that last MJB album? Can I get a Big Noyd single or something from the G Unit mixtape one time? We Got it for Cheap 3? No?
I long for the days when we did crunches to "Ridin Dirty," before the teacher with the good taste in music quit dancing to become a life coach.
Only today, at my lyrical ballet (shut up) class, after we warmed up to Rufus Wainwright, our routine was to this sullen dark ballad I had never heard before:
It sounds like it was probably on an episode of Grey's Anatomy (unconventional beat structure; layers of female vocals; dramatic / confessional lyrics) but apparently it dropped in 2002 before there was even independent music on television shows (pre-OC!) or myspace.
The dream had something to do with trustfalls. I was forcibly strapped together for a skydive with someone who also didn't know wtf was up with the parachute, yet I was entrusted to pull the cable cause the jump-partner was chicken. Even while dreaming this, I consciously recognized my subconscious was remembering the story of Jon going skydiving with Ludacris.
Before the jump but after a campfire and some group choreography with our trustfall crew, we ended up at one-story house where my boyfriend (Matt Seracen?) slept on the couch beneath a colorful afghan, sound asleep and none the wiser while I made out with one of my dude-posse and felt guilty for cheating (on Matt Seracen!) but could not resist dude's... seriously... the taste of his breath. Like, that was a whole conversation in the dream. "Your breath is amazing." I can smell it in my mind right now - like if, awake, I had to choose sexy breath, that would be it. I think I am mental.
My whole point in telling you this is twofold. 1. I think I divined some of the choreography in Step Up 2 the Streets THE NIGHT BEFORE I SAW THE MOVIE. All the foot shit we were doing around the campfire before the trustfalls? They were in the grand finale, after the typical storyline comes to a close (girl from wrong side of tracks meets boy and they fall in love/become dance partners against all odds, their love culminating in an award-winning dance competition - the cliff's notes to EVERY DANCE MOVIE EVER MADE / I know because I have seen them all).
2. I can't remember the second reason. Earlier at the gym I thought that I would tell you about one of my best friends in high school, Manny (NAME CHANGED), who shot a boy on the steps of a dorm my senior year - because I think of him every day, because I thought harder about him today seeing those kids from the IL college on the television during my workout... but it's a story I've already written ten times and can never get it right. and don't want to give it up so easily, anyway. It's not a story for the internet.
3. The third reason, I guess, is that I like that chance loopholes the future, even when things seem predetermined and maybe staid.
Extremely tired of:
1. Feminists, particularly upper-middle-class white second waver feminists in the media and academic elite, who accuse the women who don't for H-Rod on principle as a betrayal of feminism. Pardon my francais, but you all need to sit the fuck down until you realize that "WOMEN" does not solely equate to fellow upper middle class white second wavers who share your ideals. In the meantime, please read this very interesting piece by the brilliant Melissa Harris-Lacewell, Princeton professor of politics and African American studies.
2. Journalists covering the tragedies of inschool shootings who disproportionately DONT cover that youth get murdered every day by their peers, by their parents, by police.
3. The mfers who wrote the economics article in the Times that said equal goods-consumption in rich and poor homes meant that the poor weren't bad off, which prompted this very astute response from the people.
I've been thinking about Teddy Riley about... my whole life, but also lately since I found out he is basically broke and auctioning shit off like he's Gary Coleman's autographed Dockers on eBay. (Regular readers of crunktastical.blogspot.com will understand the preceding sentence in its entirety.) I'm like... can boo get a little of that Guy cake? Like where did the royalties go? I think this calls for a... NEW JACK SWING revival. (I'll just pretend I already haven't been trumpeting that since I graduated from middle school.)
Happy V-Day -
Excellent, inspiring piece in the Times on Future First Lady Michelle Obama. AKA my new feminist role model.
The author totally daughters H-Rod, setting Michelle up as the better Bill to a better candidate. And she even managed to write it without any of that "CURIO/other" subtext that was in that awful Vogue profile a few months back. Imagine!
My video interview with Teyana Taylor (and her mom, Nikki), on the set of the "Google Me" video shoot is up now.
I finally checked in the warranty and got a replacement iPod for the one that was doused in water - this time silver, because I have come to the conclusion that Apple black plastic doesn't look as hot in presence as it does in theory. But I digress - the point is, walking back from BFred's after watching the Grammys, 20 minutes across Brooklyn in the -40 cold, the iPod shuffled itself to Oschino's Major Figgas dis - wherein his brags consisted of 1. "you following my moves like a bitch with a crush" 2. defending State Prop's filmic achievements and 3. extolling the triumph of selling 10,000 copies of... his mixtape? Something. And even though this year's Grammys had some of the best performances I've seen on that dismal formalist ceremony - taut Bey outshined by the raspy fearlessness of Mama Tina, 70 and working silver lame and a full nipple flaunt, for one - it was refreshing, after the Grammys' pomp and ceremony and self-conscious torch-passing, to hear such a modest brag, Oschino still knowing the Major Figgas, well - they couldn't top it. Oschino's truth, even modest, was just that much nicer. Of course, this was cut before Ab-Liva got up with Clipse, and before Gillie was like... doing whatever he do. But still. Oschino. I must admit, my Roc still beats red.
on set at teyana taylor video shoot today - she had five teen dancer boys all wearing holographic metallic leggings and sgt pepper's jackets, voguing down the runway, wave-hands and all - teyana wore a red cut off shirt, gigantic black tulle skirt and jordans... that's all i can really tell you, mostly because it was a lot of standing around while they cut one scene repeatedly in front of a green screen... but watch for more on the new homestead... or read schnipper's gen F on her in the santogold/keri hilson issue of the FADED.
i can't talk about super tuesday presently, it's too late. but i cast my vote for obama at 8 am this morning, at a BKLYN public school while third graders hopscotched all around on the adjacent playground. It felt good. It mattered.
Above all else, I encourage everyone to vote tomorrow.
I will be holding it down at a Brooklyn Public School down the way, casting my vote for President Barack Obama. Repping my state like the triumphant Giants. They said it wouldn't happen.
I encourage you all to do the same. (At your own respective polling stations, obvs.)
And watch this video, via Michelle Obama and Rachael:
Last night in the bathroom at the Rub, somewhere between Lindsay's awesome ol'skool soul & B set and Cosmo goin loco with the Timbaland cuts (PONY ALWAYS BRINGS DOWN THE HOUSE), this girl cornered me and was like, "Are you Georgian?" and I'm like, "you mean the country?" and she's like yeah and I'm like "I'm Mexican" and she's like oh, you look Georgian to me and then she walked away. Now I get a lot of random ethnicity "You Look..." comments - sometimes people guess I'm Mexican but more often I get Israeli, Italian or "half- something"... but no one has ever said Georgian. My question for you all is this: What do Georgian people look like?!?!
NEW JOBBY JOB: Senior Editor of The FADER. NEW EMAILY EMAIL: julianne@thefader.com. The old VIBE swag, jshepherd@vibe.com, is dead. PRIVATE MESSAGES, FUNNY YOUTUBES: jawnita@gmail.com. Straight up.
