Love Letters, Snow Storms and a cute photo..

Love Letters, Snow Storms and a cute photo..

BoomBap

Andy Kessler Memorial Art Show- NYC Saturday

Support and remember Common Folk. This IS a real homie whose influence is infinite and forever.

and also saturday-



This chick is blazin' and Dalek is back (with new style!!!). Actually I've been wondering how Dalek was gonna elevate and progress to the next step. From what I've seen he's actually still keeping to his same style put pushing it in new ways. I was worried he was gonna type cast himself forever to the space monkey.

HRC Buying for Equality 2010 Guide

Grab it here

Ghetto Tourism

Just saw this from TheWorldsBestEver-

"LA’S MAP TO (GANG)STARS HOME

The next time you’re in L.A., forgo the map to the stars homes and instead embark on the Compton tour."

Curiosity? Exploitation? Bleeding heart Liberalism? Buying a Ghetto Pass?
I've heard about these Ghetto Tours going on all over the place, such as the favelas in Brasil etc. In some ways I'm admittedly intrigued by the whole thing. Who doesn't want a special pass to explore 'forbidden' places? It's like getting into the club where you gotta know somebody to be somebody. Whenever I visit a new city I almost immediately seek out the non-tourist areas for better or worse, whether wandering to boring suburbs of Madrid or being grossly out of place and stared at in an Istanbul ghetto or even getting mean mugged deep, deep into Bushwick. Perhaps there's a bit of a designation between tourist and explorer. But really, what makes taking these ghetto tours all that different from paying thousands of dollars to 'volunteer' in some third world country? To really give them the benefit of the doubt, at least they have the curiosity instead of trying to ignore it all together(?).
Now if you want a real OG Ghetto tourist who put his money where his mouth is you gotta check out Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets by Sudhir Venkatesh. While studying at the University of Chicago he got sick of the scholarly, ivory tower approach to sociology and just rolled up into the Robert Taylor Houses of Chicago and ended up living there for 6 years.

R.I.P. Technics 1200's

It's a sad day to discover that Technics will stop production of the indisputable institution of the 1200's in February 2010. It really is the seeming passing of an era. They'll be replacing it with the SL-DZ1200 digital turntable. And it's almost like rubbing salt in the wound to find out this digital turntable will play almost anything but vinyl, "The distinctive slip surface on the 10" platter lets you spin, scratch, break, and otherwise work a track in a number of formats, including CD, MP3 and AAC." I mean, c'mon, really? If they have the technology to pull this off I would think it wouldn't be too far off of a cry to enable it to actually play REAL vinyl as well.

Sigh.

There should be no war between digital and analog. There's no reason it should be an either/or situation. It's the unfortunate case that instead of a more utopian reality of coexisting with analog, digital is completely pushing it out. Why is it there can't be a more dynamic reality than just right/wrong, better/worse? Why should technology edge out tried and true solely for the sake of technology? The 'best' is not an absolute. I think this is a real root problem in a lot of instances of conflict whether it be opinion, race, nationalism, religion (no religion), etc. There's enough room in the world for a lot of things to coexist as opposed to being one or the other. To make another illustration along this line, yes, the U.S. is ONE of the best places in the world but it's not THE best, 'THE best' doesn't exist. To quote, "what might be right for you/might not be right for some."

I'm all about rockin and ipod or Serato but that doesn't mean I still don't want to go back to my real turntables. For reasons both logical and sentimental there's some music I just don't want in digital format- old school soul, r&b, jazz. Like I said, it's sad that what was a true innovator doesn't see the room for both. Technology is a good thing, it just shouldn't be the only thing.