Many shouts to Nas and the director of this viral music video: Rik Cordero (Asians represent…)

Hotness. For clarification on my views toward Fox News, go here and here.

UPDATE (7/14): I heard rumors that Nas was gonna show to that China earthquake fundraiser in NYC Chinatown over the weekend. But who knew it was actually gonna happen? Publicity for the upcoming album? Yeah of course, but he took the time to explain his presence instead of just showing and specifically said he was there to “support the Asian community.”

Dag Nas, you’re creeping back into my Top 5 dude…

Since it is so busy here at work, I will review Lil Wayne’s new release “Tha Carter 3.” I know he’s the world’s hottest emcee right now, at least to all the hip hop Internets nerds. Now I’ve only heard him on a couple songs in the past and I will say he’s a lot better when he’s not on a track alone. Whether he is the guest star or he has a guest on the song with him, he becomes a lot easier to listen to when it’s not just him. I don’t find him a bad emcee, I just don’t find him to be enjoyable at all to listen to.

The most of what I know of Lil Wayne is he has kissed Baby on the lips and that would be fine if not for the really scary relationship they seem to have. You know, how Weezy calls Baby his Daddy, and has rhymes like “Baby is the Daddy, my Daddy is a Baby, Now I’m the Baby of my Daddy who’s a Baby” or some shit. It’s creepy because that’s not actually his f-cking father. The rest of what I know of Lil Weezy Ana is that he once dated Trina and cried when she broke up with him, and Gillie da Kid supposedly ghostwrote a lot of his better rhymes from early in his career. Oh and Wayne also is addicted to sizzurp…

So because I can’t really stand more than a lil Lil Wayne (see what I did there?), I have not listened to his new album, or really any of his albums or mixtapes. So I will review “Tha Carter 3” based on song titles alone. (more…)

Until now.

So now that need has been met. Let’s move on.

Happy 50th Birthday Prince. I wrote you a little prose poem.

I have never seen Prince up close. Not like my homie Bao who saw him and his entourage at a record shop in Minneapolis. Not like my friend Connie who was running through the Detroit airport to catch her connecting flight and stopped mid-stride upon seeing Prince and his entourage. Not like Visionaries leader Key Kool who recorded his first demo at Paisley Park and walked into a room only to see Prince sans entourage.

I’ve seen him in concert once: back in 2004, when he was on tour, doing his old hits for the “last” time. (We all knew he would keep doing his hits. When you write and record songs that are nothing less than masterpieces, why would you ever stop performing them?) I would say it was a life-changing experience, if it didn’t sound so stupid. I choked up twice. To my left was my “date” – Vudoo Soul (we’ll talk about this another time) – to my right was a white family of five, with a youngest child about 7 years old. Behind me was a row of 6 or 7 35-40 year old Black women wearing purple. In front of me was, well, a lot of air because I was in the second balcony.

I was at the concert because of the gracious donation from my lifelong best friend Dave, who surprised me with a ticket one night several months prior. Serendipitous doesn’t begin to describe. Literally no more than 2 weeks before that ticket-as-gift night, I had made a list of things I wanted to do in my life. Item #1: See Prince in concert for free.

A lot of people see Prince and they see the chunky platforms. They see the svelte figure and effeminate body language. They see the pompadour, the racial ambiguity, the sexual expression beyond what we’re supposed to find appropriate, the sometimes scratchy/sometimes mellifluous falsetto. They see what appears to be an inability to grow a full beard/mustache. They see the multi-millionaire painting the word SLAVE on his cheek with eyeliner. The man who changed his name from Rogers to Prince to the symbol, giving music stores fits about where to display his CDs in their alphabetically-perfect world. Then the Artist. Then back to Prince.

In short, they see a freak. Everything he’s done seems to be exactly what nobody else would do.

And he’s built a career, no, a legend, by doing things nobody else would do. “When Doves Cry” was a dance song that features absolutely no bass. Unheard of at the time, and still never replicated to that level of success. When contemporaries embellished their life stories through song, Prince only told the absolute truth, and held the specifics and names in his own head, never giving too much of himself away. All the pain and sadness came out, but you had to listen to the music, not just the lyrics. Rumor states he once recorded a song about his father that was so emotional he destroyed all tapes before anyone else could hear it. When he makes music, all he knows how to do is tell the truth, sometimes against his own better judgment.

He would ask his band to play 3 hour shows, jump into their cars and zip across town to play another 3 hours to a different crowd. Anything to play for people. Anything to avoid talking to them. He only knows how to talk to you through performing for you. He’s notoriously soft-spoken in person. And what really would you expect? Because Prince is all those things that make people call him freak, and that means young Rogers Nelson, growing up in Minneapolis, was all those things too. And if interacting with the people around him was difficult because of their judgments about him, then why wouldn’t he channel all of it into his music?

Sure, he’s a rock star. He built a mansion, keeps the gate locked, has his famous friends over. But he’s different about it. His mansion is in Minnesota, his home state, not California or the Hamptons. He unlocks his gate often, holds a weeklong music festival on his property, lets everyone in. When other rock stars come over, he opens his garage to the public, let’s them walk right up next to him and watch a jam session.

Prince doesn’t know how to talk to strangers. He probably doesn’t know how to talk to friends. His stage show runs 3 or 4 hours because he’s telling us everything he wants to say every night.

When I saw him live, I felt like he was right in front of me. In contrast to the elaborate stage shows, the “40 muthafuckas on stage,” different backup dance crews, the fog, the strobe of today’s big stars, the everything to make you forget the central character on stage is just that: a character, there sat Prince, strumming an acoustic guitar on a rotating chair, so nobody in the crowd could feel deprived of seeing his face. Inviting people from the audience to come on stage and dance to his music - and sing lines from his songs. Calling his band “too funky,” pouting off to a couch on the side of the stage and flipping through a magazine until the crowd begged for him to come back. Letting us sing along to that “wooh hooh hooh hooh” part at the end of “Purple Rain” for like 10 minutes as he closed the encore.

He helps remind me that sometimes you really do leave it all on stage. Not once did he look like he wanted to rush through the rest of the show and get to his dressing room and watch SportsCenter. I wouldn’t have been shocked to hear he had to be carried to his hotel the moment he disappeard under that stage. I also wouldn’t have been shocked to hear he went to the Paradise Rock Club and played another 3 hours.

He helps remind me that yes, it is OK to open your soul on a mic; and yes, it is OK to close it when you step away from it.

A lot of people see Prince and see a freak.

I look at him and see the exact same thing. That’s why he’s beautiful.

London recently saw the world premiere of the musical adaptation of the novel (and subsequent film) Gone with the Wind. Seventy-nine shows later, it’s been canceled.

Various reviews online pan it, saying it aims to condense too much into a play. As many of you probably know, the story focuses on a love story between some rich bratty Southern Belle, and a suave pro-slavery capitalist. The backdrop is the Civil War, and tied up in the setting of everything is the historical understanding of race and slavery, war, economic development and exploitation, and…well, isn’t that a lot already? We all know it’s risky business to set a love story against such ominous historical events, unless you can convey the gravity the situation and its effect on the people who lived it.

So the musical tried to do that by having actors playing slaves singing a happy jaunty song entitled “Negroes for Sale.” And that is astounding. That someone thought it would be acceptable to portray slaves as jazz-handsing their way into a lifetime of brutal torture and rape is beyond me.

Or it was at first, but then I realized that there’s a long history of playing up pain and suffering for ticket sales. It’s more than a little appalling to think an interpersonal love story could be so compelling as to turn slavery - slavery! - into just another fact of the day. A musical certainly could convey the dire conditions of an historical era and harsh realities of life in that time, but it appears that “Gone with the Wind” didn’t, so good riddance.

But it has to make you really wonder about the continued popularity of “Miss Saigon,” doesn’t it? (more…)

I have never paid attention to horse-racing ever in my life, but the events of this past weekend have got the wheels spinning a little in my head.

So Eight Belles, one of the horses running in the Kentucky Derby, broke two ankles during the race and was euthanized on the racetrack. My reaction was to immediately question why this horse couldn’t simply have been allowed to live and see her ankles heal and simply hang out in a field the rest of her life. What I found online is that horses generally can’t heal from broken legs and ankles, and not euthanizing a horse after such an injury would actually amount to torture as the healing process for a horse is very painful and oftentimes fatal.

So naturally, my second question was – seriously? If these injuries, which you hear about often enough for the general public to know racehorses are euthanized, are relatively common, why do we have horse racing at all? Isn’t that somewhat needless?

And again the Internets provided the answer. Horses run in the wild as well, and they in fact race each other naturally, so doing so on a track is pretty much giving them a place to do it, and also allows people to get some enjoyment and cash out of it. OK, that makes sense I suppose. There seems to be some acknowledgment that breeding racehorses does result in animals that are a bit more likely to break a bone, and while that doesn’t exactly seem ethical, I’m really not an expert on the matter, and it’s hard for me to judge what’s really acceptable without being very well acquainted with the sport.

Now if you know me, then you probably know where I’m going next. What is the major difference between supporting horse racing, a sport in which animals are bred to be more likely to die than they would be in the wild, and dogfighting, a sport in which animals are bred to be more likely to die than they would be in the wild? How are clips of dogfights shown on CNN with a warning, but the Kentucky Derby is nationally televised to an adulating audience? Why are dogfight losers considered “brutally” killed, and Eight Belles was “euthanized?” How does Michael Vick get 23 months in prison, but the owner of Eight Belles gets a letter from PETA?

And as usual, I’m not advocating for the filly’s owner to be tried as a criminal and locked up, I’m just saying, there’s somethign a little uneven here, and if you just think about what types of folks tend to be into horse racing, and what types of folks tend to be into dogfighting, and I’m just saying, the different way they get treated has more than a little bit to do with the race and relative wealth of the audience.

After the exhausting trip back and forth to Poughkeepsie, I spent a few hours at home Friday morning, then had to jump on a flight to DC because the University of Maryland beckoned. Riding the DC Metro reminded me of my youth (relatively), when I spent two years living in the nation’s capital. I have very fond memories of DC because it really helped me develop as a writer, and I was also welcomed into the U Street spoken word scene, which was especially great because I lived just blocks away from there. So word to DC. I miss it.

But not enough to move back…

Anyway, I arrived at Maryland and chilled out in Dharma Naik’s office with Bobby, the lead student organizer. For some reason the office was incredibly hot. I didn’t bring a change of clothes because I was only in town for like 14 hours, so I was worried about sweating through my clothes. I undid some buttons, but quickly rethought my strategy and simply moved myself into the hallway. There I got to hang out with my old buddy Neel Saxena - who eats Chinese food with Marion Barry! - and Parag Khandhar, who is now teaching at UMCP.

Also in the house was Gem Daus - who helped Neel and I establish the scientific theorem that all API men can perform a standing long jump of exactly 71 inches - and Garret Lum, who is the asshole in the picture to the left.

Anyway, the room was interesting, with a ceiling entirely made of glass. I know the administration was trying to send a message to us. Oh Asian Pacific American Heritage Month? Give ‘em the room with the glass ceiling! Damn you!

Four students kicked it off: Heather, Malcolm, Kenton, and Nikki. I couldn’t help but think of Prince’s song “Darling Nikki,” which I would have mentioned to Nikki if it hadn’t been completely inappropriate. You know, given the fact that it’s the song that was so raunchy it is directly responsible for those “Explicit Lyrics” stickers on cassettes and CDs. (Back when cassettes and CDs still existed…)

When I see old friends, I start to act, well, old. I start making jokes that you can only understand if you’re like 25+, and you’d only think are funny if you were born in the 70s. For example: whenever I see a group of handsome Asian men, it reminds me of the Basco brothers…but when I mentioned that to the crowd of college students, it was pretty clear none of them knew who the Basco brothers were. That’s a shame. I should have scolded them harder.

But we had fun. Got a chance to hang out afterward at some place where I ate an entire half chicken. I think there were fries involved too. I spoke to a small and awkward (Kumudha’s assessment, not mine) group of students about activism. When Dharma had said I could talk to them about campus organizing, I kinda laughed it off because I was thinking, no students want to talk about organizing on Friday night! But I guess I’m an idiot. Kudos Maryland students, you’re much more committed to the cause than I was in college.

So that night I hung out with my boys from back in the day. We played Commodore 64 and my man Coy dropped me off at the airport at 3AM to catch the first flight back home.