Did anyone know there was a player named Jyles Tucker playing for the San Diego Chargers?
The rookie recovered a fumble for a touchdown yesterday in a win over the Raiders. I’ve heard of people with Giles as a last name, but this is new.
His name is Jyles, pronounced like Giles.
Or is my name Giles, pronounced like Jyles?
Oh the movie never ends it goes on and on and on and on…
Nostalgic today because of yesterday’s news about the Juice Crew. Awesome. Peep the ill trio of Masta Ace videos below.
Kool G is actually my favorite member, but something about Masta Ace is mad timeless.
According to blackfilm.com, there is a movie in the works about the Juice Crew. Holy shit!
So apparently the actress who played Akeelah is gonna be Roxanne Shante, which got me saying like…word? I thought she was like 11, but after reading up on her, she seems like a good choice. A+ for you guys.
Surprised about Cuba Gooding Jr as Marley Marl, and looking forward to David Banner as Biz. But I’m casting the movie in my head. Please play along:
I get salty as salt nuggets around holiday season.
Please check out my craptastic poem here: Crappy Xmas Poem in 7 Parts.
And here’s a picture of Jay-Z in a Santa hat.
I got a lot of positive response to this entry I did for BPRLive.org three days ago, so in the spirit of laziness, I’m crossposting here.
Please read on.
Hands down, the greatest song of the melodramatic arena rock era that took place in the late 70s/early 80s was “Don’t Stop Believing” by Journey. I have a hard time believing anybody could disagree with this sentiment. There’s something for everyone: the boy meets girl under less-than-ideal circumstances story, the insightful observations about human nature, the repetition of the word “on.” I think people usually assume its some overly cheesy pop song with no meaning, but there’s poetry in them thar lyrics. Please check the following trio of haikus, taken directly from the song, and devoid of their original context and punctuation:
People living. Just
to find emotion hiding
somewhere in the night.
Just a city boy.
Born and raised in south Detroit.
He took the midnight.
For a smile, they can
share the night. It goes on and
on and on and on.
So perhaps Journey’s connection to Asian artistic forms led them to their most recent band-related decision, which was to bring on an actual Asian to front the band. Arnel Pineda - the lead vocalist for a bar band who covers Journey tunes in the Philippines - is their new lead singer. Holy shit!
Click here to read the rest of this post at BPRLive.org
Many of you know Barry Bonds stays in the news because he holds the record for most career home runs in Major League Baseball, and a lot of folks assume he’s been juicing for years. Never mind that the MLB has known ballplayers have been using steroids for a long time and never did anything to discourage it or that it’s never been proven that Bonds ever used steroids - a lot of baseball fans, particularly white baseball fans, hold a distaste for Bonds so rancorous, you would think he was Dick Cheney, Jeff Skilling, or someone who did some truly evil shit - not a professional athlete. (Huh? What do you mean there’s more apathy than hatred for Cheney?)
So Marc Ecko - who made his fortune selling urban fashion, with best-selling brands like ecko unlimited, G-Unit, and Avirex all a part of his empire - won Barry Bonds’s record-breaking homerun ball in auction with a bid of over $750,000. Populist that he is (I say that sarcastically), Ecko created a website where people could vote what to do with the ball, and the result was never really in doubt. The vote was as rigged as the presidential election was in 2004, and - surprise surprise - America voted to give the ball to the baseball Hall of Fame with a big fat asterisk stamped on it, to serve as reminder that while Bonds may have broken the career mark for homeruns, he cheated to do it by using steroids. You know, because guilty until proven innocent and all that.
Now of course a lot of older white folks - who had never heard of Marc Ecko, but whose kids have - are shitting their pants out of excitement that Barry Bonds will forever be remembered as a cheater in the HOF. I wonder if this will have an affect on the sales of clothes from ecko unlimited? I wonder if this stunt has anything in common with the fact that virtually all of the models on the ecko website are white for the first time like ever? Nah, probably coincidence.
But see, we shouldn’t really be surprised, I mean, Marc Ecko has sucked for a long time. You all may have seen a viral video that was going around the Internets a couple years ago of Marky Marc graffiti tagging the president’s plane Air Force One. Of course, it was fake and not at all tied to the impending release of the graffiti-based video game “Marc Ecko’s Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure.” (Remember folks, sarcastic.) He tried to play it like he was representing this pent-up frustration with the government that a lot of regular folks feel, but when questioned about the stunt, his true corporatist colors shined on through saying that not just anybody could pull off such a stunt, because “you have to be rich.”
Before all of this business - and I mean that in every sense of the word - took place, Marc Ecko was just doing his thing: exploiting clothing trends in Black urban communities, repackaging them and selling them back to those same communities he stole them from and selling them to kids in suburban mega-malls who assumed he was the trendsetter, not the trend thief.
It’s like he just gets worse and worse and worse. Maybe someone should set up a website to vote on whether we should continue to spend our money on his clothes or if we should start stamping asterisks all over them.
I was tagged by eliaday for this blog meme recently, and so I guess that means I write 8 random things about me here. I call this an ingenious way to come up with blog material; you call it lazy. Let’s just agree to disagree.
I’m calling this blog meme “8 Diagrams” in honor of Wu-Tang month. There are actually no diagrams, but there are 8 bullet points. So take from that whatever you want.
1. My favorite slept-on rap verse off any mainstream song is Babs Bunny’s verse from Bad Boy This, Bad Boy That My favorite couplet in the song is: “you a thug, why you keep on talking? Let’s get it crackin/Get a b** stomped out in the club, I make it happen.” It’s just so unapologetically gangsta; it’s like that moment in A Bronx Tale when the motorcycle gang gets locked into the mafia don’s bar. Thrilling.
2. I hate wearing t-shirts with sleeves, but I hate dudes who always wear sleeveless t-shirts more. If I started wearing sleeveless t-shirts around town, I might as well grow a ponytail and ride a Segway to make the transformation from person into “Mad TV” sketch character complete.
3. When I was a kid, whenever someone anywhere in the building flushed a toilet, the water from all faucets would flow weaker. If this happened while I was in the shower, then I’d step away from the water because I’d be thinking, “ew, toilet water,” and then once the stream got strong again, I’d step back in.
You may have heard that CNN’s Glenn Beck was on “Good Morning America” last week on the same day that Mitt Romney was to give a speech addressing - for the first time during this, his campaign to become the Republican nominee for President - his religion. Because he is a Mormon, and because he doesn’t have Chuck Norris’s endorsement, his hold on that number one spot is starting to slip. So I guess his staff felt like it was now or never to address the fact that he practices a religion that a lot of Americans kind of just assume is crazy.
(By the way, I find it weird that Romney never converted to Protestantism - not because I think Mormonism is worse or anything, but simply because Mitt Romney will usually do anything to get elected. He tends not to be very strong in his beliefs, and I would assume that his faith is no different. And I know: I live in the state in which he was once elected governor, and almost everything he said then is the opposite of what he says now. Anyway, I can write “Sorry Mitt Romney, You Suck” another time…)
For some reason, ABC thought it might be a good idea to bring the aforementioned Beck on to talk about it. I’m not sure why they thought that was a good idea, because although Glenn Beck is a Mormon, he is also a windbag. Any insight he might have had because he shares a religion with Romney would be negated by the fact that he never never never knows what the hell he is talking about.
Perhaps hindsight is 20/20, and I’m simply saying this stuff because I already know how ridiculous he looked on the show. But it’s not just that; what has caught a lot of people’s attention is that when it was his turn to comment, the first point he made was, “why are we going to a candidate and asking about religion? Who cares?”
Uh…is that, like, a trick question?
Don’t you care, Glenn Beck? Or am I wrong? I thought you were the same guy who invited The Honorable Keith Ellison on your program on CNN after he became the first Muslim to win election to the U.S. House of Representatives, and said, “what I feel like saying is, ‘Sir, prove to me that you are not working with our enemies.’”
Indeed, who cares about religion?
This genius went on to say: “I’m not accusing you of being an enemy, but that’s the way I feel, and I think a lot of Americans will feel that way.”
You know what I think a lot of Americans feel? That Glenn Beck is an asshole.
Many of the 3 people who read this blog are unaware that I also blog on BPRLive.org, a website/podcast/streaming radio station started up by a few dedicated smartypants volunteers at Boston Progress Arts Collective. I jumped on that bandwagon pretty early, because it’s pretty unique. I’m gonna guess there is no other site on all the Internets where you can hear a stream of independent API musicians 24/7, plus read and hear interviews with API artists, CD reviews, watch video of API performance events, and more and more and more.
But coming up with blog content is hard, even with a team of folks. So to give our tired fingers a rest, we developed a new feature over at BPRLive.org called Shuffled!, which allows our loyal readers to take a little stroll around the brains of notable API artists and find out what’s on their playlist nowadays.
So this feature makes its debut today! And who should play Malkovich to our collective Craig? None other than my brother-in-arms (and on tour) former Native Guns emcee Kiwi Illafonte. Click the link, read, and enjoy!
Bryn Mawr Hosts ASA Culture Festival
Hannah Mueller, 12/04/2007
From the The Bi-College News
Lions, poetry, swords, a capella, hula—Bryn Mawr’s Asian Students Association Culture Festival had it all. “Night Market: The OccAsian of the Year,” held in Thomas Great Hall last Saturday, was well attended and a great success. The performance portion of the show was followed immediately by a Night Market, a beautifully decorated and eclectic “street fair” in the back of the Hall with food, games, and gifts.
Kelly Soudachanh ‘10 and Sandra Lee ‘10, Culture Festival co-heads and emcees, really had their act together, which made the show flow naturally and quickly. The first and last performances were by the Johns Hopkins University Lion Dance Troupe. Pounding drumbeats accompanied the five dancers, four of whom composed two huge, colorful lions with moving mouths, ears, and eyes. As part of the dance, the lion dancers pounced into the crowd, and later into the Night Market.
…
Giles Li’s performance was the finale to the program portion of the festival. Li is a spoken word artist from Boston who has founded the Boston Progress Arts Collective and works as an Arts Coordinator at the Neighborhood Center in Boston’s Chinatown. Comfortable and friendly with the audience, Li performed lyrical spoken word poetry about America’s international situation in “Mathematics,” the hypocrisy of commercialized Christmas in “A Crappy Xmas Poem in Seven Parts,” and a deeply respectful and heartfelt tribute to the women in his life in “Woman.” Li interspersed his poetry with funny stories from other performance experiences, and with an acoustic version of “Umbrella” on the guitar, which was pretty funny. His last poem involved audience participation; in three sections, we yelled “Okay!,” “Yeah!,” and “What?” at his direction and were incorporated into an ardent appeal for peace.
Click here to read the entire article.