Tuesday, October 30, 2007

McRib Post Number 1

2 Haikus

McRib And me is
Is It to Be I Will Hope
Only once a year.

Too Much? Immpossible.*
Let that bitch drown in some sauce.
Leave it in the vat.

*it only works with six

Albuquerque: Report #1

Now that I've been here a month, I have a slight grip on what the fuck is happening all around me. Here are a few initial observations/important things.

1. It's a little bit thugged out. And I choose the phrase thugged out carefully because i believe it adequately describes the scene. It's not so much that the city is fucked up and full of crime and poverty, it's more like a normal place, just filled with thugs.

2. But it also is fucked up and full of crime. One of the guys I work with takes his car battery out of his car and brings it up to the office every day so no one will steal his car. It is safe to say i had never heard of such a thing in my life.

3. It's not fucked up in a cool, northern rust-belt crime ridden decaying city type of way. It's more like a sprawling mess with shit (literal and figurative) scattered all about the desert with no rhyme or reason. And there's lots of meth, or at least there's a shit load of meth heads. And they look like grade-a fucking tweakers too.

4. And never in my life, with the slight exception of right off an Indian reservation in northern Minnesota have I seen so many people cross streets with zero regard for the power of the car. I'm not talking about jaywalking downtown, no I'm talking about major roads, three lanes on each side, women walking with their kids in the middle of the road, and sometimes, not even to cross the street, walking in the road with traffic. Sometimes they are pulling their children behind them, sometimes, although I have only seen it once, they are pulling a television set attached to a crude rope-like device.

5. Downtown is where the party is on the weekends. And all the bars clear out into a block and a half stretch and the cops let it go on and get a little bit wild and then the hammer comes down. But how does the hammer come down, yeah, no worries, the cops just ride fucking horses through the crowd. Yeah, no big deal.

6. Said horses shit all over the fucking place and after the drunks have been disperesed to the four corners of el burque, then a group of meth heads wearing hot neon green lands end style jackets and donning the latest bluetooth earpieces come in and shovel the shit away.

7. There is Mexican food, and there is New Mexican Food. These things are so different it would blow a mind. Food is made new Mexican by the addition of green chile. Sounds like a good idea, but it's a good idea taken so too fucking far. The other day I had a blt, so you think, fine, a little green chile on the bread, or perhaps some type of green chile infused mayo or some type of green chile spread. I knew it would come somehow. But, it's no armature hour out here, the bacon was cooked in a pan with green chiles allowing the green chile liquids to enter the bacon. There also is green chile wine.

8. There is an area called the war zone. Now you might think, war zone, oh shit, must be a lot of crime and bad stuff and I should live there. No. Someone told me "dont live up there, that's the war zone." I asked, is there a lot of crime? To which the answer was "no one gets killed or nothing, but my cousin lived there, every night something got set on fire. A car, a dumpster, a tire, every night there was a fire.

9. It's as high up as denver, so it's fucking cold as shit and then hot as hell in the late afternoon and the elevation does a number on my already-dry-as-shit skin and within days I'm going to split open and melt/bleed all over the place like I did back sophomore of high school when dan ollman called me alligator hands.

Wednesday, October 10, 2007

ABSOLUTE SHIT



Let me make this clear, Real Talk is the song of the year.
That being said, the best song of the year has the worst video of the year.

Honestly, I was expecting something special. Something very special. Instead, we get R. Kelly with his dudes n em in the studio fucking around, playing dice, and just sitting there not caring. Which is the worst part of the video. If any song should not have a video featuring other people sitting around, totally unmoved by the lyrics, it is Real Talk. As I've mentioned before, not on this blog, but out loud, loudly, to many people, it's the best song of the year, hands down no contest. Could be top five Kells song of all time, which would put it somewhere in the top 17 songs of this milenium, top 25 of all time. But I digress. Here is what sucks the most:
1. R. Kelly's chohorts are just fucking around. No human being can listen to this song and fuck around and not be totally engrossed and amazed at the genius. Their faliure to react with the proper emotional response to certain lines of the song makes one second guess the quality of the work in the first place.
2. At the end of the song/video the dice game gets ugly, a gun gets pulled out, and there is a shot fired. Unfortunatly, this is during one of the best moments of the song. R. Kelly tells his Butler Milton to start the car and warm up quick "this bitch done lost her motherfucking mind," but because of the gun, it fades out quick and you can't hear the line. Here's the deal. Kells' has got a dude to warm up his car, and that dude's name is Milton. If I had a guy named Milton to warm up my up my car, let alone a friend named Milton, I'd damn sure brag about it, and I wouldn't let a gun going off ruin me letting you know about that shit.

To summarize: Real Talk The Song=Best Song of the Year
Real Talk the Video =Worst Video Ever

ALSO
when you search for real talk on youtube you can get a gang of videos like this, which dudes answering the phone and acting the shit out. All are better than the one Robert gave us.

ART REVIEW NUMBER 1

ONLY BUILT FOR CUBAN LINX II VS. MR. SCARFACE IS BACK
(a scientific evaluation)






1. STORY LINE

MSIB: Much has been made of this cover photo and it seems that there is a slight disagreement as to the identity of the man in the Hawaiian shirt. The only two theories worth discussing are the most obvious, either he is the supplier, or he is an undercover cop acting as a supplier. Either way, the stage is set for a drug deal gone horribly array. For the purposes of this review, the story behind the photo is as follows: a drug deal went bad. Everyone pulled out their shotguns, and for some reason, only shotguns were brought to the scene. (We'll discuss this later.) During the chaos and confusion a homeless guy sneaks down to the ground and tries to shovel as much coke up his nose as humanly possible.

OBFCL2: The beauty of this one lies in its simplicity. The audience need not know what the fuck happened only moments before the photo is snapped, the past is prologue, and we can bet some shit went down of Eddie Nash proportions. And now here they are, on the floor, with guns pointed at each other, either about to blast or try and calm the shit down. It is unclear how both parties in this wound up on the floor in the position they are in. It stands to reason one would pull the other one down, thus making the distance between them seem unlikely. I'm guessing they fought, fell, and rolled away John Woo style to draw the guns.

Winner: OBFCL2
MSIB is just to confusing, there's a million different things that might be happening that have lead us up to this event. While OBFCL2 is slightly guilty of the same critique, I feel that it doesn't matter as much. What is important to the storyline is what you see, it's two guys about to blow each other away. That's all the story you need.


2. THE MOMENT AKA THE HENRI CARTIER-BRESSON AWARD

So, what if the basic principles of photography "is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as of a precise organization of forms that give that event its proper expression?" What if?

MSIB: Not really the moment here. The standoff here is exactly that, a standoff, it could last all day, shit it could already be all day. Now the guy with the Hawaiian shirt does grab the gun, which logically would lead one to believe that the guns just came out and this is his immediate, instinctual reaction to the situation. But, what is troublesome is the prescence of the coke-doer. It seems that if this just happened an instant ago, this guy would wait a minute till he got down on his knees. Because of these inconsistencies, the time line is more or less fucked, and the decisive moment cannot be properly evaluated.

OBFCL2: All it is a moment! You know these dudes just got on the floor and just pulled out their guns. And I'm guessing, one's about to blast. I don't think cooler heads will prevail.

Winner: OBFCL2 (not even close)


2. GUNS
MSIB: Shotguns, only shotguns.
OBFCL2: Pistols.
As far as the "if everyone's going to have a gun they are going to have the same gun thing," I think pistols are a far more realistic choice. That being said, the fantasy of everyone having shotguns is worth a lot more than grounding your photo shoot in what-a-man-going-to-a-drug-deal-can-conceal-reality.

Winner: MSIB

3. NUMBER OF PEOPLE WHO STAND TO BE KILLED
MSIB: 7, and the mysterious seventh hand helps us believe more might be involved.
OBFCL2: 2

Winner: MSIB

4. NUMBER OF PEOPLE THAT MIGHT LIVE
MSIB: 3 to 5. This is based on the assumption that there are indeed seven people involved. Shooting will start, and either all of one party will perish, or after a few deaths the situation will cool down.

OBFCL2: 0 The angle of the gun, the distance between them, all these things point out these guys are for real, they ain't backing down, and shooting first is nothing more than shooting before the other guy whose two feet away from you shoots you. There's no way out of this one, and there certainly are no winners.

WINNER: OBFCL2 (not even a contest)

5. Bustedness/Realism

MSIB: This just looks crazy. And not in the since that a while ago it was harder to take a more realistic shot and have it look real without being fake. But this is outta control. The coke on dude's hand looks painted on, it doesn't seem like all the people posed at the same time, the dude that might be Bushwick Bill (and if he isn't, he's just some other midget) looks like he's actually floating in the air. There's a lot here that doesn't add up.

OBFCL2: This just looks like they didn't want to put something glossy out there. Granted it's sloppy, there's some weird fluorescent light being reflected on the floor, the amount of cocaine on Raekwon isn't just beyond being realistic, it's beyond surrealism to the point where it doesn't look like a drug deal gone bad, but that he went to town on a powdered doughnuts. Either way, and granted, it could be a let's spend a shitload of money to make some dope looking shit(literally) I don't think they did. I also don't think they got whoever took photos for Shabazz the Disciple, Sunz of Man, or some other third string Wu-Affiliate. I think they had a great fucking idea and went with it and it turned out to be a great.

WINNER: OBFCL2

So, to sum it up, OBFCL2 wins 4-2. Nicely done. Let's hope the album is half as good. I didn't spend all this time writing this shit over three days at work to hear some The Lex Diamond Story type shit.