Shock and Awe

Yeah. Hello world. Now we are up on some shit, "like they bringing' '88 back, listening to the new track "Shock and Awe" with Z-Trip and Chuck D. Tingle down the spine when Chuck steps in to the ring, when I hear the basso profundity. Now we got Chuck on our side, no irony that the apotheosis of PE occurred during the last "morning in America" administration. Something clicked, like, ok, it's time to listen again. Chuck, we welcome you. Cornel West makes this great point in Democracy Matters that basically you can understand the Patriot Act and 9/11 through the long lens of racism...bear with me here:

The ugly terrorist attacks on innocent civilians on 9/11 plunged the whole country in to the blues. Never before have Americans of all classes, colors, regions, religions, genders, and sexual orientations felt unsafe, unprotected, subject to random violence, and hated. Yet to have been designated and treated as a nigger in America for over 350 years has been to feel unsafe, unprotected, subject to random violence, and hated.

Getting searched a the airport, having your phone conversations taped, being kicked in the thigh so many times that a blood clot reaches your heart and kills you, getting flown to Nigeria for torture... just a messy sidebar in the great American experiment.

And what of this experiment we have here, on the page? I say, bring em' on.

Blogging from Kyiv

hey y'all, I'll be trying to do some (more or less) steady blogging while we're travelling--we arrived in Kyiv just a couple hours ago, late Sunday night (it's 1:50am now). Check over there for updates: steadyblogging.blogspot.com (for some reason the blogger buttons don't show up on my sister's computer, so I can't create links).

NYTimes series on social class

I haven't had a chance to read any of the three massive articles from this past week that have kicked off this series the Times is doing on class in America. I plan to read them on the plane to Kyiv tomorrow night.

Hopefully they won't disappear into the pay-to-play archives starting Sunday. Speaking of which, did you catch the news that the Times is going to start asking for a subscription fee to read their Op-ed columnists online. The nice thing is that subscribers to the print edition will get not have to pay the additional online subscription fee--and it seems that the online subscription will include access to the archives! So even though I think it's a bad move for the Times to limit online access (read Salon on the move here, and Kos on it here), it works out well for Anj and I.

Finally, on the topic of class in America, I borrowed a book titled Class (I think it's this one) from my man Jon Groat when I was in Ann Arbor last summer (see this SteadyBlogging post for some of the backstory). He highly recommended it, but I haven't read it yet (same with the other UofC classics he lent me).

Common Knowledge

I'm going to defer to Arun to post a grand mission statement for DillyTaunt (or at least an explanation what he has in mind with the name).

In the meantime, here's some Common info I was going to e-mail out anyways:

Seems like Common's got the promo push behind him for the new album. I was pleasantly surprised to see the street team had got some BE posters up on Mission last week. (I was going to snap a photo, but they got papered over by a new set of promo posters this week--I've got to start packing the camera on the regular, taking some photos around town.)

Also, Gilles had Com live in session this week. Tracklisting here. (But instead of messing with BBC's wack audio player, load this link into RealPlayer to listen to Worldwide as a Real Audio stream!)

Got an e-mail earlier this week from Common's website, in advance of next week's release of BE. Click here to get to a nice little pop-up player that plays snippets of each of the tracks on BE. You can also find the player here, along with the videos for "Go" and "The Corner."

Brady sent this story from the Chicago Trib a few weeks ago, which verifies and fleshes out Brady's reaction to "The Corner" video--that this album represents a homecoming to the Chi. (My e-mail reply to Brady's forward was that I came across a funny account of "The Corner" video shoot written by one of the okayplayer guys, in which he mentioned filming at 79th & Cottage Grove and in Washington Park...where "We could smell Harold's Chicken from up the block"! Go here and click on the Feb 2005 link in the navigation sidebar.)

It'll be interesting to see if Com can finally go platinum on this one. Having Kanye behind the decks (and his name featured prominently in the promos) can't hurt.

Finally, I'm sure Brady won't mind if I post this (Flickr is lovely; click through to see what little I got in my photostream):

Common Knowledge
Originally uploaded by suman_ganguli.