Currently reading

Here's what currently in rotation: this and this.

First one came on recommendation from fatmango. Anj tore through it in a week or so, and really enjoyed it. I'm only about 50 pages in--it's good already, looking forward to the rest.

Here's an odd fact: while I was growing up, our family visited Little Falls, MN, where Lindbergh was born, a handful of times.

Why that second one? It's not only b/c I have a scholarly interest in the stochastic calculus and Black-Scholes. More on that later...

Independence Day mix / last.fm

With all this talk about music up in here, we ought to start sharing some actual music.

JuniorCooper recently asked me to send him a copy of Nuyorican Soul. I'm finally going to get that out to him this week. And to pay for the delay, I'm going to throw in a copy of a compilation I threw together the morning of July 4, when fatmango was up here. Gave him and Arj copies that day, and I've been playing it myself a fair amount. I uploaded the tracklisting to my YahooBriefcase--look in the Music folder. I'm interested to see whether you guys can grab it--YahooBriefcase has been unreliable.

Got to give credit where credit is due. The opening Coke Escovedo burner is a d/l from SoulSides, a few of the tracks are d/ls from SoulSeek, and the Maxayn cover of "Shelter" is something JuniorCooper himself e-mailed me a couple months back.

Let me know if you want a copy and I'll mail out.

OTOH, if you want some streaming radio, check out last.fm. I may have e-mailed some of you guys about this a few months ago. I played around with it for a while back then, but gave up on it b/c it seemed to be early in the beta stage--lots of bugs and slow servers. The servers are still not blazing, but the interface and reliability has improved. I haven't paid for an upgraded account that would allow a personalised radio stream based on my listening profile. But any user gets to listen to "Neighbour Radio" for free. My last.fm page is here, while JuniorCooper's is here. If you open up an account, add us as friends.

BBC Selector: Common

Common choosing up an hour of (excerpts of) classic tracks here.

Tracklisting:

Grandmaster Flash - The Message
Eric B and Rakim - Paid in Full
Krs 1 - Stop the Violence
NWA - F**k the Police
Pete Roc and CL Smooth - The Reminisce Over You
Common - The Light
D'Angelo - Lady
Lauryn Hill - Ex Factor
Nas - The World is Yours
Public Enemy - Shut em Down (Pete Rock remix)
Kanye West - Jesus Walks
Mos Def - Umi Says
Common - I Used to Love H.E.R.

Online until 16.08.05

I'm recording it right now, thanks to iRecordMusic, while also transmitting it to the stereo via AirPortExpress and Airfoil. Technology is miraculous.

LA-SF by high speed train

In a previous post, I mentioned that I've been obsessing about public transit, and slipped in a mention of the proposal, the idea, the dream--that someday there could be a high speed rail line btwn downtown SF & downtown LA. No more dealing with the I-5: downtown to downtown in report from Sacto:

"The Legislature initially placed the bond measure on the November 2004 ballot, then decided the state's budget woes made a 2006 vote look better. Now a bill that would delay the vote until November 2008 has passed the Assembly and is awaiting action by the Senate.

The bond measure would provide $9 billion for high-speed rail, about half the money needed to build a line that could carry passengers between Los Angeles and San Francisco in about two and a half hours."

Now my math says that means about $18 billion for that train. Though the same article later quotes a price of $35 billion. Maybe something to do with inflation..

In any case: damn, we need that train..but taanstaafl, for sure. Who is going to pay for that sh*t? We've got to, somehow.

Cassette tape DJ

Cassette tape DJ
Originally uploaded by kde-head.

Put the link to this in a comment to juniorcooper's nice post below. But figured I might as well take advantage of flickr's capabilities and blog it.

Obituaries...

Good to see some action up in here. Johnee, thanks for reposting that e-mail.

Peter Jennings is the big obituary of the week, but there are always remarkable people passing on from this world. Brady and I kicked some e-mail back and forth a couple weeks ago about how there was a spate of soul men who died in July: Luther, Obie Benson of the Four Tops, Eugene Record of the Chi-Lites.

I'm becoming one of those people that find the obituaries among the most interesting parts of the paper. Wasn't it in Fortress of Solitude that Abraham would read Dylan the obituaries over breakfast every morning?

Notes on Hip Hop

(repost of recent email):
I think that there's this authenticity trap that I fall in to, wherein I like to say that I was down with whoever at whatever time. Yeah, I had the Black Moon "Enta Da Stage" joint when it was blowin' up blocks in BKLYN. I look at our UofC years and think that there was so much original hip hop at the time, that I was cool b/c I listened to Digable Planets and GangStarr (or whatever)...then I'm out at a show and see some kids who were born in the late 80's talking about how fucking Ludacris or Eminem were on some pioneer shit, and I'm like WTF??!! I mean, I'm even a little ambivalent about Jay-Z--it's like he was the best rapper and the most popular rapper in the world when he went out (I feel kinda corny actually saying that--part of it is having lived in NYC, you see the direct street impact from somebody like him in his moment).

Anyhow, I get how invested we are in this argument when I get together with Brady and Novy and Arun around a few beers and try and decide the most important hip hop albums ever--what a fucking night! Gets back to the question of what hip hop is--I prefer KRS-One's more ecumenical, inclusive approach--there's a long and deep richness to be mined. But then there's the bullshit repugnant, repetitive taste of ass that is on every city's Hot 97 and MTV--I mean, it that's hip hop...?

There's something about hip hop that we all want to own, perhaps because for many of us it was a transformative music that appeared at an inflection point in our lives (high school)...who can forget pumping your fist to PE driving in your mom's car on the way to pick some piece of 11th grade ass up? Or waiting for Tower Records to open so you could cop the first copy of "Fear of a Black Planet"? Some kernel of that stays in you, and so much about who you are from that point on in life is somehow invested in the music you were listening to right then. I ran in to Chuck D. on an airplane about 6 years ago. All I said to him was "Thank you." That's all that needed to be said.

Summer jams

Good to see some posts by Johnee, incl the photos.

It was a lazy Saturday morning. I had the TV on while doing some bills, and happened to come across VH-1's video countdown. Number one was Mariah's "We Belong Together". Like everyone else, I've been hearing bits of this here and there all summer. As Anj will tell you, I got a predilection for sappy but catchy R&B like that (prime example: Jaheim's "Put Your Woman First"). But I didn't realize it was Mariah, or that it was the summer jam. There's something about it that sounds familiar, as if it came out years ago. Maybe it was just the presence of that line, "If you think you're lonely now..."

I couldn't even place that line, and it took Google to remind me that it's Bobby Womack (I hadn't listened closely enough to pick out that Mariah names him in the lyrics). A nice thing is that Womack got songwriting credit on Mariah's song for that.

Odd coincidence: Google also led me to this article by Kelefa Sanneh from Thursday's NYT Arts section, about how Mariah's track is indisputably the song of the summer.

Brady Rockin' the Vegas Pimp Lifestyle/holdin' down/all he needs is a crown/gettin' props from the brown
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Rockin' the Ramen Tokyo Style!
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