Writing Exercise

I finally figured out how to enable the title field

2008-05-17T19:03:00.000-07:00

It's been like three years without post titles and I finally figured this out. I feel triumphant yet sad.

A Weekend of Good Eating

2007-12-24T11:40:00.000-08:00

Friday
breakfast: mixed green salad w/ dijon and herb dressing, avocado, tomato, sauteed king mushrooms with caramelized onions and bacon, two eggs, old cheddar cheese

lunch: pork and mushroom jiaoze or potstickers

dinner: smoked mackerel, herbed Gravlox, baby shrimp, Alaskan Snow Crab, yam and potato salad, tempura batter beef, brussel sprouts

Saturday
breakfast: free range chicken laksa and a Hong Kong style milky tea
snack: Chinese chicken bun, mixed nuts
dinner: Mussels in a white wine and cream sauce, radishes dipped in salt with the stalks on, French bread, wine

Sunday
breakfast: Pacific Centre Mall food court Chinese food, bourbon chicken, chicken curry, shrimp and vegetables, an original Orange Julius half Pina colada

dinner: Roast Lamb, five kinds of olives, flavoured rice, stilton and gorgonzola cheese, pear, pepper pate, home made bread, salad w/ mixed greens red and yellow peppers, bocconcini, avocado and cherry tomatoes

Monday
breakfast: Roti Prata with leftover lamb

Chihuahuas on Main

2007-11-21T14:47:00.000-08:00

I just witnessed a scene out of some repugnant romantic comedy. An oh so quirky hipster girl walking a Chihuahua with a pink sweater just crossed paths with an equally embarassing male yuppie on his way south with THE EXACT SAME DOG except this animal's sweater was green.

Their eyes met, she did a little hair toss except her hair was underneath a toque. He made some smug comment. The dogs sniffed each other and then they parted.

Main Street is not what it used to be.

Vancouver Violence

2007-11-15T19:47:00.000-08:00

Vancouver has felt very violent over the last few months. The incidents I remember are the obvious ones:

A mentally unstable, yet harmles, man gunned down by police at Granville and sixteenth.
Seven men are shot, two fatally, in a restaurant at Fraser and Broadway.
The gangland massacre in Surrey.
The assasination of two gangsters at Granville and Seventieth and the suspected retaliations.
And of course, the latest internet viral craze, Robert Dziekanski's brutal death by taser at the hands of the RCMP.

There's really no point I'm trying to make with this post except to put forth my general mental state. What makes all this violence worse is that the location of the violence overlaps with my yearly, monthly and weekly routines. The victims are all people I share a very specific public space with. Likewise, these killings were commited by the apparatus of power that controls this space: gangs and the police.

This violence isn't new exactly. Much of my East Vancouver neighbourhood as a teenager was grow operations. I've woken up to the pop pop of a drive by and a SWAT teams in my backyard. At least three houses on our block had their front doors baterring rammed and their contents carried out in garbage bags. After the plants were removed from the house two doors down, the police dumped the agricultural equipment on the front lawn. My mom took some planters for her garden. Just yesterday I bought some milk at the local Hell's Angels run supermarket, Super Valu.

But somehow this latest stuff is more disturbing. I think it's because, while I'm never going to get wrapped up in gang violence (I hope), I can see myself in the face of Dziekanski or the animator suffering from depression gunned down by police for acting outside the rules of normal social behaviour.

2007-07-18T01:51:00.000-07:00

It took some prodding, but I finally finished a song I gave up on months ago. Here's the MP3:

Potatochips

Trailer Parks are Substandard Housing

2007-07-05T20:05:00.000-07:00

A week ago, my friend and I left Vancouver, planning to hit Seattle, Portland and the Oregon Coast. One thing I noticed right away was the trailer parks. Although we certainly have them in Canada (see The Trailer Park Boys), they're less apparent here than the large fields of cheap siding and rust glimpsed from the interstate.

Jokes abound about bad weather and trailers, the most common is calling trailer parks, "tornado magnets" or "tornado bait." This is nonsense of course. Bad weather hits other buildings too, but it's the trailer parks usually suffer complete devastation. These are homes with no foundations, built from the flimsiest of materials and completely at the mercy of the weather.

I'm guilty myself of using the saying "attracted to him like a tornado to a trailer park." The implications of such quips never occured to me until this trip. I mean, all kinds of attention is given to the shanty-towns of the underdeveloped world, even the dilapidation of American inner cities; but I've never thought about the sheer number of rural and suburban North Americans who live in substandard housing. There aren't a lot of tornadoes here in the Pacific Northwest but there's consistent flooding. Images on local TV of mobile-homes being washed away is common. Outside the staggeringly wealthy centres of Seattle and Portland one can see whole towns, endless subdivisions of mobile and manufactured homes.

Another interesting thing driving through rural America is the way the war manifests itself in the endless stream of bumper stickers, pins and billboards. In coffee-crazy Washington state, even the smallest hamlets have three or four drive-through espresso stands. The stereotype of Latte Liberals and Seven-Eleven-drip Republicans doesn't have much currency here. One stand we went to, in the parking lot of the "Faith in Action Thrift Store," dished out Cappucinos to guys in pick-up trucks. It's wall of local soldiers' names had turned into a shrine of sorts, flowers adorned with those little flags Americans love so much.

In the tiny town of Drain, Oregon, every filthy little thrift store was covered in "Support the Troops" stickers. A bridal boutique display had dresses in red, white and blue and the old man outside wore a stars and stripes singlet. Fifteen miles down the road, we arrived in a considerably different town: one with vegetarian cafes, a freshly painted pub/bakery/bookstore celebrating it's monthly Art Walk. Baby boomers and some even older dressed in the rural ideal (immaculate leather boots and LL Bean hats) waved large rainbow peace flags as they marched down the block with placards reading "Bring the Troops Home Now." We were the only audience.

The next day, in a suburb south of Tacoma on the edge of a highway on-ramp there was another flag waving ceremony, this one "in support of the troops." It's where I took this picture.

2007-06-03T16:46:00.001-07:00

Happy birthday Abra!

See the rest here

Seven Ways to Amazing Health: Aaron's Miracle Diet

2007-05-22T15:11:00.000-07:00

Fasts are stupid. So are ridiculous diets. Here's Aaron's miracle fast for instant health:

Buy two bushels of spinach, fry them with as much garlic as possible and some chillies. Add salt, and maybe some sesame oil.

Get a large filet of black cod, make a sauce out of miso paste and cooking sherry. Pan fry the thing. Add diced green onions

Eat everything together as quickly as possible on top of steamed brown rice.

Fasts are stupid.

2007-05-19T15:53:00.000-07:00

My Birthday so Far or Why I'm Happy to be Twenty Three

woke up free of angst for the first time since last summer.

checked my email: inbox 1738

new text message from Eva in Ghana

put on Nina Simone, In the Morning

thirty eight new Facebook messages

breakfast: Roti Canai, onions and two eggs

watched some of a western on TV, the "Indians" were white guys with dark stuff on their faces

played the piano

cleaned the cat litter, fed Atilla

did a load of dark laundry in the bathtub, colour saving detergent

mom called to say the reservations is for six thirty at GUU, my favourite

put on my grandpa's wool shirt and walked through Victoria park

Bonnie Prince Billy, Ease Down the Road on the headphones for the first time since Will Oldham assaulted me

got Abra a Latte at Abruzzo and hung out at Magpie Magazine Gallery

complained to her about Ricepaper being hidden from view

she let me have the new Giant Robot and a Waxpoetics FOR FREE

at the people's Co Op bookstore I noticed a gorgeous magazine amidst all the anarchist zines

"holy shit," the new Ryerson Review of Journalism

two lesbian bike punks making out on the corner, I think I went to highschool with her

sat in Victoria park reading the Ryerson Review of Journalism, the sun finally came out

watched the old men play Bocci

two mexican kids smoked weed on the bench nearby

went home, put on Professor Longhair

wrote blog entry

2007-05-03T19:28:00.000-07:00

Free Association Videos

Unfortunately for the LAPD, these brown people are a FOX camera crew.

Nina Simone says, "I would have been a killer" in this excerpt from the documentary La Légende.

Two epic songs.

But You Hit My Heart With A Harpoon

2007-04-25T22:00:00.000-07:00

A writer from Ricepaper loaned me a couple books by Adrian Tomine. He's a graphic novel/comic writer/illustrator from Berkeley, California. The last time I was this excited about an author was when I read Hemmingway's complete short stories. Sleepwalk and other Short Stories just blows me away, it's sixteen animated stories about the emotional lives of literate twentysomethings. It's eerie how much I identify with some of the characters. It's the rare graphic novelist who is as good a storyteller as he is an illlustrator. Tomine is briliant on both fronts

On my way back from Seattle today I listened to Herman Dune's I Hope that I Can See You Soon maybe five times in a row (thanks Jason). The video for this song is just as amazing.

The CanWest Museum of Human Rights

2007-04-23T14:28:00.000-07:00

The Canwest Museum of Human Rights?
from This Magazine's Blog

Philip Gourevitch, in his essential We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families, describes the ridiculousness of reading a newspaper article on Rwandan atrocities while waiting in line at the Holocaust Memorial in Washington.

During a speech at the museum's opening ceremonies, Bill Clinton called it "an investment in a secure future against whatever insanity lurks ahead." Gourevitch writes, "Apparently all he meant was that the victims of future exterminations could die knowing that a shrine already existed in Washington where their suffering might be commemorated..."

Gourevitch goes on to chronicle not only the horrors of the Rwandan genocide (a word the Clinton administration was loath to use) but the west's complicity in the act. Not only for acting too late, and acting incorrectly but for a creating the historical circumstances that lead up to it and ultimately for supplying the resources with which to carry out mass murder.

This week we've been hearing a lot (especially if you live in a Canwest owned town) about Gail Asper's coup in securing federal status for the Human Rights Museum to be built in Winnipeg. Stephen Harper, always the intellectual, described the partnership as such, "never before has there been a collaboration of this scale to develop a national museum, but if ever there were a Canadian cultural institution suited for a public-private partnership, it is this one, because human rights can never be the exclusive preserve of the state."

According to Canwest News Services, "It's unclear how much say the Asper family, whose private foundation is putting $20 million into the museum, will have in the running of the museum. However, Harper said major contributors will serve on its board."

Call me an alarmist, but somehow "the Canadian state," in partnership with a right-wing media behemoth, defining human rights in my community doesn't sit right. Even worse, this is all happening in a structure expected to tower over Winnipeg in the form of an ancient Babylonian Ziggurat. Why such an obscure--and ugly--architectural reference, if we're giving homage to the great slave-labour empires of antiquity why no go with something a little more pleasing to the eye, a Pharaonic Pyramid perhaps, or maybe a couple Kremlinesque domes.

Last summer I visited the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site in Atlanta. The memorial to one of America's greatest heroes is a small National Park Service red-brick building across the street from his childhood home. The once thriving middle-class black neighbourhoood is now depressed. Only blocks away, I saw hundreds of people encamped underneath massive highway overpasses, many laying on bare concrete, amidst posters that said re-elect Ray Nagin as mayor.

The exhibit chronicling MLK Jr's life and the history of the civil rights movement was moving as was the video presentation that acknowledged the radical path he was on right before his death. In the section of the centre aimed at children I found a booth admonishing us to make ethical purchases. The exhibit gave an overview of sweatshops around the world and listed some organizations fighting child labour. "Great," I thought, but turning around I noticed a large plaque with the words "this exhibit is proudly sponsored by the Coca Cola corporation."

Coca Cola is one of Atlanta's biggest companies and they have a budget with which to sponsor culture, but this is the same brand that many student groups have been trying to kick of campuses world wide for human rights abuses in Colombia, India and other countries. The month before, I had watched a Colombian bottling-plant labour organizer weep as he recounted being tortured at the hands of the paramilitaries hired by Coke to imprison him and harass his family.

I'm not sure if it was the same feeling Gourevitch experienced outside the Holocaust memorial, a combination of shame and frustration, but my visit had been ruined and one of my heroes dirtied.

Cornell West talks about the Santa Clausification of Martin Luther King Jr, the rebranding of a political radical into someone cuddly and safe. I'm not sure if he knows that, like Santa Claus, MLK is now a shill for an authoritarian beverage company. And pretty soon, Canadian school children will have the privilege of learning about "Human Rights" from the number one purveyor of anti-labour, anti-muslim, anti-LGBTQ, and anti-women sentiment in this nation.

Vaisakhi Day in Vancouver Photos

2007-04-20T18:44:00.000-07:00

Vaisakhi in Vancouver

Greeks, Sex and Alanis

2007-04-11T18:09:00.000-07:00

from This Magazine's Blog

Some things have been bugging me a lot lately. I worked a sorority ball the other night and it was by far the most embarassing thing I've ever witnessed. My university didn't allow greek associations and so until now I never quite understood what my friends meant when they admitted to hating these people.

I'm not one to rail against debauchery, I have no problems with people doing silly things and getting wasted, partying, having meaningless sex or whatever, but these people, the "sisters" and their fratboy dates, really bothered me. On the way in, girls already had to be helped into the washrooms to puke, they could barely stand up. The conversation ranged from meaningless to insecure. "There's this brand, kinda edgier than American Eagle, but not, like Abercrombie or anything like that..."

The drunk organizer couldn't understand how to speak into the microphone and even the seniors were basically illiterate. Their "roasts" of the graduating class were the saddest excuses for rhyming couplets I've ever heard, and, even in this hyper-sexual day and age, genuinely shocking, but more for the sheer magnitude of mainstream sex acts described rather than anything subversive.

On the other hand, I saw Alanis Morissette's parody of The Black Eyed Peas' "My Humps" video which everyone is talking about. It's brilliant, but wasn't the original song satire to begin with? That's the only way I can explain lyrics that bad. My question, if the original song is a commentary on the commodifying nature of mainstream culture then what is Alanis' version?

2007-04-02T19:12:00.000-07:00

Anonymouz & Copasetic: The ILL-Legitimate Crew

The Vancouver Gateway Project

2007-03-24T16:05:00.000-07:00

from This Magazine's Blog

I've been spending some time in Seattle lately visiting an ailing grandfather which means I've been stuck, bumper to bumper, on the I-5 for literally hours a day. I'm talking about the commute between my grandfather's house in north Seattle, the hospital and downtown, three places quite close to each other. Just the sheer number of cars that role through Seattle each day, all day, is quite astounding. Rush hour is especially brutal.

The on-ramps have stop lights to space the cars getting on, this can mean waits of up to twenty minutes when busy. Once you're on, it's six/eight/ten lanes of bumper to bumper in both directions. When you finally get off, whether in north Seattle or downtown, you're stuck in even more congestion.

This brings me to the Gateway Project; the BC government's plan to "improve" regional transportation, specifically the plan to twin the PortMann bridge and widen Highway 1 into East Van (aka my back yard). I think it's a horrible idea. Vancouver currently has minor (by North American standards) rush hours, which some think can be solved simply by adding more highway.

It was Jane Jacobs' book Dark Age Ahead that introduced me (I'm young) to the idea of "induced demand" that more freeways mean more cars, hence more congestion especially around major off ramps. My place in East Vancouver already gets plenty of commuter traffic to begin with and would become unbearable.

But don't worry about me, Jacobs' main argument against highways is that urban neighbourhoods, the economic and creative heart of the city, are often destroyed or significantly altered by megaprojects like these. Imagine the harm it could do to the cultural life of Commercial Drive and Strathcona to have thousands more cars per-day inching through the Downtown Eastside. More traffic would then necessitate extending the freeway even further into the city. The last time we allowed something like this to happen, Vancouver's only black neighbourhood was destroyed to create the Georgia Viaduct. I like to think that in this "post car, post racist" age, there are better ways to organize a city.

A vocal movement of people opposed to the project already exists, check out gatewaysucks.org for more info. Similarly, the David Suzuki Foundation's briefing document (highly recommended reading) suggests that highway construction is only a (very) temporary solution to traffic congestion and ends up doing far more harm than good.

The answer to the traffic problem, according to almost everyone who studies the issue, is light rail and more busses. The B-Line experiment--articulated express busses to the university and the airport--has been such an overwhelming success in terms of ridership and affordability, why not replicate it everywhere else?

American Logs: A Photo Essay

2007-03-22T22:11:00.000-07:00

An Evening Walk: Photo Essay

2007-03-18T14:09:00.000-07:00

The European Hotel, Niagara Falls

2007-02-27T00:31:00.000-08:00

Stuck in an Elevator

2007-02-18T17:59:00.000-08:00

I spent an hour in the elevator at work today with one of my co-workers. For the first twenty minutes it would jump up three floors and then jerkily drop a couple. Eventually we got in touch with security over the emergency phone and they managed to stop the car inbetween the eleventh and twelfth floors.

It took the Otis repairman fourty five minutes to get there at which point I had taught the girl my foolproof Tic-Tac Toe strategy which she immediately used to defeat me.

In better news, Nick and I pulled off our first catered dinner in grand style. We served four courses and earned all kinds of amazing compliments. Looks like we might be doing a couple more very soon. We started with Nick's very own "pear and butternut squash soup with a blue cheese coulis, grilled pear slices and chopped pecans. Following this was a salad with both white and green asparagus, cherry tomatos and roasted red pepper dressed in garlic parsely oil. The main course was a beef tenderloin steak, on a plate with mascarpone mashed potatoes, bacon wrapped green beans and a veal bone demiglace. The dessert was homemade cheesecake topped with a blueberry wine reduction and organic blueberries that came from Nick's family blueberry farm.

I served and helped plate the food, poured the five different wines, made the coffee and after dinner decanted Courvoisier into the hostess's family heirloom brandy serving tray (or whatever it was), cleaned up and was out of there in five hours. It was unbelievably smooth. The only thing I was worried about was that at the rates we charged the couple, we had no backup ingredients in case something went wrong.

My Reading List

2007-01-27T13:22:00.000-08:00

Something which I think needs repeating is that Anarchism is not just some hardline ideological position (although many assholes indeed practice it that way). Charles Demers' interview with SFU professor Mark Leier, author of Bakunin, for The Tyee, is refreshing in that neither man is trying to one up the other which allows for a pretty earnest discussion.

Leier: No, I don't think bowling leagues are the anarchist utopia, but they, like much of our lives outside of the workplace, are organized without hierarchy and oppression; the most meaningful, truly human parts of our lives already work best when organized on anarchist principles. Yet I also believe that in its function as critique and as a vision of the future -- perhaps the only one that doesn't end in our extinction as a species, or, as Orwell put it, as a jackboot smashing a human face, forever -- anarchism is not only desirable but possible and necessary.

____________________________________________________

Planet of Slums by Mike Davis is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the major social issues that will define the next century (massive rural-urban migration, the disintegration of the post-colonial state, exploding megalopolis' of absolute poverty). He's also a magnificent writer. In fact, I'm so impressed, I plan on reading his earlier book, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (2001) as soon as I pay off my library fines.

If you want a taste of the book, you can read Davis' original article for the New Left Review or dig up that New Yorker from a few months ago with George Packer's article on Lagos.

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After informing the world of my love for Faulkner (really anything southern), many suggested that I check out Carson McCullers and so I'm reading The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. Some of her characters thus far are too obviously vehicles for ideas rather than people, and her dialogue can be a bit grating (especially her black characters) but overall this book has won me over (and I'm only half way through).

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So what's your favourite new Neon Bible (Arcade Fire) song? Currently I'm digging The Well and the Lighthouse but that's just because it's the obvious catchy one.

Pictures from an Abandoned School in New Orleans One Year After Katrina

2007-01-04T12:49:00.000-08:00

Jesus Loves Me, This I Know

2006-12-24T20:21:00.000-08:00

This is an altar in America's oldest house, New Mexico, taken in June of 2006.

The Native American Church is a syncretic religion, formed in the late nineteenth century, combining the practices of psychedelic shamanism with Christianity. The cactus, Peyote, is ingested and allows the participants to talk directly with Jesus.

Jesus Loves Me is a traditional Christian hymn, reworked by Everette Red Bear and Sandor Iron Rope of the Native American Church. It's drum, rattle and a two part harmony and is sung in a mixture of languages.

Chief Quannah Parker, the father of the movement, once said, "The White Man goes into his church and talks about Jesus. The Indian goes into his Tipi and talks with Jesus" In this sense, the lyrics: "Jesus loves me this I know, because the bible tells me so," when sang by Red Bear and Iron Rope, take on almost satirical meaning. To people who talk directly with Jesus and can experience his love first hand, what use is the bible?

2006-12-07T00:32:00.000-08:00

Brick Lane Beigel Shop

photo taken by Elisa in London

Photos of People Doing Things

2006-12-04T12:19:00.000-08:00

A protestor outside the White House on the international day against torture.
An anti-Zionist Hasidic Jew protesting the Walk With Israel rally in Boston. Note the hundreds of riot police.
Gay Pride, Vancouver
Hare Krishna oxe driver and oxe during the Hare Krishna parade, Vancouver.
The Roma Band, Boston's North End
Torture victims, Washington DC
Dutch Headbangers, Utrecht
Krishna devotees, Vancouver

GIRL TALK/THE BEATLES/NEW ORLEANS PHOTO

2006-12-01T11:41:00.000-08:00

I took this picture in an abandoned elementary school in New Orleans. It had floated from the stage and landed in the aisle.

I've been listening to Girl Talk on repeat since I got Nightripper last night (two months late, I know). My friends sometimes tease me for frenetically tapping my fingers against my leg, desk, wall, wherever I am. Girl Talk is as close to a manifestation of that nervous energy as possible. The sampling is, I'm pretty sure, five deep at times and takes from most pop genres of the last five decades. I'm not sure if it works as dance music, exactly, he doesn't let you get into the the rhythm before changing it, but more as an audio art collage. In a way, this saves Nightripper from being just another hipster dance mixtape.

Girl Talk also confirms what I've been thinking about pop music for a while now. I used to think the ideal mashup (don't laugh) should take diverse samples and create an original composition fundamentally different from either of its parts. This way, the more obscure and manipulated the source material, the purer the final composition is. I realise now that this approach is naive and leads to indulgent music (DJ Shadow come on). The brilliance of Girl talk is that the listener, (if she/he's anything like me) should recognize every sample, triggering a sense of nostalgia which the DJ then subverts by mixing in other samples and topping it off with some booty rap. It's about recontextualising familiar sounds and phrases and just blowing your head off. Some purists might call it lazy, but there's nothing lazy about composition on this level. It's post modern music, where DJ meets composer meets computer and I can't stop listening to it. It's like that 22 year old itch in my brain is finally getting a vigorous scratching. Eventually it'll get raw but right now it's such a relief.

Girl Talk - Overtime
Girl Talk - Smash Your Head

My friend Marco Extended Drum Solo sent me what he thinks is George Martin (the Beatles producer) trying his hand at a mashup. From the latest Beatles release:

The Beatles - Within You, Without You/Tomorrow Never Knows

And finally here's me fooling around in garageband:

The Swords of Righteousness Brigade - Bad Luck

Propaganda I Love

2006-11-23T16:01:00.000-08:00

Propaganda I Love:
After dinner with the former Iraqi minister, she gave me a wonderful video on Kurdistan entitled "The Other Iraq, Share the Dream." I haven't watched it yet but i say it's wonderful because the cover has a little girl in the middle of a mountain valley holding some sort of luminous orb. Here's the corresponding website:

The Other Iraq

Another propaganda site that I'm really digging these days is the response to Hubert Sauper's horrific (but also wonderful) documentary Darwin's Nightmare:

darwinsnightmare.net

It's a thinly veiled creation of the Tanzanian tourism ministry (or whatever) and aside from the hilarious attack on Sauper which completely misses the point it's a well designed site with links to fishing industry sites. The best part is the attempt at user generated content where you can post photos, ideally of Tanzania's natural wonders but also anything that might slander Sauper. Some savvy researcher has managed to find photo evidence of Sauper's links to both Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein.

Here's the real site:
darwinsnightmare.com

ps HAPPY BIRTHDAY ELISA!

2006-11-07T21:53:00.000-08:00

SANTORUM!

Rap Music

2006-11-07T17:44:00.000-08:00

In The Conciousness Industry Hans Magnus Enzensberger writes:

"Too often the champions of inwardness and sensibility are reactionaries. They consider politics a special subject best left to professionals, and wish to detach it completely from all other human activity. They advise poetry to stick to such models as they have devised for it, in other words, to high aspirations and eternal values. The promised reward for this continence is timeless validity. Behind these high sounding proclamations lurks a contempt for poetry no less profound than that of vulgar Marxism. For a political quarantine placed on poetry in the name of eternal values itself serves political ends."

There's a movement within Rap that seeks to judge contemporary black music according to a set of aesthetic and thematic values known as "keeping it real." In the world of these Hip-Hop Heads (as they refer to themselves) everything is judged by how closely it can approximate the so called "Golden Age" of rap, roughly the decade spanning the mid eighties and early nineties that saw what was essentially an African-American folk style from New Yorks' outer burroughs become the dominant pop-music style in North America. It eclipsed Country as the highest selling genre, I think, in 1998.

Within this "Backpacker/Hip-Hop/Neo-Soul/Purist" culture there is very little room for experimentation

As many of my friends know, I sometimes listen to Rap Music. I can't stand anything, however, that attempts to be cerebral or concious or anything less. Have you ever wondered what people listen to in Baltimore ?
Government Names
Vancouver

Writing, Africa, and the Edmonton Oilers

2006-10-16T16:46:00.000-07:00

This is a picture I took of a ceramic cat and a bowl of my neighbour's tomatoes. Don't they look tasty?
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I was setting the room for the Edmonton Oiler's the other day: I put up the tables, polished the silverware, put on the three layers of tablecloths (the silencer the underlayer and the overlayer) and was just starting to set the tables when Hans walked in the room.

"No butterknives!" he bellowed in his Austrian accent.

"wha, am I doing something wrong?"

"No no, you're fine but those hockey guys. They don't like the little knives. No little forks or spoons either. Two big spoons, two big knives and two big forks. They got big hands theees guys. If you give them little knives they just throw them in the corner."

"That actually happens?"

"Ya of course, everytime. And no coffee either. They're on diets theees guys. And take away the butter too, that's verbotten."

"So do they, like, throw the mugs into the corner too?"

"No, but they complain."

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So yeah, that's one half of my incredibly! exciting! life! The other half you can find out about by reading Streethawk Magazine, or more specifically, articles I write for Streethawk Magazine like my recent review of The Pink Mountaintops concert at the Plaza.

I had an incredible idea the other day. I should go to Africa. Eva just got a job in Ghana, Danny is in Namibia, Munya is in Zimbabwe and Laura and Verashni are in South Africa. In fact, I have more close friends on "the dark continent" than, well anywhere. If I could save up all this winter and just not pay my student loans I could probably afford it. I'm sure there's other, more productive, ways of going there (like volunteer NGO type work) but I don't have the faintest idea about how to do that.

Read Verashni's article on South African Women's Day in The Mail and Guardian.

See Laura's Photos from inside a South African special forces helicopter.

The following picture is a recreation of the jungles of Africa taken in my mother's garden.

2006-10-12T20:05:00.000-07:00

SHOUT OUT OUT OUT OUT OUT and other thoughts.

If you can find me in this picture you win a prize.

I got really angry at this concert at the large contingent of fucks who stood in front of the stage and refused to dance to the dance music. I also got really freaked out at the cellphone company who had branded the event as some sort of VIP promotion bullshit. Otherwise, I haven't danced that hard since returning home to Vancouver. Holy Fuck were also especially good, if a bit anticlimactic.

I've been to a few shows recently: The DFA, The Pink Mountaintops, TV on the Radio, I've been playing squash and i've also been working... In fact, I almost threw coffee in David Emerson's face yesterday. I mean, how often do you find yourself standing in front of the most hated man in (BC?) politics with with a full pot of fresh coffee. At the last moment the enslaving logic of Capitalism kicked in and I merely set the pot on his table. Like you'd expect, Emerson has the mannerisms of a mafia boss. He was in a working lunch with a bunch of provincial transportation ministers and obviously loves being the big-man in the room. I hate him: my Conservative member of Parliament.

In other news, has anybody else noticed the startling thematic similarities between Brokeback Mountain and Paradise Now. I'm thinking that would make a good blog post but I'm too numb right now from working overtime to do it.

Also, I bought my ticket for Bonny Prince Billy in November. Sometimes I get scared I might die first and then my life would have been in vain.

Streethawkmagazine.com is something a friend of mine started up. It's pretty much the only site to go to for Indie/decent music news and criticism in Vancouver. Go there.

The New Camera,

2006-10-10T21:37:00.000-07:00

My dad has a new camera and it's absolutely ridiculous. These were the results of me fooling around on Thanksgiving. It picks up the smallest detail and is super easy to use.

2006-10-02T00:48:00.002-07:00

Flickr is great! Doesn't Iraq just look like so much fun. WIsh i was there now.

2006-09-13T23:09:00.000-07:00

Cut the sleeves off your lumberjack shirt and drive to San Francisco. Shop at the Haight-Ashbury Gap. At the house in Oakland we ate plum preserves and talked about god. Stopping at the Taqueteria the grandmother stared at me as I ate my barbecued pork ribs. Was I doing it wrong?

In Los Angeles, big beautiful cars go very fast. Echo Park. The Watts towers are in Watts. USC=The University of South Central. Wealth is in the hands of the white elite. Bleach bottle blonde, "today we wear flats, skirts and a white top." Shantytown USA has sheet metal roofs and chickens in the front yard. We ooh'd and ah'd over the screenwriter's couch but never called her back. "That's the armory" he said. "During the riots a few years back it was nice to know it was there."

"I mostly listen to, like, melodic hardcore."

The Burbank Ikea. Laurel Canyon. Mulholland Drive. The Santa Monica Freeway, the I5 and Rosecranz boulevard. Two hours in traffic. LA's only Reggaeton and Hip-Hop station!

"I just wish you would treat me right, the way I treat you because I love you"

"Yeah you tell him girl. Carlos, if you're listening, this song's for you."

A Typical Weekend in the Pacific North West

2006-08-13T22:25:00.000-07:00

Stuff

2006-08-12T12:59:00.000-07:00

As always, things are changing for me. I've got many more stories from my travels that I'm working on, but won't be posting them anytime soon. My best New Orleans photos are still to come. In the meantime, read about my super exciting life in Vancouver:

Last wednesday Ninja High School, the tight-pants-rap outfit out of South Toronto (jokes), who manage to make yelling over mp3 beats, slam dancing and writhing around on stage look like high art, played the Video-In. I had a great time. Tom, a new aquaintance, recorded the show and posted it on his blog noiseandsound.blogspot.com. Rumour has it they're playing again tonight:

Castle in the Clouds with lots of solo performers!
152 W. Hastings, Vancouver, BC
$5, Doors 8pm!

The opener Hot Loins would have been good if the first band Blue Grey Dots hadn't been amazing.

Last night I saw some noisy art bands at the Waldorf's Tiki Room, a delightful little bar reminiscent of Tony Montana's hangout in Scarface. Except for the high price of drinks, this is the place to be in East Vancouver. Still, it felt hollow. What is it about going out here that is just way less grungy, and far more expensive, than back east? I'm craving the dark and stinky little places with cheap beer that are so ubiquitous in Central Canada. More dirt and more drinks equals more fun. Speaking of which, after leaving the place around one (we skipped the Shearing Pinx) we trekked through the Downtown Eastside looking for Funky Winker Beans, the best (and dirtiest) pub in the world. Unfortunately, it was closed so we went over to the "good" side of town and oggled the Ginos and the jocks on the Granville Strip. Imagine the confluence of clueless yuppies with violent suburban trash and drunken Australians and you have one of the most shockingly awful spectacles in the world.

Okay, enough complaining. In a week I'm driving to Los Angeles via Eugene and my "spiritual homeland" the Bay Area.

Arriving in New Orleans

2006-07-28T19:16:00.000-07:00

The 11:45 PM bus to Montgomery was full so we sat on the ground of the Atlanta terminal until 2 AM for the next one.

"I'm from N'awlins," said the young woman across from us.

"Oh, that explains your accent" said the girl from Alabama. "We were wondering."

The woman had a little son. He was the age where, not yet able to talk, he communicated by throwing things and making outrageous facial expressions. He was black but with light hair and blue eyes. His mother was white.

"How is it there now?" asked the girl.

"About the same as eleven months ago. St. Jean's parish isn't half as bad as the Ninth Ward, but it's still mostly empty. Nothing's really been rebuilt."

The India House Hostel is in the mostly empty Mid City Neighbourhood. It, however is full of travellers, young construction workers and locals who get a bed for working a few hours per week.

The city might still be mostly rubble, but Capitalism don't stop for nothing. Brand new billboards are everywhere, advertising liquor and lottery tickets to a meagre bunch of returning residents, those poor few who never left, and Mexican construction workers.

Waiting in Charleston

2006-07-19T22:45:00.000-07:00

Across Dorchester Road, in the swamp behind the store selling boiled peanuts, two kids (braids, XL tees and denim shorts) inadvertently celebrate July first by setting off the bottle rockets intended for Tuesday.

"The two forty five bus to Atlanta broke down outside Florence," says the intercom. "It won't be here for another four hours. Don't blame me because it ain't our fault."

The intercom is a single outside speaker broadcasting the station manager's announcement through a foot of concrete to the bench where I sit, next to two older West African women with name tags.

Inside the cooled air of the one room station, a gang of Mexicans joke around and buy each other rounds of cola from the machine in the corner. The stuffed animal claw game periodically bursts into action accompanied by an electronic melody. The computer is broken and the station manager (a fat woman with skin tight jeans and hair extensions)shouts at the five person line, "y'all haf to wait a while." Nobody looks at her.

At the store, the vats of boiled peanuts are a sickly green so I buy the dry ones instead. The woman who is looking after my bag wants a bag of Cool Ranch Doritos and the boy in front of me (braids, an XL tee and Air Force Ones) buys onion rings and a stick of beef jerky. He counts out his coins one at a time.

The Arab behind the counter is watching the World Cup on a little TV. His accent is both deep south ebonics and Arab ESL. "Who won the early game" I ask.

"Tie...England and some place, Borto. I don't know what that is."

"Portugal?"

"Yeah, Portugal"

He yells at a guy stacking boxes in the back and smiles as he counts out the change.

WASHINGTON DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA

2006-07-18T12:15:00.000-07:00

Albuquerque is the Greatest Place on Earth

2006-07-18T11:10:00.000-07:00

Chicken Fried Steak, Okra and Mashed Potatos with a Butterscotch Malt at the Route 66 Diner.
Two Dollar pints of Blue Moon Wit Beer at the Copper Tank
Sweet Rolls at the Frontier
Green Meat and Chorizo New Mexican style Burritos from a stand off Route 66
Fair Trade Coffee at Winnings
Carne Adovada, an Enchilada, a Taco, a salad and a Coke with a shot of Vanilla Syrup at some student run place in Santa Fe
plus more cool people than I met on my whole trip, mountains, adobe buildings and aging hippies.

Remembering the London Bombings

2006-07-08T08:30:00.000-07:00

A year ago yesterday, I waited half an hour for a bus that never came. Deciding to take the tube, we walked towards Liverpool Street station, right into a news scrum outside the gates of a London hospital. Ambulances, helicopters and police cars made it impossible to hear the spokesman give his press statement. On the other side of the street, women in head-to-toe Burqas shopped in the Bangladeshi vegetable market. We walked through Brick Lane, and past the police presence at Aldgate East. People were still being evacuated from Liverpool Street Station. A guy in a suit came up to us warning us to stay away. "Terrorism," he said with an air of self importance. "It's the fucking Arabs." I bought a newspaper with the headline "Terrorists Bomb Tube, Scores Dead" only to find no article inside. It only happened , like, half an hour before. What could they know that I didn't.

Yesterday, I was on a bus from New Orleans to Austin Texas. At Houston, five recently released convicts came on wearing their prison regulation pants and shoes. The first white people I'd seen on a Greyhound since New York City. They all had only one red mesh bag, big enough for a change of underwear and big box of condoms. Except when one tried miserably to hit on a blonde girl, they all just sat and stared forward, arms crossed, shirt sleeves rolled up Tattoos bulging.

Last night I saw Danielson at Emo's. Tomorrow, Albuquerque.

2006-07-04T16:44:00.001-07:00

Biloxi Mississippi is a pile of rubble next to luxury casinos and vast trailer parks. New Orleans is not much better. (I didn't actually take that picture but almost a year later it still looks that way)

The Mid-Atlantic

2006-06-30T15:52:00.000-07:00

So I know I haven't been keeping up with this. I hardly have any internet access so I'll just do a quick recap.

I spent four nights with my homeboy John in Jersey City (aka one PATH away stop from Manhattan and a pretty cool place in its own right). He is also the sole member of the (amazingly good) indie folk act Soul of Jonas. I met him in Rome last year and he invited me to stay with him. In New York I did the usual stuff, wandered the Lower East Side, got lost in the Met and the MOMA, ate in incredible delis, pizza places and Chinese dumpling shops. In a Puerto Rican neighbourhood I had a Tamarind shaved ice from a street vendor. It was incredible. In Williamsburg, Brooklyn we saw a bunch of bands (Anoushka or something like that, Sticks and Stones and something else I can't remember but who were awesome nonetheless). That neighbourhood is absolutely ridiculous. Imagine Queen West between Bathurst and Ossington and multiply it by sixteen. Harlem was also awesome. I spent about 15 minutes debating whether to buy a limited edition Diplomats T-shirt but didn't because they only had them in double XL.

In Philadelphia I danced all night Saturday (Low Budget of Hollertronix, Mark Ronsson) and on Sunday went to see Espers, Bright Black Morning Light and Marie Sioux in a Unitarian Church. They were all quality Psychedelic Folk of the Joanna Newsome, Animal Collective, Devendra Banhart vein.

DC is pretty awful. I got ripped off by a cab driver, stayed in a shitty hostel and missed most of the Smithsonian because it was flooded. The rain was the hardest I've ever seen, like a tropical downpour. The city also felt like a police state, with bag checks, dogs and metal detectors in every building including the public library. Plus everywhere there were reminders of mass slaughter: the Vietnam and Korean Memorials, the museum of the American Indian, the air and Space Museum (including the Enola Gay), the Holocaust memorial and the Museum of American History (which was actually closed but I can imagine). In front of the Whitehouse I chatted with some Grandmother types and torture victims in the rain as they observed the UN's international day against torture.

I met some really interesting people at the hostel. A veteran who claims he was the victim of a covert US government program showed me piles of documents proving that he has microchips embedded all over his body, has had his life intentionally ruined and is perpetually on the run. When he heard I have a journalism degree he gave me all kinds of phone numbers. I ended up on a party line with a bunch of other people just like him.

I also met a guy from UC Berkeley who is researching covert government biological tests from the sixties. This guy was more legit with actual access to the National Archives and stuff. Then there was the Lebanese/German guy who has a PHD in something to do with Native American music and is in DC working at the Smithsonian and the Berlin Anthropological museum. He had a native (Indian) accent because he learned english on a reserve in North Dakota. We drank beer together.

Baltimore (aka Mobtown) was cool. I had Sushi there and wandered clueslessly through the "Ghetto." The fourteen hour overnight bus ride to Charleston South Carolina was not cool. Torturous actually, but an interesting cultural experience. There were two transfers: one at 2 AM and the other at 6. Imagine the tiny Greyhound station in Richmond Virginia at 2AM after ten busses have rolled up and about 800 sleepy, angry people are trying to find the right place to catch their transfer south. The crowd is all black with some latinos and one or two white people. The white people though (and I'm not making this up) were so strange looking. They all had weird lips, and strange bowl cuts, dressed in oversize sweat suits and had the most vacant expressions on their faces like they were mentally disabled.

Charleston South Carolina is gorgeous. The hostel where I'm staying is an old house with two porches and a hammock. I borrowed a bike from one of the staff and rode through a neighbourhood of nineteenth century wooden houses all with peeling paint, grandmas on the stoop and little kids on lowrider bikes (everyone is black). At the beach there were sand dunes, marshes and herons.

Everyone here is maaaad cool. I think we're going out to eat soul food now and listen to a blue grass band. Later I'm going to sit on the porch and drink beer.

Snap Yo' Fingers

2006-06-25T16:06:00.000-07:00

I heard that song at least three times last night as I completed, what to me was, the ultimate Philadelphia club crawl. We started at the Five Spot, across the street from the hostel. It was ridiculously crowded and humid, and the clinetele was a hundred percent black. They played rap and dancehall. The energy was low, alot of playas just hanging out by the bar sipping Hennesy-and-coke through straws. Alot of bumping and grinding as the night went on.

We moved to the Metro lounge where Low-Budget of Hollertronix fame plus a few more likeminded mashup, indie dance rap DJs were throwing their Saturday night party. Fucking incredible. It was everything I'd expected of that scene except way more intense. The crowd was perfectly mixed, black/white, boys/girls and they were all losing their shit. I haven't danced that hard maybe ever. Unlike their Toronto equivalents, these guys can mix. Plus the full time guy on the mic is actually exciting instead of embarassing.

After that ended we moved to Transit, a massive afterhours place with three floors. I expected to be let down but again it was amazing. The top floor was Lil' John, the second floor Bjork and the bottom was rock and electro. We danced until early. It was way past the hostel curfew but it didn't matter because the manager was with us. I passed out on my top bunk in my clothes feeling completely validated.

Maybe some other day I'll write about my New York experience but tonight I'm going to some folk show in a church.

Photos From the Road

2006-06-23T23:31:00.000-07:00

Upstate New York

2006-06-18T18:49:00.000-07:00

I've actually written two blog posts since the last one but the computer that I was working on swallowed them both. The Erie county library doesn't exactly have the greatest facilities. They do, however, have the original manuscript of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Fin. He's apparently from Buffalo, not Mississippi as I'd always thought.

Anyways, I'm in Boston now staying with my dad's cousin. I don't really have the energy to write about my last week, as a lot has happened, but I will list some of the highlights:

Niagara Falls is dull, even the kitsch. Downtown is the most depressed, boarded up, crumbling place I've ever seen.

Buffalo is amazing. The art gallery is better than Toronto's. The chicken wings are stellar. And Buffalonians are either the most sullen, dangerous looking people ever or incredibly friendly depending on if you're being hustled or not. I got hustled but I'm saving that story for a future blog post called "Conversations with Americans" that I guarantee will be filled with sex, violence, drug abuse, class warfare, racism, xenophobia and religious fundamentalism.

Cortland, New York is the small town where my dad grew up. It's pretty and kinda slow. I stayed with my dad's highschool buddy who is also the former mayor. I went with his family to see motherfucking Dave Matthews in Saratoga Springs, New York. It was the whitest experience I've ever had by far, and I've had some pretty white experiences. It was also kinda good...

Anyways, now I'm in Boston. An amazing place.

The World Cup in Toronto

2006-06-13T09:52:00.000-07:00

And so it's world cup time again in Toronto. When the great Portugese underclass of this city rise up and honk their horns for eight hours straight to celebrate their one nil win over former colony Angola. My friend Mike wrote about his experience at Toronto's favourite Angolan bar yesterday on his blog romsaca.blogspot.com

Today I'm putting on my Sao Paolo FC, Cicinho jersey and going down to the local Brazilian hotspot to watch the game. Do I know anything about sports? No, but it doesn't matter because the beer is cold and no matter who wins there will be street dancing and perhaps some brawls.

I forgot to include, in my far too hasty post about Montreal the other day, a picture of some Quebecois-Algerian guys who sat beside me on a park bench. While I ate my smoked meat, they smoked weed and then in broken english asked me about Vancouver. They liked the beaches but not the incredible dullness. They claimed Montreal was the greatest place on earth and seemed to be especially excited about multiculturalism. They talked to me at length about how Jews, Arabs and Greeks all get along in Montreal and how I must learn French. They encouraged me to visit Algeria and reminisced about the beautiful sand dunes they had once known.

Also, I now know my travel schedule. Tomorrow morning I go to Niagara falls. I'll explore Buffalo for the day before hopping on a bus to Cortland, New York where my father grew up. I'm staying with a high school friend of his, the former mayor for a night before heading on to Boston.

Montreal in the Summer

2006-06-11T16:35:00.000-07:00

The quick version of my trip to Montreal: I stayed in the Plateau with a very beautiful girl. We spent alot of time hanging out on the patio listening to A Tribe Called Quest, PJ Harvey and Nick Drake while drinking heavy Quebecois beer like Maudite and Fin Du Monde. The nearby Mile End neighbourhood is an amazing confluence of Hasidic Jews, Haitians, and hip people. I walked through a Just for Laughs gag and realised that it's mostly staged: Those "unsuspecting" people are actors!

Tam Tams makes me embarassed to be human. The weekly neo-hippy extravaganza is one part massive drum circle, one part medieval battle recreations and another part faux ethnic bazzar. Imagine the body odour of thousands of peace loving dreadlocked Quebecois youth in the summer humidity.

The Smoked Meat from Schwartz's deli just solidified my opinion that vegetarianism is completely immoral (and perhaps even anti-semitic). Likewise, the chewy Bagels that I ate in Mile End were far better than that doughy shit they sell at the supermarket.

2006-06-07T11:12:00.000-07:00

Old White Men

I love when old white men feel aggrieved about one thing or another. Last week while reading the crypto-fascist website Canada Free Press, I laughed as pundit Arthur Weinreb bashed The Globe and Mail for their anti-Harper rhetoric. His accusation were based on an innocuous article written by my homegirl Eva Salinas. Weinreb calls the article a "textbook case of media bias" and an attack on Stephen Harper. The problem. Eva uses sources that are skeptical of Harper's plan and even one that "no one has ever heard of before."

It's funny because when I read the article I see sources as diverse as the mayor of Burnaby (one of BC's largest cities for all you unfamiliar with geography west of Mississauga), the wife of recently deceased MP Chuck Cadman (a tireless advocate of stricter anti-street racing laws whose name Harper has hijacked), a Vancouver defense lawyer and an activist whose sister was killed by street racers.

Most of Weinreb's hysteria is about Eva's use of this last woman. He writes, "The Globe and Mail quoted Nina Rivet who lost her sister to a [sic] street racing which doesn’t seem to be as much as a problem for her as the fact that Stephen Harper and the Conservative Party are now in power." Waaaaa. Poor guy is mad because people don't think like him.

It's an interesting case-study. A British Columbia woman writes an article quoting other women directly affected by the story. Some mysogenist in Ontario gets all huffy calling the sources worthless and goes on to defend Our Dear Leader the Prime Minister (an Ontario born Anglo male) from these rabid accusations and then accuses the entire mainstream media as having a liberal bias.

In other angry-white-man news, I have tickets to go see Robert Fisk tonight at Concordia University in Montreal. Now this is a Caker I can get behind. His reporting from the Middle East is consistently solid, contrarian and, despite the constant attacks against him, never ending. He's also one hell of an entertainer. Seeing him all blustery and red faced in a packed auditorium cracking jokes about Osama Bin Laden's mom is about as good as it gets. I'd go see him over The Blue Man Group any day.

Tomorrow I'll post some Montreal pictures. You can look forward to dreadlocked, mud smeared neo-hippies dancing wildly to the beat of a hundred drums and some more conventional pics of smoked meat sandwiches.

2006-05-29T15:20:00.001-07:00

It is excruciatingly hot in my room. Luckily, it is only my room for three more days. Yesterday, I walked all the way from Queen and Bathurst to Kensington Market with my flatmate Nicholas Bernier (congratulations Nick on your first Google appearance) where Pedestrian Sundays was in full swing. There was a Samba squad, life-sized Scrabble, women dancing and a rickshaw. I ran into old Vancouver friends, Mike and Nadav.

2006-05-26T10:35:00.000-07:00

"...voyage and narrative are twins because both signify a displacement, an abandonment of the place, the plaza, a farewell to the common place and a plunge into the territories of risk, adventure, discovery, the unusual."
-Carlos Fuentes

Two days ago Cliff and I bought some beer. We went back to my place and sat on the roof. On the way up we saw my flatmate's cat, Astrid. I posed with the Toronto skyline. It was a lot of fun.

Rick Ross v. the State

2006-05-24T10:25:00.000-07:00

I'm still in Toronto trying to get my shit together before leaving and watching a lot of BET. One of the most refreshing videos lately is Hustlin' by Rick Ross. Instead of the fetishization of corporate power that you see in the work of someone like Jay-Z, Hustlin' is an homage to the informal economy.

Jay-Z takes the typical rap image of crime boss and switches it so that his persona is that of a legitimate capitalist. He is as much revered for his skills on the mic, now, as he is for being the leader of a business empire. In the all too familiar rap game of one upmanship, Jay-Z has fashioned himself as the most powerful kind of person one can be in this global economy, a CEO.

Rick Ross doesn’t play those games. The intro to Hustlin’ has Ross in Miami’s glamorous South Beach with fancy cars and girls in bikinis. It quickly switches locations as Ross drives across the bridge and growls, “this is the real Miami.” In a dusty sun baked place with no beach, a large woman sells onions out of the back of her van and dread locked kids run beside the car selling candy bars. If you’ve ever been anywhere in the underdeveloped world this is familiar stuff, people hawking food, crafts and whatever. They’re working in the informal economy: work that’s “unregulated by the institutions of society, in a legal and social environment in which similar activities are regulated.”

In Asia, on average, 65 per cent of nonagricultural workers are informally employed, in sub-Saharan Africa 72 per cent. In developed countries, it’s about 15 per cent. These are the people that Rick Ross is championing. He’s not just talking about selling drugs either, the people in his video are selling cheap electronics, taking bets, and prostituting themselves. Instead of showing them in a disparaging light however, informal work or “hustlin” becomes a way of empowerment.

The young woman leads the man out of the club by his tie and is later counting her cash. The dread locked guy shows a family his van full of appliances; the daughter smiles as she buys a brand new cellphone. In a way, these are all visions of the future. As the gap between rich and poor grows in America, more people are being pushed into this kind of work everyday. At a time when a Wal-Mart/McJob gives you no benefits and next to no pay, Rick Ross is saying, fuck Jay-Z and his “American Dream” propaganda. Real life, “the real Miami” is in the streets hustlin’.

The best part, however, is that there’s not a single “conscious rap” cliché in the whole thing, it’s pure and rugged Florida Crunk of the Trick Daddy variety. Notice the red banners waving in the breeze near the end. You think? Nah?