"Hip Hop is the CNN for the Ghetto"   Chuck D

 (Small Caveat: It's Friday and feeling a little lame for staying in and working,  I opened a bottle of wine when I started writing this, so if it starts getting a little messy blame "Quinta Da Aveleda")
 
Last night after we got off the phone I was playing around with my i-Pad and started downloading some books so I could get my electronic read on.  I downloaded a couple I have been wanting to read for awhile, "Living In The End Times", by Slavoj Zizek,  "Toward a New Architecture", by Le Corbusier (because I am trying to impress this architectural "shorty") and "The Book of Ice" by Paul Miller, aka DJ Spooky.  When I downloaded the last one, Apple did what it normally does and made some recommendations on what I might like.  These suggestions have always given me the creeps.  It's as if you were in a book store and someone, catching a glimpse of what you were browsing through,  came up and whispered in your ear.   Like someone barging in your room while having sex and asking if you would like some fried chicken.  It's at once disturbing and way too intimate for the situation.    But, this one suggestion did give me pause.   It was Jay-Z's new book "Decoded."  I had already heard of it because of an article I read about the marketing campaign which involved a digital scavenger hunt all through out New York City.   So I bought it.  Today I had to go to the police station to get my car out of the pound because of some "alleged" illegal parking I had done the day before.   I ended up being there 3 hours waiting for an email from my insurance to verify that everything was up to date and I was a respectful, fully insured, citizen.  You can say that I was more than frustrated, but knowing that loosing your temper in the middle of police station can cause you more problems than you want, I kept my cool.  I ended up taking a seat and doing the most rebellious thing I could, considering the resources I had, which was my i-Pad, car keys and various documents of identification.   I started reading "Decoded".   Take that Pigs!  Fuck the Police!  Ok, so my act of rebellion wasn't all that bad ass, but I did find the book better than I thought it would be and it has led me to today's post. 
   "No one reads poetry anymore" is a constant refrain that you hear all the time.  Scolars and professors are always eulogizing the death of literature and poetic verse.  Until today I actually was one of those people. Not that it bothered me one way or another.  I could give a fuck whether kids want to drink beer and listen to Justin Bieber instead of read Roethke, Plath, or Ginsberg. But if asked, before my stint in the police station,  I would probably have agreed with the above statement.  But as I was reading I cam across this passage in the book :

"When a rapper jumps on a beat, he adds his own rhythm. Sometimes you stay in the pocket of the beat and just let the rhymes land on the square so that the beat and flow become one. But sometimes the flow chops up the beat, breaks the beat into smaller units, forces in multiple syllables and repeated sounds and internal rhymes, or hangs a drunken leg over the last bap and keeps going, sneaks out of that bitch."

I read it again.  That sounded like something. Something that sounded so familiar that it all instantly clicked in my head. Hip Hop is modern Poetry. Now, this isn't something that I hadn't thought before.  I love Hip Hop and have know that the lyrics are a form of street poetry, but I hadn't really put  it on the same level of Keats or Puskin. But sitting in that chair,  I instantly realized that one day the whole poetic canon would one day include ryhmes from the likes of Nas, Rakim and Jay-Z.  That somewhere in the future those expensive, thick anthologies of poetry that we have to buy in University would surely include Hip Hop songs.   I spent the last hour our so thinking of my favourite poetry verses:

A robin red breast in a cage
Puts all heaven in a rage 
William Blake  

And with tears of blood he cleansed the hand,
The hand that held the steel:
For only blood can wipe out blood,
And only tears can heal.
Oscar Wilde

I do not want a plain box, I want a sarcophagus
With tigery stripes, and a face on it
Round as the moon, to stare up.
I want to be looking at them when they come
Picking among the dumb minerals, the roots.
I see them already-the pale, star-distance faces.
Now they are nothing, they are not even babies.
I imagine them without fathers or mothers, like the first gods.
They will wonder if I was important.
Sylvia Plath  

I've lived to bury my desires,
And see my dreams corrode with rust;
Now all that's left are fruitless fires
That burn my empty heart to dust.
Aleksandr Pushkin

I'm sick of your insane demands.
When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?
America after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world.
Your machinery is too much for me.
You made me want to be a saint.
There must be some other way to settle this argument. 
Allen Ginsberg




Then I thought of my favourite  Hip Hop Lyrics:

Words of wisdom wail from my windpipe
Imaginations in flight
I send light like Ben's kite
I've been bright.
Common

Music orientated
so when hip-hop was originated
fitted like pieces of puzzles
complicated.
Eric B and Rakim


Truth brings light
light refracts off the mirror
visions of yourself and error could never clearer.
The truth is that you ugly
not on the outside
but in the inside
on the outside you frontin you lovely
Pharoahe Monch

I switched my motto
Instead of saying fuck tomorrow
that buck that bought a bottle could've struck the lotto.
Nas

I knew I was on to something and when I got home I  started doing a little more research and I came across this English professor named Adam Bradley.  A couple of years ago he  issued a manifesto to his fellow-scholars. He urged them to expand the poetic canon, and possibly enlarge poetry’s audience, by embracing, or co-opting, the greatest hits of hip-hop. “Thanks to the engines of global commerce, rap is now the most widely disseminated poetry in the history of the world,” he wrote. “The best MCs—like Rakim, Jay-Z, Tupac, and many others—deserve consideration alongside the giants of American poetry. We ignore them at our own expense.”  So in honor of my esteemed mother fuckin' professor Bradley I compiled some songs for you that I think are good enough to stand side beside the giants of Poetry and if the Poetry scholars leave them out...they best be prepared to get a cap in their ass. 

If you were a bottle of wine I would break you over a gorillas face and rape him.  

Nas "Life's a Bitch" "I switched my motto / Instead of saying fuck tomorrow, that buck that bought a bottle could've struck the lotto." This vivid articulation of hope in the face of despair could be defined as the same circumstances that created hip-hop culture in the first place. Nas's hip-hop lyrics show maturity, urgency and a vivid view of urban struggle.



I could add at least 100 more Nas Tracks.




Common "Resurrection" "Words of wisdom wail from my windpipe / Imaginations in flight, I send light like Ben's kite / I've been bright." How often does Benjamin Franklin wind up in hip-hop lyrics? When you have the ability to resurrect the status quo of rap ability like Common, expect the unexpected.




Eric B. & Rakim "Microphone Fiend" "Music orientated so when hip-hop was originated, fitted like pieces of puzzles, complicated." Rakim proudly raised the standards of hip-hop lyrics with this statement. His microphone addiction allowed us to get high off of his talent right along with him.


Kool G Rapp "Streets of New York" "It gets tiring, the sight of a gun firing / They must desire for the sound of a siren." Kool G Rapp takes us inside the violent realities of his New York environment with these melancholy lyrics. Hip-hop songs of this social caliber deserve to be studied in universities.





”Truth brings light, light refracts off the mirror, visions of yourself and error could never clearer. The truth is that you ugly, not on the outside, but in the inside, on the outside you frontin you lovely”-Pharoahe Monch, The Truth



”Make a radio hit - headz criticize it; Underground classic - nobody buys it”-Ras Kass, Reelishymn

I'm sitting here in front of my computer, smoking a cigarette and toying with the notion of opening a bottle of wine.   I am also leafing through a book that I picked up in Bilbao at the Guggenheim, called "Walkscpaes, Walking as an asthetic practice".  As I am looking through it I am realizing that this was a complete vanity buy.   It has sat on my shelf for more than a couple of years completely unread.  I think that I was consumed by the gravity of being inside that building and having to choose a book that at once made me feel intellectual and enlightened.  A book that would gain the nodding approval of the saleswoman behind her illustrious counter. As if by choosing a book so esoteric and utterly bizarre I would somehow be saying something profound and cool about myself.  I would be saying that I understood, I belonged.  I belonged in the same class as Anselm Kiefer, Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, and Richard Serra, whoose works I had just seen.   Maybe not as an artist but as someone who understood and appreciated the things they did.  What a fucking asshole.  Anyways, I did read the first chapter tonight  and it describes walking as a type of  landscape architecture.   By traversing a cities streets and alleys you apparently can intervene temporarily in it's form.  It starts with the history of nomadic wandering moves on to something called Transurbance, created by a crazy group of student architects called Stalker, and ends with my favorite: The Anti-Walk.  The Anti-Walk was a form of anti-art.  In 1921 Dada organized a series of "excursions" to the most banal spots in Paris.  He wanted to reject the cities "assigned places" or places considered of interest.  He wanted to reclaim urban space, especially ones that were considered lost or unworthy of enjoying.  Shit, I might have to credit him with the idea of  We Hate Tourism Tours.  Anyways, after all this I wished desperately that you were here and we could do some "art walking" together.  Since we are constricted by geography I thought maybe at least you could enjoy some pictures I took on my walk last Sunday, and with the right kind of eyes and imagination we could be on that walk together.   If you were a piece of pie I would snort you like cocaine.  

"There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in."
--Graham Greene

   One of the benefits of being an only child as I already told you was being able to choose my own clothes. On a very basic level this doesn't seem so important, but somehow, besides giving me an incredible fashion sense, I think it helped form my ability to create and imagine different worlds. The clothes were a vehicle for letting me inhabit, try out, and play with different realities.   I once worked as a production assistant on a documentary about play and how it relates to happiness.  One of the interviews I remember the most was with this professor, or psychologist  (I really can't remember, too many damaged brain cells).  But I do remember more or less what she said: while some benefits of play are obvious—fitness, fun, and negotiating skills.  The subtle, even sacred, way play enriches children's lives is not so easy to define.  Excitement builds when children of all abilities are included in a playful and rich engagement with each other and the living world.  Play, the way in which we do it and where we do it defines our ability to navigate the world.  The observation and antics we bring to our first environments are transferred to every landscape of endeavor that follows whether in business, science, architecture or the arts.  In a sense creativity develops through risk-taking, storytelling and secret world building.  Today children spend less time outdoors, have less public places to play and the places that are left have a hard time competing with television, internet and gaming.   I am not one of those who say that these things are bad and have a negative impact on our children.  I am a realist and know that the world that they will inherit will be a technologically complex mesh of digital interaction,  one in which they will need skills they learn through playing video games and online interaction to succeed.   But, just like children need a balanced diet of food, they also need a balanced environment of play.  One that encompasses both the digital and the natural world.  One of my dreams has always been to build a playground.  I don't know if I will ever have a chance to do it, but I find it fun to imagine what it would be and look like.   I would want a space that not only provides a place to play for children, like most playgrounds, but a multifaceted space that brings together children, teenagers and adults.   A place where the experience of play can be shared.  A place where just like a library that has librarians to help visitors find specific books they are looking for, my playground would have volunteer "play monitors" that would act not as policeman or authority figures but as enablers of play.  Below I have included some bits and pieces of playgrounds that inspire me or I find interesting.    Well, I hope you have a wonderful day and find the time to get outside and play a little. 






Imagination Playground at Brownsville, New York from Imagination Playground on Vimeo.


I love "Imagination Playground." It is the perfect embodiment of my idea.  A playground that is constructed entirely by the children who play in it, where the only limitation is their imagination.

These next two photos are of play spaces that incorporate the fanciful and design.  I think that all to often design is ignored when it comes to thinking about spaces for children and many play spaces end up looking like something out of the 1950's.  Creating a space that is beautiful and design rich helps children to develop at an early age an appreciation for how the material can and should interact with the natural world.  The images hopefully will stay with them through their adult life and bits and pieces of this information will influence them when thinking about  urban housing projects, bridges,  skyscapers and communities. 

    The space below is in Spain. While I don't think is a marvel of modern architecture  or even that beautiful, I do love the idea and would want to incorporate something like this in my park that seamlessly flows into the children's area.  Everything below was built with inexpensive or recycled materials and the park itself replaced an otherwise abandoned lot.  "Factoría Joven helps attract the restless, unemployed street youth off the streets and provides them with a place to skateboard, hip-hop dance, climb rocks, create graffiti — whatever they would otherwise do in much more sinister surroundings. There are also a computer lab and a dance studio, both 800-square-meters in size. Meeting rooms and spaces for theater, video and music are all included."

The last image is of the tactile dome in San Francisco.  Something that could be experienced by Adults, children and teenagers.  The photo is black because, well, it is a space you explore in complete darkness.  The link has a better explanation. 

http://www.exploratorium.edu/visit/tactile_dome/press_release.php

After finally finishing constructing my new room or "super lair" as I now wish it to be referred, I settled into my bed and prepared for what I thought would be a magnificent night of sleep. But, instead of waking to the soft, warm rays of the Portuguese sun, I was awoken by a group of drunken vandals, hell bent on destruction. When I was first startled awake by voices in the hall I thought it was just people coming home, but the faint smell of vegetables mixed with whiskey on their breath gave them away as something much more dangerous. Shitfaced Vegetarians. Well, I am convinced they were vegetarians anyway. Only lovers of produce could perform such an act so brutal. These veggie fucks opened all the trash I had put outside the door and commenced to litter the entire hallway with bits of my unwanted belongings.   It was as if someone vomited an unflattering portrait of me all over the stairs. Old clothes, embarrassing Cd's(Cindy Laupers greatest hits) and various other bits of my unwanted life lay there mocking me and my wastefulness. I immediately ran to the window to see if I could catch a glimpse of these hoodlums, but I only saw their skinny mal-nourished silhouettes and the back of their protein deficient heads. Damn kids these days just want to watch MTV, eat vegetables and gang-bang. So after a sleepless night, I am sitting here at work reconnecting with a cigarette after 8 hours apart and I thought I'd drop you a line explaining just what the hell this is.  Basically it's a "blog that Smerds."  What that is exactly, I am not sure.  It's a place where I will be posting music, photos and other bits of irrelevant cultural findings that I like, think you might like or inspire me.  Probably will end up being a site with random pictures of cat's asses, but we'll see.   I would love to eat your face.










Hypnolove's Island presents : Holiday Reverie from Record Makers on Vimeo.