Brandwhoring: Achievement Unlocked

Best friends forever.

Friends, you will recall about a year ago when I was in the market for a new phone, I was (A) pretty certain I wanted to be as far away from Bell as possible and (B) happily ensconced in the world of Android.

How then, to explain the shiny black box in the picture above? A shiny black box provided by Bell, even?  As it happens, and what I already knew from past experience, is that when you’re legally clear to walk and threaten to do so, cell phone providers actually act like human beings.  Holding them over the bucket got me basically the deal I had before plus 6GB/month for pretty much what I was already paying.  I dropped the portion that gives me unlimited everything with ten numbers [MyFun Whatever the Hell They Call It] because I don’t think I know ten people I want to talk to that frequently and I can use Skype or some other service for long distance.

So why jump to iPhone now?  I admit, down to the wire I was still hemming and hawing, as new Android handsets were released [the HTC One series being the last device that had a shot].  But the decision to do so was twofold:

• I’m an app whore. Right now, unless it’s coming from Google, most apps are designed for iOS with Android as an afterthought.  This might not be the case a year from now, but it’s the case now.

• The woman I live with got one, and I had to watch her play with it for the better part of six months, all the while my HTC Wildfire S seemed to get wheezier and wheezier, after less than a year.

Look at this footage I took from the HHK Anniversary show back in March [turn your speakers down].

Now watch the footage she took with her 4S the same night, at the same time from farther away.

Come on now, son.  You can say I was justifying, but I immediately started thinking of all the things I could do with it from a content creation standpoint.  Buying the MacBook changed the way I can produce content for PFG, the iPhone has made the way I collect the raw materials for that content creation so, so much easier.

But lest the more militant of you whip out your flaming swords prepared to lance me as another slobbering fanboy to the House of Jobs, calm yourself a moment.  After playing with the phone for a few days, while I don’t regret my decision to go with the iPhone in the least, I can admit there are some things that Android does better than iOS.  I’ll break down some of them after the cut.

Tags: 21st Century Boy, Namedropping for Googlejuice, You'll Never Know How Much I Love You

Caught Sleeping: On Community

A few short hours after I post this entry, I’ll be plopped on my ass on the couch eating Doritos for dinner and engaging in something I haven’t done in years: appointment viewing.

DVRs, On-Demand and piracy have all but driven to extinction the idea that viewers make sure they’re home for a first-run episode of a beloved television show, but that’s exactly what I’ll be doing tonight as Community wraps up its third season with three back-to-back episodes.

I’m late to the Community party. The pilot failed to grab me [as it fails to grab most, real talk] and as many other commentators have noted, when the show isn’t being meta or working in the conventions of television cliche it rarely ascends beyond typical sitcom tropes [something like Troy's 21st Birthday being a rare exception].  But when it hits, please believe, it’s unlike any other show I’ve ever seen: dark, painfully self-aware, equal parts lacerating and affectionate in its parody, Community is arguably the most creative show on television right now, certainly the best comedy.

Which probably means it’s doomed after next season.  Conflicts between showrunner Dan Harmon and star Chevy Chase [never known as an easy man to get along with, if one's to believe the portrayal of him in the Saturday Night Live oral history Live From New York], a reduced episode order for Season 4 and a timeslot change to the wasteland of Friday Nights all forecast doom and gloom for the Greendale crew, but if that’s the case, what a ride it’s been [UPDATE: Harmon announced on his Tumblr Saturday morning that he's been fired from the show he created].

What shocks me the most about this show is how much I adore the characters.  I care about them with an alarming level of fanboyishness.  Troy and Abed are one of the greatest on-screen pairings in television history. Annie has taken my passing crush on Alison Brie and inflated it to unhealthy levels. When I see Brie appear onstage at one of Donald Glover’s Childish Gambino shows, I feel giddy because I want to believe these people are as good of friends offscreen as on. The constant teasing of a Troy/Britta hookup this season has filled me the sort of rage usually reserved for online message boards. Not because I preferred the Jeff/Britta pairing of previous seasons, but because I don’t want any of them to get involved with each other.  I’m a guy who thinks the purity of their friendship, the camaraderie of  the Greendale Seven as a study group should be cherished more than any romantic dalliances.  It’s probably more realistic to assume that the young and single members of a group that tight-knit would hook up with each other, but this is a show that’s featured two epic paintball battles, a stop-motion holiday episode, crossovers with Cougar Town and a journey in a space simulator built by Kentucky Fried Chicken: realism was never on the table.

Thankfully, I likely won’t have to worry about that in tonight’s finale, as our [expelled] study group fights to rescue Dean Pelton from imprisonment and overthrow Ben Chang’s child-policed dictatorship [and can we tip our hats to Jim Rash, the man who portrays Dean Pelton? Everyone loves Troy and Abed, me included, but really, Dean Pelton is the MVP of the show on a weekly basis].  And when it’s over, I will feel sadness in my heart, because I will miss them. And I am fully aware of how insane that is to say, but it’s the truth.  As a guy who still cherishes the two years he spent studying journalism at a college in my hometown, Greendale strikes a disturbing amount of familiar yet happy chords.

Have a great summer, Greendale Seven.  I’ll be spending my time making E Plurbius Anus t-shirts and writing Inspector Spacetime fan-fiction and looking for Annie’s Boobs in every air vent I pass.  See you in the fall.

Tags: Namedropping for Googlejuice, You'll Never Know How Much I Love You

The Return of the Mighty RadioPFG: Now on The Wheels of Steel

I can has beats?

Well. This took far longer than I was expecting it to.

The first application I bought from the Mac App Store after I bought the MacBook was Algoriddim’s djay, a sort ‘My First Program’ for guys like me who wanted to learn something about DJ’ing but didn’t want to toss out a few grand on turntables and a Serato rig.  The ultimate goal was to get some practice in and change RadioPFG from something that sounded like a campus radio show [Dead air...umm...dead air] and make it more of a live mix set.  I could play more music in less time that way, which greatly appealed to me considering the last few episodes only got about ten songs in and ran an hour [I'm chatty, what do you want?].

What they don’t tell you about DJ’ing: it’s haaaaaard! I mean, this is the most basic of the basic, with the software doing all the lifting, I can only imagine what it was like pre-laptop for all the cats who were dragging record crates to gigs and had to beatmatch by ear.  I salute you. All things considered, I don’t think it turned out too bad.

Also the first time I tried using Soundcloud.  The easy integration with WordPress made it a no-brainer, but who knows how long I’ll be able to keep it up for. Promotional purposes only, lawyers. Setlist!

DJ Jazzy Jeff – Passin By Me
Common – Nag Champa
Ayah & DJ Jazzy Jeff f/ Kardinal Offishal, Skillz and Shad – Notorious
Childish Gambino – Fire Fly
De La Soul – Much More
Project Move – Make it Fresh [Remix]
Slum Village – Raise it Up
Q-Tip – Let’s Ride
Freddie Joachim – Strawberries
J-Rawls f/ Jonelle – Miss You [Bring it Back]
Project Move – Butterfly Theory
Alliance Ethnik – 5 Heures du Mat
A Tribe Called Quest – Award Tour
Pase Rock – Grey Matter
Beastie Boys – Shadrach

Tags: 21st Century Digital Boy, i'm down i swear, Poor Performance

On That Grown Man Steez

In recent posts on Drake and Kendrick Lamar I’ve pointed to the generational aspect of this hip-hop game. Like most pop culture, hip-hop is a culture that prioritizes youth, something that’s created a pretty sharp schism between the kids today and their predecessors.  For every annual batch of XXL Freshmen there’s another crew of retirees riding off into the sunset or putting out another underground mixtape in the hopes that it will help put them back on.  It’s a young man’s game, and while someone like Jay-Z can still move records as he moves into his 40′s, he’s the exception: for every Hova, there are two dozen Whodinis, Erick Sermons and Positive K’s littering the hip-hop freeway [Freeways too, for that matter].

What to do then, when the game’s passed you by?  That’s the subject of ‘Adult Rappers,’ a new documentary from former Def Jux signee and Hangar 18 member Paul Iannacchino, Jr.  Featuring with interviews from artists like Jarobi from A Tribe Called Quest, R.A. the Rugged Man, J-Zone and the Artist Formerly Known as Hot Karl, Jensen Karp, the doc looks like it’ll provide a complimentary contrast to Ice T’s upcoming doc celebrating all things hip-hop ‘Something From Nothing.’ The rap game can bring unmeasured joy and sometimes wealth to artists and audiences, but as Iannacchino notes on his film’s Kickstarter page, the game is also, “cruel, cruel bitch with little to give but heartache, bad credit and chronic wanderlust.”

Iannacchino’s Kickstarter for the project met its finding goals earlier today, but if you’re of the generous persuasion, the page will be open until tomorrow morning.  You can peep the trailer there, too, since WordPress won’t let me embed iframe widgets. [H/T Ego Trip]

Tags: i'm down i swear, Making the Best of Bad Situations, Namedropping for Googlejuice

More Juice than Picasso got Paint

B-Boys Makin With the Freak-Freak.

I’ll call this out at the top:  When Beastie Boy Adam ‘MCA’ Yauch lost his battle with cancer this week, an era of hip-hop ended.  We’ve suffered many losses in hip-hop, many of them are senseless.  But this one….maybe because it’s natural causes, maybe because it’s not something anybody could have prevented, it just saddens me so much more.

The Beasties were never the best MCs [I always made the joke that they got paid everytime they told a listener what their names were], but they were charismatic as hell, something that has to be credited to the unique personalities and tonalities of their voices.  They each occupied a different sonic register and complemented the other two perfectly: AdRock’s played the nasal high, Mike D sat in the middle, and MCA rounded out the bottom with his signature rasp. It’s incredible when, individually let alone as part of a group, an artist can develop a voice instantly recognizable to a listener. And now one of them is gone.

My entry to hip-hop came on the playground. Schoolyard boomboxes blasting Run-DMC and the Fat Boys at recess made me a fan for life.  It wasn’t a popular position in a world where The Bangles and The Pet Shop Boys were dominating airwaves. Classmates subjected me to the usual accusations of being a ‘n—-r lover’ and cursed at me to turn down that “monkey music.”   But things started to change the next year: people started getting their hands on License to Ill by The Beastie Boys.

There’s no arguing the point: for white kids on the playground, The Beasties made it okay to like hip-hop.  Even if your friends didn’t want to follow you to the worlds of LL Cool J or Eric B. & Rakim, you’d always find common ground with License to Ill.

I can’t overstate how revolutionary that album is.  The Beasties and sometimes DJ [and Def Jam Records founder] Rick Rubin took the aesthetic of black hip-hop and used their own musical heritage to make something wholly their own but respectful of the mode they were working in. Instead of James Brown, they were using Led Zeppelin.  Much as I never want to hear ‘Fight for Your Right’ or ‘No Sleep til Brooklyn’ ever again, there are a surprising number of jams on that first album that were killing dance floors in the ’80s.  The Def Jam coffee table book that came out last year specifically discusses how much it frustrated some black MCs that a song like ‘Hold it Now, Hit It’ was so good, because they really wanted to hate them.

Three years later they took whatever superficial fans they made with License to Ill and tossed them under a bus with the crate-digging opus Paul’s Boutique. A more traditional ‘rap album,’ but with an a progressive view of sampling rivalled only by Public Enemy’s Bomb Squad. Like their debut, this is not an album that could ever exist under current sampling laws and pay structures.

The album that resonated with my friends and I the most was 1992′s Check Your Head. The Boys returned to their punk roots to perfectly coincide with the grunge explosion, not just playing punk songs ['Gratitude,' 'Time for Livin'] but taking the chopped guitar riffs of License to Ill and rubbing them full of dirt to give the songs a gritty, lo-fi, DiY feeling.  It was the perfect record for a 15-year-old trying to fake a love of rock music while gangsta rap was leaving him alienated from hip-hop.  It worked for a while. I mean, watch the video for ‘So What’cha Want.‘ That’s basically how we all dressed until 1996 [toques in the summer all day, son!].

I fell off after Ill Communication, really stepped off after Hello Nasty [too many wack people who reaaalllly liked 'Intergalactic'], checked in and was pleased by To the Five Boroughs  and Hot Sauce Committee Part Two. Though I never had any reason to, I always considered Yauch the most creative of the three, maybe because he so overtly stepped into other arenas like directing their videos or crashing awards shows as his lederhosen-wearing alter ego Nathaniel Hornblower. If you need a clear indication of the group’s cross-generational appeal, watch that video for ‘Make Some Noise‘ again, and count just how many celebrities were willing to take a day to be a part of a Beastie Boys video.

Had they toured this summer, I probably would have gone to see them, not because I’m any sort of super fan, but because they’re legends and I should have seen them when I could.  Now I can’t. But if Yauch’s out of pain, if he was at peace with his passing [as a Buddhist, I hope he was], nobody has any right to complain.

Rest in Peace, Adam ‘MCA’ Yauch. Thank you for constantly reminding us that the foundations of this thing we call hip-hop can still rock a party after 25 years.  Don’t believe me?  Watch the Boys rip ‘Shadrach’ from Paul’s Boutique on Soul Train, and pay attention to how that crowd goes from skeptical to buck wild thanks to a skillfully placed ‘Funky Drummer’ drop, some ‘Don Cornelius’ chants and the sheer will of the Beasties’ enthusiasm. A lot of rappers today could do well to take some showmanship notes from these dudes.

Tags: Confused White People, i'm down i swear, You'll Never Know How Much I Love You

Uhh…. Now What?

I haven’t shaved since Thursday. I don’t think I’ve eaten a proper vegetable in longer than that. My four-month-old Macbook blew a pixel somewhere during the process. My fluid consumption hasn’t been caffeine-free since last Saturday. But I pulled it off.

Yes, friends, I finished it. I submitted it. It’s fate rests in the good hands of the folks at the publisher.

If you squint at that photo you can suss out what it was for. I won’t openly acknowledge it since I’m superstitious like that. I should know either way within the next couple of months. Me and all the other cranks who took advantage of the open call, ha.

Whether or not it gets accepted or not is kind of irrelevant, though. It was a good idea, and it’ll still be a good idea if they decide it’s not a good fit for them right now. I’ll find somewhere else for it.

What’s more important is the education this whole whirlwind provided me. Chief among the lessons: This is what I love to do. Waking up at 6.00 a.m. some days was still a pain in the ass, but once I got the coffee maker working, sitting down to work on it was a joy. I’m sure this was partially due to the pressure of the oncoming deadline thanks to my brain’s inability to summon an idea until just over a week before the due date, but it was more to do with loving what I was doing. The hardest part now is waking up tomorrow and not have to immediately rush to the cafe or the kitchen table to get some work in before I went to my job.

I hope it will be habit forming. This last week was the only time in recent memory I wrote every day. On something I valued, not cranking out a blog entry to distract myself from short stories or anything else I had on the go. Working on the proposal only served to affirm how much I love to make things, whether that’s podcasts or stories or blogs. These are the things that bring meaning to my life. Some of you probably knew that all along. I’ve always been a bit of a dullard when it comes to these things.

Thankfully, I have two other writing projects to try and finish this week, along with the aforementioned Macbook display issue to try and remedy, so I’ll be able to keep busy. Turns out, I kinda like busy.

Before I collapse in slumber, I would be remiss if I did not thank some people for their love and support this past week. I can be….,, unpleasant to deal with when immersed in a project like this. It lives in my head and consumes my thoughts, which can lead me to expect people around me to read my mind by osmosis, or to understand what I mean with little explanation. This can…strain some relationships occasionally. My thanks to those who gritted their teeth and let me go crazy, or kicked my ass when I was needing it.

To Richelle Gratton, Tera Brasel, Jeff Meloche, Khaiam Dar, Caitlin MacKinnon, Sarah Jacobs and Nicole Bryant: you all get shouts in the acknowledgements. And I hate acknowledgement sections in books.

Now, I think I’ll go pass out.

Tags: Burning Down the House, How to Feel Inadequate, Making the Best of Bad Situations, Who Do You Think You Are

BRB

So, things are going to go silent around here for the rest of the month.

‘You say that like it’s not a regular occurrence.’

Oh, so you all are some funny muhf**kas now, huh?

I agree, my fits and spurts are well documented.  But something happened, friends.

I recently learned a series of books I greatly enjoy was putting out an open call for submissions.  I mused over it a little bit, ultimately dismissed my ideas.  But something happened as I waited in line at the 7-11 to pay for a carton of milk, laughing at the woman in front of me who dropped a vial of cocaine from her purse as she fumbled for her wallet:  I had an idea I didn’t hate.  An idea that excited me. An idea that had me telling everyone I knew I was thinking of doing it.

So I am.  Deadline’s the end of the month, and I’ll need every second I can find between now and then to do it.

In what I’m hoping is a bit of personal growth, the likelihood of failure isn’t getting me down at all:  because whether I get selected or not, it’s a good idea. Getting approved or not won’t change that.  It costs me nothing to do it, and in the worst case scenario, I’m just another of the cranks who submitted an idea. I know I won’t be the only one.

So that’s the scoop, friends.  You can still find me on Twitter during the interim, and the odd photo or quickie may very well go up on Tumblr, but my attentions will be off PFG for a couple of weeks. 

If I’m willing to do that, it must be important.  See you in May. Wish me luck.

Tags: Burning Down the House, i'm down i swear, Making the Best of Bad Situations