the break/s

Saw a show last night on the tab and behest of friends of mine visiting from the Bay. Said friends are significantly more "with it" (this is what the kids call it, i think) than i, significantly more aware, exposed, ready, eager. The show was at ACT downtown, a show called the break/s: a mixtape for stage written and performed by Marc Bamuthi Joseph, an attempt, i think, to introduce the middle-class, middle-aged white audience of a $50/ticket (!) theater to hip-hop, both as a culture and, to a lesser extent, as a musical genre. (A review that seems to well encapsulate the whiteness of the intended and actual audience can be accessed here.)
Are we all aware how unknowledgeable i am about hip-hop? Anyone? Bueller? Anyone? Anyway, i enjoyed it more or less, although we only paid a total of $60 for four of us with a discount code and a couple of student tix which were only $10. It was worth that much, in that i enjoyed the way he tied the transnationalism of hip-hop culture to a personalized narrative (Haiti to US to Europe to Senegal to US to Cuba to US) and defined hip-hop more as a type of potentiality rather than a specific set of criteria (although isn't this true of all genres, movements, cultures?). Things that failed: poor integration of black male sexuality; unfortunately limited integration of black women (limited to a video clip of :45).
No one i went with liked it, so we can probably say that is was a poor hip-hop performance (i think all of the people i went with are hipper than me, even if k@ is not hip-hopier), but i expect white people understood it madly, loved it. Did it fail, then? What it probably failed to do was provide a real reckoning with hip-hop and the violence of its oppression (both as object of and purveyor of). Did it provide white people with a cathartic experience through the aesthetics of hip-hop? Maybe.
I cannot decide if that is good thing or not. Think y'all should have been here to critique it (i'm sure it would have failed for you), gotten drunk with us and eaten some fucking homemade pizza (we didn't do this last part, but that sounds really good right now).

independence day

I was at the Madison farmer's market at the capitol square and saw the coolest marching flag contingent made up of cute little old white people.  I filmed some of the action and forgive me if it makes you recall the works of a certain 'documentarian'.  In any case, it's a slice of life here in the Midwest.

Zoo Day

Yesterday we discovered that it was my birthday (who had known?). Discovering it in a timely fashion, however, we made plans for when k@ got back from her interview at the ACLU (-how'd it go? the first questions of our tongues, mine and her sister's, the latter visiting us from California. She is an elementary teacher and this summer she has off. The answer: alright. Malaise a la Jimmy C, the C is for Mr. car-TEAR). We made plans to visit the Woodland Park Zoo, k@ being a fan of zoos generally, my being indifferent to depressed by them, and all of us figuring we should mark this in some manner. We spent maybe 4 hours there, passing and repassing the concrete walks that hid one section of captive animals from another. I was thankful that the Orang-Utans had a large enclosure. Nothing makes me more sad than to see Forest People in a tiny little concrete block like at the Portland Zoo. Well, nothing maybe more than seeing People People in a similar situation.



We saw this dude, too, a Malaysian tapir, the size of a pony. His dick was huge and when he stood up he seemed to be using it to sweep the area under his body, like an elephant might do with their trunk. It was ludicrous and incredible. I admired his dexterity and we moved on.
At home i drank two beers while making pizza. k@ made brownies. We watched Revenge of the Nerds, leading me to the conclusion that the category "nerds" includes: people with glasses, the gross, musicians, gay black men, people with hats, all Asians. Black men whose sexual orientation remains unmarked seemed to be nerd allies.

At the end of last week k@ and i went to Neptune and against a tiny audience of two other teams, k@ and i blew the competition out of the water with our knowledge of the first four seasons of The Simpsons. We won this:


Successful work on my summer paper is minimal. Today i am going to a group interview at Safeway to make some side scratch to support my love of beer and handmade yeasty dough. I await the return of the school year when i feel less like i've fallen into some hipster limbo.