Paint the White House Barack

Run, nigga! Ruuuuuuunnnn!!!!

Harlem's Lingering Hatred of Brooklyn (Part I)

Part I: The Party

The other day I invited a couple of friends to a party that I was going to out in Park Slope. It was going to be low-key, but nice. I told them in an email: "The notice may be short, and the distance may be far, but I know you guys have cars. So let's do it to it." Besides the fact that I was sneakily positioning myself to get a ride home, rather than take the subway, I really wanted them to come.

They're old school cats who've been living in Harlem all their lives. They've seen the condos come up where there used to be abandoned lots. They've watched neighborhoods turn like seasons from a brown autumn, to a white winter. And, for the most part, they - like so many middle and lower-middle class beneficiaries of gentrification - have prospered. One of my friends just bought an X5 BMW to go with his Lexus.

But when I told these two old school Harlemites about the party in Brooklyn, they looked at me like I was crazy. "Brooklyn," my friend with the new X5 said, turning up his nose. "I thought it was only people living out there. I didn't know there were parties in Brooklyn."

He started laughing and giving fives. "I didn't know people partied in Brooklyn. Hahahaha!"

(To be continued...)

The Rule of Bad Grapes (Ideas Had While Reading The New Yorker and Eating a Bowl of Grapes)

You have a bowl full of green grapes. Some are dazzling, spotless, glistening. Others are okay, though a bit brown in places. And others are just awful, hideous. Shriveled, deeply scarred, moldy.

(One of them is the best-selling grape of all time.)

You start eating, and you’re only going after the good grapes. But every now and then, you pick up an okay grape. It has a slight bruise near the stem. Maybe you sniff it to see if it is indeed okay. It’s not bad; you pop it in.

(One man you've never heard of is trying to change all this.)

After eating the not-so-bad grape, you find a couple more good ones and eat them lustily, relishing their untarnished grapeness. As the amount of good grapes decreases, the amount of the “other” grapes rises by comparison: it seems as though you can’t find anything but okay and hideous grapes.

(But one of these grapes is Norah Jones.)

The really good grapes are a distant memory, and now you’re restricting yourself to the not-so-bad ones. You’ve already had a couple while you were eating the good grapes, and really they’re not so awful. From time to time, you pick up a disgusting grape. But, somehow, you’re not as disgusted by it as you were a couple minutes ago, when you were only eating pristine, fleshy specimens. Maybe, hesitantly, after several sniffs and holding it up to your desk lamp, you decide to throw caution to the wind and eat something that is damn near a raisin: brown, baggy, wizened, a dry white fuzz at the tip. It tastes a bit fermented, like it has booze in it.

(That’s why wine makes you bone ugly chicks.)

Perhaps, you know how this story ends. No, you do not stop and chuck the bad grapes in the compost heap. You keep eating, your standards diminishing in direct correlation to some mathematic rule of bad grapes that Malcolm Gladwell will read about in an obscure mathematics journal somewhere and package into a few thousand semi-thought-provoking words: "The Rule of Bad Grapes: How Human Standards Change to Fit Environmental Pressures: And What That Means for Big Business: By, me, Malcolm Gladwell."

You finish the bowl of grapes and the Gladwell article. (Something about predicting hit movies.)

You wake up the next morning with worms growing in between your teeth.

The Death of the Album, or Sweeping Pronouncement #84,581

In the graveyard of cultural artifacts, in between the opera and the novel, there lies a plot of grass reserved for the single- or multi-musician compilation of unified sonic work known affectionately as the album. Standing there with a shovel, ready to break the soil, is a young gravedigger named The Internet.

With the rise of mixtapes, downloadable music, and the like, listeners are no longer forced to break a $20 (and once a twenty is broken, it's gone) on an entire album. They can pay a buck on iTunes for the song they really bought the album for. Or they can download it illegally on a P2P server.

What's more, especially in hip-hop, but slowly working it's way into indie rock, is the culture of the mixtape. A mixtape is a kind of album, except it's a compilation culled from various different artists (sometimes across different genres). And in the realm of the mixtape, the person putting the mixtape together, usually the DJ, is king. Before songs go out on albums by hip hop artists, major labels test them on the training fields of the mixtape circuit.

All this, coupled with the reign of the iPod - and our increasing reliance on the shuffle mode, which is somehow not only artistically but existentially significant (for reasons I don't have the energy to expound upon) - seem to hail the death of the album as we know it.

But of course there's always another side to this. One might make the claim that albums, in response to the nature of our downloadable, bitrate-crazy music culture, are actually responding musically: with shorter albums, or more unified albums that weave a narrative throughout (Sufjan Stevens comes to mind).

And there is an afterlife of cultural production, where though it has outlived its immediate relevance (this might have been for the album, the 1960's-90's), it continues to be a fresh new ground for experimentation and novelty, as with its literary counterpart, the novel. So, it might be some consolation that beautiful flowers do tend to bloom in graveyards.

My Youth in JPEGs

My youth was too real.

Ethiopian Singer Teddy Afro Should Have An Afro

There's a great tradition of musicians who have named themselves after their own hairstyles. Afroman, Blondie, and the Nappy Roots are a few that I can think of (wait for it!) off the top of my head. (Pow!)

But then there's this guy, Teddy Afro. I don't expect you to know who he is, unless you're Ethiopian - in which case you're probably sick of him. As you can see by the photo inset, Teddy’s last name – which by the way is not his government – is a misnomer. On his head, no afro to speak of. I think this is an injustice. Teddy Afro should have an afro on top of his head. A huge one. One that would make Tego Calderon shudder in envy.

Otherwise, the dude’s gotta change his name to something more appropriate. Teddy Hair Gel. Teddy Finger Waves. Teddy S-Curl. Can we agree that this makes sense? I await your response, Teddy [Blank].

Soft-n-cuddly first name aside, Teddy's a beast in Ethiopian pop music. He's been the bestselling act for the past few years and his reign at the top doesn't look like it'll let up any time soon. Ethiopian pop music has very limited appeal outside of Ethiopian audiences. The instruments are synthesized. The lyrics are in Ethiopia's national language, Amharic (which is not its most spoken). The rhythms are redundant, awkward, and derivative. All of these things are true of Teddy Afro – he just does them better.

His lyrics, personality, and voice all radiate a certain smiling, boyish charm. Unlike many Ethiopian musicians, who are at home in slow, brooding songs of love and loss, Teddy sings about childhood, Ethiopian history, and (most of all) his undying, resilient love for Ethiopia. When placed side by side with the bitter realities of contemporary Ethiopian life – AIDS, floods, droughts, rampant government corruption – Teddy’s tunes might strike a casual listener as a bit incongruous.

Ethiopians love Teddy because he belongs to Ethiopia. He’s traveled the world and has fans wherever there are Ethiopians (D.C., Stockholm, Sydney, Beirut), and yet he still dresses with the awkward, ill-fitting swagger of a kid fresh of the boat. Though fluent in English, he sings everything in Amharic. Of course, there are moments when he'll drop the odd - and I do mean odd - English word or two.

For instance, take the chorus of his recent song dedicated to Bob Marley. In it, Teddy rekindles the debate over moving Bob Marley's remains from Jamaica, to the reggae legend's self-proclaimed spiritual home, Ethiopia:

Bring him! Ziggy Marley./
Bring him! His body./
Bring him! Because he wants it.

Hearing a foreigner speak words in another language is painful enough. Hearing him try to rhyme words in a song is like, well...like this.

Harlem Trees Bear Stinko Fruit

There's a tree just outside my door. I'll give you a couple guesses what kind of tree it is (hint: look left). It's a fairly big tree, as far as trees in the city go. About 25 feet, with big droopy boughs, lushly adorned with many healthy green leaves. A great tree by all accounts.

But towards the end of summer, little golf ball sized fruits, with the shape, furry texture, and light hue of apricots, fell one by one from its branches. They were—these strange little fruits—quite dense and would make a resonant thud whenever they landed on the roof of a car parked underneath it (or with a fleshy smack when they hit the pavement).

As August turned into September, those of us who had to pass the tree every day, going to and from our front doors, started noticing a foul smell when we passed the tree and the fruit-littered stretch of sidewalk below it. One day, curious as to where the smell was emanating from, I bent over and picked the strange fruit off the ground. I brought the small, fleshy orb to my nose.

Putrefying meat, my brother's basketball shoes, my high school gym bag: these were the images that rifled suddenly through my brain in hectic montage. I threw the fruit down (smack!), retching in disgust.

I found out later that what I’d smelled was the “silver apricot” of a female gingko tree, and according to Wikipedia:

The seed is 1.5-2 cm long. Its outer layer (the sarcotesta) is light yellow-brown, soft, and fruit-like. It is plum-like and attractive, but the seedcoat contains butanoic acid and smells like rancid butter (which contains the same chemical) when fallen on the ground.

This past Sunday, between one of the countless naps I had indulged in, I heard my neighbors discussing the tree in decidedly less scientific tones:

Who cleans this up? Ain’t sanitation supposed to get rid of this? Shit, I’m tired of this. Messing up my car. Smells like shit. Can’t even sit outside no more. They need to cut this fucking tree.

I was in agreement with the disembodied voice of my block until that very last point. You see, besides bearing odiferous balls that stain Escalades and befoul stoops, the ginkgo tree outside my building is the only thing separating the two large windows in my studio, which are only a few feet above street level, from the curious eyes of passerby, the jabbing midday sun, and the midnight watch of Gingko-hating, curtain-fingering neighbors.

So, this time around, I must side with Mother Nature.

And her smelly balls.