3 posts tagged “aboutme”
Realistically, this was the first hip-hop album I ever got into. Sure, in the fourth grade everybody was down with DMC and the Beastie Boys, and we all knew a little bit about what else was out there. But when this dropped, it was a new decade, and I was a young kid, and this was full of ideas to me. A lot of them. Ideas about consciousness in teh community, about what black people valued and how they acted (admittedly, at the time I knew about four black kids), about fun rhymes and wordplay and having a good time.
I heard it again this weekend, and what amazed me most (other than how effectively gangsta rap and the media embraced/hated each other to the extent that that's all that would be associated with hip-hop for a long time, seemingly ending this type of smooth, jazzy flows once tribe and de la were done) is how much this album apparently influenced me, because there are at least a half-dozen lines on this that I don't even quote so much as they've been absorbed into my own particular vernacular. "You get an E for effort, and T for nice try," is one, and there are others, so much so that listening to the album with my gf -- who is sufficiently younger than I to an extent that albums like this that meant so much to me occasionally never even crossed her desk - was this funny exercise in rapping along with something that I could still remember 80% of the lyrics to, and then arriving at these "I say this all the time" phrases, and it was almost like this eerie acknowledgement of who I am as a person and where my personality comes from and man, I've been at this life a long time and man, I need to get some thoughts of my own.
I've been working on my book list. I used to read alot, and singehandedly brought home the BookIt! title for my fifth grade class with a whopping 83 books read that year. Now I'm in school and I read a lot more online stuff, or magazines, or short stories. I don't think I read a novel all school year. I'm on my second of the summer.
Anyway, I have kinda cool connections to two of the books on my list so far. I have a signed copy of Mother Night that I got in 1996. My freshman year Writing Workshop prof was also the dean of student affairs, and when Vonnegut came to speak at the school, she got me into both the small-party dinner the night before he spoke and an upper-level English class he guest-lectured. I chased him down after class, asked him to sign Chapter 40 (a brief treatise on motivation) and borrowed his lighter, smoking about half of my cigarrette with him before the professor he was with got a little annoyed at me and I left.
I don't have anything in particular about the Noam Chomsky reader, but a claim to fame for me is that I know he's read articles I wrote. In 2002-03, I lived in Costa Rica, and worked for a paper called MesoAmerica. We covered Central American news one country at a time, digesting the daily national papers into monthly summaries. (Going to Costa Rica in and of itself was arguably the biggest decision of my twenties, but that's for another time). Anyway, Noam Chomsky was a subscriber to the magazine, wrote blurbs for us and all, and at one time emailed commentary on one of my articles to my boss.
So I got that going for me, which is nice.
I mean, I have been. Sometimes for several months, but never more than a year. I've had full on domains of my own and even once bought a book on hosting thinking it was just about setting up domains (in 1995, gimme a break).
One of the reasons I've never been a real blogger is not knowing how not to make it too personal. Which is odd, because in person I'll tell you almost anything, to the point where I'm trying to learn to restrain myself a little bit. Not everyone wants to see your cut-off toe, you know? But I do read a lot, and I have a pretty good system set up to get content I like to me, and I have some amazing resources, and enough people have asked me enough things that I figure I should just start putting some of it out there. This was never meant to end in an endorsement, but there's something about Vox that makes me feel like this is the place to do it - partially because I'm on board here early, partially because alot of my online friends and influences are already around me here, and partially because the various contexts of my life seem to be moving from planning and preparing to execution, and I'm in the middle of what will likely end up as the best summer of my life.
