The Beauty is in the Bassline.

Yes. Dear friends. This image is BEING SOLD ON T_SHIRTS. Excellent dude!

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10 Things That I Have Learned about Myself Since I Have Last Blogged.
1. Failure Can Be Career Defining.
2. Bullies at work, continue to bully because no one has stopped them.
3. It is painful to watch hundreds of Black and Brown People fight eviction, without and attorney, in Housing Court.
4. I really like the Gap Band.
5. You can tell alot about a person based on how they handle a crisis.
6. People Really like to Argue over the word N-GGA.
7. Jay- Z likes to announce concerts that we can't afford.
8. American Apparrel Dresses are really snug and sexy.
9. A diner that me and BL brunch at from time to time was in the Soprano's Grand Finale. Deep Hunh?
10. If a man does not feel like he is making you happy, he will bounce. ____________________
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Who innna h-ll is Saalam Remi and is it legal for him take haunting, Queensbridge, doing 80 on the freeway type beats.
The beauty is in the bass line yall.

Peace to Spinemagazine.com for the laink.

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Lady gets bucked at for tryning to rid her building of D-Boys.

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This dude was posted up in Union Square train station with this. I thought it was very "Berkeley" and decided to take a picture of it. And I dontated a $1.

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Washington Post done went ahead an did a whole series on Black Men. It is not as substatitive as I would LIKE for them to use their powerful resources to produce, it certainly is better than that Doom and Gloom Orlando Peterson piece in the NY Times earlier this year.

African American Men: Moments in History from Colonial Times to the Present Colonial Times, 1492-1776

1492: Among the crew on the Santa Maria during Christopher Columbus's voyage to the Americas is Pedro Alonzo Niño, a black man. Africans also accompany Ponce de Leon, Hernando Cortes, Francisco Pizarro, Hernando de Soto, and Francisco Vasquez de Coronado in the early 16th century.
1623: William Tucker, the son of indentured servants living in Jamestown, is the first recorded black birth in America.
1625: A census of Virginia counts 11 black men among a population of 1,227.
1641: Mathias De Sousa, a free black man, is elected to the Maryland General Assembly. He had come to the colony as an indentured servant.
1644: Lucas Santomee, a black physician and one of the major landowners in what is to become New York, is granted a tract by the Dutch that stretched from modern-day Greenwich Village to Brooklyn.
1700: About 60 percent of all African Americans in the colonies (16,390) live in Virginia.
1712: Though other colonies had passed laws regulating the behavior of slaves, South Carolina passes a slave code that becomes the standard for slave-owning states. It proscribes escalating punishments for rebellious acts including death for escaping, authorizes whites to punish any slave found violating the law, and prohibits slaves from growing their own crops, working for money or learning to read and write. 1729: In an early precursor to lynchings, Maryland passes a law that mandates savage punishment for slaves accused of violent crimes: decapitation, hanging, or having a body's remains publicly displayed after being drawn and quartered.
This info was, er- procured from washingtonpost.com

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I had to wade through, six or seven paragraphs before the New York Magazine article on Damon Dash got to his conflict with Jay Z. No one ever talks about power dynamics, atleast not in a transparent, constructive way. And finally they did here. Reading is confirmed that men take their friendship losses hard too.

Although Jay-Z had already spent years searching in vain for
a record deal, Dash says he was drawn to him from the outset. “Everybody thought he was too old; they didn’t like the way he dressed: like a Harlem dude. He wore Nike Airs, which everybody called uptowns.” The class distinctions were lost on
nobody. “The Brooklyn cats who were more dominant were known for doing things like gold teeth, much more ghetto,” and they viewed Harlem’s aesthetic as soft.
But Dash saw in Jay-Z a sort of uptown swagger. “I was shocked. Here was a guy with the same aspirations that I had. We wanted to be known for making money.
All we talked about was making money and how to spend it, what the best of everything was and how bad we wanted it.”

“He said, ‘It’s business,’ ” Dash says. “But we were always
supposed to be about more than business, Jay especially.” Dash saw his own role as the executive’s so that Jay-Z could remain an artist at all times. “I did everything I possibly could so that he didn’t have to raise his voice. He just had to whisper something in my ear and I’d take care of it. The people I fought with to make money for him, Lyor Cohen and Kevin Liles”—executives at Def Jam—“he’s made friends with. He hangs out with Puff now. It’s like if your brother leaves you.”

Dame's comment regarding the fact that Jay is now friends with the people that Dame usta negotiate with. It is almost as if Jay is parlayed his intelectual property into leverage for his career and Dame does not feel useful anymore. Men take the breaking up of menships hard too. Sometimes the thing you want the most is the thing that money can't buy, friendship.

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So the sandals are out. The two for $12 Old Navy tanks are getting rocked. I got hella competitive playing Taboo in Staten Island (which looked like the Bay, by the way) last night. Life is good. What's cracking wi'chall?

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