Posts (page 2)

Getting the "new" Sa-Ra full-length was probably the event of my week. Heard the whole thing on audioditions.com yesterday morning, and sure enough, the good folks of UPS showed up that afternoon with the copy I ordered from Amazon.

(Became impatient with the local record shop, which was slipping and sliding on whether they had it or not.)

I'd been listening to tracks from this group for the last two or three years. Of course, if you have a good number of songs floating out there for a while, the chances for heartbreak tend to increase. Too much expectation, especially if Talib Kweli, Bilal, Erykah Badu, Pharoahe Monche and the late J. Dilla are all showing up.

Overall, I would tend to agree with the assessment by Stone of Couch Sessions, which I would sum up by saying that the futuristic soul funk collective from both coasts may have tried to put on too many hats to please everyone, perhaps leaving everyone a bit dissatisfied. (At least those who have been following them for a minute.)

Another achilles heel might have been the group's possible inability to wrangle some quality tracks (heard here on http://www.myspace.com/saramusic) from other labels on which they've done singles. I liked the group's cover of its own song, "Hollywood", but I like the first one better. Unfortunately, that’s the way it goes.

But their little lacrosse team wouldn't be a bad place to look to as an example of why one shouldn't draw hasty conclusions.

That said, snark and beer are disguising my anger at those who decided that one or two murders at Virginia Tech weren't enough to merit a stoppage of classes at the school in Blacksburg, Va.

"A campus police force that Dubya could be proud of," I remarked to a friend after probably making him sick of hearing me say, "what in the hell were they thinking". "So much for 'Let's roll'", was another quip.

Granted, the decision to continue classes at Virginia Tech came well above the cops. I'm just flailing at this point.

The precious little that I know is that when you're a college student and someone in your dorm bites the dust, I'm not sure that you're not going to be the best student that day. Yes, you're in a campus with an enrollment of nearly 30,000. But you've seen the faces within a dorm, and when one of those faces goes away, I think it does make an emotional impact.

So really, that's what I'm thinking when I hear of the total of 33 killed -- 31 of them killed after those shots at the dorm. I think that someone screwed up badly. At the same time, I'm taking a breath, and am trying to look at this as something where you just can't start pointing fingers to make yourself feel better.

That's what the Boddington's is for.

Pairing "whore" with something you enjoy is probably passe by now -- as in crack whore or an "Ice-T whore".

Well, I'll add to the overuse, because I've been a mail-order whore for the last two months -- purchasing every thing from records and books, to a garment bag, to a chef's knife and and the frigging Chop Wizard. (Look it up, then avoid the impulse leading you to shoot me.)

As I write, I'm watching "The Other Side: Los Angeles", a DVD and CD set comissioned by Time Out magazine and put together by Madlib and Peanut Butter Wolf of the Stones Throw crew. It just came in the mail this afternoon, at the same time as the garment bag and one day after the Fat Freddy's Drop CD came into my mailbox.

Making a rundown of everything that's mailed to my apartment is not depressing, but it's telling me that I should make better use of the phone number I got at Sotto Sopra this week than I did the one I got at Club One a few months ago.

Pairing "whore" with something you enjoy is probably passe by now -- as in crack whore or an "Ice-T whore".

Well, I'll add to the overuse, because I've been a mail-order whore for the last two months -- purchasing every thing from records and books, to a garment bag, to a chef's knife and and the frigging Chop Wizard. (Look it up, then avoid the impulse leading you to shoot me.)

As I write, I'm watching "The Other Side: Los Angeles", a DVD and CD set comissioned by Time Out magazine and put together by Madlib and Peanut Butter Wolf of the Stones Throw crew. It just came in the mail this afternoon, at the same time as the garment bag and one day after the Fat Freddy's Drop CD came into my mailbox.

Making a rundown of everything that's mailed to my apartment is not depressing, but it's telling me that I should make better use of the phone number I got at Sotto Sopra this week than I did the one I got at Club One a few months ago.

By now, I'd like to think that most people are privy to the the latest set of insensitive words of shock-jock Don Imus, who characterized members of the Rutgers women's basketball team as "Nappy-headed hos". Today, he was suspended for a couple of weeks as a punishment for those remarks.

Needless to say, Imus is getting off light. Rush Limbaugh, someone I find far less entertaining than I ever found Imus, got fired "with the quickness" by ESPN's pre-game football show for comments that seem mild compared to the romper-room banter in Imus' studio last week. Yet, I have mixed feelings about firing Imus.

Really, I'm wondering if it even a requires "reason" to fire Imus after those comments. At the same time, I'm not sure that this is the solution to this particular problem. My objection to firing him is two fold. First, I think Imus would have another show somewhere before the end of 2007. Secondly, I think it takes CBS and MSNBC off the hook -- they'd end up hiring someone similar, with less of the stink.

I think that a 30-60 day suspension seems about right, definitely sticking to the wallets of Imus and his bosses, but it would also keep some pressure on.

Oh, I'm forgetting that keeping pressure on yourself isn't exactly the way it works.

Thoughts negative enough to merit a nap instead of writing a blog post....

Arguing with my boss over not giving him a reason why I don't like to forward my phone calls... Letting a friendship die, and not really caring if it does. (If it ever existed in the first place)... Hearing my little brother tell me the how and why of the shooting death of one of his best friends... Not really getting into this movie "Brick" I rented on Netflix. (Will give it a go tomorrow.).

Sorry, but I refuse to talk about the weather.

Movies watched recently: Agnes and His Sisters (video), Battle in Heaven (video), The Departed (video), The Lives of Others.

Book I'm reading: "Dominion", by Calvin Baker.

Recording artists whose CDs I've purchased: 4 Hero, Amy Winehouse, Loose Ends, Christopher Cross and Jeffrey Osborne.

Accomplishment: Setting the VCR to tape the morning news.

More chipper next time. Thanks.

There's definitely some comfort in going to a place you know and (kinda) love.

Not sure if this falls into the category, but both Denny's and Waffle House both remind me of a sense of desperation.

Denny's will always be about a road trip from USC to the Bay Area for a couple of men's basketball games against Stanford* and Cal, the highlight of which was a motel-keeper on Telegraph Rd. who forced his daughter to give up her television so his cash-strapped extortionist guests could have ESPN in their double. (Really, it was about the accent, my colleague Sean basically saying "no ESPN, no business" and the astonishment about how far dude was going for our biz. Definitely a "had to be there moment.") I don't even remember much about the Denny's trip, other than the fact that it was in Oakland and the meal there was the last thing before we drove back to LA.

Our family stumbled into Waffle House on my first quasi-cross-country trip, from Topeka to Charlotte, where my older brother was to play in one of these exposure basketball camps. It was the first time my brothers and I had traveled more than a few hours from home, and from I-70 to I-64 to I-40 to I-77, you couldn't swing a cat without hitting one of these Waffle Houses. And of course, we loved waffles back then -- if not always and forever -- and even more of course, we did not have a spare dime for dining at Waffle House. (If that made any sense.) So what I remember most was hoping we didn't run out of gas as we puttered into Kansas City to borrow money from my mom, and this longing for Waffle House as each one appeared all the way back from Charlotte. I don't exactly remember when I finally hit up a Waffle House, other than that (a) I was cashing regular paychecks by then; and (b) it wasn't all that great.

(I'm remembering a stay in Atlanta before covering a football game in South Carolina. I just remember hanging out with an old high school friend named Ryan, going to a party of people from Junior Achievement, and said party degenerating into a game of spin the bottle. WTF!!! Is that allowed after age 15? If this is happening when you're 25, please have a sick feeling about writing about it when you're 32. I also remember going to a record store and picking up my first Gilles Peterson compilation. Nothing embarrassing about that. In fact, I'll be heading to his set at Five next week.)

I came to this topic via a recent brunch with my buddy Alicia and her friend Monique at a IHOP in Parkville somewhere in Baltimore County. Please don't take this the wrong way. I'll always be the IHOP compatriot of anyone who doesn't piss me off, but I'll admit to being a bit bemused by the IHOP obsession. My old roommate Bill is another person devoted to IHOP when it comes to going out for brunch. Same goes to building mate Nia, who was ensnared by a combination of nostalgia and whipped butter.

Maybe it's something I never grew up with, and before hitting the East Coast, my only experience with it came when I was a senior in high school. We ended up skipping school to go see the Royals play on opening day against the Red Sox. Afterwards, we went to the IHOP and my only memory was this 300-pound kid named Scott Levine who ordered too many pancakes, put on too much blueberry syrup and got sick, probably because he'd been boozin' it up on the way down to the game. Fourteen years later, I'm almost a reformed IHOP customer.

* I'm still amazed by how fresh the Stanford athletic building was. A bloody spa, if I remember correctly.

Because I didn't get my Thai ice tea over at Banthai, my gratuity for the waitress was a little less than I normally would. No one got stiffed, I spent more time than I would have liked calculating a proper tip.

Of course, I was doing this on a packet of Domino sugar because I was too lazy to reach into my bag and grab an actual piece of paper. Maybe she thought I was just another black dude who doesn't tip. Eff 'em.

Right now, I'm a little bit distracted by the ball game on the tube, but that doesn't mean that this will be a short entry.

Another great moment of March 9 would be getting my Trileptal in the mail. In terms of refilling and renewing prescriptions, you may not find anyone worse than the person writing this.

It generally goes like this: I'll see the bottom of the bottle, say "I'm running low, aren't I." Then I'll let a week or 10 days pass. At that point, I might call Caremark and send more dope my way. Sometimes not. Finally, I'll make the call. Thankfully, my supplier is in Wilkes-Barre, but I'm sweating it by the shipment comes in becomes in. While I haven't checked the bottle, I think I would have had enough for tomorrow and Sunday.

Now, if only my chef's knife would show up.

Last, but not least, I will sign off with an outtake from one of my e-mail rants, this time about the National Hockey League, a league that just bugs me with it's arrogance. It's not as good as the friend who voiced his disappointment with his girlfriends's know-how in the sack. But try to deal:

Right now, I'm 2/3 through a six pack of Raison d'Etre, and I'm trying to figure out if I really care about the end of "Brotherhood", the political/mob drama on Showtime.

I know a few critics probably dug this, and I'm probably using a steep scale in invoking "The Wire", but "Brotherhood" seems to be something similar and falls flat in comparison. Once again, it's probably not a horrible show, but I've seen the mountaintop, and it's from the people at Blown Deadline.

Perhaps it's that this show is stuffing too much stuff into a 11-episode season -- I don't think the character Annabeth Gish is a horrible mother, but she's a decent mother if that mother is 14.

I'll try to get a decent post off in the next seven minutes... Yes, this will be a quick week in review.

I'm here because I spent too much money on dinner at Saffron, a trip I made because it's right in my backyard, I didn't have any social invites for the night, and it was payday.

So I passed on King Britt tonight over at Sonar, and it's me and the Chocolate City program on KCRW in Santa Monica.

A few quick hits...

Greeks at HBCUs -- if not Greeks in general -- need to be less defensive when one of their members end up taking the ass off of one of their pledges.

To assess Jason Whitlock is to realize is that he's basically Howard Beale. He's not necessarily trying to pander to white people. He's just gone friggin crazy.

Yes, I think that coverage of Tamir Goodman in 1999 may have been one of the worst cases of fraud in sports journalism ouside of journalists who just make stories up.

Okay, time's up. I promise to try to talk about something uplifting, like my resume, or the non-pursuit of the TI-99 we used to have when I 10 or something.