Collie Buddz - Come Around

So, in the fine tradition of other white reggae artists, I present to you Collie Buddz. Me mate linked me to the vid and I immediately thought of MC Snow. Appearances aside, this is still a solid track. I've tried pretty hard to hate it, it just isn't working out. Oh well. This hate is gonna have to wait for another day.

Tales of fish and fightin'

After dinner tonight, me pops, meself, and the dude renting out a room in our house were chilling about the table and story time started up again. The conversation lasted two hours and was all over the place but it was mainly about "home."

I especially enjoyed these two bits:

"During the rainy season we always ate fish. Why? Because when it rained the fields would flood and there would be fish everywhere. It was a matter of sticking your hands in the water and picking them up. We had a bunch of different ways of catching fish. Your uncle and I would make big footprints in the mud by stepping and twisting our feet around. When the water drained away, there would be a fish in every footprint you made. Another way was to cut a thick piece of bamboo into about the length of your forearm. You just plunge it into the water randomly and when you felt the bamboo shake you would stick your hand into the bamboo and pull out the fish. One time my dad was unlucky enough to catch a very angry snake this way.

My favorite memory was from when I was really little, maybe four or five. I asked my dad, 'Pa, why are there so many fish in the fields but only when it rains?'

'That's because it rains fish during this time of the year.'

The next day it rained, I remember getting on top of the house with a bucket and staring into the sky for an hour while all my brothers laughed at me. My father took me down and asked me what I was doing. I told him I was trying to catch fish like him and he put his hand on my head and laughed. He worked hard for us and it was always great to see him smile, however rarely."

This one's a bit more trivial:

"Your Uncle Badong was the most expensive student out of all of us. The reason was he was always getting in fights. Him and Entie would spend the entire day playing basketball and they'd always start fights. He would take a grudge on the court into your own house. Seriously, he'd bust into some guys house and raise hell like no other. And the thing was, he never tired of fighting because he knew that if he got in a fight, we all did. There was no way to lose. Eventually, when he was going to college in Manila, he was in jail like every other day. I ended up enrolling him in martial arts classes out of my own paycheck just so he had somewhere to release stress."

That's some gangsta ass shit.

Feel Me Flow

Naughty by Nature - Feel Me Flow

I can't get this song of my head. The lyrics are just fun, without being overly ridiculous -- *cough* southern hiphop *cough* -- I'd post the video here but the person who posted it up disabled embedding. I played around with the code a bit but I couldn't get it to work.

Here's a link to the vid, though.

Enjoy.

The Drive Home

The drive home with my dad was, as usual, full of stories and randomness. We always end up on the subject of "home" which, for him, means the Philippines. I told him about how everyone back home told me stories about my mother (R.I.P. Ina ko) that revealed a side of her that rarely exposed itself in America, where she was just another woman.

They say she was a natural born leader with a loud, powerful voice and that she always said the right words. She could sway a group of people in seconds. She was never alone, people followed her just to hear her talk. Classmates hoped her knowledge rubbed off on them. The people there that remember her were only children or teens when she left, and they say everyone wanted to be like her. Dad affirmed it all, adding that a lot of them wouldn't admit it but she also fed most of them as children on days when parents came home empty-handed.

My father worked as a government engineer in her town, and he formed a little gang of his own. Many of the older teens latched on to him, because he bought them drinks and food, and was also a strong personality. My pops had a private car and a driver and was stacking mad paper working for the government. When he went places with my mom, he preferred to hire two jeepneys, because even though they were on dates, the kids still followed them around. He made a deal with them that he would provide them transportation to the beach, as long as they brought a little of their own food. Weekends would see a convoy of jeepneys full of poor children bearing stolen coconuts, bananas, mangoes, avocados, and various other produce.

We spoke about "home" for quite a while and then somehow segwayed into life in America. As I've become older he's become a lot more reflective about his first years in the States. This time he told me how much he regretted never being able to use his degree here in the US. At the time he was so focused on keeping the family together that taking odd jobs making porches and decks for rich white people wasn't even a problem. Once he got over how wasteful Americans were, he was just happy to be here. Now, he says, he can't stand his job anymore. He has a new boss every year, college graduates with a B.S. in Industrial Engineering that doesn't know shit about the industry. They constantly ask questions when they need help but then act cold towards their employees when they don't need them. They take forever to address problems while he McGuyvers solutions in seconds.

Despite the regrets, though, he says he's glad he was able to help raise all his nieces and nephews and that he wouldn't trade his time here for a stable, high-paying job under a corrupt government. He wouldn't trade learning to change diapers three at a time on the rare occasions he was off. He claims he'd never trade having to eat the dozens of eggs that my Ate refused to eat because the yolks popped. He says he'd never trade cooking ramen noodles at two in the morning for my Kuya when he had the flu. He says he'd never trade having to wear pink clothes for a week when my cousins mixed up the colored clothes with the whites when they were supposed to be babysitting me. He'd never trade the looks on all of my cousin's faces when he was the first one who let them drive his car, even though they only had just gotten their permits. He says the countless high school, college, and grad school graduations of his blood are payment enough for any of the frustration at work, from racism, bigotry, and ignorance that he's had to endure.

Now he's starting to talk about going back to school. Maybe becoming a professor in the Philippines when he retires. It fits; he's always learning. I bring my old textbooks home and he reads them while taking a shit. We spend nights together on the couch with one leg up. eating rice with our hands while watching the Discovery Channel. We don't discuss the scores of "the game" in the car, we talk about politics, and the economic situation in the third world. I'd always loved my dad, mostly because I have to, but the last two years have given me a respect for him that is unequaled. He is, by far, the most amazing man I've ever met and I just can't believe it's taken me so long to discover the treasure I've lived with my whole life.

Ones and Twos

So I'm sitting here right before my exam, chugging an energy drink and not thinking about the exam at all. I was thinking about all the things that I wish I could do. The foremost among them are the four elements of hip hop. I have a passion for them now that's hardly matched by many other thing in my life right now but somehow I feel like it's too late to do anything about it. For instance, I sincerely wish I had learned to spin:






Cutting skills aside, Kid Koala has an amazing ability to visualize phrases in music. Honestly, how many times do you think he's listened to every set of vinyl in his library? To be able to just sit down and jam to funk and soul records all day just to find the perfect breaks and then become so absorbed into the music that eventually learn the ability to find the music within the music. I'd fucking kill. And, hell, I'd love to start learning now but then I watch vids like this:





Oh, Asian kids. Is there anything that you can't make grown ass people feel more inadequate in?

TheRebel

http://www.therebelmovie.com/

I fucking called it. The historical epic genre is taking over Asia. Now Vietnam is in the mix, man. When is it the PI's turn?

Also, take note of the use of scissor kicks in the trailer. This is a signature move of Vovinam Viet Vo Dao, the premier Viet martial art. This, if I'm not mistaken, will be the first feature film released in the United States to feature Vietnamese martial arts. I'm psyched.

You silly Cambodian kiddies...

Boy befriends 4.8-metre-long python

How crazy would it be if this happened to you as a kid? I really want a Burmese python stuffed animal now...

I found an Al Jazeera report on this. Check it.

Clazziquai - Fill this Night

I don't understand Hangukmal but I can't get over Clazziquai. I'm going to be screaming Korean melodies in the morning and I won't have any idea what I'm saying.

The Death of Me

I'm starting to think too much about this blog. I couldn't sleep on Monday night/Tuesday morning because I had an idea stuck in my head. I ended up getting up and then writing a block of broken prose. It sounds good and it's kinda spoken word-esque which I think is what I'll make it in the future. I would usually post something like that right away but it's kinda personal and I'm scared the person it refers too might read it. That's another sign that I'm thinking about writing far too much. I'll post it up here in some indefinite amount of time in the future. Some of the shit I write is really raw if it comes out of me right away. I also made a little note in italics that describes my mindset at the time just to remind me when I look back at it:

12/4/07 3:32 AM

Man, I have been thinking about this too much. I couldn’t sleep last night because I felt cold, even with the sweat on my skin. I was trying to sleep tonight and I while I recounted the weekend in my head I thought I was repeating lines that I didn’t think sounded quite right. I had to get up and write. This blog is going to be the death of me. This may well become a poem in the future. Who knows.

I need time to mature before reflecting. I'll be sure to link back to this. This blog will be the death of me.

"Feeling Fucked Up"

I was wasting time on youtube again, just now. I watched Def Poetry Jam season four, episode three and I came upon this bit by Tracy Morgan. As I listened to it, I thought to myself, "Why have I never felt this way before?"

My own question caught me off guard. Would anyone ever want to feel like that? I imagine most would say no, but for those uninitiated to "love," it's an enviable emotion. Sure, it's not as enviable as, say, love itself but it's an experience that I can admit I've never had. Is that fucked up? Seriously, I hear all this shit from people about first kisses and sparks and fireworks and passion and shit, but I still don't feel drawn to it. I've never been on a date, which I imagine is a consequence of me never having asked anyone out, which I imagine is a consequence of my fucked up sense of what I want. In all honesty, despite all the effort to come off as intellectual (not really effort, but more just the way I am) and despite the way I think people think of me I just don't give a fuck about having a close, lovey dovey relationship with a girl. Don't get me wrong. I'll talk to a girl that's cool, and I'll hang out with the ladies. But in the end, it just isn't that different from hanging out with my boys (except, perhaps, for limitations in what you can say, and those don't even exist with some girls). Frankly, I don't desire anything more from a girl in terms of a relationship.

If I wanna fuck, then I just wanna fuck.

Maybe it sounds like hookup culture is what's for me, but even then: Where's the draw? Fuck and run? Maybe I'm too nice, or maybe I have a disillusioned view of what a relationship should be. Not even peer pressure, the mightiest of all forces in the adolescent universe, has yet convinced me to give it a try. What's the problem (is it a problem?)? Am I too nice? Am I too scared?

Am I actually thinking too much?

I want to be an amored ice bear when I grow up.

The Golden Compass Trailer

Blue Scholars - Joe Metro

Always finding new shit, man. Filipino MC from the west coast, this is from his new album Bayani (hero). I'm diggin' his Katipunan hoodie. I guess the revolution never ends.

The 25 Most Infamous Yellow Face Film Performances

Seriously, that's ridiculous. Oh, America.

Snow - Informer

I had an itchin' for some old school and I came upon this classic. Whatever happened to Snow? Sure beats Vanilla Ice.

Random

Every morning when I wake up I get on the laptop and start surfing (given I have time, that is). I surf the same sites in almost the same order, it's sort of a ritual to get my mind moving. School e-mail, g-mail, facebook, myspace, a few blogs, and a few forums. Now, I've just finished my rounds and I've had some random thoughts.

First, does anyone else think that Kim Jong-il's shades make him look like a porn producer?

Second, how sick would a T-shirt with Bruce Lee on the ones and two be? I was just thinking about all the stock images of Bruce Lee* I've seen and I remembered this one:

I want to ask a competent graphics design major on campus to photoshop turntables under his hand and then put headphones on his head with the right phone on and the left hanging around his neck. Tell me I'm not a fucking genius. Get at me if you wanna work with me.

*Yesterday was Bruce's birthday, so that's why he was on my mind. Well, more than usual. I'm always in the Bruce state of mind.

Music Hunt

I went shopping this past Black Friday for my first time. I didn't go crazy or get caught up in the hype. I ran into Best Buy with an agenda and ran the fuck out of there as fast as I could. I copped an external hard drive to store my po...videos, music, and important documents. Anyways, so I was transferring all my shit and I fucked up big time. I copied over all my movies and then I went and deleted all my music. In my defense, they both started with the same letter so fuck you.
So now I gotta rebuild my library which, honestly, is fun for me. It gives me another excuse not to do productive work and I'm always finding new shit. Here are some new finds and some classics:

The Visionaries - All We Need Randomly found these guys while researching DJs. Good, fun stuff.

Justice - D.A.N.C.E. feat. Mos Def and Spank Rock Got a tip on this track from Adriel over at http://www.adrizzle.com

East Flatbush Project - Tried by 12 A classic.

Swollen Members - Aggression

DJ Shadow and DJ Q-Bert - Organ Donor

Soul Position - I Need My Minutes Another fun track.

Souls of Mischief - Center of Attention

Jurassic 5 - Cut Chemist Suite (feat. Ozomatli)

Shit's Hot

Awww, fuck yeah. Check out the new album by Dahlak: Dual Consciousness. It's free but you should cop it for real. I did, and that's saying a lot. Support real hip hop.

http://www.thisisdahlak.com/download.html

Another Father-Son Moment

I wrote this as another facebook note (yeah, too lazy to start up a blog) shortly after arriving home for Thanksgiving break. My dad likes to talk a lot and we always talk about random shit in the car. His stories are amazing and you should expect to read some in the future. This one is a bit more frivolous.

"Some guy at work yesterday got fired for threatening to kill someone. I hate people that threaten bodily harm. In the Philippines, you don't get a warning, someone just shanks you. That is the reason no one messed with the Belmontes back home. We rolled deep and we kept it real. If I wanted to punch you, I'd have let you know by fucking punching you."

-Rudolfo Floriano Belmonte (translated into contemporary English)

Father, your words of wisdom never fail to entertain.

Tonight (but actually the night of October 6th)

Another facebook note from a while back.

So I'm a little tipsy. I'm not stumble fucked but I'm wobbly knees fucked. It's times like these where I think about my time in the Philippines. The most drunk I ever got was in the P.I. and my grandmother's words always echo in the back of my mind in moments of inebriated epiphany.

"Ay, bastos. Burat ni apo ko."

"How shameful. My grandson is a drunkard."

-Consolacion Roda Nogra

I love the woman.

Marco Demoño. "The Mark of the Demon." It tastes like gasoline. Oh Filipinos, is there anything you won't drink?

P.S. I later made another note in response to some people asking me to clarify the original:

It's been brought to my attention that my translation of my grandma's quote was confusing.

"Ay, bastos. Burat ni apo ko."

The way I put it may have sounded like she hates me. Not true. The word "bastos" is kinda tricky to translate because it depends on context. Perhaps I should have used "ridiculous."

Anyways, to sum it up. My grandma loves me. She was making a joke.

Facebook Copy-Pasta (delicious!)

Note: I wrote this as a facebook note shortly after my return from my trip to the Philippines this past summer. It is unmodified.

Haha. Candace wrote on my wall asking me about my summer. I thought about it and realized that it was the first time I had even stopped and considered what I had done. I wrote an unnecessarily long and elaborate response on her wall (come on, it's me) and then read it. I realized it was bloggish. I thought about expanding on that shit in a note but I got lazy. Honestly, I wrote it about 3 minutes ago and I woke up about 5 minutes ago. So I'm just gonna quote that shit.

"My summer has been full of miscellaneous travels and activities. Thankfully it wasn't nearly as uneventful as breaks past. I went to the Philippines for the first time and had a blast. Trips like that are 50% awesome and 50% depressing for fairly obvious reasons. I've been humbled by how unintentionally gangster my relatives are. Necessity is more than just the mother of invention; she's a bitch."

I'll probably come up with something to elaborate on what exactly all that means some other day when I feel more reflective but I'm sure some of you get the point.*

Real men drink 40s and eat goat heads.

*I still intend to write more on my trip to the P.I. I need more thinking time.

"Are you from England?"

Note: This essay was written for my freshman writing class. It was supposed to have sources and shit but it evolved into a pure narrative. I ended up still getting a B on it because I'm awesome as shit. Also, I know it ends kind of awkwardly but that's a consequence of it being an assignment. It had to end, and I was too lazy to write anymore so I just kinda ended it. Enjoy.

I used to have an accent. I grew up listening to two languages but my knowledge of English, prior to elementary school, was limited to my parents’ proper, yet stilted Filipino English and the extreme west coast quips of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Needless to say, my first days in kindergarten were awkward. Not only did I have to worry about not knowing what the Pledge of Allegiance was, but I spoke English like a foreign extreme sports aficionado. The predominantly southern classroom didn’t know what was “wrong” with me but they knew the one question to ask to find out:

“Where are you from?”

Without looking up from my toy, I immediately responded with, “Newport News.”

He looked at me, clearly puzzled. “No. Where are you really from?”

Not knowing what he wanted to hear, I simply responded, “I dunno.”

Again he stared at me, clearly wanting to hear something specific. There was a brief silence during which he examined me, quite intrusively: getting in my face to see my eyes, examining my skin (by sight and touch), even sniffing me down. I continued with my imaginings in silence, a silence he promptly broke with a loud, almost declarative, “Are you from China!?”

I stopped, shocked. I looked up to examine my interrogator, though admittedly not with equal zeal as he. The boy who asked me had blonde hair, blue eyes, and the faint southern accent typical of modern Virginians. I eyed him up and down, thinking silently. The silence, at this point, was tense and awkward as was evidenced by the uncomfortable look on his Aryan face. I stared him right in the eye and asked him, “Are you from England?”

Without thinking, he opened his mouth to respond but then stopped. He wanted to say, “No, silly goose,” I’m sure but he instead slowly closed his mouth. The look in his eyes embarrassingly said, “Oh.”

This was the first time I had ever even considered this question but it wasn’t the last. That day marked the first time I ever really noticed myself. Before then, I was Jonathan, I was “this many” years old, and my favorite color was green. After that, I was Jonathan, I was brown, and I talked-ed funny.

What seem like trivial differences now, were the things I paid attention to most. My physical traits were obvious but I paid little heed; I figured no one gave the black kids any trouble and they were way darker than me and their hair looked funny. The one thing I was most insecure about was my speech. I grew up in the U.S. and I spoke grammatically flawless English (most of the time) so I was never put into any special programs, but I did have a very strong accent that frustrated the most patient teachers and put off most every classmate. The first days of school frustrated me too and I swiftly came to the conclusion that the only way to alleviate my communication problems and, even more importantly, my insecurities was to master the English language like no one had ever done before. What everyone else took for granted was what I wanted most, I dreamed to take language for granted.

The journey was long and arduous, consisting primarily of people-watching and TV-watching. I spent many days in class or in front of the television with my mouth closed but my ears very much open. I absorbed every syllable and spent my spare time repeating words and sentences to myself. Kids at school just thought I was really shy and my parents never minded the sight of their only child talking to himself.

My endeavor finally reached its end in the second grade. How is it that I can pinpoint second grade as the end of my endeavor to master English? That’s the first time I heard an adult tell me, “You’re English is very good!” At the time I felt elated; enough to run home from the bus stop that day and tell my parents about the event with a huge smile on my face. That elation faded as time passed, however, as repeated inquisitions into the high quality of my speech made me realize that people were genuinely surprised because they expected my physical foreignness to express itself verbally as well. Though initially disheartening, I decided that what I had accomplished was one more step towards breaking that stereotype.

Elementary school was enjoyable from that point on; I was able to talk to people without difficulty and I soon found myself enjoying “normalcy.” My comfort was short-lived, however, as my parents found it fitting that I be transferred to a school with a focus on science and technology. This was all find and dandy with geeky, little me, but I was ill prepared for my new intellectual home. It turns out that this program was a cleverly designed way to get children from the suburbs bussed into the poorest part of the city.

My first day was much like kindergarten except that I didn’t speak at all. There were customary inquisitions in to my ethnicity that went unanswered, which was apparently fine with them as that left them free to create absurdly long lists of made-up countries, and even begin to place bets on whether or not I even spoke English. It was all alien to me: the odd contractions, the slurred words, the mixed up grammar, and the rhythmic pronunciations and flow of sentences. The reason I remained mute wasn’t shame or fear; I was in linguistic heaven. My silence was me soaking in this new, beautiful dialect. I was determined to make my first words to these kids the most un-different, and non-foreign words they had ever heard.

The first weeks of class heard no words out of me for I was too busy listening and watching. When I was home I listened to as much hip-hop radio as possible and even tried practicing dialogue with my mom, something she found horribly amusing.

The day I felt prepared enough to engage in hip conversation with my classmates, saw me walk into class decked out in Fubu attire purchased the day before: jeans half-way down my ass, two large tee-shirts, and a white gold chain around my neck; I was so nervous that my first words didn’t come till recess. We had gathered on the basketball courts to begin the daily rounds of insult trading. “Yo mama” jokes and fat jokes abounded. Nappy hair, light skin, dark skin, big lips were open for all to burn. My shining moment came during a lull in the laughter. I don’t exactly remember what I said, but I know it something to do with, “That nigga’s ashy knuckles.” The seconds afterwards felt like hours, as those about me realized who had just said what. Thankfully, my execution was flawless and I’m sure they noticed that I was dark enough to know what ashy actually meant. Laughter followed but I had just begun…

With two languages and two dialects under my belt, I felt ready to take on the linguistic world. My love for words soon matched my love for numbers and facts. Accent impersonations became a hobby that randomly expressed itself in conversations. I often found myself in airports repeating interesting sentences I had heard from people shuffling through. Time indoors was spent watching Discovery Channel, History Channel, and the BBC as much for the narrator’s speech as for the fine educational programming. Soon I had the dialects of the Deep South, Oxford, Manchester, Scotland, Ireland, Australia, France, Germany, China and every region of the English speaking world in my head and I practiced them like a sport.

To this day I continue to observe and learn from the ways people around me use language but I always, in the back of my mind, remember those days in school when I envied everyone for being comfortable with their words. Now I know that many envy my mastery of language. The one thing that I thought exiled me from the rest of America became the one thing that made me appreciate one of the most diverse and exciting aspects of American culture.