I'm Locking Out The Lockouts

Alright, I'm gonna try to keep this post short, as I admittedly do not know much about the labors lockouts pending in the NBA and NFL, but I feel they worth some form of discussion. I mean, hell, I can barely manage the payroll for my simulation Nationals team: it's halfway through the season and I am somehow twenty million in debt to the District of Columbia already (Jake Peavy is fucking expensive, man).

This man is a completely impotent leader.
I can't be funny about how much I hate
David Stern. Photo by Eric Richardson.

My interest can merely just not stay tacked to such a meaningless issue, meaningless in that it is a bunch of fucking-absurdly-rich people arguing for more control and revenue from a bunch of more-fucking-absurdly-rich people. That might sound uneducated, sure, but sports is about putting balls into goals, reaching the endzone, or any other of the various signs of physical and technical dominance that rile us up and make us proud to be fans. Sports is not about having the entire construction of teams altered to fit markets, punishing an area not for its lack of love for a team, but for its lack of something as basic as population.

This is how areas like Florida get two World Series winning Marlins teams, an appearance at said monumental sports occasion by the Rays, as well as one of the most dynamic groups of basketball players the last few decades has seen. And how does the area reward these amazing accomplishments? THEY STILL DON'T GO TO FUCKING GAMES. These attendance struggles by the MLB are confusing enough, this isn't even the USA's sport any more as much as it is Latin America's, a population certainly prevalent in Florida.

Kool Keith: Kooler Than You

Hip hop is a lot of things these days, but rap, not so much. Producing is where the real groundbreaking is done, hell, the advent of rap came about through the constantly evolving role of the disc jockey. The two roles, rapper and DJ, were not mutually exclusive, but rather worked with each other to create new ways of combining poetry and music. There seems to have been a split somewhere however, and now the two are rarely excelled at in conjunction today, the former if at all.

Fuck it, I'll say rappers suck nowadays, There, it's out in the open at the beginning so I don't have to ease you into the notion of a white guy complaining about rap music, shocking as it is, I know. I don't even really have a problem with the music, hip hop production has been constantly evolving with new sounds and rhythms. And back in the day, sure, there was something crucial to be said in gangsta rap as it evolved out of the early stylings of Stetsasonic and what have you, it's political message being violent and cathartic if a bit ill-wielded. However, this dual progression seems to have been left behind in the good-ole-days of hip hop and rap, as it were, the path of Double Dee and Steinksi influencing such innovative acts as DJ Shadow (such a Bay legend people forget he's form the Bay, but just listen to The Outsider), NWA and Ice T have left us with the poor legacy of Fitty and Eminem. Later, with De La Soul and Tribe we get the feel good rap: music about getting fucked up and fucking bitches in a nice way, or just about how great of a rapper you are. Even later comes the political hip hop, touched on by Tribe and Soul's Afrocentrism but really outplayed by guys like Immortal Technique to the point whiny bitchiness. (Oh and if you want point for genre reference, Kanye West is dance music, nothing more.)

It's either this... Photo by QXZ.

... or this. Well, fuck, not much of a choice. Photo by Dan Figueroa.

True Blood: Uh... What?

True Blood made an impact in my life far before I started watching it. It seemed to spurt up from the veins of society as a cultural phenomenon directly related to the ongoing vampire craze of the time, one that seemed to have reached its peak upon True Blood's beginnings. Hell, True Blood debuted on September 7, 2008 with the oh so infamous Twilight movie premiering two months later in what seemed a clusterfuck of shitty vampire melodramas.

There was hope, however! True Blood's first season got absolutely rave reviews, I mean fuck, it won a Golden Globe and an Emmy! Maybe I was wrong about this whole vampire thing being a smorgasbord of shit and blood. So when an opportunity to explore the show came up at a local science fiction and fantasy conference, I checked it out, got a full first season review and even had some fairly enlightening conversations about how the nature of the show could be related to issues of social justice.

Mission Statement: Shit

There's a lot of shit out there. Good shit. Bad shit. New shit. Old shit. Many would say that society today is filled to the brim with the excesses of an imperial capitalism as it creeps across the globe and even into the most modest of third worlds. Shit.

I love sports. Sports weave a complex fabric between heroic stories of domination and defeat, as well as connecting the worlds of these athletic aces to the common man, becoming a Bildungsroman for an entire society. People pitched on the edge of their seats awaiting outcomes that indicate the emotional investment that an entire association of individuals connected solely by spatial orientation.

Well, that's how it should be anyways. The Dodgers are going to shit because of divorce proceedings.

I love television. Television has become a tapestry that all of society looks on from the loom, its construction the very reflection of our own dreams and ambitions. Not only something as milquetoast as those vague notions, however, but also a vivid imagination that contains within it ever more complex relations between character, situations and genre.

But then again the only shit I have on my DVR is COPS and PTI.

I love music. Music can connect unknowing strangers into bonds of pure joy, lifting listeners into abstract ecstasies that bring about unique forms of mental and physical transformation. Entire cultures have formed and died around not only specific genres, but specific artists. The emotional resonance of music is something that can be found nowhere else.

However, Katy Perry's musical career exists. Shit.

All of this stuff is shit, what some would call the excesses of a far too culturally productive society. I however, take what I consider a much more enlightened look at all this shit. I will sift through it, finding the best and worst the world has to offer in the form of cultural output, be it through whichever media strikes the hot iron of my taste or distaste.

You're all knee-deep in shit too, so you might as well grab a handful and start flingin'.