what a crazy asshole

Beautiful

Do some light reading when you get the chance.

Look out Boston!

I will not be the first, nor the last to post this piece of brilliance on the web. Let it just be known that the Starbury section of the freedarko tome was excellent and at times even enlightening.







Wow!

P.S.-Steven A. Smith went to FIT for a year to play basketball, maybe to get a BA in knitting, who knows...

Huff

Fair Warning: This is going to be a ramble, the likes of which I've never quite attempted. To keep things buoyant and let you breathe, there will be random video breaks that will have a specific order to them if you pay close attention; or maybe not.

Ok, it's over; the great high of the Aughts came to its heady conclusion in Amsterdam. After spending the better part of the decade smoking pot; it all boiled over in to this vacation on a houseboat in Amsterdam. Maybe the point of the blog is for me to post my pictures of pretty places, tell you about my FEELINGS, random youtube clips, inconsistent sports related opinions, random music, the occasional obtuse reference to Truan Savage, Darren Sproles, or, wait what was I talking about. So now, where to go from here?




I remember hearing an interview with Dave Chappelle where he referred (reefered?) to the writing, shooting, editing and releasing of Half-Baked as a result of the "Great High of 1998" as he dubbed it (great name btw); so don't think I'm trying to puff my chest up like a Robin in springtime to show off some stoner ingenuity. I recognize we live in a weird age, I'm not unlike any other. It got me to thinking; how much weed I smoked would leave merely capitalist/mathematical computations as to my query of the 'greatness' of a high; so, no, it is not necessarily the amount that was smoked/vaporized/vapoorized that put the experience in perspective. Rather it was, how much was consumed in each single session, the length of the sessions, the activities that came with it and the general loathsome qualities of Americans on holiday.



Comedic epiphanies are only as good as the people you can discuss such matters with; maybe what made Chappelle's great high so great was the organization of the ideas discussed in that period of time. What I mean is this; I hate that 70's show, but the clips of them getting high in the basement in a circle was a very good tool for demonstrating what most people do, just without the movie camera.


Then I thought about the Madvillain song "America's Most Blunted", one of my very favorite pothead opuses; it was the first song that revealed to me the seemingly unlimited depth of both MF and Madlib's minds. This is a song that intriguingly emphasizes 2 very important aspects of how I view pot smoking;
-Connectivity: The title itself might immediately elicit visions of Tupac and Snoop back in 1996; by tying in other works, which is the very nature of sample based music, before a single note has been played.
-America: We smoke pot differently than other places; that is to say, that I am looked at like some kind of junkie for smoking pot without tobacco. The Dutch Master cigar, for instance, has so much tobacco in its rolling leaf that adding any would be a silly waste of time. They even put cigarette tobacco in bongs here in the old continent; MADNESS! (madder than deleting all your Bob Dylan off your computer)

Then I got to thinking about "RMXs" vs. "Covers"; it has been bothering me ever since I sat down at my parent's Compaq desktop and downloaded a free, incomplete copy of fruity loops 3. One day in Geometry class, freshman year, Joel Backus, known in Princeton for being that dude who could do the Rahzel "If Your Mother Only Knew" beatbox and for having some of the longest limbs I've ever seen on another human being (marijuana and shot blocking have been the crux of Sean Williams' basketball career, why can't others see this as the path of least resistance?), asked me if I wanted to listen to some beats he had been working on. I was a straight A student up to that point; what came out of the headphones on full blast was digital white noise with a digital kick thumping in the background; it was LOUD and didn't seem to end nor begin at any particular point. So, he got me; I had to know how I could shape sounds in such a way, I had my own ideas obviously, and he told me that cursed name Fruity Loops. The cover song is a staple of all performers; the tasteful cover is a different story all together. It is utilized as a change of pace, most often times to surprise the listener by demonstrating the performer as a listener as well (empathy!). When you're jamming, it's inevitable that you will want to learn other people's songs to jam on (if not, you are a crazy asshole) and that you will do your best to incorporate the elements of the song that speak the most to you; this often times can result in outright failure (READ: Tribute bands/band specific cover bands[you've lost the point of the cover song!]) success (Radiohead covering The Smith's "Headmaster Ritual" sounded pretty fucking good)



The RMX (I'm speaking of course of the Al Gore/Sean Combs invention, "The Remix") is an attempt by studio musicians to take whatever aspects they see fit of any sample and frame the audience's perception of it by titling it as the original with any number of long winded parenthetical statements to establish just who it is that mixed it up. From what I can tell it was originally a technique for re-releasing tired singles that charted well, but for a generation that can mix on their laptop, every song is a new remix waiting to happen. The above track by Boys Noize is a "RMX" of Feist's "My Moon My Man", a song with a really heavy beat to it that received praise across the spectrum of fans that I met while at a small, liberal arts school in Ohio (I had to write that sentence after I thought about it more). So I don't know shit it seems, but I do know that remixing a song by adding a few theatrical tricks is outright lazy. I almost got expelled for giving away my answers on the geometry final, which I got a c+ on, which I only decided to do because I was getting paid and because I had stopped paying attention and instead chilled with Joel and Neil Strauss in the back of the room where I listened to them ramble about hip-hop, football and stealing snapples from the cafeteria.



It's not all dreary sadness in this big, big world of ours, is it? I had a talk with Avis recently, about gas, and if Spain was getting any in lieu of the crazy shit that has been going down with Russia bullying the Ukraine, other Eastern European neighbors and EU nations as well; read here. These motherfuckers have a resource advantage, now, but if it is any indication, the decline of Citgo's oil for poor people scheme leads me to believe that Russia will have some serious social and political questions to answer from both it's own citizenry (I guess we can include South Ossetia and other lovely tourist destinations)[can I just say that any time a train hits a landmine, something fucking crazy is going on?]. I sat next to a Ukranian girl on the bus back from Madrid; she had a potbelly, but was kind of cute, made me think that I should start some Eastern European boy bands up and plant my seed in the motherland; call me the Slavic Lou Pearlman, the Iranian Humbert Humbert, call me anything, but don't call me Shirley (or Chevy Chase for that matter you illiterate fucks).