You know these new novels make me tired. My God! Everywhere I go some silly girl asks me if I’ve read ‘This Side of Paradise’. Are our girls really like that? If it’s true to life, which I don’t believe, the next generation is going to the dogs. I’m sick of all this shoddy realism. I think there’s a place for the romanticist in literature
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned
I didn’t love this book. I found it a little tough to get through; but this little quote did give me a good laugh.
You could think you cool wit yo nice things but get wiped cleaned for ice cream when the lights beam
Joey Bada$$
My girlfriend put me on to this young cat from Brooklyn. If you surf the blogs or twitter at all, you’ve probably already come across this guy. I’m probably late to the game on this one, but even so, I felt the need to put in my two cents. This kid is rapping over MF Doom and J Dilla beats and doing them justice to the fullest extent. People are going to say The Progessive Era is the East Coast answer to OFWGKTA and to some extent it is; but when you get down to it, this music is, in my opinion, in not just a different lane, but a different league. It’s getting back to the basics of hip hop: beats and rhymes without the theatrics. Listening to 1999 brings me back to the first time I heard albums like Illmatic. I could be a little over enthusiastic about this guy, but this is some of the best music I’ve heard in five or six years.
I don’t love reblogging, but one of the few sites I do like to reblog from is Hypbeast. It’s probably the only blog thats transitioned from a place where sneakerheads came to find out about Nike Tier 0 accounts to a legitimate landing page for all things culture (and it’s probably the only site I read in 2006 that I still read today). This is a perfect example of how the site has grown up over the years. Jeff Staples of Staple Design has been moderating a series called the ‘Scholastic Survey’ focused on bringing issues of education to the community that frequents sites like Hypebeast and High Snobiety. I’ve watched a couple of the videos from the series casually but this one, featuring a professor from my alma mater, piqued my interest. In any case, enjoy.
Interesting column bringing a more focused and international perspective to the often misdirected idea that small businesses are best and create the most jobs.
If you’re like me and lost a lot of weight during the recession, all your belts come have been coming up about one hole short. I recently got a leather hole punch.$8 to avoid the cost of buying new belts. Easily paid for itself upon first use.
It’s been a while since I’ve come across anything (book, graph, article, movie, commercial, tweet, hashtag) this non-sensical. If you’re familiar with the whole ‘Where have all the black men gone?’ debate, you know that it’s extremely one-sided. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not so crazy as to think that there are enough eligible black men out there relative to eligible black women. All you need to do is step into a college classroom or a boardroom to know that black women have outpaced black men in terms of education and professional achievement. But this picture in my mind encompasses just how ridiculous and unfounded the debate has become. Through some ridiculous form of statistical manipulation it comes to the conclusion that there are 3 ‘good’ black men for every 100 single black women (note that this picture also represents 100% of black women as single, red flag from the beginning). While I could go into the numerous ways that this illustration of the disparity is flawed, I’ll just point out one. This picture totally ignores whether or not the odds of finding a ‘good’ single black woman are any better for a black man. I don’t necessarily think that these standards (money and looks especially) are what should qualify anyone. With that said, this picture is useless, non-sensical, biased, misleading, and down right offensive without the view from the other side. I would not be surprised if there were only 3 ‘good’ black men for every 5 ‘good’ black women (if both populations were measured by the same standards); but for someone to put forth this ridiculous a visual representation of the romantic plight of the black woman is a slap in the face to ‘good’ black men everywhere.
