I mostly like the Girls album and I mostly like the line about the pizza and the bottle of wine. But let’s all just take one step backward.
This is twice. Why is Drake always looking over his shoulder in videos? Is he checking for letter jacket thieves? Low flying planes? Is the start of every take actually just the end of him running a deep post route? WHAT IS GOING ON?
I had planned to use this space to say something terribly clever about the Delonte West arrest. Then, Bethlemhem Shoals over at Free Darko went and filtered his take on the story through his own bi-polar diagnosis. It’s short, arresting and pretty much the final word on the subject.
“Point Break” was the first R-rated movie I ever saw. My friend Chris had HBO and two teenage sisters. His parents were a little more laissez-faire than mine when it came to movie selection.
It is in many ways a silly film, especially when it veers into the “100-percent pure adrenaline” speak of the early 90s “extreme sports” boom. On the whole, though, Kathryn Bigelow made a movie that is just slightly greater than the sum of its parts. I still have a hard time not staring at it until the credits roll when it’s on basic cable.
All of which is to say I’m a touch more discouraged over Patrick Swayze’s death than I have any right to be. I spent the morning listening to Mark Isham’s score, which has held up remarkably well. It made for a fitting tribute.
I'ma sell to anybody in your damn family.
As I left my doctor’s office a few weeks ago, I walked past a handful of strung-out looking men huddled around a younger guy who was decidedly better dressed than they were. My mind immediately processed all the figures, but took a minute to do the math. The picture sharpened significantly when the dealer palmed a bill from one of his customers and handed the buyer something in return.
I’ve lived in some fairly bombed out neighborhoods in my time and listened to enough Clipse mixtapes to know the routine. As I walked away, I decided that the extra mental beat wasn’t the result of my naivete, but the details running the interference. It was 11 a.m. on a bright West Village Friday in August and we were on a fairly major street. I’m at best ambivalent about post-Giuliani New York, but something still didn’t seem quite right.
It turns out the large medical building where my doctor keeps his practice also houses a methadone clinic. Our dealer wasn’t necessarily out to terrorize the otherwise Sesame Street vibe of the block. He was just practicing that most basic principle of retail: location, location, location.
His business acumen got me thinking about the efficacy of methadone treatment. I’m not an addiction specialist and my knowledge of such maintenance programs is largely based on its more infamous pop culture references. The scene in “24 Hour Party People” in which Shaun Ryder desperately tries to lick the stuff off an airport floor comes to mind. It was enlightening, then, to find this in a 12-year-old Times piece on this very subject:
“Successful methadone users are invisible” said Dr. Edwin A. Salsitz, director of the methadone medical maintenance program at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York City. ”Methadone is always judged by the failures.”
A source in a similar, but much newer article in the National Journal this April put the three-month follow through on methadone at 75 percent. Of course, the latest news is that monitored heroin use might be even more effective. Given the current state of the healthcare debate that’s probably a push.
The serial digressers can hang it up til Monday. Tyler Green dropped the parenthetical of the week today.
That’s it for now. Certified Gangsta relaunch coming next week. I’m going in.
And in this video, Tony Yayo boasts about being in the region where your grandfather was born in a house that probably didn’t have indoor plumbing.
Two quick thoughts on the Kanye West-directed video for “Best I Ever Had.”
For a dude who spent most of his adolescence on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s payroll, Drake looks terribly uncomfortable on camera. Those stairwell scenes approach an early Snoop vibe, like when he spent half the “G Thang” shoot staring at his Chucks.
It’s kind of impressive that Kanye has kept his love of the female bosom so earnest in the face of his friendship with Takashi Murakami.
Meant to do this yesterday, but the factory where I clock my 9-5s frowns on nipple pasties. Which led to me forgetting about it last night, which means this is now probably somewhere between “meh” and “death throes” on the internet hype cycle. I’d like to think, though, that it’s gorgeous enough to wring a few extra days of life.
Please resist the urge to immediately start work on a 10,000-word essay that asks whether Basement Jaxx “works” in the “post-luxury economy.”
In re: this Mr. Hudson dude I’m suddenly supposed to know exists.
It is pretty blatant that Jay and Kanye — enthralled with the idea of Chris Martin, but less so with the idea of paying Chris Martin royalties — decided to grow their own hook-singing Englishman in a lab, right?
I mean homey looks like the offspring of John Mayer and Roy from “Blade Runner.
It all makes Hov’s recent gripes with more obvious rap sci-fi pretty hard to swallow.
