What the heck is hip hop?

It's modern, gamey, and fun. It's about pulling a hat low or wearing sweet shades and kicks.  It's about making up or importing new words for things.  It feels creative, edgy, positive, exciting, and it feels ours.   It feels like a force that unites us, that brings people of all colors and backgrounds onto the dance floor, and through rhythm and rhyme we can all connect.  

Paula is from Colombia, and the girl can let fly to salsa, merengue, cumbia, or ballenato.  But when I put on some Weezy she put on the brakes.  She said, "I dig it, I guess, I just don't know anything about it.  Tell me about it.  Show me."  So the goal is to create a sequence of YouTube videos to introduce her to Hip Hop, to convey the kind of excitement that is held in this music, the kind of joy it brings to my heart, the way it makes my body move.  So the lineup could be Kanye's "Goodlife," Busta Rhymes' "Put Your Hands Where My Eyes Can See," Xbox 360's "Jump In" commercial, something from Stomp!, and a dance sequence from Stomp the Yard or Step Up 2.

Hip Hop MOVES ME.  It's all about the dance, the sway, the shimmy.  It's the rhythm that sets a tempo, and the instrumentation and song that carries the energy up and down.  With tempo and energy, I can't help but dance.  No mom, it doesn't have the musical content of Rock 'n Roll as far as mastery of instruments, but that's not the point. Hip Hop creates a mood, a feeling, joyous or sexy, and in that space we can feel something beautiful, cultural, human.

Hoop Dreams

B-ball is an incredible sport, because it can be approached from two radically different angles.  From one side, you can see the game as a test of athleticism and courage, a battle of will, and jumping and slashing and the confidence to take the ball to the rack.  This type of balling has lit up the NBA since Dr. J, and is the "cool" basketball.  It's street ball. It's hip hop.  It's dope.

On the other hand, basketball can be approached with the mind of a surgeon or engineer, like what Kelly Meek did in Steamboat for thirty years.  The court is small, the points are finite and everything can be broken down to proportions and chance.  The space can be mapped with angles and shapes, and set plays and a motion offense system can open up certain high-percentage shots for the right people.  It's not a cool basketball, but like we proved with coach Meek in the boat, we could beat much more skilled and athletic teams by instituting our system and having a will to play defense (so uncool!)..

Hooping in Riverside park today made me think of the game from these different angles.  I was taught to be a system player, a role player, to play defense and set screens and effectively move the offense.  And on the courts today, I still bring some of that to the team, and it helps.  But I also see the need to make this body MOVE, to take people on, to drain my jumper, to look for my own chances.  To be a streetballer... 

Wringing out the sweat from my t-shirt,  I threw pounds to my boys Che, Duke, and Hunt, and then longboarded through Central Park and then over into Brooklyn with an Italian girl to drink Brahma in a bar called La Favela.  What a trip of a city!

Colombia: la vamos a tumbal

If I spout about Colombia, I run the risk of overly romanticizing... so call me a Risky Rod the Daredevil.  Nevertheless, I'll try to be fair.  

I fell in love with Colombia because of Tito Contreras, who I met hitchhiking in Chile, and convinced me to come visit him in Colombia.  He took a month off to show me around.  We drank in the nightlife of Bogota, saw endless coffee hills in Armenia, soared to the top of 16,000 foot Nevado del Ruiz, comimos arepas paisanas en Medellin, y fuimos a las playas caribenas de Caragena y las Islas de Rosario.  For three weeks we travelled, hosted by Tito's family friends, going dancing nearly every night.  Doting older women and flashy young beauties taught me to salsa, merenge, y ballenato.  I fell in love on nearly every dancefloor.

Slow mornings drinking tinto (espresso) gave me time to reflect on what I was seeing, and to my happiness, my perceptions of Colombia as a dark jungle filled with drug cartels faded away and was replaced by the realities of a beautiful landscape, vibrant and beautiful people, and an armed conflict that hung on to the national coattails like a nasty burr.  

Every day there were newspaper headlines of violence linked to drugs.  But I didn't see any drugs, or any violence.  The violence is like a backdrop, like a white noise that people have come to accept.  Displaced rural peoples build new lives in suburban slums.  Middle class Colombians talk over beers about mass murders.  Paula's father was threatened, and for five months she had to escorted by bodyguards where ever she went.  Tito worked with kids whose lives had been rocked by the violence.  

And all of this was just a background to their lives of love, gossip, dancing, family, plans for the future.  Tito's priorities where 1) coming out to his family and 2) getting ready to leave for Paris to get his masters degree.

The national government fumigates cropland from planes, private paramilitary forces invade guerilla outposts, and rebel groups claim to be leftist revolutionaries.   These three forces dance round and round, as they have for decades, with no clear end in sight, and on a dancefloor in Bogota I step to the soulful accordion track of a ballenato.

Penrose, Pike, and Public Perks

In who-knows-what-year, Zebulon Pike was taking the southern wagon road toward Cali when he saw an island rise up from the seemingly interminable Great Flat. Some time later, some guy named Penrose must have made a lot of money here, cause everything old and made of stone is named after him. This is Colorado Springs, known for being the home of military bases, prisons, and megachurches. RTD doesn't have a line down here. Not until this year did FREX create service between Denver and the Springs. There is an airport here, but no buses or taxis are available to get out there. This is really really America, a city built on getting married and having kids and driving places.
But lets not rule out contradictions. I have often asserted when hitchhiking that no one with money will ever pick me up. People who have felt need know what it means when they see someone hitching, and people who live with money and therefore have never felt need will never stop. I've gotten lots of rides from people in beatup cars, or construction workers, or latino immigrants, but i've never gotten a ride in a 2-seater BMW, until today. Thank you Colorado Springs, and God Bless America.

Red-pine Renewal

Global warming, overpopulation, wars, natural disasters, hyenas. Hyenas are perhaps the ugliests things ever. Regardless of my morphologic bias, it is evident that we are living in interesting times. Steamboat is booming, as Bennie Beall greases the wheels of development and ushers in new bigboxes and casinos. Gas prices make a steady climb and may in fact make the American people revisit our culture of excess. And along the Yampa, Green, and Colorado, Tamara's Diorhabda elongata munch on Tamarisk in our efforts to further manipulate a manipulated ecosystem and thus restore a "balance."
And closer to home, the hillsides turn red without the Fall Foliage photo-tourists, as the Pine Beetles kill Lodgepoles and Ponderosas hasta el horizonte. Some people are very sad, and rightly so. Trees are big, powerful, old, and they breathe opposite us, filling us with such joy. However, this beetlekill is altogether natural. We've suppressed the natural fire regime for the past 150 years, and whereas these forests should be touched by wildfire every 70 years, leaving a heterogeneous landscape, what we see across the Rockies is a homogeneous and overmature forest. As we learned in Jurassic Park, "nature finds a way," and this clever girl has found the beetles a useful tool for the turning of the wheels.
So, as sad as it is to witness change, mog on little bichos!

Like not so valleygirl!

The use of the word like has certainly stirred up some controversy in my life, based on my mother's grammar-royale lessons and the various ways I've come to interpret language.
Language is an expression of who we are, who we aspire to be, and how we hold social power both as individuals and within our communication networks. So how is the oft-hated "like" an expression of self?
"Like," as well as "um," serve to fill space and to avoid scary silence. As a simple filler, it could be said that "like" becomes a sound devoid of any of its official definitions. However, upon note that in Colombian spanish "como" is used as a similar filler, perhaps a new hypothesis can come forth. "Como," like "like" functions to create the simile. The simile, by creating a comparison, adds relativity to a statement, avoiding the boldness of a concrete declaration. "It is like a hot day" compares the day to a hot day, instead of the more forceful "It is a hot day." Therefore, the adolescent "It's, like, a hot day" could be thought of as a simile, as the speaker shies away from the declarative.
Viewing "like" in closer detail can teach us more about the psychology of our speakers, instead of just thinking of them as idiots.

The Idea Starts Here

Stop the buck. Pick the papaya. It's time to say something. I turned 24 yesterday, with Dos XX en las venas and Colombia in my hair, sawdust en los zapatos and coals glowing in the fire. Soda Creek sang a slow song in the starlight, and I called off a b-day bash to opt for the company of family and a fudge brownie. Life is great.

Common philosophy reiterates time and again that we know nothing. Music lyrics, blogs, Bartlett's Famous Quotations, and the 104 section in the non-fiction stacks are filled with people spouting that the more we live the less we know. This I've found true, and thus journeyed further into the realm of indecision, relativism, opinion-shying, and information omnivory.

However, I HAVE learned some things about this world. I've encountered some truths, some opinions, and since I'm 24 now I think I should grab hold of 'em. Pine forests, Incan ruins, river currents, library patrons, cognates. I want to talk about these things. So Idea 7/24 will be a year of short essays, the intention being to stay away from journaling format, but rather to create 365 statements about this world. With the 365th entry I will turn 25, on 7/24 of 2009. Let's have a great year.