Many shouts to Nas and the director of this viral music video: Rik Cordero (Asians represent…)

Hotness. For clarification on my views toward Fox News, go here and here.

UPDATE (7/14): I heard rumors that Nas was gonna show to that China earthquake fundraiser in NYC Chinatown over the weekend. But who knew it was actually gonna happen? Publicity for the upcoming album? Yeah of course, but he took the time to explain his presence instead of just showing and specifically said he was there to “support the Asian community.”

Dag Nas, you’re creeping back into my Top 5 dude…

Until now.

So now that need has been met. Let’s move on.

Happy 50th Birthday Prince. I wrote you a little prose poem.

I have never seen Prince up close. Not like my homie Bao who saw him and his entourage at a record shop in Minneapolis. Not like my friend Connie who was running through the Detroit airport to catch her connecting flight and stopped mid-stride upon seeing Prince and his entourage. Not like Visionaries leader Key Kool who recorded his first demo at Paisley Park and walked into a room only to see Prince sans entourage.

I’ve seen him in concert once: back in 2004, when he was on tour, doing his old hits for the “last” time. (We all knew he would keep doing his hits. When you write and record songs that are nothing less than masterpieces, why would you ever stop performing them?) I would say it was a life-changing experience, if it didn’t sound so stupid. I choked up twice. To my left was my “date” – Vudoo Soul (we’ll talk about this another time) – to my right was a white family of five, with a youngest child about 7 years old. Behind me was a row of 6 or 7 35-40 year old Black women wearing purple. In front of me was, well, a lot of air because I was in the second balcony.

I was at the concert because of the gracious donation from my lifelong best friend Dave, who surprised me with a ticket one night several months prior. Serendipitous doesn’t begin to describe. Literally no more than 2 weeks before that ticket-as-gift night, I had made a list of things I wanted to do in my life. Item #1: See Prince in concert for free.

A lot of people see Prince and they see the chunky platforms. They see the svelte figure and effeminate body language. They see the pompadour, the racial ambiguity, the sexual expression beyond what we’re supposed to find appropriate, the sometimes scratchy/sometimes mellifluous falsetto. They see what appears to be an inability to grow a full beard/mustache. They see the multi-millionaire painting the word SLAVE on his cheek with eyeliner. The man who changed his name from Rogers to Prince to the symbol, giving music stores fits about where to display his CDs in their alphabetically-perfect world. Then the Artist. Then back to Prince.

In short, they see a freak. Everything he’s done seems to be exactly what nobody else would do.

And he’s built a career, no, a legend, by doing things nobody else would do. “When Doves Cry” was a dance song that features absolutely no bass. Unheard of at the time, and still never replicated to that level of success. When contemporaries embellished their life stories through song, Prince only told the absolute truth, and held the specifics and names in his own head, never giving too much of himself away. All the pain and sadness came out, but you had to listen to the music, not just the lyrics. Rumor states he once recorded a song about his father that was so emotional he destroyed all tapes before anyone else could hear it. When he makes music, all he knows how to do is tell the truth, sometimes against his own better judgment.

He would ask his band to play 3 hour shows, jump into their cars and zip across town to play another 3 hours to a different crowd. Anything to play for people. Anything to avoid talking to them. He only knows how to talk to you through performing for you. He’s notoriously soft-spoken in person. And what really would you expect? Because Prince is all those things that make people call him freak, and that means young Rogers Nelson, growing up in Minneapolis, was all those things too. And if interacting with the people around him was difficult because of their judgments about him, then why wouldn’t he channel all of it into his music?

Sure, he’s a rock star. He built a mansion, keeps the gate locked, has his famous friends over. But he’s different about it. His mansion is in Minnesota, his home state, not California or the Hamptons. He unlocks his gate often, holds a weeklong music festival on his property, lets everyone in. When other rock stars come over, he opens his garage to the public, let’s them walk right up next to him and watch a jam session.

Prince doesn’t know how to talk to strangers. He probably doesn’t know how to talk to friends. His stage show runs 3 or 4 hours because he’s telling us everything he wants to say every night.

When I saw him live, I felt like he was right in front of me. In contrast to the elaborate stage shows, the “40 muthafuckas on stage,” different backup dance crews, the fog, the strobe of today’s big stars, the everything to make you forget the central character on stage is just that: a character, there sat Prince, strumming an acoustic guitar on a rotating chair, so nobody in the crowd could feel deprived of seeing his face. Inviting people from the audience to come on stage and dance to his music – and sing lines from his songs. Calling his band “too funky,” pouting off to a couch on the side of the stage and flipping through a magazine until the crowd begged for him to come back. Letting us sing along to that “wooh hooh hooh hooh” part at the end of “Purple Rain” for like 10 minutes as he closed the encore.

He helps remind me that sometimes you really do leave it all on stage. Not once did he look like he wanted to rush through the rest of the show and get to his dressing room and watch SportsCenter. I wouldn’t have been shocked to hear he had to be carried to his hotel the moment he disappeard under that stage. I also wouldn’t have been shocked to hear he went to the Paradise Rock Club and played another 3 hours.

He helps remind me that yes, it is OK to open your soul on a mic; and yes, it is OK to close it when you step away from it.

A lot of people see Prince and see a freak.

I look at him and see the exact same thing. That’s why he’s beautiful.

This entry can be read in its entirety at BPRLive.org.

Ten long years ago, I was working as a delivery driver, passing the summer before college started up again wearing a tuxedo shirt and bow tie, drinking customers’s sodas, then telling them, “Sorry, we ran out of Sprite, do you want Poland Spring instead?” In other words, they were good old damn days. I could drive around the city – and surrounding areas – with my new license, my mom’s car, and a tape deck that worked most of the time. People sometimes ask how I got to know my way around Boston so well, and I tell them they can trace it back to the summer of 1997.

Getting sick of hearing Natalie Imbruglia and Eagle-Eye Cherry every 45 minutes on the radio, I turned to my boy A+ – shockingly, not his real name – for some music I could record onto a cassette that wouldn’t get boring through the grind of 10 hour days spent mostly behind red lights, counting out tips in coins, and looping in circles trying to find where Atlantic Ave actually starts.

A was ready for me. “These some West Coast Chinese rappers man,” he said. “Like a mix between the Pharcyde and Ras Kass – but Chinese!” A isn’t Asian, so please forgive him for not knowing that Key Kool and DJ Rhettmatic (formerly of Brotherhood Creed) – collectively known by some as Kozmonautz – were actually of Japanese and Filipino descent respectively.

Those who know, know that one of the standout tracks on their independently-released debut was “Reconcentrated,” Key’s dedication to the 120,000+ Japanese Americans unjustly incarcerated during WWII. I could write an entire post about what that song has meant in my life, but I’ll save it for another time. I’m really back in 1997 right now because I want to get to Day One of the Visionaries, the supergroup that first recorded together on “Visionaries (Stop Actin’ Scary)” off the Kozmonautz joint. In fact, they recorded the song two years earlier, but it didn’t make its way into my tape deck until 97.

Read the rest of this entry here.

There are a lot of reasons why I feel silly being a big sports fan. The rampant sexism, the more subtle but as-rampant casual racism, the proclivity of many fans to identify jingoistically with their favorite teams, the enjoyment many fans get out of watching injury-causing plays, the faux-nostalgia created as a marketing tool, the corruption of American university systems in an effort to become pro sports powerhouses, the blatant disregard for human life at baseball academies in the Dominican, the pro-corporate/”people? what people?” attitudes pushed by superstars like Michael Jordan and LeBron James, and on and on (a la Journey).

But with all these things that gnaw at my insides from further inside, I may sound like the biggest hypocrite in the world when I say it’s only entertainment (a la Journey, I mean, Jay-Z), which it is. I tried to quit watching sports in 2004, but it proved to be more addictive than nicotine. I relapsed, and what with my Boston-area teams doing pretty well recently, I don’t really think I’m going to wean myself off watching sports until I’m dead.

But not all is awful. It’s not as though it’s the ugliness that keeps me watching. So without further ado, I present to you my friends, the Top 10 Awesomest Moments in Sports (EVAR!), as compiled by me with absolutely no illusions of historical perspective, regional unbiasedness, or intelligence.

1. Derek Redmond and his dad
A British sprinter who had pulled out of competition during the 1988 Olympics in Seoul because of a hamstring injury, Derek Redmond had a legit shot at a medal in Barcelona, but during the heat that would have put him in the finals – he had a steady lead more than halfway through the 400m – his hammie jumped on him again, and he fell to the ground. His dad jumped out the stands and ran onto the field of play and helped his son up on his one good leg and together they hobbled to the finish line. With all the stories you hear about overbearing parents of athletes, this is one of the stories that gets forgotten.

2. Muhammad Ali gets stripped of his title for refusing to be drafted
As I mentioned earlier, modern-day superstars are too concerned with their endorsement deals to ever take a stand on anything remotely political. So when the biggest public figure in the sports world in 1966 refused to be drafted to fight in the war in Southeast Asia, that shit took huge balls. He didn’t really have to do it either. Because of his celebrity, he would have gotten a non-combat job, maybe one of those morale-boosting jobs like going to talk to “fellow” soldiers to convince them they were fighting for a just cause. But he refused and as a result, lost his title as world champion. And he didn’t complain at all, simply saying “No, I am not going 10,000 miles to help murder kill and burn other people to simply help continue the domination of white slavemasters over dark people the world over. This is the day and age when such evil injustice must come to an end.” The crazy shit is, everybody loves him now, proving that the real world can actually be changed for the better by athletes.

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Harry Allen, the Media Assassin, has a blog. And, just as you would expect, it is filled with writing that is enjoyable to read and more than its share of expert analysis. I mean, it’s Harry Allen.

So he does a very well-thought out entry reflecting on the Will.I.Am/Barack Obama connection that makes a lot of valid and interesting points, and is filled with quotable line after quotable line, but this one particularly struck a chord with me:

…the question I had after I first heard Black Eyed Peas is very similar to the one I had after hearing white people lose their minds over Obama’s 2004 Democratic National Convention keynote address: Where’s the funk?

Comparing a typical Obama speech to today’s, great Black speechmakers—say, Jesse Jackson, Louis Farrakhan, or Juanita Bynum, to name obvious ones—is like comparing the Kool & the Gang of 1981’s Something Special (”Get Down On It”) with the Kool & the Gang of 1973’s Wild and Peaceful (”Funky Stuff,” “Jungle Boogie,” “Hollywood Swinging.”)

From “No, Seriously: I’d Much Rather Listen to Obama Girl”.

But yeah, almost the exact same thought (minus Kool and the Gang) popped into my head after Obama-mania reached its first peak after the 04 DNC. How was Obama’s speech getting all this love, when Al Sharpton was clearly the star of the show? Both in what he said and what he did: they gave him 5 minutes to speak, but he commandeered the podium for 20 minutes, letting rip with the most progressive statements about disastrous foreign policy and social inequality that anyone dared to speak during that convention. Exactly the kind of shit the brass of the Democratic Party didn’t want to have anything to do with; exactly the kind of rhetoric that could have won the election for them if they had embraced it.

I guess they were too busy trying to recapture the Joe-mentum of 2000. Yeah that worked out well…

Anyway, if the title wasn’t an obvious enough clue, I’m just trying to make the point that when it come to the election: don’t believe the hype.

I like how at the 00:17 mark, the panda just runs up the dude like “Get buck! Nah, I don’t want jewelry. I want your jacket!”

Pandas: they may be cute, but they’ll strip you naked.

If this was a video game, we could just turn off the console and start the day over and Yao would never have this injury. Unfortunately, this is real life, and my favorite NBA player is out the rest of the year with a fracture in his foot. Below, please find a photo of him making a face that illustrates how every Rockets fan feels right now:

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So I realized this week just how many blogs I read every day, which is to say a lot. I have over 60 RSS Feeds up in my Firefox. Some of them I read for straight up information, some for computer tips because I am a technopeasant, some are about radical politics, some music, some sports, blah blah blah. But I figured since I’m kind of lazy, I would waste this blog entry simply telling you about other blogs I read on the Internets.

BPRLive is a streaming Internet radio station playing only independent API artists, both obscure and…relatively less obscure. Just kidding. Aside from the names you’ve been knowing like Blue Scholars, VuDoo Soul, Visionaries, Kevin So, etc, there are jams from plenty of folks you cannot hear anywhere else except their myspace pages. (Watch for a live version of some dude named Giles covering “Part Time Lover.” For real it’s coming.) But aside from all that, it is a blog that I contribute to on the regular, along with other homies around these parts, and we write about API music, but also about other issues affecting our communities. But most recently, we’ve developed a feature called Shuffled!, in which API artists put their iPod on shuffle and write about whatever comes up. It happens every Thursday, so definitely keep checking for it.

Status Ain’t Hood is Tom Breihan’s blog for the Village Voice. I basically disagree with every single point Breihan makes. He seems to hate good hip hop and love corny hip hop. It’s rare that I get through one of his entires without coming across some point that in my mind completely invalidates his entire article. OK, considering all that, the tone of his writing is, dare I say, perfectly suited for a blog. Even when he writes about shit I’m not interested in – like country music or the Country Music Awards – I still read the whole thing because his writing is just that enjoyable to read. Regardless of the topic and his opinions, his writing is exactly the kind of writing I want to read off a computer screen 15 minutes at a time. That sounds oddly like a dis, but is a compliment.

I am bad at everything I do, but in particular, I’m bad at designing shit, like my own fliers and you know, this website. So I consider reading I Love Typography a bit of a voyeuristic treat. It’s all about fonts. I know I have no real understanding of why some fonts work better than others, and reading this thing doesn’t make my eye any sharper. But I do know when I like a font and when I don’t, and for some reason when I like a font, I REALLY like it. (I rented the documentary Helvetica though, and it wasn’t as exciting as I hoped it would be. I rented it when my wife was away so she wouldn’t make fun of my taste in film, which she already knew was pretty suspect.) But I appreciate the insight I’m privy to when reading the entries and comments, and it helps me pretend that maybe one day I’ll be more than the Denny Blaze of font appreciation.

My So-Called Career is Paul Shirley’s blog about what it’s like to be a true journeyman basketball player. He was a college star,went on to play a few minutes in the NBA, and currently plays in Spain. Somewhere along the way he picked up the skills to become a really talented writer. Who knew? I became a fan of his writing when I read this article comparing Kobe Bryant and Kevin Garnett on Slate earlier this year. Another aspiring NBA baller who has an awesome blog is Rod Benson, and he can be found at Too Much Rod Benson.

The D-Nice Journal. Why would I need to convince you? It’s D-fucking-Nice!

Bon bon kids. Welcome to another Appreciation post, it’s been a minute since I’ve done one. To catch past entries in this vein, click here.

Now that we got that out the way, let me bring you to Summer of 2000. I was less than two months removed from college graduation and working my very first real world job, which was pretty much nothing like the real world. I was a staffmember at the Organization of Chinese Americans, and was spending two weeks in Atlanta for the annual National Convention. It’s crazy that I was 21 and in charge of mad shit for real. But I can look back and appreciate that my experiences at my first job out of college – stressful though it was – really instilled me with a lot of confidence in my abilities to get stuff done. And that time in Atlanta was also interesting because 4 separate dudes I met there offered to set me up with women they knew. No wonder they call it HOTlanta.

Irregardless, that summer was also the first time I met the R&B group Kai. The name was short for kaibigan, the Tagalog word for “friendship,” and as you probably expect, they were 4 Filipino cats from the Bay plus – as you may not have expected – one Chinese dude who sang bass. They were signed to a major label, I think it was Geffen.

Although I had been taking performance poetry kinda serious for like a year or two by then, they were kinda next level for me because I had actually bought their CD single when I was in college. Maybe that seems like small-time nowadays because of the way that buying music has changed, but at the time, it was pretty big news that I could walk into Media Play in rural farmland Hadley, Massachusetts and buy a Kai CD. You young’ens might not get it, but Kai was as big API celebrities as we could imagine at that time, aside from maybe Margaret Cho. But she sucked anyway.

Read the rest of this entry at BPRLive.org