Red Clay: High and Low from Shawn Peters on Vimeo.
“A new performance art project that we have been working on with RED CLAY called High and Low, the name is based on the Kurosawa film with the same title. We take High art to common places and see what reactions we get.” – Shawn Peters
Duke professor Mark Anthony Neal and Grammy winning producer 9th Wonder (pictured left) are using SunMoonChild – amazing song by imani uzuri, amazing video by Pierre Bennu – as part of the midterm exam for their course, ’sampling soul.’ The course is about black cultural production and the tradition of borrowing/remixing/sampling and how it all relates to today’s legal issues of intellectual property rights and copyright law. Since YouTube just removed SunMoonChild after three years this issue cuts particularly close for us.
He’s made the midterm public on his blog to encourage a wider dialogue and wider exposure to the ideas. Stop by and give it a read, comment if you can! 
)
–jb.
As a DJ, an artist, a sometime teacher, and the son of an academic, I will never get tired of marveling at the intersection of HipHop and academia. It’s an honor to have my work thought of as contributing to this discussion.
–pb
Meditations during gardening season – applicable to gardening, or life.
When you get a plant from the store it might seem healthy, but in actuality it has already outgrown the container it’s in.
It must be put in a larger container or it will die.
When you take it out of its old container you will see the roots so tightly packed that they are in the shape of the pot.
You must firmly/gently crush it out of this shape to free the roots. Some use a razor blade to free the roots.
The plant may go into shock but this is necessary for growth.
If the roots are not freed it won’t matter what pot u put it in… the roots will grow in on themselves & choke the plant.
[Read more]
I was tweeting today in response to media coverage of a white, male suicide bomber who flew his plane into an IRS building in Texas, and the coverage of Tiger Woods’ press conference about his marital infidelities.
b/c that’s what i do, instead of blogging as often as i should. I tweet. 
anyway, I wondered why so-called ‘news’ organizations were not treating the former as a terrorist attack, and why we were still hearing about tiger woods at all.
in my string of tweets, i mentioned racism as marketing, and one of my twitter folks asked for clarification. I doubted I could explain what I meant in 140 characters or less, so I wrote this post. enjoy.
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The mark of a great marketing campaign is when the idea or slogan transcends the product. it attaches to the cultural consciousness, and when attached to the product, makes the product greater.
During one of the long conversations I have with myself while doing chores a tangent formed in my head. The things that are now considered the elements of hip hop (among them breaking, mcing, graffiti) were part of street games I remember people playing like skelly or handball, street football etc. Well, while the guys were on one side of the street, what did we see the girls playing…DOUBLE DUTCH! 
The thought that crossed my mind was what if Double Dutch was the thing what “blew up” instead of hip hop? Perhaps I’ve been watching too many twilight zones but what if hip hop were double dutch …the following were just the one i could remember from a very long list of very bizarre thoughts. Feel free to add on…
IF HIP HOP WERE DOUBLE DUTCH…
- The best that ever did it would have been from Brooklyn.
- There would be double dutch beefs.
- they would have platinum telephone cords ropes.
- They would objectify men in their videos.
- They would not give male jumpers the credit they deserve.
- There would be “positive” jumpers & “gangsta” jumpers.
- There would be jumpers that dumb it down by jumping with one rope.
- Turners would be replaced by something digital.
- it would be dead already.
- 40 year old women would be wearing Gucci print Jellys talking about they’re maintaining the culture.
- adidas would have a jumping shoe .
You may be familiar with Elon James White from his ‘this week in blackness’ videocast… we thought this little essay was both amusing and quite to the point. Guess what? Black people are not a monolith. Yup. So now you know.
- Dear late 80’s early 90’s r&b group, I cant really sing but if I can dress up like you, learn the choreography and just be the guy that says “whooooooo” at the end of the breakdown of a slow song ill be eternally grateful.
- Dear person who says “ValenTimes day” instead of ‘Valentines day’ you should officially receive nothing on this day as you are not pronouncing it correctly. Instead, you should have a holiday called “ValenTimes day”where you receive the empty wrappers of candy and presents from those who do pronounce it correctly. 
- Dear fluffer, you are the unsung hero. I salute you from a distance with my clean hand LOL
- Note to self: its ok when asked about your weight to say your putting on pounds for a role in a film.
- Dear pseudo righteous poet type dude, I don’t think here in public is the best place for the ” do you know how good an enema is for you” conversation. PS please stop calling my son “my seed” its just feels weird.
- Dear rasta I’m curious. In my youth I probably devoured enough chew sticks to decimate a rainforest and build low income log cabin housing for the inner city. But I still don’t know where chewsticks are made and how they are flavored. Do you? [Read more]
Excuse the brevity and scattered nature of what you’re about to read. It’s late/early. The sun has not yet come up. These are the moments I must salvage to be creative – I’m up editing a documentary and planning for the website and my plan was to also edit the three (count them: 3) new baby blogs that were all unfinished because the baby has been sick.
This being our first baby and our first sickness we work in our strengths. My wife does everything and l look worried and ask what can I do.
Since I don’t have the body full of milk and the hairier face I am the legs of the family. The “could you get me the…” guy I’m also the “oh and don’t forget the…” guy and more often the “did you remember to…” dude.
Its late on a Friday night at the Oyin warehouse, deep in the cut of east Baltimore. Our building sits at the crossroads of gentrification and the HOOD as popularized on tv and movies. We are literally on the other side of the tracks as a train runs directly behind our building.
I’ve been very conscious of what music I get into my child’s rhythm and I recently realized I haven’t really listened to Gnarls Barkley’s new album. I mean I’ve played it but I really haven’t sat with it. So I make the decision that that’s the sound track to our ride home tonight. He’s up and in a particularly laughy mood.
I put it on random. The first song was WOULD BE KILLER.
We lock the gate and drive off… almost immediately I see the most brilliant sparkling lights in the rear view
They are coming from a very unassuming minivan
I drive on for like half a block before I realize it was me they wanted.
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classic joints from the exittheapple archives.
links to people, places, and stuff that we dig
