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.
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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.

———————-
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.

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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 .

Bobby McFerrin demonstrates the power of the pentatonic scale, using audience participation, at the event “Notes & Neurons: In Search of the Common Chorus”, from the 2009 World Science Festival, June 12, 2009.VERY COOL! (hit the pic for the link)

- Dear guy with missing tooth laughing at the duct tape situation my tail light is in: he who haseth not teeth is in no position to laugh publicly about anything.
- Dear record store I miss you.
- Dear ears, dude are you slowly going deaf? If so tell me but tell me really loud cause I can’t hear too good.
- Dear supermarket can we get rid of those dividers? Are they really necessary? This is my stuff right here, all that stuff way back there not touching my stuff is her stuff. I mean really, are you that fast that one day you just rang up everyone’s stuff together? [Read more]

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.

 Message from the Average Black Person on HuffingtonPost

(editors’ note: in order for this story to work you must commit to the sound effects. out loud is best.)

dun duN DUN DUNNNNN!

its time for adventures in the back yard with Pierre Bennu!

budbudBUDbudBUDbudabbuda

…the sound of the eco friendly electric hedge clipper cutting hedges with NO gas or carbon…hooray environment!

budbudBUDbudBUDbudabbudaaZIZIZPHHHHZIT!!

…the sound of the eco friendly hedge clipper cutting its own wire & a tiny explosion

LOLOLOLOLOLOL!

…the sound of all the uncut hedges & all the birds & insects who saw me catch that “L”

@#$&!!

…the sound of me cursing the birds and bushes laughing at me & swearing revenge

tap tap tap tap

…the sound of me on craigs list seeing if any one wants a double dutch rope that used to be a very long electric cord

dun duN DUN DUNNNNN!

…this concludes this episode of “Adventures in the back yard with Pierre Bennu…brought to you in part by ‘eco stuff sometimes sucks’ & ’sometimes city boys need to just hire someone to do their yard’

- dear white cat. Please just give it up. No matter how slow you creep or how fast you pounce they see you coming a mile away. I hate to sound racist, but yes it’s because you’re white. you stand out against almost any background. PS the sound you hear as they fly away is not chirping it’s laughter.

- note to self: when you fall down in public again (and you will fall down in public again) DO NOT pop back up as fast as you can! Laughter directed at your pain and ripped clothing hurts your feelings instead… lie motionless for as long as possible hold your breath and when you can no longer do that roll your eyes to the top of your head and twitch violently till some one calls the ambulance. If you can muster up some drool that’s a plus. Then when you hear the paramedics, that’s when you pop up as fast as you can, dust yourself off and walk through the crowd surrounding you and off into the sunset. PS Remember to wipe the drool off.

- dear wife: 10 years! WOW that’s cool. but isn’t it kind of random how they only make a big deal on anniversaries that are divisible by 5?  I say after this, let’s celebrate on years that are prime numbers.

- dear guy with one eye working at that place: I would think (seeing as how someone poked out your eye and you have no depth perception and you wouldn’t make a good eye witness and no one is really gonna see what your saying) that you would be a nicer less rude person…oh well guess I was wrong. I got my eye on you. [Read more]

On Monday, on WNYC’s Brian Lehrer show, Rosie Perez discussed the G word — gentrification — in Manhattan and in her childhood Brooklyn, specifically in Fort Greene and in Clinton Hill, where she now lives. You could say that Perez is on the anti-gentrification side of the ongoing citywide debate about how to preserve the old NYC while embracing the new. She complained that her neighbors don’t say hello to her. “When I walk out of my house, I used to know everyone on my block in Clinton Hill. I walk out there now, people move away from me because I’m a person of color and then once they recognize me, they go, oh. That’s a horrible feeling. That’s a feeling I didn’t grow up with,” she told Lehrer. This morning, at WNYC’s flashy new Jerome L. Greene Performance Space, the conversation continued, with Perez’s signature feistiness in full force. She hosted a broadcast debate in which community activists and city-landmark officials argued over the nature of this changing city. “Let me tell you, since I said that [on the radio], now everybody is saying hello to me,” she told her mostly amused audience (many of whom seemed to be from Fort Greene). “Be careful what you wish for.” [Read more]