I got the new Kanye, it's not bad. Maybe I gotta give it a couple more listens but nothing blows me away. Favorite songs are Roses and Hey Mama. Nothing great like School Spirit on it. Should have given Game a verse on Crack Music.

The Brothers Grimm isn't even a movie, it's just a bunch of stuff that happens. For no reason. Plus it's a huge Van Helsing rip off, only nowhere near as good. And Van Helsing wasn't a great movie, not that you would wanna rip it off or anything. It's just a good dumb movie, and you can't get dumb from dumb, you can only get ass stupid, like the Brothers Grimm.

MTV Video Awards last night. They were kind of boring and I got pissed off at some of the awards. Like whatever award "Number One Spot" got. I love Luda, but that's gotta be his worst, twirly-whirlyest, most annoying and gimmicky song. Dumb, and also dumb that Ciara didn't win anything. Plus, the Game deserved more than just one head-shot when the dudes were Krumping or whatever. My favorite moment was actually before the awards on the White Carpet when Kurt Loder called Young Jeezy "Lil Jeezy." Then he got made fun of by Jay-Z, and the only thing Jeezy ended up saying during the whole interview was "That's what it is" at the end of the interview when Loder got his name right.

After Fat Joe made his little sarcastic comment about being glad there was so much police presence with G-Unit being there, you could hear some dude in the background yelling "Fuck you Joe! Fuck you Joe!" and then 50 and Yayo called him a Fuck Boy and a Pussy Boy before MTV got wise and started bleeping. The only thing that surprised me was that Diddy din't make any comments about losing his best friend to a rap beef, especially considering how he's trying to put himself out there as some Hip Hop elder statesman. Speaking of Diddy, I don't really get why people think that an orchestra lends them any musical respectability or credibility that they didn't already have. That shit is insulting and doesn't even sound good.

I hate Fallout Boy. and I'm glad I'm not from New Orleans.

Here it goes, suckas! My and my bro's interview with Wiley. Yeah, boy, I write for Pitchfork now, so get ready to drop my name and shit! You read my blog back when I was mostly writing about how I hate Craigslist and writing political rants about old Bond movies.

The price of gas is gouging me right now. I'm half and hour away from baltimore, so that means it's about a $7 round trip depending on where I buy my gas. Since I'm on vacation and have no money at the mo that means I pretty much can't afford to go kick it in the city. So what can you do for free in Ellicott City? Watch old Bond movies on AMC is about the best I can come up with. I'm watching some of them today and I get to thinking. In those old movies Bond isn't just fighting random bad guys like he is now, he's always up against S.P.E.C.T.R.E. - the "Special Executive for Counterintelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion." It's this organization which is devoted to evil, hijaking nuclear weapons, capturing space shuttles, whatever. The way they work is they just pit the great powers against each other, the USA and the USSR. At the end of almost all these movies they're poised to go to war until this wiley British dude who bangs a lot of girls and sometimes smacks them around foils the plot. He's always the dude in the corner who's going "What about S.P.E.C.T.R.E.?" And the Americans are like "No, it's the Russians!" It all seems real hokey, but they make sense within the context of the day. I wish Kissinger had watched these fucking movies. I'm saying, this evil organization wouldn't be shit without the Cold War, and the whole arms race and paranoia between the great powers. The Cold War actually did propel a lot of crazy people to way more prominance than they would've had without support from one power against the other. Kinda like how we used to supply weapons to Osama and Saddam just cause they were fighting their enemies, Blofeld (the dude with the cat) sometimes counts on the Americans and the Russians to destroy the world for him, taking advantage of their kneejerk reactions. See "You Only Live Twice." Now there's no more Cold War, there's just the War on Terror. I think the first Bond movie they made after the Cold War was "License to Kill," a really bad one about him fighting a Colombian drug lord or something. Now they've gotten a bit better again, though, and the last one was him fighting some North Korean psycho. Now Bond is Bush's bitch, fighing agains the "Axis of Evil." It's a shame though, cause the idea of the truly evil people as not necessarily being on either side of the Cold War or the so-called "culture war" between the West and Islam but actually being the ones benefitting from it still applies. I got into an argument with some of my friends up in New York about whether or not the terrorists who blew up the WTO really gave a shit about American culture. My friends seemed to think all these dudes decided to blow themselves and 3000 other people up because they really care about bikinis and gay rights on the other side of the world. That's the kind of mentality that leads us to ally with Musharraf. Here's a dude who came to power in Pakistan through a military coup, who's now a dictator ruling a country with Nuclear Weapons, not in production but in the barrel, and we stand shoulder to shoulder with him cause, uh, he closed some Madrassas and helped us fight the Taliban. Who probably hated him anyway. Plus he's on the brink of war with his nuclear armed neighboor that's got the 2nd biggest population in the world, and most of his own population probably would love to overthrow him if they got the chance. What the fuck? We didn't need him to fight the dumbass Taliban, and we probably would've captured Osama years ago without all that outside help. And like the America of the old Bond movies, we're still overly fixated on fighting whatever government we think is behind all our problems - like Iraq. Meanwhile Saudi Arabia, the country that supplied most of the 9/11 terrorists and if you belive FOX News, most of the insurgents in Iraq, is still sitting pretty with America. Why? We have to keep a good relationship with them and all those other little pint-sized monarchies over there because then we can count on a plentiful source of oil, right? Course, that brings me all the way back to my original point, which is why the fuck am I paying $2.70 a gallon for regular unleaded?

I saw the 40 Year Old Virgin yesterday. I kind of thought it would be funnier.

I think Bob Dylan is pretty overrated, especially his whole foray into folk-rock or whatever. I think the Freewheelin Bob Dylan has some great songs like Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall but also some filler. But Bob Dylan's Blues is such a great song I'll put the tape in just to hear that. Where does this song come from? These perfect notes keep falling off of this stuttering faltering rhytmm until you realize the song could go in 5 different directions but it just keeps chugging along instead. It doesn't sound like any other song in the world.

Every time I turn on the TV there's all this stuff about the Israeli evacuation from the Gaza Strip. It's sad and all, but the only way they were able to build these settlements was by evicting people from their homes and bulldozing their neighboorhooods. At least the Israelis are getting compensated.

I looked at a warehouse apartment today off Craig's list. I was pretty jazzed up about it, thinking it was in a decent neighboorhood, convenient for my work, real cheap, bla bla bla. Anyway, I go there, and there are like, piles of garbage everywhere in this big old floor of some old warehouse. Someone's spraypainted the wall with "Die Yuppie Scum" (most of the people who live there are college kids) and the guy showing it to me said it gets cold in the winter. Guess I got to keep looking. I could move to a place just northeast of Patterson Park that's in a nice building but where 13 year old kids outside say they're going to the store to buy blunts and the bigger kids standing on the corners say "I just can't STAND white people!" when I walk past. That might not work out either.

So, I just watched this DVD called "The Original 50 Cent" about how the rapper we know took his name from some notorious stickup kid from Ft Greene who got killed in 1987. You can see this dude on the back of Rakim's Paid In Full album in the bottom right corner, and Eric B was one of the old friends they interviewed in the movie. They called him 50 Cent cause he was something like 5'2. Being a short dude as well as a crook the dude wanted to rob the whole world so he ended up getting killed when he was just 23. You know, if there was a kind of uptempo old-timey country dude called Dillinger who sang about robbing banks and women I bet people would eat that shit up too.

Saw Four Brothers last night. I liked it, but my buddy was dissapointed that it wasn't Boys 'N the Hood set in Detroit, or something. It was just a kind of cheesy action/mystery movie but it was good for that. It had one really good gunfight and I liked Andre Benjamin in it.

My brother's getting paid to write a blog, so check it out. Dude is movin on up.

On friday night I saw Roll Deep at the Knitting Factory. DJ Ayres opened up for them, and he was playing a million times better music than you'll hear at the Rub party. The crowd was pretty dead. When they heard "Tear the fucking club up!" they apparently took it to mean "stare really hard at the DJ while he pretty much stands there and twirles a couple knobs." It was the only time I saw nobody dancing to Baltimore club music. Everyone continued to stand there and stare as Roll Deep came out and forgot their lyrics. They had a few snatches at brilliance but I was glad I didn't pay. The show tightened up a lot towards the end (They said it was the last song before 4 or 5 different songs) when it was just Wiley and some dude in a Polo shirt. Wiley didn't do his song off Run the Road, which was a shame considering the big reaction it got the next night when Diplo dropped it.

Diplo was opening up for Kano, who's this nineteen year old potential hearthrob grime rapper. Now, when I went to the Run the Road record release party a few months ago it totally blew me away. I was drunk and paying a lot of attention to some chick I was dancing with, but there were a lot of "Oh Shit!" moments that made me forget about everything else. Some dude would open up on a crazy insane super fast and out of control but tight flow and just run with it and it was always great even though I couldn't understand shit. Even after living in England for 2 years. Now, Kano was like that, except you could understand a lot more. Switching his flows up on acappella and everything. There was this dude backing him up who would be worth paying to see by himself who would do some crazy savage fucking ruff tommy gun shit every time Kano got a little laid back. So, he had a lot more breathing room than the Roll Deep crew who were all competing with each other and occasionally fighting over the mike. After the Kano show I actually interviewed Wiley. I wasn't really supposed to and I was a bit flustered cause I never interviewed anybody or ever even wrote anything people read and I was making up questions on the fly. He seemed like a nice dude though. I asked him if anybody in England was listening to Baltimore Club Music and he was like "Huh? What's that?"

"Sitting on the Dock of the Bay" by Otis Redding is one of my favorite albums now. Half just cause of The Glory of Love. This song stays stuck in my head and I don't mind. Sometimes in the middle of conversations I want to jump up, smack the table, and start singing it. The throbbing horns, the tempo speeding up and changing up the whole song, shit. You should hear it.

So, looking for these apartments on Craigslist has gotten me feeling pretty desperate. Thinking I'll just take whatever. So it feels good to realize that it hasn't gotten that bad, I'm not so desperate yet that I can't say "fuck this shit." Like, met some lady today, just bought this house, commutes to DC, looking to rent out a couple bedrooms. Place is decent, you know. I ask, "would it be okay if I got a dog?" She goes "no, I Hate dogs." Okay, "Fuck you." You hate dogs? Eat shit. I could never live with you.

So I saw that Government Names linked this article about Baltimore Club Music by Julianne Shepherd. And there was some guys essay about Bob Dylan and Club music off Govt Names a couple weeks ago. I was glad Shepherd got the name right, cause the other guy called it "Ghetto Trax" or some shit. Is Baltimore club about to blow up? Are all those hipster DJs gonna spinning this shit in their mixes?I mean, I know they already are, but is it gonna be all over the place like that Favela stuff? That would make me be ahead of the curve for the first time ever.
The music has been around a lot longer than this, but for 4 years I've been telling my friends in New York "Listen to this shit! They're sampling Mr. Postman! What is this? This is great!" And they've all been like, "uh. Whatever." My old roomate begged me never to play the Spongebob song again, cause he really thought it was neverending. I used to have a couple DJ Technics mixes that I would play on the Ram Van, a 15 passenger Chevy that I would drive back and forth between my college's Campuses in the Bronx and Manhattan. I would play it in 2:00 in the morning for kids going down to the city to party, and I'd play it in the early afternoon as I drove people from classes. It fascinated a kid from Yonkers who sold weed in the dorms who was like "He goes from putting a beat on the farts in 'Uncle Fucker' to 'Never Scared?'" I loaned one of my mixes to a professor at Fordham and he never gave it back. I think some German girl took the other one I had back to the fatherland, so now all I got is the Rod Lee CD, but that doesn't matter cause the shit is constantly on the radio here.
Anyway, my point is, Shepherd writes in her article how the only place to hear about Baltimore Club music is in the Baltimore Blogs Government Names and my brother's Dip Dip Dive. But my bro is up in New York now. Maybe it's time for me to pick up the slack! I mean, I've been wondering why I've been writing this shit for a while, it's not really about anything, it has no focus. I've always wanted to know more about this music and I've been trying to tell people about it for years - I guess now people will care. I gotta start going out to club more often now. I mean, me and Tom were talking about going to Club Choices once at the dinner table and our parents' reaction was the same as when I said I wanted to get a motorcycle. They were like, they'll kill you. I thought they were being crazy until last week when I was talking about it with some people at my work and even the black girl was like "I'd never go to Choices." But I could hear this shit at Hammerjacks now. I mean, there was a mention in this article about this party K-Swift spun at, and I was there! I wrote about it, and I guess I'll keep writing about it if people are reading about this shit all the way in San Francisco.

I saw Seven Samurai and it put me to sleep but I still think it's a good movie. The fight scenes in Kurusawa movies are really unique cause they're so desperate and frantic and dirty.

So, Jedi Knights of the Old Republic is bullshit, I think it's modeled after dungeons and dragons but with lighsabers. What a waste of time.

Finding an apartment on Craigslist is the worst thing I've ever had to do. I've been on and off that website since May, getting rid of my place in the Bronx and trying to find places in New York and Baltimore. I found my old apartment from a friend who lived in the building so I never knew what it was like to just have to respond to ever tweedledum bastard who puts up his little closet in the ghetto for 450 a month because his ad on the website makes it sound a lot better than it is. The one place I did move into off the website was a disaster, with these wannabe folkies stealing each other's laptops and shit. I'm sposed to see some place close to my work today, and to go to an open house in Little Italy tomorrow that sound promising, but it's getting tought to drum up any more enthusiasm for this crap. Plus spending this amount of time on Craigslist you see a few ads that say "Free apartment for a young female - I'm a hotshit investment banker who wants a home away from home where I can go to be taken care of - attatch a photo." This website will make you lose your faith in humanity.

Red Dawn is cool. I laughed. Avenge Me!

Went to this place called Mike's in Fells Point where they had a million different kinds of beer. You can also buy cigars at the bar, which is cool just cause I'm still getting over seeing people smoking cigarettes in bars. Avenge Me!

NBA Street V3 is fun. It's a little frustrating though, it's embarrasing to be playing it with other people in the house cause sometimes I can't help jumping up and screaming "Fucking Dunk It! Shit, What are you doing? Nooooo! Avenge Me!"