Classic Hip Hop is Like Porn

I know it when I, uh, see it, and Inspectah Deck and 7L & Esoteric have made a strong play for classic status with their new album Czarface.

Actually, the Hip-Hop Classic Committee would probably deny me a vote.  I just haven't kept up with enough stuff over the past few years.  I needed a Google search to tell me that 7L & Esoteric were not some kids but veterans almost 20 years deep in the game.  Given that I lack the necessary credentials to be seated, I hope this amicus brief pleases the court.

Anyway, Czarface rocks the bells.  The emcees reminds me of Black Thought, not in style, but in the sense that you are in the hands of a consummate professional.  Not sure that either Deck or Esoteric deliver a whole lot of memorable verses or even lines, but the skill and craft are evident in every syllable.  Given than beats mean more to me that rhymes, a high level of competency is enough to satisfy.

And those beats?  Son.  SON.  Somebody got high honors on their thesis at the University of Shaolin.  If Ghost had his way and a good ear, he'd have dropped whatever money he needed to buy them all, dropped the Octagonycologist verses, and released the whole thing as Supreme Clientele II.  When I reviewed that Kendrick Lamar joint, I denied it personal classic status because the verses were just a wee bit too digital for my tastes.  Well, that's not a problem with Csarface in the least.  The hiss in the drums is there.  The boom bap is alive.  The martial arts samples and looped weird noises that sounds like martial arts soundtracks are there.  The ill scratches are there.

Son, I fucks wit the beats.  I fucks wit them completely and wit great vigor.

Yeah, so if you ever threw up a W, you need this shit.

Meditation Overload

I am in the midst of an identity crisis that cuts to the core of who and what I want to be.

Do I want an end to suffering?

Do I want to awaken?

Or do I want to transcend the limits of human perception and trip the light fantastic?

The first wonderful experience I had in meditation came about two years ago, thanks to Grant Morrison and his wonderful little book called The Invisibles.  Morrison sold me on the idea that there was a hidden world just outside of the reach of the every day that humans had and could access, if they'd just dive far enough into the weird and wild, where all the good stuff resides.  The fan website Barbelith led me to Condensed Chaos, which is as good an introduction into the principals of magic as I can imagine.

One of the first things an aspiring magician needs to learn is how to achieve the gnostic state.  Basically, you close your eyes or look into a mirror or a bowl of water and just...let you mind go, wander, play.  Don't forbid yourself from seeing anything, and you might see everything.  When I stopped worrying about whether what I was seeing was real, I could see a lot more cool stuff, a lot more meaningful stuff.  I saw myself as Gandalf retreating to my castle of ice.  I met my spirit animal, the grey wolf.  I journeyed deep into the heart of death and found complete peace there.  I learned so much about myself, and I felt I was moving forward.

Books got me on the gnostic path, so it's fitting that a book should have knocked me from it.  Magic had shown me glimpses of the whole world, but I didn't want a piece of the world.  I wanted the whole thing, and Buddhism Plain & Simple seemed to offer that.  All one had to do was let go of everything superfluous and just...wake up.  Awaken to ultimate reality.  Right now, because there is only now.  The key wasn't to let your mind wander but to stay present in the moment.  If one could understand right now completely, without hope or fear of anything else, one might actually wake up, and then one really could see everything.  As I learned just a little bit about Tibetan Buddhism, I saw a lot of stuff floating around like bodhisattavas that matched some of what I saw in gnosis, which only furthered my belief that Buddhism was big enough to encompass magic and a lot of other stuff.  I felt I was moving forward.

With the beginning of yoga teacher training, I've encountered a third organizing principle for meditation.  Yogic meditation seems to want to calm the fluctuations of the mind, not for the sake of awakening, but just because.  Because it will make you better, fuller, more content.  I confess I've thought the least about this type of meditation and that it appeals to me the least.

Frankly, all that the yogic ideas behind meditation have done is bring to a head a situation that had been developing for quite some time, which is that I've officially hit meditation overload.  Too many chefs have spoiled the broth.  I'm confused.  I don't know whether to seek calm or enlightenment or visions from another dimension of reality.  Too many ideas are competing for the time I spend in lotus.  I don't feel like I'm moving forward.

In the long run, I'm not too concerned about where I am.  I'm not going to stop meditating, and I recognize that even the best journeys have times spent at pit stops, lost, or stuck in a ditch.  I believe Steve Hagen when he says that all we need to do is show up and meditate each day, and the practice will teach us everything we need to know.  Ultimately, I think all of these paths have one final destination, anyway.  The Buddha and the great magicians and yogis of history are all chilling at the top of the same mountain together, calmly sipping mushroom tea and tripping off the world in all its glory.

I get all that.

But that doesn't mean I'm not frustrated now.

Discipline

It bugs me to no end that I haven't been able to keep up any semblance of a regular writing schedule for the past month.  If I had to make a list of activities I enjoy, writing would be right behind yoga near the top of the list.  Writing is solace, a chance for me to play in the world of ideas and to talk out some of the things I think I'm learning and to connect with those who feel the same.

That connection may be my favorite part.  I try to be pretty vague about the details of my life but honest and direct with my thoughts and feelings.  At the risk of sounding like a sensitive poet type, I do try to pour my unfiltered self into what I write for this blog, which is why I'm always amazed, humbled, and grateful beyond measure that even one person finds these posts worthwhile.  It may be trite, but a lot of my lonely goes away every time someone hits the like button.

There are perfectly valid and acceptable reasons why I haven't written, but neither you nor I care about those.  Writing is therapy, and writing is my desired vocation, but writing will suffer without regular practice.  As my friend Bob might say, I need to make the time.

The GOP's Sista Soulja Moment?

For those of you who, uhm, aren't old, Sista Soulja was an ancillary member of the Greatest Hip-Hop Group of All Time who, in 1992, made some very mean comments about how black people should take a week off from killing each other to kill white people instead.  That kind of statement wasn't that out of left field in the glorious world of post Golden Age hip hop, and Sista Soulja probably would have faded into Bolivian if not for the actions of a young Arkansas governor.

At a very public event for Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition, Bill Clinton criticized Soulja's comments and Jackson for allowing her to continue to work with the Rainbow Coalition.  The incident continues to be referenced whenever a national political figure tries to put his or her party's base in their place.  When you have a Sista Soulja moment, you try to reassure the bulk of the American people that, although you share the same party with the crazies, you know they're crazy, and you know how to keep them under control.*

Well, doesn't that sound like exactly the kind of thing the GOP could use right now?  That's all I could think of reading how some nonentity GOP congressman is watching the State of the Union with noted insane person Ted Nugent.  If I'm Ricky Rubio** or Paul Ryan and I have my eyes on the 2016 prize, opportunities like these are exactly what I am looking for.  Maybe it's too early to start regulating the Tea Party wack jobs, but, like, TED NUGENT, people.  Low hanging fruit with no negative repercussions for giving him a little chin music.         

Said Nonentity

* Please note that I am just describing the candidate's mindset and not trying to attribute craziness to anyone, let alone Jesse Jackson, who I admire.

**Yes, that's what we're calling him.

The 10 Year Plan

Sorry for the lack of posts lately.  I just started yoga teacher training, which has eaten up what little free time I used to have.  Anyway, I wrote this little ditty below for TT, so I figured I'd post it.  It's a little more heavy on the "me" talk than I'd like, but it is what I wrote today.

10 years from now, I intend to be awake. This goal makes a terrible topic for an essay about the future, because I can do everything I need to do achieve enlightenment today. I can meditate. I can practice yoga. I can live mindfully. I can be aware of my surroundings at this moment in time. The trick is to actually do these things, so the rest of this essay will describe the conditions that I believe will best provide the conditions to wake up.

10 years from now, I hope to have achieved financial independence. I define financial independence as some combination of accumulated resources that will allow me to live comfortably for the rest of my life and a job with tremendous flexibility in the hours it requires and the location where it can be performed. Ideally, I’d like to be a full-time professional writer, while teaching enough yoga to satisfy my passion for teaching but not so much as to distract from my own practice. I would like whatever work I do to be ethical and help as many people as possible achieve inner peace and their own definition of a good, full life. I also hope to have been and continue to be a good boyfriend/husband, son, brother, and friend. I don’t believe I have to change much to accomplish this goal.

But let’s explore this “writer” thing a bit more, shall we? Five years from now, I hope to receive regular income from writing. Even if I cannot be full-writer, given the writing I have already done, I believe it is realistic that I can get paid to write. I need to figure out how to do this, soon. The path that I have observed most writers who I admire and become professional is to maintain an active blog that they update frequently. I have such a blog that I relaunched in December and updated faithfully until teacher training started. The two immediate obstacles that I have to overcome is the lack of updates since teacher training has begun and my propensity to diversify my topics. On the former, teacher training, my regular practice, cooking, and talking with my girlfriend eats up most of my free time, but I do spend a fair amount of time each day playing video games, so time is not an excuse. On the latter, a blog focused on a single topic may be the best way to move towards financial relevance, but I think I want to resist that urge, at least for a little while longer. People are multifaceted. Their writing should be allowed to be as well. The topics on which I currently write—my yoga and meditation practices and my desire to try to live an ethical life and move towards enlightenment and waking—seem to be pretty in line with my goals of trying to earn a living ethically.

One year from now, I hope to have had writings published at major internet yoga and sports portals. Places like Elephant Journal and Mind Body Green publish work whose quality and content I am confident I can replicate. I have a reservoir of approximately 150 blog entries, many of which I could revise to make suitable for publication. The best way thing to do might be to look back and see which of my pieces have garnered a positive reaction and to make them fit the submission guidelines at EJ.