Alexander Florov – Sketch of Colossus from the #X-Men
Thanks for the request via Twitter, Alex. This is a great portrayal of the warrior/ poet character of Colossus. He looks like he could destroy everything in his path, yet human enough to create art too. Great job.
Check out more: http://partsincluded.com/
Jordan
When I started Serengeti Appreciation Month it was as a distraction from planning my sister’s wedding, and after the wedding I took an impromptu trip to California to teach tai chi and visit friends. The hardest part of blogging is not having a deadline, as well as not getting paid to do it; so, Serengeti Appreciation Month is turning into Serengeti Appreciation Summer.
The flexibility of this project suites the release of Serengeti and Hi-Fidel’s album: Saturday Night. Which is expected to ship out “mid-summer”. This gives me enough time to explain the rest of Geti’s albums, and finish with a review of Saturday Night.
Geti released five albums in 2006: Dennehy, Gasoline Rainbows, Thunder Valley, Race Trading, and Noticeably Negro. Three of these I have already covered in past weeks. This post I’ll focus on Race Trading, and next week: Noticeably Negro.
The theme of Race Trading, and Noticeably Negro, are both about issues dealing with race. From the first track of Race Trading, Afro, Geti raps about having a “fro” so big he can hide a can of mace inside. The title track, Race Trading, deals with interracial relationships, with such lines as “I want to be with someone from the same ape”, and how his friends won’t date outside their race.
The skit: We’ve Been Dating for 112 Months, has a girl telling her boyfriend how her mom doesn’t think “black people have emotions”, when he asks to meet her parents. The final song on this album is Mexican Hands, with rhymes like “towels are folded by Mexican hands/ Los Lobos is a Mexican band”, it addresses the contradiction in how Americans view the value immigrants bring to their country. This album’s theme isn’t race, it’s about the contradictions in our actions, and our desire to define the world around us.
“I’ve got too many thoughts, moods, views, and stories/ and they change everyday so fuck a category” – Nico B, from the song Hiccova.
Race Trading is available free from Audio 8 Records: http://www.audio8.com/releases/A8014.html
Tracks from this album you might like:
Jim Duggin
Teenager
Race Trading Remix
America
Bees
Girlfriend
Thanks for helping me spread the word. Word.
]]>For some odd reason I was prevented from uploading this song to my last post. Here is the song Rich:
After listening to Gasoline Rainbows at work today, I am less confident in how much this song represents the album. It’s the opposite message of every other “rapper”. The chorus, “Do I have to deal drugs?/ Do I have to be a thug?” is a phrase you will never hear again in rap music. Jewels, cars, and expensive liquor, are not interesting to me. I can’t relate to those objects in my daily life, is there a positive message in this song?
The inspiration for one of most recent posts: Playing Tai Chi in Subway Stations, was inspired by the trip to San Fransisco in February, my never-ending love for taiji, and my experience with the song: Playing in Subway Stations; by Chicago-based rapper David Cohn, aka Serengeti, and producer Polyphonic the Verbose, from the album: Terradactyl [sic]. Before I left Geti released a select few songs from Terradactyl on his myspace, and one song on youtube that I brushed off as too weird – Playing in Subway Stations:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TkvjjpsIPM8]
The live performance of this song didn’t click with the Serengeti I had expected. Auto-tune? Singing? I disregarded the song and the video as some obscure experiment Serengeti is known to do. It wasn’t until I heard the album version of Subway Stations, on the Amtrak back from California, when I grew to appreciate this song. I had to rinse my cup of expectation before filling it with the great song of Playing in Subway Stations,
@DaveSerengeti has 58 followers on Twitter. Not that Twitter followers is any measure of success, but it took me four pages of a google search to find results for Serengeti, the musician. Africa’s diverse Serengeti plains are one of the ten natural travel wonders of the world, the World Cup starting in South Africa, and the Chicago Blackhawks one game away from possibly winning the NHL Finals: Conditions are right to make four blog posts focusing on Serengeti the musician.
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We never worry about scorpions in Canada. Maybe when we escape to Arizona or Central America, during the famous Canadian winter, thoughts of poisonous night crawlers never cross our minds. My friend’s grandparents are “snow birds”, retirees who fly South for the winter. We used to stay in their trailer, in Mesa, Arizona, during spring break from high school. We would go out onto the golf course at night with black lights, and freak out at all of the scorpions illuminated on the golf course, because scorpions glow under UV light.
In Costa Rica, my friend put her hand behind her pillow, and a scorpion stung her hand underneath. Jennifer panicked, and ran to the front desk of her hotel for First Aid, because her lips were going numb. The staff laughed at her worries. They knew the local scorpions are harmless to fully-grown healthy humans. Since she told me this story, I’ve taken a second guess before I put my arm under my pillow anywhere south of the 49th Parallel.
I’ve never considered scorpions anything more than a pest; however, in China scorpions are a culinary delicacy, and have said to cure blood cancer and tumors.
In most Asian markets and traditional pharmacies you will find worms, bees, snakes, scorpions. In traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) a scorpion is considered an earth animal. Ground animals, and insects, dig through soil and ingest the garbage within. In TCM, the idea is that by ingesting insects you can root out the garbage in the systems of our bodies. Dried scorpion (Quan Xie) is considered a herb that when consumed targets the liver meridian and is said to relieve headaches and calm seizures (For more info: http://tcm.health-info.org/Herbology.Materia.Medica/quanxie-properties.htm & http://tcmtreatment.com/herbs/00-quanxie.htm).
The only three Mandarin words I remember are: “Jiu”, (酒; pinyin: jiǔ) the word for alcoholic beverage, “Pijiu” (啤酒 Pinyin: Píjǐu) the word for “beer”, and Baijiu (白酒; pinyin: báijiǔ) means white liquor and is made from distilled grain. On Daqingshan Mountain, in China’s Shandong Province, we were served fried scorpions and treated to a tincture of baijiu, ginseng, goji berries, and scorpion. Imagine drinking lightning mixed with sweet dirt. The fried scorpions tasted like “Chicken Popcorn” from KFC: only crunchier. However; this tincture, which was referred to as “Jiu”, is rumored to kill any tumors or cancer growing inside you.
The superstition behind the healing properties of scorpion venom healing is now gaining ground as a legitimate alternative medicine in the West. National Geographic News, NBC and ABC, have reported on the potential for use of scorpion venom in “painting” brain tumors, and as a nanopartical for passing through the blood-brain barrier so drugs can act on tumors. Also, a patent filed by Jinghai Zhang, Runlin Ma, Siling Wang, Yanfeng Liu, Chunfu Wu, claims that a peptide found in the venom from a black scorpion can be used an analgesic and anti-tumor drug. The method Zhang, Ma, Wang, Liu, and Wu, use to extract the active peptide is by diluting the scorpion in either distilled water, a basic or an acidic formula. Alcohol, such as baijiu, is a basic solution.
So, would you eat a scorpion, or drink alcohol infused with scorpion venom?
If you were diagnosed with a serious health dilemma would you try this alternative treatment, or would you be suspicious of taking a treatment based on superstition?
Please comment, retweet, and share.
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The best part of the night was a guy who was either a body builder or a mixed martial artist asking me in a thick Eastern European accent, “Do you think they will play the song I’m So Big?”. I said, ‘Of course, it is one of their big hits”. He was so anxious he went to to the bar to get a pen and a piece of paper. He walked past me and flashed a sign reading SO BIG.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kc8SLwGNmwE]
DJ Champion and the G-Strings played I’m So Big for their encore. Buddy was so pumped for this song, it was the best part of my night. Training is hard, and can mess with your mind. Any music that can get you through the pain of training is something worth celebrating. I was there for a friend’s birthday party, and we all had an awesome time; but how happy this guy was hearing his favorite workout song added extra meaning to the music of DJ Champion.
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]]>Internal power is when a body uses gravity to its fullest. When we consider why gorillas are so strong, we look to their massive arms and chest, and assume this is the source of their superhuman power. We rarely consider their legs, and why gorillas move closer to the ground than humans. The center of gravity for gorillas is in the waist, yet you will rarely see a gorilla standing upright like a human. Even when gorillas are fighting they keep their knees bent to lower their center of gravity, to enhance their balance.
When we move upright we are fighting against gravity. We bend our knees and elbows, and scar the tissue around our bones, causing muscle. On a vehicle, the coils or springs inside our shocks soften impact. The spring creates stability too; with compression the spiral becomes strong and loaded. Any amateur carpenter knows the saying “why nail when you can screw”. The nail does not root into the wood or steel, and can be easily removed, bent, or broken. By fighting gravity our entire lives our bones and joints become brittle and tired as the years pass.
In everyday movement we do not use spirals, thus, we do not have the ability to jump like a cat or have the speed or strength of a gorilla. As spirals compress, one half goes down and the other raises, this is the theory of complimentary opposites. Also known as ying and yang, a theory at the foundation of Taoist religion, representing the balance between opposites, or dualism. Day and night, male and female, inert and animated, are examples of dualism. Trees are the balance between living and dead. The dead bark provides stability for the living roots and leaves to grow. Roots move using spirals, and rotation, to create stability. The trunk and branches can flex and bend with the force of gravity being disbursed, and anchored, through the roots. Trees use spirals instead of lines, so do gorillas, and cats.
The Practical Method of Chen Style Tai Chi can show us how to develop the mechanics of motion we never learned, but animals seem to posses intrinsically. This jewel of Chinese history is the embodiment of Taoism, because it is founded in the duality of anchoring and rotating. By anchoring and rotating we can lengthen our muscles and use our joints as coils to compress, pressurize, and release, instead of a hinge, and increase human power to superhuman levels. No other martial art, or sport, uses the mechanics of the body like the Practical Method of Chen Style Tai Chi. Gorillas do not lift weights, so why do you?
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On Saturday my roommate, Rusto, was t-boned doing a u-turn in his van. The van is a write off and he is lucky to be alive. He is a professional cab driver and he screwed up, anyone can. Be careful driving in the rain. I’ve been calling him Kanye West but he doesn’t get it. ]]>