You're Now Tuned Into the Muh'fuckin' Greatest

Bear witness to the greatest - Beanie Sigel, "It's On"...









Get Banged On might need to be renamed "Get Blaked On." Although, maybe we should save that for the title of the porn movie that Timofey Mozgov and Frederic Weis should now appear in together.

Damn.

*shakes head*

*returns to furiously texting friends*

The Illustrated Rick Ross

If you like rap music and surf the webs, you've likely heard the new Kanye album. Among the record's nicest treats is Rick Ross's cameo at the end of "Devil in a New Dress," less for the lyrics than for the typical Ross audacity. So actually, perhaps exactly because of the lyrics. It's as opulent, grandiose, and improbable as one might expect. Rick Rozay has become such a cartoon at this point that I started to wonder what would it look like if you actually tried to illustrate what he says. Below is one man's first attempt, broken up into chunks.

I would pass along the track via YouTube, but Kanye's record company is waging war on the concept of streaming audio, so I have nothing for your ears. I am sorry. Find a leak online, unzip the download, and then follow along. Or open this clean version in a separate tab and cue up the audio appropriately.

Here (for now?) is the Rozay verse. Starts at the 4:00 mark:



(Click on images to enlarge)

"Lookin' at my bitch/I bet she give your ass a bone"


"Lookin' at my wrist/It'll turn your ass to stone"


"Stretch limousine/Sippin' Rozay all alone/Double-headed monster with a mind of his own"


"Cherry-red chariot/Excess is just my character"


"All-black tux/Nigga's shoes lavender"


"I never needed acceptance from all you outsiders/Had cyphers with Yeezy before his mouth wired"


"Before his jaw shattered/Climbin' up the Lord's ladder"


"We still speedin'/Runnin' signs like they don't matter"


"Hater talkin' never made me mad/Never that/Not when I'm in my favorite paper tag"


"Therefore, G4's at the Clearport"


"When it comes to tools, fool/I'm a Pep Boy"


"When it came to dope/I was quick to export"


"Never tired of ballin'/So, it's on to the next sport"


"New Mercedes sedan/The Lex Sport/So many cars DMV thought it was mail fraud"


"Different traps I was gettin' mail from/Polk County, Jacksonville, rep Melbourne"


"Whole clique appetite's had tapeworms"


"Spinnin' Teddy Pendergrass vinyl as my jay burns"


"I shed a tear before the night's over/God bless the man I put this ice over"


"Gettin' 2Pac money twice over"


"Still a real nigga/Red Coogi sweater/Dice roller"


"I'm makin' love to the angel of death"


"Catchin' feelings/Never stumble/Retracin' my steps"

More Rappers Should Use Ambient, Asian Instrumental Music

Was using the internets today when I came across the source material for G-Side's dope, enduring "Rising Sun." A full year later and G-Side's Huntsville International remains one of the better hip-hop things I have heard in a while.

Broke Down Palace

I remember adulthood. I was an adult once before. I had the job, the apartment, the income, the perverse delight that came with 3 AM fever-dream emails sent to bosses on both coasts. I had free time on weekends. I could go places, do things, meet people, merely because I wanted to. I put on big-boy clothes everyday, a tie and everything. In those early days of being a real person, possibility and hope were everywhere--taking taxis with me downtown, eating with me as I felt my way through Seattle and Chicago for the first times, putting their feet up on my Ikea coffee table as I plowed through the DVR's treasure trove on a lazy Sunday. (Like many adults, the nicest piece of furniture in my apartment was the television, and nothing else came close. Certainly not the framed Roots poster I bought on the internets or the entry-level couch that survived four or five apartment floods.)

It was possibility and hope that ushered me along to graduate school. Twenty-six and fairly accomplished at my job, I nonetheless recognized that I wanted something else, and I was young enough, still, to make the time I would need to better control my own fate. Possibility and hope argued that with a law degree, I could credibly attempt to break into basketball. If that failed, they said, I could work in bankruptcy, corporate law, securities, or something else that already captured my imagination. So much else was tugging at my attention that I couldn't fight it off anymore. So much else seemed within reach, regardless of the specifics, that law school made sense.

During my first two months of law school, in the fall of 2008, Lehman Brothers failed, AIG collapsed, and America fell off a cliff. At that time, the economic crisis was sobering, but it felt remote, the way I read about earthquakes in Turkey, revolutions in Myanmar, or flooding in China. As I was insulated from those cataclysms by geography, so did I feel insulated from the American economic upheaval by a temporal cushion. I had three years to study, during which time the economy would rebound. Further, I felt insulated and validated, no matter how misguided my elan, by the righteous indignation that America's crash and burn was a sadly appropriate denouement to the Bush years. Who was surprised? A country that had embraced a lowest-common-denominator culture was finally learning a hard lesson: ignorance was paying a price for masquerading as a populist response to uppity elites insistent on their facts and education. Besides, Obama's structural reforms were on the way, and I was leaving that everyday seriousness behind for a short while. I was done playing adult and had returned to school. Homework, yes, but naps, days off in the middle of the week just because, and everything that comes with an artificial university ecosystem. Possibility and hope would deliver me.

It's been about two and a half years since then. I graduate from law school in May, and the looming specter of returning to adulthood as America's descent hastens has fucked me up. Possibility and hope are failing.



When I leave my cloistered, academic experience in the spring, I'll step out onto corrupted terrain lighted by a poisoned sun. America is dying slowly, and it has been for some time. A nation that was founded on the promises of possibility and hope has betrayed both. No longer does this country adequately educate its citizens. The rash of home foreclosures and the lingering economic problems created or exacerbated by the financial meltdown demonstrate a broad middle class falling further and further behind. In fact, the steady death of America's middle class has become so entrenched that already it can be conclusively studied. In lieu of a society that rewards hard work, promotes meritocracy, values knowledge, and practices actual liberty, the United States hosts a privileged ruling class that exploits ignorance and aggregates more and more power.

The brilliant documentary Inside Job wonderfully distills these horrifying problems. As I said upon seeing it, the movie should be required viewing for all citizens. Inside Job's great value stems from two impressive feats. First, while it largely recapitulates modern financial history that has been widely reported, it explains the mechanics of the financial meltdown with remarkable clarity. In striking terms, Inside Job walks its audience through the development of modern finance, how Wall Street firms came to dominate the global economy, and how the reckless risk-taking manifest in derivatives, credit default swaps, and fraudulent hedges ultimately destroyed the American economy. The movie is a withering indictment of Wall Street, hammering home the point that unfettered greed meant to benefit a few has cost so many so much. It is the unavoidable truth, and while watching Inside Job, a person can't help but wonder why the response to such brazen, apparent misfeasance hasn't been swifter or more severe.

The movie anticipates this question, of course, and provides a discouraging, albeit illuminating, answer. Inside Job's second great accomplishment is its unapologetic focus on the inbred entanglements among America's economic elites. Setting his sights on lobbyists, government, industry, and academia, Charles Ferguson, the movie's writer, director, and catalyst, traces the inextricable links between, say, Goldman Sachs and the government bodies meant to regulate it, the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department. Those conflicts of interest have been documented before, but Ferguson uses his narrative gift to coherently and starkly emphasize how insidious and dangerous they have been.

Digging further, he also exposes the academic industrial complex that countenances these conflicts. At Harvard and Columbia, leading centers of academic economics, Ferguson confronts professors and administrators whose standing as untarnished, independent experts is anything but. Industry pillars including Lawrence Summers, Glenn Hubbard, Martin Feldstein, and Frederic Mishkin are rightfully indicted for growing rich through conflicts, sacrificing the integrity of their work in the name of personal profit. Getting rich, and wanting to get rich, are not transgressions. They are not even damnable aspirations. However, Inside Job makes clear that these men are the unscrupulous sort who purport to offer rigorous, academic study while authoring influential reports commissioned by their subjects without disclosure, accepting unreported speaking fees, and serving on the boards at companies they often evaluate in service of public ends. Mishkin, in particular, clowns himself. This portion of the film, one which starts out as a somewhat tangential inquiry, quickly emerges as a sad emblem of the pathetic American culture in which even the best educated and most intellectually powerful have grown numb to greed, corruption, and the embarrassment those crimes should engender.



Inside Job closes with a troubling exhortation for its audience. After thoroughly surveying the upper echelon of America, a tier of influence that is insular and populated by people desperate to wield as much power as they can over the unsuspecting masses, the movie tells viewers that fighting against these people will be difficult, but that it's necessary. That sort of conclusion should be reflexive: Inside Job is a two-hour exploration of all the ways that banks manipulate the economy, economists endorse this corrosive financial deception, and politicians willingly allow them to do so if the politicians get to stay in power, or better yet, a piece of the action. People should be furious and in the streets. Only, they aren't. We aren't. I think the answers are ignorance and despair.

Consider my circumstance. I have no formal economic training. As a teenager, I took AP macroeconomics because I went to Nerd High School, but my crowning achievements in that class were perfecting my imitation of the teacher and discovering that The Economist had more to offer than not-funny cartoons about British people I'd never thought about before. In college, I took an economics class, but I slept through most of it, either in my bed or in a lecture hall. I didn't really figure out how to go to college until my junior year, and economics was a casualty of that early time in the desert. Since then, I've been left to my own devices, and those devices primarily comprise reading various things. Whatever I know about economics beyond the relationship between supply and demand and the time value of money is self-taught. Quite the CV, eh?

As the 2008 meltdown metastasized, I had to learn more about economics and finance so that I could better understand the severity of our grim times. In some ways, it has been a luxury of personal background, the household in which I grew up, and my own curiosity. A corresponding result has been that most of my economic writing is driven by personal narrative. In lieu of the authority which I would enjoy were I the product of a more rigorous formal economic education, I rely on the authority of my own experience.

For anyone, individual experience is ultimately the only thing each of knows best. The best writing is persuasive writing, and an effective composition usually requires that the author convey authority. An opinion cannot be right or wrong, of course, but its credibility can be undermined, and its weight diminished, when an author cobbles together banal ideas with vague support. Here's an example: Were I to argue that Anthony Trollope's work was the quintessence of Victorian literature, my essay would be boring, riddled with error, and unmoving because I could recite an entire episode of Life and Times of Tim (just pick one) before I could even name two things Trollope wrote. I would be embarrassed by the writing because it wouldn't reflect anything I truly understood. And that underscores this point--we each are experts merely about ourselves. A personal narrative imbues one's writing with the feeling and detail necessary to make it resonant, and resonant writing is persuasive.



So here I am, a random voice on the internets returning again and again to outrage informed by my own curriculum. With degrees from Nerd High School, the University of Michigan, and another forthcoming from Washington University, I am among the best-educated people in America. But even with all of those advantages, it took me extensive time and effort to learn about collateralized debt obligations, how mortgages even work, and what Lehman did wrong. Moreover, all that reading has delivered me to a state of defeat: I look out upon what has transpired, I assess whose hands are on the levers of power, and I shake my head in frustration because I am so far removed from those who chart this country's course.

My constant concern and anger is made even worse by the persistence of the problems. After an economic failure that threatened the nation's structure and initiated a global crisis, one would think that everyone--from everyday voters to President Obama--would prioritize a massive overhaul with conviction. We should not settle for papering over a faulty foundation and hoping for the best. We should insist on meaningful change. But that isn't happening, and it is sickening.

Despite dire financial straits, the White House is going to capitulate and extend tax cuts that the United States can't afford. After financial cataclysms that have thoroughly illustrated the toxic greed of corporate America, there is no public sentiment or compelling marshaling of facts strong enough to shame businesspeople. Look no further than this past week's disclosure that Michael Bloomberg and his friends think that Obama has unfairly vilified American businesses. Never mind that Obama's economic stewardship, however faulty, has likely staved off destruction, left the S&P 500 up, and allowed banks to record historic profits. This is a President who is bad for business? If anything, the wrongly celebrated Dodd-Frank financial reform bill has not gone nearly far enough. And now, after elections, Republicans are riding a surge of popularity that has emboldened them to retrench in the financially reckless terrain that caused many of the current economic conditions. Government, more than ever, is run by a select few rich people who are almost nihilistic in their disdain for government, regulation, society's greater good, and reason.

That last point is the most unsettling. As corporate power and wealthy individuals have stripped away regulation, changed every rule possible to gain an advantage, and left wreckage among the middle class in their wake, America, as a society, hasn't had the good sense to say stop. Logic--the sort of thinking that might seize upon recent empirical evidence to pursue a vastly different course--has failed. Instead, larger United States culture apologizes for ignorance while elites connive to exploit it. As Chief Justice John Roberts wrote this summer while striking down a key accounting oversight body empaneled by the Securities Exchange Commission, "One can have a government...that benefits from expertise without being ruled by experts." Yeah, who would want to have leaders who know anything?

Like I said, ignorance and despair. Most people no longer know enough to understand what has happened, and they are told by leaders to find comfort in that relative naivite. Meanwhile, those who attempt to understand the system so that they can participate in it effectively uncover that power is so far attenuated that there is no hope for effecting change. That's no way to have a functioning country, exploiting the mass uneducated and freezing out those with knowledge but no power.



Law school has been well worth it. The job market is wretched, but my legal education has enriched my life. I have learned to think in new ways, I have gained expanded understanding about why life is structured as it is, I have been shown realistic access points to subjects that are endlessly engaging. I also have enjoyed a reasonable opportunity to inspect the careers I envisioned when I first enrolled. Rather than acquiring a dispassionate career cynicism, and rather than arriving at disappointment and dead ends, I have been pleasantly surprised by the expansive set of jobs that arouse my passion. I feel fortunate that so many lawyer jobs seem interesting, and I am confident that I will find a job, and a career, that I want.

But I am far less confident that it will mean very much beyond what it provides me and, eventually, my family. I am far less confident that this country will return to form as a nation in which possibility and hope pervade. Over the past few years, the steady pace of decline has accelerated, and the United States continues to squander opportunities to reverse, or even stem, this slide. Last week's election was especially jarring because it is frightening to watch the people who helped get us here now exacerbate the problems as they purport to be the solution. I have experienced the financial crisis and attendant recession in a uniquely visceral fashion. This upheaval has not only tapped into my deepest angst but it has animated all of my now virulent anger and frustration. Enough is enough, but there appears to be no end in sight. That is truly unsettling.

L'Chaim, Internets

(via)

Photo comes from The New York Times. Could Shyne look more photoshopped? Could that be any more perfect for this story? Even the caption that accompanies the picture seems like a joke:

"Moses Levi, also known as Shyne, visits the Western Wall in Jerusalem."

Sorry, but that's exactly what someone on the internets would write as a joke after inserting Shyne into a random photo from Israel.

And what's with the velvet fedora? I don't doubt the sincerity of his conversion, but a velvet fedora seems better aligned with a protracted Halloween stunt than a lifestyle overhaul.

Regardless, everyone is a winner with this.

Point Guard Portraits

Today on FD, I posted what is likely the apex of my artistic life. Like so many, I draw my inspiration from Rondo and Russy.

Talking Noise

This past Thursday, I was on 1560 AM in Houston to talk about the NBA, the FreeDarko book, and G.O.O.D. Music with Raheel and Nuno. You can download it here.

My Brain Has Ended

What else is there for me to say? Look:

Isiah Thomas still believes he can help the New York Knicks win a title.

"I want to be on the float and I want to get my ring," Thomas told ESPNNewYork.com.

Isiah Thomas believes that, with or without LeBron James, he will someday help the Knicks win their first NBA title since 1973, writes Ian O'Connor.

When Thomas took over the Knicks in 2003 he had planned to bring LeBron James to Madison Square Garden in free agency this past summer. But in 2008, Thomas lost his jobs as president and coach of the Knicks.

Now, he is coaching college basketball at Florida International, just down the road from where James plays with Dwyane Wade, Chris Bosh and the Miami Heat.

"I do find it ironic that we all ended up here in Miami instead of us all ending up in New York," Thomas said. "But it's a four-year deal."

It will be four years before James can opt out on the Heat.

Asked if he hopes to replace Donnie Walsh whenever the 69-year-old Knicks president retires, Thomas said, "Every single day of the week."

"When I look at my GM/executive record, if I'm evaluated on that, then whoever's after Donnie, if you're not talking about some of the top people in the game, I'll put my draft evaluation record up against anyone's."

Is this EVER going away?

Should I donate a limb?

What should I do?

Serenity now.

Aqua Teen Hunger Force Stays Awesome

This Aqua Teen Hunger Force episode remains a towering triumph of satire. It was, and is, too perfect. The joke is both intrinsically funny and extrinsically knowing, and the writing is great. Especially when the lines are delivered in that beyond-audacious, quasi-hysterical Shake voice. Or the Carl voice.

"What the hell is this here? Some, uh, some sort of gayout?"

"I'll talk to you later, doggie."

"Dance! Let's make and receive cellular phone calls with Boost Mobile!"

"What are you dancin' about here? You're poor."

"I'm on my land. We're both in America, which used to be a good country, until they started letting people like you do whatever you want."

"We got the whole city behind us!"

"East side, west side, outside..."

"Come on, dog, you're into this...You're black...You sound black...Where are you from?"

"We were just about to do some hands-free national roaming"

"Alright, that's not very urban."

"It's bling-blong. It represents my lifestyle and stratus as a street-savvy irreverent youth who lives large, yet hunger for the next level in life. You know, Boost Mobile is the premium yoth foocused communication network and instant gateway to opportunities."





P.S. Kanye should go back to making soul beats.

Testing

Posting will be light through Saturday. In addition to handling the usual array of classes, homework assignments, and job responsibilities, I need to study for a standardized ethics exam so that one day I can be a practicing attorney.

But good news: my open letter to Michigan athletic director David Brandon will be only that much more timely after Rich Rodriguez loses Ineptitude Bowl III: The Unqualified Shall Inherit the Earth to Ron Zook this weekend. And, immediately after my exam on Saturday, I am going to see Inside Job so that I can froth in a near-hallucinatory-level of anger. That should yield some kind of a review.

Until then...

Soliciting Your Attention

Friendsters, there is so much to discuss--Rich Rodriguez's impending funeral; the Democrats' impending funeral; the passing of Ginny Sacramoni. All in due time. For now, two things:

1) Check out this NBA essay that I wrote for the latest issue of the Norman Einsteins. It has Rondo, Russy, and the return of cool. Also, the wrong Lakers ring ceremony is up there right now, but it should be corrected by tonight. Don't work late at night!

2) My Rondo obsession has spilled over into hip-hop music. I was listening to my favorite street anthem of the year the other day, and I realized that the chorus calls out for a Rondo version. Witness:



Something about the Eastern Conference, or the NBA's elite, along the lines of:

Rondo
South Beach
But the champs ain't in Atlanta
B-O-S, on the way
Kevvy G, in the Phantom

Help me out here.