Wall Street is back on their bullshit.
Everyone is all excited that the stock market appears to be rebounding but no one is asking how it was accomplished.
Maybe it was the stimulus package issued from Washington D.C.?
Actually it was the i.C.’s and their willingness to stimulate ANOTHER package. [ll]…
This drop is in part an answer to my friend Gordon Gartrelle from Respectable Negroes. Respect…
I don’t think we fully understand how our economic system has conditioned us to becoming insensitive to the needs of others. We are all lust and desire as creatures now. All greed all the time. We didn’t get this way overnight though. It took us about fifty years to completely ruin our economy, our promise to future generations and our comittment to the elderly. We did it through the demonization of socialism. We did it through the dismantling of our nation’s manufacturing infrastructure.
We hold up capitalism as the ideal of freedom, but true capitalism eventually leads to one person holding all of the chips. That is the natural progression of the animal. From mergers to acquisitions to one day Disney owning everyone’s social security number. You can’t tell me that generations of celebrating opulence has not imbued Americans with a false sense of privilege and entitlement.
Rockaway peninsula comes to mind right now. Several of the Blacks that were incarcerated with me a few weeks back were from Arverne in Rockaway. The Rockaway community was a secluded wealthy area until Robert Moses constructed two bridges from Brooklyn and Queens that accessed the outer piece of Long Island. Before these bridges were built there was only one remote entry onto the Rockaways through Belle Harbor in Nassau County. Because shipping and manufacturing facilities were still viable in that portion of New York City Robert Moses also constructed public housing so the workers could access their jobs more easily.
I don’t blame Moses for the poverty that would envelope most public housing developments. That was a function of landlords and factory owners being capitalists and relocating their businesses where the profits could be maximized. Unemployment and drugs were the toxic ingredients to the decline of public housing. Arverne and Edgemere are particularly blighted areas because their construction in the early 1960s was the final salvo of public money for residential development. Acres and acres of tracts in the Rockaways are just humongous empty lots overlooking the vast expanse of the Atlantic Ocean.
To the north of the Rockaway inlet is Jamaica Bay and the John F. Kennedy International Airport where Rockaway residents can have a daily view of people going someplace else on a jet plane. People stuck on Rockaway are going nowhere fast as if they were also jet propelled.
Global Supremacy Daily aka NYTimes: In Faded Beach Community Seeking Rebirth, Projects and Luxury Homes Meet
Capitalism tells the condo owners across the street that more police will be deployed to quell the savage unrest (and stabilize your investment, er, neighborhood). How do you go from abject poverty into a million dollar home across the street? Capitalism used to separate the haves and the have-nots with some railroad tracks or at least a highway. Now you can cross to the next sidewalk to be in full view of what you can not touch. Don’t tell me about personal responsibility today when that isn’t the modus operandi of CitiBank or AIG executives. Why must the savages then subscribe to such nobility?
If this is all these people will ever have then I suppose we should at least make it look presentable in case the neighbors from across the street come over for Thanksgiving dinner. You know, the whole settlers/natives kumbaya romantic conceit that capitalism told you.
The floors and walls have been cleaned and scrubbed. The hallways have an institutional antiseptic feel to them. Are you in a hospital, a psych ward, a prison or someone’s home? The correct answer would be all of the above. When the final grandmother is evicted from these halls we can tear down this reminder of blight and poverty. Capitalism doesn’t need these landmarks.
Blaxberry out…
Mountain Dew’s Green Label Art project rocks on with RockStar Games artist STEPHEN BLISS. He’s the guy that produces all the iconic artwork that covers your Grand Theft Auto video game. STEPHEN will actually be creating some new images for this event and some lucky folks will get to paint along with the master.
Come through and chop it up about video games, sneakers or just NYC in general and also share a Mountain Dew or a beer or two with your favorite internets celebrity.
Before I talk about the new show that HBO is debuting this weekend I have to tell you my situation. I’m a few days in front of my next paycheck and I’m crawling to the finish line. The only thing saving me in these times are the marketing companies that have listening events or preview parties with free food and drinks. My meal for this day would consist of pizza, along with beef, pork, chicken and fish tacos (ugh, why did I do the fish?). The Hof Brau Dunkel dark lager was deee-effin’-lish. Plus, it had the word Dunk in it’s name. Free food for the motherfuckin’ win everytime. Now that I have taken the edge off I’m ready to watch some television.
HBO has yet to recreate a comedic series as monumentally genius as ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’, but bless their hearts for continually trying. I wasn’t into the ‘Eastbound & Down‘ premiere as much. Don’t get it twisted, I fux with DANNY McBRIDE hardbody, but the writing for that show was visibly cliche to my senses. I was waiting for the rubber chicken to get pulled out. The new series ‘Bored To Death’ is way more watchable and should be a decent post-Curb treat.
The writing for ‘Bored To Death’ isn’t as under the radar smart as ‘Flight Of The Conchords’ (tragically slept on hilarity), but the punchlines and sight gags still snap and pop regularly. The creator and lead writer JONATHAN AMES lives in the urban fiction writer culture of white wine, sex and weed (stuffwhitepeoplelike) so he effortlessly describes it in the show. JASON SCHWARTZMAN plays the lead character who shares the same name as the show’s creator, along with his best buddy played by ZACH GALIFIANAKIS and his boss, for whom the classic TED DANSON has been cast, we have a nice little ensemble ready for the shenanigans to commence.
ZACH’s character is a sex obsessed comic book artist, while DANSON is a pot-obsessed magazine editor. The deal with SCHWARTZMAN’s character is he is into the reisling a little too much. How can you be too much into reisling? I don’t know either but I will play along for the sake of laughs that should come from wino humor. Which is something AMES should add to the series now that I think about it. If the lead character is so heavy into his wines that his lady is forced to leave him he should also dabble in the bumwines a bit. That would give a nice little urban edge to this series.
DANSON and GALIFIANAKIS are scene stealers and the situations the lead character puts himself in will bring out the LOLs. I like the idea that the lead is an open minded recreational drug user. So much that he even considers smoking crystal meth. It’s funny to me because the character is supposed to be 30yrs old and not 21 (which is the ONLY age to be a legal recreational drug user). He’s too old to still be this irresponsible, but that is the story of so many other 30yr olds nowadays. JONATHAN AMES did it all so that hopefully you won’t have to make the same mistakes as him. Wine, weed and sex. It’s a wonderful lifestyle if you can live it.
