Graffiti moved from simply ‘getting up’ into a legitimate form of artistic expression thanks to people like DONALD WHITE pka DONDI.
His top to bottom burners were all-city subway canvasses I used to watch at Chambers Street on the J/M/Z platforms.
WHITE was more than just all-city. He took graff all over the globe. Piece to the colorful universe he created.
This is a look at some of the redesigns in the U.S. dollar that are part of a contest sponsored by an NYC graphic designer.
I don’t mind adding some color to the dollar. Colored people? Not so much. You see how that shit is working for Zimbabwe? How about a 65,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 % inflation rate?
Nah man, I don’t want any Black people on my dollar bills. Shit is already expensive enough to buy shit with a pocket full of big faced white folks. No way I’m gonna get my monies worth with some Duke Ellington dollars in my wallet. And what Black people would we put on our denominations? I love the irony of Malcolm X on a dollar, or the humor of Richard Pryor on a $20 (rolled up to snift yayze, natch).
Chances are we will have the same Black faces we see every February – MLK Jr. and George Washington Carver. Black people need some more heroes. My choices would be Turkey Leg Jenkins or Everett Bailey? This is America people, and if we are going to devalue our dollar bills any further then at least we should have some fun with it.
You know what shit would push white over the edge? Obaamabux.
On July 4th, NikeSB invites you to get patriotic with a pair of Dunks.
I’m sorry but all of you folks from the Mexican diaspora and assorted immigrantes can’t own these.
You have to be born in the U.S.A.
MobbDeep – ‘Peer Pressure (produced by DJ Premier)’
ThunderCracker and I having the chance to work together was a godsend. We both kept each other out of trouble except for the times we were causing trouble, but at least we were together then too. Everyone had their little grinds back then. Soundwave had the Oppenheimer joint and Polo was working for the Lintas ad agency. We all knew our next stop was millionaire status. A little offer came to me from some buddies who I went to Tech with. They always saw me in the clubs and parties downtown. They wanted to know if I felt like stepping up to the superstar spot in the club scene. These dudes wanted me to push that yayze for them.
I was several years removed from standing on Northern Blvd. with Bar-Kim and those dudes and cocaine was way more glam than crack was. Crack was for poor people. Cocaine was like caviar I thought to myself. Only rich people could even fathom the taste. I told them dudes I was down to go in and see what was what. The popular parties at the time were a few spots in the East Village that played house music and the earliest form of techno(which sounds good comparatively today). Save The Robots was the after-after hours spot to get it in at and this is where the hardbody partygoers touched down to get high.
I asked TC to fux with me one night/morning I was going to Save The Robots to put in work. I had to promise him there would be broads to fux with at this spot. TC didn’t immediately trust me on this maneuver because the house music downtown scene was hell’a ghey(just like it is today) but I convinced him that we would have fun plus I was gonna break him off from the money I was making that night. The math was real simple too. Grams were going for forty but 8-balls were a hundred. Smart money would have copped the 8-ball because that shit was 3.5g so you basically got yourself a free gram for your committment to getting high.
I could hardly ever move the 8-balls though and sometimes I would sell five grams to the same cokehead. Don’t bother with trying to explain fiscal values to someone trying to blow their brains out. That same head will be begging for a discount when his paper gets short. I gave breaks to the best custies anyhoo. So ThunderCracker rolled with me to the club on the promise of ho’s, cokeheads and adventure. As usual we find what we are looking for. Save The Robots was forever that spot.
You walk into the basement of Robots and you can barely see your outstretched hand through the smoky darkness. The air is rich with the smell of burning tobacco x cocaine. Its a funny smell to me because its acrid yet amazingly sweet tasting in my nostrils. You will never confuse this scent with anything else in your life. Hopefully you won’t ever become as familiar as I once did.
I showed TC the corner where I usually posted up. Back in these days you could smoke in NYC clubs so TC knew to pull out the White Owls and to start rolling up. I was busy looking for custies in and around the bathroom area. When I got back to TC he already had a spanish shorty sitting with him. Very Lisa Lisa-ish. For all I know it could have been Lisa Lisa except she wasn’t that busty. She wanted to smoke our weed and I didn’t give a fux as long as TC didn’t either. If you knew him like I did then trust that he was going to try to fingerbang this chick in the corner.
Shorty had a plan though and that was to put her crew down with the blunt. A couple of Puerto Rock chicks on the ‘L’ is what’s up, but a whole calvacade of LES mofos plus some random crackhead is not happening. TC told dude not to touch the dutch but I guess that regal Puerto Rock attitude couldn’t comply and when dude was about to put his lips to the blunt you heard the electric sound of teeth clicking one another. Hard. What was that for? TC was one of the best knockout artists of all time and dude was prA’li unconscious before his head hit the floor.
Now these chicks and some other skinny crackheadish character are flailing away at TC. Like a surgeon he steps back to get some space from them and then extends a jab into the jaw of the skinny dude immobilizing him instantly. It started looking like Michael Jackson’s Thriller zombie sequence as all of these crackheads, cokehead and clubheads started converging on TC and I. We were fighting our way up the stairs and out of the club. When we got outside onto the sidewalk I started to bust out laughing. TC was still super-hype and angry and he yelled at me what the fux I thought was so funny. I opened my fist to show him the blunt I had picked up as soon as the fracas broke out. We lit that shit up and smoked on our way to the F train Second Avenue station.
I didn’t ask ThunderCracker to come with me to the clubs downtown after that. He wasn’t mad neither.
MobbDeep – ‘Peer Pressure (Large Pro Remix)’
I always liked writing and shit, but I never considered this as a profession until SoundWave went to prison. In the over eleven years that he spent on lock down I never went to see my dude. I don’t like prisons, or hospitals for that matter. I always felt a kind of way about going to see people in jail because I didn’t want to end up behind bars with my homey. I imagined that the warden would be like, “Thanks for doing the legwork for me and bringing yourself in.” Is that ridiculous of me and cowardly? Hells yeah.
I kept in touch with SoundWave by writing him often and talking shit with him in the same way we did when he was home. I gave him the updates on the ‘hood and the encouragement that we were still on our journey to being millionaires. The funny shit that happened when SW was in prison is that a million dollars lost it’s value. SW, ThunderCracker, PoloTron and I were the get rich clique. We had dozens of capers between us but we were still looking for that big score. We never got it as a crew, but the fun was in trying.
I remember this botched bank drop job that Polo set up with the old butcher shop where he used to work. This job was going down on Jamaica Avenue in broad daylight two blocks from the police precinct. SW convinced us that it was doable with the thinking that a crime near a police station was safe since all the police were somewhere else. This was SW’s super power. Dude had a steely confidence, he could sell the tone to the phone. SW was just one of those smart-dumb niggas who had book knowledge and street knowledge and could interchange the two fluidly.
And yes, he was a bit of a lunatic, but not in the sense that I was. His lunacy was tempered with logic. When we used to run around acting stupid and kicking up dust SW was the dude that always kept an eye out for the emergency exit just in case we couldn’t get out of something the way we came in. Fam was definitely a rider though. He had no business riding with me to Baltimore in a stolen car just to visit my girlfriend at Morgan State for her school’s homecoming celebration. I think that part of the reason he went with me was because he bailed out when I drove to D.C. a week earlier in the car he and I stole from Greenwich Village. SoundWave wasn’t gonna let me have all the fun two weeks in a row. He also trusted me that I had his back.
The drive to Baltimore was one of my favorite trips evar. We were jetting south on I-95 and passing state troopers all the while. We would speed and slow down, each time talking to each other about the reason for the move. We were fucking idiots. Smart dumb niggas supreme. And yes, we were lucky that we weren’t arrested and made it back to NYC. I think of all the dumb shit that we have gotten away with and I realize why SW thought he got pull off a bank job. You won’t ever encounter someone who calculates the contingencies as thoroughly as SW does. I hate planning. No wonder I sucked as an architect. Planning is what prevents you from failing. Or so I thought…
SW planned this job with some of his homeys from VA. These weren’t dudes he had grown up with but he knew them from the times he would retreat to Virginia Beach to get away from hustle and bustle of NYC. Theses dudes heard SW’s stories of the fifty ways we used to get money in the city and they wanted to add a chapter to the book. “Do y’all realize how often these banks get heisted?” was the theme of SW’s pitch.
The scene inside the bank was on smash and SW would commandeer the getaway vehicle. The plan worked too and they got away. Unfortunately for them they were pulled over in New Jersey. A monthly quota speeding ticket became one state trooper’s retirement portfolio. SW fucked up by being a stand up guy. While everyone else dropped dimes on each other SW’s silence bought him the stiffest sentence. He sat inside the Federal system for over a decade. While I continued to party and bullshit SW took the weight for my teenage years. ThunderCracker’s mom, who loves me dearly, once told me that I was the reason that everyone were so cautious and scared for all of us, because I was the one leading the boys down the path. I am still the Black Peter Pan.
SW is home now and frankly looks better than he ever did. He has adjusted to his time away and has no bitter resentment towards life or even the bullshit that I still get into. He has a brand new son who looks tremendous and a beautiful wife in Virginia. SW still has that gleam in his eye though. That maybe if I tried hard enough I could convince him to go with me to Mexico next year. Yeah, the homey is still a rider.
