You remember when Marc Ecko Cut & Sew did their Star Wars tribute? That shit was official bone gristle. I still haven’t come up on the Boba Fett hoody because people are beasting out on the eBay system. But if I had it like that I would also copp the Stormtrooper hoody along with these Dunks pictured below.
These joints are Dunk 1-pieces. They are given the namesake because the upper is shaped from a single piece of leather. I could see an army of clones rocking these super clean joints.
For the last decade there has been a constant surge of propaganda aimed at demonizing Muslim peoples and culture. This all came to a magnificent crest under the G-Dubbz administration wen we all but blamed Muslims for everything sideways in this country. If someone were to look just a little deeper you could see that we all share a fondness for goat. Muslims like to eat goat on their holidays and we like to make scapegoats.
Capitalism will sometimes trip over its own feet in its rush to exploit someone’s culture for monetary gain. The lone electronics selling mega-giant Best Buy created some Black Friday ads bigging up the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha (c’mon and admit that you thought it said Al Queda, I did) and now the heartland of America is all bent out of shape because they think the terrorists are selling the good people flat screen televisions and iPods.
Nevermind that NOTHING you will buy on Black Friday will be made in America, unless you are copping something made from prison labor. Americans have had the morals and their priorities mixed up from the word go. The Muslim has become the trendy boogeyman alongside the country’s stalwart African America males and now anything that sounds remotely foreign (read: un-midwestern) has become offensive, or un-patriotic, or worse, un-American.
You made this mess starting with your mainstream media that uses all of its powers in imagery wizardry to describe to you angry, volatile people. This is on purpose and you have bought into this likeness over the past twenty years at least since the days of Ayotollah Khomeni. These images are presented to you at such a rate, along with various and inconsistent name mispellings to give you the impression that many of these angry people exist and are actively working towards your disenfranchisement.
Meanwhile, the Federal reserve is looted right under your nose. Our children’s children are conscripted to lifelong debt or worse, war with the effin’ robots.
All of this because of what?
Land?
Energy?
Power?
Nope…
Fear.
HIMANSHU from Das Racist put me on to this film one day when we were talking about growing up in Queens. The film is called ‘Chop Shop’ and it is filmed almost entirely in the Willets Point Blvd junkyards that are on the outskirts of Corona.
The story is about an orphan who lives in the yards all the while trying to make a better life for himself and his sister. The story is tight and it feels so real to me. Shea Stadium exists as a character in the movie due to it being a part of the constant background.
The truth is the story is that impoverished kids have a single chance to make it up from the bottom and if they don’t use that time well they may be lost forever. That isn’t the message of the movie though but it is still so colorful and compelling I recommend it to you.
As the iC’s were wrapping up our day of shooting on Saturday we drive down Roosevelt Avenue in my old stomping grounds of Corona, Queens. The police had 111th Street blocked off and there were seemingly hundredss of people in the street. I thought to myself that we must be missing some awesome latino holiday. We had just finished having a meal at La Cabana which is a popular Dominican eatery on 103rd Street so we had all had our fried pork allotment for the year.
Just know that if there is a latino holiday upcoming you will be required to eat some manner of pork. Shouts to RAFI for eating mofongo. Even I WON’T eat that shit, but bless RAFI’s brave heart he went in on that joint hardbody, rather hard artery. We weren’t missing a holiday on 111th Street however. Some dude hacked up his wife and his son and had them stashed in the apartment’s closet.
Queens Man Charged With Murdering Wife, Son
*Soundwave: That shit was in the Owen’s family building*
Corona was such a fun place to grow up in when I was a child. The diversity of latin folks, asians, whites and everything in between gave me an early world view that would be destroyed by the time I got to middle school and learned that it wasn’t normal for a Black kid to have white friends (from outside of the neighborhood). The other magical mysteries of Corona have begun to fade as well. Visiting the old junkyards during the shoot also brought back a lot of memories about the neighborhood that I think I may have forgotten.
The Willets Point Blvd junkyards was the place that we would go to get bike parts from when we were younger. When BMX bikes became popular the junkyard streets were like our own private training course. Everything possible took place in the junkyards so you didn’t go in there alone. If you can remember the Fat Albert show then you can imagine a bunch of kids traipsing through the scrapyards looking for some summer adventure. When we got older and our means of transport went from bikes to stolen cars we came back to the junkyards to peddle instead of pedaling.
The thing that made me sad though was that the junkyards looked exactly the same as they did twenty plus years ago. The streets that were fucked the fuck up then were beat down even moreso. The neighborhood remarks of a shantytown in South Africa or India. There is so little infrastructure development in the area mainly because it serves poor people. Who do you think comes to the yards to have their cars fixed? People that can’t afford to go to a dealership or even a repair shop on the avenue.
The city has gotten along just fine ignoring this segment of the population because they pay their taxes and don’t expect to have rights anyhoo. I tried to buy a drink from one of the Salvadoran ladies that pushes their shopping carts through the yards. They ignored me as if I were the police. I was such an outsider to these women. That pissed me off. I hate being labeled as a doppelganger, but here I was in the yards now impersonating a working class person. Nevermind the fact that I was just in court this past week to resolve my arrest from a few weeks prior.
I’m torn in my emotions now from preserving the yards so that the poor and working class people that make NYC tick can have a place to have their cars fixed, or to just raze the whole neighborhood and let the asian money that has been developing Flushing move into Corona. One of the OG selling points the former mayor Giuliani had issued about reconstructing the new stadiums had been the notion that these sports team monuments would redevelop the neighborhoods they were nestled in. That ended up being politricks double speak, but I wonder now if this neighborhood couldn’t use a touch of the Disney-fication that the rest of NYC has been blessed with?
Mark your calendars ATL sneaker fiends!
TheShoeGame.com is doing it extra big for their third anniversary. Free admission and refreshments. Free giveaways on some sick ass kicks plus more…
NIKE Store
Lenox Square Mall
3393 Peachtree Road NE
I need to get my ass to Atlanta for this joint.