Tuesday, March 29, 2016
Quote of the Night
Tinker Hatfield of Nike via GQ.
"… the reality is I think we’re all influenced by cool stuff that happens all over the world, and I like to think that when I sit down to design something, what gets produced on my computer or on a sketchpad is a culmination of everything that I’ve seen and done in my life and so, you know, I’m a good observer. I try to get out and travel around the world. We encourage other designers to do the same because in the end, the inspiration for new ideas is really old ideas, and so we’re always looking around. I totally respect the work of other people."
Saturday, March 26, 2016
Atlanta’s Hip-Hop Workaholics: Young Thug vs. Future
New York Times - "Future and Young Thug, Atlanta’s Hip-Hop Workaholics, Go Their Own Ways"
By Jon Caramanica
"In general, though, Future is a reducer, reliant on a few proven approaches. Young Thug, however, is an experimenter, someone who’ll try anything once. Future’s vocals tend toward sleepy groans; Young Thug’s are strangled cackles. Future opts for production both booming and slurry. Young Thug tends toward the striated and whimsical. Young Thug has described Future as an influence, but the two have become stylistic polar opposites.
Which is why it was perplexing when, a couple of weeks ago, Young Thug and Future — both of whom release music at a furious clip — began quibbling on Twitter soon after Future announced the release of “EVOL.” It was a reignition of an earlier squabble, where Young Thug called Future the Tito Jackson to his Michael.
This is, of course, an unfair comparison, and inaccurate, too. If anything, Future is Michael and Young Thug is, perhaps, Sun Ra. Future has become extremely refined in his misery. A few weeks earlier, he released a more effective mixtape, “Purple Reign,” that served as a clear extension of his brilliant 2015 run. Perhaps the most striking facet of Future’s reign is that it hasn’t resulted in any gargantuan mainstream hits, though some songs he’s recorded with Drake have come close — even though he is a style vanguard, he remains something of a cult figure.
Young Thug is more obscure than Future, but with his more sui generis approach, he seems like a pop idol in the making."
Sunday, March 20, 2016
Richard Linklater's "Everybody Wants Some!!"
March 30, 2016
Written & Directed by Richard Linklater (Dazed & Confused, Boyhood, Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, Before Midnight)
"The First Proven Expedition to the North Pole"
New York Times Magazine - "An Insurance Salesman anda Doctor Walk Into a Bar,and End Up at the North Pole"
"The scene before them was not what they imagined back in Minnesota, when a dare in a bar instigated the least likely polar expedition of all time. A group of average middle-aged suburban men — an insurance salesman, a mechanic, a doctor, an engineer — had joined forces with a young Canadian adventurer, scion of the snowmobile manufacturer Bombardier, which was sponsoring the voyage. The snowmobiles the men had brought to the Arctic were primitive 16-horsepower Ski-Doos, little more than riding lawn mowers with snow tracks. Now, only a few miles into the journey, the idea of going to the North Pole by snowmobile suddenly seemed dangerous, impossible, insane."
Wednesday, March 9, 2016
Ta-Nehisi Coates on His Forthcoming The Black Panther
The Atlantic - "The Return of The Black Panther"
"Despite the difference in style and practice of storytelling, my approach to comic books ultimately differs little from my approach to journalism. In both forms, I am trying to answer a question. In my work for The Atlantic I have, for some time, been asking a particular question: Can a society part with, and triumph over, the very plunder that made it possible? In Black Panther there is a simpler question: Can a good man be a king, and would an advanced society tolerate a monarch? Research is crucial in both cases. The Black Panther I offer pulls from the archives of Marvel and the character’s own long history. But it also pulls from the very real history of society—from the pre-colonial era of Africa, the peasant rebellions that wracked Europe toward the end of the Middle Ages, the American Civil War, the Arab Spring, and the rise of isis."
Young Desiigner
The Fader - "Desiigner Met Kanye West In A Car Outside LAX And Then Nothing Was The Same"
"At the start of 2015, Sidney Selby III was an impossibly deep voiced 18-year-old from Bed Stuy with dreams of a career in music and a handful of features under his belt. Then his manager, Zana Ray, encouraged him to finish a track he had been sitting on since he had bought a booming beat from producer Menace for $200 a year or so earlier.
That track, "Panda," Desiigner's first, was only beginning to gain traction locally in Brooklyn when Plain Pat, an A&R on The Life of Pablo, played it for Kanye West. Soon thereafter, Desiigner was on a plane to L.A. because Kanye wanted to show him something. He met with Kanye in front of LAX in a car surrounded by paparazzi, and together they listened to what would become "Father Stretch My Hands Pt. 2," a TLOP track built on "Panda."
West took off for Paris after that, but Desiigner returned to his studio, where he recorded an as yet to be released song that he credits with getting him signed to G.O.O.D. Music/Def Jam. Kanye announced this signing during his fashion show-cum-album listening at Madison Square Garden, and now Desiigner has taken a leave from high school to focus full time on music."
Saturday, March 5, 2016
Cereal Business & Nostalgia
New York Times - "Cereal, a Taste of Nostalgia, Looks for Its Next Chapter"
"Breakfast cereal is a powerful engine of nostalgia — the warm, helpful kind, not the morose, depressive kind. The relationship starts with babies, who use Cheerios like Bitcoin, and stretches into old age. Almost half of all American baby boomers and nearly 40 percent of the generation born before them say the cereals they loved as children remain their favorites, according to an August 2015 report by Mintel, the global market research company.
But breakfast cereal, both as a cultural marker and a profit center, is at a crossroads. Since the late 1990s, its popularity has been slowly fading. Sales, which totaled $13.9 billion in 2000, dipped last year to about $10 billion.
Younger consumers are not as attached to cold cereal for breakfast as their forebears, analysts and cereal makers agree. They either don’t eat breakfast at all, or eat it somewhere other than home. And when they do eat breakfast, a bowl of cold cereal is often replaced by hot grains, smoothies, yogurt or breakfast sandwiches."
" Millennials are snackers, and not easily fooled by packaging or advertising, but they are as nostalgia-driven as any group of cereal eaters.
“I literally had three bowls of cereal for dinner last night,” said Christina Tosi, the New York pastry chef who founded the Milk Bar cafes and made the milk left in the bottom of a cereal bowl a culinary phenomenon by turning it into ice cream. She is a big fan of Lucky Charms and Frosted Flakes.
Ms. Tosi, 34, could be considered either a member of Generation X or a millennial. Like many people her age, she thinks of cereal more as a creative outlet or a way to dip into the past than as breakfast.
Since the business began slumping in the 1990s, cereal companies have been trying to position cereal as something other than breakfast, putting it into crackers and snack bars. But Ms. Tosi, who consults for Kellogg’s, said they haven’t exploited all the various ways cereal is being used.
“They have to embrace that people love the flavor and texture of cereal and the vintage nature, but it’s not about breakfast,” Ms. Tosi said.
Ms. Tosi is not the first to play with cereal in the professional kitchen. A decade ago, the chef Ferran Adrià of the innovative El Bulli restaurant in Spain poured a rich reduced seafood broth over Rice Krispies for a dish called Kellogg’s paella.
Off-market uses for cereal have seemed to accelerate recently. Last year, the Bedrock Fizz at the Eddy restaurant developed a fan base among young New Yorkers who appreciated a $16 cocktail infused with Fruity Pebbles. Trisha Yearwood, the country singer who is also a cooking celebrity, created a cocktail in which she infused milk with Cinnamon Toast Crunch cereal and mixed it with Fireball Cinnamon Whisky. "
. . . .
"Fancy cocktails and cutting-edge cuisine may not do much to budge sales figures. But the chefs may lend breakfast cereal some needed cachet — and visibility — if only by eating it.
Kyle Mendenhall, the executive chef of the Kitchen, a restaurant group in Boulder, Colo., likes to pour cream or whole milk over Honey Nut Cheerios, the nation’s top-selling brand.
“Every chef is probably a cereal guy,” he said, “because 90 percent of them go home at 2 in the morning and eat what’s there because they don’t want to cook anymore.”"
Influence
Yo @dangerookipawaa after that @kendricklamar Grammy performance , you have to release those untitled tracks asap!!! What's up? Talk to me— LeBron James (@KingJames) February 23, 2016
Dam my nigga u on my head 2...The fans been killing me. Y'all just backed me in a corner..Give me a few days 2 think https://t.co/5mFIPYUMXJ— dangeroo kipawaa TDE (@dangerookipawaa) February 23, 2016
Pitchfork - "Kendrick Lamar Releases New Album untitled unmastered." (March 3, 2016)
Hypebeast - "LeBron James is to Thank For The Release of Kendrick Lamar's 'untitled unmastered.'"
Thursday, March 3, 2016
Ghostbusters
July 15, 2016
Directed by Paul Fieg
Written by Paul Fieg and Katie Dippold
Starring Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig, Kate McKinnon, Leslie Jones
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