Mixtape Friday
Okay, so it was a short tape.

Kweli Mixtape:
1) The Blast
2) Raw Shit
3) Guerrilla Monsoon Rap
4) K.O.S. (Determination)
5) Manifesto
6) Get By
7) Eternalists
8) Know That
9) Gun Music
10) Rolling with Heat

Common Mixtape:
1) Time Travelin'
2) The Sun God
3) I am Music
4) Full Moon
5) Charms Alarm
6) Resurrection
7) Respiration
8) Soul Power
9) Introspection

One.

freestyle of the day
if i have to tell you more than once
then you're probably a dunce
and i'm sick of your shit
cuz you give mcs the runs
and you got the nerve
to come out of the burbs
try to make it on the street
and get left on the curb
well i stick to the verb
and i'm ready for the action
by the time you gettin started
i'm done and just relaxin
waxin poetic
cuz i got enough to dead it
in the first round
i'm a dog
and my verse hounds
i'm a god
and you cursed now
the worst now
i'll leave you in a hearse now
eh you it's true what they say
my rhyme hurts pow!

Silence.
Silence.

It was what resulted last night at the dinner table, where Kelly, her friends, and I sat. It was what resulted after one, a vocal performance Master's student, asked me what my work involved.

I tried to be general, but perhaps I was too general. I told them it focused on literature and postcolonial theory. I tried to summarize postcolonial theory without relying on its keywords: ambivalence, negotiation, agency.

And I failed. There was silence.

A professor of mine at Brooklyn College had warned me about this, about how I would never be able to have conversation with people outside of the graduate humanities world. About how all of my friends would be academics, too.

In short, about becoming a lifelong nerd.

I tried to avoid it, once I got out of high school.

In Columbia, Missouri, I dressed fancy to class. I styled my hair every morning and sported a well-kept goatee. I exuded confidence, mystique, charm. I was nineteen.

At Brooklyn College, I gave that up for a disheveled coolness. I grew my hair out, my goatee long. I wore baggy clothes and bore an ice grill on my face wherever I walked. In the summers I shaved my head and the ice grill looked meaner. Deadly.

Here in Minneapolis, I've submitted to nerddom. I wear whatever isn't dirty, randomly assembling daily wardrobes. I leave the library with twenty books at a time. I spend my time out of class reading at home, sprawled on our sofa.

The next logical step would be to buy pocket protectors, specs, and plaid shirts.

I'm sorry to the non-nerds in the future who must survive a conversation with me.

Jessica Hagedorn
Last night, a snowy one here in Minneapolis, the writer/performance artist Jessica Hagedorn gave a reading of her new novel, _Dream Jungle_, at the Loft.

The plot sounds exciting, and given Hagedorn's biting humor, we're in for a treat. The setting is the Philippines, in the 1970s. Two historical events circumscribe the text: the "discovery" (in the Columbian sense, only) of a tribe that, for possibly many good reasons, has not participated in globalization and modernity; and the filming of the epic film, _Apocalypse Now_.

Sightings: David Mura was in the audience and asked some interesting questions about Hagedorn being a Filipina American writer writing stories set almost entirely in the Philippines, which she does with this text and _Dogeaters_, her most famous work to date -- especially given Hagedorn's sarcasm, which is potentially read as ignorant of the gravity of the postcolonial Philippines.

In a way, though, her focus on the Philippines even as an immigrated and assimilated writer demonstrates how our attention as an American reading audience should focus on places like the Philippines where American colonialism really f*cked up.

Her effort intervenes into the current Bush II dialogue about how Iraq has the promise of becoming what the Philippines became after decades of American presence. This discourse succeeds in ignoring what really happened (and still happens), relying on how little Americans know.

Hagedorn teaches us a little about it.

One.

25th Hour
We watched Spike Lee's 25th Hour Saturday night. Interesting plot, but it failed to build any suspense. I was left watching how Ed Norton lived the last day of his free life, without questioning whether he would go in or not. Only in the final scene, when his father tempts him into fleeing, is that question raised. Before that, all we want to know but don't is who turned him in?

Anna Paquin's role was strange. Besides showing what a goof Phil S. Hoffman was, what? Wasn't one sexy woman enough? C'mon Spike, I expect better from you.

More disruptive to the movie were two things: the homage to 9/11, which seemed corny and forced, and the two or three periods of racial angst, which were even more forced, not to mention taken straight from his older work.

The film, while certainly wrought with race, ethnicity, class, gender issues, did not seem to be calling them into question specifically. The plot involved a hip white man -- with Irish roots, to be sure -- and his dilemma of going to the slammer. Sure, his girlfriend was Puerto Rican and said identity was questioned and excused for turning him in, but that was the extent of such dialogue; it hardly engaged in the larger narratives of exclusion and racism.

So to me, his five-minute rant picking on every sub-category in New York was totally out of place.

Today is November 1.
It is time to pay rent.

I've been steadily working on my website; it should be up in the next week or so. Most of the information -- because there isn't much -- is set in place. I'm more concerned with design right now. I'm striving for uniformity as well as style and appeal. I expect this much from myself, though my first attempts are always sloppy and amateurish.

It's a tricky process, as is deciding what content is worth displaying. It's a bit like an identity filter: what should be disseminated to the public, what shouldn't. Moreover, how should it be presented (this is where style comes in).

Pages that exhaustively attempt to describe one's persona are tiresome and boring. As viewers, we don't want to know everything, only what's interesting, novel, relevant. So I'm going for brevity.

Images convey as much info about a person as the words that appear. This, too, is a touchy subject. I'm trying to find the right balance between being accountable and with integrity to who I am, who I know myself to be, as well as to present myself in a way that makes me appealing to the public.

Don't front. We all do it when we choose which clothes to buy, which shoes, which restaurants to eat at, which movies to see, which friends to make. Transparency is not very desirable; only the illusion of transparency is.

One.

Greetings
The question I pose today is merely to speculate why DJ Premier did not produce a track for Jay Z's The Black Album. The reports have varied from Jay rejecting all of the cuts Premo submitted, to Premo being too busy to submit anything.

With all of the hype surrounding Jay's "last" album, it is a bit disappointing that rap's most successful emcee and one of the best DJ's of all-time failed to collaborate.

Instead, Pharrell has included what sounds like a wack track. I hope the rest of the album has a street sound. I also don't doubt that Jay will be back for more.

Speaking of coming back for more, Fiona Apple is supposed to release an album early next year. Which means she beats D'Angelo once again. The two came out with albums within a year of each other in the mid-90s. Both of their sophomore efforts came out four or five years later.

D'Angelo has reported been working with George Clinton and Raphael Saadiq, and some reports say he has seven songs. But I'm not holding my breath.

One.