Aug 18
lindsayrgwattNYC, Random dj culture, hip hop
DJ Premier. DJ Scratch. They’re two of the biggest hip hop dj’s of all time (Note: if you have no interest in this, skip this post). Between them they’ve over forty years of experience (in an art form that’s maybe 30 years old) and have produced more hit records and created more unique beats than just about anyone else. So imagine my glee when I heard that they were performing a free concert tonight at the Red Hook ball fields.
The show was insane – easily one of the best hip hops shows I’ve ever seen. They started off by playing some pre-hip hop tunes: the originals that were sampled by early hip hop pioneers (think Steve Miller Band and the O’Jays). This was followed by them playing some early hip hop and then on to some recent favourites. And all the while, they’d alternate songs in a classic battle.
The battle wasn’t really a battle; in the end it was Premier playing straight man to Scratch. Scratch started off by living up to his name with this rework of Herb Alpert’s Rise. The man would not be stopped: Sex Machine was double-timed to make James Brown even wilder while LL Cool J developed a stutter on Rock the Bells. He slowed down Tribe’s Scenario by looping “Change your little drawers ’cause your pants are saggin’” to a crawl and then stood in front of the decks – still mixing – and started pulling down his pants to reveal his Superman drawers.
Don’t just take it from me: listen. Here’s Scratch working over Run DMC’s Here We Go (Live at the Funhouse). Note the point where he starts looping “So kick off your shoes” again and again. What you can see is that he’s taken his shoes off while DJing and used on to stop the turntable.
Here’s the outro from the night (apologies for the yell at the start); again, it’s some Run DMC, but this time Peter Piper. Listen for the end when all you hear is “there it is” looped again and again. The man’s hands were on fire and I thought he’d melt the max. Then he had DJ Evil Dee come up on stage and the two took turns scratching, each doing one cut after the other. They would literally walk around each other every second to do so. Then at one point, Dee used his gut to stop the record (I can’t make this stuff up; you really just have to see it).
An unreal night.
The other comment I’d make is that the crowd lived their hip hop. I’ve never been to a hip hop show where the crowd knew every word to every single song. I like hip hop, but these guys (and girls) love their hip hop. The definition of true fans.
Aug 18
lindsayrgwattFinance, Science behavioural economics, Psychology
I love reading about behavioural economics and how human nature limits our ability to make rational decisions. I love it even more when I find myself behaving irrationally despite being aware of it (this is all very meta).
Here are two recent examples:
1) On Sunday I went for a run. In the crazy heat. With my iPhone in my pocket. After two and a half hours in my sweaty pocket, it wouldn’t work.
I had turned my $0 run into a $450 run and mentally readied myself to go buy a new phone on Monday.
But then something great happened-the damn thing came back to life (I’m writing this blog post on it right now). I started to feel elated about the $450 I had ’saved’ when, in reality, absolutely nothing about my financial situation had changed.
2) I sold a bunch of stocks the other day at a modest return. However, I kept tracking this portfolio just to see how it does. Unfortunately for me, it’s been doing great-or at least one stock has. This pains me-even though it’s just a shadow portfolio.
Moreover, when the market fell on Monday, I going myself checking to see how much I would have lost, even though I would still theoretically be up. Needless to say, this was getting so unhealthy that I just deleted the portfolio.
I’m quickly realizing that though it’s easy to read about this stuff it’s going to take a lifetime to master.
Aug 14
lindsayrgwattNYC brooklyn, sunsets
It’s Friday evening and the sun is slipping westward. Once again Wen and I are being treated to a spectacular sunset. This is definitely one of the most positive unintended consequences of our move to Brooklyn…
Aug 10
lindsayrgwattBusiness netflix, supply chains
There’s a fascinating article in the Chicago Tribune about how Netflix delivers their DVDs. I have a nerdy love of companies that are really, really good at what they do (Toyota, Amazon, etc.) so this sort of article always interests me.
Here are some killer numbers for you:
- 95 percent of titles are rented every 90 days
- every day they go through their entire nation-wide inventory of 89 million discs and figure out where each is
- less than 1 quarter of 1 percent of discs are mistakenly shipped
No wonder these guys are worth $2.6 billion.
Aug 09
lindsayrgwattFinance chase, wamu
Well, it’s official. The WaMu in my building has now become a Chase:
I’ll be interested to see if Chase keeps any aspects of the old WaMu. While the bank was run by a bunch of terrible executives, they did provide one great thing: the experience of using the bank. You didn’t stand in a line, instead you went to a ‘greeter’ who took you to the right person to help you; you didn’t talk to someone via a reinforced bulletproof glass window, you did it side by side. (At one point, WaMu was recognized by Fortune magazine for this). I hope Chase realizes that the retail experience had nothing to do with the collapse of the bank and doesn’t do away with it completely…
Aug 03
lindsayrgwattRandom, Uncategorized ballard, fiction, quotes, writing
I just finished reading J.G. Ballard’s Super Cannes. It was an amazing book: I don’t know if I’ll ever again find a book that mixes corporate intrigue, mass murder, psychopathy and architecture in a great read. For those who don’t know, Ballard narratives tend to involve similar worlds to ours, except that the architecture frequently has an overpowering effect on the characters.
Throw in a dash of great lines and you’ve got rewarding literature.
For your pleasure, here are a few lines that caught my fancy. For more, read the book:
I began to count the pools, each a flare of turquoise light lost behind the high walls of the villas with their screens of cycads and bougainvillaea. Ten thousand years in the future, long after the Cote d’Azur had been abandoned, the first explorers would puzzle over these empty pits, with their eroded frescoes of tritons and stylized fish, inexplicably hauled up the mountainsides like aquatic sundials or the altars of a bizarre religion devised by a race of visionary geometers.
…
Reflections from its disturbed surface seemed to bruise the smooth walls of the house.
…
Civility and polity were designed into Eden-Olympia, in the same way that mathematics, aesthetics and an entire geopolitical world-view were designed into the Parthenon and the Boeing 747.
…
The strong sunlight had stirred up an atlas of currents that cast their shadows across the tiled floor…
…
The mental climate that presided over Eden-Olympia never varied, its moral thermostat set somewhere between duty and caution.
…
Memories jump the rails and speed off down the wrong track.
…
They were pleasantly high, but in an almost self-conscious way, as if they were members of a tontine blessed by the unexpected death of two or three of its members.
…
The twentieth century was an heroic enterprise, but it left us in the dark, feeling our way towards a locked door.
…
Dust lay over the swimming pool, an overnight veil disturbed by the feeble movements of a waterlogged fruit fly, struggling against the meniscus that gripped its wings in a mirror harder than glass.
…
Ten feet from my kerbside table the limousines moved on towards the Palais des Festivals between the lines of police and security men. Helicopters circled the Palm Beach headland, waiting to land at the heliport, like paramilitary gunships about to strafe the beachside crowds. Their white-suited passengers, faces masked by huge shades, stared down with the gaze of gangster generals in a Central American republic surveying a popular uprising. An armada of yachts and motor cruisers strained at their anchors two hundred yards from the beach, so heavily freighted with bodyguards and television equipment that they seemed to raise the sea.
RSS
Recent Comments