Category: Me Myself&I

That’s what you hear when the Spurs are in the paint. DeMar, Lamarcus, Rudy, they’re all yelling the same thing while struggling to score.

The problem is on defense though. A lack of effort and mostly, anticipation. That’s where Kawhi is so, so good. He anticipates two turns ahead of everyone in most cases.

The Spurs are making players better. LMA out of Portland was a tank, only posting up and shooting 2s. Now he runs back and forth, gets alley oops, shoots 3s. DeMar in his first season immediately got his career-high assists per game and he is working on his defense more. He’s not very good at it but he’s got better.

There’s definitely something about shooting/defending 3s that is killing them. The league really is about shooting those now. Last night they were not falling for the Spurs. It happens. They still need much better defense.

Maybe moral is low after a string of losses this past month. KEEP GOING

Why yes, I enjoyed this iconic architectural masterpiece for a few hours last week.

When that day off hits you in the neck

It was exactly how I thought it would be: pretty small yet spacious. Loved it. Here’s the short version of the history of this house:

Clarence “Buck” Stahl had the original idea for the home. After purchasing the lot on which it sits for $13,000 in 1954, he began, along with his wife, Carlotta, to search for the perfect architect to realize his vision. More than one architect the Stahls met with insisted their dream could not be executed. Pierre Koenig disagreed. The young, energetic architect took on the project in 1959.

Today, the home is known as Case Study House #22. That’s because it became the 22nd of 27 homes to be a part of Arts & Architecture’s famous Case Study series, which commissioned emerging modernist architecture in Southern California. Homes designed by Raphael Soriano, Charles Eames, Craig Ellwood, Richard Neutra, and Eero Saarinen were also part of the project, but the Stahl House has become the most recognizable of the Case Study houses. It embodied the home of the future.

LA Mag

It was an everyday people’s house is what is so interesting here. Buck Stahl had a very weird (for his time) career. He moved to LA to become an actor, found the lot almost randomly, worked on it for three years and half to make it better (by adding concrete he would scavenge around Los Angeles because the man was broke) while paying back the loan and living modestly somewhere. He was in his forties, had a dream house and worked to make it happen.

He built a model, showed it to architects. Most thought he and his wife were nuts. Pierre Koenig accepted the challenge though. Here comes the most beautiful and ironic part of the story of this house. To finance the building, the couple had to take a loan. No bank wanted to be part of a project like this. Too risky. Pierre used his connections and found a bank to loan money. A black-owned bank.

In short: a white couple built a modern, iconic house in a segregated area (the lot was not to be sold to anyone not Caucasian), thanks to LA’s black capital. THIS SHIT RIGHT HERE BRO THIS SHIT RIGHT HERE

Curbed (excellent article about the house, you should read it)

I didn’t know that when I visited the place. I learned that sitting in the living room, as the only black person in the room too. I mental five’d my ass off, giggling.

Back to the everyday people thingy: the Stahl family is a simple, humble family. You would think that they are all about tuxedos and martinis, they are not. Like the very nice tour guide Andrew said, they were more about “beer cooler and kids jumping in the pool from the roof” type of folks, which you know, feels right. And yet out of character when you look at Julius Shulman’s outstanding and timeless pictures.

This is the most widely published architectural picture in the world

Now my review of the house. The house itself, the volumes, the amenities, size, furniture, floor to ceiling windows… It’s pretty much perfect. I love how they lowered the ceiling in the kitchen while providing non-direct light to the islands. The most striking effect is how the house itself disappears: you live in a beautiful space and don’t really feel like in a box like we feel like in traditional houses. It’s soothing and elegant. I can’t get enough of that modern feeling. That horizontal, wide, cinematographic, no limit vibe.

On the other hand well, building on top of a hill is, I think, not that great. Yes, you have an absurd 270° view of Los Angeles. You also get all the wind, all the cold, all the sun, all the time. That can be harsh sometimes. And it’s of course, pretty cumbersome to drive all the way up there. I can imagine that living up there and commuting can be alienating and isolating.

Having said that, once you sit down next to the pool, looking over the sun going down while the city turns into black and lights, the hum slowly dying down… It’s wonderful and calming like no other places I’ve been to.

Thank you SO much dear Stahl family for letting strangers in instead of selling the place for dozens of millions of dollars. It’s very much appreciated and I look forward to do the same once my custom-made house is built and attracting peasants I mean, everyday people.

Unraveling Race
Thomas Chatterton Williams wants to discard traditional racial categories.

It’s an interesting point of view. I think it lacks a connection to the real, dirty world of everyday reality.

Williams understands that his path is not necessarily for everyone. “I am not so ingenuous as to think everyone can want to reconceive themselves,” he writes. “But I do believe the more people of good will—white, black, and everything in between—try, the more the rigidity of our collective faith in race will necessarily soften.”

People mostly just want to have decent, happy lives. Race —obviously as a social construct and cultural angle— will determine a lot of outcome, out of the womb.

Of course you might want to identify with the powerful ones. Which are not black (not that we can’t be powerful but with an average wealth ten to a hundred times smaller, obviously, it’s very much harder).

And your face will determine a lot, as we all know. If you look like a negro, even if your skin is #FFFFFF you won’t be treated the same in western society. This intellectualism about what you call yourself and what you identify with, becomes pointless in the day-to-day life. It’s all about what opportunities are more or less available and how it’s consistently worse for black people, every, single, time. No matter what. If you can un-identify with blackness so that you can have a decent life, considering the receipts of the past 60 years, you might want to do it. It makes sense. Weak, but it makes sense.

As a black man I am not as free to choose as I want to be. In our society that’s more of a feature than a bug. I don’t have a problem identifying as black while doing black things like designing sound, a future home, reading a lot about everything, being extremely proficient with a computer and knowing its history as well as 90s rock or 80s funk etc.

The day wealth is completely, evenly redistributed, black people will be able to not care about race at all.

Which we didn’t obsess with in the first place, to be clear.

‘been biking LA for ten years.

You bike without a helmet, isn’t that very dangerous?

AR-15s. Those are dangerous. Those will pulverize your body in the distance through a concrete wall, do you understand? Navy Seals training is dangerous. Landing a switch 3 flip to switch crooked grind on a handrail is some dangerous shit.

Biking is way softer than that. Most people on earth ride bicycles without a helmet, sometimes drunk while wearing flip flops. And for those who do wear a helmet here in California, well some are the wildest riders I’ve ever seen, running red lights as if they were driving a Hummer. You might have a helmet but you’re still a bunch of sticks on wheels, bro.

How do you deal with traffic, potholes etc?

You just do, memorizing them. My training comes from playing shoot’em ups when I was growing up. I’ve become pretty good at aiming, avoiding, “reading” movement and now have an acute sense of anticipation. It’s crucial. And yes, you need to know how to ride while looking behind you on both sides. It takes a little while to get good safety habits for rush hour time.

It’s also taxing. More than the physical effort, paying attention to the environment at all times is the hardest part of biking daily I think. You can (but shouldn’t) chill in your car. You can but also cannot on a bike.

Still biking the same bike?

Yup, ten years on my 1974 red Schwinn bought off Craigslist in 2009. Extremely sturdy. Built-in kickstand. Single speed. Sometimes I wish I had two that would go like “default” and “nope, not today”.

Why red?

It’s a nice, bright color. You want to be seen on a bicycle, people are not even looking at the road anymore. And it’s also red like Kaneda’s legendary vehicle and I like that. I’ll stick to red.

Aren’t drivers in LA the worst?

I think they’re fine (they feel way worse when I drive my car for sure). They’ve never done anything bad to me. But I also make sure to be gracious to them: a little peace sign when they let me go while waiting. It’s just courtesy. I’m still nothing on my bike so I make sure the four-wheels predators are chilling. No taunting or anything like that. Be fluid, don’t act as if you were a full vehicle. Don’t be that biker who doesn’t give a damn.

Maintenance?

Beside the occasional flat tire and greasing the chain once a year, not much. I just broke my brake cable and one pedal, after ten years. Bike technology is fascinating when you think about it. I mean, you have a wheel that stands on an axle that needs to be locked on one side (bike frame) and is in perpetual movement on the other side (wheel). While taking all kinds of vibrations from the road and sustaining my weight on tubes full of air. The whole thing allowing me to bike 5,000+ miles a year *for years* without changing anything. Talk about resilience.

A bicycle axle is some serious technological dope ass marvel, is all I’m saying.

I saw Ta-Nehisi speak and Ryan Coogler asked him why he decided to try to write fiction and he said because he realized that facts and history have short arms and can’t compete with the reach of mythologies.

Kyle a.b.

That moment struck me and that take, although I absolutely understand it, freaks me the fuck out.

Myths are false. That’s the definition. They have no weight to me. Yet they’re powerful enough to start some reasoning for some people and make them believe something. More than reality.

Knowing that we need to stick to the realms of reality because the reality is that we’re fucking up our planet at an unprecedented rate, mythology being “hip” is I think, not a good thing.

As societies evolved, we’ve made progress despite myths, not thanks to them. Considering the future, feeding myths to a young crowd that has to deal with adults lying, pictures and videos being fake, deep fake, photoshop’d, people pretending being someone they aren’t on social media 24/7 while watching crossovers of actual, real history (Black Wall Street) laced with fiction (Watchmen), is some crazy ass shit. Seriously.

Those kids will not believe anything ever happened for real. I wouldn’t be surprised, with the level of BS floating online (and the impossible task of deciphering it) if kids born in 2019 don’t believe that WWII happened and was horrifying. They’ll downplay it and think it was like the movie Starship Troopers or the game Call of Duty. Brutal, but kind of fun.

I don’t like fiction like that. It’s just dangerous and kind of unconscious to make it super serious.

If facts and history have short arms, let’s not give myths longer ones. It’s not going to help at all.

A challenging month, that’s what that was.

A few days with Prince’s ghostwriter and his client before the artist passed away.

Prince, you’re right. We have to own our things. And create.

You’d be surprised that I wrote my own memoir lacing music, technology and my intersectional life all in one, in my second language, English. An Englishman (white) and an English professor (black) told me it was good writing, if not really great.

I also wrote and produced 100+ songs and tracks. Videos. Thousands of sound effects. Thousands of blog posts. I coded a couple games.

I also play bass like Sonny T (that is, play bass guitar like a guitar, too).

I did it all 99% by myself. I own all that stuff.

It ain’t over brother P. Thanks again for the inspiration.

I’ve been following a blog for fifteen years. The dude has a  kid. Had a kid. The kid is grown up and just moved out of the house to go to college.

I read so many stories, their relationship. In real time, basically. RSS is the best thing ever.

It’s a new chapter for them.

I love long term things. I had followed that blog for some computer game stuff in 2004 and ended up giggling at family stories, weather updates and whatnot for all those years. Some good people.

And like them, I’m a little sad. It’s beautiful though. I’m glad he’s sharing a part of his life.

To the next hundred years.

I’m reading books about music. James Brown is mentioned. I’m torned by this mf. He came from absolutely nothing, changed how popular music was thought, had a private jet in the 50s. But he raped, assaulted and fucked over so many people.

Just yesterday, some big names in game development fell to sexual abuses claims. People I had been following for most of my career. People both younger and older that I am. People that I didn’t expect to do that at all. But like, not at all.

Earlier this week Paul fucking Mooney fell. He apparently molested Richard Pryor’s son in the 70s. What the actual fuck. I cherished that man. Gave his autobiography to a young brother I love because it was a good book. I wanted to inspire him.

It’s like a vast amount of men I looked up to, from my childhood to now are/were twisted fucks.

I don’t know how to explain how it feels like.