Summary


Unbeknownst to most folks, my personal life is fuckin' chaotic.
Wow I haven't written in a few months.. what can I say? Life get's in the way... the summary would be that I am recently single again, living out of a suitcase and on my brothers couch in the border of Brooklyn/Queens..
grandma is in the hospital que Dios lo bendiga...
I have 2-hour commutes three times a week to go to college in the Bronx..
and I'm still partying hard, bytches!!!
I'll write back soon....

JuneBug

Heeding the words of advice from an older, wiser gentleman.. "Don't reinvent the wheel".
I've decided to back away from the whole non-profit project and look into what's already developed in the Bronx and Brooklyn.

Someone asked me recently why I haven't been performing.
The best way to answer that is because I'm still adjusting, and I'm not far enough in my adjustment period to warrant "hindsight", which is the meat of my creative meal.

I went to go visit my blind friend Patch at the cancer hospital last night. By the time I got home, it was past 9pm, and I didn't have the energy to write to El Museo Del Barrio about why they didn't have a Dominican Republic Art Exhibit.. as a matter of fact I couldn't think of anything other than the cold hard fact that my boy is dying :(
Patch put on nearly 100 pounds, is losing the mobility in one of his arms, and the medics are having a difficult time treating his migraines and other physical ailments with the drugs they have. God bless you Patch.. Goddamn your Lion-faced forearm tattoo is fly.

Move Move Move

Everything hinges on the first move, my whole plan. The make-or-break point. I have all of the essential players in their respective places, but I keep reminding myself not to get too fired up , not to get too amped, I have a history of always trying to prematurely develop the next Big Thing, and I always regret moving so fast in the end.. even when it jumps off correctly because I always think that I overlooked the details that would seve to further the lifespan of my project.
in 1997 it was the rhyme crew, had the potential to be one of the most powerful entities in Brooklyns underground, and by overlooking some preventable faults we caused it to crash and burn.
in 1999 I made a gigantic leap into the music industry, lived a hard and fast party life and overlooked the oncoming merger of AOL and TimeWarner.. There's a hundred such incidents within the past 5 years and I always didnt see something that I should have seen.. Ambition is a muthaf*cka aint it? This isn't going to be incident # 101.
Start off slow, maybe volunteer at The Door, see how it all works from the inside out.
It's hard when you're someone like me, popular from a distance. Resources constantly fall into my lap and sometimes they require teamwork, and sometimes I'm that antisocial dude.. you can see where that ends up.

I got to shake this chronic fatigue shyt, and quick.

Man Wit Dat Plan

Bueno,
I've begun my foray into the future that I've created in that space between my eardrums. Currently seeking High-Falutin Philanthropists to fund Talent Workshop for gifted underprivileged teens.
Oddly enough I don't seem to have alot of people willing to make the jump with me on this project, i believe the ones that are able to handle the workload already have their hands full with their own projects, which i can fully understand, though I would have loved to keep this thing of mine in the same poetic circles.
I've written to some places, made some calls, I even faxed this one Organization because they wouldn't provide any alternative contact information.
As my haitian counterparts would tell me, c'est la vie.

The semesters just about over, my Psyche professor is being quite a puerto rican pain the ass despite the fact that I'm the highest scoring student on her roster.. but I take comfort in the fact that by this time next week my pain will be over and my ass will revert back to a state of normalcy.

Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center Art Exhibit

My friend "Patch", the blind artist, sold 3 out of his 5 pieces at yesterdays art exhibit, which I think is phenomenal.
He had these clay sculptures dipped in brass, I couldn't believe how well he transformed his art from 2 dimensional ( from drawing, before the blindness) to 3 Dimensional ( clay figurines ).
In typical "Patch" fashion, the art was based on fantastical creatures.
As always, I went with my best buddy, and as always we had too much wine and we had way too much fun making fun of eccentric old folk.
I had to sacrifice an evening at the studio for this but I don't regret it at all, Patch, Joel and I are the type of dudes that were friends in the pimple faced teen days and will be friends when we're old and gray.

Soon enough I'll be interviewed by a public access show that wishes to shed light on the underground artistic community. Though I consider myself a loner ( kind of oxymoronic if you know how popular I've become in certain circles ) I do have to say that my schema of community entails the Acentos family and Poetically Incorrect, kudos to all of you, you've made my past 2 years onstage very interesting and you continue to do so with the creative fire that y'all bring.

Mondays Plan
I`m going to check out my friends art exhibit today at the cancer hospital, the kicker is that my friend is blind. He wasn`t always totally blind, he had one good eye and he wore a patch over the other one up until last year.. and he was a great artist who drew fantastical creatures. He was born with a form of the "Elephant Mans Disease". he has constantly growing tumors in his spine and brain, last year one of the tumors in his head strangled the optic nerve of his good eye.. thats definately one of those things u dont expect to hear about someone.. its not like " hey you know John Doe had a baby?" which is a naturaly occuring life event. It`s more like " Yo, you know John Doe lost an arm last year" or "I know u haven`t seen your cousin in a while, you know he came out the closet".. like one of those wild unexpected shocks.
We love `em though so we show full support.

The weekend:
Went to Studio8 on Saturday night, nice little spot but a little too populated with doo rags for me.

Acentos @ BlueOx:
Even though they were catching heat from the BlueOx owner for not being of age, I was thoroughly impressed with the creativity of the young Urban Word group, spec-fucking-tacular. I'm not even playin' with you, if you never heard these kids perform, they are driven. Much props to their mentors and to the Acentos team for bringin them up to the Blue Ox.. OK maybe I just have a soft spot for teens since I'm going to school in the hopes of mentoring them in the future.. but they rocked.
Quick cut to my Easter holiday weekend:
i went to club Deep on thursday, on Friday I took my girl to the BBQ`s in Fordham Road, Saturday night we went to the Copacabana, El Gran Combo performed that night and yesterday we went to see Passion Of Christ. The Passion is a good movie, I was more interested in it because I am fascinated by the psychiatry and philosophy of religion

So in the past few days, in my mad quest for new sonic-based motivation,
I've picked up a Staind CD, the latest Linken Park CD and the new Dead Prez CD.
Now, Dead Prez used to be my shyznit, all of that revolution talk, knotty dreadlock hip hop and everything but this latest effort didn't immediately strike me as a phenomenal soundscape. For one, they have a song with the king of bling bling, Jay Z. Now, I happen to LIKE Jay Z when I'm in ignant-knucklehead-party mode, but if I'm popping in a CD of music made by Socialist Party orators, it needs to be delve a little deeper than that. Why not do a song with, sayyy, KRS One or Chuck D or if you wanna keep it current, Nas?
Staind is more my speed... that slow-grinding-spiral-towards-the-underbelly-of-my-soul type of music.. totally emotional.

Dude i'm Getting a Dell

LEGAL DAY ONE of the Fleet/Bank Of America merger:
The dark storm cloud hovers above our building, but I havent seen the 4 apocalyptic horsemen in the corridors yet.
the lay-off decisions will come from the parent company, which right now is a faceless monstrous entity, so the only thing they know about me is that I'm a numbers cruncher LIKE EVERYONE ELSE IN THIS BUILDING! ( Gulp!).. lol, I'll be fine though, the worse that can happy to me is that i get reassigned. I'm a finacial contractor, I get paid by a different 3rd party company.
Yes, as todays headline suggests, I'm getting a brand spanking new Dell computer, even faced with the fact that I very well might lose my job.. fuck it you only live once

Wow, amazing what a little blogskin makeover can do to your site. Pretty freakin' amazing.

Acentos Anniversary.. MiGuel Algarin feature:
One of my best memories of live salsa was 1998 in Madison Sq. Garden, there was a jazz festival and at the time I was in the entertainment biz, so I sat up in the front row... and Tito Puente was playing.. he was amaaaazing and the faces he made were bugging me out! I learned back then, through that one experience, that being a performer did not mean being cool onstage, as many of the new salsa artists always tried to do. Look at the root word of PERFORMER. One is to PERFORM. And the masters of performance don't set rules to how the art radiates from their bodies.
MiGuel Algarin, in the context of my life experience, was as Tito Puente was in the garden... the spirit of the art took possesion of his body and he made a dramatic impression on the packed crowd.. the most packed I have ever seen Blue Ox bar be.

Snowstorm Poet

Okay, early morning run-around at Lehman College yesterday to get my student loan enacted. You know what i don't like about Lehman though? I saw a couple of Math professors there, one caucasian man and one asian, both looked so scruffy with their hats turned backwards. Is this an attempt to connect to the youth or are they just not feeling their jobs?

Then when I got to my office, there was a "suspicious package" that lead to 6 of us being detained and quarantined. Check this out though... turns out that the temp mailroom guy who opened that package might actually have been an agent sent over by the company that bought out my firm... they my have been looking for the companies reaction to such a scare tactic.
Damn, more corporate devils to appease.

Last night at the Blue Ox was my first time back at the scene since early fall, but unfortunately the last time this semester since there's scheduling conflicts.
I did that piece about the whole hoax situation that went down at my job... as usual i don't get much vocally-expressed feedback from the crowd but I've learned to sort of feel the air for vibes. There were some great poets and also some not-so-great poets, all in all though a great night to kick off the new year goals for myself.
Don't worry folks, you'll catch me at Chances "Poetically Incorrect" series, or Bar13 on Monday nights.

To the young lawyer who asked me how to get over nervousness onstage for her presentation at the college......
well I'll tell you what I learned from my experience about stage fright.
It usually helps me when I don't meet all the eyes in the room.. it's a good practice down the line because it makes your audience feel engaged, but if you're nervous its not gonna work for you. What you can do is gaze around the room while you're talking but dont actually look anyone in the face, try to look at the armrest, or even better look at their hairstyles.
OR... you could focus mainly on one person or a particular area and make eye contact with a select few people, but this will make that particular audience member uneasy... hope this helps :)

ToozDay Absence
If I could only meet one poet who's alive today in the here and now, it would have to be the legendary Miguel Algarin.
It was his book- "Love Is Hard Work"- that inspired me to touch the stage in the first place, back in the Year-Of-Chronological-Paranoia 2000. I was talking about this with a politically-charged Rich Villar last night..
Hey, LouderArts/Acentos team!
I heard you guys caught him at the Nuyo on Tuesday, I am jealous to an insane degree. lol.. anyhow, hope to make more of an effort to catch you crazy mo'fo's on Monday Nights.

NuyoRican Hip Hop Junky

Whats poppin' viewers?

When I was a young cat, I'm talkin' like Junior High School, My
brother and I used to act like we were on-air personalities for an
imaginary radio station that we called "Radio-Off-Tape-On".
That was actually written on the switch that turned the radio off on
our tiny azz boombox and got the tape deck operational, anyways me and my bro did everything.
We did fake commercials, fake songs, fake interviews, we were just
some little nuyorican Brownsville cats that were in love with
anything involved with hip hop.
I was a lil young dude and I just wanted to emulate what I knew about
rap..I used to call myself "Funkmaster Flex", and I named
my younger brother "Hellraiser Richochet". I got my name from hearing
you on the air at WBLS I believe around DJ Red Alerts time.. imagine
how far back that was!
I'm a Nuyorican (from Brownsville/East New York), I'm a spoken word
poet, I'm an emcee, and once upon a time I was the audio-video guy at
Atlantic Records, where the Terror Squad ruled.
At the time I was there, though, I didn't take full advantage of my
position, in retrospect I could've done so much more but I really
wasn't aware of how the odds were stacked against us. As a matter of
fact, it looked as if the doors were swinging wide open for latinos
when the legendary Big Pun went platinum! But here we are, a few
years later, and we're still out of the spotlight.
I believe that we ( latinos ) are still considered background
entities in regards to hip hop.. always the dancer, always the
producer..the graff artist/ promoter/ you-name-it, but rarely do we
get to be the actual performing stars on-stage.

do you feel that the time for
more latinos onstage in hip hop will come, or that our time has
passed? The decisionmakers are all corporate and not from the
public, from what I understand.. what do you think?

Don't worry, my people.. its a rhetorical question ;)