Is It Burning O Fuckin Now Yer Learnin

I keep waiting for this nightmare to end. Like this is some sort of Groundhog Day version of my life where everyday is another executive order telling us we must now call french fries freedom fries(remember when that happened, when congress changed french fries to freedom fries in the senate cafeteria, that should have been our first clue that this shithead might win) or that muslims must sign up to a registry. But no, it just continues. Everyday is the same orange nightmare tweeting fart noises out of his armpit while the world watches in utter dismay as what was once the most powerful job in the world turns into a giant sounding toilet flushing our democracy down.

How did this happen?!

Well, Russia.

We should applaud Russia for knowing more about the idiots in our country than I or my friends did. I laughed when Michael Moore said Trump could win. I laughed harder when that dude who predicted elections said he would too. I sat down November 9th with a bowl of popcorn and awaited the first female president rolling out dabbing in a crisp white pantsuit.

Fucking Russia.

There is an amazing piece in the New York TImes Magazine about how Putin has a propaganda machine that from a windowless building makes fake Tumblr pages of people like Wiccan girls that love fairies and pledge their allegiance to Putin.

Putin probably started putting the pieces together when Hannity was knob rubbing to shirtless pictures of him on his Fox News show and saw an opening.

It didn’t help that Hillary was boring as shit.

Her husband was playing sax on Arsenio Hall cool daddy style making everyone love him. All Hillary had going for her was that she was married to the dude that played sax.

Oh and the thirty fucking years of political experience.

Yet things like experience don’t resonate with voters who can’t name their senator but can name all the characters on Duck Dynasty. Top that off with Russia meddling with their hacking and you have a recipe for disaster.

And that disaster is here, everyday, on our television screen, our news, our comedy shows.  Everyday the nightmare continues. Is there any hope we can gather from this?

I believe so. As time rolls on and this mess continues our goal over here on the side I like to call REALITY will be to show that some people though they may know about cars, or graphic design, or engineering yet by voting for this dipshit it makes any political argument they have null in void.

In order to explain I’ll have to give you an analogy. 

I like to call it the Air Bud argument.

Let’s say you’re at a party and after a couple of drinks of lemonade, or soda pop a conversation gets started about basketball. There’s a few people in the conversation and you begin to ask the gentlemen who their favorite basketball players are. One says Kobe Bryant. Makes total sense. 5-time champion, scored 81 points in one game, League MVP, one of the greats of all time. You ask the other guy in the conversation and he says Russell Westbrook. Averaging a triple-double in the league right now, never won a rings but has a lot of gas left in the tank. One of the best in the league right now. Again, makes sense. You finally turn and ask the last guy in the conversation who his favorite player is, he pauses for a moment and replies Air Bud

Air Bud?

Like the fictional fucking Disney dog?

That Air Bud?

Is this a joke? No. Okkkkkkkk. Well then.

Now. After dude says this would you ever talk to him about basketball? About anything that had to do with putting a ball in a hoop?  HELL. NO.

Lately, we come to realize that there’s always one. One in every family, or a friend. One who voted for Trump. We’re so baffled by it. The truth is they don’t know shit. I’m saying we should just treat it as such. A political conversation comes up, in the midst of it you find out they voted for Trump, “o, wait, well you can shut the fuck up because you have no idea what you’re talking about.” You don’t have to say it out loud(though I prefer it). You can just quietly hang back and let the talk fall apart. Why even try? Essentially they were filling out an NCAA bracket without knowing anything about the sport just picking Duke because their favorite color is blue.  

Except, what’s worse, is that they did it with something that affects our lives! And I’m suppose to take anything you say seriously?

This is for people like me, who see the comments section of an article and some dipshit is talking about NYtimes being fake news and I just want to chime in. I want to SO BAD. Then I just think to myself Air Bud and I calm down.  

It’s like taking my motorcycle to a guy who bakes cakes asking him what’s wrong with my engine. He doesn’t know. HE BAKES CAKES. These people could be really smart at something but they don’t know shit about politics and we aren’t going to teach them on Facebook. I mean if they’re 30 years old and voted for a guy for president who fired Gary Busey on a fake reality show then just say it with me. AIR BUD.

Hope this helps.

Peace.

Started From The Bottom Now We....

Hey you just moved here? Welcome to Detroit! I’m glad you decided to join us. I know, I know. It took you awhile to actually find a decent apartment, with Midtown, and Corktown so full. Where did you end up moving? Oh Indian Village good for you! So real quick let’s go over some things you’ll need to know now that you moved into our beautiful city. The Club? Ok good. The phone number to a car window replacement shop? Great! The number to the Police? Ha! Just kidding! They won’t show up anyway…Here's a question though.

Seriously though, what the fuck?

When you live in Detroit you have to look commonsense in the face at some point and ask that very question. 

Seriously, what the fuck?

Most of your days are spent in this sort of hypnotic kumbaya. Moving around with horse blinders on to the sense of reality that is unraveling before you. Your perpetual orb of optimism cannot burst as people rattle off the facts of crime, the police response to crime, bankruptcy, theft, blah, blah, blah. Fuck it. Those facts can be ignored since it’s nearly impossible to find a decent place in the city because they’re all rented up. Everywhere I go I’m seeing more people opening businesses, buying homes, riding their bikes, but occasionally it all has to come crashing down.

Because this city is fucking retarded.

Detroit is like someone who ate bad sushi the night before. They can’t stop throwing up or shitting and they don’t know which to fix first so they keep puking and shitting till they’re lying on the floor dying. On top of all that they’re really excited to eat the leftovers when they feel better. They just can’t fix it because they don’t know where to start.  All these feelings came about when I saw this.

Now, I’m not any sort of architectural expert but this building looks pretty pristine.  You look at that building and wonder why on God’s earth would anyone tear this building down and there’s no way the city will allow it. Then reality starts to creep in. And let the shitting commence.  Detroit has no idea what to do with anything.  When everyone took off to the burbs Detroit became a sort of a scumbag Monopoly game set for a bunch of rich dudes. Now they just sit on ass while their buildings collapse waiting for some guy with moneybags to ride in on a unicorn.

For example:
Look at the CPA building across the street from the now infamous train station. The dipshit is asking 1.2 million dollars for that building. Which probably won’t happen BUT might’ve had a better chance if it remained functional which it was ten years ago when it was occupied.  I’ve heard that the city actually came in and shut the building down because the owner was stealing power. Wait it gets better! The building got completely scrapped and on top of all that a man who was living on the second floor would walk up to the third floor and use a room for a toilet. Now there's a room in that building completely full of shit (TRUE STORY).

That is/was a beautiful building. Now it’s going to sit there until a bum fire turns it to ash because the city doesn’t have the balls to ticket him for violations for fear of this guy’s scumbag lawyers.  Not like city has anywhere to talk when it comes to their buildings.
Take the Burton International School on Pine Street and Trumbull.  The school closed probably no more than five years ago and I took a special liking to it because it has a full court basketball hoop right in front of it.  All day and night I’d play pick up games with whoever passed by.  I remember playing one on one with a pastor, and with a young kid who was walking home from the hospital after getting a cast for his broken arm all in the same day.  I would dream about owning that building. I had no real idea what I would do with it but its beauty roused in me a sense of responsibility. I felt it was my duty to make sure this building didn’t end up like the constant stream of destroyed buildings decorated across our city. One day I ran into a gentleman who intended to buy the building. His idea was that he would turn the building into a business incubator. It would have an array of services that included a full sized industrial kitchen and people on-site to help with your business plan. People would rent a classroom for a hundred dollars and it would give them full access to everything. He wasn’t full of shit either.  I saw him over months where he introduced me to business partners and a small staff that was appraising the building. He would offer to give me a tour of the building. He was legit.  One day I ran into one of his staff and I asked her how it was going. 

This is why we can’t have nice things

She proceeded to tell me that in negotiations for the building the city had the power shut off.  Everyone started calling frantically reminding the city that when you cut the power you CUT THE ALARM. They would call everyday, and the city said they were taking care of it.  Which of course they never did and scrappers came in and caused three hundred thousand dollars in damage to the building. Tearing through walls for tiny pieces of whatever in the plumbing, throwing radiators down stairs.  With that the deal fell through and the city has another building that they let funnel down the toilet.  I was so fucking furious. If I saw a city official in that moment I would’ve worn their face Silence of The Lambs style. It’s so frustrating.  Fuck it let’s get a pizza.

HE AIN'T SAYING NOTHING FUCK HIM

You wanna react.

We've had a lot of viewpoints about the events pictured above including this knob so I thought I'd throw my hat in the ring and say my two cents since, well, I live in Southwest Detroit. 

First let's talk about the graffiti, seriously really bad throw-up guys. I was looking for more angles and a little bit more shade around the lettering.  Honestly though is this a fucking joke? You're saying no to hipsters now? There's like seven of them. Seriously S E V E N. Once there's a restaurant named after some bike part or an Urban Outfitters downtown(sorry dudes MooseJaw doesn't count) then you can start worrying. Till then just be happy someone wants to live in your neighborhood and open a business there.  Does anyone know what gentrification even means? It's tossed around as much as that other equally vague term "hipster." If people are going to start throwing those terms around lets start to understand what those terms actually define. Or actually lets not, because either one of these things are NOT A FUCKING PROBLEM IN DETROIT. The city had two million people siphoned down to roughly seven hundred thousand. It has a little room for everybody at this point. The problem is that I can't even write an article beyond a paragraph about this shit. I mean have you seen Vernor, the street that takes you up to Mexicantown and towards Southwest? One out of every four buildings is vacant. Every night when I drive home coming off Michigan Ave I'm shadowed by a giant fucking useless artifact, then from there I watch as both sides of the street are littered with empty buildings.  Seriously get the fuck over yourself  Southwest. Nobody is trying to tear down your food co-op for a Trader Joes. You have to GET a food co-op first.

What really irks me about the paint gizz that someone threw all over the place is the realization  just how useless newspapers are.  Some guy from the News wrote an article about this? Everyone with eyes in their face know that one or two guys did this over the span of one evening. It's not like some wide spread protests.  He interviews some kid at Mercury, and calls it a "locals vs hipsters turf war." Yes, he really wrote that.  By just the third paragraph even the writer had a enough sense to confirm that "you shouldn't read too much into it" than proceeds to, you know, read too much into it.

I understand why people wanna live in Southwest. It still has an incredible amount of businesses including grocery stores. It's one of the few neighborhoods in the city that's completely self-sufficient  There's Clark Park, and neighborhoods with kids playing along the streets backdropped by beautiful homes. But cars still get broken into at an alarming rate. A friend of mine had to put a car alarm in his old shitty Neon because someone tried to steal it twice...IN A WEEK. Some time ago I heard a woman screaming, this wasn't just a light screaming it took over the entire sky and echoed down the street. I ran down my stairs and out the front door only to realize it was coming from the alley. As I ran to the other end of my house I grabbed a butcher knife on the way out the back door. I headed towards the alley when I saw a woman who was completely naked running down the alley towards a house. Just then my neighbor who owned the house the woman was running towards came out, he immediately ran back inside and grabbed a coat for her and called the police. There was no need to call the police because a woman who owned a house along the alley was yelling from her window into a phone explaining everything that was happening to the dispatcher.  There was another scream coming from a car of a man that was, I thought, calling the name of the woman. The woman said that she was getting raped and when she asked to go pee ran from the car. This was behind my house. I waited until the police arrived and went back inside. I still live here. My friend with the shitty Neon still lives here. This is our neighborhood now too. For better or worse. Fuck you.

WELCOME BACK

    Some time last week I noticed a post from a friend was looking for hip-hop music to listen to on a road trip. I started going through a mental catalog and trying to decide what I would recommend to her.  By the time I ran into her she had already returned from her trip. Having spent all this time trying to figure out what were some of my favorite artist’s songs, what would be good bangers for a road trip, what songs I’ve always believed were amazing but ultimately slept on I thought it would've been a waste if nobody got to see it. So here it is.  With that, I decided to further it by trying to do something like this weekly.  A lot of my friends love hip-hop but don’t have the time or patience to navigate through hours of bullshit mixtapes, singles, remixes to find the one decent track. Hopefully you can come to this on a weekly basis and grab some beats to bump in your sea foam green Ford Focus...

I heard this for the first time last week and can’t believe this slipped by me. I actually quietly got mad at myself for never hearing this track when it came out. It’s a Lil C beat that sounds like he just straight robbed Mannie Fresh’s hard drive. Jeezy details the life of the gangsta. These gangstas seem to really like him because “they’re on his phone and at his shows.” Hopefully not both because that’s some stalker type shit. 

I picked up this CD about six years ago at of all places the Birmingham Public Library. They had about six hip-hop CDs four of which were Slim Shady garbage, a Black-Eyed Peas disaster (seriously who listens to that shit? I wanna know. Everything they write sounds like it should be on a Jock Jams comp that you have to listen to while drinking a skunk pee smoothie in Hell) and Young Dro. 

A T.I. protege that was part of his Pimp Squad Click, Young Dro is mostly know for the hit “Shoulder Lean” in 2006 and has ever since been trying to break back into the mainstream or at least stay relevant through the mixtape circuit. What I don’t understand is why he even disappeared because his “Best Thang Smokin” album is so fucking good. Nearly every track is a banger.  100 Yard Dash starts the album and it never stops.

Ghostface Killa is one of the top five lyricists of the last twenty years.  It’s only because he hasn’t got shot and/or he's part of the greatest hip-hop group of all-time that he gets forgotten about.  If anyone wants to challenge this just listen to Supreme Clientele, then Fishscale, THEN Ironman, and finish it off with Only Built 4 Cuban Links.  He’s a monster. This is off his forgotten Bulletproof Wallets album.  It’s forgotten because it largely sucks.  Go to any hip-hop bargin bin and there’s a good chance you’ll find this album. It’s like he blew his load on Supreme Clientele and just decided to smoke weed and make pancakes(and that’s exactly what he’s doing on the record cover) rather go hard on the follow-up. This song is an all encompassing example of the entire record. The beat is dope, Ghost’s flow is great, and then all of the sudden for no reason whatsoever this awful female singer comes in and sings on a completely different beat and takes a dump on the whole song. M.I.A would later do a better job at using the chorus sample on one of her tracks.  But even a sub-par Ghost track is better than sixty-percent of the shit out there.  Just plug your ears during the chorus. 

Black Milk-

Detroit.

Rep It. 

This track has one of the best descriptions on the state of our city right now. Paints an amazing picture in just three verses.

“It’s Liquor Store, Liquor Store, Church, Church, Liquor Store, Gas Station, Coney Island that’s where all the N*ggas go. Only thing you never see is cleaner streets and bigger homes. On the streets all you see is church, church liquor store. Man it’s pitiful…” 

End it with an instrumental.  I don’t know what the fuck this is but the beat is bangin! Waiting for Danny Brown or somebody to shit on it. Girls are getting dry humped all over the dance floor to this.

Things I Hate About Detroit

I’m going to spend a lot of time on this blog riding Detroit’s dick hard.  I love this city. I truly do.  Not just for it’s “potential” either.  It’s a viable, creative, fun city.  Yet it has it issues. Just so people don’t think that I’m walking around with horse blinders on I'm going to list a few things I hate about Detroit.  And it’s not just going to be crime and lack of grocery stores. You can take that shit to your Grandma’s house in Wixom.  It’s just everyday little nuisances that if changed would help the city greatly.

1. Nobody Knows How To Parallel Park.

    Seriously, back your car up to where you can’t see the bumper in your rearview mirror.  Don’t worry about tapping the car behind you.  It’s called a bumper for a reason. I know, I know, nobody is even going to park in front of you.  I mean who eats at Le Petite Zinc on Sunday? Oh yeah, fuckin everybody.

2.      Nobody Uses Their Turn Signal.

    Again I don’t know if this is the symptom of the press telling everyone how empty our city is or it’s just a general lack of awareness for the people around you. Either way it’s completely frustrating.  Driving behind someone who makes an abrupt, halting stop only to turn into a gas station is unnerving when it happens as a rarity imagine when it happens often.  And by often I mean ALL THE TIME. As in almost every drive.  It’s already bad enough that you have to take an extra amount of time at every stop sign just in case the car approaching decides to ignore the stop sign in front of him. Now I have to keep a distance from the car in front of me just in case they don’t feel like doing that thing with their finger. You know, that thing, right next to your steering wheel that goes up or down depending on where you plan your movement.  It’s one of the highlights of technological advancement. Try it sometime.

           

      3.   Walking

          A lot of our time in Detroit is spent driving.  What can really be frustrating is when you want to actually walk around the city.  Most drivers look at you like they're staring at a Yeti.  "Should I let him pass?" Wait why is he not passing?"  BECAUSE YOUR CAR IS STILL CREEPING TOWARDS THE STOPLIGHT!  I'm not going to walk in front of a moving vehicle no matter how slow it's going.  Unlike any other city where the driver has to be attentive for people walking around, most drivers treat it like an rare annoyance when someone is walking or biking in a city filled with 800,000 people.  

      Look that those people, using their feet, the nerve.  

      

      4.    I Want Thai Food At Three In The Morning.

    Any functional, burgeoning city needs to have a place where you can get Thai food at three in the morning.  New York. Chicago. L.A.  I’m not saying but I’m saying. 

5.   Robocop Statue

     Hey Brandon Whalley your Robocop statue can fuck off.  If this is some type of pop art project you are officially the Kim Kardashian of the art world.  Your shit is weak, talentless and lacks any depth of thought.  Which you’ll probably reply something all high-brow like, “well that’s the whole concept of pop art.” To which I’ll just want to kick you in the nuts. You know what, screw it, I’m going to get a kickstarter going to get a statue of Axel Foley, and, I don’t know, The Crow. The Crow’s from Detroit right?  And you know what, you people, you, you just don’t get it.

                                             stay tuned for my bronze statue Axel Foley kickstarter

6.     Shitty Landlords

    A major complaint I hear from anyone looking to open a place in the city or move into a building is the lack of reasonable, intelligent property owners. It seems that all this press has given these people the illusion that they’re sitting on a gold mine.  That if you approach them about opening a business in their storefront they, don’t have to white box it for you, or give you any of the rent off as you repair what they should have fixed.  You would think that it would be easy to find a place to open a shop in so many closed up storefronts. Yet I’m hearing more and more complaints about the difficultly of finding a place that isn’t a mess, ran by someone who is either rude and/or completely void of reality when it comes to their property.

There you have it.   Just a few things.  Again this will probably be one of the last complaints you'll hear from me about Detroit.  Most of these complaints are things I hear over and over from people.  So hopefully we can find a remedy to the problems now that they're out in the open.  

Next weeks post we’re going to go on a little field trip in order to put to rest some things that are always being said about our city. Come join me. K?

Snooze Detroit

    Over the last couple days there’s been a lot of talk about the recent articles between Toby Barlow and the Rabbi as they argue about who is an “actual” Detroiter on the Huffington Post.  I’ve had this same conversation with people many times.  People from the suburbs love to rep the city all the while never engaging in the city except for going to sports games, Fox Theatre or whatever the fuck can get you in and out of the city in a few hours.  Politics, crime, or our adult illiteracy problems aren’t a concern  as much as the carnival of Suh stomping on motherfuckers takes their attention.  What Toby Barlow was trying to explain was that the people who use the bad news to just reinforce their existing views need to come down here and see the city in a different light.  The problem is those people nine times out of ten don’t read Huffington Post.  I know the internet age is allowing groups of people to interact and share ideas but the people that live in my old neighborhood don’t go onto HuffPost to explain their feelings about Detroit.

 And to be honest I don’t want them to.

             I don’t want Toby to be the spokesman for the city.  Some guy who collects six figures at a business that’s called Team Detroit based in Dearborn doesn’t really do much to solidify his argument.  Talking about having the ability to get your dry cleaning done in the city doesn’t really touch a cord with my family of GM retirees.  Or even with me for that matter. I can’t imagine people reading this article and being like, “wait, you can get your dry cleaning done in the city! Fuck it pack your bags kids we’re moving to the D!”

            The people that are complaining about not having a Target in the city aren’t going to understand what’s trying to be built within the city anyways.  We’re trying to build a new community.  Many of my friends have created businesses, bought homes, opened spaces, booked shows, not for the sole purpose of, cross your fingers, having a Trader Joe’s built in Detroit they’re doing it because they believe in the city.  Warts and all.  The politics in this city affect them but it’s not like the City of Chicago’s politics isn’t full of corruption as well.

            At the end of the Craig Fahle show Rabbi Jason Miller told a story about how he went to a Lions game and as he was leaving, outside the stadium, there was an abandoned building that was probably used as a “crack den.” Craig Fahle just about burst a blood vessel in his head when he heard that he was so pissed.  The truth came out.  Among this honest intellectual dialogue came the shattering conclusion that the Rabbi had the same ignorant view of the city as anyone from the suburbs and he ACTUALLY visits the city often.  We’ve got a lot of work to do…. 

P.S. Fuck that dude.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/toby-barlow/detroit-meet-detroit_b_1097133.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rabbi-jason-miller/im-a-detroiter-too-a-resp_b_1106736.html

http://wdetfm.org/shows/craig-fahle-show/episode/podcast-craig-fahle-12-1-2011/

Re-Up

 

                      Too Many Cookies

                                                                                         Gucci Face

                                                                                           Stay Focused

                                                                                              Brrrrrrrr