Zen-La-Rock – New Jack Your Body ft. BTB

Been lovin' this one for a while, and can't believe that I hadn't posted it to YKFS before now. Pump up the sound and enjoy.

My buddy went all the way to New York City...

...and all I got was this bad ass Jim Kelly t-shirt!!!

Mobile Mondays – DJ Darrell D Live in NYC

Two weeks ago, the homie Darrell D made another summer sojourn to NYC. As usual, he got a chance to rub shoulders with various legends of hip-hop at the park jams and elsewhere. Before breaking back to the Southwest desert, he brought the Arizona heat to the East Village as a guest deejay of Mobile Mondays at The Bowery Electric. Every Monday night, from 10PM to 4AM, Mobile Mondays unites local New York disc jockeys (Just Blaze, Misbehavior, Operatorz EMZ, Natasha Diggs, etc.) with visiting vinyl addicts from across the US and other parts of the groove-lovin' globe -- and they play strictly 45's all night. Now, I'm prolly a lil' biased, since Darrell D is my boy, but I've heard the MP3 of his time on the tables, and I think that he nearly burnt the Bowery down. You can hear (and judge) for yourself, though. Courtesy of The Bowery Electric, YKFS offers your lucky ears forty fiery minutes of funk, soul, hip-hop and Afrobeat grooves direct from Darrell D's Mobile Monday's set (click here)! To learn more about Mobile Mondays in NYC, click here.

DJ Darrell D & Mobile Mondays hostess, Gizmo

Distant Brothers – The Thai Connection

"Words with no apparent meaning, 
a Hindi script graffiti,
sprayed upon temple walls 
that have long ago decayed."
– St. Paco


There are no coincidences.

Really, it was only a few days ago that, while scrolling through the contacts in my phone, I briefly reflected on brutha' Damon when his name quickly passed under my eyes. I hadn't been in touch with my Afro coiffed partner-in-crime for some time, so a mental post-it™ note was made reminding myself to reach out and learn what he's been up to as of late. Three days later, before I'd even had a chance to make good on my intention, an e-mail arrived to let me know that Damon had shared a photo with me on his Flickr feed.

Spotted within the body of that electronic note, placed just above the link that would guide me to the image, was the title of my previously released poetry zine, Distant God Meditation. "What does...this mean?" I wondered, as my finger clicked the mouse to activate the link. Damon, a fantastic photographer and fellow designer, had already sent a snapshot several months back, showing the zine on his coffee table; his creative way of saying that the contents of my unanticipated envelope had arrived in the mail.

My eyelids widened and my jaws separated after his newest photo-telegram had loaded. Framed within its borders was the remarkable sight of my kung-fu-brutha-from-anotha-mutha, sitting in some time-worn temple -- with his now very travel-worn copy of Distant God Meditation in hand. "Didn't he just get back from Hong Kong not too long ago?" I thought through a widening fog of amazement. "How the heck did he wind up in...Thailand?"

After enlarging the photo, my pupils pored over the image, as I was still partly in disbelief that he had actually gone to Southeast Asia -- and that he'd taken the zine along with him. But, as my eyes panned from the bottom of a suede and nylon mesh hiking shoe, seen at the bottom of the shot, to the very point of a stone spire elevated high above his chocolate-colored Afro, it quickly became clear that this was not the work of Photoshop. Someone had been on a airplane.

In the film Amelie, the father of the title character has one of those vintage-looking garden gnomes that stands on the front lawn of his middle-class home. Early on in the film, that white-bearded figure gets gnome-napped and within days, Amelie's father begins to receive mysterious envelopes in the mail. Each one contains a photograph of the ceramic ornament, taken in the various spots around the world to which it had, somehow, journeyed. Studying the photograph sent by Damon, I began to feel a little like Amelie's father must have felt.

Last year, when the making of Distant God Meditation had been finished, I'd also felt something else, something that I really hadn't felt with the other publications I'd produced. The feeling emanated from a recurring daydream that I had about of this particular zine. To me, it just kinda' seemed like something that a reader could take with them as a not-too-heavy distraction on their crosstown bus ride. Or, even better, while aboard a long flight to some far-flung destination.

I'm not completely sure now if that musing of mine had been mentioned to Damon. Whether it was or not, he still managed to do my imagination one better by taking that work into the discolored ruins of a 12th century Buddhist temple in Thailand.

To see the photograph that inspired this post, click here. To see more photos by Damon (aka Super 巧克力 Chocolateur), click here.

[Press-N-Play®] Sizemen – Chao Phraya River

And speaking of Thailand...

[Press-N-Play®] Sizemen – Chao Phraya River
[Press-N-Play®] Sizemen – Intro Shadow Funeral

RZA on the power of imagination

  I was playing with my son and he goes "shoo-shoo"––making like he's shooting powers at me. "I'm sending my powers at you!" he'd yell. And the first time he did it, I said, "You know, that really won't hurt anybody."
   But the second time he did it, I didn't say that to him. Because I thought about it and realized that if you really have that will and that chi energy, and that understanding, who knows? Maybe you can fuck someone up that way. That thirty-sixth chamber in martial arts, that's the one where the fighter just forces energy at his opponent and knocks him across the room. So I don't want to take that away from a child.
   It's imagination. To imagine means to image. And once you make an image, you can make flesh. It's power upon power. And it's real. That power, that force--if you let it, it can move mountains.

– RZA

Source: The Wu-Tang Manual, pg. 87

The Deadly Hands of Kung Fu – Collect 'em all!

One thing that every collector realizes early on is that there will always be something new (or old) on the horizon that will trigger the desire to covet  hoard collect. My present guilty pleasure is the Marvel-affiliated magazine Deadly Hands of Kung Fu. Published during the kung-fu craze of the 1970s, this eye-gougingly good mag ran for 33 issues, between 1974 to 1977. In addition to serialized black and white comic strips starring a rotating cast of characters like Shang-Chi, Iron Fist, White Tiger, Daughters of the Dragon and others, each issue of Deadly Hands of Kung Fu also offered great interviews, articles, pop culture reviews, and so much more. How it was that not a single issue of this series was represented in my collection is worthy of a Scooby Doo Mystery. But the oversight has been corrected. Thanks to Ebay, I now own five of the seven or so issues that have piqued my interest: Since the Iron Fist comic book runs of Marvel Premiere 15-25 is complete, and Iron Fist 1-15 is one issue away from being complete, I'm focusing on the Deadly Hands issues that feature this kick ass character. I've got some classics, true believers. Check 'em out.

 

 

 Click to enlarge

[Press-N-Play®] Shaq ft. Rakim – Game of Death

[Press-N-Play®] Shaquille O'Neal ft. Rakim – Game of Death

Retrospective – Nike's "Chamber of Fear" Ads Featuring LeBron James (circa 2004)

 

 

 

Nike's "Chamber of Fear" starring LeBron James and Jim Kelly, circa 2004.

Jim Kelly – Requiem for a Fighter

Jim Kelly, who passed away on June 29th, was the star of Black Belt Jones (1974). It was the first martial arts movie that I ever saw up on the silver screen. Although only five-years-old at that time, I still easily recall many of the details of that evening. Uppermost among them was the excitement that I felt walking out of the theater into the night with my parents and four-year-old sister--and how she and I launched little kung-fu kicks into air on our way to the family car.

Like so many other African-American children who grew up in this country in the immediate aftermath of the civil rights struggle, the gulf between movie heroes and heroines within whom we could regularly see our brown faces reflected was both deep and vast. But along with actors like Diane Carroll, James Earl Jones, Richard Pryor, Bill Cosby, Billy Dee Williams, Teresa Graves, and a smattering of others, Jim Kelly was one of the proudly watched, though rarely visible few.

Admittedly, for me in those very formative years it was Muhammad Ali and Bruce Lee who were my two biggest pop culture idols. But Jim Kelly was placed high among them on very short list. And though he had only appeared in a few films -- even fewer of which were actually good films -- the impression that he made on me, and so many others like me, was positive, strong, and long lasting.

Nearly four years ago this month, while attending the San Diego Comicon in 2009, I had the unexpected pleasure of meeting Jim Kelly. And though I've never been much in the way of anybody's fanboy, I found myself that day temporarily awestruck. But then, for me, there was actually so much more involved with meeting Jim Kelly than just meeting Jim Kelly.  

In the theoretical principle of six-degrees of separation, it's said that a connection between any two people located anywhere in the world could be established through the identification of five or fewer shared acquaintances. You know such-and-such, who knows so-and-so, who knows blasé-skippy-woo-woo. Well, because Jim had known both Lee and Ali, being in his presence for that brief moment made me feel somehow much more closely connected to all of my boyhood idols. 

Yesterday, in the wake of Jim’s passing, my buddy Joe Doughrity (Akira's Hip-Hop Shop) gave a touching remembrance on his Facebook page. There he mentioned that he'd also met Jim at a comic convention. But this meeting was much more recent than mine, having occurred just in the past few months. Fortunately, due to the growing popularity of such conventions, people like he and I will often get a chance to shake the hands of some of the pop culture figures that we looked up to as kids. Master Jim Kelly was one of them.

Feeling a tad bit overwhelmed at the moment, and losing my way on just how I should close this post, I’ll defer to Joe, who I think summed it best when he said of Master Kelly that: "He fought the good fight."

That he did, true believers. That he did. 

Click to enlarge

Mama said knock you ouuuuuut!

Set Adrift on Chocolate Memory Bliss

Click to enlarge

Not that there's any reason to even recall this, but I forgot that Chicago's Beatrice Foods was once the home of some of America's sweetest candy treats. These include Milk Duds, Slo Poke and Black Cow suckers. As early as the 1920s, these cavity causers had been made in Chicago by the Holloway Company. In the early 1960s, Holloway was bought by Beatrice Foods. Around that same time, the Clark Company of Pittsburgh (maker of Clark and Zagnut bars) was bought up by Beatrice's expanding candy empire.

By the end of the following decade, it was a familiar sight to find text-heavy centerfolds in the pages of comic books that advertised Beatrice & Holloway's "Infamous Milk Duds Superduds Sweepstakes!" First place winners were awarded with an all expenses paid trip to New York City. While there in the rotten apple, the winner and their guests (limit 4) would be given a tour of the offices of either Marvel or DC Comics. Even better, an artist would draw the lucky winner's sweet-toothed likeness into the pages of their favorite comic.

Well, as happenstance would have it, while on my break at work yesterday I found myself noticing the Clark candy bars perched in the spiral rings of the snack machine. I'm still not sure as to why they caught my eye, I was never particularly a fan of Clark bars. In fact, as far as crunchy peanut butter bricks covered in milk chocolate went, the Butterfinger (another well-known candy originally made in Chicago) was always so much yummier.

But then today, with the Clark bars in the snack machine at work still hovering at the back of my brain, I happened across one of those old Superduds Sweepstakes ads. After focusing on a small image of the Clark bar's blue and red wrapper at the top of a cut-out entry blank, I had a realization: Save for Milk Duds and maybe Zagnut, I never see any of Clark's fellow candies anymore. Are any of 'em still even made? And as my thoughts reached for the remnants of sugar sweetened memories, I found myself gripped with a gnawing pang for the tastes of days gone by.

[Press-N-Play] Doom, Are You Awake?

[Press-N-Play®] MF Doom – Doom, Are You Awake?
[Press-N-Play®] MF Doom – ? ft. Kurious

Fuck This Noise! – Beatrice Foods Building, 1987

 

 

Fuck This Noise! Raven & Upski. Chicago, 1987

Kanye West + ReggieKnow + Toy Tokyo

CHANNELZEROTV.COM presents the never-before-seen clip "Chicago Hip Hop 101", starring Kanye West and his trusty, fashion forward barber, Ibn Jasper. Filmed in the years prior to the release of the multi-platinum Roc-A-Fella debut album "College Dropout", we join the duo mid-haircut as Kanye drops knowledge on the iconic Chicago hip-hop fixtures they grew up with. Along with in-depth narration by Kanye, we bring you exclusive CREATIVECONTROL.TV footage of the Toy Tokyo gallery showing hosted by Fashion Figure, Inc.'s creator and stylist, ReggieKnow aka "Polo Reg". Shot & Chopped by: Danny Joe Sorge and Directed by: Coodie & Chike

Published on Apr 17, 2013

Kickin' Live Productions – I Got Rhythm

[Press-N-Play®] Kickin' Live Productions – I Got Rhythm

Fanboy letter to BROTHERMAN, circa 1992

 Dear Sims Bros.,

I have just finished reading Brotherman: Dictator of Discipline number 5, and as I type this letter, I continue to admire the book's fantastic illustrations. Dave Sims' art is unique, innovative and quite distinctive of urban youth subculture. May I say that Brotherman is a graffiti artist's dream? The "ERUPTION" splash-page was striking, and the last panel of page 14 resurrected memories I retain that only few individuals could share: remnants of broken glass, soda pop cans and empty spray paint cans intermingling on a 'Big City' rooftop. Humph! Knowotimean?

Dave's art coupled with Guy's amusing, insightful, poignant prose provides each reader with a captivating street-level view of life in the megapolis...or a view from the underground, if you will, which brings me to my point. A book like Brotherman: Dictator of Discipline is a gem in the comics genre. It is a gem because it is one of the only such books in which graffit art or urban art is presented in such a professional manner. "A View From Da' Underground" by Tramp, Hayz and Cee, printed in The Source is one other such gem. But gems indeed are rare.

Hence, it is my hope to one day see other innovative illustrators like Tramp, Hayz and Cee--and still others like Pikasso--contributing toward the expansion of this art form in comics. It would also be a privilege to see famed graffiti artists like Dondi, Futura, Gnome, Seen and Skeme providing diverse interpretations of cover art for Brotherman comics.

Peace in the East.

PDT
Chicago, IL

Click to enlarge

Letter originally published in Brotherman: Dictator of Discipline #6, 1992

Samuel L. Jackson on pursuing his new dream

David Carradine on superheroes

"When I was a little kid I read a comic book called Supersnipe. This maybe six-year-old kid was the world's biggest comic fan, and he dressed up in baggy red long johns with the window in the back, plus a cape and a little black mask, and went around trying to fight crime and stuff. But in a couple of the stories, he actually became Supersnipe, over six feet tall, with lots of muscles and skintight long johns, but still with this tiny six-year-old head on top of it all. And it wasn't exactly a dream in the stories; the daring deeds really did get done.

"Well, I was the world's greatest comic fan, and I got my grandmother to sew me a superhero costume and tried to fly in it, off the garage roof. I really believed this stuff, and I'm not embarrassed to say I still do... Superhuman abilities are a lot of fun. Rarely in the comic books do they get into the price. It's heavy, as I remember. But, hey, you live only an infinite number of times, so why not make yourself useful."

– David Carradine
Source: The Kill Bill Diary, pg. 131

Esthero – Superheroes

 "Stay a while longer, sweet tongue of fur and feather / There is a white breast, waiting for you here / Between the superheroes and the electric blanket, it's warm..."

[Press-N-Play®] Esthero – Superheroes
[Press-N-Play®] Esthero – Country Livin'