Conversations with Big Ra

Since I know most people now read this blog solely for a Big Ra anecdote, here it is. Big Ra told me Stack Bundles was his nephew. Big Ra is 36, Stack died when he was 24. I'm not quite sure how Big Ra is Stack's uncle, but there are a lot of things I don't understand in life.

While researching Mr. Bundles, I learned he only has a wiki entry in Deutch. And that is very reason many argue the European Union is ahead of us.

According his wiki (which I cheated and translated with Google), Juelz Santana, Jim Jones, Maino, Lupe Fiasco, Joe Budden and DJ Clue all attended his funeral. If each and everyone of those people are not at my funeral, then my whole life was a failure.

Gelfness

I kinda work/write for Gelf Magazine now. It's a dope online magazine that covers everything.

I interviewed Shawn Boburg for the magazine. Boburg writes for The Record in New Jersey and co-wrote "Becoming Manny" a biography on Manny Ramirez. The book was good, nothing great, but it was solid and I know know a lot about Manny's life pre-asterisk.

I interviewed Boburg in Washington Heights, Manny's residence between the Dominican Republic and Cleveland. It's where Manny grew up sharing a two bedroom apartment with his mom and two sisters and later where he shattered every record at George Washington High School. To my understanding GW is the Lincoln High School of baseball.

Boburg is a good guy and nice writer. Manny seems like a crazy dude and is a pretty good baseball player. But the real star of the book was Macaco, Manny's mentor, and arguably the trillest dude on earth.

Macaco is a good 30 years older than Manny, he was raised in the DR, then moved to Washington Heights where he helped found a baseball league and at one point coached six teams at once. He became Manny's mentor from early on and still is close with Manny. Since he has lived in the States, Macaco worked the graveyard shift in the local hospital. He still lives with his mother and niece in subsidized housing in Washington Heights. He's never asked Manny, who has roughly 94 zillion dollars, for a dime.

He sleeps a couple hours a day and spends the rest of his time hanging out at Peligro Sports, a baseball shop two blocks away from Manny's childhood home. Macaco is not an actual employee but he is always in the shop advising kids on what cleats and mitts to buy. Everyone in the neighborhood knows that if your glove breaks, Macaco will fix it for free.

With his royalties from the book, Macaco bought baseball gear to give out to the kids back in the DR.

I met Macaco in Peligro Sports when I was with Boburg and he was the coolest dude ever. A short old Latino guy, leathered skin, wearing some baggy jeans, a white tee with a blue Dodgers fitted resting atop his head.

Read my interview with Boburg here.

Also Gelf hosts a speaker series every Thursday night in DUMBO Brooklyn. If you live in the area come check it out. If you don't live here you can watch videos from the event online. My favorites of the events I have been to: New York Times writer Bruce Weber and Brooklyn Brewmaster Garrett Oliver.

Nice places

The person who buys this condo wins the game of life. That simple. Thanks to the New York Times for the article and pictures. Thanks to Sep for the link as he reads the Times much more thoroughly than I.

The condo is in my favorite part of the city, DUMBO, where my favorite eatery, Front Street Pizza, and my favorite park, Empire-Fulton Ferry State Park, are located. If anyone buys this for me I'll give you control of wherespmac.com, the rest of my Google account and I'll throw in a few pairs of sneakers.

Art: Part II

I needed some art to accompany the Willy Northpole promo poster on my walls. Unfortunately I did not have a uterus I could wrecklessly abuse, so my artistic options were severely limited.

Somehow I was able to expand my mind out of the hackneyed fetus-killing spectrum, and I decided to roll with an project I started a year ago. Back in the good ol' days I lived in Buenos Aires as a blissful 21-year-old without a care or responsibility in the world. Each day I would wake up, and look out my window to the gorgeous urban backdrop de mi barrio de Palermo. All was right in the world.

I should note that my life now is not that much different. I'm a year older. My neighborhood's dominant language is Puerto Rican Spanish instead of Argentine Castellano. I have very few responsibilities. I have a nice room with a nice window. However, now I spend most days freaking out about what the hell I am doing in life and why I have the same shitty job I had when I was a senior in high school. I am going to defer all blame for my unhappiness not on my own mind, which I could change easily, but on the American rat-race lifestyle. ¡Qué quilombo!

Back to the art talk. So I had a grip of photos from my Palermo window, all like the one above, except time-lapsed over three months. I was going to put them all together and blow minds in the process.

I printed all the pictures using Winkflash, which cost me 99 cents because Winkflash is dope. I built a base for the pictures out of wooden bed slats my roommate found on the street. I put it all together over a week because I was lazy. 42 pictures (queer art symbolism: Jackie Robinson) affixed by 84 small nails (queer art symbolism: Tip Drill 84).

Done deal. Final product.


Only problem. It looked better sans pictures.

So I kept the pictures on for a week, until I could not stand the artistic disaster any more. Then it hit me. Fuck all that remembering-the-greatest-time-of-your-life-in-Buenos-Aires stuff, why not just put a funny picture of Greg Oden on the boards? And since I happened to have my Greg Oden 8x10 I bought at the NBA store for 99 cents, I threw it on there and everyone lived happily ever after.


*****
While I am on the subject of home improvements (Jeezy ad-lib: Tim Taylor). I am going to post the work I did on my floor. My bedroom floor was messed up because the previous tenants were wastes of life who should have been part of Ms. Shvartz's art project (Jeezy ad-lib: aborted).

I wanted to support the local ma-and-pa store, but they did not have what I was looking for (Jeezy ad-lib: like that U2 song). So I decided to go Home Depot, which I actually prefer to a ma-and-pa store because I like thinking that my purchase puts money directly into Mike Vick's pockets (Jeezy ad-lib: Arthur Blank). And I really like Mike Vick. Plus my dad worked on Arthur Blank's house, so by shopping at Home Depot I am indirectly putting money in my own pa's pockets.

Before:


After:


I ended up only using an ounce of the $30-gallon of finish the schmuck at Home Depot said I would need (Jeezy ad-lib: I'm gonna return that shit). Sorry Mr. Blank, my dad and Mike Vick.

A buck twenty

Art: Part II will come, and surely disappoint, in due time. In the mean time I felt compelled to show some love to my boy Patrick Kane. In that sense "my boy" means "favorite player on a team I barely support of a league I barely follow" and "love" means "exploit the hilarity of his recent arrest."

Now I have a new reason to be a Patrick Kane fan. This incredible off-season police blotter.

The 20-year-old Chicago Blackhawks star and his cousin, James Kane, were arrested early Sunday morning after an alleged incident involving a cab driver in Patrick's home town of Buffalo.

A report in the Buffalo News said the Kanes paid for a $13.80 cab ride with $15 around 5 a.m. The cab driver claimed he didn't have the coins to give them the full $1.20 in change. The driver alleges that the Kanes then took the $15 back, punched the cab driver in the face, grabbed his throat and broke his glasses, according to police.

I really respect Kane for going above and beyond the trite star-athlete-gets-a-DUI story, which would have been too easy for Kane since he's under 21. Let's just all pray this was premeditated. For the record Kane makes $875,000 a year before bonuses and sponsorships.

Thanks for Seppy for sending me the original link.

Art: Part I

It's not ideal, but I have a silly restaurant job again. I hate working in the restaurant industry and I would prefer a job where I use my brain and possibly my college degree. But it pays the bills and it was the location for the following story.

I was forcing small talk with my coworker today who is 23 years old and has a lame mustache. He asked me what I do. This is an appropriate question because if you have white skin and work in a restaurant in New York City there is a 99 percent chance you are an "actor" or "musician," using both of those terms loosely. If your skin is not white and you work in a restaurant in NYC there is a 90 percent chance you are an "actor" or "musician" and an 8 percent chance you are working in this country illegally while being paid under the table.

I told him I am not sure what the hell I am doing in life and I guess that's why I am back in this silly industry. He told me he is musician, came to NYC in a band, they broke up, he still plays guitar, etc. He lives with his girlfriend, who is an performance artist. He told me his girlfriend was getting paid to get her performance artist graduate degree from New York University.

"Is she having any luck finding gigs?" I asked.

"No, she's a performance artist, not an actress, she does not do theater," he responded.

"What does she do?"

"For example a performance artist will sit in a museum and starve herself for seven days. That's not what my girlfriend does though. My girlfriend is actually kinda famous."

"Cool. What is something she has actually done?"

"Don't tell anybody in the restaurant this. I don't want people to know. Her last project was having nine abortions." (note: What I wrote above was the extent of our small talk, excluding the standard 'Where are you from?' 'Did you go to school?' I do not have a clue why he felt he could confide his secrets with me.)

"Wow," I said with the same deadpan expression I use whenever anybody says anything that ridiculous. "So you got her pregnant nine times?"

"No this was before we were dating," he calmly replied, acting as if nine abortions were the equivalent of twisting your ankle. "Her senior thesis was that she would get pregnant and then purposely take medicine that would make her miscarry."

"Oh, cool man," I said. Then I decided that was enough for today and I found an excuse to walk away.

I thought about his ridiculous story for a while. I'm not wildly pro-life or pro-choice, but I am pretty sure nine abortions is crossing some line.

I didn't tell anybody at work except for my friend Big Ra, the dishwasher, who happens to be the only person I really talk to at work.

In Arizona all the dishwashers were Mexican and spoke little, if any, English. I understood this as most of them were living in the country illegally and with a heavy communication barrier, washing dishes was the best job many of them could get.

I have no idea why able-bodied, English-speaking African-Americans wash all the dishes in my current restaurant. I keep waiting and hoping for them to make an ass out of me and tell me the entire history of BMW a la Jamal Wallace.

"Nine abortions! I ain't never heard of anything like that. Man that pussy must be tow' tha fuck up," Big Ra said.

"It's gotta be," I responded, withholding my it's-not-your-fault-but-society's-fault-for-raising-you-in-centralized-poverty-with-an-terrible-education-system-that-never-gave-you-a-fair-chance diatribe for yet another day.

I walked out of work thinking that perhaps my abortion-freak-dating co-worker was just an incredible bullshitter with a sense of humor far more deranged than even my own. Maybe the kid was just as bored as me, fabricated the grossest story of all time and laughed at me the whole night for actually believing it.

I got home. Googled "nine abortion performance art." The motherfucker was telling the truth.

Classic, shoulda went triple

My little brother Cameron aka "Ninny" was in the city last week and while we were walking around Allah blessed us with the gift that keeps on giving, Willy Northpole promo posters. The above picture is Cameron in front of a building hyping Arizona's greatest rapper while mean-mugging the camera. Not that Willy needs much hyping as his first album almost went platinum in its first week, and by "almost" I mean it sold 2,496 copies.

Below is a picture of me mean-mugging and repping Phoenix in front of the shrine to a lesser known artist.


Then we took the posters to their target audience, the guests of the Waldorf Astoria. As you can see in the pic I had to cover Willy's face because 50th Street and Park Avenue is the type of place where people will seriously fuck you up for a Willy Northpole promo poster that you ripped off a wall in Harlem.

Ninny also took these dope pictures.

Me mid-Diddy-bop.


This guy painting.


A green car (I took this one).


A helicopter (This is a Ninny masterpiece).