Paradigm Shift!

Out on the wiley, windy moors
We'd roll and fall in green
You had a temper, like my jealousy
Too hot, too greedy
How could you leave me?
When I needed to possess you?
I hated you, I loved you too

Bad dreams in the night
They told me I was going to lose the fight
Leave behind my wuthering, wuthering
Wuthering Heights

(Chorus) Heathcliff, its me, Cathy come home
I'm so cold, let me in-a-your window

Oh it gets dark, it gets lonely
On the other side from you
I pine alot, I find the lot
Falls through without you
I'm coming back love, cruel Heathcliff
My one dream, my only master

Too long I roam in the night
I'm coming back to his side to put it right
I'm coming home to wuthering, wuthering,
Wuthering Heights

(Chorus)
Oh let me have it, let me grab your soul away
Oh let me have it, let me grab your soul away
You know it's me, Cathy
(Chorus)

A Leg Up

This blog is a lot of things, but I never expected that it would become what it has. This post is about just that: the unexpected creation of reality.

A few months ago, I posted about Tetris, one of my favorite games. Now, I'm not one for re-runs, but that post got me thinking about the viability of writing about Tetris in an academic setting. Due to the connections I drew to Confucian ideology of ritual and instinct, I pitched it to my philosophy professor and in the end wrote about this very issue for my final research paper in Confucianism and Virtue Ethics this past semester.

This is as much about the willingness of my professor to allow such a discussion take place, but because of the time I had spent composing my thoughts into writing on this blog, it made it easy to pitch this as a meaningful analogy and literal example of Confucian ritual. Because it was about something I care about deeply, the paper was engrossing to write and I think it turned out pretty well. There has actually been some scientific studies on the effects of Tetris linking it to brain development, specifically thickening the cerebral cortex. It's even been intimated as a "cognitive vaccine" for post-traumatic stress disorder. I would never have discovered this had I not been able to dip my toes in the waters of this blog.

Now, there's a lot of writing going on here at LegLeg, much of it is incredibly relevant to what's going on in popular culture, and it could very well serve as a jumping off point for further more "legitimate" forms of written work. This is the proof. What began one night as a kind of jest has become a consistent launching pad and work space for thoughts rendered from the impenetrable granite that is the internet. It makes me think about what a blog is for, really. College students spend so much time thinking about what other people think, getting trained to think quicker, more broadly, more specifically, and with confidence. Is a blog in this context about escaping from the framework of imposed subjects in order to apply our new cerebral methodologies to what we want to think about?

Or maybe we're learning more from this forum than we think, and it's fueling thoughts that might not have coalesced had we not taken this opportunity to say whats up. In any case, I'm just expressing my gratitude to the series of tubes that we call home, it's given me a leg up.

 

Wolfman

My dude Lucas over at Thoughts From The Wolf just finished an epic piece on the state of racial politics in America today. Among other things, he discusses the white middle class's love of hip hop, Michael Moore as a "White Nationalist," and the Tea Party movement. Read it, it's worth your time.

kill too hard

Lil' Wayne is going to be in jail soon. He's going to be out of our lives for a long time, and we need to think about that.

I believe in the metaphor "spreading yourself too thin." I think it can be a real thing, overextension to the point where the ends no longer justify the means, or where quality of the product suffers at the hands of overproduction. And that's the metaphor people have been tossing around in regards to Wayne, Lil'. Whether it's his involvement in rock and roll, or his constant outpouring of verses and obscure features, people are saying that dude has gone too far, lost the talent that put him on the map in the first place. That he needs to slowwwww downnnnnnn.

So let's dig in to this metaphor a little bit, "spreading yourself too thin." The implication being that rapping/making music is like "spreading," that one has a limited amount of butter, or art, to spread with, and if they choose a piece of toast too big, they'll be wasting their skills. Okay. So the toast is ambition, the butter is artwork or music, and the act of creation is not unlike labor. That all makes sense to me. But in regards to Weezy F. Baby, this conceals the truth. It implies that the butter is an object outside of the artist, an external, material rendering of his talent that is then packaged and sold to the consumer on the basis of taste. Furthermore, it implies that the artist has chosen to enter into relations with his field in the same way one might choose a summer job. That is, he wakes up in the morning and decides to get the butter out of the fridge.

The problem is that we can't talk about Lil' Wayne in a conventional way, with conventional phrases like "spread too thin." We must recognize that for Weezy art is not the "externalization" or "initiated activity" that the butter metaphor implies, but a constant state of internal creation, second nature, the result of which just so happens to be art. He's the first rapper to truly be raised in rap, encountering it in the same way that one might encounter their first language. At age 11, he was virtually adopted by the rapper and CashMoney CEO Birdman. At 13, he accidentally shot himself with a .44. At 15, he joined Hot Boyz and spit his first major label verse. We know the rest of the story.

What we're witnessing with Weezy, then, is rap music growing up and raising its children (I mean goddamn, Jay-Z is 41!). And like any good adolescent, Lil' Wayne is finding ways of rejecting the image of his parents, dabbling in rock and roll music with his album Rebirth, and taking the concept of "grind" to the extreme by generating an endless amount of material. And it may just so happen that some think this art is "bad" (or, like me, they don't), but maybe we should consider that what we're judging may not be art in any traditional sense of the word at all, but the result of a person trying to express their emotions, thoughts, and dreams, etc in the only way they know how, hip hop.

So when Weezy goes to Riker's, I think we're going to realize just how significant he really is to this rap thing. It's impossible to imagine the rap world without him, just like it's impossible to imagine Lil' Wayne without rap. The timbre of his voice is so recognizable that you might imagine producers wanting a Weezy feature in the same way they want a heavy synth line or a wicked drum sample, so deeply has he permeated the collective aural life. And in doing so, he has not spread himself too thin, but instead covered the entire planet in a thick, syrupy coating of butter.

Subject: Care to Lax, Bro's? [sic]

Gents,

Spring is almost here.  That means a few things.  It could be time to start building a base at Sol Tanning Center, start stockpiling for 4/20 before prices get too high, or plant seeds with girls lacrosse players who will finally lose all the weight they put on in the fall/winter.  Indeed, second semester is a busy, busy time.

But more importantly, the spring marks the beginning of the club lacrosse season.

As the most exclusive and renowned team at the infamous Tech, we have a responsibility to lax at a high level, drink at a higher level, and look great while doing it.  If you like doing any of these things, it would be in your best interest to show up for our first informational meeting at Usdan this Friday. Room TBA.  Shirts mandatory since its Usdan, I apologize for any inconvenience this causes.

Love,

Gary

Michael Marcovici: an introduction

and part 2



Michael Marcovici is a retired financial planner and entrepreneur turned artist who works in many medias, from painting, photography, and sculpture to artistic online monetary fraud.