Behind The Scenes: Great Scott

Phil might try to sue me for this but...

Madbury Coming Soon!

SoHo

Thank You

No matter how the holiday originated or why it is popular it has definitely become a time that brings family together. People make plans a month ahead on where they are going to eat and how much they are going to eat. You seek out cousins that you honestly can't stand any other time of the year and embrace uncle's that can't even remember your name or how your related all to eat more than you thought your stomach could hold and past out not too long after the utensil's are down.

Striped bass based in paprika and old bay seasonings sautéed in a soup of cooking oil, onions, scallion, red peppers, green peppers, tomato's, thyme, scallion and garlic, on a bed of cilantro, on a very low fire.

Hope you all enjoyed your Thanksgiving Day feast.

SoHo

Attention to Detail

This picture is genius. 

With that idea out of the way I just want to welcome Eric Koston to the Nike team, it's a great company to work for and it is only a matter of time before the people outside of the street wear/ sneaker culture realize that Nike runs the world. While half-heartedly watching the Orlando Magic string along a game against the Miami Heat and searching for some new content to be content with I stumbled onto the Hypebeast site where I caught a glimpse of this picture.

Watching the video interview with Koston one theme remained constant in my mind "this guy really appreciates a good trainer". A lot of people that are fans of good trainers are only fans of the way the trainer looks and disregard the way it wears, the level of comfort or the craftsmanship that goes into the complete production. To me it's the little things that make the trainers really good. However when you take someone that really appreciates the minor details that go into the creation of a trainer and give them the opportunity to design trainers that person is going to put together some great trainers.

source

 

SoHo

The Classics

Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel

There was a time when men dressed as men.

 

SoHo

The Good Fellas

photo credit: Cre 

When I saw this picture I thought back to when I first became aware of the existence of these two very individual individuals and the whole Award Tour movement. The year was 2005, Demetri and I went to the same school and his fly gear was getting him a lot of recognition and forced on lookers to compare him to people two grades ahead of him. Juice was infamous at that time for being a free spirit. He basically did what he wanted to, when he wanted to & regardless of what you think of him he demands your respect. P & I didn't formerly meet up with these two and the rest of the crew until 2006 at a fashion show in Brooklyn due to the fact that there was a mutual friend at the time doing everything in his power to ensure that we all never became friends. 

It's been three years and some months since the first time I met these guys and what I must say that it was a beautiful day in space when we all met because it was like we all instantly became family. I can go weeks without talking to Juice but when we link up again something happened to one of us that the other completely understands and we just happen to be building on the same ideas. Demetri and I think so much alike that I can almost predict his moves. More recently I've been calling him my nephew due to a situation I had to help him out of in which I impersonated his uncle.

They say blood is thicker than water but I believe when you actually choose the people that you want to consider family it is a stronger bond than the family you are born into. 

"No man alive can divide this family." LaRon James

 

SoHo

Style Doesn't Fade

featuring: Reezy

Cool is determined by someone who was cool enough to do something not already considered cool.

SoHo

Kicking & Screaming

Life is a road. On this road you will encounter many potholes some of which can seriously damage your drive and possibly sidetrack you. This can cause stress so intense that you feel like the walls are closing in and you are sitting in the corner just watching everything in the room fall apart. You feel compelled to do something for your survival but you feel completely helpless; so what do you do?

You scream. 

There is nothing wrong with screaming. From time to time we all need to scream, so scream & let it all out.

SoHo

C.R.E.A.M

E-Money Lopez

 

You win.

 

SoHo

Create a Pattern

When it comes to style Michael and I took two different roads however we always seem to end up at the same gas station so to speak.

When people started saying that the BBC/ Ice Cream and Bathing Ape trend was over I asked Michael if he was going to stop wearing it and he laughed. He laughed so hard it made me laugh because at that moment we both realized that for him it was never about the fact that everyone else liked it, he wore it because he likes it.

SoHo

The Ripple's in Life...

When you drop a stone in a serene pond it creates a ripple effect on the water that can go from one end of the pond to the other if the force of the stone is strong enough. A collective of the ripples then create a pattern. A similar thing happens when you wear certain clothing. You create a ripple in the sea of people that are dressed a like. In a group effort to be so different we have managed to look more alike than ever before. So when someone different actually appears that presence is much like that stone in the pond causing ripples to go through the stagnant sea.

I like to look at clothing as an expression of the person wearing it. You can tell whether the wearer is really into style or if the article of clothing was just purchased because everyone is wearing it just by paying attention to small details. You can tell if someone really cares for a certain clothing line or if they just want to wear it because everyone else thinks it’s cool.

SoHo 

Spread Love...

The coolest people that you know play in the city but they live in Brooklyn. 

Love is necessary for anything to positively progress.

There is love in Brooklyn.

SoHo

The Movement

Some say they are down for the cause but they don't even know what the cause is. What are we fighting for and whom are we fighting? These questions never get asked so no one really has the answers. There is nothing wrong with standing up for what you believe in but be sure that you know exactly what you are getting involved in.

 SoHo

Perception Is To Perceive

The art of perception is to perceive. 

I am mastering the art of perception. When is a tree not a tree? When you realize that it is a man. Life is built on the foundation of perception. What happens as opposed to what doesn’t happen doesn’t matter because what ever you think happened, happened. Whatever you see your mind perceives as REAL unless you’ve trained your mind to think outside of the constraints of the five senses. The beauty in photography is perception. Politics is perception. Life & death is perception. So it is safe to say we are what we perceive because perception is the basis upon which everything that you internalize is born. Art is perception.

SoHo

The Naked Truth

When I came across this picture I was moved for a couple reasons. My first reaction was am I seeing what I think I'm seeing? Are my eyes deceiving me or is she completely naked? Upon enlarging the picture my mind was reassured of what my eyes were viewing; the model in the picture is completely naked. Then I let out a laugh that would have scared anyone within earshot of my genuinely maniacal howl. What I realized in my second thought was something that most people wouldn't this picture is deeper than your mind would first conceive. 

There is a Chanel bag covering the head of the model and she is in heels however that is all she is wearing. So rather than explain what I think about this picture I'll ask you this: when you buy high priced, high fashion articles of clothing what are you really buying into?

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SoHo

Harsh Reality Inside of Reality

I don't want to go to jail, especially not outside of US borders. This is supposed to be rehabilitation? No wonder why, when prisoners are finally released they can't be "regular" productive citizens. The laws of the outside world don't apply to them anymore. They have no sense of humility because they have come to know fighting & homosexual acts as nothing more than a day to day activity. Being imprisoned is equivalent to being enslaved. You are striped of your rights as a man, you are cut off from the outside world (95% true in the prisoners situation), the rules that you once lived your life by have now gone out of the window & once your mind is exposed to that kind of living there is no turning back. Who wants to take a wild guess at the ethnicity of the majority of the inmates in the US prison system?

 

SoHo

The Man in the Mirror

Narcissism

Derived from the name Narcissist which is drawn from a myth that dates back to 36 BC. Narcissus was a man well known for his good looks. He was so absorbed by his own features that he couldn't appreciate anyone/ anything else around him. As a result for his unique situation the gods cursed him. He fell in love with an image that he saw in a pond, what he didn't realize is that the image was a reflection of himself. He was so wrapped up in his image that he couldn't leave the pond. He eventually fell in the pond and drowned. When he died the pond wept, when questioned why, the pond said that he looked deep into my eyes but he never got to appreciate my true beauty.

 Freud believed that narcissism is a necessary aspect of every human beings. It feeds and fuels the ego and provides a source of aspiration to live. Basically you love yourself so you will do any and everything necessary to preserve your life. I say it only becomes dangerous when you are in the extreme's of narcissism and you have lost an appetite for life outside of yourself.

 SoHo

It's a Lifestyle: Denim

I've been living in these denim's for some time now and everyday they get that much better. I'm not careful with anything that I wear because I think when you really live in your clothes you leave your special imprint on them. No one else can put on these jeans and be comfortable in them because they have adjusted to my body. The most recent change is the hole in the back left pocket. It happened because my relatively new wallet has an emblem on it that rubs against the pocket when I sit down; over time the hole was formed.

Make your jeans YOURS.

 

SoHo

Peace To A King

Photo's by: Melinda Griffith 

For this part of the shoot I was channeling my favorite member of the Wu Tang Clan. Peace to the King Russell Jones better known as the "Ol' Dirty Bastard". Funny fact about myself is when I first heard "Brooklyn Zoo" as a child I thought it wasn't in English. Now I can't stop playing the song. When he got signed to Roca Fella records under the alias "Dirt McGirt" I was happy because Kanye was doing his beats and he had an all star cast and crew backing him so the album was going to be amazing but unfortunately he died in a manhattan studio from a drug overdose and the album was never completed. I still have the newspaper article written on him that was published the day after his death.

 

SoHo

I Will Not Rhyme On Tracks

"I am not the son of cha clack clack! I am before that, I am before. I am before before, before death is eternity, after death is eternity, there is no death there is only eternity & I'll be riding on the wings of eternity like YAH! YAH! YAH! cha clack clack; GET ME THE FUCK OFF THIS TRACK!" Saul Williams

 

SoHo

Justin Blaze vs The Alchemist

You may be the Alchemist but quite frankly you can't fuck with Justin!

 

SoHo

The Gift

(clears throat)

Words. 

So many words come to mind that group together like constellations of stars that form the signs that we all happen to coincidentally be born under. The same signs that will then determine our demeanor & assist others in identifying our character before we even learn our ABC's.

The same words that are uttered by a man half the stature that his intellect boast but twice the man that his stature presents. Similar words to the words that may have previously fallen on death ears that might have been reborn had he mustered up enough courage to wear a different tie to the party... WORD!

My words slide out of the small part in my lips and float slowly through the air as if they were being usher into your earlobe by the melodic rhythm of life and life itself seems to sway to the notes that I spoke into existence. Those words slip into your ear, are processed by your brain and slip you into a trance that makes want to do nothing less than slip your under garments off. Those same words are the words that get processed by your brain and make you want to slip your hand in your bag and draw your can of mace. Those just so happen to be the words that make you hate me but not so much because you hate me but rather because your words say you hate me but truth be told, words may lie and you just hate to love me. These words grouped together to form a main idea in this thesis of a life that we are active members of determine whether we speak for the next month or not. These words are our navigational system because without these words we would just wander aimlessly. These words are the best damn words you have heard in a long time. These words are our judgement, our jury; with these words I am god.

What is it about the fusion of my eyes with your eyes that allows for the perfect atmosphere for my conscious to generate such words to implant in your brain that in turn cause you to elicit a response that is so monumental in the progression of our existence that it can only be compared to moving mountains with MY OWN BARE HANDS...

Why do my words make you smile?

 

SoHo

Where's SoHo

(click to enlarge)

I attended the York University halloween party the day before halloween. I went dressed as this guy, I'm not sure if you are familiar with him, a couple hundred people think he's cool but I don't know; he's usually referred to as SoHo B. Can you find that guy in this picture?

 

SoHo

REAL Rap

"I aint vote for Obama, I don't mess with politicians.

They crooked as they come, if you only payed attention, you would see the bailout was government spending your hard earned money buying all these corporations, leaving you in debt to be a slave to the nation, but they don't tell you that; they keep it secret like the masons." CURT@!N$

 

SoHo

Perception Based Truth

ideas from "The American President"

People want leadership, in the absence of genuine leadership they will listen to anyone with a microphone. They want the truth, they are so thirsty for it that they would crawl on their hands and knee's through the desert and drink a gallon of sand. 

However they won't drink the gallon of sand because they are thirsty but rather because they don't know the difference.

 

SoHo

Happy Your Day!

Good Morning

Hey you! Yeah you! Good morning, glad you woke up this morning; aren't you? Today is a special day, haven't you heard? I'm sure you've heard so you must have forgotten but today is your day. No, I'm not making this up and I can prove it. This is how it works, it's rather simple so please try to keep up.

What ever you usually do, do the opposite of that. Where ever you usually go don't go unless you absolutely have to. If your safe, take risk. If you are a risk taker, take more risk; you'll be fine. Whatever thoughts usually cross your mind will still cross your mind but today you will embrace those thoughts. 

Have you gotten the picture yet?

Today you will be you! Well not you but YOU! The YOU that you would be if you weren't inhibited by your morals, standards, ideas, ideals, thoughts, etc. (Wait rewind) That's what you think holds you back: your morals, standards, ideas, blah, blah, blah, blah. What really holds you back is what others think of you. You are completely absorbed with the opinions of others and that is what prevents you from being who you really want to be but not today because today is YOUR DAY.

 

HAPPY YOUR DAY!

Some People Are Fish

When its cold outside and you don't necessarily have to go outside, I say don't go. No matter what you decide to do with your free time when you stay in one thing is for sure; you are going to get hungry. Then the fun starts all over again because you quest for food turns into a scavenger hunt. You raid the pantry and find the box of cereal that can do nothing more than motivate you to find a bigger score. So you check the fridge and find that your refrigerator is dealing with the same problem New York is facing: overcrowding (man do I miss that second fridge). So now that you have found the food there are only two more steps: prepare and enjoy.

I bet you thought I only made pancakes.

 

SoHo

None Above Natural Law

"Making music is art, it doesn't change who you are as a person. It doesn't mean you're entitled or you're above the law. You still treat people as human beings. It doesn't change the laws of the universe. Life has a balance and for every action there is a reaction. So if you put negative energy in, negative energy comes back to you. You have to live your life within the laws of the universe and I haven't lost sight of that." Shawn Carter

source

SoHo

The Next 5 Miles

The start of a race and the end, the first and fourth quarter; that's how I play. What about the middle ground? What happens when your on a path chasing a clear dream and you wake up? What do you do when everything that you once worked so hard for is out of sight? How do you maintain the course? How do you even find the course? When you start working towards a goal every step closer to success comes with a new level of comfort. A comfort that was previously unknown to you, making it easier for you to rethink why you are working so hard in the first place. If you engage the comfort and become comfortable you will stop working towards your goal. In the childhood story of the tortoise and the hare, the hare was so far ahead that he felt comfortable and decided to rest a while in his comfort. He never imagined that his little break would grow into a full on sleep that almost cost him the race. Remember this when you think of taking a break, resting or stopping because you'll find yourself sliding back down the same mountain that you worked so hard to climb. Wonder how it will feel when you are standing in the same spot that you started the trek.

May the force be with you.

 

SoHo

You & I Both...

Approach you with my eyes closed, your breathing heavy, your body temperature is rising, your almost ready. Open my eyes wide & dive inside yours, you belong to the city but your mines behind closed doors. Swept you off your feet, you would have fallen for my charm but I held your stamina up with my energy. Deep inside the fox hole I massage your soul, I pull you close to me, whisper in your ear "let it go" & watch you lose control... WOAH! 

I think you need a break, I see it in your face, your about to break but I promised I would you give you more than you could take, your core starts to quake, your leg starts to shake, your nails in my back, your screaming my name! Your stuttering words, all you can say... gator... gator. You want that gatorade? No more holding back, I'm about to give you all, then I pause for just one thought: How sturdy is that wall? Thought lost, socks off, now we will never fall. The bed's dead, the rooms a mess, everything is on the floor but we don't even notice we are caught up in the storm. You didn't know secure until you were in my arms. Your body told your mind it felt love in my palms & your eyes told me "I want you to hold me". Lost inside a pleasure we are having fun, I know a place that we can go (whispers in your ear) "Baby just cum". The volcano explodes, the hurricane came, you lay there froze, your so amazed. You want to take pictures but your in a daze, DAMN what a day, MY what a night, BEAUTIFUL girl, o what a LIFE! I watch the sun rise, your gone before I yawn twice...

This was just a dream it was all in my mind. 

SoHo

Anyone Have The Time?

A non spatial continuum in which events occur in apparently irreversible succession from the past through the present to the future.

I think we have all been mislead about time. As a child the way you are taught to understand time is through the design of the clock. In the early stages they show you a clock with two hands and the instructor manipulates the hands of the clock, stopping on particular times that are easy for you to understand. There are only two hands on these clocks that you are taught with, the minute hand and the hour hand, so does that mean that as a child seconds don't exist? 

Seconds don't exist to a child.

As we get older the clocks that we see get more intricate. Bigger faces, beautiful trim, life size grandfather frames, elegant hands and so much more get added to the original clock that we first learned to tell time with as a child. However there is one substantial difference in the clock; the second hand. Once we get past the age of 5, the second hand becomes real to us. Is it that we better understand time now or is it that time has somehow grown with us? Has time expanded to include seconds or have the seconds always been present? Somehow these new clocks always remind us of the first clock that we learned on so we will always be able to tell the time no matter how different they look.

Our minds are conditioned to think a certain way from infancy.

Daylight savings time is a blatant manipulation of time for the economic profit of the government, America isn't the only country that follows this setting the clock back/ setting the clock ahead process. Remember the initial definition of time? "apparently irreversible succession" doesn't it strike you as odd that the English definition of time uses the word "irreversible" but yet we set our clocks back for an extra hour of sunlight?

What is the connection between the clock and time itself?

The clock is a tool, a man made device that stems back to the beginning of time. When the clock was first created man used the positioning of the sun to determine what time it was. What does the sun have to do with time itself?

Forget Everything You Already Know!

Time is independent. Everything else is affected by the existence of time. The planets in our solar system orbit the sun in a matter of time but the time they take to orbit the sun doesn't determine time itself. Therefor the time it takes our planet to spin on it's axis doesn't define time itself. Truth is no man has ever completely understood time. Time is a natural force of the universe and the key to comprehending the idea of time is understanding yourself and nature itself. Technology has created this idea that we can manipulate the forces of nature but in actuality it has kept us further from the truth than ever before. We aren't living off of the natural time of the universe but rather by an artificial man made time. The reason we can actually manipulate this time is because it isn't real.

Space, Time, Nature & God

SoHo

Jay-Z: The Godfather

"The Michael Corleone of the microphone/ The Michael Angelo of flow/ I paint pictures with poems..." Shawn Carter

I find it comical that we are in this situation yet I am not surprised. P and I often speak on the fact that most people don't understand Jay-Z so it always amazes us how much people like him. Recently the jigga man has been brought to trial on all sorts of charges from his marriage and thoughts of children to his affiliation with the free mason society. Earlier today a 7 minute track by Beanie Sigel entitled "What you talking bout?" was the hot topic on twitter. The tweeters thoughts varied, from why Sigel was saying these things about Jay-Z to why Jay-Z would do these things to Sigel. In order to understand the situation you must first understand the man involved, that man being Shawn Carter and in order for one to understand Shawn you need to decode the messages in the lyrics of Jay-Z. They are two very similar individuals but as any dictionary will tell you "similar" is not "identical". If you don't believe me google images of "Jay-Z" then google images of "Shawn Carter" you will see that completely different sets of photographs will show up for each respectively. 

If you have followed the career of Jay-Z as long as I have think back to his first album "Reasonable Doubt", to me the album cover is foreshadowing what is to come from Mr. Carter. The shot seen above includes Dame Dash and Kareem Burke the co owners of Roc A Fella records but the shot that was selected for the album cover was a solo shot of Jay-Z. The theme for the album and those to follow are obviously very heavily influenced by 'The Godfather' trilogy. This movie in combination with: 'Scarface', 'Goodfella's' and a bit of 'Casino' are the keys to understanding the rhymes of Jay-Z and the mind of Shawn Carter. The moves that led to the break up of "The Roc" would have been predictable if people were more observant. In the first installment of "The Godfather" three important things happen to allow Michael Corleone, the youngest out of three brothers and a sister, to become 'the godfather'. The first being the murder of his older brother Sonny, then the death of his father and finally the extermination of three don's and a major player from Las Vegas. These men that were murdered  under Michael's orders were men that worked with his family in the past that he saw as threats to the survival of his family. Once these men were strategically taken out of the picture Michael Corleone received the title of "Capo di tutti capi" or Boss of all bosses. There was no one left to stand in his way and his family was now the strongest with him as the sole controller.

This is a plot that Jay-Z knows all too well, his songs are sprinkled with the ideals from the depicted mafia lifestyle and even specific terms. In a 1997 freestyle done for the "Bad Boy Mixtape Volume 3" Jay-Z says in the first line "Roc A Fella's Capo unflappable" now for those of you whom don't know the word "capo" is short for caporegime which is a high ranking ''made'' member of a family. Owning this title grants you certain privileges, for one you can't touch a made man without an approval from a boss; so your basically bullet proof unless someone has the resources to handle being the target of an entire family. A capo is head of his crew and has some influence in the organization or family however he is not the boss. As a matter of fact the Capo is under the underboss whom is second in charge only to the boss. Jay-Z knowingly admitted in his '97 freestyle to being third in charge of the Roc A Fella family, however as his popularity grew and the family ventured into new avenues he realized that he would always be in that position unless he took action. When Dame brought on Cam'ron and Dipset as the newest members to the Roc, that was a very pivotal point and could possibly being viewed as the move that led to the separation. The problem Jay-Z faced with having Dipset on the label is the fact that he wasn't in control of them. Cam'ron was not a soldier, he was a leader and if you pay attention to everyone that was previously signed to the Roc they are soldiers. If Jay-Z said shoot, they shot. If he said take this bullet for him, they did it without question. This is the point when Jay-Z realized that he had to up his position in the family and there was only one way to do that; eliminate Dame. The tragic assination of the Notorious B.I.G was like the death of Michael Corleone's father, I believe that B.I.G played that role to Jay-Z. I hear a lot of Biggie's lines in J's rhymes but I see it more as the knowledge that B.I.G left him with that he is passing on, just as Michael Corleone passed on the knowledge that his father left him with. So now with Dame out of the picture & Burke continuing to play the background Jay-Z is now the "Capo di tutti capi". Doesn't every other rapper respect him as the best rapper alive? Isn't he the most revered rapper alive? Kanye West refers to him as "the god of rap". Lil Wayne was content with being second on MTV's best rappers of 09 list once he found out that Jay-Z was number one. Oh and think about this for a second: How relevant is Dame Dash? How relevant is Jaz-O? How relevant is anyone else that got dropped from Roc A Fella records? 

I understand everything Jay-Z does including the things he has been accused of by Beanie Sigel in this new track because I have seen the aforementioned movies (Godfather, Scarface, Goodfellas, Casino) and I see what power did to those characters, he is not exempt and he knows that he is not without fault. As he said in a freestyle over Kanye West's track "Grammy Family" "I got my face to the ceiling/ got my knee's on the floor please Lord forgive him/ has he lost his religion is the greed gon get him/ he's having heaven on earth will his wings still fit him?" Do I agree with all of Mr. Carter's decisions? No. However I can say that as long as a man is aware of the mistakes that he has made, he can learn from them. I hope that after reading this everything makes that much more sense.

"I'm spiteful/ If I don't like you I'm liable to buy you and drop you." Shawn Carter

SoHo