Yiamas!

A portion of the DCQ team is currently en route to Greece for a month long sabbatical. You may ask, how can he vacation for a whole month, and not lose his esteemed position as a DCQ contributor? Well, he's just that smooth. And also, he's promised to provide some Greek-related posts during his travels. Enjoy some ouzo for us, buddy.

Opportunistic Lefties Strike Again

Nice, gay marriage proponents: Stealing the concept of nonconventional marriage support from Ben & Jerry's. How very Obama of you. You liberals are shameless. Shameless, I say. 

Puerto Rico Day 2009...

...was tight as always, albeit a little light on the underage freaking. So tight, in fact, that we're gonna let it marinate for another day or two before attempting to describe it. In the meantime, Long Island City looked nice the other day (realtors: photography skills for hire -- yes, it's true, I'm still available):

We ventured across Newtown Creek for LIC Artists' Open Studios and, in typical DCQ fashion, set aside enough time to visit the workspaces of three of the 150-plus participating artists. Converted old factories and warehouses on barren industrial blocks slicing through a neighborhood trending residential housed the studios...

...which held, along with paint-splattered daycare centers, rotting staircases and freight elevators, some nice stuff from relative unknowns:

The Moss impact on Culver City

Culver City is experiencing a major re-development at present, spearheaded and contributed to by architect and SCI-Arc Director Eric Owen Moss. Mr. Moss and his team of 25 at Eric Owen Moss Architects have dubbed the revitalization Conjunctive Points, and have and continue to work on more than 20 projects in Culver City, many of which are located on Hayden Street alone. Known for unique interpretations and a diversity of form, Moss' varied projects fortify Culver City's hefty reputation as a community teeming with arts. Pictured above are the Ince Office Complex and a city-sponsored Architecture as Art public artwork entitled What Wall. Pictured here is a rendering of the Gateway Art Tower, an "information tower" and office building, constructed at the corner of Hayden and National, marking the primary entry point into the revitalized zone of the city. The building includes 5 screens that advertise messages to passersby pertaining to local tenants' events and news. Another of the Architecture as Art public art works, the Beehive, occupies the front section of a two story office building housing medschool.com.

Finally, this image depicts 3535 Hayden Ave, a unified working environment for a high profile graphics company.

Symptoms: Robbed.

We were robbed. That we knew immediately. Musty clothes covered every inch of linoleum floor, from the cinderblock walls to the kicked-in back door. Two worn, ransacked backpacks lay somewhere underneath. The passports! Still in their place, alongside the credit cards and insurance cash under the plastic-sheathed mattress. Amid the tumult of the floor, an iPod stood out in its fluorescence, headphones disconnected earlier and stashed separately. They’d left this behind. They didn’t know what it was.

The cameras! The cameras. Gone. They got the motherfucking cameras. The ones with the photos of the beaches and the waterfalls and the jungles and the strutting street kids and the islands and the funeral pyre and the dirty fish markets and Waterloo and Maracas Bay and San Juan de las Galdonas. The cameras packed in our bags an hour before as we’d left our rented, windowless apartment to drink one last Carib with friends and close the book on Port-of-Spain and Carnival Tuesday. To bring closure to three days of round-the-clock costumed, painted, sweaty revelry and three weeks of haggling and tromping our way through Trinidad and northeastern Venezuela. Upon reaching Tragarete Road, we dove into a pulsing current of celebration, each participant a member of a “band” clothed in the stereotypical vision of cultures real and imagined -- ”Egyptians” in full King Tut headgear, “jungle warriors” with leaves covering only the most forbidden of body parts, “Americans” channeling John Wayne. 

The coordinated costumed pranced alongside flatbed semis alternately carrying full bars and stacks of speakers blasting the designated soca songs of the year (and there were about eight of those, played with according frequency). But this was day three -- and we were out of Puncheon spitfire rum, with a plane to Tobago leaving in three hours. Our gang was easy to find -- they were usually hanging in the steel-pan yard on the corner, shirtless and stinking from too many consecutive days of music and beer and just trying to “maintain” through the weeks of nonstop practice leading up to the festival proper. We said goodbye to Nigel and Kurt and Tommy and the kind dreadlocked guy Lennox whose canines were chiseled down to vampire fangs and walked back to the unkempt, ground-level unit to collect our packed bags en route to the airport. Only they were no longer packed. 

Suspects abounded: Bryan, our drug-dealing landlord with stitches sealing a two-inch mystery gash above his Adam’s apple. Anthony, the skinny dark-skinned man who charmed us weeks earlier with his sordid story of growing up in The States for 35 years before being deported in the ‘80s for smoking a joint in San Fran’s Washington Square Park, who had led us to Bryan when we were in desperate need of shelter? The group of standoffish teenage boys loitering outside Bryan’s apartment when we left for the parade earlier? Nigel, the band leader and our entree to true Trini culture, our unofficial Tragarete Road tour guide? Could he have!? Someone who knew we wouldn’t have time to call the cops over for a report. Someone poor; that eliminated nobody. Someone who knew our schedule -- someone who knew us. Someone we’d never find. 

The Number of the Day is '300'

Sincere props to RJ, though we admit it feels a bit like bowling a 250 in the bumper lane. Walnut Creek represent (and how often do you get to say that!?). 

California Love Redux

Something led us to that old Dr. Dre/Tupac "California Love" video the other day -- you know, the apocalyptic one where they're running around in rags and ramshackle Hummers, all early Gibson-like? We couldn't help but admire the stylistic shout-outs (ha! get it? hip-hop reference) they squeeze in there: Aside from the obvious overriding Mad Max trilogy theme, the video opens with vintage Chris Tucker doing his 5th Element thing (you know, the outerspace-crackhead schtick he used to land more lucrative gigs playing comic relief to Jackie Chan's unintentional straight man) and is followed with a scene lifted from The Warriors before descending into full Road Warrior mode; this later tiptoes quietly into Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome territory when they move to sweeping aerial shots of the stars rapping inside a, yes, Thunderdome. The whole video's simply fantastic, but why waste it on "California Love?" I know Australian apocalypse-themed jams don't usually chart, but still: "California Love" is one of the few songs that actually warrants your classic mid-90s rap video -- you know, 64s, Cristal, ladies in thongs, egregious materialism, guest spots by other definitively regional rappers. 

What's that you say? Oh. 

Fuck you world

I just watched a Southwest Airlines ad whose selling point was "Your Bags Fly Free!" This strikes me as analogous to Craigslist apartment ads highlighting "Free Use of Toilet!" and hookers throwing in handjobs with Eliot Spitzer specials. 

That is all.

Two months late and 94 short

Detroit photographer Kevin Bauman has 100 Abandoned Houses (via Volts, Amps and Ohms). We have six. But we swear we shot these before his site blew up earlier this fine spring. Check the trees if you don't believe us. Ha. Moted. 

Nobody's out but the ruffians

One of the first warm weekends of this nascent summer in New York, and the streets on Saturday night were quiet where they should've been cracking and chaotic where they should've been silent. Los Trinitarios seemed to be staying in playing Mob Wars, leaving Los Sures to the older crowd: In the five minutes after I left my house, I exchanged pleasantries with a trio of homeless folks on the shelter steps, passed a heaving circle of Dominicanos going verse-for-verse in front of the mechanic's garage, came upon an impromptu taco stand--complete with two-man mariachi band--in front of an apartment building, and ducked and weaved through fifteen twentysomething men streaming out of a row house to watch a brawl in the making. 

Later, walking to the train through an eerily silent LES, a beater Camry packed with Latino teenagers screeched up alongside me, veering onto the sidewalk across the street and almost hitting a hydrant. On the phone, I glanced over long enough to gather that the driver was fighting with a girl in the passenger side, with another girl riding bitch most certainly not real thrilled about the whole scenario. Before I turned the corner, I looked back in time to see homegirl square up and punch the dude in the jaw, hard, before he drove away. An hour later, after an empty train ride back over the river, I stumbled down from the platform to see a white guy in a Warriors-inspired getup talking to three cops--one uniformed, two plainclothes--with blood caking the left half of his face and big welts rising on his forehead and right cheek. Jumped by kids on the train: "And the worst part was--listen to this--the worst part was, they were videotaping the whole thing! Check Youtube, I think they were doing it to put up there..."

And so on.