#ross in philly

[applesfallingfromblondehair]

the streets are saying ross looked especially giddy at the show yesterday

Who are these streets and how can we question them further 👁️👁️

[mansorus]

[ogbiggiepac]

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[groundupradio]

Rick Ross and Meek Mill Reunite On Stage In Contrast Of Beef Rumors

Rick Ross and Meek Mill Reunite On Stage In Contrast Of Beef Rumors

Rick Ross and Meek Mill Reunite On Stage In Contrast Of Beef Rumors Despite rumors to the contrary, Rick Ross and Meek Mill actually reunited for the first time in more than a decade. Their reunion was in the form of a special concert marking the 10th anniversary of Meek Mill’s debut studio album, Dreams and Nightmares.  In short, it was a high-octane, high-fun affair. Despite being billed as a…

[heavenlybackside]

a neat look inside the Betsy Ross house (in philly ) where the first american flag was woven

[solipseismic]

2023 poetry rec list

technically a day late but who cares! i don't. it's gonna be a long one this year too despite not having read or written as much poetry as of late; i'm putting my overall fifteen favorite + poetry book recs up here and the rest below a cut to spare your dashboards :)

2022

2021

books:

calling a wolf a wolf (kaveh akbar)

cinema of the present (lisa robertson)

dictee (theresa hak kyung cha)

pilgrim bell (kaveh akbar)

prelude to bruise (saeed jones)

the crown ain't worth much (hanif abdurraqib)

top 15:

abecedarian requiring further examination of anglikan seraphym subjugation of a wild indian reservation (natalie diaz)

about eight minutes of light (robert king)

at luca signorelli's resurrection of the body (jorie graham)

ginen the micronesian kingfisher [i sihek] (craig santos perez)

gods, gods, powers, lord, universe-- (chen chen)

kupu rere kē (alice te punga somerville)

look (solmaz sharif)

ode to the 9,000 year old woman (@/goodbyevitamin)

one art (elizabeth bishop)

petitioning the patron saint of childbirth (danielle boodoo-fortuné)

so mexicans are taking jobs from americans (jimmy santiago baca)

the death loop (jon lovett)

the difficult miracle of black poetry in america: something like a sonnet for phillis wheatley (june jordan)

the madwoman as rasta medusa (shara mccallum)

vocabulary (safia elhillo)

& the gun echoed for centuries; interlude with drug of course; & the light devours us all (yasmin belkhyr)

a brother named gethsemane (natalie diaz)

a map to the next world (joy harjo)

between autumn equinox and winter solstice, today (emily jungmin yoon)

cherish this ecstasy (david james duncan)

coffins (derick thomson)

conflict resolution for holy beings (joy harjo)

failing and flying (jack gilbert)

ginen tidelands [latte stone park] [hagåtña, guåhan] (craig santos perez)

how to be a dog (andrew kane)

i love you to the moon & (chen chen)

i'm sorry birds (@/quezify)

insomnia and the seven steps to grace (joy harjo)

i was sleeping where the black oaks move (louise erdrich)

i watch her eat the apple (natalie diaz)

moth wings and other things (@/grendel-menz)

my father (ollie schminkey)

my soldier, my stranger (scherezade siobhan)

new year's day (joan tierney)

october (louise glück)

praise song for oceania (craig santos perez)

praise the rain (joy harjo)

real estate (richard siken)

sharing a cigarette with joan of arc (dante emile)

song of the anti-sisyphus (chen chen)

table (edip cansever, transl. richard tillinghast)

tear it down (jack gilbert)

temporary job (minnie bruce pratt)

the blue dress (saeed jones)

the lesson of the moth (don marquis)

the universe, as in one last song for the lonely hearts (michelle hulan)

throwing children (ross gay)

untitled (joan tierney)

voices (naomi shihab nye)

when i die i want your hands on my eyes (pablo neruda)

why i am not coming in to work today (jess zimmerman)

wolf moon (nina maclaughlin)

yes, it was the mountain echo (william wordsworth)

[hit-song-showdown]

Year-End Poll #24: 1973

[Image description: a collage of photos of the 10 musicians and musical groups featured in this poll. In order from left to right, top to bottom: Tony Orlando and Dawn, Jim Croce, Roberta Flack, Marvin Gaye, Paul McCartney and Wings Kris Kristofferson, Elton John, Billy Preston, Carly Simon, Diana Ross. End description]

More information about this blog here

*Turns my chair around so I can sit in it backwards*

So. You were just caught trying to cover up a major break-in into the Democratic National Committee headquarters in order to cement your reelection.

As I alluded to last poll, one major historical event I need to mention is the Watergate scandal. The actual break-in took place the previous year, but the resulting investigations and trials won't start to take place until this year -- after Nixon's reelection. However, there aren't many songs about the incident from this time, or at least not in the charts. Most of the songs protesting Nixon tended to focus on the war.

Speaking of the Vietnam War, 1973 does not mark the end of the war, but it does mark the beginning of the United States' exit. To bring it back to the music, one of the 60's polls included the Monkees' Last Train to Clarksville, a song that wasn't explicitly written about the war, but had the war projected onto it because it's a song about someone leaving home and not knowing when they're coming back. It seems fitting that one of the songs on today's poll is Tony Orlando and Dawn's Tie a Yellow Ribbon[...], a song that wasn't explicitly written about the war, but had the war projected onto it because it's a song about someone coming home and not knowing what his welcome will look like.

Soul music is continuing to have one of its golden ages, with artists like Roberta Flack and Marvin Gaye topping the charts. It's been a while since I talked about Billboard from the business side of things, but the explosion of this genre gives me a good excuse to do so. In 1973, the Billboard chart for R&B songs was changed from "Best Selling Soul Singles" to "Hot Soul Singles". This change may not sound that significant, but it becomes more notable when you see how often this title changes. This article goes more into depth about Billboard's complicated history when it comes to its representation of Black music.

Which reminds me, it's time to start talking about disco. It will reach the polls soon, I promise, but now feels like a good time to set the scene before we get to that point. As I mentioned in a previous poll, the disco scene really came out of soul. Especially Philly Soul, which had lush instrumentation that worked really well with the overall atmosphere of early disco. At this point in history, disco is still an underground subculture, and musically the line between it and soul music isn't that clear. Disco as its own genre of music that could be identified as such by the average listener will come later.

I don't usually talk about the formation of genres until they reach the charts, but I'm going to make an exception here. Because 2023 is the 50th anniversary of this genre, the genre has grown into a dominating musical force across the globe, and it's the only genre I actually studied in college.

In 1973, a Jamaican-American teenager named Clive Campbell (more widely known as DJ Kool Herc) and his sister, Cindy, started hosting parties out of their apartment in The Bronx, New York. These parties would play a lot of funk records, but he wouldn't just play them. Instead, he would play two copies of the same record on a turntable so he could extend the percussion section of the song, also called the break (which is where breakdancing comes from). This would lay the foundation for hip-hop, further expanded by artists like Grandmaster Flash and Afrika Bambaataa. All three of these men are still alive and I've linked interviews with some of them.

Hip-hop and rap are often used interchangeably, but there is a difference. Hip-hop exists both as a subculture and as a style of music. It incorporates art forms such as DJing, breakdancing, graffiti, beatboxing, rapping, and many other elements. That's why I said DJ Kool Herc helped set the foundation of hip-hop. Within early hip-hop culture, the MC was mostly there to bounce off of the DJ and keep the energy up. That isn't to discredit the difficult work of early MCs (trust me, if you were bad at it, the audience would let you know). Rap itself as an art from has a plethora of different artistic roots in Black culture, from scat singing in jazz, to various traditional West African storytelling techniques, to early 20th century gospel groups, to rhyme games, to Black radio DJs. The genre started to get more notice outside of the party scene as wordplay and flows started to expand further, especially as the first hip-hop groups started to form and the MCs became part of the "band". Like disco, hip-hop was still very much an underground subculture, but it would soon take over the nation.

It will be another 17 years before the first rap song reaches number 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 (Vanilla Ice's Ice Ice Baby). We won't see a rap song featured on these polls until 1995. But it's hip-hop's 50th birthday, and so much of modern American culture doesn't make sense without its involvement.

[april-is]

April 25, 2024: from Moon for Aisha, Aracelis Girmay

from Moon for Aisha Aracelis Girmay

— for Kamilah Aisha Moon, with a line after Cornelius Eady’s ''Gratitude''

Dear Aisha, I mean to be writing you a birthday letter, though it’s not September, the winter already nearing, the bareness of trees, their weightlessness, their gestures — grace or grief. The windows of buildings all shining early, lit with light, & I am only ten & riding all of my horses home, still sisterless, wanting sisters.

You do not know me yet. In fact, we are years away from that life. But I am thankful for some inexplicable thing, let’s call it “freedom,” or “night,” the terror & glee of being outside late, after dark, my mother’s voice shouting for me beneath stars which, I learned in school, are suddenly not so different from the small salt of fathers, & gratitude for that, & for the red house of your mother’s blood, & then, you, all nearly grown, all long-legged laughter, already knowing all the songs & all the dances, not my friend, yet, but, somehow — Out There.

In one version of our lives, it is November. Through a window I see one of our elders is a black eye of a woman, is a thinker, & magnificent. [...] It is always her birthday. She has always lived to tell a part of the story of the world, what happened here.

If not a moon, what can we bring this woman who walks ahead? For whom you were named, & whose name has been added to by you whose language crowns the dark field of what has been hushed, of what is beautiful & black, & blue.

--

Read the full poem here.

Written to the author's friend, poet Kamilah Aisha Moon, who died in 2021. Read one of her essays: It's Not The Load That Breaks You Down; It's The Way You Carry It.

More on friendship: + Ode to Friendship, Noor Hindi + from how many of us have them?, Danez Smith

Today in:

2023: Still Life with Nursing Bra, Keetje Kuipers 2022: A Small-Sized Mystery, Jane Hirshfield 2021: Prayer for My Unborn Niece or Nephew, Ross Gay 2020: Vigil, Phillis Levin 2019: Nights in the Neighborhood, Linda Gregg 2018: I Dreamed Again, Anne Michaels 2017: wishes for sons, Lucille Clifton 2016: Told You So, Keetje Kuipers 2015: Accident, Mass. Ave., Jill McDonough 2014: This Hour and What Is Dead, Li-Young Lee 2013: To Myself, Franz Wright 2012: Manet’s Olympia, Margaret Atwood 2011: Three Rivers, Alpay Ulku 2010: Ode to Hangover, Dean Young 2009: We become new, Marge Piercy 2008: The Only Animal, Franz Wright 2007: Dream Song 385, John Berryman 2006: The Quiet World, Jeffrey McDaniel 2005: Man and Wife, Robert Lowell

[fabaceous]

i was tagged by @thenelse to do 8 shows to get to know me better...ok honestly i dont watch a lot of tv. i mostly watch the same shows over and over so i actually could barely list 8. fyi the first 4 are probs my favorite shows but the rest are just shows that have impacted my life in some way. please dont judge me i swear i have good taste in other things 👍

1. yellowjackets obviously because it has literally everything i could ever ask for in a tv show. it irreparably alters my brain chemistry on a weekly basis

2. always sunny in philly. i can always bond with my girl friends’ boyfriends over this one LOL. ive seen every single episode a truly embarrassing number of times and i dream of being randomly thrust into a trivia situation where there is a question about always sunny because i have an obscene amount of knowledge on always sunny lore and am 100% confident i would nail it.

3. arrested development. second only to always sunny in the making lanie laugh category. tobias funke character of all time

4. haunting of hill house. winner of the making lanie cry category. great autumnal watch, i love rewatching around halloween. bent neck lady reveal had me legitimately in shambles

5. i mean the office i guess. i watched it in high school or maybe college,  mostly because my friends were always referencing it and i wanted to get the jokes...and lol i rly thought jim/pam was peak romance. luckily now im older and wiser and know jackieshauna is peak romance

6. back in college i watched all of friends because of a vaguely homoerotic bestie situation that later imploded and the one perk of losing her was that i was finally free to admit that show fucking sucks especially ross fuck that guy fr. me and my friends would have killed ross with hammers i can tell you that much

7. i used to watch bones with my parents when i was probably a little too young to be watching it. perhaps this is the origin of my fascination with morbid things

8. another childhood nostalgia show is monty python’s flying circus which i always watched with my dad. to this day we are capable of annoying everyone else in the room by having an entire conversation made up of monty python quotes (complete with bad fake accents)

EDIT BECAUSE I FORGOT THE MOST OBVIOUS ONE I KNEW I WAS MISSING SOMETHING: DARK (the german time travel one) thats actually a legit favorite of mine, took me on so many emotional journeys and made me laugh and weep and theorize and ponder. and it was good german practice 👍

well now you know, for better or worse...probably worse...anyway i nominate @chel-c-fsea @jamesv-t @movingtoparistoshootheroin @excluded-from-the-narrative ummm ermmm ehhhm... i would also say @teabookgremlin but you already got tagged...but...get double tagged i guess? lol ok i wont be offended if any of you guys dont do this but i didnt want to be boring and not tag anyone hehe <3

[screamingforyears]

IN A MINUTE: // A_NEW_MUSICAL_EXPRESSS…

@cup.id.xps.yche are here w/ “SPIRIT,” the latest single from their forthcoming debut LP titled ‘Romantic Music’ (10/13 @felte_label) & it finds the LA-based duo (& former Abe Vigodas) Michael Vidal & Juan Velasque waxing upon “innocence, terror & mystical aspects” across 4 ½ mins of tenderly cooed NüRomance. “RUN” is the lead track on @floodingks’ forthcoming LP titled ‘Silhouette Machine’ (9/29 @tgic_recs) & it finds the KC-based trio of Rose Brown (guitar/vocals), Zach Cunningham (drums) Cole Billings (bass) deploying their quietly/loud template across 5+ mins viscerally gutted NoiseRawk. @friend.phl are here w/ “ALL THE MONEY IN THE WORLD,” the latest single from their forthcoming LP titled ‘Dog Eat Dog’ (2/2/24 @bornlosersrecords) & it finds the Philly-based trio bringing their zippily blitzed & catchily popped brand of GoblinPunk. “WAS IT REALLY ALL THAT BAD?” is a brand-new standalone single from @_leftwich & it finds the Nashville-based duo of vocalist Lex & multi-instrumentalist Elijah bringing the hazily faded goods across 4 mins of ethereally textured & romantically shimmered DreamPop. @packstheband are here w/ “HONEY,” the lead single from their forthcoming LP titled ‘Melt the Honey’ (2/19/24 @firetalkrecs) & it finds the Toronto-based quartet of Madeline Link (vocals/guitar), Dexter Nash (guitar), Noah O’Neil (bass) & Shane Hooper (drums) bringing the sweetly slacker’d & indie_rawked goods. “WARFARE” is the lead single from @rifleldn’s forthcoming EP titled ‘Under Two Flags’ (10/27 @standardprocessrecords) & it finds the London-based quintet of Max Williams (vocals), Cam Sims (guitar), Albert Dury (guitar), Ross Whelan (bass) & Flynn Whelan (drums) bringing their “rowdy, musically bankrupt, furious & tuneless diy punk”

[applesfallingfromblondehair]

It won’t let me embed a link on anon :( but apples pls look at this https://x.com/1975fan_nyc/status/1723363052643381644?s=20

Omg 😭😭😭😭

If you, too, wanna see Matty and Ross briefly holding hands, please click here

[mansorus]

RICH FOREVER #BOSS

⌛️🔌💸💰

[oh-bonerline]

So much gay occurred in Philly oml

I had a friend there reporting back on some of the gay moments, but I will be needing all of the videos please!

But honestly I woke up to the video where Matty and Ross are on the couch together and Ross takes a drag on Matty’s cigarette and that alone was enough gay to get me through the next week probably 🥲🥲🥲

[radgritty]

There's actually a (clearly joke-written) bookcabout the philly phanatic and gritty exoloring each other's bodies. It's called "city of brotherly love a philly phan phiction". I know about it thru college humor / dropout's erotic book club, i swear i'm normal

(This is actually a rec to listen to it on youtube / watch it on dropout, it's led by the wonderful rekha shenkar and jess ross, both such funny comedians who talk about erotic books so candidly and without shame and i honest to goodness learnt a lot from this show and also. Funny and pretty women i'm so down. It is very much libfem but what csn ya do, yk) (both are philly natives and proud of it btw)

Hi, I love you. This, this is the stuff of dreams.

[hyperculture]

Because the eyes skating endows one with are surviving eyes, dreaming eyes, repurposing eyes, multifunctioning eyes, metaphoring eyes, analogous-ish to my eyes for unused or underused buildings that might be converted into basketball courts. They are a dime a dozen, really: retired industrial facilities or, even better, old community centers or churches, whose ceiling on the sides are low enough you’d have to adjust your shot, the way we do on those snug courts with the overhanging trees. And you know, I’m being fancy: what about milk crate hoops? Shopping cart hoops? What about those guys at the corner of Twenty-seventh and Brown in Philly who bungeed a little rim to the phone pole? What about a line on a wall? What about a line in the air?

How often I see a paved gully on the side of the road and think, almost like a mantra: skateable. A marble bench in a courtyard: skateable. The not-totally-verticle wall at the almost brand-new and heavily endowed Global & International Studies (the world-is-a-market studies? International theft studies? Same shit, different name studies?) Building on campus: ooh, very skateable. Or, the other day, riding my bike to the community garden, I followed the enticing scent of newly poured asphalt (this toxic affection a skaterly remain) to a new local food hub about to open, and emerging from that soon-to-be-very-smooth parking lot was an old waterpipe, about six inches in diameter, slick, bent at maybe a forty-five-degree angle, ending four or six inches from the newly painted (white) wall, which would, be, for a skater maybe not me but maybe, I’m thinking grind the pipe up to a wallride (this sentence is an alibi for when the smudgy black rainbows arrive): damn, so skateable.

And the damn so skateable thing (yeah, it’s called, often, a spot, which is something like a stain) the skater stumbles upon is almost never kept to themselves. Remember that bucket. Share your Independent. Rather, after a test run or two, word is sent—in our day, if Sugar was around (so named because he liked to snort Smarties), he was dispersed on his Santa Cruz Slasher, like Pheidippides; these days people probably resort to the cellular phone (good use for such a devilish device!)—to the hordes, big or small, to join us at this new spot, this new stain, this wreckage, this abandonment, this ruin, this commons, this c’mon.

Ross Gay, Inciting Joy