Lance's blog

I went in to work somewhat earlier than usual this morning, and the early alarm clock seems to have caught me in a dream that I now recall as follows:

I am walking down an urban street at night with what seems to be the United Nations of young hip people. (I'm not sure what I'm doing with them. The street is too close and shadowy to be one of Atlanta's; it seems European, though it could be New England.) I speak briefly with one not-so-hip fellow who I imagine to represent Russia. He appears in every way to be Jerzei Balowski (played by Alexei Sayle) from the Young Ones.

I end up speaking with a tall blond gentleman who is the center of the group (both socially and spatially), and I tell him that I think we're going to Russia's party, though I express that, having met Russia earlier, I am skeptical about the quality of this party. The gentleman stops and turns to face me and, with an aristocratic air that is both commanding and winningly inclusive, says “I am Russia, and my parties are legendary”.

It turns out the first guy was from some former-Soviet satellite state or something.

Anyway, the “legendary” part turns out to be true, as I find myself in a beat up car with three people who were friends during my college years (none of whom have recently commented on this site). They are desperate to get into Russia's party because they have heard that he is generous in handing out party drugs. They think that I can get them into the party because I was with the UN crowd earlier. I'm torn between wanting to do a good turn for my (fairly pathetic) former friends and a sense that their quest is a ridiculous, pointless waste of time. We drive through a crowded parking lot while I try to think of something else to do, and that's about when I wake up.

Weird, huh?

So to sum up: I committed a faux pas and then failed to take any action to separate myself from some stupid people's stupid agenda. In my dreams, I am Charlie Brown.

It's true. I've tried it and it works. If you start your 2006 or later Toyota Rav4 in park, with neither the pedal nor the handbrake engaged, and then:

• Raise the handbrake,
• Pump the pedal brake twice,
• Lower the handbrake,
• Press the pedal brake down,
• Pump the handbrake twice,
• Release the pedal brake,
• Raise the handbrake, and then
• Pump the pedal brake twice,

...the Vehicle Stability Control and Traction Control systems are deactivated. (Depending upon how you look at it, these systems either keep you from making certain stupid maneuvers or keep you from regretting the stupid maneuvers you try to make. Put simply, the TC and VSC keep you from burning rubber.) The little swervy-car light on the dash comes on, and a computerized voice* reminds me that my car, despite being a baby SUV (i.e., a tall mid-sized station wagon) has about the same horsepower-to-weight ratio as a Mazda RX-8. Vrooom!

(Sg, the fact that you have survived to read this owes something to the fact that the TC and VSC systems are automatically re-activated whenever the car is turned off. Mom and Dad, I promise not to enter the Freedom Code when Sg will be riding with me.)

I'm going to try some different combos (maybe including the windshield wipers and radio preset buttons) to see if I can unlock invincible mode.

* Computerized voice may be imaginary

Hey, while we're on the comics tip, check out these awesome and hilarious illustrations by Jack Kamen. A quick search indicates that most or all are from EC Picto-Fiction (a short-lived family of exploitation titles that combined black & white artwork (see below) with blocks of text). The source for these is Mr. Door Tree's incredible Golden Age Comic Stories Blog.

Oh my god, that's horrible. For how much?

(More after the jump…)

In the very beginning (and I know this is hard to believe, Sg), Family Circus was even more boring than it is today:

We went to a Pumpkin Patch down near Newnan with my parents before Halloween. In addition to a whole lot of pumpkins, there was a petting zoo and a hayride. A number of photos (somewhere between too many and too few), some with captions, can be found after the jump.

After hearing an interview with the author on NPR this morning, I decided to spend some time this evening reading Creative Loafing’s three part peice on the Black Mafia Family, which is pretty much what it sounds like. Wikipedia tells us:

The Black Mafia Family, or BMF, is a drug trafficking organization originally from Detroit, with major hubs in Atlanta and Los Angeles, that in 2000 delved into the world of hip-hop music and entertainment, successfully promoting not only Young Jeezy but also BMF Entertainment’s sole artist, Bleu DaVinci.

The Creative Loafing piece is fun for a few reasons. There is the writing, which seems to be the product of a farm team reporter with an ambitious approach to narrative. The story is told in vignettes that jump back and forward in time. Occasionally these leaps left me grasping for the thread of the story, but more often than not the author (Mara Shalhoup) makes it work.

There is the tale itself, an archetypal journey through success (“federal prosecutors would estimate that BMF pulled in tens of millions of dollars annually — at least $270 million since the organization got its start”) to excess (“BMF members have credited themselves with inventing a phenomenon called ‘making it rain.’ They would toss fistfuls of money in the air. The bills would descend like droplets. And the crowd would go wild.”) and, eventually, to downfall. In this city, you gotta make the money first. Then when you get the money, you get the power. Then when you get the power, then you get the women. Then, apparently, you get investigated by a number of local, state and federal authorities and, eventually, indicted. (Did I mention the murders? There are murders.)

But story and storytelling aside, my favorite thing about the Creative Loafing story is the backdrop. When I read about “a crew selling large quantities of coke up and down Boulevard”, I'm thinking “oh, yeah, it’s so totally all like ‘the Wire’ down there on a Friday night”. When I read that “Jeffery gunned it through a red light at Spring Street and North Avenue, and agents lost him”, I think “hey, I’m at that intersection like 5 times a week!” (I also thought “hey, that’s good to know if I ever need to ditch the feds”. But then I thought “that light is photo enforced now, perhaps limiting its utility as a getaway device”. Oh well.) My Atlanta now includes a new and fascinating layer; my day-to-day mise en scène is a little more interesting. Good stuff.

The video above is the product of the record label arm of BMF, and it is partly a love letter to Atlanta. I’m not qualified to judge its merits from a hip-hop perspective (though I do enjoy the 8-bit “pong” sound in the first half of the video), but I enjoy it because it is shot through with an affection for this town that is not unlike my own. ‘Cept I don’t run a flamboyant record label cum drug smuggling ring. Yet!

(One caveat—the story of BMF as told in the Creative Loafing piece seems too good to be true. And indeed, there is a lot of inference that could either point to a vast underground crime organization with a ruthless code of silence or point to a bunch of thugs who hang out together but do thuggish things more or less on their own. If the story is as good as it appears, then there is a pretty good book in it.)