ACTION BRONSON:BRUNCH
This is the best and most disturbing video I have seen in a while… Yo Action by the way whats a Scunt?
Directed by Alexander Richter and Tommy Gould be on the look out for these cats they are the next dudes mark my words.
PITCHFORK REVIEW OF DR.LECTER
Nice review of Actions record via Pitchfork earlier in the week. Good stuff indeed….
8.1
In any discussion about the new-on-the-scene Queens rapper Action Bronson, two things inevitably come up: (1) He sounds a whole hell of a lot like Ghostface Killah, and (2) he loves rapping about food. Both of these things are entirely true. Like Ghost, he’s got a pinched, high-pitched, urgent delivery, rendering his boasts in a dense, inventive New York slur that moves from one idea to the next with necksnap immediacy. He’s not a rip-off artist; he’s got none of Ghost’s emotional streak and little of his vividly violent storytelling impulse. But the mere grain of his voice is similar enough to provoke the momentary sensation every time a new verse starts that you’re actually hearing Ghostface.
Similarly, the food fixation is no invention. In a recent web interview, Bronson claims he hopes his rap career can bankroll his culinary studies in Tuscany. And even “Ronnie Coleman”, the song where he laments his weight and lack of impulse control, has enough impassioned food descriptions to make you seriously hungry: “An hour later, eat the burger with my drug dealer/ Then add the butter to the fudge to make the fudge realer.” Bronson raps about food with the same loving linguistic dizziness that Pusha T raps with about cocaine, or that Lil Wayne raps with about blowjobs.
But even though both the Ghostface and the food talking points hold true, they don’t really get to the bottom of what makes Dr. Lecter, Bronson’s debut album, such a breath of fresh air. Simply put, Dr. Lecter is a rock-solid, ridiculously fun New York rap album, one that recalls the city’s past glories without ever feeling like an act of stylistic exhumation. All the tracks on the LP come from one producer, the heretofore unknown Tommy Mas, whose style would’ve fit the late-80s classics of Marley Marl and the Juice Crew but maintains a crispness and energy that we rarely hear in retro-rap. Mas chops up breakbeats and soul samples, all the while keeping his sound simple, sparse, and funkier than any recent hip-hop. And Bronson attacks every one of his tracks, delivering quick bursts of streetcorner shit-talk, having too much fun to take himself seriously. Bronson’s lyrics can be ignorant as fuck (”Take a dyke on a date/ She let me pipe cuz I’m an ape”), but he doesn’t have the nihilistic edge of an Odd Future affiliate. He’s just kicking silly bullshit, and it’s tough to imagine anyone seriously getting offended.
Maybe the greatest thing about Dr. Lecter is how the album never announces itself as some triumphant return of New York rap. Bronson never claims to be the savior of anything; he just belts out his punchlines and then disappears. Songs typically don’t have choruses, and the album’s 15 tracks end in less than 45 minutes. Bronson names songs after relatively marginal figures: perennial WWF jobber Barry Horowitz, 90s NBA journeyman Chuck Person, 60s/70s football great Larry Csonka. A few guests show up, but none of them are big names. And though the two rappers’ styles are radically different, Dr. Lecter calls up memories of Marcberg, the great and underrated 2010 album from fellow New York shit-talker Roc Marciano. Like that LP, Dr. Lecter doesn’t try to break any ground; it just does a long-established style very, very well.
— Tom Breihan, June 20, 2011
A LETTER FROM STEVE BERRA AND THE BERRICS: WINDS OF THE CHANGE
WINDS OF CHANGE
Three and a half years ago we started the Berrics out of my bedroom inside my house. We had 4 people, one filmer, one programmer/art director, myself, Eric Koston, a skatepark, what little money we had, and an idea. We saw a void in the industry and we wanted to fill it, but the last thing skateboarding needed was another magazine as there were already four that didn’t need a competitor, besides, we didn’t know how nor could we afford to create one anyway. We did know the culture was shifting though and skateboarding, usually off somewhere on it’s own island immune to the winds of change and always at the controls of them, couldn’t prevent the infiltration of technology. What one used to wait a month for, they were getting every day. What one used to wait years for, they wanted every day. What one could experience and access in every other aspect or interest in their life they wanted to experience with skateboarding. They wanted something to inspire them, something to help them, something to entertain them and something to make them feel closer to the thing they loved the most in their life and they wanted it daily. We’ve tried to provide that and over the course of three and a half years “they” have become you and you have been coming here hoping to find it, and it’s you who has made the Berrics so popular.
I read an interview recently from a guy “inside” the industry who talked about how stupid kids are and that their stupidity is what makes certain things and people popular in skateboarding. Kid is the word commonly used by an industry type to mean you, no matter what age, because you are on the outside, you are who the industry depends upon to keep them alive, to keep skateboarding alive, so you, no matter what age, are the kid and referring to you as stupid is, well, stupid because you are the future. I can bitch and complain about how I loved going on tour with my Sony Walkman and a case full of cassette tapes but there’s a point whereupon the stupid finger points at me because everyone else in the van is listening to their music on an iPod. You are the ones with the iPods and the guy whose interview I read, well, he’s the Walkman of yesterday well on his way to being forgotten in the dustbins of history… and that is a fact.
The Berrics is not in competition with magazines or skateboarding videos or the people who make them. We are simply here to supplement and co-exist with them, to lift them up, just as they lift us up, to help companies survive better and help skateboarders survive better which in turn helps skateboarding not only survive better but survive forever. No singular entity is going to do that, not even the Berrics. It’s a group effort involving us, them and you and no matter how many different opinions there are in regards to what’s best for the survival of skateboarding, the one opinion most of us agree upon is that it needs to survive. So, our competition doesn’t lie within our ranks. Our competition is the “outside” world. When Eric and I came up with the Berrics we didn’t want to be bigger than Thrasher or Transworld, we wanted to be bigger than Rolling Stone and the Huffington Post. We wanted to see skateboarding capsize baseball and basketball because we know, just as well as you do, that skateboarding is better than baseball and basketball. So for the past three and half years Eric and I have poured our money and time into the Berrics to try and make that happen and when we see fifty thousand comments on one single facebook thread over this past weekend we know we’re getting there. The Berrics now have 23 people working towards providing you what you want more of every single day, skateboarding. Those 23 people would not have jobs if it weren’t for you. Those 23 people do the work of a 100 and the Berrics wouldn’t be what it is without them as many of the ideas don’t just come from me anymore. So, it’s with great pleasure that I’m writing this. It’s with great pleasure that I get to tell you now, as if you haven’t discovered it already, the Berrics has a new site design to make your experience here easier than it’s ever been.
The new site is viewable with your mobile device. We have a new search field whereupon you can look up any skater that’s ever been on the Berrics. We’ve moved all of the features buttons, previously on the right hand side, into their own drop down menu up at the top so as to clean up the look of the site and make everything easier to access. We’ve made a daily ops calendar menu at the bottom of the page so that you can access any past day of the site easily. Now going to the very first post we’ve ever had is only a few clicks away. The archives to each section are also much easier to access so if you’re trying to watch that one Bangin you saw a few months ago but can’t remember exactly what month or what day, it won’t take you a million clicks of the “older” button to find it. We’ve made improvements to the player by adding a loading bar, quick commands and probably the thing I’ve gotten thousands of emails about, a full screen option! At the end of each video you’re also given suggestions to related videos, but you might want to be careful with that feature because you could fall into a Berrics hole and end up not doing what we want you to go out and do, skate. To top it all off we’ve provided you with both tweet and like buttons so that you can tell everyone about the content you enjoy on the site. Seeing the PJ Ladd and Chris Cole game get over two thousand likes on Facebook makes everyone here ecstatic because we know skateboarders are starting to become more popular and more powerful than the politicians you see on the Huffington Post or the musicians on Rolling Stone.
For every single one of you who has emailed us the past three and a half years, we may not have been able to respond, but we have been listening. You are what’s made the Berrics what it is. Young, old, black, white, male or female, all of you make skateboarding survive and the very least we could do over here in our corner of the sandbox is listen and do our best to provide you with what you’ve wanted the most, high quality skateboarding content every single day. This does not mean that the site is perfect, not yet, like any skateboarder we are always working on making it better so if you experience problems, especially in this first few weeks, just know we’re aware of them and working hard fixing them should they arise. Don’t be surprised if over the next 6 months you see a lot of new improvements with the Berrics and a lot of new content from all the skaters and companies you love. We look forward to bringing them to you. Like always, thanks so much for the support. — sb
ps. For those of you who are wondering if this was my secret project I’ve been working on for the past 5 months… no, it is not.
DANTE ROSS SAYS: My love for the Berrics and all it has done for me the past few years, the doors it has opened and all the love I have gotten from the community of skating is beyond measure. The Berrics simply is all about love as far as I’m concerned. That said some people have there feeling about The Berrics I think this puts is all in perspective. If your a hater hate on The Berrics is here to say, it’s only gonna get bigger and better so like they say move b….get out the way.
D Ross
REMEMBERING MY DAD ON FATHERS DAY
Tomorrow is the first father’s day my family and I will experience since my father passed. In looking back on my father John Ross’ remarkable life I ask that all of you who can celebrate tomorrow with their father hug him just a little bit tighter and longer this year for me and mine. My father, my sister and me spent the last few fathers days together knowing they could very well be his last as he battled Cancer valiantly for 2 plus years while under going 3 surgery’s and 4 rounds of chemo therapy which left him compromised physically and at the end weary of further treatment. My father in July after being handed a terminal sentence declined yet another round declaring “living this kind of existence is not living” a sentiment I fully understood. The half promised additional few months another round chemo might grant him wasn’t appealing to him something I could identify with. He knew he was going to pass and no longer wanted to live in constant pain and suffering. This past January he departed the earth after being giving a year to live in mid July of 0/10.
My dad knew his days were numbered when he had yet another tumor removed from his liver in May of 0/10. He knew it would be an endless up hill battle as he often commented he was living on borrowed time for the last several years only to be told he was terminal 2 months later. Fathers day never meant much to both of us, he not being one for sentiment until he initially got sick in 0/8 when all of a sudden every day meant so much more as we secretly monitored our relationship by each and every holiday. Dealing with my dads terminal illness was one of the most if not the most difficult thing I ever experienced in my life thus far, thank god for my younger sister and friends for with out them I would never had made it through sad and as damaged as I still am by it, the strength of others allowed me to stand up tall and be there for the most important person in my entire life: My father.
In the midst of finding out about my dads terminal illness amongst other things I caught my then girlfriend cheating on me with a multitude of people including someone I considered a old friend adding another unpleasant dynamic to my already spiraling world. I found myself drinking like a fish as well in order to quell the pain. I also switched jobs taking a gig I truly knew I wasn’t right for and relocated to LA to be closer to my dad as he split his last days between San Francisco and his beloved Mexico City. I spent my 40 something birthday in a hotel with him in SF feeding him soup and watching his beloved Giants with several friends of his and mine wishing my dad could enjoy it more as he declared “ These weren’t his Giants anymore” a reaction to his physical pain and the realization that he would never again see a world series, that his days were winding down and that his body was being ravaged by cancer, his days increasingly regulated by pain pills something he waged a personal war against. My dad had been free of heavy drugs since 1983 though he smoked weed all day every day like the bohemian he truly was. He gave up all other narcotics including alcohol something I believe allowed him to accomplish so much artistically in the latter part of his life. He was deeply troubled by the need to take oxy’s and whatever else he had to take to get through the day to help manage his pain. It was a tough road to walk and one I’m glad I was able to walk side by side with him. If I had not I believe the pain of his passing would have been that much more painful mentally and spiritually for me.
I spent Thanksgiving with him in Humboldt County. We discussed the book we were working on together his idea one that is finally completed though one he didn’t live to see finished a great regret of mine. I in the midst of writing it hit a serious case of writers block, the magnitude of writing a book with my dying pops having thwarted my ability to put words on paper. He reminded me he was running out of time as I struggled to capture the words I wanted to commit to our tale for perhaps the first time in my adult life. It was a worrisome situation. My dads physical pain mad him angrier than usual and he always had an anger issue much like myself. He was at times verbally abusive which made loving him that much harder. I overcame this and chalked it up to my higher power and allowed my faith to guide me through the rough patches as my compassion over ruled any feelings of alienation his behavior may have caused my sister and me in less important times. I remember the deep emotional pain my dad and me mutually experienced the day after Thanksgiving when his best friend and emotional guardian Sidney who’s house we were staying at had a stroke which sent us both in to a tailspin of sorts. It was a trying day for sure but one I’m glad I was with him on. The fear I saw in his eyes that day was one of the only times I ever saw my dad scared of anything, for he was a warrior till the end.
My dad was a complex person. He was a revolutionary of the highest order a leftist in the realest sense of the word. He was also a very published and accomplished writer. As a father he was absent for a large part of my childhood and all of my younger sisters. He was never going to win father of the year, yet in my teens he housed me, took care of me and helped me get my life back on track. He bravely re entered my sister’s life when she was in her early 20’s and stayed in her life the rest of his days. He was a man of contradiction, acerbic, brilliant, and sweet, yet full of rage. He was an amazing artist; an activist who put his life on the line many times in sacrifice for what he thought was the greater good. He was a man of conviction as well as a man who had been convicted. He served an 18-month jail term for refusing to go serve in the war in Vietnam. He upon he release was told by the warden “Ross you never learned to be a good prisoner” a statement he wore like a medal of honor till the day he passed, and one I think truly encompassed him as he was a rebel to the end, he never bowed down to “The Man “ even in his passing as he continued to rage against the deadly disease that finally took him under. He was also my closest friend, my deepest confidant and the man who consoled me over the troubles and tribulations of my ex, who told me to close the door on that ill fated relationship and to “date a woman not some hot young girl’. He encouraged my spiritual connection though he did not believe in god in any traditional sense yet saw that my Universal Unitarian faith helped me with my daily struggles. He was a big hearted stooped over lion of a man and I am honored to be his son till the end of my days. It is my highest achievement in many ways.
As the end neared I spent Christmas with him in Mexico City my first time ever visiting him there. It was a strange visit as I went to take apart his cramped writers apartment with him and his dear compadre Oscar a street musician and a typical wild character of a friend. My dad collected characters as friends everywhere he went he was always drawn to eccentrics much like himself. I think it’s where I got it from like my dad most of my close friends are crazy artists, skateboarders or musicians of sorts. Like father like son no? But let me not digress, Oscar, my dad and me set upon organizing my dads life during his last days, his last Christmas on earth as he battled mightily with pain managed increasingly by his reliance on narcotics. He directed us on his very specific wants as we pain stakingly broke down his physical property. It was heavy stuff, a bit tense and an experience once again I was glad to have under taken, to be there for him was another honor bestowed upon me by my father and by god itself. For it I am beyond thankful. One evening when he somehow felt up to the task he walked me around his beloved Zocalo district in Mexico City as he visited his favorite eatery the Café la Blanca where he was greeted as a celebrity. Many of the staff with heartfelt tears in they’re eyes told me what a great man my father was. I saw he had truly touched them. As we continued our evening my dad and I did what we always did: We walked the streets. We did this in every city we were in together whether for over 30 years whether it was NY, SF, Malaga Spain or London. It was what we did, how we bonded; we both loved cruising the streets talking shit, taking it all in it was our thing. We enjoyed that one last stroll through the streets of my dad’s beloved adopted city knowing it would be our last time pounding the pavement together. It was priceless to say the least.
As we continued to put his things in order the next few days a throng of visitors constantly came to see him. It was draining on him but he knew the importance of saying good-bye to his friends, for closure was all they wanted. He granted them that with as little sentiment as possible declaring “ Death is a weird experience, I wouldn’t miss it for the world” something I chuckled at. My dad made irreverence an art form of sorts, to see him still hold on to his sense of humor even if for just one last afternoon chuckle was a memory I will always savor the rest of my life.
As the holiday wound down we had the big talk all children wish to have with a dying parent. The wound is still deep for me and one I don’t know will ever fully go away. I find it hard to relate the gamut of personal things we spoke of that night in depth but a few things he bestowed upon me I can share. He asked me to forgive his absence during my childhood, something I had long ago forgiven for which I related to him. He told me “ Dante at the end you only have your friends and family. You have very little family but lots of friends. Make amends with all the people close to you if you can, while you can. Forgive them if you can and allow yourself to be forgiven, it’s important” I promised to do so as well as keep his best friend Sidney’s son Zach in my life which I had been delinquent in doing the last few years for no apparent reason being that Zach is one of the best people in my life and like a brother. I was also given the chance to tell my father that he was the most important person in my entire life, my best friend which I don’t think he ever knew to that night. I emphatically agreed to follow up on all of the promises he asked of me in a tear filled moment of bonding. My father after the water works had settled asked me to lay him down to sleep. My father had always been a tall and lanky man, he was know stooped over and a literal bag of bones all six feet plus of him had been reduced to 135 pounds soaking wet ravaged by cancer and surviving on pain pills and the compassion of those dearest to him both family and friends. As I laid him down to sleep I held his hand tight and sat in a chair next to him as he had done for me as a toddler. He feel asleep only to wake up an hour or so later his hand still in mine and declared “ Dante me hijo always keep me in your hand, always keep me in your heart and I will always keep you in mine” something that we both promised to do. It is a promise I will never let go of.
I left Mexico City on December 29th. I spoke to my sister like I had almost daily for the last 7 months and let her know dad would soon be gone something she already knew. His fragility was evident, his humor failing him and his want to hold on slipping away. He passed at his friends Kevin and Arminda Quigley’s house overlooking lake Patzcuaro in Michoacán Mexico 19 days later with none of his 3 children by his side, as was his choosing as all of his children asked to be by his side a request he denied. His death was on his terms like his life, as he wanted. It was poetic, complex and full of contradiction much like the man he was. He wanted to spare us the pain of watching him die I guess, something I still don’t understand but must respect. His want to leave the earth as he did was his choice and strictly his, one I hope to come to understand better one day. As I reflect on my dad this fathers day I say that the void he left is still there, the pain comes in waves but the knowledge that I am his son, his only son makes the want to leave a dent in the world in his honor that more real, to carry on his legacy that much more important and to feel his spirit in my soul that much more evident each and every waking day.
This fathers day I ask that if you read this, you give your father a extra squeeze for my family and me for our greatest collective wish would be to have our amazing dad for one more fathers day so we could celebrate the love we have for him and each other one more time.
God Bless
Dante Ross
ACTION BRONSON: KARMA LOOP TV LIVE FROM THE CHURCH BOSTON
Another video from my favorite Albanian Jewish Rap Singer Mr Action Bronson.
Enjoy
Dante Ross
ALCHEMIST: SOUL ASSASSINS LOOKBOOK
This is dope from the clothes to the beats Alchemist and the Soul Assassins are that shit
ACTION BRONSON DANCE SONG: CHOPPED HERRING
This so cool, nice one Bob
Enjoy
Dante Ross
FRIENDS WITH YOU RAINBOW CITY NYC HIGHLINE PARK EDITION!
Friends with You opening in Chelsea last night was really dope. Good food, lots of grown folx, good sounds provided by my man Jesse Marco and a happy go lucky art installation adjacent to NYC’s ever growing highline park. Good stuff it reminded me of the game candy land come to life with NYC as it’s back drop.
The view from inside one of the installations. I climbed in a few and bounced around there kind of like a trampoline of sorts on the inside I felt like a 3 years old it was super fun!
Take a peep from above. This was a great little shindig and a welcome addition to NYC’s highline park which is already pretty dam cool. I saw the first edition in Miami and dug it there, i think I like this one even better. It’s open to the public all summer long go take a visit I think you’ll dig it it’s pretty groovy.
LIL WAYNE VS BLACK SABBATH
This tight courtesy of Terry Urban… good shit kid!
DJ NUMARK PLAYS WITH TOYS
Nu-mark sent me this, it’s pretty cool just like he is. I really dug it hiphop is missing play fullness and irreverence this is both of those things
Enjoy
Dante
