#Hip Hip Journeys

[dreamsaretangiblegoals]

"Hip-Hop Journeys: Where Dreams Became Tangible Goals" Rest In Peace Santos Night Club aka Santos Party House

Rest In Peace Santos Night Club aka Santos Party House

In this edition of Hip-Hop Journeys, as we celebrate Hip-Hop's legacy, I can't express enough gratitude for how it has become the soundtrack of my life, paving the way for my global adventures and preparing me for the future. The stage was set in New York City, with an Indian summer vibe, the cool breeze sweeping through the city, and temperatures in the pleasant 80s, creating the perfect atmosphere.

On September 1st, 2010, the Rock The Bells Tour made its stop at Governors Island in NYC, promising potential special guests and surprises. A big shoutout to Dan Green from Clockwork Music Inc., a globally diverse company specializing in talent booking, concert marketing, production, online marketing, and project consultation, for promoting and marketing the event. The concert would feature Hip-Hop legends AZ and Cormega, along with opening acts brothers Willie The Kid & LA The Darkman. For me, this marked a significant milestone as I would be hosting my first major show in NYC while handling the promotion and marketing.

The primary goal was to ensure a great turnout, and the pre-ticket sales were already showing promising signs.

As they say, "If you can make it in New York City, you can make it anywhere," and that morning, I experienced the truth behind this cliché. Savoring my tea, croissant, and egg cheese sandwich with turkey bacon from the Bodega, I took the 4 train from 183rd and Jerome to Wall Street Station, and from there, I walked to the pier for Governors Island. As a native Bostonian, I embraced the city's atmosphere whenever I traveled on public transportation, appreciating the sights and being mindful of my surroundings. Governor's Island reminded me of Thompson's Island back home in Boston. To reach Governors Island, I had to take the NYC ferry, and upon arrival, the music filled the air, with two stages set up - the Main Stage for the headline act and smaller stages for upcoming artists.

Positioning myself strategically between the two stages, I seized the opportunity to personally hand out flyers for the show to people leaving the venue or moving between stages. Although I hadn't secured tickets to attend the show, a stroke of fate led me to encounter a distressed young lady who worked for Rock The Bells. Her date had stood her up, leaving her with all-access guest passes, which she generously offered to me. Gratefully, I found myself backstage with the crème de la crème of the Hip-Hop industry, no longer needing to distribute flyers. I was now adding the headline acts to the guest list for the evening event. My dreams had become tangible goals as I witnessed my first major show, with an iconic and legendary guest list. From Ras Kass West Coast legend & Lyrcists, to Consequence fresh off A Tribe Called Quest rocking, RIP Phife Dawg was still alive, Dres from Blacksheep, my big Bro Vic Black Gangstarr, and the Legend DJ Tony Toca Touch. There were so many more these were the pics I could salvage.

Now its showtime, I hopped into a cab and headed to Club Santos, also known as Santos Party House, located at 96 Lafayette Street in the Tribeca neighborhood. There, I reunited with my brother DGomez, and our friend joey had made the trip from Boston to film the night's unforgettable moments. It truly was a night to remember - my first time seeing AZ live, alongside Nature, Craig G, and the electrifying mic exchange that went down in Hip-Hop history at the 1:10 mark. It all flowed seamlessly, akin to a baton pass, with the crowd united in their clear requests. You can see my big bro from Queensbridge, The Testament himself Cormega, and The Revelations bringing down the house.

Here’s another angle from the night ! Salute to Grandgood

#Hiphop50 #MemoirsOfSagittarius #DATG #DreamsAreTangibleGoals #HipHopJourneys: Where Dreams Became Tangible Goals #InThisEdition #MotivationMondays #Throwback #NYC #ClubSantos #TribecaNYC #2010 #RockTheBells

[saintescuderia]

some thoughts on the beef...

now, i will preface this by the admission: i did my masters thesis on kendrick lamar.

so the bias runs deep. from the moment in 2013 when i first listened to bitch, don't kill my vibe and realised he'd perfectly encapsulated the idea of get your noise away from me, kendrick became a key figure for me. my entire adolescence was characterised by the releases of to pimp a butterfly and DAMN.

i was born and raised christian, but i only started to fully explore that after listening to faith.

i was born and raised in an egyptian household, but i only started to fully identify with what that means after complexion.

my highschool teacher once said to us that there will be no amount of growth in a time period unlike from your 18th to your 21st. and i can testify this. DAMN came out when i turned 18. mr morale and the big steppers came out after i finished being 21.

and, as always, kendrick knew what i needed. that a song about the lifelong affects of trauma and dealing with grief, with pain, with shame. i remember listening to mother i sober for the first time and bursting into tears on my bedroom floor because i never thought he would actually go where i needed him the most.

and now, we're here. that dr*ke is a pedophile. i won't censor that word, but i will censor his name. his artist name deserves no more respect. if anything, it should be that aubrey is a pedophile. and whilst these allegations still need to be proved to be true with evidence, i think it's worth noting something.

kendrick's suffered from the affects of abuse. why would he make light of it and throw them around so carelessly?

if anything, we've seen how nothing he does is careless. everything is so carefully thought out, so methodically thought out with even the most minute details being considered with the utmost deliberation.

aside from that, there's too much pain for that to be the case.

this could've been a good example of the sport. it's what it started out as. it's not worth going through all the subtle disses kendrick has dished out in his career. if anything, his pulitzer prize should be enough proof that a rap diss could remain as is; a rap diss.

but this wasn't a mere rap diss. this was mr morale in action and providing a real life example of the stories and themes he explores in his songs. the affects of unchecked corruption within the self. the affects of generational trauma and how the cycle continues - unless you stop and look in the mirror.

-- + -- + --

we should've known

how a son was finally shown

like the apple with the bruise

it's all coming loose

treat the world like your whore

only for it to reveal

your rotten core

(pls, seek him. heal.)

[faeriekit]

Health and Hybrids (XIX)👽👻💚

[I can't remember the original prompt posters  for the life of me but here's a mashup between a cryptid!Danny, presumed-alien!Danny, dp x dc, and the prompt made the one body horror meat grinder fic.]

PART ONE is here PART TWO is here PART THREE is here PART FOUR is here and PART FIVE is here PART SIX is here and PART SEVEN is here PART EIGHT is here PART NINE is here PART TEN is here PART ELEVEN is here PART TWELVE is here PART THIRTEEN is here PART FOURTEEN is here PART FIFTEEN is here PART SIXTEEN is here PART SEVENTEEN is here PART EIGHTEEN is here...nineteen...oy vey.

💚 Ao3 Is here for all parts (now featuring mediocre mouseover translations, only available on a computer)

Where we last left off... THE BART RETURNS! The earth rejoices! 🥳🎉 Physical therapy can be fun, even if it usually isn't!

Trigger warnings for this story:  body horror | gore | post-dissection fic | dehumanization (probably) |  my nonexistent attempts at following DC canon. On with the show.

💚👻👽👻💚

Danny learns a few more words with practice.

Foda is simple. If Danny is hungry, he can ask for foda. It sounds exactly like food, and when he asks, they feed him.

…Or they up his IV. Which. Danny’s tongue might still feel sore and nasty, but the doctors and nurses and millions of minders don’t seem that mad when he sticks his tongue out at them. Sometimes they even laugh.

They don’t even sound all that mean.

It takes Danny a good chunk of waking time for him to realize that he…probably is hooked up to something he doesn’t want to think about, since all the efforts of lifting and moving him haven’t resulted in a single bathroom trip since he woke up here.

Firstly: horrible.

Secondly: his legs are super, absolutely, positively immobilized, and if someone doesn’t give him enough medication quickly enough after it wears off, Danny is very aware that something is deeply wrong with them.

So. Uh. That’s…gross.

He learns bealo just as quickly. He isn’t sure what bealo means, per se, but when he says it, they up his medication until Danny can pretend he doesn’t have any legs again.

God niht is goodnight, unless Danny is feeling snippy, and then it’s just niht.

…The one lady who minds him always says the whole thing, though. Even when Danny’s mean. Like the one time he threw his rocket at someone.

Or the time he started ignoring everyone when they tried to touch him.

…Or the one time he tried to freeze his IV bag, and put everyone on alert because if he’d been human, that would have seriously hurt him.

“Sorry,” Danny’d whispered, even if it wouldn’t mean anything to her.

She’d patted his hand and meant it. Danny’d had to dry his eyes with his wrist. “Eall es wel.”

Anyway.

Danny hates being in the freaking bed every hour of every day. So when his “sitting up” exercises turn into “hey, let’s try the wheelchair” practice, Danny gets so excited-slash-nervous that he kind of feels like he’s going to throw up all the liquids he’s been injected with.

None of the regular people try to lift him. Instead the lady does it herself, scooping Danny up in very strong arms, the golden cuffs on her wrists weirdly warm on Danny’s skin. When Danny’s settled, his legs sticking out real weird and his back kind of sore, he’s…out of bed.

He’s. He’s not in bed anymore.

And. Sure. It’s temporary, but it’s not the bed. Danny can wriggle, and he can sort of palm the wheels underneath him with the heels of his shaky hands, and he can see so much more of himself than he has in ages and ages.

For one. Both of his legs are in casts. That’s. Not good. He can’t feel it right now, but the sight of fully encased legs…

Well. If he can transform that won’t be a problem. If. If he has to escape. But it is…it’s super scary. He mostly remembers being captured, but the…the other people had been focusing more on his thoracic cavity and his face and head.

…So why are his legs so bad? Did something else happen?

(It did, didn’t it?)

(…Didn’t it??)

His hands shake, but there’s something to all that grip training, or else Danny wouldn’t be able to paw at his neckline to look down his own shirt. Or, well, his cloth nightie, anyway.

It’s good that he looks, since, well…his chest is glowing a solid green.

Whatever should probably be scar tissue. Uh. It…isn’t. There’re gouges down his chest and a crater where his heart should be that probably should be healing over, considering, you know, he’s not freaking dead at this exact second (mostly??), but. Instead of, like, healed flesh, or, say, his insides, there’s a transparent green…jelly… holding him together.

He can see how the green bounces with his heart beat.

...Danny drops the neckline of his gown. His breath comes in choking bursts, eyes pressed into his eye sockets—he feels sick.

He is sick. He has been sick.

The humans are keeping him here because he’s a freak of nature and he’s broken from head to toe and the Guys in White carved his flesh out of his body and opened him up like a can of cranberry sauce.

He presses his hands to his chest, to his stomach, just trying to breathe for long enough that he doesn’t throw up his oatmeal and occasional juice and IV nutrition onto the pristine floor of his sickroom. The people around him all make sympathetic noises that don’t help because he doesn’t know what they mean.

And then he feels something weird.

Not all the sensation in his fingers are back. It’s easier for him to feel impediments than it is to feel textures—something that blocks him from moving, rather than anything sensory-specific. He can usually tell when he touches fabric, because when he moves too far, it pulls tight around his hand. He can tell when he’s on something solid when his hand fails to go through it.

There is something solid sticking out of him.

Danny’s heartbeat quickens. It’s not. It’s. There’s something in him.

And it’s not—it’s so solid. When Danny brushes his hands against it, he can feel his skin and his flesh move with it, trying not to dislodge the thing embedded in him. It pulls at his skin. He doesn’t know what it is.

His fingers tremble as he tries to brush over the object through his gown, trying to figure out its shape from faulty touch alone. It’s like waking up to find himself jammed with needles all over again.

People are talking around them. Danny doesn’t try to listen in. He’s scared. He’s so scared. Something’s happened to him, and he didn’t even notice.

Some of it is—hard. There’s a crinkling sound when he moves. Danny manages to pull his gown neckline back again to catch something of a glimpse, and all he sees is plastic.

He doesn’t know what it is.

He doesn’t know who to ask. He can’t understand anyone and he doesn’t know if he trusts them.

They put something in him. There’s something embedded in him.

He thinks he’s going to cry.

Something touches his arm—Danny flinches. His core tightens with stress as he puts a metaphorical hand on the button, ready to run and hide at any notice.

It’s the lady. He knows her.

No, he doesn’t. He doesn’t know her at all. He can’t talk to her in any way that matters. She’s not a doctor. He doesn’t know why she’s here, or why she’s keeping him here.

She’s nice. She fed him. But is that all it takes to trick him? To make him compliant? Pliable?

She stops touching him when he gets scared, her eyes worried. She kneels—closer than Danny would like, probably, but she keeps her hands to herself. Danny’s heart races faster, out of order, starting and stopping and starting again like a bad engine.

“Eow eart wel?” she asks from his left arm rest, a common question, so softly. Danny doesn’t know what it means. “Eall es wel. Ænlic eow, ænlic me. Bruce bræð wið me?”

She takes a big, deep, breath. Her hand rises slightly over her chest, following an exaggerated movement. Don’t panic. Breathe. Breathe like me. One, two, three.

Danny’s breaths are more choked. More panicked.

But when she breathes, he breathes with her—even with every stutter in between.

“Hwæt es woh[O3] ?” the lady asks, so gently it’s almost a whisper. Her pointer finger hovers over his body, but doesn’t touch—and eventually, Danny figures out she probably wants to know where he’s hurting.

But he’s not hurting. He’s scared. There’s something inside him, and he isn’t sure what it is. He presses the heel of his hand to the object. He feels something rigid refuse to bend inside his flesh.

There’s something of recognition in the woman’s face. “Inne cwic tima,” she says, more certain of answers outside the room, and darts away,

Danny wants to bounce his bound leg. He feels awful when anyone is in the room with him, considering how little of them he knows, but, somehow, it’s so much worse when he’s actually alone.

When she comes back, there’s a second person who walks through the double doors with her, in blue scrubs with ducks on them. They wave to Danny.

Danny…blinks. He feels numb. It’s kind of a problem.

They take it in stride, though; in their hands is a blank board and a chunky marker. The cap comes off, the new person scribbles for a minute or so, and then turns the board around so that Danny can see.

It’s a…person. A rudimentary outline person, sure, with some visible bones and organs to fill in the person-shaped outline. Danny can recognize most of them from anatomy class, although those memories are more…personal, now. A little more painful.

The person taps on the board. The person points to Danny.

Danny frowns.

The person turns the board back around and makes some Pew, Pew, Pew! sounds with their mouth, occasionally opening and closing their hand over the board to match the noise. There’s some more scribbling. When the board turns back around, there’s a violent smudge of marker on top of the drawn person’s drawn intestines.

The person takes their covered pinky finger and erases a little neat circle of marker in the intestines, mostly favoring one side. They draw a little arrow from the hole to the general outside-of-the-person blank area. Then another circle, with a thicker circle inside.

Danny recognizes the object jutting out of him. Oh. This is how he got it.

The person—probably a doctor, Danny guesses, or the surgeon who did this to him—do these people even need credentials, actually?—hands the board over to the lady. They hold out ten outstretched fingers, marker under their arm, and make a show of counting every one of the outstretched fingers with the opposite hand. Then they take the board back.

And then, when they write on the board, Danny can actually understand what they say.

Or, well, it’s numbers! The numbers are the same as his—the line and a circle is clearly meant to be a ten, and the little x is a multiplication symbol— they draw a 10, as clearly and a brightly as it could be against a stark white board, and add a little x 7, probably to indicate a week; the result is ten suns times seven, or seventy suns.

Danny feels his heart bounce in his chest. Danny would bet a whole lot of money that the number is meant to be seventy days. There is an end point. It’s not that Danny is free to be subjected to random anatomical whims—there’s a goal here. This was purposeful.

The little circle-within a circle gets erased. The hole is scribbled through as if it was never there, and the person makes a weaving gesture with the marker that Danny is certain is meant to be sewing.

Tears prick at his eyes. The lady gets close by him again, but Danny lets her. His hands aren’t good enough for wiping tears the way he wants to, yet. Help and company are good.

She gives him a tissue from Danny's bedside table. He takes it with a whisper of a grip.

“Seventy?” Danny rasps, tearful. Hopeful. Terrified of hope. He practically jams the tissue into his eye sockets.

The lady’s eyes go wide. “Seventy,” she repeats, marveling.

It’s enough. Nothing is perfect, but it’s enough. And if Danny's allowed to spend so long in front of the space window that he falls asleep in his wheelchair, well. It's not like he was in charge of where they went.

[lovegrowsart]

no matter whether ppl are trying to make zk's canon relationship out to be sibling coded or associative friends or whatever else ppl make up i feel it all comes from this place of people that don't ship it being unable to handle zuko and katara's canonically deep and intimate friendship at the end of show without (whether subconsciously or not) perceiving it as some kind of threat to whatever katara or zuko ship they DO ship (usually either k/a or z/s or m/z)

they don't know how to acknowledge/write zk (and i don't think them being a m/f ship is divorced from this) having their canonically close friendship alongside whatever they ship because that closeness, no matter how platonic, can't supersede the romance of their own ship. so they just lazily write it off as "siblings" or convince themselves they weren't ever that close in the first place or that katara still secretly hates zuko or something in order to get out of the bind of allowing them to be close friends even if you ship them with other people 🤷‍♀️

[the-iron-duck93]

[journeytothewestresearch]

Dragon Ball Z New Year's Eve Special

My love for Journey to the West is thanks to my love for Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z. A friend just directed me to this crazy awesome bilibili New Year's Eve stage play. It's basically an 11:45 min overview of Z, but with dancing, fighting, animation, etc. It's great.

[tha-wrecka-stow]

[mymelaninmatters]

fuck all my haters 💕 @mymelaninmatters

[veganathleteballerina]

August schedule

Mon - improver ballet 5-6pm

Tues - grade 2 ballet 6:30-7:30pm

grade 2/3 ballet 7:30-8:30pm

character ballet 8:30-9pm

pointe prep 9-9:30pm

Wed - tap 7:30-8pm

hip hop / jazz 8-9pm

Thurs - stretch 5:40-6:40pm

Fri - drama 5:30-8pm

Saturday - ice skating

Sunday - aerial hoop

I am yet to try aerial hoop but plan to try it this month if I can. I keep getting scared. I'm so excited about the new dance term starting up. I'm going to also try to go ice skating at least once a week.

Tap shoes, jazz shoes, character shoes, canvas ballet shoes and satin ballet shoes.

[kevinkevinson]

it's like he learned nothing on his sockventures

[divinexlegend]

my second home 🫶🏽

[pattokarts]

I've been sick for a week, so here's some rose hip (idk why I wrote rose bud there. literally just now realized 🙃 Maybe because it was late & my brain was thinking "Hagebutten" (german for rose hips)) studies from october (literally a month ago today, wtf). I love the last picture so much 🥰

I think I'm currently at a point where I'm comfortable with sharing sketchbook stuff even if it's "not perfect" (whatever that means). Art is a journey and practicing, playing, discovering, "failed" pieces are as much (if not even more) a part of it as finished paintings 💙

[fearless-franklin]

Don’t catch feelings, catch flights. Jet life til the next life. 🤙🏼

Goodbye Denver, Colorado. Hello Dallas, Texas.

[fatepony]

Fern hips

[dbguidebook]

Darling Bonnie's Book Club. #Societythings