BiblioMarket

Wednesday, April 19, 2023

The (Un)holy Gospel of Suga Free

If you’re not a hip-hop fan of a certain age — or an Angeleno — then the name Suga Free may not ring a bell. Which is, to be clinical, a damn shame; the man is one of rap’s great unsung regional heroes. Thankfully, the Los Angeles Times saw fit to commission a full feature profile on Pomona’s finest, and Jeff Weiss does it justice, giving Free his well-deserved flowers while not shying away from his music’s conflicting nature.

There is a YouTube video from around 1995 that goes viral just about every time someone posts it on social media. It’s alternately known as the Suga Free “Pen and Nickel” or “Kitchen Table” freestyle. Filmed with a handheld camera at a Compton dope house, Suga Free performs the rap equivalent of hitting a full court shot backward and following it up with a 720-degree slam dunk. Using a nickel as a kick drum, a pen as a hi-hat, Suga Free floats like he had never experienced gravity. He’s Gregory Hines in alligator shoes, Cab Calloway on a mission to make money with Minnie the Moocher. The voice pirouettes and crip walks, flows and bends like alien cadences from an advanced civilization where “Dolemite” is revered as sacred text. When Questlove posted the clip last month, the reactions were typical: thousands marveling at the level of difficulty, describing it as the pure essence of hip-hop creativity. Or as A$AP Ferg chimed in: “Unbelievable 🔥.”

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His Death Turned Bob Lee Into a Symbol—His Friends Are Trying to Take Him Back

When Bob Lee was killed in San Francisco in early April, that tragedy almost immediately birthed a second one: people turning his death into a political cudgel. The true circumstances becoming known (and Lee’s alleged killer being arrested) has undone some of that craven weaponization, but not all of it. Now, Scott Alan Lucas speaks to Lee’s friends and associates — some of whom are far more sympathetic than others — take the measure of a man who, by all accounts, was loved dearly.

It’s not that Lee’s friends don’t think the city has its challenges. They do—and they want the city to address those problems. It’s more that they don’t want the memory of their friend to get lost in the process. “There was a sense that all of us have that San Francisco has seen better days,” said Schultz. “Now isn’t the time to talk about where San Francisco will go. I want it to be about what Bob was about. This is the only time that the vast majority of the world is going to hear about Bob and the only impression I want to leave is what we’ve lost.”

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I Really Didn’t Want to Go

Lauren Oyler was pretty determined not to enjoy her nine days aboard a cruise ship on a “Goop at sea package,” and she succeeded. There is plenty of whinging going on here, but both Goop and the cruise ship industry feel like fair targets, and Oyler’s dry humor lifts this piece up.

Last summer, I got an email from my editor asking, sneakily, among the how are you’s, “Have you ever thought about writing on wellness??” She was looking for someone to go on “the Goop cruise.” Like most female writers, I had thought about writing on wellness, mainly in terms of the free stuff I could get to do so. And for name recognition and potential hate-read appeal, a Goop assignment is the ne plus ultra of wellness writing.

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‘Nothing will go wrong. It’s paradise.’

This story might make you think twice about taking a cruise. Based on extensive documentary evidence and interviews, Tom Warren and Anna Betts paint a portrait of an industry riddled with wrongdoing: sexual assaults — the crime most often reported on cruise ships, according to the FBI — inadequate investigation, potential coverups, and more. It’s like one of the central storylines of Succession come to life:

By midnight, the party was in full flow. [Jane] Doe decided to run around the cruise decks. As she ran up a stairwell, a Carnival crew member was waiting for her. According to a complaint filed in 2019, which BuzzFeed News reviewed, she claimed he then lured her into a closet and locked the door.

“I remember being scared seeing him holding the lock, so I started asking him where he was from to, like, calm the situation down, and he just kept saying that I looked like his girlfriend,” Doe recalled during her deposition.

She said the crew member then raped her and ejaculated on her.

When the assailant finally unlocked the closet door, Doe immediately rushed to her room. According to her deposition, she was pursued by the employee, who caught up with her and asked to be let into her cabin. She declined and closed the door behind her.

Once inside, Doe burst into tears and told her friend what had happened, she recalled in her deposition. She began having a panic attack and hyperventilating. She and her friend immediately reported the alleged crime to Carnival guest services.

Doe was placed in a wheelchair and taken to the ship’s medical facility. When she told the doctor what had occurred, Doe said the medic apologized and told her, “Unfortunately, this happens all the time.”

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The Once Unthinkable Revolution Coming to Figure Skating

Pairs figure skating is a truly beautiful thing to watch — but with far more women in the sport than men, why does a pair have to be opposite genders? It feels like a question that should have been asked a long time ago (apart from in Blades of Glory). But it’s only recently that a step was taken, with Skate Canada, the country’s figure skating governing body, removing all gendered language from its competition rulebook, redefining teams as “Partner A and Partner B.” In this informative, thoughtful essay, former skater Talia Barrington considers what this means for the future of the sport, along with a detailed look back at its history.

As piano echoed over the sound system, they began to dance, their bodies matching effortlessly, limbs stretching in identical lines, torsos coiling. With their arms wrapped around each other tightly, they unfurled to spin around in endless motion. Improvisation became choreography, and they alternated between carving across the ice and laughing at a botched move. Over and over, they practiced a Fred Astaire–style dip until it was easy. Cheek to cheek, then far apart with just a single push, the pair forged a new routine.

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My Transplanted Heart and I Will Die Soon

Author Amy Silverstein has had a heart transplant—twice. Now she’s dying of cancer. Those facts are related, as she explains in this essay. The procedure that saved her is now killing her:

I gave my all to sustaining my donor hearts despite daunting odds, and the hearts rewarded me with extraordinary years. I have been so lucky.

But now I lower my chin and whisper the words malignant … metastatic … lungs … terminal. It is the end of the road for my heart and me — not because we didn’t achieve and maintain sparkling cardiac health. But because the sorry state of transplant medicine took us down.

Organ transplantation is mired in stagnant science and antiquated, imprecise medicine that fails patients and organ donors. And I understand the irony of an incredibly successful and fortunate two-time heart transplant recipient making this case, but my longevity also provides me with a unique vantage point. Standing on the edge of death now, I feel compelled to use my experience in the transplant trenches to illuminate and challenge the status quo.

Over the last almost four decades a toxic triad of immunosuppressive medicines — calcineurin inhibitors, antimetabolites, steroids — has remained essentially the same with limited exceptions. These transplant drugs (which must be taken once or twice daily for life, since rejection is an ongoing risk and the immune system will always regard a donor organ as a foreign invader) cause secondary diseases and dangerous conditions, including diabetes, uncontrollable high blood pressure, kidney damage and failure, serious infections and cancers. The negative impact on recipients is not offset by effectiveness: the current transplant medicine regimen does not work well over time to protect donor organs from immune attack and destruction.

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The Prince

Stefano Cernetic was the Prince of Montenegro. His ancestors were said to be Julius Caesar and the real Count Dracula. He socialized and attended lavish parties on the French Riviera — as princes do — but something about him was off. He told people he could secure them diplomatic passports for a few thousand euros each; he bestowed titles upon ordinary people not born into nobility. Eventually, Cernetic was called out as a fraud.

In this entertaining, unbelievable story for Truly*Adventurous, Alessio Perrone unravels the truth about a conman and self-proclaimed prince.

Weeks later, a copy arrived on Tamenne’s desk of a baptism certificate from the Christian Orthodox Church of Trieste, the prince’s hometown. Tamenne showed it to an acquaintance who had experience verifying authenticity. Right away, the acquaintance suggested that something seemed off in part because some sections of the document seemed to have been tinkered with. It also appeared to contain a suspicious combination of fonts, indicating that multiple typewriters were used.

That was enough for Tamenne—the rumors, the obscure family history, even some of the bizarre titles. He discovered that the prince had not received the collar of the prestigious Order of Saint Sylvester after all, but the relatively worthless collar of the similarly named Association of Saint Sylvester, a different organization with a far lesser pedigree. Exaggeration was one thing, deceit was another. He had believed in the prince. With the Riviera awash in so much money, the currency with the greatest value was honor and trust.

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