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Archived wordplay & original interviews by Chul Gugich, unless otherwise noted. var sc_project=7097742; var sc_invisible=1; var sc_security="fa9f88ff"; var scJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://secure." : "http://www."); document.write("");

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Command and Conquer Isn’t a Fun Pastime Anymore

When I was visiting my dad in Washington State two weeks ago for the 4th of July, he insisted that I sort through a stack of boxes containing some old belongings of mine. Stuff I’d stored in his garage back in 2007 before I made the cross-country move from Seattle to New York City.

One of the many plastic storage bins contained a collection of classic video game consoles and a grip of old cartridges, including this one:

Remember this? You probably don’t. When this real-time strategy game dropped in the States in 1990, it wasn’t particularly well-received. My brother and I, however, played it obsessively.

Herzog Zwei was a precursor to the online battle arena games that arrived subsequently, those titles where the basic objective was to protect your home base from annihilation while simultaneously trying to inflict similar destruction on your opponent’s. In Herzog Zwei, you accomplished this by commanding an armada of robots -- drones, essentially -- which you could build and then program to carry out certain tasks: protect, invade, occupy, repair, and, of course, attack. Herzog Zwei featured brilliant game play and was definitely ahead of its time. Today, it’s developed something of a cult following and been called “the best game you never played.” It’s basically The Big Lebowski of video games.

It’s fun to reminisce over Herzog Zwei because of how much joy it brought my brother and I; we warred for hours on its virtual battlefield. After I re-discovered that box of video game nostalgia, I passed it along to him.

Herzog Zwei is also a bittersweet memory because of the game’s very nature -- one of violence -- and how closely the technology used today by the military and police department mirrors Herzog Zwei’s then-fantastical inventions of 26 years ago. “Command and conquer” was never an innocent notion, but at one time it was far removed from my reality. Accomplishing Herzog Zwei’s virtual mission comes with far less satisfaction these days because I know it’s happening in real life somewhere across the world.

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Seeded Country

A couple things:

1. If you’re in the Los Angeles area, get thee to Lodge Bread (11918 W Washington Blvd) for their seeded country loaf (good enough to eat plain and un-toasted, but for a transcendent experience apply a liberal spread of salted Kerrygold and call it a life). And while you’re in there, try their cinnamon roll. It’s impossibly fluffy and light for its kind and therefore won’t weigh uncomfortably in your belly after you’ve eaten the entire thing (though it’s easily big enough for two). The topping is more of a whipped cream than a gooey frosting, minimally sweet and with the slightest touch of citrus. It’s applied sparingly. You will wish there was more. I don’t know if “artisanal cinnamon” is a thing, but if it is, Lodge Bread uses it. Theirs is more complex than your average grocery store spice; it’s almost floral. This is the best cinnamon roll I’ve ever had.

2. “This flower is the purple of a little girl’s dream.” That’s how my wife referred to the blooming Jacaranda tree, a ubiquitous species found lining the streets of Los Angeles with, apparently, a strong love-hate relationship among the city’s residents. Leave it to an Angeleno to find disdain in resplendent nature because something about it fucks up their car’s paint job. As my wife goes, however, the Jacaranda -- and other natural beauty of Southern California -- is why it’s so easy to “gush” over this region. Unlike our previous home of New York City, also awesome, but not in the same ethereal way of Los Angeles. The mountains, beaches, native plants -- they all beg the attention of your senses. You forgive LA’s inconsistent architecture, ugly-as-sin strip malls and six-lane arterial roadways for what lies just behind it all: The uncompromising wildness of the desert and unlimited promise of the Pacific.

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Shorty Wardrobe is the hottest rapper out.

Shorty Wardrobe straddles the clinical line between dwarfism and “just very small.”

Shorty Wardrobe played in last year’s Celebrity Game at NBA All-Star Weekend and dribbled clean under Snoop Dogg’s legs for a reverse layup.

Shorty Wardrobe recorded an explicit version of Skee-Lo’s “I Wish.” (It was about having sex with Yao Ming.)

Shorty Wardrobe is about as tall as the mixing board in the control room.

Shorty Wardrobe was once accidentally locked in the recording booth for three consecutive days by her engineer because he couldn’t see her sitting on the piano bench.

Shorty Wardrobe only needs three ounces of water a day to stay hydrated.

Shorty Wardrobe will fit in your pocket.

Shorty Wardrobe thinks Too Short was overzealous when he chose his rap name.

You know how your playlists sometimes get fucked up on Spotify? That was Shorty Wardrobe. She’s inside your smartphone right now.

Shorty Wardrobe is actually more of a concept than a living, breathing human. She’s a theory, really.

Shorty Wardrobe’s reality is not so different from ours. Context is everything.

Shorty Wardrobe challenges gender norms and racial stereotypes.

The game needs Shorty Wardrobe.

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We Are Living in the Future / We Are Not Living in the Future

Live-streamed death videos. Police killings via robot. Conspiratorial media manipulations. Pokemon Go.

The first time in my life I truly felt like I was living in the future was when the first iPhone dropped. It really felt like we were on some Star Trek: The Next Generation shit, the way the touch screen perfectly duplicated Lt. Geordi La Forge’s starship Enterprise navigation panel. The ubiquity of touch screens in all manner of consumer products quickly flattened the technological landscape, however, to the point that today “capacitive touch” seems almost prosaic.

The second time in my life I truly felt like I was living in the future was just last week -- early in the morning on July 8, 2016 -- when I woke to learn that Micah Xavier Johnson, the man accused of shooting 14 police officers, five of them fatally, was killed by the Dallas Police Department using a Remotec ANDROS Mark VA-1 bomb disposal robot. For the first time in America’s history, a police department used a robot to impart lethal force against a suspect.

The killing of Micah Xavier Johnson alone didn’t excite my perception of the future. The live-streamed death of Philando Castile also contributed to it -- a dystopic scenario that could have been lifted directly from a Philip K. Dick novel. Less dismally, the nightly gathering of hundreds of jolly Pokemon Go zombies players in my downtown Los Angeles neighborhood added a convivial, if eerie, sense of estrangement from the present.

The objective analysis of these concurrent events left me with a sense of cold wonder. Objectivity, however, is simultaneously my privilege and coping mechanism these days. Privilege because I’m personally able to remove myself from the atrocities occurring to the black community by virtue of my own racial immunity. (I’m Asian American.) And coping mechanism because to attempt to empathize with those brothers and sisters of color is almost too much to bear. In a sense, this is my own curse -- grievously entitled and exempt from any actual physical danger as it is -- but a curse nonetheless.

I was snapped out of my objective reverie while watching the first two parts of ESPN’s recent documentary, OJ: Made in America. If you haven’t watched it yet, you should. It’s alive and vital, provocative and disturbing, and will cause you familiar shudders when you view the images and hear the audio of past events unfolded against blacks in South Central Los Angeles. Events that exactly mirror those we saw last week in Baton Rouge and Falcon Heights, Minnesota, and so many other places. We are truly repeating our sins. Over and over, insanely and dispassionately. My objectivity as to what constitutes the “future” allows me to forget that.

The future, as it’s been promised and sold to us as a wealth of progress and equitable humanity, isn’t really here yet. What we have now is merely a camouflaged, gross extension of the past. The Remotec ANDROS Mark VA-1 bomb disposal robot was used to kill a supposed murderer, but scholars are already fearful that someday these robots may act as stand-ins for police attack dogs, just like the ones sicced on Watts rioters by the LAPD in 1965. The future, as a saleable bill of goods, is the horde of Pokemon Go players gathering nightly in the streets of downtown Los Angeles, distracted and reveling in a virtual playground where no one ever really dies. The real future, is daily death by police execution viewable just as easily on those same touch screens.

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Bernie Endorsed Hillary Today, and I’m Totally OK with it

The Republican and Democratic parties have split like atoms this Presidential election season, with much hand-wringing over the supposed “souls” of the respective political associations.

“Where are we going as party?” “Who is best equipped to lead us there?” “And if a suspiciously apocalyptic-appearing horseman slash doofus billionaire real estate mogul somehow managed to slither his way into a nomination by one of the country’s two dominant political parties, and we just kind of stood around with our mouths agape instead of freaking the fuck out, would the racist, sexist bile he vomited forth really make a sound?”

These are all reasonable questions, simultaneously baffling and terrifying, and I’ve become alarmingly numb to them.

Still, it’s hard for a “progressive liberal” (*horn toot sound*) like myself to not feel the burn (as it were) of intra-party friction between the nouveau-beatnik supporters of Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton’s old guard battalion. Friends and colleagues in my previous place of work -- a quasi-socialist housing organization in New York City -- had real-life arguments over the “fundamental change” that either candidate might bring to the highest office in the land. I suppose these were good conversations to have, but when you’re at a happy hour with a group of liberal teammates, it only takes a drink-and-a-half’s worth of debate for diminishing returns to start creeping in. Eventually it feels like five people wearing identical jerseys trying to make a layup on the same basket at the same time: If you’re one of the five, it kinda seems like a fun and wacky challenge, but from the bleachers it looks fucking absurd.

My Facebook feed this election season was mostly dominated by those in the pro-Bernie camp. Actually, the term “pro-Bernie” doesn’t do justice to my virtual friends’ positions: These people aren’t just feeling the Bern, they’re practically standing in the fire. On purpose. And that’s cool -- self-flagellation as part of one’s belief system is a rich tradition. I just wish it were easier to engage with some of these folks on why Hillary is not only a perfectly suitable candidate but, more importantly, a greater historic one.

The conventional argument goes a vote for Bernie is a vote for fundamental change, or, better yet, is equivalent to taking part in a “political revolution.” There are groups of political protestors in other parts of the world that would probably have something to say about Sanders’ use of that term, but fine -- if the word “revolution” is fire-starter for a Bernie base then slap a “Context is Everything” disclaimer on that shit, light it up and hope for the best.

The Bernie Bros (and Sisters) also like to say that a vote for Hillary is a vote for “more of the same.” It’s here where I start to worry that the heat is getting to their Bernie brains. While it’s empirically true that a vote for Hillary is a vote for more of the political “same” -- many of her policy positions mirror those of Barack Obama, after all -- what’s not true is that Hillary Clinton, as a living, breathing human being, is the embodiment of “more of the same.” And that’s because she is a lady. And there’s never been a lady President of the United States.

I repeat: There’s never been a lady President of the United States.

Do you remember back when Barack (“Bottom of the ninth with a comfortable lead and fucking loving it”) Obama was elected the first black President of the United States? And, assuming you voted for him, do you recall how awesomely awesome and amazing it was to wake up every morning, turn on a shitty news feed, and see the words “President Barack Obama” under a photo or video of that guy? A black guy? Do you remember how improbable and awe-inspiring that felt? I’m not claiming it’s not still awe-inspiring, but I am claiming it does feel slightly less improbable.

We’ve gone from, “My President is black!” -- something I heard a young black woman exclaim with a mixture of joy and amazement on election night in Harlem in 2008 -- to comedian Larry Wilmore uttering on live TV, “Yo Barry, you did it my n*gga” at the conclusion of his set at this year’s White House Correspondents Dinner. Wilmore’s much-maligned middle finger to polite society was not normal. But the President to whom this provocative, comedic and therapeutic congratulations was directed has become, over the course of the last eight years, the norm.

And really it’s that normalization I’m concerned with. For me, the idea of electing a woman President of the United states surpasses the idea of electing a white, male democratic socialist. While I would like to wake up in a world with greater progressive taxation, a single-payer health care system, a $15 minimum wage, and no corporate influence over political elections, I’d also like to wake up in a world where my four year-old niece is brainwashed taught, every day, into believing it’s possible for her to become President. Yes, that’s a gooey sentiment. But it’s also the one that might ultimately bind us more closely together.

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"This used to be Chul's playground." 📷: Claire Meredith.

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Beats, Rhymes and Life

My personal thoughts on the music and passing of a hip-hop legend: A Tribe Called Quest’s Phife Dawg.

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First time in print for the kid.

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The 28HUNDRED interview series featuring rapper and activist, Bambu. Filmed at the Knitting Factory, Brooklyn on 10.29.14.

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The 28HUNDRED interview series featuring Canadian MC, Shad. Filmed at The Studio at Webster Hall in Manhattan, on 12.4.14.

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206UP YEAR-END: What Mattered Most in 2014

Great things happened in Seattle hip-hop in the year 2014 and many of those things took the form of cohesive, fully-realized albums. We’ll get to listing some of those tomorrow. Today, though…

On Shabazz Palaces, D’Angelo and how their musical fates intertwined with Black America’s in 2014 and time immemorial.

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The 28HUNDRED interview series featuring Detroit hip-hop producer and MC, Black Milk. Filmed at Free Candy in Brooklyn on 11.20.14.

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The 28HUNDRED interview series featuring Seattle hip-hop artist, author and activist, Gabriel Teodros. Filmed in Brooklyn, NY on 7.13.14.

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[Interview with producer/composer Adrian Younge for Passion of the Weiss, 9.23.14.]

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[Album review for Potholes in my Blog, 9.3.14.]

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["206UP Five Year (2009-14): The Top 15 Albums" for 206UP.COM, 9.4.14.]

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["206UP Five Year (2009-14): The Top 25 Seattle Hip-Hop Tracks" for 206UP.COM, 8.4.14.]