Head in the Sand, some methodological concerns

Guess I've been a little selfish lately.

The past few weeks i've been spending afternoons in my apartment, recalling nights past of cyphers, battles, and jams--reading back notes i've texted to myself from b-boy practices out at 5+5 dance studio, evenings playing videogames with MC Webber, being invited to perform on CCTV-7 with Sbazzo and Jeremy of Yinstang (anybody can be anybody's favorite hype-man),
the Iron Mic Chinese MC championships, and weekly hip hop parties up near the Yonghegong metro station, et cetera et cetera...and keeping them all to myself in my little black moleskin. Soon enough, I fear, or perhaps anticipate, that these instances, once singular occurences in space-time, will morph into a jumbled web of entangled experience, and become nearly impossible to tease out one without having the others come tumbling out--like some ill-fated game of sociology Jenga.

36 chambers crew practice

The key then, I assume, is to think thematically. To indulge in the natural connection of these experiences, and embrace the web. The four pillars themselves are connected, are they not? There is a connection to be made between the ethos of battle emcees and breakers, there is a relationship between the hyper visibility of senior citizens fan dancing in parks and the invisibility of public hip hop dance, there is 关系 between old and new school appropriations of hip hop and their respective images of self-authenticity (breakers vs. poppers/"new stylers", graff vs. the art studio, golden agers vs. dirty south kids, dmc vs. club dj)...


My jaw hasn't dropped in a good while, and for what its worth, its a good thing. Or maybe its just dropping so much I can't remember what it feels like to be closed. Either way, I feel like I'm getting pretty deep. The crash course of late night researching and boozed up notes is now an ebb and flow which no longer suprises me. (Careful Mims, your huberis is showing.) But, as my undergrad research methods professor advised me, pay especially close attention to days that seem "normal", for those are the best note-taking days.

This the type of undertaking in which one can merely stop, in the purest sense, you're always on the clock. Like the fat lady says, the show must go on....least until i'm done singin, anyway. The
data just keeps piling on, I already feel as if I have more raw data than I know what to do with. Analyze what you can, and share even more.

Jiezi, DirtyNan, Haifeng, Grouch & Ijapa..enjoying a breakfast of Champions, 多肥角和牛奶

There are no breaks from this type of field research, no three week trips to one's "community" followed by a one week writing hiatus. No superimposed dialectic of 'us' and 'them.' The friend-subject line runs a lot more hazily...consider them all friends, and your an interference to your own study, consider them all subjects, and you're a lonely. Consider it "their" community and you've got no place there, consider it "our" community, and get lost trying to find your role as participant-observer-researcher-producer.

Nasty Ray's an emcee & Wordy's a DJ, but where do I fit in?

For all you curious fourth grade math scholars out there, the total breakdown of my time is probably something like this:

1/2: researching at jam sessions-practices/field studies at concerts-events/ home-stays
1/16: editing videos/editing pictures
1/16: writing notes
1/16: frying chicken/frying assorted other items in pantry

ancient chinese cuisine: jam fried potatoes---甲毛炸土豆片

1/16: working on my graphic novel/murals/general doodling
1/8: paralyzed on the couch, cursing myself for not writing enough
1/16: studying chinese
1/16: kicking myself for not studying enough chinese

For the most part, days are lost getting dizzied somewhere in between "field" research and living my life day-to-day as an African-American in a city which only sees in two colors: Chinese and foreign.

And all this to say, its back to basics for me. Or rather, it has been for a while--and not just in a research sense. Startin' from the ground up: doing my first tags, practicing my six step, cracking back open the rhyme book and chinese dictionary. I read somewhere earlier that right action is about the proper balance of inspiration and motivation; when one starts running on empty, temper it with the other.