It’s been a long and cold winter here in Southern California. It’s mid-July and it wasn’t until last week that the sun thankfully decided to come out. So friends decided to come over and we biked to Santa Monica for food & dranks. It seemed like all of LA was at the beach. Seriously, I don’t think Ive ever seen this many people physically on the sand at once. It kinda reminded me of those vintage black & white pics where the entire beach is covered with coat & top hat wearing beach goers. On the way back we caught a bit of the Venice Beach portion of the Summer Fix LA Competition sponsored by LA Brakeless. The wifey just got a brand new cruiser and now wants a bright, multi-colored Fixie… grrreat, we don’t even have enough room for all the bikes we currently own.

BIG BANG BIG BOOM – the new wall-painted animation by BLU

These wall-painted animations have become increasingly popular, but Ive never seen one so expansive – BLU must have painted an entire town to create this thing. Its a little long, but at least watch it once because the complexity of the story, paintings and 2d/3d animation is amazing.

This past Friday, DJ Neil Armstrong of the 5th Platoon, and better known as Jay-Z’s tour DJ, made a stop at LA’s Soul Sessions in Chinatown. I first heard of DJNA back in 2005. Ever since then, I’ve been following him and every one of his mix tape releases. What makes his mix tapes stand above everything else is his eclectic musical taste. Anything from Prince, The Cure, Coldplay, Tears for Fears to Alicia Keys, Gregory Abbot, Common and Jay-Z can all be found on the same CD. He recently finished a worldwide tour with Jay-Z as his tour DJ. This has no doubt catapulted him into the mainstream spotlight and I’m glad that a lot more people will be exposed to his work.

I had a chance to catch Neil right before his set at Soul Sessions and he was nice enough to stop for a quick picture to represent Social Clothing.

A huge crowd gathered at the front stage when he started his set. I made sure I had my spot at the front. Simply put, he killed it. I don’t think there was a head that wasn’t bobbin that night.

With DJ PlannB

Here are some pictures from the end of the night.

Grand Star Jazz Club

The Shrimp Guys were also set up in the parking lot to satisfy those late night munchies.

It’s not Giovanni’s, but it’ll do

Soul Sessions is held at Grand Star Jazz Club in Chinatown every 2nd and 4th Friday. Thank you DJ Neil Armstrong for bringing the West Coast some love.

Twitter:
DJ Neil Armstrong
Soul Sessions
The Shrimp Guys

After everything that happened to dude, I figured Chris Brown would go underground and re-connect with the streets. Apparently its the streets of LA with local Tyga of Young Money (see my previous post with Tyga). The video was released yesterday so this is right out the oven. Chris Brown is rapping this time and homie is actually really good. It’s a damn good party song and sooo LA! I hope I hear this in the clubs, but I doubt it will get airplay. Regardless if the mainstream will ever accept him again, I’m on the look out of more hot sht from C Breezy.

On a final note, that Bed Rock song is still going hard and it’s basically May.

The Hood Internet is a Chicago based DJ duo that specializes in hip hop and indie rock mash ups. I heard about them a little over a year ago via Jason Kottke (bookmark his site, it’s a great read). They released their fourth mixtape (is that term even relevant in 2010?) in November but really didn’t give it a full listen until I was tired of listening to my same “workout” playlist on my iPhone. After giving them a full run through from beginning to end, it’s my current “what should I listen to while I get ready to go out” soundtrack.

I’m sure you’ve heard similar type mixes but the way they choose current hip hop songs and combine them to more obscure “indie” instrumentals and the way they mix them seamlessly makes them sound like that’s the way they were supposed to be made. My favorite mashups on the CD are:

Modest Mouse vs. Kanye West
Clipse vs. Yuksek
Amanda Blank vs. VEGA
Flo Rida (feat. Ke$ha) vs. MSTRKRFT

Their fourth volume is easily my favorite of all their mixes although all of their CDs can stand independently by themselves. Best of all, all four mix tapes are available for download for free on their site. Enjoy.

I’d like to start this post by saying I am an unabashed Apple fanboy, so you shouldn’t be surprised to see a fair amount of Apple related posts. That said, even if I wasn’t an Apple fanboy, how could I let this pass. Gizmodo apparently has pictures of the yet-to-be-announced fourth generation iPhone. The story goes like this: someone found what looks to be like a normal iPhone 3G/3GS in a bar Redwood City, CA (Nor Cal). Upon closer inspection, it looks to be an Apple prototype of a phone that hasn’t been released. The person who found the phone alerted both Engadget and Gizmodo of the find and reportedly sold the phone to Gizmodo for a rumored $10,000 to what amounts to be the largest Apple, if not largest gadget, scoop of all time.

A couple of my thoughts on this. This is either a planned leak, which Apple routinely does to gauge interest on a new product, or someone at Apple is unemployed as of this morning. It uses the new micro SIM standard that the new iPad 3G is going to use. This means the iPhone is still on AT&T at least, and there is no Verizon version, yet. The rest of the specs are amazing. All new enclosure, improved camera with flash (!), front facing camera (!!), and a higher resolution screen. Be sure to check out the full post at Gizmodo for all the details.

Update (9:33pm): If there were any doubt if this iPhone were real, this should clear it up.

Most people associate Downtown Santa Ana with local government buildings, homeless people and jury duty. A lot has changed in recent years and it no longer deserves that stigma. In a little unassuming store front on Broadway, you’ll find one of the more unique spots on Orange County. In fact, it was voted best bar in all of Orange County two years in a row. The Crosby is a restaurant, bar, bookstore started by 3 friends who all had the same vision.

The Crosby recently celebrated their 2 year anniversary on April 1st. To celebrate they had DJ Rhettmatic of the World Famous Beat Junkies and PlannB, resident DJ of LA’s Soul Sessions spin some classic, definitive hip hop. Here are some shots from that night.

The Crosby is open Monday through Saturday from 5p-2a. You can catch Rhettmatic and PlannB at the Crosby every 1st Thursday of the month.

The Crosby
400 N. Broadway
Santa Ana CA 92701
www.thisisthecrosby.com

My name is Jay and I’m the second blogger/author on the Social Clothing blog. Based here in Downtown Orange County (Santa Ana), I hope you find my posts on technology, new media, music, local events and random links engaging, insightful and entertaining. Aside from posting here on the Social Clothing blog, you can follow me on Twitter or on my personal site. Stay tuned.

Well, this is what happens when our generation enters the workforce: there is a campaign by UC Davis physics student Austin Sendek to make “hella” an officially recognized prefix by the International System of Units (SI). I remember taking a trip to visit family in Vallejo, CA sometime around 1994(?) and returned to Oahu with two important things from my older cousins: Mac Mall’s Illegal Business album, on cassette tape of course, (classic!, but I can’t believe I was listening to such explicit shit at that age) and the word “hella” to express large quantities. 15+ years later, not only is that word still going strong, but it could be legitimized through science.

Official SI prefixes:

10 = deca
100 = hecto
1,000 = kilo
1,000,000 = mega
1,000,000,000 = giga
1,000,000,000,000 = tera
1,000,000,000,000,000 = peta
1,000,000,000,000,000,000 = exa
1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 = zetta
1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 = yotta
1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 = hella?

Join the movement on fB:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Official-Petition-to-Establish-Hella-as-the-SI-Prefix-for-1027/

ha, and yes I categorized this under Tech

#MusicMondays, er Wednesday. I dont know whats up with the ROC camp as of late, but they have had a string of really dark themed “music” videos. Kanye West just came out with the video for Coldest Winter from his 808’s album. Oh I know everyone loves to trash that album (especially when Jay-Z came out with his Death of Autotune song, it was cool to jump on the 808-hating bandwagon), but I personally really liked it… really liked it. I did find it strange Hova’s first single DOA knocked Kanye’s entire album concept. Imagine how that conversation panned out between the two of them: “Yo Kanye, I have this great idea for a song!”. Anyway, so new video for Kanye, dark, just like his previous video with the same director. Where the ROC videos have been tip toeing around dark themes for awhile, this video fell off a cliff OOPS, I didn’t mean to give away the ending.

When Blue Print 3 came out, everyone was singing “New Yoooork” and loving “that one song with Drake”, but I had “On To The Next One” on repeat. I mean no producer can fuse hard lyrics with a catchy, almost club beat, like Swizz can. Especially with such consistency over the years? DMX, Cassidy and my old favorite “Split These Bars” by Drag-On! So when the video came out I was like WTF did they do to my favorite song?! Visually the video is stunning, I love the black and white concept, but the themes and images that flash are unnecessary. If you search the internet people break down the single frame images that flash, specific times and all. There is already a ton of talk online about Jay’s supposed new found belief system (start to type in Jay-Z and Bing will autopopulate the rest). I’ll take it all at face value though. In doing so, I question why these videos are so dark? I can see one video concept like Micheal Jackson doing Thriller, but what does the villain of Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol have to do with this song? (read the book, it’s good)… I hope they don’t ruin the video for Forever Young, should it ever be produced.

KANYE WEST “Coldest Winter” Directed by: NABIL

Kanye West “Paranoid” directed by NABIL

Jay-Z & Swizz Beatz “On To The Next One”