meditating past maya ii

nyc subway shot -jamal shabazz - a brooklyn, ny phenomenon in photography

image dominates movement in new york, as soon as you step outside your building, you have an audience, people are posted on the block like pages of gq and details and vogue. depending on the block, it might mean the rudeboy approach, where one may be “gucci down to the sox,” as biggie smalls noted as a means of negating/compensating for the racial stigma of “black and ugly as ever.” in new york, race/class consciousness is in a tug of war with fashion-consciousness.

what was hot, dope, ill last week is tough, crack, popping this week and the styles and attention to them are as quick to change as the turn of subway turnstyles during rush hour. the cool trickles into social engagements where you may feel the need to be “arriving late, cause our clothes and our time gotta coordinate,” as ludacris put it.

my boy matt, from rhode island, once told me he never felt so much pressure to stay up on fashion as he had after moving to the rotten apple. his resent led to an animosity, which i've seen in other friends as well, who hated hipsters and willy burgh, where an entrance pass may mean being perpetually retro-fitted with a manicured unkempt beard, shaggy hair, and walking with a coffee, rolled up cigarette and an ipad.

nothing wrong with “looking feeling like a million bucks.” but if you are participating in something you don't want to participate in, that's not real to You, then it's a slippery slope of negative vibrations. 

you may hate shopping, or having to shop or feeling you have to shop or wearing the clothes you bought and not feeling fulfilled even though you spent hours picking them out to look just like kanye, justin timberake, jessica biel, megan fox. within a month you don't even like the clothes, the shoes, the books, the plates, the phones, the classes,the tickets you bought. even if you do, the markets already changed styles, and what you're wearing is so out that wearing it would be almost as bad as walking through the trains with shit smeared all over your dingy clothes, hair and face. 

in babylon, we meditate through self-image, where everything is a pricetag and most relationships contingent on the image of who you market yourself as – teacher, doctor, musician, actor, writer, market analyst, lawyer, life-coach, yoga-instructor, etc, etc - material/ego becomes our god, our point of meditation.