This article originally appeared in the Occidental Weekly.Visit funbelly.com to grab your tickets to our upcoming tours.
Author: Daphne Auza
A group of eight followed
Occidental alumnus Carlos Aguilar ’98 down Colorado Boulevard during the
April 19 soft launch of his food tour company, Fun Belly. The party
made six stops on their three-hour tour, including one at Little Beast
for a sampling of American comfort food and one at Four Cafe for their
organic options. Between dishes, Aguilar entertained his
hungry guests with Eagle Rock’s local history and provided stories on
the background of each establishment they visited.
With the
thousands of restaurants and diverse flavors that make up Los Angeles’
food scene, food tours allow both locals and visitors to sample the lot.
Guides take customers on a walking tour of the neighborhood, stopping
at restaurants for tastings that add up to a full meal. According to
Aguilar, Fun Belly focuses on the dining options available in developing
neighborhoods in the San Gabriel Valley and Los Angeles.
“When
you take a look at tours that other companies offer, they’re in places
like Laguna Beach and Downtown LA,” Aguilar said. “The tours that I
offer now are grounded in the history of the San Gabriel Valley and the
development of the city of Los Angeles.”
Fun Belly currently offers three-hour public walking tours of eateries in Eagle Rock and the Claremont Village. Public tours in each neighborhood take place once a week, while private tours for special occasions, corporate teams and other groups of six or more may be reserved at any time. Aguilar is also in the process of developing tours for Old Town Pasadena and Highland Park.
Not every tour is the same, according to Aguilar. To plan
the tour, he coordinates the time and date for the visit with the
restaurant owners and managers and sometimes requests certain dishes or
off-menu items. Each tour guarantees at least six tastings.
“Even
if the food turns out to be the same [on each tour], the type of
information changes because there’s so much rich history, I could never
cover it,” Aguilar said.
Before starting Fun Belly, Aguilar wrote
and produced documentaries on the Bible, American Idol, WWE and NASCAR,
along with food and travel segments for television. Brad Haskell, who
attended the launch of the Eagle Rock tour, worked with Aguilar as a
camera operator at Associated Television International. He said that the
tour was reminiscent of the days when he and Aguilar traveled the
country to film and produce television segments.
“[Food] was
always a part of our experience, so it was like we were travel hosts or
food critics going around and tasting different things from wherever we
went,” Haskell said. “The food tour business is cool because it gives
people the opportunity to have that experience without traveling too
far.”
Aguilar first formally ventured into food culture as an undergraduate when he and education Professor Clarence LaMont Terry—also a student at the time—wrote a column for The Weekly called “tasteBUDS.” Initially the column reviewed meal options on campus, but they eventually convinced local eateries to sponsor their meals with the prospect of free advertising.
“Many, if not most, Oxy students
recognized that college meal plans were generally problematic and not
designed for students from working class families,” Terry said. “So,
while we made it our mission to regularly ‘hack’ the meal plan system,
we were also very much interested in what food choices northeast Los
Angeles has to offer.”
Aguilar and Terry expanded the scope of their column even further when they applied for a grant from the Durfee Foundation, which allowed them to study interpersonal dynamics around dining in Beijing and Shanghai for six weeks. Aguilar continues to integrate this connection between history, culture and food into his motivation for giving food tours.
“Food is not just something you
eat; it’s the culture around the preparation, the serving, consumption
and appreciation of the food,” Aguilar said.
With each tour, Aguilar strives to tell a more inclusive history of the neighborhood the group is visiting. After going on a food tour in the San Gabriel Valley offered by the Claremont Historical Society, he said that it neglected the complex history of the area’s development. He plans to avoid doing the same by conducting more localized research, like asking restaurant owners about their personal history within the community.
Aguilar
hopes to grow his company by hiring and training tour guides and
establishing relationships with more restaurants. In the meantime, he
looks forward to receiving feedback from the community at his alma
mater.
“[This company] is new and if I were to have 100 people
give me feedback on a tour, I’d like as many Oxy folk as possible,” he
said.
There’s an Angel on my left shoulder and she’s telling me to say “NO” to social media for Lent.
“’But…but…but you work in social media” sayeth the Devil on my right shoulder, in between looking at his IG profile.
‘Ok, then, no non-work related social media for 40 days,’ the Angel screams back at the top of her aching lungs.
Why tho?
Will it hurt?
Mommy, I’m scared.
To add insult to misery, I’m avoiding sugary snacks and wheat (e.g., bread, tortillas, life) for 40 days, too.
Look, I haven’t observed Lent in decades. (More on that later…maybe.)
Why now?
Well, the self-denial could do me some good. What kind of good? I don’t know but we’re about to find out.
So, how’s Day 1 Hour ZERO going, you ask? Well, I’ve already unwittingly checked FB, Twitter and IG while standing idly in the kitchen waiting for my coffee to brew. It’s a curious habit; one I’m looking to break. So, I’ve removed the apps from my phone…but not before impulsively checking them a half dozen times before lunch.
Shit just got real.
While there’s a spiritual root to this exercise, I’m also motivated by material productivity.
I’m hoping I can scratch a few things off my ‘meaning to do but probably won’t’ list, including purging my Inboxes and removing additional time sucking apps from my phone. I’ll be doing some reflective journal writing and I might even meditate every morning.
Catch me by phone or better yet by face. That way I can look into your soul and exorcise the demon of Tumblr and MySpace from you.
As Big Frugal Brown Parents, we cherish free play–as in free free–as in, no money required–as in, Disneyland gets no love.
Our kids are getting older (10 and 7) but they still love a good park.
And it just so happens they love a good taco, too. So, after we hit the King of all Tacos in Baldwin Park, we walked across the street to Bolen’s crowned jewel, Morgan Park.
In case you haven’t heard, the Eagles are not going to the Super Bowl this year.
This means that while many of you are posted up watching sub-par teams work their way towards a rinky-dink trophy, Big Brown Family is out making the most of our Sundays.
With our beloved Philadelphia Eagles out of the playoffs, our Sundays have opened up for more activities outside of the crib. This past Sunday morning, we decided to head out to The Claremont Village for some food and family fun.
On your mark, get set, lesssgooo!
First, we grabbed a bite at 42nd St Bagel, a family favorite. Their bagels are fresh and their Iced T has some zing.
I love practicing hip hop as a heuristic. It provides entry into a range of important skills for kids, adolescents and adults alike. Off top, I’m talking vocabulary development, literary interpretation, creative writing, engaged listening, choreography, design, performance …and the list goes on, er, can’t stop, won’t stop.
Similar to your favorite religion or political philosophy, an orthodoxy has been established. And the twin pillars of any good orthodoxy are 1) shared history and 2) shared meaning.
I came across Carole Boston Weatherford’sThe Roots of Rap at a bookstore while my kids were picking out a Wimpy this and a Harry that. The illustrations (by Frank Morrison) were arresting. The format, a free flowing rhyme, takes readers down hip hop’s history row.
The book opens
“Folk tales, street rhymes, spiritual–rooted in spoken word. Props to Hughes and Dunbar; published. Ain’t you heard?”
As you can see, Weatherford is playing ZERO games. She roots hip hop history in cosmopolitan folklore, street life, the church and African-American literary pioneers.
I can’t say enough about the artwork. I wonder if they’d publish a poster pack as part of the series, or a limited drop with signed artwork.
Visit Weatherford’s site and you’ll note that she’s written books on The Tuskegee Airmen, Gordon Parks, Harriet Tubman and the Civil Rights movement. And her son Jefferey is an accomplished artist, too. Clearly, the Weatherfords value arts education. Big propers.
And props to Little Bee Books for putting this out. This is a book our family highly recommends.
Feel free to offer your untrained, pop cultural psychoanalysis as to why. I’m more than happy to toss that shit in the trash.
Buuuuuuut…if I had to venture a guess tho, it’s likely connected to some existential angst related to divine hiddeness.
This is my first (and prolly not last) stand up experience. There’s something poetic about having to do this with my son, Joaquin, in hand. But Dad is the way of the walk.
Yo, we’re throwing this one back back back to the warning track.
No one would choose to live without friends, even if he had all other goods.
— Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics
In 1993 an underground Brooklyn Hip-Hop trio calling themselves Black Moon released their debut album on Wreck Records. The record, aptly titled Enta da Stage, stripped down the then popular airbrushed thump and swagger of East Coast rap to a grease paint scowl of urban New York drama. Enta da Stage was a new direction in Hip- Hop, but perhaps was most significant to the careers of the artists and their fellow associates in rhyme. Rather than focusing the fruits of their newfound success solely on building their own fame, Black Moon instead parleyed their fortunate hand to win recording contracts for a half-dozen of their cohorts. The members of these fledgling groups – Original Gun Clappaz, Smif-N-Wesson, and Heltah Skeltah – joined with Black Moon to create a meta-group of sorts, the Boot Camp Clik. Along the way, Black Moon frontman Buckshot even co-founded his own record label, Duck Down Entaprizes, as a means of navigating his friends’ production efforts in the free market system while maintaining their own interests at heart. Amidst the often unforgiving waters of the record business, the Boot Camp Clik managed to set a precedent for self guidance that has been followed and expanded upon (to the tune of millions of dollars) by the likes of Sean “Puffy” Combs (Bad Boy Records), Suge Knight (the now defunct Death Row Records), and Master P (No Limit Records).
The story of the Boot Camp Clik is indeed an encouraging tale of camaraderie and sound business acumen, but what, you ask, do rappers with stage names like “Louisville Sluggah” and “DJ Evil Dee” really have in common with the robed Grecian philosophers of old, other than a penchant for loose-fitting clothing? Among outsiders to the culture (see sidebar), Hip-Hop is mostly known for its “negative” aspects: strong language; references to criminal activities; dangerously low bass frequencies. But equally integral too is a constant, if sometimes coded, expression of the necessity of community in various manifestations. And thus Aristotle’s musings on the importance of friendship above mere success are echoed in the lyrical philosophies of one Snoop Doggy Dogg: “It ain’t no fun if the homies can’t have none.”
While Hip-Hop culture consists of four main forms of expression, it is the packaged voice and sound of Hip-Hop music that both ascends the Billboard 200 and infiltrates the minds of the wider culture. And if Hip-hop begins in the popular conscience with the music, the music begins with the crew: the basic unit of the Hip-Hop community.
Unlike most other realms of pop music, where entourages become commonplace only when said pop star hits the big time, Hip-Hop groups and individual MC’s often lead an entouraged existence from the start. Even the most individualistic rappers, the self-professed “haters of players” and rhyme-sayers, roll with a crew. To operate solo in the Hip-Hop world is to carry one bullet in a shootout. The importance of one’s crew and/or group is nearly paramount to that of the individual. And when one gets put on, so does the other. An MC’s identity is often synonymous with the group he/she represents: Method Man and the Wu-Tang Clan; Snoop Dogg and the Dogg Pound. As Kurupt, another Dogg Pound member, puts it: “We rise and we fall together, all together / We brawl and we ball together / Doggs forever!”
The ethos of Hip-Hop is a seemingly contradictory amalgam of typical American rugged individualism (where I am what I am) and a more pre-industrial communalism (where it takes the entire village to raise the children). On the one hand is the extended familial network that helps deal with the economic, educational, political and religious disadvantages of being non-white in a country where, by all appearances, ‘white makes right.’ On the other are the well-intentioned voices of self-reliance: Horatio Alger’s ghost blows violently through inner-city high school motivational speeches, and commercials during NCAA basketball tournaments challenge an audience of disproportionately non-white viewers to “be all that you can be.” All this leaves young people of color trying to make sense of what it means to pull themselves up by the bootstraps that their tio and tia bought for them. Hip-Hop culture has evolved, in part, as an expression of that tension.
The introduction of a commercial success shifts balance between individualism and community, though, and an additional, invisible hand joins in the “pound session” (the customary, albeit varied, greeting offered by Hip-Hop mavens). As the popularity of Hip-Hop has increased, one can already make out the marks of capitalist consumer bleaching Hip-Hop’s richly woven textile. While rap videos dominate MTV’s playlists, while MC’s star in Sprite commercials, while Hip-Hop cuts routinely crack Billboard’s Top Ten, it is at the most rudimentary level that the influence of capitalism in the Hip-Hop community is most obvious: the transformation of the posse cut.
What once was an infrequent way to spread love through alliance (MC’s inviting unsigned crew members and affiliates to shine on a song), guest appearances and posse cuts now resemble a celebrity parade of body-movers and booty-shakers. Posse cuts at one time were celebrations of already-existing relationships (as with the LA-based Likwit Crew and the aforementioned Boot Camp Clik) and were considered prized rare gems on an album. Now posse cuts are as ubiquitous as golden crucifixes, and are less about creating a unique collaboration than they are about exploiting the current popularity of all involved. Perfect example: the song “Men of Steel,” an Ice Cube, Shaquille O’Neal, Peter Gunz, KRS-ONE and B-Real collaboration. Produced in the high-gloss R&B/Hip-Pop style, it embodies all that is wrong in Hip-Hop music: a lame song with languid verses from overpaid artists who don’t mesh on a limp soundtrack to a lifeless movie (“Steel”?!?!?).
The recent rap scene is littered with such bland compilation cuts — songs that value style over substance, but deliver neither. While collaborative ventures in music have not always worked, market forces have rendered solo performances the exception, even as they’ve pushed authentic crew collaborations down the path of the coelacanth (yes, quite possible at the bottom of the ocean off the coast of Madagascar with real Rhythm and Blues). While one could argue that the frequency with which these posse cuts are being produced is evidence of the community support in Hip-Hop, the meat thermometer says otherwise. When Talib Kweli and DJ Hi-Tek collaborate on a track under the group name Reflection Eternal, versed Hip-Hop followers aren’t likely to ask, “What soundtrack is that on?” “Who’s in the video?” or “Is that the one they played at the club last night?” Like Juan the Baptist, Reflection Eternal carries their conscientious message far and wide, even while knowing that few have ears to hear. But when a new Ruff Ryders single is out featuring the meteoric (and mediocre?) chart-toppers DMX, Eve, Juvenile, and Ja-Rule, the issue at hand is bloated record sales, not mutual respect or the preservation of artistic vision.
Consolidation and combination for convenience and profit is nothing new to society: Time Warner’s recent merger with AOL only followed in the “join them before they beat you” ideology. It is the disturbing trend of assessing value based on convenience and profit that assaults Hip-Hop and art in all forms. Hip-Hop consumers (every suburban youth with a raised pant leg and mom’s credit card number) outnumber Hip-Hop followers (those who can name ten Hip-Hop MC’s recording before 1988), and while it’s not the buying power that’s the problem, it’s the brain drain and accompanying value system that is disappointing. Ask most 18 year-olds with the latest Jay-Z single who Marley Marl is (a Hip Hop legend) and you’ll get a reaction as if you asked who Gerald Ford’s press secretary was. Valuing the momentarily and monetarily flashy has created a Hip-Hop of today that attempts to please everyone, but in the end sends the newest and most vibrant form of music of the past 20 years towards Pat Boone blandness.
A greater ill is at hand, though: when the sustaining force in hip hop becomes the almighty dollar, the original love and unity of the hip hop community begins to resemble the fraternity of the rich (the old homeboys club) whose primary motivation for maintaining alliances is to make more money. The art, the craft and the culture suffers as the underwriters of co-optation market an existence without substance. Hip-Hop has proven its consumer viability, and no one is so pure in practice or so distant from reality to deny the desire for economic opportunity. Hip-Hop has also proven its durability, contrary to the naysayers who labeled it a passing fad in the mid-eighties. Hip-Hop can sell — records, shoes, images, itself. The invisible hand might deserve a pound, but it’s managed to maneuver most of today’s Hip-Hop into a full-nelson, perhaps at the peril of the culture. Consumerism, me, me, me. Hip-Hop, we, we, we. So to which community will Hip-Hop ultimately pledge a greater allegiance to? Is Hip-HopHHHop selling out or buying in? It is a developing situation that should be watched with real concern and interest as it pits the faith, strength, and identity of a marginalized community against the purchasing power of co-optation and American economics.
