NO GPS

NO GPS | 2024's NBA Champions Predicted the US Election Results? | Ep23

Recorded during the heat of summer, Mez, Matt, & Aharon bring you a special NO GPS episode that’s been waiting for just the right moment to hit your ears. With the NBA Finals and the U.S. elections on everyone’s mind, we thought—why not bring the worlds of sports and politics together? From game-deciding shots to culture-shaping trends, this episode is a snapshot of our collective anticipation and excitement. Now, as election day nears, our playoff analysis and predictions resonate with a new meaning, showing just how much the game on the court mirrors the game off it. Tune in and see where the Celtics’ victory and our “election forecast” collide in a blend of basketball insight and political intrigue.

After Sunset | I Bleed Toronto RAPTOR Purple Pt 1 | EP 5

In this first episode of a three-part series, we take a unique and innovative look at how city life, professional sports, and popular culture intertwine to shape narratives about citizenship, individuality, and community. Through the lens of the Toronto Raptors’ rise, this podcast explores what it means to belong—both as a fan and as a member of a city that’s finding its voice. In preparation for Vince Carter’s jersey retirement at Scotiabank Arena, we reflect briefly on his legacy, but the real focus is on reimagining these themes in fresh, novel ways. Stay tuned for the next two episodes, as we continue to unravel these stories in ways you’ve never heard before.
Produced by Matt J.
Written by Aharon
Music by TrethWest
Art by Matt J.

NO GPS | Guess Who's Comin' to Dinner? They're on The Menu! | Ep22

Originally set to release in January, this episode of NO GPS dives deep into the biting satire of the film The Menu, unraveling its critique of class, capitalism, and the art world. Mez, Matt and Aharon explore how the movie captures the widening gap between the rich and the working class, a world where the only time the "haves" and "have-nots" interact is when the elite are being served. It’s no wonder that the restaurant becomes the perfect scene for a class reckoning. The podcast also touches on the profound shift from labor exploitation to societal neglect—today’s workers aren’t merely exploited; they’ve become invisible, marginalized by a system that strips them of value.
The guys also discuss how The Menu mirrors our world’s obsession with scarcity and exclusivity, particularly in the realm of food and art. The film’s critique of hustle culture and capitalism's hollow promises is clear: the rich have time to become specialists in meaningless pursuits, while those who serve them struggle to survive. Both groups struggle with the same issue: a lack of meaning and purpose outside of production, circulation and consumption. Ultimately, The Menu offers a chilling reflection of the current Euro-American soul — a soul that has gotten itself lost in a Maze of profits and cheap thrills, leaving art, creativity, and human connection starving for meaning.
 
Time stamps for The Menu:
 
0:50 - Intro
2:33 - Ralph Fiennes is in this movie?!
3:00 - Spoiler Alert
3:35 - A post-Covid era movie that got turned into a cult classic
4:10 - A critique of the uneasy critique of the relationship between art & commerce
4:40 - Aharon is an artist? Yup, one that does it because he loves it, not because he receives sustenance from it
5:15 - The writers for the Onion wrote this? Everyone is a performance artist now, even New York City Mayor Eric Adams.
6:00 - This movie gives insight into the world of super scarce food that the global rich enjoy. Things like molecular cooking.
6:50 - the mega wealth and cultural gap between the super rich and the rest of us is symbolized in the movie by the austere and monastic lifestyle of the workers/servers and the restaurant’s patrons who live lifestyles Robin Leach couldn’t even fathom
7:57 - Fanboys are killing the mystery of art by exposing all of the secrets to greatness
8:50 - The consumer eventually becomes the consumed
9:20 - Scarcity creates value in this era of too late capitalism. The world is becoming a dessert
10:34 - This is a film that gives you insight into the current American soul
13:40 - Artist’s need the basics of life to be covered to create good art - but do they need the type of capital that big studios provide for this?
16:40 - Hustle culture - the global rich have an excess of time, hence they become specialists in things that do not give society, on a whole, value, at least for humans. And the meaning they derive is taken from those who must work endlessly for their daily bread
17:25 - We all need to get a life - we work to live we should not live to work
18:08 - The film examines subjects, both rich and poor, who live without meaning
18:50 - Working to enrich the soul, not one’s pockets (Poiesis) 
19:08 - The people that serve the global rich live nowhere near the places they work. They exist on the edge of the cities - hence, the only time they can address a class conflict is at the site, the work site, where one works
20:35 - Economic segregation - and why is Chef Slowik quoting Martin Luther King’s ‘Letter from Birmingham City Jail’?
22:00 - The workforce, the cooks, are themselves a cult because it is the only outlet of meaning in a world that stripped them of value so ruthlessly. The sacred has been stripped of meaning by capital
22:40 - The service class themselves are going through their own delusions and mythmaking to give themselves meaning - even if it deals with them getting revenge in the most heinous way against their elite overlords
23:15 - The situation the film reveals is one where workers are no longer workers but are serfs that pay rent and receive none of the value they create. Hence, the horror that is revealed is that Capitalists are no longer capitalists, but are rather feudal lords
23:45 - Venture Capitalists can get wicked with it. No angels in their investments
24:50 - Margo aka Erin figures it all out. The oldest profession and its practitioners see the truth and hypocrisy of the world before we all do
26:40 - Cheeseburgers with American cheese will Make America Great Again
28:00 - The Chef comes back to his roots - the place that makes America possible: Waterloo (Iowa). Historical link to the battle of Waterloo that ushered in a century of peace in the Euro-American world. A cheeseburger is the symbol for this return to the thing that makes one Great, again
28:50 - Losing the American soul
29:50 - Aharon gives his advice on how to make art that has soul
30:30 - Who will pay for good art in a middle-classless world? The real customers for elite art are the elites
32:00 - We’ve entered a truly Gilded Age - the public can no longer support art made by artists that make art for the public
33:30 - The difference between the performance, the labor and the work
34:35 - Shout out to the show ‘The Bear’
35:10 - We live in a time when a lot of popular media being made these days makes fun of the rich - the rich laugh at us laughing at them..
36:15 - Cultural anhedonia has taken hold - pain, in a world filled with fake smiling faces trying to sell you something, is the only thing that can mark you as being real. This is the real function of horror as a genre in this era of too late capitalism
39:00 - With this film Mark Mylod shows us the emptiness of his subjects
41:10 - The guys dream of returning back to Eritrea and making chic exclusive food from cactus pear
42:10 - The guys finally admit they are looking for venture capital to make their art full time lol
43:05 - Outro

NO GPS | Part II-> H Rap Brown: Kendrick Lamar, Drake and (Ni**a) Authenticity | Ep21

"You run to Atlanta when you need a check balance,Let me break it down for you, this the real nigga challenge" - Kendrick Lamar"See it's no in between: you're either free or a slave" - H. Rap BrownIn one of this podcast's favourite articles, On the Question of Nigga Authenticity, Ronald T. Judy  writes:"The nigga is constituted in the exchange of experience for affect. This is not identical with the bad nigger who jeopardized community by insisting on having unmediated free experience. Such an insistence requires an essential innocence of identity, a way of understanding experience that is simply impossible right now. A nigga forgets feelings, recognizing, instead, that affects are communicable, particularly the hard-core ones of anger, rage, intense pleasure. One can belong with millions of others in an asynchronic moment of consumption of the same affect, the same passion. This is not empathy. The possibility of the nigga rests on the twofold of experience and affect, and the fact that experience is essentially unfungible; it cannot be sold as is but must be abstracted and processed by the formulaic functions of transnational capitalism. Knowing this, the hard-core gangster rapper traffics in affect and not values. In this sense, hard-core rap is the residual of the nonproductive work of translating experience into affect—it is pulp fiction, drawing into its web all the real nigga experiences it can represent in the affective constitution of niggaz."In the decades since its publication, global capitalism's wholesale consumption of Judy's hardcore nigga has been completed. Maybe many times over. Processed and reformed to the point it has achieved a smooth exterior. A cutting edge that glows in the dark. Caramelised product that goes down better than ever before. But in order to keep reforming and fine-tuning itself so as to be the perfectly malleabe ready-to-eat sedative, it has to keep returning to take a dip into a real that is inexhaustible in its output of authentic experience. An endless reserve of curdled black experience that it can whip into affect to sell back to the consumer as narcotic pleasure. Drizzy Drake knows a truth about authenticity, namely, that it doesn't need to pass for the real thing as much as it needs to pass for passing. Black (in)authenticity performed long enough, repetitively enough, has become browness' rite of passage and Drake understands that if black experience is unfungible, black affect is the gold standard of the cultural foreign exchange market. Drake isn't so much driven by, and driving forward, the question "what is it like to be black?" as much as the question "what is it like to act black"? Hence the modern day consumer reads the couplet black+rap as ontologically stitched together, and therefore takes it for granted, while being eternally kept from asking the perhaps more pertinent questions : What is brown authenticity? Where is the line between the unfree and the not-a-slave? How would "rapping like freeing the slaves" look and sound like in brown and how would it fare in a free market of exchange when there was no taxes levied on the very concept that is rap's likeness? What is the residual affect of the non-productive work of the non-white and non-black translating black experience? What is the upshot of a double negative that shops down south? How do they rap in H-Town? Say Drake! What is it like to rap brown?
 
Produced by Matt J.
Music by TrethWest 
Art by Matt J.

NO GPS | H Rap Brown: Kendrick Lamar, Drake and (Ni**a) Authenticity | Ep20

Today's episode is the one you didn't know you were waiting for! Mez, Matt, and Aharon do an in-depth analysis of the rap beef between Compton's "home is not where the heart is" Kendrick Lamar and Toronto's "placeless" hit-making global superstar Drake.
This seemingly juvenile rap beef has laid the foundation for an audit of Hip-Hop after over 50 years of its existence. Surprisingly, this audit—or rather, revelation—has emerged from the unlikely places of Toronto and London, England. German philosopher G.W. Hegel tells us that the philosopher arrives at the end of an epoch to make sense of its many paradoxes and ironies, not before or midway. This person, akin to Athena’s Owl of Minerva (it seems Toronto is home to more than one kind of OWL), can interpret the world of meanings often lost to us. For this instance, we call this person Hip-Hop’s Last Philosopher.
This rap beef has signalled the official end of George Bush Sr.'s New World Order and a return to history with its many geopolitical fault lines—apologies to Fukuyama. The era of prioritising interests over ideology is officially over. This was a period where the individual was fashioned to be a jet-setting, the-world-is-my-backyard, free agent of infinite possible identifications. Now, the lines are being drawn in the sand, brown sand, once again. Apologies to Rakim, but it's no longer "where ya at"; it's back to "where are you from?" Like the rise of ancestry tests, the worlds of culture, politics, sports, and entertainment are increasingly concerned with where your allegiances lie and what your values are.
Additionally, the guys discuss the disastrous effects that globalisation had on local LA and Toronto neighbourhoods post-NAFTA. This rap beef has cast Drake as a rootless and feckless agent of extractive globalisation, with his parade of accents and affiliations, while positioning Kendrick as the local agent of neighbourhood revitalization and grassroots advocacy. To understand this better, let's take a historical journey.
In the 1980s, downtown LA and the West Hollywood movie studios were pivotal sites for post-Cold War globalisation, particularly focused on receiving investment from the Asian Pacific, particularly Japan (the second biggest investor in the LA county region at the time were firms coming from Canada). This led to the global economic integration of various industries on the West Coast and the American Midwest, resulting in deindustrialization and joblessness for many white Americans, who now suffer through the opioid crisis. Meanwhile, on the other side of town (word to Tony Toni Tone - and it does rain in southern California, figuratively speaking), globalisation took on a different form.
The introduction of the globalised trade of crack cocaine marked a black market integration into the world economy, starting in LA through figures like the real Rick Ross. This not only exported dangerous street drug commodities but also the vehicles for selling them—namely, the set formations of local LA street gangs. Ice Cube's 1991 song "My Summer Vacation" perfectly describes this late 80s to early 90s phenomenon of exporting brother-on-brother violence and its associated Scarface cocaine dreams. By 2005, this form of integration in the global economy via crack cocaine, originating in South Central LA, was distributed through Crip and Blood sets across America and eventually the globe.
A street documentary entitled "The Real Toronto," released in 2005, showcased the interrelated relationship between these distant geographies. A similar sense of boundedness and territorial identity formation was developing in Toronto's black neighbourhoods, even as a global ethos of borderlessness and openness was being embraced. This culminates when a young black Toronto teen states in the documentary: "If you take a good look around the block, it’s like two squares and a square on that side, and then a square on this side. …The government, that’s how they control us. They box us in.” We highlight this not to sow division but to make our interconnectedness clear.
Lastly, the whole world has seemingly been sprayed with an unplaceable colour of Kim Kardashian like-brown. It seems everybody wants to be brown now. Yet, I can remember a young Brandy Norwood in 1994 singing that she wanted to be down. A specific way that particular demographics in the Black Atlantic would describe a type of black communal solidarity. But in 2024, the whole world has replaced the world down with the word brown. Not just any type of brown. A Michael Jackson ‘I can be from anywhere so guess my ethnicity’ type of brown. Michael Jackson from the Martin Scorsese directed music-video/short film Bad type of brown. A figure who is for everybody because he is not particularly for anybody. An individuated agent whose origins are untraceable. A being who is a guest in their own body. The perfect amorphous agent for the type of unfettered free market fundamentalism (only for the overdeveloped nations) that globalisation unleashed on unsuspecting populations all around the world - populations of people who just wanted to be seen and acknowledged. Who just wanted to be down. Michael Jackson started it all - and now we have a coterie of brownified global superstars that someone from Afghanistan or the Dominican Republic can identify with. But this is only a skin deep connection - it doesn't tie in to that person's indigenous real-non-virtual-world social, cultural, political realities and histories. Fanon already wrote a book called Black Skin, White Masks. So I need not explain further on the point. But let me say this, the mask is now brown and it is not only black folks wearing the masks - everybody's in on the jig now. Nevertheless, if we take the metaphor between the two rappers (Kendrick identifying himself with Prince and Drake identifying himself with Michael Jackson) seriously, then, it may be 37 years too late, but we finally have our promised battle between two music industry heavyweights (remember - not the time - that Prince was initially casted to star in Jackson's Bad video in the role played by Wesley Snipes).
Come take a ride with the guys from NO GPS, with NO GPS!
Time Stamps:
0:00:34 - Intro
0:2:18 - Toronto as a seminal Hiphop city
10:56 - Sandman Negus
13:45 - City of Quartz - LA as the launchpad for Globalisation
17:28 - Exporting gang violence
23:32 - Drake & Kendrick
27:07 - The electrifying and pacifying effects of LA & Toronto music & inauthenticity
38:05 - The 2008 connection between Obama, Kanye West & the great financial recession
43:04 - Obama
45:03 - Drake's Story
48:42 - The Eminem effect
51:34 - Drake's conquering of the USA-centric Rap Industry, why he moved to the US & claims of being an agent of colonization
58:03 - Outro
 
Produced by Matt J.
Music by TrethWest
Art by Matt J.

NO GPS | Is Boston The More Complete Team? | Ep19

Mez, Matt & Aharon are back again with commentary and breakdowns of the first two games of the NBA Finals featuring the Dallas Mavericks and Boston Celtics. 
 
They talk about what went right for the Celtics, who are up 2-0, and what went wrong for the Mavericks. 
 
The guys even discuss Boston sports culture and Aharon's weird connection to it this particular year (he lost a bet and had to forsake his beloved Toronto Blue Jays and watch 50 percent of the Boston Red Sox's regular season games for the 24-25 season). As a long time Boston and New England sports hater he has come to appreciate the sports fluency of the region and has learned a thing or two about dynasty building (no joke).
 
At the end of the episode Mez reveals that the guys will continue to cover basketball into the summer - with a special focus on the WNBA. He gives Aharon 2 teams to watch (one from the east and another the west). So look forward to the guys covering the W!
 
Time Stamps: 
 
00:46 - Intro
03:56 - Jrue/KP - Luck of the Irish
05:23 - Dallas off their gameplan
09:39 - KP's Value 
11:20 - Dallas' Defense
13:33 - Boston's Greatness/Boringness on their Way to Victory
17:45 - Love for Boston?
20:13 - Game 3 Expectations
26:58 - Jaylen Brown. the Boston system & how players fit into it
28:32 - Boston's Very Long Journey to the 2024 NBA Finals
29:59 - Closing Remarks & Predictions
 
Produced by Matt J.
Music by TrethWest
Art by Matt J.

NO GPS | The Basketball gods must be Crazy (Finals Preview) | Ep18

Mez, Matt & Aharon are back with another doozy of a NO GPS Podcast episode! Back and in rare form the guys discuss the NBA playoffs in the only way they can: with novel insights and off-the-cuff jokes that end in boatloads of laughter. From analogizing the play of teams and players with current political and cultural trends to offering up deep analysis on game schemes and game-by-game adjustments, the guys give a lot to ponder on and discuss. They talk about the 1st, 2nd and 3rd round of the playoffs respectively and end the podcast by giving an overview & predictions of The Finals matchup between the Dallas Mavericks and the Boston Celtics.
 
Two things to watch out for: JJ Redick is discussed as a possible candidate for the now vacant Lakers head coaching job  - the guys did not know that at the time of the podcast recording that Shams Charania broke news that the Lakers were zeroing in on JJ as the future head coach of the LA ball club. Of course, Mez & Aharon give a scathing critique on the Hollywood like character of the LaLa Land franchise. The second thing is Aharon's outlandish Finals prediction at the 01:14:26 time stamp (take a listen, really, you should, it's an interesting take - not a First Take, but rather a Last Take!) - he uses a geopolitical analysis to discuss the political stakes at play in The Finals.
 
Time Stamps: 
 
0:00 - Podcast Intro
0:46 - Show Intro 
02:54 - Bucks vs Pacers (It's always fun talking about Glenn Anton 'Doc' Rivers)
06:54 - 76ers vs Knicks  
12:35 - Cavs vs Magic
15:44 - Celtics vs Heat
16:10 - Lakers vs Nuggets
20:48 - TimberWolves vs Suns
25:50 - Mavericks vs Clippers
32:34 - Thunder vs Pelicans 
36:58 - Thunder vs Mavericks
41:56 - Timberwolves vs Nuggets
46:29 - Knicks vs Pacers
54:34 - Celtics vs Cavs
57:52 - Celtics vs Pacers
01:02:02 - Mavericks vs Timberwolves
01:04:35 - Finals Preview
01:11:44 - Celtics vs Dallas
01:14:26 - Aharon's 13 Colonies Theory & Predictions 
01:16:29 - Outro
 
Produced by Matt J.
Music by Trethwest
Cover art by Matt J.

NO GPS | African-American Fiction? | Ep17

In this episode of NO GPS, Mez & Aharon discuss the Oscar-nominated film 'American Fiction,' directed & written by Cord Jefferson, featuring Jeffrey Wright, Tracee Ellis Ross, Sterling K. Brown, Leslie Uggams, Issa Rae & Myra Lucretia Taylor. The guys delve into the artistry of the film. They question the reasoning for making a film like this in 2024. Given that the film deals with similar themes and tropes of one-dimensional portrayals of Black characters in the mold of Robert Townsend's Hollywood Shuffle & Spike Lee's Bamboozled. 
What we see in the film is the Obamesque desire for a type of negritude display of Black elite life. That is to say that the film gives in to the new Black(ish) want to be disabused of the notion of race, to be SEEN as they truly are. Yet this bad faith effort to escape the facts of life leads to many false starts and misunderstandings in American Fiction. The main character Thelonious Monk Ellison gets no respite in either his professional or personal life because of his resentment of the book publishing world as well as academia. The family melodrama, though, that the film is ensconced within shows the complexity of Black life that Black millennials have been starved to see reflected on movie screens. This is where we see the true genius of Cord Jefferson at work; namely, his ability to create portraits of Black family life that are discordant yet redemptive.
Lastly, the connection between Jeffrey Wright's Thelonious Monk Ellison and his portrayal of Basquiat was crystallized in the (paraphrased) line shared between the two films: "His art gives voice to the gutter." This line connects the two films intertextually - showing the full circle connection between the two characters and the artistic drive of Jeffrey Wright to play roles that are self-agental and not bound by societal conventions. This gives much deserved light and shine to the magnificent and often underappreciated film oeuvre of Jeffrey Wright. 
Recommended films to watch: Hollywood Shuffle, Bamboozled & The Inkwell.
Intro and outro song: Tequila No Chase by Aharon, https://open.spotify.com/track/03gfonQpnThqb1ONS52wAu?si=B5JuFKiiTCmySGtvUT5gKQ.
Recommended reading: In Defence of #blackaf's Celebration of Mediocrity by Aharon Joseph, https://nsjcp.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/default/article/view/95/37.

NO GPS | Professor Daniel McNeil Discusses 'Thinking While Black' | Ep16

In this intellectually stimulating episode of NO GPS, Mez & Aharon engage in a profound discussion with special guest Professor Daniel McNeil, delving into the nuanced themes of his seminal work, 'Thinking While Black.' This conversation transcends the ordinary and navigates the complex waters of the Black Atlantic, touching upon its historical, cultural, and philosophical underpinnings.
The groundwork for this enlightening dialogue was laid in the thought-provoking 3-part series, 'The Soul Rebel Generation,' which is available on various platforms including Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Throughout this series, Mez & Aharon wrestled with the rich and deep meanings laden in 'Thinking While Black,' setting the stage for this episode's deep and immersive conversation.
Mez, Aharon, and Professor Daniel McNeil explore the depths of Black Canadian expressive cultures, seeking out the authentic and transformative experiences that lie beyond the confines of institutionalized multicultural events like Caribana. Professor McNeil's profound insights shed light on Canada's cultural landscape, offering a perspective that transcends the conventional narratives.
The conversation also touches upon the imperative of carrying forward the cultural legacy of previous generations, translating their political struggles into contemporary contexts and building upon their foundations of freedom fighting. Lastly, we hope this discussion leaves you with a renewed perspective on Black Atlantic cultural productions, politics and histories.
And yes, Professor Daniel McNeil does know Canada better than Canadians!
Produced by Soker.
Music provided by TrethWest.

After Sunset | Lovers In A Dangerous Time | EP 4

We have been living through the throes of a Love Apocalypse since 1986, when Zapp & Roger released Computer Love, and 1995 when the first online dating site was created.
In this episode of NO GPS After Sunset Aharon talks about catching the lovebug via social media and online dating sites. Catching a lovebug that brings on cravings to ghost and troll one's love interests. Strategies on how to de-bug-ify and battle the Love Apocalypse are discussed in depth. 
We’ve got special performances from Aharon & the Love Savers, our resident poet A. Love and the Love Anthropologist himself, Professor Jemer.
Lastly, We never thought we would go from checking for tender-rooni’s to tinder-rooni’s! We went from being stood up on blind date’s to getting catfished for a year (sorry, Manti Te’O). People can’t even tell the difference between Valentine’s Day and Halloween anymore because they’ve been ghosted so many times! 
Enjoy this episode of NO GPS After Sunset. And remember never to forget Love, even when it is absent. 
Produced by Soker.
Music provided by TrethWest.