Ben Nadeff-Haffrey
speaker
1,009 appearances
5 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 6 Aug
Ben Nadeff-Haffrey’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 3.
Appearances
It was also the deeply segregated place where kids living on their own little island watched adults fall to their death.
A kind of paradox.
And my theory is that paradox was expressed in the word Shaolin.
Shaolin.
When RZA was a kid, he and his cousin used to go to a Times Square porno theater.
Sometimes it showed kung fu.
And one movie that they loved in particular, The 36th Chamber of Shaolin.
Most people came to that Times Square movie theater to jerk off, sniff glue, or shoot heroin.
But Rizzo would later say in interviews that he and his cousin were locked in on this poorly dubbed movie about a small village in China that was being oppressed by a distant government.
The hero of the movie is a villager who journeys to the Shaolin Temple in China to learn to fight back.
Rizzo saw this movie over 300 times.
He hadn't realized that kind of oppression happened to people who weren't Black.
This is from The 36th Chamber, when our hero learns what Shaolin is.
At some point, RZA started to call Staten Island Shaolin, the place he learned his secret weapon to fighting oppression, hip-hop.
But Staten Island was also a version of that distant oppressive government he saw in the films.
And as he walked the island trying to come up with his next play, he didn't decide to start a group called the Shaolin Clan.
He came up with an idea for something called the Wu-Tang Clan, named after Shaolin's rival.
This is from another kung fu movie they loved, called Shaolin vs. Wu-Tang.
RZA kept walking and thinking.
Shaolin.
Showing 421–440 of 1,009 · page 22 of 51
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