The Skillman

Back to School

2009-06-25T04:33:00.006-04:00

The Skillman was gone, now it's back.

Let's not make a big thing about it.

Things I Still Like (Alphabetical Order):
Ba-Rock
Bed-Stuy/Brooklyn
Deftones
Iranians (I was on this before you first Twatted, so FTW if you're gonna give me shit)
Noz
View My Blog
Wu-Tang and Affiliates

Things I Recently Like:
Alley Labs
The Awl
Chè
The Free Music Archive
Hanoi, Vietnam
Kasteel Rouge
Mr. Wrong

Things I Still Don't Like:
CNN
Other People Talking
Shark Biters
Tricep Extensions

Things I Recently Don't Like:
Australians
Celsius
Skin-LessMax Vietnam

Announcing

2008-11-06T16:16:00.001-05:00

A new affiliated blog!

The Obama White House Chronicle

Check it out.

My Map

2008-11-03T09:53:00.005-05:00

Here's how I see it playing out tomorrow:

<p><strong>><a href='http://projects.washingtonpost.com/2008/pick-your-president/'>2008 Election Contest: Pick Your President</a></strong> - Predict the winner of the 2008 presidential election.</p>

Obama will win Ohio and Florida. It may take a while to find this out, Ohio will be very close, Florida may be easier to tell. But it won't matter, those won't be the results we need to determine the election. Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia will all go Obama.

Virginia: Has been solidly in Obama's column for about a month now.

Georgia: 31% of voters in Georgia cast early ballots by the close of early voting - that's 1.7 million out of 5.6 million voters. Obama will get a big boost from a large black turnout and depressed Republican base.

North Carolina: Also recorded enormous early voting turnout - 40% of voters voted early and 52% of those people were registered Democrats; 32%, registered Republicans. Unreliable numbers? Yes. But at that scale, I think they're good guides.

The Rest of the Map

McCain won't pick up Pennsylvania. Registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans in the state 4.4 million to 3.2 million. Most polls still have Obama in the +5% to 7% range in PA and I think that sounds about right. Without PA, McCain is lost.

The other big win for Obama - more psychologically than anything else, its electoral votes wont count for much - will be Montana where Ron Paul is on the ballot, and John McCain is not well-liked. Bob Barr, the Libertarian candidate, and Paul will peel off 7-8% of the vote and that will be enough for Obama to make a blue mark in Big Sky Country.

Arizona, I think, will go McCain.

When You Can Call the Race

Well, this is a little iffy. It really depends. Here are a couple thoughts:

The first polls close at 6pm; for the eastern portions of Kentucky and Indiana who splice themselves up for poll closings (this, btw, will be news to the fucktards at CNN who list the earliest poll-closings at 7pm on their website, which is wrong). Indiana could go Democrat, but I don't think it would be that portion of the state that closes at 6pm that would give the state to Obama, I think it's the portions in the West, that close at 7pm.

We could feel confident about calling the race by 7pm, though, if Virginia (likely to be known immediately after polls close), Georgia (I think we could know this quickly which would be a huge surprise but I think this goes Dem by a couple points), and Florida (unlikely that we know the results with any certainty at 7pm, but huge early voting turnout might help? tough to say) all post results within the first few minutes after polls close.

If not 7pm, then all eyes on Pennsylvania at 8pm. If Obama wins this, then the big push from McCain has failed and probably ended his shot. He still has other ways to win, but losing PA would be a huge, and hugely expected, hit.

But the possibility exists that this will be a very long night, again. Voter turnout will be enormous. North Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Missouri... all these states are keys to victory either way and they could all be close and/or have results delayed by massive voting lines. It could take a while to sort out.

But it'll be worth it in the end.

Krugman's On The Same Page

2008-11-03T09:28:00.000-05:00

Paul knows the GOP goes postal after this thing, too.

Joe The Forklift Driver - May 1993

2008-10-31T12:37:00.002-04:00

The Moon Under Water

2008-10-30T11:59:00.008-04:00

4th Avenue is a wide thruway for Brooklyn that will take you, start to finish, from Fort Hamilton, Bay Ridge, to Sunset Park, past Greenwood Cemetary, Park Slope, and Gowanus where it ends at the frantic intersection of 4th, Atlantic, and Flatbush Avenues. Up at the Gowanus portion, 4th Avenue sits between the self-congratulatory perambulator-pushers of 5th Avenue and neglected 3rd Avenue.

Near its terminus at the Williamsburg Savings Bank Clocktower and the big intersection, 4th Avenue is a throwback to the Gowanus that Jonathan Lethem's Dylan Ebdus, from "Fortress of Solitude," grew up in. Gentrification drips on 4th Ave, from the exorbitant antique shops on Atlantic and the patioed restaurants on 5th, but mostly 4th Ave is bodegas and incense pushers. Drug addicts and wanderers. Double-XL T-shirt salesmen and halal hole-in-the-wall restaurants with no seating. It's not Boerum Hill, Fort Greene, or Park Slope. As Dylan's mother tells him in "Fortress": "'If someone asks you say you live in Gowanus,' she said. 'Don't be ashamed. Boerum Hill is pretentious bullshit.'"

Between Bergen Street and St. Marks on 4th Avenue, is the 4th Avenue Pub. I found it, I'm somewhat embarassed to say, by going to Yelp.com and sorting the city's bars by highest rank. 4th Avenue came up first, not because it was the highest rated bar (it's a 5-star system - lots of bars had 5-star ratings), but because its name started with a number and the sorting was alphabetical. My roommates and I met there for a drink and began a pub night on Wednesdays.

In 1946, George Orwell published a piece in The Evening Standard called "The Moon Under Water" about his favorite city pub:

"My favourite public-house, the Moon Under Water, is only two minutes from a bus stop, but it is on a side-street, and drunks and rowdies never seem to find their way there, even on Saturday nights. Its clientele, though fairly large, consists mostly of 'regulars' who occupy the same chair every evening and go there for conversation as much as for the beer. If you are asked why you favour a particular public-house, it would seem natural to put the beer first, but the thing that most appeals to me about the Moon Under Water is what people call its 'atmosphere.'"

Orwell goes on to describe the qualities that make him frequent Moon Under Water before revealing at the end that there is no such pub as the Moon Under Water; he made it up to describe what his ideal pub would look like and bemoan the fact that one with those qualities does not exist. But I could do no better than George Orwell's opening paragraph above to begin a description of the 4th Avenue Pub.

I can't say whether I put the atmosphere of the 4th Ave Pub ahead of its beer. I think they run equal. I can say that I've not encountered a bar with a better selection of beer in the city. 4th Ave has about twenty beers on tap, another thirty or so bottled, and the menu changes weekly. Terrific stuff. Unfiltered Belgian lager; dark, Gulden Draak Belgian Triple; Sixpoint cask ales; Youngs Double Chocolate Stout; Maudite... It is difficult to exhaust the menu before a new set of kegs arrive.

I've not encountered a bar with a better atmosphere either. This starts with the bartenders and then the regulars. I think a good bartender attracts good regulars. Atmosphere is also setting. 4th Ave is dark, unglamorous with floors sticky from the free popcorn and booths that are worn, dark. A painting, a portrait of a fat man with a glass of beer and a fine suit, is the only art I can recall on the pub's walls. It is back by the bathroom door. The garden in back is more spacious than the indoor space and a good option when the weather is clear.

Usually I wind up at 4th Ave with friends, but I sometimes prefer to go alone and have time to talk with the bartenders* and patrons. Of the bartenders, Mel is young, 24-ish, and lives on the LES. She is slight and warm, with an easy smile, and engaging eyes. Frank knows good music and what beer you want, or should be trying for the first time, before you do. Sarah is funny and a little awkward, she runs the bar like a champ and is unflappable on the busiest nights. These are the three who I see most often. There are two others who seem like good guys but I've only just started to get to know them. The proprietor has sharp features and an offbeat wit. Frank told me he ran out of change one day and called Mike, the owner, to let him know he needed more. Mike called back a while later and asked if Frank still needed change. Frank said yes, he did. Mike said, "Oh yeah? Then vote Obama."

A few doors down from the 4th Avenue Pub is another bar, Pacific Standard. I've gone there a couple times and find it the antithesis of 4th Ave. The clientele is older, mid 30's, with strollers. The interior is bright and crisp with a large room in the back with a projection screen for sports events and political speeches. The atmosphere is sterile, the bartenders are fine, but seem removed, the beer is good with some interesting variety but everytime I've gotten one, I've only aimed to finish it quickly and return to the 4th Ave Pub.

The idea of being a regular at someplace in a big city, it goes, is to make the city manageable; to create a community of your own when the one presented by the city is too large for the individual. Certainly being a regular at 4th Ave has this effect. But becoming a regular at a good pub is, I think, important for another reason.

There is an insularity that exists in this city. I mean this on the individual level. When we are around other people, how often do we go to lengths to separate ourselves from them and contain ourself within our own bubble with space for only one person? We wear headphones on subways and buses to block out the crowd; attach ourselves to cellphones in stores and ignore the clerk; we whip out our laptops on trains and planes and forget our seat-mate. In the past, we might have had a book instead. In which case the person to my left on the G-Train could say, "how do you like that book?" But the earphone, the cellphone, are a sort of statement: I will not speak to you, and you will not speak to me.

As David Foster Wallace said in his commencement speech to Kenyon College grads a couple years ago: "There is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute center of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. And so on. Other people's thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real."

But the 4th Avenue Pub is not a place for an I-pod. There is no wireless service. When it's quiet, a person on a cellphone would seem out of place and rude. So instead you talk. To the bartenders, to the regulars, to the irregulars. I've met a Sarah Palin fan from Jackson, Mississippi (both the only person from Mississippi I've met, and the only Sarah Palin fan); an Australian living in New York and soon to move to Kyrgyzstan to work for an emerging markets firm; a pair of sisters, Brazilian, who work as lawyers in Sao Paulo; a French DJ living in Fort Greene with whom I discussed... whatever, with, until 3am.

People who live in New York like to talk about its multiculturalism. The boiling pot. But we go to such lengths to shut it out when we're around each other. And when we take our headphones off, too often it's only to talk to who we know or people we don't know in a place where the chances of variety aren't great to begin with. Our default setting when we're in the small spaces of the city crushed up against its multicultural inhabitants is frustration and a thought along the lines of, what makes these dirty animals think they've got the right to cohabit MY space.

So you go to a pub with great beer, bartenders, regulars, and atmosphere and you meet the other people that live in this city and visit here. I can see George Orwell liking the 4th Ave Pub. They've got plenty of those stout beers he liked.

*(Names changed to protect the innocent - I didn't ask their permission to use their names)

The Permanent Republican Majority

2008-10-29T12:29:00.007-04:00

When Karl Rove settled in the White House in 2000, he aimed to foment a permanent Republican majority in the United States. Rove believed the United States was a conservative nation and that with the right policies a Republican machine would develop over Bush's tenure and last a generation. It was V.O. Key's "realignment theory" that allowed Rove this vision. In a 1955 article, "A Theory of Critical Elections," Key proposed that American politics and political allegiances of the electorate change dramatically and, if conditions are right, in a single election.

In a 2007 article in The Atlantic, "The Rove Presidency," Joshua Green wrote of the theory of realignment elections:

"Historians have shown that two major preconditions typically must be in place for realignment to occur. First, party loyalty must be sufficiently weak to allow for a major shift—the electorate, as the political scientist Paul Allen Beck has put it, must be “ripe for realignment.” The other condition is that the nation must undergo some sort of triggering event, often what Beck calls a “societal trauma”—the ravaging depressions of the 1890s and 1930s, for instance, or the North-South conflict of the 1850s and ’60s that ended in civil war. It’s important to have both."

When Bush took office in 2000, those conditions hardly existed. The economy was strong and no societal trauma had occured yet. But Rove thought he could game the system. As Green wrote, "[Rove thought] if you could recast major government programs to make them more susceptible to market forces, broader support for the Republican Party would ensue." What ensued, of course, was a societal trauma in 9/11 that threw considerable support behind the Republican party in the 2002 and 2004 elections. After '04, Rove thought he had his majority sealed.

But through another societal trauma, Katrina, a disastrous push for the privitization of Social Security, and utter disdain for Congress, Rove spent all his political capital in a very short time and only two years later, voters threw the bums out of Washington. Rove tried to bend the system but when his grip slipped, it snapped back into place.

Today, it seems that the conditions Rove tried, initially, to manufacture to create a series of realignment elections have developed organically: Party identification, according to a recent Pew survey, among Republicans is down 6% from 2004 - from 44% to 38% - and up for Democrats to 51% from 47% four years ago; we're in the midst of about our fourth or fifth societal trauma since 2000 with the collapse of the financial institutions and instruments which ran the world's economy for the past 20 or so years; and the current presidential election offers one candidate who would certainly "realign" the image of an American president.

Things in 2008 seem ripe for a realignment election. Obama is leading in the polls and in states that Rove must cringe to see shaded blue. The Democrats seem likely to take even more of a lead in the House of Representatives, and will likely wind up with a defacto filibuster-proof 60 seats (even if they don't hit 60, they're likely to get 57 or 58, and at that point, it's not so hard to strip away a couple Republicans for, essentially, a filibuster-proof majority). Rove's been foisted by his own petard; he tried his best to force realignment, and the reaction against his manipulation is an apparent realignment election in the opposite direction. For every action...

But really, this is the simple outlook. What's far more interesting and unpredictable is how the conservative, evangelical, ardently anti-Obama right wing "base" will react in the face of this realignment election, should the Democrats pull it off.

After this election, assuming it goes the Democrats' way, there will be a sizeable portion of the electorate that will not have any of the Obama Administration, and will feel sold out by the Republicans they supported and who failed to deliver on their conservative social agenda.

The fact is, and it Rove knew this, to create a permanent majority, there must be a steady stream of issues that will reliably get your voters, your base, to the polls. Gay marriage and abortion have been stalwarts for the Republicans (though they're falling flat this year). But while Rove used those issues as bait, there are people in the United States who actually want action on overturning Roe v. Wade. Or a constitutional ban on gay marriage.

If the Bush Administration and its brain trust - such as it was - really wanted to overturn Roe v. Wade, don't you think it would have by now? Or at least put forth a serious effort? From 2002 - 2006 they ran the Democrats out of Washington and had quite the grip on the governing of this country. But to overturn Roe v. Wade, to really push for that, as the "base" wants, would cede a gold-mine of Republican support. While conservative representatives might truly want abortion overturned, the higher you go up the political ladder, the more dangerous it must seem to overturn a major source of voter enthusiasm for Republicans.

Enter Sarah Palin.

It's hard to believe, now, that Palin could wind up president by winning an election on her own. She can't shield herself from the press in a 16-month election process and she's not smart enough to actually learn how the world works in the next four years and debate Obama on the issues. That said, if McCain loses this election Palin will come out the other side having inherited the far-right Republican base.

Even though this base does not come close to 50% of the voting public, more like 20% maybe, they are vocal, active, and emotional. They know how to organize. The LA Times published an article just today about the future of the social conservatives in the Republican Party. The opening two paragraphs:

"The social conservatives and moderates who together boosted the Republican Party to dominance have begun a tense battle over the future of the GOP, with social conservatives already moving to seize control of the party's machinery and some vowing to limit John McCain's influence, even if he wins the presidency.

In skirmishes around the country in recent months, evangelicals and others who believe Republicans have been too timid in fighting abortion, gay marriage and illegal immigration have won election to the party's national committee, in preparation for a fight over the direction and leadership of the party."

This group of conservatives and its far right social agenda does not have the broad appeal to win national elections without a seeming-moderate like George Bush (at least in 2000). Perhaps Mike Huckabee could do it, but Sarah Palin doesn't fill the moderate facade. If these conservatives take over the Republican Party's organizational apparatus, where does it lead?

While a moderate Republican might appreciate the wisdom in an Obama line like "we may not all agree on the right to abortion, but we can certainly all agree that we should cut down on the number of unwanted teenage pregnancies," a social conservative evangelical likely would not. After all, teenage pregnancy rates amongst evengalical christians are the second highest by religious association in the country after protestant blacks. This is a coalition that, under the reckless stewardship of Sarah Palin, who holds the potential to be far more dangerous than George Bush, could be a fanatically religious, violent, radical group within our own country.

The realignment, if it happens, in this election is not the story. The social conservatives who feel sold out by the Republican establishment, and utter disdain for democrats and their black president, will not go quiet into the night. Their numbers are dwindling as America becomes more multicultural and their inability to gain the numbers to win an election in the future will force this dangerous wild animal into a corner.

The Correction

2008-10-10T14:41:00.005-04:00

How wrong Jonathan Franzen turned out to be. The little rubber squares protecting our economy were just a cruel ruse. Our world is still fully capable of calamitous collapse. We may have had safety features, but the seatbelt only works if you buckle it.

Who to blame? Well you can say Reagan, Clinton, the Bushes, the Democratic Congress, the Republican Congress, the Chinese, the Europeans, Dick Fuld, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Republicans, Democrats, Alan Greenspan, and Ayn Rand, and you wouldn't be wrong. They can all share. But equally culpable is just about every American who has lived during the past twenty years. I thought Gawker actually put the list quite nicely. In fact, the regular citizens' portion of the blame doesn't have to stop at our borders. I would say the only people on the planet who don't deserve any blame for the financial crisis are the very young, and most Sub-Saharan Africans.

The rest of us have benefitted somehow. Everyone's gotten a credit card, a car loan, a student loan, a mortgage, 2nd mortgage, 3rd mortgage, refinanced mortgage... whatever, that was enabled by the byzantine financial web of subprime loans, credit default swaps, and/or the $531 trillion global derivatives market. Unfortunately, pleading ignorance doesn't cut it. If you, Mr. Subprime Predatory Lender Victim Homeowner, want to plead ignorance, then you gotta let Dick Fuld do the same.

The fact is no one really knows how exposed anyone is to these markets or where the next bank collapse will occur. When I cite the $65 trillion credit default swap market or the $531 trillion derivatives market, don't take those numbers at face value. The numbers are not indication of the value of those markets, but rather the impossibility of determining, in an unregulated system, whose money is whose. Especially when it changed hands a half-dozen times on the way there.

Is Dick Fuld more culpable than Mr. Subprime Predatory Lender Victim Homeowner? Absolutely. And I fully support anyone else who decides to knock him the fuck out, as he was at the Lehman Bros. corporate gym the day of their collapse. I've always been a fan of China's system for dealing with massively corrupt businessmen (although they hardly apply it equitably, just every once in a while to get headlines) in which they are put on trial one day and, if convicted, executed pretty much the next day.

But blame is for another day. Blame is a luxury we should hope we have the opportunity to explore. If there is no country or judicial system left in a few months, then the only justice we'll have to meet out will be tawdry mob-vengeance. I doubt it's as satisfying as it may sound.

Here's how I see where we stand now: The country, and you might be able to say the whole world, is basically without any leadership. George Bush mails it in everyday. He just wants to run out the clock and dump this in someone else's lap. That's what the hopes were for the $700 billion bailout - it didn't even get him through a day. The economists who know what's going on, who aren't still insisting that liquidity is the root of the problem (a la Bush and Paulson) and have stated since the beginning that lack of capital is the root of the problem, have been ignored. Their ranks, to me at least, are led by Paul Krugman who I read religiously for his political and foreign affairs analysis before the crisis - even though he's an economist - and then tuned in closely to his economics work as the crisis unwound.

Thankfully, when British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, injected £50 billion of capital into British banks yesterday, the US took notice and Paulson is considering using the authority that Congressional Democrats insisted he be granted in the bailout, which Paulson declared he did not want (because it's SOCIALISM!), to do the same with the bailout money for US banks. That would be a good step towards loosening the credit market, lowering the TED spread, if it's not already too late.

The dangers we face in the future are a McCain presidency and a loss of financing from foreign states. Right now gross US liabilities to foreign states exceeds $16 trillion; that is more than our annual GDP. If China gets pissed off enough by Bush's recent sale of $6.5 billion in arms to Taiwan (they're mad already) to yank out its support on the dollar, we're sunk. This is from a recent report by Brad Setser from the Center for Geoeconomic Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations titled "Sovereign Wealth and Sovereign Power":

"A debtor’s ability to project military power hinges on the support of its creditors….In some ways, the United States’ current financial position is more precarious than Britain’s position in the 1950s…Britain’s main source of financing was a close political ally [- the United States]. The United States’ main sources of funding are not allies. Without financing from China, Russia, and the Gulf states, the dollar would fall sharply, U.S. interest rates would rise, and the U.S. government would find it far more difficult to sustain its global role at an acceptable domestic cost."

The more pressing concern is a McCain presidency. McCain and his campaign - it is unclear how this dynamic works, it appears the campaign surrogates (Palin et al.) aim to project this image and leave McCain with plausible deniability - are in such a desperate position that their strategy is to incite the most racist and vile portions of their base to assassinate Barack Obama. If that happens, the United States will no longer exist the next morning. Riots would be the most benign term for what would ensue. Neither would the United States survive a John McCain presidency. His utter disdain for all policy that doesn't include the word "defense" will ultimately break the bank and we'll either end up a most dramatic anarchy or a brutal dictatorship by his term's end.

Would Barack be able to turn this place around? On the economic side, it's impossible to say simply because there's no way to predict what the situation will be when he would take the reins. It may already be too late by then. Unemployment might be at 15% and China may have yanked its lifeline to the dollar. If that's the case, then good luck. If we can ride things out until January, the immediate benefit of Barack in office will be a return of goodwill from the rest of the world towards the United States. Foreign leaders will be more willing to work with us, and there will be a period of international support from the people of the world who would love to see America as a force for good, on their side. John McCain couldn't inspire ice to melt on a boiling tarmac in Houston.

The only things to do now: your reading on the economy, your poll work for Barack, and every American ought to go up to the attic and dust off their long-lost sense of humility. Pride is what got us here and, if we stay hopped up on it, it will be the end of this country.

Videogames, Comic Books, Literature, and American Mythology

2008-10-09T12:21:00.005-04:00

My buddy, Michael Highland, has a great videogame blog that should be checked out. Michael made a movie a while back called "As Real As Your Life" about his addiction to videogames that's very insightful and you can check out on the site. Recently, there was some activity on a comment board talking about his movie and Michael got into a good discussion of videogames as a form of mythology and hero-worship. Below, reposted, is my response to his comments and here is the link to the post on his blog with the aformentioned comments. D-bow, when you get your head outta the Honeyplex and finish designing your follow up on "Mail Goggles," I expect to hear from you on this...

Hey man,

Couple thoughts on this post... First, I want to look at this statement: "A book never asks you, the reader, to participate; video games demand action and establish a direct causal link between the player and the virtual world." Though I understand what you're saying to an extent, I disagree with you on this. A writer has already written the book I'm reading. My picking it up and reading it does not change the symbols on the page. In a videogame, though, my input dictates the activities of my avatar. Fair enough.

My first response to your statement is, on a very basic level, a videogame will not really play itself, nor will a book read itself. Both require some basic level of participation.To go a little deeper, I think sophisticated books - like sophisticated videogames - demand (but do not require) a deep level of participation. In fact, I think you could argue the relationship is causal.

To explain this, let me start by addressing participation in videogames. In a videogame, the player does not really "create" each set of actions. The possibilities of what one can do are defined by the game's code. Someone before you has defined the parameters of your action, and you function within those parameters. The possibilities are, to some extent, prescripted.In a book, I think there is an analogous situation. While James Joyce has put the symbols on the pages of "Ulysses" what you make of the meanings of the symbols requires your participation. The reader has the ability to create and define meaning.

Now, one can read "Ulysses" as just a good beach read if you care to try, just as one can approach MGS4:GOP as an FPS and run around mindlessly blasting everything in sight like it was a Resident Evil arcade game at a movie theatre with the red plastic shotgun. But both the sophisticated book and the sophisticated videogame demand participation in order to "get the most out of" the game or book.

But this analysis is structural. The more important point addresses the "value" of videogames versus books.

David McCullough put this point succinctly and I sort of agree with him. "Learning is not to be found on a printout. It's not on call at the touch of a finger. Learning is acquired mainly from books, and most readily from great books."

Now, I agree with McCullough in the sense that there is something that great books offer that nothing else ever will in the same way. There are simply essential truths that the written word can convey and I think a videogame cannot. The medium for the videogame does not allow for it. It clouds out the message of the game.

However. Your really great point is about the mythology of videogames and in that context I think it may be unfair to discuss videogames alongside great books or novels. I think the more appropriate analogue is comic books.

I have a friend whose father has a giant comic book collection that's like the third largest in the country or something. I remember him saying a couple years ago that when you read comic books you're reading "American mythology." Maybe that wasn't an original thought, but it was the first time I'd heard it and it stuck.

I would adjust his statement, perhaps, by saying that comic books were the 20th century's incarnation of American mythology. I expect videogames will be the 21st century's.Now, if we think about videogames from that perspective, maybe we can engage them alongside books and literature.

Are 20th century American comic books and 20th century American literature "equals"? Is that not a fair question? My feeling is they are not equals, that the 20th century tradition of American literature far surpasses in scope, seriousness, depth, and effect, that of comic books. I don't like this comparison, and don't mean to diminish comic books' importance. But the question may be valuable. Literature will not die off in the 21st century, but I would think that there will be far more serious "gamers" in the 21st century than serious "readers." If this is so, then can videogames rise to the occasion? Can they take the mantle that 20th century American literature held? I would seem to have already answered my own question with a "no," but maybe I'm wrong.

My issue with videogames is their medium - the television (or computer) screen. But Greek mythology, The Odyssey, say, began as a strictly oral tradition and was later written down and is now read in book form. The message adapted to a new medium. Was something lost in that transition? Probably. But I think we're better off for having The Odyssey in a book than having lost it in the ephemerality of speech. Likewise, can videogames take part in literary tradition? I don't mean by simply putting symbols and words on the screen, something else would have to happen.

That, I think, is the real challenge of videogames in the 21st century. To go from oral to written tradition seems a fairly obvious step, perhaps: Hear the word, write it down. But how to go from literary to videogame? It cannot simply adopt the tenets of moviemaking, or it will simply parrot another artistic tradition. Videogames have to create a unique language. That hasn't happened yet. But that's the fundamental question to me; will videogames be the next iteration of comic books and the American (or global) mythology of the 21st century? Or can videogames expand the territory of comic books and find someway to combine and expand the literary tradition as well?

Cornering A Wild Animal

2008-10-08T16:13:00.004-04:00

Things are going well for the Obama campaign; John McCain revealed his true ornery and reckless self, Sarah Palin serves only to inject vitriol into a base that was never going to vote for a black man anyway, and much of the conservative media is moving on to 2012 and a serious period of introspection to redefine American conservatism. Obama leads in the polls in Ohio, Colorado, and Virginia, and McCain has given up on Michigan. The global economy smells worse than my gym shoes and we're losing a war in Afghanistan to what conservatives once considered primarily a pile of dirt. So fine, all signs reasonably point to a democratic victory across the boards and a landslide doesn't seem to be out of the question.

The problem is, I just don't believe the GOP is just going to roll over on this election. I used to joke, when asked what life would be like after Bush was out of office, that I didn't understand what made anyone think he'd leave willingly. He, Cheney, Addington, Yoo, etc. have obliterated most aspects of a constitutional democracy, why stop because of "term limits"? I don't really think that idea is so funny anymore. Here are the two things that worry me:

1.) The Polls - Notoriously bullshit. Especially bullshit this time around because Obama is black. Back in the primaries, each time Obama seemed about to close out Hillary, some working class white state (like NH and OH) stood up and shouted Obama to the back of the line. The New Yorker had a good piece on that dynamic this week called "The Hardest Vote". An excerpt:

"...during the long Democratic primary fight it was precisely the white working class that kept denying Obama a lock on the nomination. The problem first became manifest in New Hampshire, a state that much of the media declared in advance to be the end of the road for Clinton. Two days after her victory, Andrew Kohut, of the Pew Research Center, published an Op-Ed in the Times about the failure of polls to predict the outcome. He had a theory: undetected racism among working-class whites. Clinton, he noted, beat Obama among whites with family incomes under fifty thousand dollars and also among those who hadn’t attended college. “Poorer, less well-educated white people refuse surveys more often than affluent, better-educated whites,” Kohut wrote. 'Polls generally adjust their samples for this tendency. But here’s the problem: these whites who do not respond to surveys tend to have more unfavorable views of blacks than respondents who do the interviews.'.... a black candidate is likely to fare worse than preëlection polls would suggest."

The context was vastly different during the primaries, to be sure. But I wouldn't put it past Americans to vote McCain into office just to satisfy an old racist ache.

2.) The Wild Card - This has to do with what I mentioned earlier about Bush-Cheney et al. blowing up the constitution. It's fairytale-ish, but, who knows. I don't think she's smart enough to realize it - I think she's just doing it because it's comfortable and gets a good reaction - but Sarah Palin's fascistic addresses to McCain supporters appeal to the dark sides of American voters. Familiar strains; xenophobia, racism, terrorism... She whips up the crowd like an oratorical incarnation of Leni Riefenstahl and incites her supporters to yell, "Kill him" and "terrorist" in reference to Obama.

McCain, on the other hand, condescends when he addresses the American people. He did so last night in the town-hall style debate all night, treating the audience to meaningless stock phrases like he was a grandfather talking to a five year old grandchild about the evils of Communism in Detroit in 1950. McCain walks the walk, Palin talks the talk - as our precious simpleton from Alaska is fond of saying.

What could they do? Who knows. Palin has secessionist tendencies. There's got to be a page on in-house hostile takeovers in the GOP handbook. Hell, they've already pulled off two in the past two elections, but those were easy because they were close. What will they pull in a potential landslide? These people are dangerous. They know better than you, and they don't even have to convince Americans of that, they just have to keep their base of racist trash whipped up into enough of a furor that there are ten or twenty million voting Americans who refuse to put a black man in the White House and will go to the mattresses behind McCain-Palin-Bush-Cheney to keep it from happening. Is that absurd and out of the question? I'd like to think so, but really most of what happened in the past eight years seemed absurd and out of the question to consider eight years ago.

I would guess that our one saving grace in all of this is that any sort of power coup would require consent of the armed forces. But they've been so mistreated and poorly cared for over the past seven years by the Bush administration that I can't imagine them signing on for more. Plus, David Petraeus has his eyes set on the White House in 2012 or 2016 and that's really where the buck stops these days.

I've mentioned this before, but I know a kid who was a big Hillary Clinton supporter and said a couple times that if Obama won the primary he'd, "never vote for that terrorist." There are clearly a lot of people with that sentiment out there. If it comes to blows, I'm fine with leaving the red states to rename themselves Palinville and we'll take the blue. It'll be fun. Care to guess which one will end up looking like Somalia first?

That One - The Debate

2008-10-07T22:52:00.002-04:00

Post-Debanalysis

2008-10-03T09:18:00.008-04:00

Most media outlets - from the Times, The Post, Daily News, CNN, Daily Dish, Drudge, cable pundits, etc. - have settled on a consensus; Sarah Palin at least met the abismally low expectations the media had set for her, thus she is able to claim some victory.

Well, ok, the talking heads on ESPN can say "The Lions will get blown out by the Packers this Sunday," and then Vegas can give the Lions +20.5 points on the spread. But when the Lions lose the game by 20, covering the spread don't mean squat in the standings - they still got blown the fuck out.

The difference between ESPN's reporters and those from the vast array of news media outlets across the United States is that after a football game, ESPN reporters don't talk about the result of the game from the perspective of spread-coverage - they talk about who won and lost. The news media in our country cares only about the results in the context of their artificial spread.

Take, for example, this from the News Analysis of the New York Times this morning: "Ms. Palin can presumably claim two victories, though modest ones. She did not offer a reprise of the unsteady responses that marked her interviews with Katie Couric on CBS News, even if many of her answers were not always responsive to the question, particularly when contrasted with Mr. Biden. Her performance — feisty and spirited — also might have heartened conservatives, many of whom had gone from ecstasy to despair in the period from when she was named until this week."

If by "feisty and spirited" you mean "flustered and contrived," then, yes. Palin puts on the folksy a lot better in her speeches than she did in the debate where it seemed like someone prepping her beforehand told her to make sure every fifteenth word was "darn right" or "gosh."

As for this little tidbit from the NY Times piece: "her answers were not always responsive to the question..." How does that entitle you to a partial victory? How do you score points like that? "They kept the game close by scoring touchdowns in areas other than the endzone."

It's true, questions she didn't want to deal with, she made up her own question and said she wouldn't answer the one that was asked. When asked if there was any project a McCain administration would have to scale back because of the financial crisis, she repeated some unrelated nonsense about an energy plan from 2005 and blessed the hearts of ConocoPhillips and Exxon.

On subprime mortgage lending, Palin blamed predator lenders and said American citizens needed to be protected from them, then went on, in the next sentence, to say Americans needed to be sure they didn't live outside their means. Well, a subprime mortgage would certainly be living outside ones means, so what's the call Guv?

My favorite double-talk came on government intervention in economic matters. Speaking on tax issues and economic stimulus Palin said, "Now, as for John McCain's adherence to rules and regulations and pushing for even harder and tougher regulations, that is another thing that he is known for though. Look at the tobacco industry. Look at campaign finance reform." In her very next response, on the same subject, she responded, "Patriotic is saying, government, you know, you're not always the solution. In fact, too often you're the problem so, government, lessen the tax burden and on our families and get out of the way and let the private sector and our families grow and thrive and prosper." Um, these are contradictory thoughts.

Biden, on the other hand, was lucid and forceful. He was didactic and laid out his objections and his ticket's positions; one, two, three. His best exchange came after Ifill asked the candidates about the use of nuclear weapons. Palin spouted off some trite bullshit about "nuke-you-lerr" weapons being the "be-all, end-all of just too many people," and then shifted the question to Afghanistan - because she had nothing informed to say about nuclear weapons - and said we should have a "surge" in Afghanistan, too.

Ifill then turned to Biden and said he could speak to either topic Palin addressed. He said, "I'll talk about both" - a theme he pounded throughout the night, tacitly proving that he could address multiple issues and categorically reject his opponents claims while Palin had trouble with basic sentence construction.

Biden responded to Palin's uninformed nonsense about the "surge" in Afghanistan by saying, "The fact is that our commanding general in Afghanistan said today that a surge -- the surge principles used in Iraq will not -- well, let me say this again now -- our commanding general in Afghanistan said the surge principle in Iraq will not work in Afghanistan, not Joe Biden, our commanding general in Afghanistan." Then he spoke to Barack's leadership on a piece of legislation securing nuclear materials. Palin parried Biden's devastating attack by calling the commander of forces in Afghanistan, David McKiernan, "McClellan."

The narrative that will emerge from this debate will be similar to the one that came out of the first debate between Obama and McCain. At first, there was a lot of disappointment on the left that Obama didn't hit McCain harder and most pundits and analysts called the debate a tie. Then it turned out that people watching chalked up a big win to Obama.

What Obama did was tell you exactly what you needed to hear. Biden did the same thing, but was even better at it. He had more leeway to deal with Palin and was able to throw, and land, quite a few haymakers in the debate. In a couple of days the better performance in this debate will shine through the shit-cycle of spin and it will be the same result as we saw in Obama-McCain: Joe Biden destroyed her.

And if Sarah Palin, that dumb lump of pitbull turd smudged with lipstick, winks at me one more goddamn time or shouts out to a class of third graders again like she's on some radio-fucking-talk show call-in program, I will send Michael "I'm-In-Prison-And-This-VP-Joke-Is-Killing-Moose??" Vick after her ass.

How Biden Wins the VP Debate

2008-10-01T16:16:00.002-04:00

There's only one way he can. It's obvious, and I've got to think he's figured it out on his own and there won't be any hubris that gets in the way of him executing the strategy, or wait, is it a tactic? Ah dammit, where's Johnny Mac to clear that up for me when I need him? Anyway, the debate stractic for Joe:

1.) Answer every question with no more than seven words each consisting of no more than two syllables.

2.) End every response with, "... and I'd love to hear Governor Palin's thoughts on this important issue."

She'll take care of the rest.

Patty-Patty Buke-Buke! WRONG!

2008-09-23T22:10:00.002-04:00

Our Nation's Magnum Opus

2008-09-23T10:51:00.006-04:00

A professor of mine told me once that it takes seven years for a tragic event to settle into peoples’ minds, the collective consciousness, before any art can come of it. So I started looking this past September 11th, the seventh anniversary of the attacks. I didn’t have to wait long. The American requiem for the attacks – penned by several hundred million authors – even took more than just those seven years to build tension, crescendo, and then collapse with bated-breath intensity of the towers. Our masterpiece came in the world financial markets, instead of in a libretto, or on a canvas, or a novel.

Briefly, we lived in a time after the end of history. During this time Jonathan Franzen wrote “The Corrections” – which a friend of mine considers the first post-9/11 novel. A prescient novel, as it was published about a year before 9/11. The final chapter of Franzen’s novel begins with this passage:

“The correction, when it finally came, was not an overnight bursting of a bubble but a much more gentle letdown, a year-long leakage of value from key financial markets, a contraction too gradual to generate headlines and too predictable to seriously hurt anybody but fools and the working poor.

It seemed to Enid that current events in general were more muted or insipid nowadays than they’d been in her youth. She had memories of the 1930’s, she’d seen firsthand what could happen to a country when the world economy took its gloves off; she’d helped her mother pass out leftovers to homeless men in the alley behind their roominghouse. But disasters of this magnitude no longer seemed to befall the United States. Safety features had been put in place, like the squares of rubber that every modern playground was paved with, to soften impacts.”

From the shadow of 9/11, this sentiment seems quaint. But we grasp for it at this moment as our legislators in Washington huddle together and try to figure out how to wedge those squares of rubber beneath the financial asteroid that has already struck the planet. Herein lies the beauty of our work of art: It is at once absurd, hilarious to watch these buffoonish Faustus’ try to renege on their pact with Mephistopheles, tragic for the lives they’ll put on the line to do it, and sobering to admit that we all knew it would come to this and avoided every Delphic warning along the way. The complicity for this disaster runs far and deep and the vicious circle of blame, from the proverbial “fat cats on Wall Street” to the “minorities and risky people who can’t pay their mortgages,” is ouroborotic; the snake eating its own tail.

Franzen also said, in an essay in Harper’s Magazine several years before the publication of “The Corrections”: “Tragic realism preserves the recognition that improvement always comes at a cost; that nothing lasts forever; that if the good in the world outweighs the bad, it’s by the slimmest of margins. I suspect that art has always had a particularly tenuous purchase on the American imagination because ours is a country to which hardly anything really terrible has ever happened."

Perhaps it’s not such a surprise that we would commemorate our first great national tragedy since slavery and the Civil War in the language this country has always spoken most fluently; commerce.

In his book “Studies in Classic American Literature” D.H. Lawrence famously wrote, “the essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.” After 9/11 that stoicism melted. Whatever we had left of a British stiff upper lip, fully curled into an American snarl. Vengeance would be our balm. They’d caught us off guard this time, but the next one we would take care of ourselves. We would will calamity upon ourselves to prove our mettle (by 2001 we were already well on our way to this present disaster).

Friedrich Nietzsche asked, in his introduction to “The Birth of Tragedy”:

“Is there a pessimism of strength? An intellectual inclination for what in existence is hard, dreadful, evil, problematic, emerging from what is healthy, from overflowing well being, from living existence to the full? Is there perhaps a way of suffering from the very fullness of life? A tempting courage of the keenest sight which demands what is terrible as the enemy, the worthy enemy, against which it can test its power, from which it wants to learn what ‘to fear’ means?"

Perhaps you’ll say it was 9/11 and Al-Qaeda which we invited to test our power. But I disagree. We have never considered the ragtag rebels and the “holes they live in” in Afghanistan as worthy adversaries. We sent fewer troops to demolish their safe-haven of a nation than there are police on the streets of New York City. Our emperor said of their Visigoth leader, “I don’t really think much about him anymore.” We had a hand in bringing on 9/11, of course, but to really see what we were made of, we needed a far more worthy adversary. We needed ourselves as our enemy.

We turned our homes against us. Every night men returned not to their castles, but to a hand grenade in which they slept. We put much of the world’s money on the backs of our homes to up the stakes and then faced down the plunging red arrows to see who would blink first. Our president – like our potential soon-to-be vice-president – if you didn’t know, does not blink. Ever. Well, this time, he blinked. Everyone blinked. It turned out that stoicism we’d traded for vengeance; we missed having it.

About a year before he killed himself, David Foster Wallace asked this question in The Atlantic as part of the magazine’s 75th anniversary “Year in Ideas” feature: “What if we chose to regard the 2,973 innocents killed in the atrocities of 9/11 not as victims but as democratic martyrs, ‘sacrifices on the altar of freedom’? In other words, what if we decided that a certain baseline vulnerability to terrorism is part of the price of the American idea? And, thus, that ours is a generation of Americans called to make great sacrifices in order to preserve our democratic way of life—sacrifices not just of our soldiers and money but of our personal safety and comfort?”

We’ve failed the trial with which we were confronted, and the one with which we confronted ourselves. The red arrows plunged too quickly, too far and we wondered where our guts had gone. Now we’re trying to make use of those squares of rubber retroactively.

Is it too late to try Foster Wallace’s thought experiment? Can we remove the “Power of Pride” bumper stickers from the backs of our Chevy’s and admit that our hubris, as it was for many a Greek, is not our great strength but our far-too-predictable Achilles’ heel? Can we make a hundred million “Power of Stoicism” bumper stickers instead? And if we do, will anyone be able to recall that strength for themselves? The alternative is probably close and it will not be the dramatic denouement to this work we want to leave in the historical record.

“To be so enormous. Then to die.”

The Warrantless Snag of Sarah Palin's E-mail

2008-09-18T10:22:00.007-04:00

Today, an American citizen's privacy is something worth fighting for. That, of course, stands in opposition to the past eight years of official government policy towards citizens' privacy which was essentially, "bend over and spread those cheeks." After several years of government probing-devices that reached deep into the rectal recesses of American libraries and personal telephone calls, Pitbull/Mom of the Century, Sarah Palin, has had her e-mail hacked and turned public sentiment permanently against invasions of elected officials' privacy.

Palin had nothing to do with the NSA's warrantless wiretapping, of course. But she does sit on a ticket with John McCain who, as a part of his ongoing surrendering-of-all-previously-morally-defensable-positions, reneged on his objection to Bush's illegal surveillance of private American citizens and decided:

"[N]either the Administration nor the telecoms need apologize for actions that most people, except for the ACLU and the trial lawyers, understand were Constitutional and appropriate in the wake of the attacks on September 11, 2001... John McCain will do everything he can to protect Americans from such threats, including asking the telecoms for appropriate assistance to collect intelligence against foreign threats to the United States as authorized by Article II of the Constitution."

This is a change from McCain's prior feelings on the subject. When asked in a prior interview whether federal statutes against wiretapping provisions trumped the Article II "inherent power" argument, McCain said, "I don't think the president has the right to disobey any law." A slimey answer from a now-slippery man, no doubt, but still it doesn't quite have the ring of "I will wiretap you."

But wiretapping is done by the government, not hackers. So maybe it's illegal and wrong, but they're still the government; we don't get to monitor them, they get to monitor us. Right?

Sarah Palin is in a bit of a mess back in Alaska over that whole Troopergate thing. I don't really find the Troopergate "scandal" evil or despicable, just mildly amusing and soap-opera-ish, a quality which is pervasive in Palin's life. Part of the Troopergate story is a question of whether government business concerning the firing, or any other state business the public should know about, was conducted through Palin's personal e-mail account in order to avoid culpability should any scrutiny, such as the current investigation, befall the governor at a later date. The McCain campaign decided to employ Bush tactics in protecting Palin from the investigation, detailed below via Harper's:

"First, Palin has asserted that her records and communications are protected by executive privilege. Second, her senior assistants have been instructed not to cooperate with the probe. Third, the Alaska attorney general (a Palin appointee and confidant who faces conflict-of-interest charges himself) has issued a series of opinions designed to bar the way for the probe. So how does the McCain team deal with accusations that it is attempting a cover-up of Palin’s involvement in a matter which, at the very least, raises severe questions about Palin’s credibility? They argue that the inquiry should be handled by the Alaska Personnel Board, not by the legislature. The Personnel Board, of course, is dominated by Palin’s cronies and reports to her."

You've learned well, young paduan.

We already know government business (not necessarily the firing, but government business) was conducted on Palin's personal Yahoo account because of state business e-mails sent accidentally to her government account, whose sender was reprimanded and told to keep such issues confined to Palin's personal e-mail. Turd Blosson, aka Karl Rove, and 80 other members of Bush's team executed a similar strategy articulated by TB in which personal e-mail accounts were used to conduct government business in order to avoid public scrutiny.

I say those e-mails are ours. We own them, the people. If Sarah Palin and Karl Rove want to pull the bullshit they have, and continue to, in order to prevent us from getting at their e-mails discussing how they govern our country, I say fuck them. Hack their accounts, take their family photos along with their e-mails concerning official state business, and post them all over the web. They are not entitled to our deference.

As Mark Slouka wrote in a brilliant essay in Harper's in June this year about the difference between American and British attitudes toward government: "In general, the Brits act as though the government is their business and they have every right to meddle in it. Americans, by and large, display no such self-assurance. To the contrary, we seem to believe, deep in our hearts, that the business of government is beyond our provenance."

For our part, we take our cues from the hypocritical talking-head class who deplore the "despicable, slimey, scummy, websites, that, in a free society, we have to tolerate," as said Bill O'Reilly on Gawker's posting of the Sarah Palin e-mails. Now Gawker is no anti-establishment, WTO bashing, anarchist hang-out, but kudos on splaying out Palin's e-mails, even if you were just looking for clicks past the jump.

We listen to Turd Blossom who has so little self-respect - even George W. Bush knows how thickly swaddled in shit is Rove, and bestowed the "Turd Blossom" moniker upon him - that he appeared on television yesterday and said, "We saw this celebrity private investigator in L.A., he's going to jail for having listened in on peoples' phone conversations. This is someone listening in on your personal e-mail, uh, this is really bad... We should throw 'em under the bus," showing no regard for the fact that he could have easily replaced "private investigator" with "my former employer, George Bush" and, except for the going to jail part, the statement would have still been accurate.

Thomas Jefferson said the tree of liberty had to be refreshed every once in a while with the blood of patriots and tyrants. No reason not to start spilling some 1's and 0's along the way, too.

Oops, There Goes $4 Trillion...

2008-09-16T15:50:00.004-04:00

No one had lost their jobs, yet, by yesterday, but I'd never seen the Financial District's streets so empty on a Monday morning.

I work about five blocks away from AIG's big downtown offices on Water Street in lower Manhattan. I pass their offices everyday on the way to the New York Sports Club opposite their building. On the way to the gym last night after work I passed two people crying in each others' arms outside the big Chase building. In front of AIG, a fit young man with a smooth, clean head, sat on a flower pot and held his head and sobbed. Maybe their fantasy football teams hadn't performed well on Sunday, or maybe their portfolios had been wiped out in the last eight hours.

Just down the street from AIG, an electric-violin player twitched absurdly before the new "Dwell 95" uber-luxury apartment building that opened its doors yesterday at 95 "Wall Street" (its not on Wall Street, it is most definitely on Water Street, in the middle of the block, not on the corner where you can fudge it, but someone paid somebody for that address...). He stomped around on a blood red velvet carpet and spun out some Richard-Wagner-on-amphetamines music while the dazed suits and IB's stumbled past. A couple photographers snapped photos of oddly placed beautiful people standing in front of the building who-knows-why.

For months designer Philippe Starck's mug stood on a billboard over the building site wearing a moronic Toby Keith beard and a cowboy hat with "yoo" printed on it in big orange letters that had me thinking the place was a new Vonage store, not high rise luxury apartments. The grotesque, impromptu fete for Dwell 95 begged the question, who is going to buy those apartments now - advertised as residing in "the energetic Financial District" (I guess... as long as you don't step outside after 6pm on Friday) - and with what money?

The Financial District suddenly looks very old. Its big stone buildings are heavy and tired. They fit more comfortably with the relic-block of early 19th century NYC preserved for posterity at the corner of Broad Street and Water Street, than they probably should.

In the past year, some of the biggest Wall Street firms have experienced combined losses of about $4 trillion. I'd be fine with that if I wasn't so sure that it's not the dipshit IB's - who'd previously spent their Friday nights at Myst on 28th Street pouring booze on hookers - who will take it in the nuts as much as it is the people in the cafeterias, office services, and maintenance departments. The world loves an overpaid dipshit.

Furthermore, I wonder what this will do to New York City/State. David Paterson, who is a sharp guy as far as I can tell, went on CNBC today and basically said it's killing us to have these firms go belly up. He said that the State Assembly, in a special session recently, cut a billion dollars from the state budget and then had that basically wiped out yesterday when the lost about a billion dollars on the rest of the year with the Lehman collapse/Merrill almost-collapse.

Oh, but at least that fucking asshole, Dick Fuld, will get to leave Lehman with $65 million even with his shitty stock at $3/share. Yeah, Dick, you go break the legs of anyone who shorts that stock.

A Reasonable Succession of If/Then Statements

2008-09-08T14:57:00.001-04:00

I heard Katy Perry's "I Kissed A Girl" played for the 96,347th time in the past month at the New York Sports Club the other day. Apparently this pastor from Ohio is as fed up with it as I am. He says you should stick to kissing boys and liking it, I suppose, or else you go to hell. Abide the church of Blacklick, Ohio, Americans.

This'll Help

2008-09-08T11:27:00.000-04:00

MSNBC Election Coverage - Olbermann = Mega-Suck

2008-09-08T10:29:00.003-04:00

I'm with Gawker on this: Phil Griffin is a gutless slug and the only thing MSNBC has going for it is the Matthews-Olbermann-Maddow trifecta with the occasional Scarborough darkhorse quip. I mean, David Gregory? Come on!

Gawker calls Gregory "the guy who became famous for abusing Bush spokespeople," but that's a crock. He's a shitty journalist and he asked stupid questions to those spokespeople. You want to see how you abuse Bush's spokespeople? Watch Jeremy Paxman intellectu-ass-whip candidate for Dipshit of the Decade, former UN Ambassador, John Bolton, on Newsnight. Coronary country.

I had an enounter with Gregory in October of '03 when I was studying abroad in London. I was at Trafalgar Square the day of Bush's first visit to the UK and there were huge protests, something like 200,000 people. About 8pm I see the NBC news-crew making its way towards me and David Gregory's 6' 5" silver -do sticking out above all the Brits. I end up standing next to him and he says, "Hey, what's going on here, what's the story, I just got in," like I'm his press attache and he's been searching for me the whole time to get the scoop. What the fuck is he asking me for? I just drank a 2 liter bottle of Strongbow Cider. I am ill-equipped to answer this, or any other, question, and, in addition, a) you're the million-dollar a year "journalist," b) you're 6' 5" and you can see over everyone. You tell ME what's going on, buck-o!

Anyway, get rid of Gregory. Olbermann or bust. We don't need another Blitzer-styled starch-injection. Thanks, but no thanks, NBC. You guys suck.

Degrees of Separation

2008-09-08T10:05:00.004-04:00

I found this portion of Sarah Palin's Wikipedia entry notable:

"Palin spent her first college semester at Hawaii Pacific College, transferring in 1983 to North Idaho College and then to the University of Idaho. She attended Matanuska-Susitna College in Alaska for one term, returning to the University of Idaho to complete her Bachelor of Science degree in communications-journalism, graduating in 1987."

Ok, nevermind the fact that she graduated from college after attending four colleges, one of them twice on separate occasions. She also graduated with a degree in communications. As you might recall from Episode 237 of The Simpsons, "Faith Off," this is the same degree held by Springfield University's famed place-kicker, Anton Lubchenko. Lubchenko is kicking in the championship game when a drunken Homer drives over Lubchenko's kicking leg with his parade-float-mobile. His career ruined, Dr. Hibbard is tending to Lubchenko and says, "Oh, don't worry about the end of your football career son, you can always fall back on your degree in..... communications??!?!?!??!?"

Yeah, anyway, "McCain-Palin '08: A-durrrr"

...And I Stop Acting Like Such A Bitch

2008-08-27T10:03:00.003-04:00

I was hanging out with a guy a while back who said, when talk of the election came up, "Barack Obama? I'll never vote for that terrorist." I found it a constructive comment from the liberally educated, clean, articulate young man. Like him, the Clinton supporters above have taken such logical steps as creating Hillary Clinton Supporters for John McCain websites and also not eating their brussel sprouts and throwing even their chocolate pudding desserts on the ground at dinner.

As I said to my friend, of the clean, articulate young man as he walked away from our Socratic discussion, "I was just gonna hit him, but I'm gonna kill him now."

Christopher Long v. NYPD

2008-08-26T10:45:00.001-04:00

Bikers

2008-08-26T10:40:00.002-04:00

To bike or not to bike. I've been trying to figure this out. I feel something that makes me not want to be a bicyclist in New York City, but I haven't been able to articulate it. Just some general sense, beyond how many people I know who've been in shitty accidents, that there's a question to ask before I become a city-rider. I can't figure out what it is though. Just a nagging feeling I can't quite get at.

On n+1's website right now, there is an article by Dan Albert, "Take It to the Street: Class Clash on Seventh Avenue," that presents an explanation of the above footage from a Critical Mass event in which rookie officer Patrick Pogan leveled bicyclist Christopher Long.

Hooray for YouTube Justice, but Albert's article, as much as I like the narrative he crafts, leaves me unsatisfied. Here's the thesis:

"Fighting over street space is nothing new. Before the Model T made driving an everyman's game, New York police had little tolerance for the automobile crowd, viewing them as arrogant, wealthy scofflaws who treated the city like their private playground. Now we've entered a different era—a neo-Gilded one in which the wealthy scofflaws ride road bikes, and working-class cops are willing to go outside the law to protect the working-class driver's exclusive ownership of the right of way."

Problem is, Albert goes back and forth as to whether or not class is the issue or not and ends up, I think, undermining everything he says by writing, "The motorless commuter, regardless of his actual class position, has become a symbol of the privilege that comes with prime real estate."

There are problems with this piece. Also Albert never addresses the Brooklyn species of biker who is not a "wealthy scofflaw" but more likely a grungy twenty-something from Williamsburg.

Check out the video and the article. I'll keep thinking on this, maybe I'll come up with something. Until then, I'm staying on my Segway.

Man, It's Slow Around Here

2008-08-21T12:21:00.001-04:00

Settle For Less

2008-08-20T11:46:00.006-04:00

I often encounter a curious subway ad for the law services of Trolman, Glaser & Lichtman PC. There are two versions; one in English, one in Spanish. The English version tells me, if I don't want to settle for less, I should call 1-888-484-5529. The Spanish version tells me for more than 40 years of experience, call 1-888-MARGARITA. My first thought was the same as yours; that's some racist shit. Anglos can remember numbers, but Latinos require a liquor-based-mnemonic to keep important stuff in their skulls?

There are a couple blogs that picked up on this as well, but appear not to have done their research. In this NY Times article from February 2001, Seth Kugel reports that the firm has no Latino lawyers nor does it have an employee named "Margarita," but...

"'Margarita' is actually 23-year-old Chastity Gutierrez, a receptionist who became the 'chief Margarita' four years ago. (Backup Margaritas serve when she is not available.) She is the latest in a line of Margaritas dating back to the late 1970's, when the first ads went on the air. The first one actually was named Margarita, but by the time she moved on, Mr. Glaser said, 'The name had become bigger than us.' The distinctly Jewish-sounding firm, he said, 'needed a name that said to people, when you call, you're not going to have to speak Yiddish.'"

If you read the NY Times article, you'll see that the number has taken on a peculiar quality amongst at least some of the New York Latino community. People call the number looking for advice and to vent frustration - the article, at least, makes it seem as though the Latino community calling the number think of "Margarita" only as a person's name, not a drink.

So I suppose there are two ways to approach this matter. Either the double entendre in the name "Margarita" is exploitative, racist regardless of these old white mens' intentions. This would put you in the Derrida school of deconstructivist "Death of the (Subway ad) Author" school of advertising theory. Or you take a more traditional approach and demand, no!, you cannot divorce the ad from the context in which it was created and the fact that the original receptionist's name was Margarita and that many people who call still refer to the receptionist as Margarita.

Me? I'm reminded, again, of the Graham Greene quote from the last post. Say the lawyers' intentions were purely honorable, good, innocent... that just reminds me of the "dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm." Then again, part of the harm that leprous ad inflicts is due to the lack of investigatorial prowess displayed by the bloggers who've spiked the ad as straight racism. As much as I may be inclined to agree with them to an extent, their failure to do research pisses me off.

Distill it, and maybe the issue is simply that us Anglos think of Margarita as "one of the most common tequila-based cocktails, made with tequila mixed with triple sec and lime or lemon juice, often served with salt on the glass rim," while most Latinos think of a person named Margarita. But maybe that's wrong too. Someone get the census bureau on it.

As for Latino reaction to the ad on the web? All I could find was this post on a NYC Latino blog (Google translated from Spanish):

"We love SPEAKING of publicity for the metro and its terrible translations. Those who advertise there know that many Hispanics come and go in the subway every day, is a clear target. Obviously directed at them in Spanish (of dubious quality) and use tricks to the phone numbers or websites to stay in the memory. The advertising Trolman Glaser & Lichtman Attorneys is one of my 'favorite.' The slogan hurts: 'Lawyers for Hispanics Number One Injured in Accident,' my grammar teacher would shout at the sky. But the best thing is the phone number: 1.888.MARGARITA…"

Followed by this reader comment:

"Worst of all is that from time to time their advertising appears on this page. It is an honour for us to have a Margarita in Nuyorker…"

The Quiet American

2008-08-18T12:14:00.004-04:00

"Death was the only absolute value in my world. Lose life and one would lose nothing again for ever. I envied those who could believe in a God and I distrusted them. I felt they were keeping their courage up with a fable of the changeless and the permanent. Death was far more certain than God, and with death there would be no longer the daily possibility of love dying. The nightmare of a future of boredom and indifference would lift. I could never have been a pacifist. To kill a man was surely to grant him an immeasurable benefit. Oh yes, people always, everywhere, loved their enemies. It was their friends they preserved for pain and vacuity." - The Quiet American, Graham Greene.

What will we do in a few months when our great enemies are gone? Perhaps we'll have John McCain, but hardly will he be as suitable an enemy as our current Jacobean characters. Just a silly man with a flimsy grip on matters of life and death. At least Bush's assuredness of the just nature of his cause will make good fodder for literature someday (and make prescient older literature such as the above).

Also from The Quiet American:

"Innocence always calls mutely for protection when we would be so much wiser to guard ourselves against it: innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm."

Obama and the Black Historical Narrative

2008-08-06T11:50:00.008-04:00

James Baldwin wrote: "...it is part of the business of the writer--as I see it--to examine attitudes, to go beneath the surface, to tap the source. From this point of view the Negro problem is nearly inaccessible. It is not only written about so widely; it is written about so badly. It is quite possible to say that the price a Negro pays for becoming articulate is to find himself, at length, with nothing to be articulate about. ('You taught me language,' says Caliban to Prospero, 'and my profit on't is I know how to curse.')"

Maybe you find Baldwin's criticism antiquated, and point to Barack Obama's "Dreams From My Father" as evidence that contradicts Baldwin's point. But, I'll say, that's just the issue.

The New York Times Magazine’s cover story this weekend is titled "Is Obama the End of Black Politics?" and written by Matt Bai. The Times, and Matt Bai, are off the mark when they address the end of "black politics," which I find a loaded term that obfuscates the writing that follows it. The question that should have been asked has to do with the African-American voice. What is at stake with Barack Obama's ascendance and this new generation of black politicians, is the black historical narrative in America and the way that narrative is shaped and told.

Glenn Loury, in an essay "Losing the Narrative," wrote: "My fear is that, should Obama succeed with his effort to renegotiate the implicit American racial contract, then the prophetic African American voice – which is occasionally strident and necessarily a dissident, outsider's voice – could be lost to us forever."

Unlike Loury, I think the dissident's voice is always destined to run out of steam. Unless it is purely satirical, the lampooning of power for the sake of it being power (and this is a much different voice), all dissident voices eventually join the mainstream. This is not a bad thing necessarily. It can be an indication of success. A dissident voice loses its raison d'etre the moment the political system, religion, whatever, that it opposes disappears.

Bai notes in his Times Magazine piece: "For a lot of younger African-Americans, the resistance of the civil rights generation to Obama’s candidacy signified the failure of their parents to come to terms, at the dusk of their lives, with the success of their own struggle — to embrace the idea that black politics might now be disappearing into American politics in the same way that the Irish and Italian machines long ago joined the political mainstream."

With Obama's rise, the dissident black voice those aging civil-rights era politicians crafted for the past 40 years is on the way out. This is an existential threat to such politicians; their reward for the success of their life's work is a page in the history books. A nice plaque on the wall commemorating their achievements and a Ken Burns documentary, to be sure, but the struggle moves into a new phase and they will have little role in defining the new narrative. Perhaps it is not so easy as knowing you’ve improved the lives of millions.

For a while, the black American voice sketched out a new narrative that seemed to follow two paths, in the post-civil-rights era, simultaneously; there was a new dissident voice – represented most prominently in American culture by hip-hop – that continued to chronicle a sense of no-exit desperation, and a second voice that was an economically empowered, upwardly mobile one that was/is working its way into the faceless mass of the mainstream.

But hip-hop found financial success, too, and now the norm for that artform is “microwave rap.” Music that is just a vehicle for a paycheck and no longer the gritty urban poetry written on the border of life and death by people like Nas. The dissident path that prospered artistically during the 1980’s and 1990’s came into some money and joined up with the mainstream as well. Although this occurred on a relatively small scale, not every impoverished black child has the opportunity to rap to financial freedom, the change of tack in the musical philosophy was significant, and debilitating, to the dissent of the genre.

Loury’s concern that the dissident black voice may be lost is probably passe. That voice has been lost. Part of the credentials of the dissident black voice was its “otherness” from mainstream American society (enforced, of course, by white mainstream America). But Obama’s personal narrative brings a distinctly untraditional black American history crashing into the mainstream. We all know the biography. By bringing the other so into the mainstream, Obama explodes the space for otherness in which the dissident black voice resided.

In the same Baldwin piece quoted above, Baldwin wrote that, “what was the most difficult was the fact that I was forced to admit something I had always hidden from myself, which the American Negro has had to hide from himself as the price of his public progress; that I hated and feared white people. This did not mean that I loved black people; on the contrary, I despised them, possibly because they failed to produce Rembrandt.”

Baldwin, here, addresses black provincialism. Furthermore, Thomas Williams, in a piece in n+1, wrote in February of this year; “Anyone willing to spend an hour in the company of Black Entertainment Television or to venture into the ‘Urban’ section of the bookstore could argue that today black culture has lapsed into a greater provincialism than ever before. It would not be hard to argue that.”

The question, for me, concerning the black American narrative and the future of a dissident black voice hinges on a difficult Catch-22. If black America is able to overcome the still significant socio-economic issues that plague a portion of its population and join the mainstream fully, then I’m not sure a distinctly black “Rembrandt,” a cultural, artistic force that overthrows a history of provincialism, can be created from the nest of the faceless mainstream where money, more than race, defines your place. On the other hand, the black American narrative has long been defined, as Loury states, by a dissident voice, and that voice has yet to find Baldwin’s Rembrandt, despite having produced some of the greatest cultural products in America’s history. Furthermore, I don't think a dissident voice can produce a Rembrandt as the dissident voice depends on some other agent (oppression, injustice) to provide the fuel for its work. I don't think a Rembrandt can come out of a system like that.

And no, Obama’s no Rembrandt.

I'll See You At The Debates, Bitches

2008-08-06T10:11:00.002-04:00

Well, I doubt you'll have seen it here first, but kudos to Paris Hilton for bringing a modicum of intellectual rigor to the past few weeks of presidential poop-slinging. "That's not a sex-tape you can believe in.. heh heh heh."

See more Paris Hilton videos at Funny or Die

In A Dark House

2008-08-01T15:44:00.004-04:00

This is just too good to leave behind in the nooks and crannies of Politico. Sorry to ruin your Friday with thoughts of prancing Republicans embracing on the floor of Congress because the Democrats told them, No, we're not going to vote on drilling for oil that will sustain us for eight more days while destroying the sea-floor, you silly fools. Now shit's gone all Lord of the Flies in the chamber as Republicans go crazy without Pelosi home to watch:

House Dems turn out the lights but GOP keeps talking
Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and the Democrats adjourned the House and turned off the lights and killed the microphones, but Republicans are still on the floor talking gas prices.
Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) and other GOP leaders opposed the motion to adjourn the House, arguing that Pelosi's refusal to schedule a vote allowing offshore drilling is hurting the American economy. They have refused to leave the floor after the adjournment motion passed at 11:23 a.m. and are busy bashing Pelosi and her fellow Democrats for leaving town for the August recess.

At one point, the lights went off in the House and the microphones were turned off in the chamber, meaning Republicans were talking in the dark. But as Rep. John Shadegg (R-Ariz..) was speaking, the lights went back on, and the microphones were turned on shortly afterward.
But C-SPAN, which has no control over the cameras in the chamber, has stopped broadcasting the House floor, meaning no one is witnessing this except the assembled Republicans, their aides, and one Democrat, Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio), who has now left.

Only about a half-dozen Republicans were on the floor when this began, but the crowd has grown to about 20 now, according to Patrick O'Connor.

"This is the people's House," Rep, Thaddeus McCotter (R-Mich.) said. "This is not Pelosi's politiburo."

Democratic aides were furious at the GOP stunt, and reporters were kicked out of the Speaker's Lobby, the space next to the House floor where they normally interview lawmakers.
"You're not covering this, are you?" complaining one senior Democratic aide. Another called the Republicans "morons" for staying on the floor.

Update - The Capitol Police are now trying to kick reporters out of the press gallery above the floor, meaning we can't watch the Republicans anymore. But Minority Whip Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) is now in the gallery talking to reporters, so the cops have held off for a minute. Clearly, Democrats don't want Republicans getting any press for this episode. GOP leaders are trying to find other Republicans to rotate in for Blunt so reporters aren't kicked out.

Update 2 - This message was sent out by Blunt's office: "Although, this Democrat Majority just Adjourned for the Democrat 5-Week Vacation, House Republicans are continuing to fight on the House Floor. Although the lights, mics and C-SPAN camera's have been turned off, House Republicans are on the Floor speaking to the tax payers in the gallery who, not surprisingly, agree with Republican Energy proposals. All Republicans who are in town are encouraged to come to the House Floor."

Update 3 - Democrats just turned out the lights again. Republicans cheered.

Update 4 - Republican leaders just sent out a notice looking for a bullhorn and leadership aides are trying to corral all the members who are still in town to come speak on the floor and sustain this one-sided debate.

Also, Republicans can thank Shadegg for turning on the microphones the first time. Apparently, the fiesty Arizona conservative started typing random codes into the chamber's public address system and accidentally typed the correct code, allowing Republicans brief access to the microphone before it was turned off again.

"I love this," Shadegg told reporters up in the press gallery afterward. "Congress can be so boring...This is a kick."

Update 4 - The scene on the floor is kind of crazy. Normally, members are not allowed to speak directly to the visitor galleries, or visitors are prohibited from cheering. But in this case, the members are walking up and down on the floor during their speeches, standing on chairs, the visitors are cheering loudly. Some members even brought in visitors, who are now sitting on the House floor in the seats normally filled by lawmakers, cheering and clapping. Very funny.

Democrats faced a choice here - should they leave the cameras on and let Republicans rip Pelosi & Co. on C-Span, or should they leave the cameras off and let the Republicans have their "tantrum," as one Democratic aide characterized it, with the cameras off. So the cameras are off, but Republicans, and the crowd, are clearly enjoying the scene.

Update 5 - Republicans are literally hugging each other on the House floor. Rep. Don Manzullo (R-Ill.), not normally known as an distinguished orator, just gave a rousing speech, accusing Democrats of stifling dissent. He referenced President John Quincy Adams, who returned as a House member after being defeated in his bid for re-election as president. Waving his arms and yelling, Manzullo brought the crowd (including a lot of staff shipped in by GOP leaders to fill up the place), and he left the floor to hugs from his colleagues. You don't see that up here every day.

Update 6 - Rep Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) just pretended to be a Democrat. He stood on the other side of the chaber and listed all of the GOP bills that the Dems killed. He then said "I am a Democrat and here is my energy plan" and he held up a picture of an old VW Bug with a sail attached to it. He paraded around he house floor with the sign while the crowd cheered.

0101011110101000100100001111

2008-07-30T14:34:00.010-04:00

"Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside. So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence. [...] Terror is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time. [...] In our long striving to recover for the Western world a unity of sensibility and of thought and feeling we have no more been prepared to accept the tribal consequences of such unity than we were ready for the fragmentation of the human psyche by print culture." - Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy

I started today thinking about fiction published on the internet - fan fiction, original fiction, whatever - after a brief conversation on the subject with some friends the other night. I went to Marshall McLuhan to stir up some thoughts on the subject and wound up completely sidetracked and with a new train of thought. Now I'm not really sure what I want to discuss. Stick with me if you can. This'll be bumpy. Also, it is probably helpful to at least check out the Wikipedia page on Marshall McLuhan before reading this if you're not familiar with him because I want to draw on a couple of terms and tools that he developed.

First, I want to look at a pedagogical tool McLuhan developed intended to focus attention on the four types of effects (as defined by McLuhan, of course) a medium has on society [image below]. Wikipedia, offering a theoretical tetrad with radio as the medium (McLuhan defines medium as "any extension of ourselves" i.e. a hammer extends our arm), gives this example of the effects:

"1.) Enhancement (What the medium amplifies or intensifies) - Radio amplifies news and music via sound.

2.) Obsolescence (What the medium drives out of prominence) - Radio reduces the importance of print and the visual.

3.) Retrieval (What the medium recovers which was previously lost) - Radio returns the spoken word to the forefront.

4.) Reversal (What the medium does when pushed to the limits) - Acoustic radio flips into audio-visual TV."

McLuhan further categorizes these four effects into groups called "Ground" and "Figure." Again, refer to the Wikipedia page for a better discussion of these terms, but basically "Figure" refers to how a medium interacts or operates in its context. That context is "Ground." Figure = medium; Ground = context, to simplify. In the tetrad, Enhancements and Retrievals are Figure qualities; Reversals and Obsolescences are Ground qualities.

Initially, I wanted to write about fiction on the internet as a medium and use the tetrad to interrogate the medium - its Ground and Figure qualities, cultural effects, and so on. But I realized "Fiction on the internet" is probably not a medium; the World Wide Web is a medium (probably a more accurate term than saying "internet"). I'd gotten close to writing on the subject, though, because putting "Fiction on the internet" in the middle of the tetrad seemed to fit - I could imagine writing about the enhancements and reversals triggered by fiction on the internet. But it was unsettling, and I feared flat out wrong, to consider "Fiction on the internet" a medium.

So I backed off. Instead I tried to put the World Wide Web in the middle of that tetrad. What does the World Wide Web enhance? Radio enhances "news and music via sound." Well, the internet does that, too. Does the World Wide Web enhance moving images, like television? Yes. Does it also drive TV and radio from prominence (Obsolescence)? Yes, it does that.

This is a simple path to follow; when it comes to Enhancement (which I would not consider synonymous, here, with "betterment") and Obsolescence, I could see making a case that the World Wide Web enhances all information based media while simultaneously making all information based media obsolete.

I am careful to distinguish by saying "information based media" because McLuhan's definition of media that I'm working with - "any extension of ourselves" - applies to hammers and bicycles as well as newspapers and videogame consoles and the web doesn't cover the territory of the hammer. Yet. But from here on out, I'll just say "media" for the sake of brevity, but I'm addressing information based media. (Furthermore, I will admit that I am unsatisfied with the term "information based media" - if you've got a better one, I'm all ears)

The World Wide Web has a chameleon-like nature - it is able to imitate the characteristics of other media almost exactly. In so doing, it destroys the media it consumes. Newspapers, music, television, radio - all are available online and all are available for free, too, if you're clever enough (and you don't need to be that clever). Those four mediums are all about to go belly up and are happy enough to blame the Web for many of their problems.

What the Web really does away with is center. Television exists to serve one purpose: to project sound and images by way of a screen. When you watch television, you are participating with the medium in the only way you can. But when you watch The Office on Hulu.com, are you watching television? No, not really, you're watching a television show broadcast via the World Wide Web.

What is the original content of the internet? Newspapers, magazines, movies... the World Wide Web enhances this media, makes its original source obsolete, but can the World Wide Web become a newspaper? Or only imitate it?

McLuhan warns us that, "it is only too typical that the 'content' of any medium blinds us to the character of the medium." I think this is especially true of the Web because the content is illusory; it is a mirage. The content of the Web does not exist.

What is the original content of the World Wide Web? The videos, writing, music, news, talk, that can all be found on the Web are conveyed by an imitation of the media that created them. The Web itself is incapable of creating content. Perhaps the quintessential Web agent is the search engine. But how does Google function? I input data and then Google has algorithms, calculations, procedures which take the data I input and spit back out results. This is the domain of the computer: "A machine that manipulates data according to a list of instructions." The World Wide Web imitates a computer. Of course one does not exist without the other, but I think even here the World Wide Web plays the chameleon and puts on the costume of a computer.

What about blogs? Again, the web imitates other media - a personal journal, diary, opinion letter, editorial. These things are offered as a unique blend via blogs on the Web, but, still, the Web just allows you to imitate a diary and editorial simultaneously, if you wish, but the form is still ripped off from something pre-existing.

What I’m trying to get at is the wraith-like quality media assumes on the Web; the New York Times on the Web is an apparition of a newspaper as the real thing, somewhere behind it, approaches death.

I guess the question at this point would be to return to that tetrad and say, “Ok, so the Web might kill off TV, radio, and print as they exist independent from the Web, now. So what happens in the ‘Reversal’ phase, when the internet is pushed to its limits? Into what does it flip?”
One answer is the internet will become the media it kills off. All that “illusory” content suddenly becomes solid because there is no alternative; the NY Times will only publish electronically. But I don’t think this is the case. I don’t think once these other forms die off and exist exclusively (or almost exclusively) on the Web that it will somehow give an article on the Web the flesh it lacks now.

McLuhan thought the result would be a “global village,” that is a reaction against the fragmentary style of life caused by print culture. Instead of breaking away into little cliques based on language, we’ll be one throbbing, frightened mass desperate for the iron rule of one person that makes us forget how terrifying it is to be in close contact with every other person on earth by being even more terrifying him/herself:

“Is it not obvious that there are always enough moral problems without also taking a moral stand on technological grounds? [...] Print is the extreme phase of alphabet culture that detribalizes or decollectivizes man in the first instance. Print raises the visual features of alphabet to highest intensity of definition. Thus print carries the individuating power of the phonetic alphabet much further than manuscript culture could ever do. Print is the technology of individualism. If men decided to modify this visual technology by an electric technology, individualism would also be modified. To raise a moral complaint about this is like cussing a buzz-saw for lopping off fingers. "But", someone says, "we didn't know it would happen." Yet even witlessness is not a moral issue. It is a problem, but not a moral problem; and it would be nice to clear away some of the moral fogs that surround our technologies. It would be good for morality.”

Rapper or Republican?

2008-07-30T11:25:00.003-04:00

Play along! I suggest everyone watch this, um, now. Spectacular.
"Rappers, Republicans... what's the difference? They both love money, they love guns... gay people scare the shit out of them, every other word out of their mouth is n****r."

Lessons of Darkness, 1992, by Werner Herzog

2008-07-14T20:48:00.003-04:00

I was going to write something about the New Yorker cover that everyone is picking at like a bug bite in the hopes of turning it into a gangrenous limb which can then be self-amputated, but, then, I realized that I don't find the cover funny, I don't find it offensive, and I don't find it clever; if this be madness, I find no method in't. So instead of many words, watch this Werner Herzog footage from Lessons of Darkness, which I think summarizes what I would have said quite well.

Desperation

2008-07-11T12:37:00.013-04:00

I want to review Nas' new album, Untitled, but I don't think I can do it without discussing a dynamic in hip-hop that's been on my mind for a while. I want to talk about first albums. This'll lay the groundwork for a review, to come later, of Nas' new album "Untitled." For now, take a look at this list of my ten favorite hip-hop albums and the discussion below. I'll drop back next week to review Untitled.

Wu-Tang Clan - 36 Chambers: Enter the Wu-Tang
The Gza - Liquid Swords

Raekwon - Only Built for Cuban Linx

Ghostface - Supreme Clientele

Madvillain (MF Doom) - Madvillainy

Jay-Z - Reasonable Doubt

Nas - Illmatic

Cam'ron - Purple Haze
Notorious B.I.G. - Ready to Die

Eric B. & Rakim - Let the Rhythm Hit 'Em

Of those ten albums, six of them are the artist's/group's first album; 36 Chambers, Liquid Swords, Cuban Linx, Reasonable Doubt, Illmatic, and Ready to Die. Some of these guys rapped other places before those albums dropped. But the Wu-Tang affiliated albums were the first under Rza's five-year plan. Nas appeared on a couple stray tracks that got him hyped, but Illmatic was the breakthrough. Same with Jay. Same with Biggie.

There's not much revolutionary about including those albums on a top ten list. They are in the Pantheon of great hip-hop albums. You can argue their respective ranks, but no one worth their salt is gonna push any of those six albums far from top-ten to twenty status. And when it comes to Nas and Illmatic, you move that album out of the top three at your own peril.

No one came closer to perfecting the New York hip-hop sound than Nas on Illmatic. Premier's beat on "New York State of Mind" dripped with the cacophony of the city and Nas probably earned the title "Greatest Rapper Ever" by the end of his first verse on that track. But since Illmatic, writers have spilled plenty ink on Nas' inability to return to that pinnacle. Nine tracks (plus an intro skit) and Nas had set the bar higher than he'd ever be able to reach again, the story goes.

I would argue, furthermore, that no one on that list of first albums equalled those works with any of their subsequent releases. Life After Death was solid, but I'd take "Machine Gun Funk" and Ready to Die over it any day. Raekwon has undoubtedly not come close to Cuban Linx since - we'll wait and see what Cuban Linx II offers, if it ever drops. Wu-Tang Forever and The W are solid albums, but not the gritty, raw, sublime masterpiece that is 36 Chambers. Liquid Swords is unparalleled in GZA's catalog and in my mind sits not far from Illmatic.

As for Jay, this tends to be the diciest claim. A lot of people put The Blueprint above Reasonable Doubt, and I could have seen the justification until Jay's "Takeover" was utterly obliterated by Nas' retaliatory "Ether" and "Got Yourself A Gun" and, for me, proved The Blueprint's braggadocio hollow and shut Jay's mouth. Reasonable Doubt was Jay at his coldest: "Nine to five is how to survive, I ain't trying to survive/ I'm trying to live it to the limit and love it a lot."

Are all these first albums at the top of my list coincidence? I don't think so. All of those albums partake of what I call "experiential rap" - rap that is born from the artists' observations and feelings as opposed to something didactic or "conscious hip-hop" (in the Tribe Called Quest/ De La Soul vein of the time, though I never liked that term because, what?, Nas was unconscious?).

I've accused Nas before of having laid the groundwork - but in superlative aesthetic terms - for the dynamic that is now pervasive in hip-hop, what Nas himself calls "microwave rap." Rap that people use to feed themselves and their families; pre-packaged, caricaturized drug rap like 50 Cent, Young Jeezy...

Great experiential hip-hop requires desperation as its motor. Biggie said, when asked why he started rapping, that he just wanted to get out of the streets, or, more famously; "because the streets is a short stop/ either you're slinging crack rock or you got a wicked jump shot." Nas looked back, in a Vibe Magazine interview from 2005 on the tenth anniversary of Illmatic, and stated that he couldn't believe what his life was in 1995 as a 21 year-old kid, that he knew he had to take his future on his own shoulders or he wouldn't survive. Rap is at its most poignant, emotive, is most bared to the world when, as Jay says on the intro to Reasonable Doubt's "Can I Live," it has "nothing to lose, everything to gain. So we offer you, well, we offer our lives. What do you bring to the table?"

Yelling At Wall, Wall Yells Back

2008-07-09T11:50:00.005-04:00

It turned out to be fortuitous, ironic, "just desserts"-serving, that a post I published on June 11, 2008 was the one in which I chose to reveal my name. I'd attended an n+1 panel discussion on the state of the internet the night before and felt chastened by the discussion of the anonymous blogger/commenter as one who criticizes from behind the name "anonymous" and does not afford the commented-upon the same anonymity. So I owned up, posted my name.

A week later, in my next post, I criticized the Do-It-Yourself concert scene and The Market Hotel in Bushwick. The BushwickBK website linked to my blog and amped my readership up to about 100 visits per day (for about five days). It resulted in eighteen mostly antagonistic comments in response to my post.

It was not the first time my writing inspired an angry response; I caused a few letters to the editor as a columnist for my college newspaper from various groups that took issue with my writing. But those interactions were different; I had a byline, a picture of myself next to my columns, and my detractors signed their letters and, even when upset, wrote cogent, mostly civil responses to my work because obscenity laced tirades don't get published in newspapers.

All of which is a far cry from, say, this anonymous commenter's response to my Market Hotel post: "A lot of the above responses were great and touched on many of the reasons why your argument is bullshit. The only thing I can add is that you should go fuck yourself you elitist douchbag know-it-all prick."

I was surprised by the response my Market Hotel post got. Not that I didn't find the response deserving - I criticized a group of blogging-and-anonymous-posting-savvy people. But not much I'd written in the past had gotten attention outside some guy in Missoula, Montana who said, in reference to a post in which I criticized MSNBC for putting Pat Buchanan on the air every night, that "Pat Buchanan has never said anything about black people that haven't been true."

Suddenly, I had a lot of piranhas taking little bites out of me and swimming off unnamed back into the murky waters of the internet. As my friend said, "yelling at a wall is all well and good until you realize that the person behind the wall can yell back." I suppose I'd forgotten that after being ignored by the internet so consistently.

Keith Gessen, an editor and co-creator of n+1, discussed on his blog yesterday the implications of self-publication. He cited a Jonathan Baumbach essay on the creation of the Fiction Collective in the '70's: "The publication of any worthwhile novel is necessarily... a deeply anti-social, even violent act. And when a publisher publishes your novel, he is taking on at least part of the responsibility for that act. You wrote it, but he published it—you share the burden of whatever anti-social message your novel contains. When you self-publish, Baumbach went on, you take that entire psychological burden upon yourself. There is nothing between you and the reader, in terms of the violence of your work."

I have spent a lot of time since the fervor (a minor, not-even-drop-in-the-bucket sized fervor in terms of the scale of the internet, but significant nonetheless for me personally) over my Market Hotel post died down trying to figure out my take on the episode.

I consulted with a few people. One said, "yeah, I liked that post, don't worry about the comments, nobody notices you if you're timid and civil." Another said, "everything you're not supposed to say about cool white people... you were right, but set 'em up first, then knock 'em down." One of my roommates noted that, "one of the key flaws in your blog, I think, is that you tend to make people very defensive."

My post was aggressive and tactless. But it did get people talking, I hit a cyber-nerve. But if the "violence of my work" results in violent responses, I think we just cancel each other out. No real progress is made. One of us, as Gessen went on to write in his post, may be "totally sincere" and the other "totally cynical." We wind up where we started, blood pressure, and hit counter, up a couple points.

That said, if I'd been tactful, if I hadn't called the Market Hotel "the flag of an imperialist hipster culture" (which BushwickBK used as the tagline for their link to my blog) would anyone have paid attention? If I hadn't made anyone defensive, would anyone have felt the need to consider their thoughts and write a response to my post?

My roommates still might have responded, but they know me. There is no wall of anonymity between us. It is much easier to lean on anonymity and be aggressive, dismissive. But knowing you have to look that person in the face at the end of the day might encourage you to be logical. This goes both ways, of course; poster and commenter.

Caleb Crain, another panelist at the n+1 internet event, wrote in his opening remarks, "it may be that communication is compromised when interactions are completely public, that grabbing attention often substitutes for deserving it, and that solitude is more refreshing than a company in which trust and tenderness are habitually threatened."

This seems to leave us at an impasse. Either self-publication (blogging, in this case) is antagonistic in order to "grab attention" and then results in the sort of unproductive back and forth that my post on the Market Hotel did, or it is private, even-tempered, and read by those who will uphold "trust and tenderness." This may be a richer experience, but it will not extend to a wide audience, and if you're just writing to your friends, why not just have the conversation over a beer?

To find a middle ground, look at form and style. I think it was also Crain who, at the n+1 panel, said that he blogs on subjects he is interested in, but does not want to necessarily read ten books of research to write about thoroughly. Several commenters who criticized my post also derided it as a "college-style essay." I admit that I try to avoid a colloquial and casual style of blogging. Although I don't claim to read the "ten books of research" for a scholarly essay, I often do internet-based research for my posts and try to adhere to an essay-like form in my blog writing.

When I don't do research, and I didn't do much for the Market Hotel post, I find I resort to emotinal arguments instead of fact-based arguments. When I have facts to cite and support my argument, my writing is less emotional; I have far more confidence in the efficacy of my research than my emotions, which tend to cloud judgment and obscure meaning. So I found it odd that my least research-based, most emotional, post was criticized for its "scholarly" tone.

If blog posts can be productive and incite discussion that does not rely so heavily on the term "douchebag," they should be far less like my Market Hotel post and far more like a "college-style essay." I assume the disdain for the essay expressed by my readers comes from the fact that they sucked to write in college when all we wanted to do was get a beer and pick up women, but there is a reason the essay has hung around for 450 years; it is an effective tool for making a point, conveying an idea, starting a discussion.

Blogging as we practice it now may resist this idea, but it does so to its own detriment. My failing was embracing my emotions when I should have resisted them and engaged in scholarship. Not every blog post needs to be a didactic, well-cited jump-off for a thesis. But the condition of trading fact for emotion seems widespread and unproductive, antagonistic. Blogging's intellectual scene would be better off if it were just that: intellectual.

Changing Your Mind

2008-06-30T11:33:00.006-04:00

Just a quick note on George Packer's New Yorker piece, Obama's Iraq Problem. In it, Packer asserts that, "Obama’s rhetoric on [Iraq] now seems outdated and out of touch, and the nominee-apparent may have a political problem concerning the very issue that did so much to bring him this far." Packer wrote that in reference to the security improvements in Iraq over the past 18 or so months -- improvements that seemed impossible when Obama launched his campaign against a backdrop of unending Iraqi violence and promised a speedy withdrawal.

Though I'd disagree that the gains in Iraq are as significant as Packer implies, he's right that Obama needs to be nimble should McCain come up with a good line or two about Obama wanting to pull out and imperil the fragile Iraqi security. Whether the military/political analysis of Iraq is correct or not is irrelevant. This discussion is in the vein of the John Kerry flip-flop debacle; can Obama (should Obama) revise his withdrawal plan of one brigade per month if Iraq continues to stabilize?

As Packer notes, "The politics of the issue is tricky, because acknowledging changed ideas in response to changed facts is considered a failing by the political class.... One can imagine him speaking more honestly on Iraq. If pressed on his timetable for withdrawal, he could say, 'That was always a goal, not a blueprint. When circumstances change, I don’t close my eyes—I adapt.'"

I would hope, and expect, that this is the tact Obama takes. It was certainly the one John Kerry should have adopted and his inability to make such a simple, and critical, intellectual leap lost him the election.

During the Depression, John Maynard Keynes appeared before parliament and presented a set of economic views that conflicted with those he'd stated previously and had failed to affect the course of the Depression. An MP called Keynes out on his "flip-flop" (to speak anachronistically). Keynes responded, "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?"

I have far more faith in Obama's ability to repay any service from McCain's court with a scorching volley than I ever had in John Kerry. But even if Obama can deal with this issue, should McCain make it one (he will), Obama supporters should be prepared for the candidate who we expect to lead us out of Iraq to temper our expectations for that withdrawal. We have made Obama an icon but we shouldn't be surprised when he reminds us that he is also a very, very savvy politician.

Barack Obama and the Theory of the Unitary Executive

2008-06-23T12:55:00.009-04:00

In January of 2007, Chalmers Johnson wrote a citizen's "National Intelligence Estimate" on the United States for Harper's Magazine. In it, Johnson detailed the American embrace of "military Keynesianism" - an economic model in which "sustained military ambition [is required] in order to avoid [economic] recession or collapse." Johnson further explained military Keynesianism alongside the theory of the unitary executive, which the Bush administration has long embraced and championed via Dick Cheney: "The theory of the unitary executive," wrote Johnson, "holds, in effect, that the president has the authority to ignore the separataion of powers written into the Constitution, creating a feedback loop in which permanent war and the unitary presidency are mutually reinforcing."

It was Dwight Eisenhower who foresaw the perils of the "military-industrial complex" first and presided over a portion of its birth. And no longer, as Eisenhower noted, do we participate in a military philosophy whose ethos was, "American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well."

I'm not sure if military Keynesianism reached its quintessence in the Reagan 80's or the Bush 00's or has yet to show its full might a la the still burgeoning Clone War-esq works of Blackwater's Cofer Black and Erik Prince. But if the self-perpetuating cylce of military Keynesianism is to be broken, or slowed, one place it might start is with a move away from the theory of the unitary executive. My eggs are in Barack Obama's basket on this one, but there's something troubling about the fervor around him alongside expanded executive powers. I have played a small part in that play, but it's one that I should step back and think about.

There was some concern this weekend over Obama's support of the FISA Bill which allowed retroactive amnesty for telecomm companies for participating in George Bush's demand to illegally spy on American citizens. What troubled many, as Greg Sargent wrote on Talking Points Memo, is that "[Obama's] candidacy has long seemed to embody a conviction that Democrats can win arguments with Republicans about national security -- that if Dems stick to a set of core principles, and forcefully argue for them without blinking, they can and will persuade people that, simply put, they are right and Republicans are wrong." Obama's support of the FISA Bill seemed not in keeping with that tradition.

What further troubles me about Obama's support of the bill - regardless of aspects of political gamesmanship which I won't address - is how it jives with the theory of the unitary executive, and how Barack will deal with the fresh Bush legacy of expanded presidential powers. Obama will have a lot of work to do repairing the economy, foreign policy, and mending two military disasters when he is elected president. There must be, in such a case, a temptation to use exceptional powers to make excpetional changes. I trust Barack Obama not to use the sweeping powers of George Bush - to shove aside the constitution and remake the country/world - because I believe he knows that the means are the ends in this game: It's not how you want the world to look, it's how you get it there.

But his supporters, myself included, expect monumental changes that will be difficult and time-consuming to achieve. Will Barack feel pressure to use his executive power - power swollen by Bush and friends - to make change quickly? Or will he be able to temper his people's expectations, encourage patience and deliberation, and perform the near contradictory tasks of simultaneously resizing the role of the executive and tackling the wounded economy and working on withdrawal from Iraq. What makes this even more complicated is the charismatic authority with which we have endowed Obama.

The sociologist Max Weber wrote of charismatic authority that it is, "a certain quality of an individual personality, by virtue of which he is set apart from ordinary men and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities. These are such as are not accessible to the ordinary person, but are regarded as of divine origin or as exemplary, and on the basis of them the individual concerned is treated as a leader." (Wikipedia)

Obama is not endowed with supernatural powers or those of divine origin, but he's certainly been bestowed with the distinction of a man, "set apart from ordinary men," with, "at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities," by many of his supporters. This can be a dangerous role to put someone in, regardless of how much Obama denies it is he who is special and insists that he is simply the "the excuse" for people's hopes and dreams.

One of the great sins of the Bush Administration, and the American people, was when Bush advised us all "to go shopping" after 9/11 and leave the work to him, and we obliged, at least at first. If Obama is elected and America is to avoid collapse and/or international irrelevance, it will not be because of the work of Barack Obama, but of all Americans under his leadership. We cannot expect to continue shopping while he does the heavy lifting. I worry that the quality of the support around him may suggest we are too enamored of the potential abilities of our charismatic leader, and still not looking to take on the burden ourselves. The organizing and grassroots work is encouraging, I just hope it lasts beyond the general election.

I've heard that the following lines, from The Unbearable Lightness Of Being, were "given" to Milan Kundera because he was writing from under the spectre of communism. Still, I think there may be precautionary value in them now.

"A year or two after emigrating, [Sabina] happened to be in Paris on the anniversary of the Russian invasion of her country. A protest march had been scheduled, and she felt driven to take part. Fists raised high, the young Frenchmen shouted out slogans condemning Soviet Imperialism. She liked the slogans, but to her surprise she found herself unable to shout along with them. She lasted no more than a few minutes in the parade.

When she told her French friends about it, they were amazed. “You mean you don’t want to fight the occupation of your country?” She would have liked to tell them that behind Communism, Fascism, behind all occupations and invasions lurks a more basic, pervasive evil and that the image of that evil was a parade of people marching by with raised fists and shouting identical syllables in unison. But she knew she would never be able to make them understand."

"Anything Is A Venue" - The Market Hotel

2008-06-18T11:16:00.009-04:00

"manifesto: to make your getting together with each other something different, someway more. not just music but all about the music; making you dance, making you stay out later. going for the magic of being right there in what's happening, with no hype, nothing elitist, everyone invited. plus giving back and being involved in making creativity happen."

- Todd Patrick at http://www.toddpnyc.com/ DIY enthusiast and booker of shows at The Market Hotel and elsewhere

The Market Hotel is marked by a white, metal door and the hipsters that walk through it, that is all. I made my first trip there last night. It is located at 1142 Myrtle Avenue, it is a few blocks past the limits of the Sumner Houses, in Bushwick. The music was solid. But the music is trivial in The Market Hotel's setting. The Market Hotel is the flag of an imperialist, hipster culture. A flag in the tradition of the many that long ago marked the take over of Williamsburg. Now the nation-building moves to Bushwick.

Eddie Izzard, in Dress To Kill, talked about the British Empire's world domination by way of the flag: "Just sail around the world and stick a flag in. 'I claim India for Britain!' And they're going, 'You can't claim us, we live here! There's five hundred million of us!' - 'Do you have a flag?' - 'We don't need a bloody flag, this is our country, you bastard!' - 'No flag, no country! You can't have one! That's the rules, that... I've just made up.'"

The same rules appear to be in play with the Brooklyn hipster music set, although, as befits them, they're not aware they're playing by them. The Market Hotel claims the space around it in the name of elitism, The Land of Hipsterdom. I could sense my proximity to The Market Hotel last night when, what turned out to be two blocks away from the venue, I saw the first white people I'd seen in 15 blocks after walking by the Sumner Houses. Standing in the main room with a friend who was equally startled by the self-assured crowd, I told her, "If someone runs up here right now from the neighborhood and beats the shit out of all of us, we will have deserved it."

The cops shut down The Market Hotel for selling alcohol illegally in February, but only briefly. They've been back up and running since. It's striking though, that they were allowed to reopen at all and that they seem to have reached an understanding with a police force that is well aware of the deal at 1142 Myrtle, as its goings-on are published all over the internet. Last night a few locals shouted at me and some kids as we walked into the venue. I didn't hear what they said, but it wasn't "enjoy the show."

Imagine a group of kids my age, 21 - 23 years old or so, from the Sumner Houses who decided to rent a place like The Market Hotel and put on shows there, sell liqour illegally. They would be shut down as soon as found out, arrested, evicted, and that venue would never play a show again. Why? Because the police perceive them as a potential threat; a hot space full of illicit booze and loud music and project kids; there's a chance something will go down at some point. But a bunch of hipsters? Yeah, they don't have a liquor license, but let it slide, they're chumps. No one's starting beef at a Harry And The Potters show.

So the wimpiness of the hipster works to his advantage. He's allowed to stake out his territory in a rough section of Bushwick because he is not rough. All well and good, go ahead and partake in the imperial tradition of your forefathers, claiming land that is not yours by way of the cunning use of flags. The cops even have your back, they'd rather see you and your friends in Bushwick than their usual fare of stand-offish kids in long white tees.

But all this makes Todd P sound like Don Rumsfeld - "they'll shower us with flowers in the streets of Baghdad!" - when he writes in his "manifesto" from the Todd P website: "...no hype, nothing elitist, everyone invited. plus giving back and being involved in making creativity happen."

Of course, the whole enterprise is driven by hype, hence the roll-call of links on Todd P's site of every single place that has written something about me since forever. A list which now includes the requisite "MTV did a thing" link. This can be forgiven, though. Hype, what is hype? Todd P has his own ideas. What is unforgivable is the astounding ignorance of saying, "nothing elitist, everyone invited. plus giving back..."

Elitist? You are the definition of elitist. Who else besides elitists can move to Bushwick, open the place, get the publicity, and get away with the illegality? And, I mean, maybe I didn't stay late enough, but I didn't see anyone from the Sumner Houses at The Market Hotel last night. I don't know that they would be turned away if they wanted to come, probably not, but then again who from Bushwick wants to listen to the So So Glos? You're not disinviting the locals, but you're sure giving them a lot of good reasons not to want to come.

I would be happy to see the day when a place like The Market Hotel could open in Bushwick and compliment the neighborhood instead of confronting it. But what exists there now is very confrontational and not at all complimentary. All the privileges that these hipsters have are the foundation of The Market Hotel. Those privileges are not afforded to the natives of that neighborhood. Hence there is a confrontation between the locals who feel slighted, invaded by a foreign force that is given special treatment they have never enjoyed. The hipster crowd might not be able to, or want to, acknowledge this tension, but it is there.

I don't know how to make a place like The Market Hotel that would satisfy the need for a venue that is syncopated with the neighborhood, so my solution would be to not make the venue at all; stay in Williamsburg. Yes, you need a cheap place, a good spot, someplace to get booked, but at what cost? And when you clearly haven't considered the ramifications of what you're doing? That is such an old, tired, rich, white aristocratic role to play. And to wear this egalitarian mask while it's played is shameful.

To Todd P and The Market Hotel: Shut down. Live in your apartment and see your shows on Bedford. You've taken over enough territory.

To the people of Bushwick: Police your neighborhood.

What Is The What?

2008-06-11T11:01:00.005-04:00

I don't think I've ever revealed my name anywhere on this blog. It's Alex Alsup, anyway. I'm not sure why I never mentioned that - I suppose some combination of trepidation of putting it out there publicly and appreciating the cloak of anonymity that most bloggers wear.

But there's no point. I mean, we all have blogs because we want a book deal, or so I'm told. And Viking Press can't make my check out to "The Skillman." Furthermore, as Benjamin Kunkel of n+1 posited at a panel at The Kitchen last night (the discussion was on the state of the internet) if I'm going to write "Anderson Cooper, you fucking moron," shouldn't Cooper have the chance to call me something by name as well? In my case, yes, Cooper should have that chance, though I'm sure he won't make use of it. But I disagree with Kunkel that the incongruity between the anonymous commenter and the identified commented-upon is a uniformally bad equation.

There are at least two species of anonymous internet commenters; the people who do the good democratic work at places like Wikipedia and rarely drop a name beside it, and those who pepper the NY Times, Gawker, TPM, and so on, message boards with mostly vitriolic comments and zero accountability. To these categories I would add a third species with a tiny population; the anonymous commenter as superhero.

New York Magazine published an article on May 25 titled "The What You Are Afraid Of" about an anonymous commenter, named, The What, who terrorizes the "yuppie scum" clientele of the Brooklyn-centered orgy-site of real estate news, and gentrification's standard-bearer, Brownstoner.com.

The What posts things like, "BUT WHEN U FREGAN YUPPIE ARE HANGING OUT IN FRONT OF THE BARS SMOKIN UR F!@#KIN CIGS> NOT CARING ABOUT THE PEOPLE THAT HAVE TO WAKE UP AT 7 AM TO GO TO WORK. KEEP THE NOISE DOWN CAUSE WHEN GET WATER THROWN ON YOU THEN YOU HAVE A REASON TO BE LOUD." Read the article to understand the full scope of his wrath.

The What is a rare case, no doubt, and I know of no other online entity like him that, depending on your feelings towards Brownstoner, comes as close to anonymous superhero (yes) or supervillain (no) status. The unfocused, random anger of postings on most blogs and websites does not amount to supervillainy, at most it is petty crime - minor vandalism. But anonymity is not in all cases an unfair power wielded by the online commenter, it is just a generally abused power.

Back a little bit before the internet a guy named Thomas Paine released a pamphlet (an old thing kind of like a blog post, but you could hold it) called "Common Sense" and signed it, "An Englishman." In the hands of a patriot, anonymity is a powerful, and sometimes necessary, tool. Of course, one man's patriot is another man's radical revolutionary. But anonymity is fragile, even amongst the mind-boggling Googleish algorithms of the internet. So how is it preserved, and what happens, and what does it look like, when it is betrayed?

My roommate and I discussed the NY Mag article and both settled on a feeling that writing about The What, even without revealing his "true" identity, served to destroy The What.

Comic book historian Gerard Jones wrote in the LA Times a while back, "Superman insisted that his work as a hero must end if the truth were exposed. Why? Why not just be superhuman in public?" The pragmatic response is usually something about how knowing, say, Batman's identity as Bruce Wayne, would make it possible for the bad guys to "get at" the people he cared about. But it has to be more than that.

I asked my rommate why some superheroes needed anonymity. We discussed it for a while and seemed to circle around a lot of the standard ideas about superhero anonymity. But when we changed tactics and took on the concept of The What's anonymity, my rommate nailed it: If The What is identified as, say, Mike Smith, "then we attribute all of Mike Smith's traits and characteristics to 'The What' and Mike Smith can't possibly live up to the abstract... character that is 'The What.'" Or, as my roommate went on to say, "nobody wants to think about Spiderman doing his laundry."

But The What was not, in fact, identified - NY Mag never figured his name, or, if they did, they didn't publish it. So why do my roommate and I still feel his power was diminished by the article? For insight I'd turn to The Simpsons. In the episode "Bart's Inner Child" a self-help "guru" comes to Springfield and convinces the citizens that they can cure whatever ails them by living like Bart Simpson who says - "I do what I feel like."

Everyone does what they feel, the town goes to shit, and Bart goes to Lisa and asks, "Lis, everyone in town is acting like me. So why does it suck?" Lisa responds, "It's simple, Bart: you've defined yourself as a rebel, and in the absence of a repressive milieu your societal nature's been co-opted." The What can trace, should he care to, or if he believes it to be as true as my roommate and I do, his downfall to the same phenomenon.

Go on Brownstoner now and anonymous comment-zing-bombing the gentrifiers is rampant. Is this success for The What? An army of anonymous posters who make Brownstoner an inhospitable horror zone? Or does it turn him into a brand-name, his tagline to every post - "Someday this war's gonna end" - a commercial jingle? Or, another possibility, does The What feel his celebrity stolen away, is he tempted to grab the limelight back, make himself known and declare, as Ghostface Killah said in "Apollo Kids," "Punk fa**ot ni**as stealin' my light!" Which would, of course, be superhero suicide. But he'd get the credit.

All internet superheroes are destined for destruction. The superhero will be found out, as that is what the internet guarantees, and, even if not identified, the mongrel hordes will invade his milieu and his potency will dissipate. But that does not mean the superhero should not try. Probably all charismatic leaders are doomed from the start, internet or not. But there is space for the anonymous superhero commenter. It's just ill-defined and requires an attention span longer than most are willing to devote.

I mean, like Thomas Paine, I was really into democracy, but then it became all about the people.

Snitches Get Stitches

2008-06-06T11:14:00.005-04:00

A little over a year ago, Cam'ron showed up for an episode of 360 with Anderson Cooper. Cooper took it upon himself to figure out why and how rappers have gotten entire communities to live by the slogan "stop snitching."

"Tonight, we're talking about a crisis," said Cooper, "We're going in- depth on two simple words: stop snitching. Now, the slogan was once used by criminals. And it meant, don't tell on others if you're caught committing a crime. But now the term stop snitching has come to mean something much more dangerous: Don't cooperate with the police, no matter who you are. You may not have heard it, but your kids have probably. The stop snitching message is being promoted by rappers, marketed by major corporations. And, because of what they are doing and how it's being distributed, murders are going unsolved, and people are dying."

Let's back things up a little further than Cooper would like to, though.

"The Slogan Was Once Used By Criminals"

As with much of hip-hop culture, stop snitching did not originate on the streets of the South Bronx. Cooper sort of acknowledges as much with the above quote, but he conveniently ignores a hugely significant portion of the term's history. When hip-hop adopted its gangster lean in the early 1980's, a lot of its swagger, codes, and language was borrowed from the history of the Italian mafia in the United States. Scarface, The Godfather, the real-life Gambino's (on whom the Rza has written extensively), Goodfellas - this was hip-hop's gangster source material.

Cooper and people of his ilk - white people who don't have the time to do their research when discussing hip-hop and find it easier to assume that rappers are just black savages who cooked this shit up on their own - have made up this lie that stop snitching began with rap music. It didn't.

In 1929 Salvatore "Lucky" Luciano, the father of modern organized crime, "was forced into a limo at gun point by three men, beaten and stabbed, and dumped on a beach on New York Bay. Luciano survived the ordeal, but was forever marked with the now famous scar and droopy eye. After his abduction, Luciano found out through Meyer Lansky that it had been ordered by Masseria's enemy Salvatore Maranzano. Luciano eventually did what Maranzano wanted, and killed Masseria. This plot would end the famous Castellammarese War." (Wikipedia)

The police came to Luciano to try to help in the investigation, Luciano refused and vowed to take care of it himself. For all of the mob's history, crimes were never discussed with the police (unless they were on your payroll). My grandfather, who grew up an Italian in the Bronx and was far from organized crime, still tells me that no one in his neighborhood would ever go to the police if they had trouble. Cooper's claim that it is something new that the term applies to all people and not just criminals is false; the stop snitching concept has always applied to entire neighborhoods and has never been exclusively the domain of a criminal who's been arrested.

Compare this to Geoffrey Canada's words, President and CEO of Harlem's Children Zone, who was also interviewed by Cooper: "When I was growing up, kids used to talk about snitching. It never extended, as a cultural norm, outside of the gangsters. It was not for regular citizens. It is now a cultural norm that is being preached in poor communities."

This may have been true of Canada's community, but the idea that "stop snitching" never existed in American communities before hip-hop adopted the phrase is just wrong.

"Murders Are Going Unsolved, And People Are Dying"

Cooper got one right. There are people dying. The people who come forward with evidence.

"The strategy sounds almost illogical: Detectives in New Jersey are being urged to build criminal cases with as few witnesses as possible. Or with none at all."

The above is the lede from an NY Times article published November19, 2007 titled "Keeping Witnesses Off Stand to Keep Them Safe". Said Detective Sgt. Ronald Hampton of the State Police of the new strategy: "“If you push someone and they agree to testify, now they’re your responsibility. You’ve got to keep them from disappearing or getting hurt. Can we protect them? Maybe. But God forbid that two years later you have to tell someone their husband or father got killed. I don’t want to have to live with that.”

Governor Jon Corzine acknowledged when he instituted the policy that the police are unable to protect people from retaliatory violence if they were to come forward and testify. If that's the scenario, what's the incentive to come forward? Furthermore, take this statistic from a November 23, 2007 article in the NY Times, "City Homicides Still Dropping, to Under 500": "But within the city's official crime statistics is a figure that may be even more striking: so far, with roughly half the killings analyzed, only 35 were found to be committed by strangers, a microscopic statistic in a city of more than 8.2 million."

"Stop snitching," therefore, is very much a community based phenomena; it is prominent because such a high portion of murders, at least in New York City, take place between people who know one another and will likely be sorted out in the traditional Mafioso sense; within the family.

I am not defending this vigilante justice, I am reinforcing the point that this "hip-hop based" (which is an inaccurate term, of course, most of these murders are, contrary to popular belief, NOT committed by rappers, rappers simply report on the language of their communities) incarnation of "stop snitching" is distinctly unnoriginal and exactly in keeping with the Italian Mafia sense of the term. Unlike Cooper's view, it did not grow in a vacuum.

"If I Knew The Serial Killer Was Living Next Door To Me?"

Finally, Cooper confronts Cam'ron with his best Tim-Russert-asks-a-ridiculous-hypothetical-question impersonation:

"If there's a serial killer living next door to you, though, and you know that person is, you know, killing people, would you be a snitch if you called police and told them?"

Cam'ron's response: "No, I wouldn't call and tell anybody on him, but I would probably move. But I'm not going to call and be like, you know, the serial killer is in 4-E."

"If you think Cam'ron is kidding, he's not. Maintaining street cred sells records," responds Cooper.

Right, Cooper, you fucking moron, Cam'ron's just gonna move away. No! This is the whole idea, you really think Cam'ron's going to find out he lives next door to a serial killer and call U-Haul? Well, he might, but only if that's what he's going to use it to transport the serial killer's bullet-riddled body to the East River.

A serial killer next door would be dealt with in-house, but Cam'ron's not about to say that on national television to a reporter who's the whitest thing since powdered wigs.

Talk of the Neighborhood

2008-06-03T12:31:00.005-04:00

"Is it safe?"

The question follows whenever I mention that I live in Bed-Stuy to people from a certain socio-economic group (read; affluent, white) whether they are my contemporaries or adults. Even those who are familiar with some of Brooklyn, usually the portion southwest of Flatbush Ave, will utter the words. It's a simple question, but I've always had trouble with it - always felt a little shiver when I hear it.

The word "safe" is used much too lightly in this question. I'm quite sure "Safe" is really a stand-in for a slew of other questions that the person is too politically nervous to ask so they toss this cover-all term at you that is in fact a bottomless pit into which you can throw any interpretation you like. A favorite response of mine to the question is, "Oh yes, most of the stores carry condoms."

The question is imbued with deep biases, privilege, and ignorance. A professor of mine once told me this story about a conversation he had with a Morocco-born French teacher at my college:

"We were eating lunch and he asked me, 'Do you have any idea how fortunate we are?' And I said, 'Sure of course.' I thought he meant we were privileged to have nice jobs at a nice college in a good town. But he said, 'No, no, I mean, this morning, I woke up, I took a leisurely walk down the road to the campus. I did not worry about my daughter being kidnapped as she did the same thing on her way to school. I did not worry about my wife being murdered or arrested as she drove to work. I did not worry about a suicide bomber driving a motorbike packed with explosives into a building next to me. Not once since I have been here have I worried about any of these things. I would be considered outlandish, foolish, for doing so.' And it's true. But there are far more people who have concerns about basic survival than there are people who don't."

It is not more noble to live in, say, East New York than it is to live on the Upper East Side. Putting yourself in a position where you are more likely to absorb bodily or material harm is not a feather in your cap. But it is degenerate to demand safety from someplace that isn't up to your standards, for selfish reasons.

If you want complete safety, throw down for the two-million dollar mortgage and go to Greenwich. Asking for cheap, Brooklyn real estate and safety means someone rips down a church in Bed-Stuy, puts in a hideous all-glass condo and prices all the locals out of the neighborhood. Or, as the Hasidic Jew asked my roommate the other night, "How much do I charge to have good people, like you, live in my building? Not blacks off the street."

Presto-change-o your kids can walk down the gaudy, gentrified block in peace. What makes someone think they deserve that? Because they can pay for it is, of course, the Republican's response. And that's fine for this world, but the gates of hell don't take Visa.

For rich, white, adults, I have no sympathy. Deal with the world. No one is safer than you or ever has been. Infants need protection and surveillance and care. And for the kids, I'm quite certain that growing up in a biosphere of affluence like Princeton can be damaging in an insidious, very different way from growing up in a place on the opposite end of the socio-economic spectrum.

As Martin Luther King wrote in "Letter from Birmingham Jail":

"I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice..."

Crown Heights Affairs

2008-06-03T11:02:00.005-04:00

In a taxi a few nights ago, the estimable headline news service which scrolls along those little TV screens informed me, "Crown Heights Braces for Racial Violence." Bracing, bracing, still bracing...

Racial violence of ticker tape proportions is not coming, good thing, but Crown Heights did make its way into the news with the story of a Hasidic youth Macing a 20-year old black college student and then beating him with a nightstick. Some retaliatory acts were taken by black youths who threw rocks at Hasidic homes as well as a bus load of Hasidic school children. Community leaders - those most vague and indefinable of authority figures - came together, showed solidarity, and things calmed down. At least until July when the weather is hotter and everyone gets their Do The Right Thing game-faces on.

I've wanted to tackle the black-Jewish-Brooklyn dynamic for a while, especially in the wake of my roommate's thoughtful and very solid writing on his own encounter with an instance of Hasidic racism. However every time I start I decide, inescapably, that I am wholly unequipped to tackle this debate without coming off ignorant and bigotted in some unintentional way, until I have a much firmer grasp of the context and history.

Until that day, I want to bring James Baldwin in for his opinion. In his 1967 essay "Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because They're Anti-White" Baldwin writes, "the root of anti-Semitism among Negroes is, ironically, the relationship of colored peoples--all over the globe--to the Christian world."

Baldwin argues that it is Christendom which has instigated hate between Jews and blacks because Jews have been able to take part in the Christian world and act like white Christian men because they are white. While blacks, victimized in history as Jews have been, are not allowed that privilege: "[The Jew] is singled out by Negroes not because he acts differently from other white men, but because he doesn't."

Below are some excerpts from the essay. The full essay here.

"The root of anti-Semitism among Negroes is, ironically, the relationship of colored peoples--all over the globe--to the Christian world. This is a fact which may be difficult to grasp, not only for the ghetto's most blasted and embittered inhabitants, but also for many Jews, to say nothing of many Christians. But it is a fact, and it will not ameliorated--in fact, it can only be aggravated--by the adoption, on the part of colored people now, of the most devastating of the Christian vices.
Of course, it is true, and I am not so naive as not to know it, that many Jews despise Negroes, even as their Aryan brothers do. (There are also Jews who despise Jews, even as their Aryan brothers do.) It is true that many Jews use, shamelessly, the slaughter of the 6,000,000 by the Third Reich as proof that they cannot be bigots--or in the hope of not being held responsible for their bigotry.

It is galling to be told by a Jew whom you know to be exploiting you that he cannot possibly be doing what you know he is doing because he is a Jew. It is bitter to watch the Jewish storekeeper locking up his store for the night, and going home. Going, with your money in his pocket, to a clean neighborhood, miles from you, which you will not be allowed to enter. Nor can it help the relationship between most Negroes and most Jews when part of this money is donated to civil rights. In the light of what is now known as the white backlash, this money can be looked on as conscience money merely, as money given to keep the Negro happy in his place, and out of white neighborhoods.

One does not wish, in short, to be told by an American Jew that his suffering is as great as the American Negro's suffering. It isn't, and one knows that it isn't from the very tone in which he assures you that it is. "
....

"The Jew's suffering is recognized as part of the moral history of the world and the Jew is recognized as a contributor so the world's history: this is not true for the blacks. Jewish history, whether or not one can say it is honored, is certainly known: the black history has been blasted, maligned and despised. The Jew is a white man, and when white men rise up against oppression, they are heroes: when black men rise, they have reverted to their native savagery. The uprising in the Warsaw ghetto was not described as a riot, nor were the participants maligned as hoodlums: the boys and girls in Watts and Harlem are thoroughly aware of this, and it certainly contributes to their attitude toward the Jews.

But, of course, my comparison of Watts and Harlem with the Warsaw ghetto will be immediately dismissed as outrageous. There are many reasons for this, and one of them is that while America loves white heroes, armed to the teeth, it cannot abide bad niggers. But the bottom reason is that it contradicts the American dream to suggest that any gratuitous, unregenerate horror can happen here. We make our mistakes, we like to think, but we are getting better all the time."
....

"What is really at question is the American way of life. What is really at question is whether Americans already have an identity or are still sufficiently flexible to achieve one. This is a painfully complicated question, for what now appears to be the American identity is really a bewildering and sometimes demoralizing blend of nostalgia and opportunism. For example, the Irish who march on St. Patrick's Day, do not, after all, have any desire to go back to Ireland. They do not intend to go back to live there, though they may dream of going back there to die. Their lives, in the meanwhile, are here, but they cling, at the same time, to those credentials forged in the Old World, credentials which cannot be duplicated here, credentials which the American Negro does not have. These credentials are the abandoned history of Europe--the abandoned and romanticized history of Europe. The Russian Jews here have no desire to return to Russia either, and they have not departed in great clouds for Israel. But they have the authority of knowing it is there. The Americans are no longer Europeans, but they are still living, at least as they imagine, on that capital."
....

"All racist positions baffle and appall me. None of us are that different from one another, neither that much better nor that much worse. Furthermore, when one takes a position one must attempt to see where that position inexorably leads. One must ask oneself, if one decides that black or white or Jewish people are, by definition, to be despised, is one willing to murder a black or white or Jewish baby: for that is where the position leads. And if one blames the Jew for having become a white American, one may perfectly well, if one is black, be speaking out of nothing more than envy.

If one blames the Jew for not having been ennobled by oppression, one is not indicting the single figure of the Jew but the entire human race, and one is also making a quite breathtaking claim for oneself. I know that my own oppression did not ennoble me, not even when I thought of myself as a practicing Christian. I also know that if today I refuse to hate Jews, or anybody else, it is because I know how it feels to be hated. I learned this from Christians, and I ceased to practice what the Christians practiced.

The crisis taking place in the world, and in the minds and hearts of black men everywhere, is not produced by the star of David, but by the old, rugged Roman cross on which Christendom's most celebrated Jew was murdered. And not by Jews."

Hawk-Dove

2008-05-29T15:53:00.005-04:00

The United States presidential election, 2008:

The United States presidential election of 2008 was held on Tuesday, November 4, 2008 to elect the 44th President of the United States of America. It was the 56th consecutive quadrennial election for the president and vice president of the United States. Republican candidate John Sidney McCain III, the senior United States Senator from Arizona, defeated Democratic candidate Barack Hussein Obama, the junior United States Senator from Illinois - the first African-American presidential nominee in United States history. The domestic economic recession and downfall of the American economy was the focal point of the lengthy campaign season. Democratic control of the White House seemed inevitable until an "October Surprise" of unprecedented magnitude, The 24 Scenario, gripped the American psyche and handed the presidency to McCain in a landslide victory.

Background: The 24 Scenario

Named for its similarity to a situation in the popular American dramatic television series "24" The 24 Scenario came to public attention on October 3, 2008. With Barack Obama holding a 55-41 lead over McCain in nationwide polls, a news story broke with a purported Al Qaeda video. In it, Ayman al-Zawahiri claimed that Al Qaeda had smuggled and hidden a nuclear "suitcase bomb" into the United States and would detonate the explosive unless all "the sons of Islam were released from US run prisons and CIA Black Sites across the world by the 15th of November."

Response and the Lead-Up to Election

A furious hunt for the weapon ensued and the world's delegations at the United Nations were removed to a summit in Berlin to discuss a response to the situation. Americans fled urban centers by the millions; the population of New York City plummeted from approximately 8.5 million to 5 million just four days after the Al Qaeda tape appeared. This became the largest mass evacuation in United States history.

While the immediate focus turned to sitting president, George W. Bush, whose waning days as a "lame duck" president were reversed and thrust into an unprecedented international crisis once again, a sudden and drastic shift in American political sentiment was also registered in the only poll taken between the October 3 announcement and the November election. In it, John McCain leaped from a 14-point deficit, with seemingly little hope of victory, to an astounding 65-30 lead just seven days after the story broke.

The American public demanded an immense military response to the threatened attack and rallied to McCain's hawkish promise to "find them and destroy them." The moderation and promise of engagement with foreign nations, including enemies, that had characterized Obama's vision of diplomacy - and won welcome praise from many Americans, if not talking heads, after eight years of unilateral Bush policies - suddenly fell completely out of favor. Further, his proposed view to "look at the source of this antagonism - look at the lack of justice in these prisons" while, simultaneously, searching out the bomb, and Zawahiri in the mountains of Pakistan were seen by most Americans as "Doveish" and not of sufficiently retaliatory rhetoric.

On election day a record-low turnout ensued with most major urban centers emptied of voting ranks. The result was an enormous victory for McCain by a margin of 70-25.

The Fallout

On November 11, 2008, days after the election, it was discovered that the video from Zawahiri had been produced inside the United States and dubbed over with a computer generated imitation of Zawahiri's voice. Still, the public worried this did not necessarily mean there was no suitcase bomb. Yet November 15th passed and the prisoners remained in Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere without incident. While many credited George Bush's "military manhunt" - which included cooperation from NATO and United Nations peacekeeping forces - in the mountainous Peshawar region of Pakistan for once again uprooting Al Qaeda manpower and disabling any capability to detonate, or deliver instructions to detonate, the weapon, others began to propose that the entire crisis was a hoax.

The Capture of Osama Bin Laden

In the mountains of Pakistan a British Special Forces unit detained a group of senior Al Qaeda officials after a two-day long firefight. Among them was 9/11 financier and mastermind Osama Bin Laden who claimed that Zawahiri had died the previous July and had produced neither a video nor a suitcase bomb before his death.

Great To Be White

2008-05-28T10:43:00.004-04:00

I spent a few days over the Memorial Day weekend in Woodstock, New York for my friend's birthday. We walked a long, paved path up the side of a mountain in the Catskills on a beautiful, warm day. Hundreds of people along the path - a great caucus of whiteness; people with plenty of leisure time, everyone greeting the total strangers they passed on the trail with a big smile and a hearty "Hello!" What is it about a bunch of white people in one place, on a nice day, and the impulse to say hi to every person they pass?

I know the conventional wisdom is that New Yorkers are rude, brusque. They rush place to place, loathe to say hello to some schmucky stranger on the street. It's just not true. Well, it's less true in Brooklyn than it is in Manhattan. I think that's a safe generalization. Sure, during the rush hours, people are harried and don't stop for much. But then suburbanites driving to their Merrill Lynch headquarter in New Jersey don't wave to the people they pass in their Porsche Cayenne's either, do they? In my neighborhood there are plenty of nods and chin-chucks and "oh-right"s tossed about on the streets. I don't know these people, but you pass a dude sitting on a stoop and make eye contact: nod, "oh-right."

But the white greeting is a totally different creature. I remember growing up in Princeton, New Jersey and going out on Sunday afternoons in town. Thousands of families with kids and strollers, a vast sea of smiling white faces. I feel like there's a subtext to that brand of greeting: "great to be white." It's a detail worthy of a "Stuff White People Like" mention; "Other White People." It's cute really, a bunch of white people out and about in some affluent rural/suburban oasis all thrilled that every person they pass is white!

There's one! the white stroller-pusher thinks to him or herself "Hello! (Great to be white)" There, another, and with a stroller! "Huzzah, friend! (Great to be white)"

I don't think this kind of thing really happens in, say, South Dakota, because everyone there is white anyway. It's these little liberal enclaves like Woodstock, Princeton, Greenwich, Scarsdale (is Scarsdale still really white? I'm not sure) where our people are thrilled for the sunny day and waltzing unfettered by otherness through the downtown arches. A guilty pleasure for the limousine liberal.

When I arrived in Brooklyn, the "oh-right" greeting on the streets was a little odd. But now I understand it. "Oh-right" is just all the acknowledgment you need: "I'm here, you're there, we both exist, oh-right." That's it.

Yes, fellow white person, I know you exist. But everytime we acknowledge that, it doesn't need to be accompanied with a snarky little celebration.

Park Slope Hate

2008-05-20T09:36:00.010-04:00

Lynn Harris wrote a fine piece in Sunday's NY Times chronlicling and investigating Park Slope hate among Brooklynites. But, I have to disagree with Josh Grinker, owner of Stone Park Cafe in Park Slope, who said people hate Park Slope because, "they're jealous they can't live here." As enticing Grinker's "cedar-planked salmon and quinoa pilaf" merchandise sounds (actually, it sounds like a description of the symptoms of a venereal disease), I think I'll stick with "sardines and chick peas." I'm about as jealous of people in Park Slope as I am of people in Greenwich, Connecticut.

That said, there are a couple of good points made in Harris' article that should be interrogated. The first is made by Jeff Sandgrund who's lived in Park Slope his whole life: "Hipsters and people who don’t have kids are terrified of becoming grown-ups and parents," says Sandgrund, "which is what Park Slope has come to represent. So you lash out against that as if it’s the worst thing in the world, when in five years, you know what? It’s going to be you."

Fair enough, we'll all be parents. But I think he's a bit off point. If us youngsters just hated the idea of being parents and "grown-up," whatever that means, wouldn't we hate young black and hispanic mothers in Bed-Stuy and East New York with vigor, as well? What makes the white, troll-mothers of Park Slope particularly reprehensible is their sense of arrogance and entitlement, as though they were the first person ever to have a child, So please, It is 1am on Friday night, I hear you down there on the street and I am calling the cops. As Chris Rock said, "even roaches have kids."

However, I'm sure there are many people for whom Sandgrund's critique holds water. But, for me, I don't think it speaks to what I find objectionable amongst that set.

Second point to look at: "This whole thing sounds like white people being annoyed by and jealous of other white people, which I find kind of funny,” said James Bernard, a union organizer and a member of the local Community Board 6. “I live in the Slope. I love it. I talk about it as much as anyone else does. But I founded a charter school near Brownsville and I don’t hear anyone talking about Park Slope over there.”

Well, duh, dipshit. If you'd been in Fort Greene or Gowanus or Clinton Hill twenty years ago you wouldn't have heard anyone talking about the Upper East Side, either. We're talking about real estate and money. If you're in Brownsville, you probably don't have the duckets to live in Park Slope, so why would you be a part of the conversation? You're just a human pinball waiting for the gentrification-paddle to move in and thwack you out of the way and into Canarsie. And never mind the cultural-imperialism and Conrad-esq tones of "civilized vs. savage" invective in the subtext of Bernard's statement.

There are plenty of good reasons to hate on Park Slope. The arrogance and entitlement inherent in a stroller the size of an Escalade betrays the ignorance of that vehicle's pusher and the role he or she plays in the socio-economic imperialism sweeping Brooklyn. Fine. But we should have all been on that page a long time ago, and we weren't.

What hating Park Slope is really about is white self-loathing. Hating Park Slope is lazy. It's so, so easy. If you want to hate on white people gentrifying a neighborhood, start with yourself in Fort Greene. Or, yourself in Clinton Hill. Or, yourself in Bed-Stuy. Park Slope was lost long ago, and who cares, fuck that place. I don't want your gonorrhea sounding fish spread anyway.

But looking out at others and criticizing is ignorant and unproductive. Start with YOU. Start with, What Does It Mean For Me To Live On Classon Avenue? Or Franklin Avenue. Or Gates Avenue. Just because you're in the minority now, just because you feel like you live in an "authentic" neighborhood now, don't mean shit. They'll all be Park Slopes in a decade.

So fine, let's all get behind an MacLaren Stroller Targeted IED Regimen for Park Slope. But you better look hard and deep at what you're doing to Gowanus. Because the mother in Park Slope is not the issue. The hipster in Bushwick, the 22-year old yuppie in Clinton-Hill, the artist in Bed-Stuy. We're the ones who owe up some answers.

"Goldeneh Medina" - Richard Price's "Lush Life"

2008-05-19T10:09:00.010-04:00

"What we have here now is bars and college students vomiting on the streets. Nothing will rise out of it. It's all vacuous and lacking substance. When I go out my door now, I don't see anyone I know. I see the loss of a community." This is Clayton Patterson's take on Manhattan's Lower East Side in a 2005 interview with The NY Times. It is an opinion of the neighborhood that Richard Price's new novel, "Lush Life," might share.

Like Price's other heavy-hitter novels, like "Clockers," "Lush Life" uses a criminal investigation - a murder investigation - as the story's backbone. A trio of two friends and one acquiantance stumble home from a night of vomiting up alcohol on LES sidewalks when they are confronted by an improv stick-up duo from the nearby Lemlichs projects. One of the three, Ike Marcus, steps to the project boys with a "not tonight, my man." Bap. "Death By Mouth."

The rest of the story teases out the murder investigation set against a backdrop of young, educated hopes and dreams, 30-year old realizations of failure, the desperate, no-aim energy of young black and hispanic project life, and the dissintegrating grime of Clayton Patterson's Lower East Side. The frustrated New York Police Department holds all the cards, and none at the same time in "Lush Life." They are a club wielded by a public opinion that, as soon as it strikes its target, seems to let go and regard the weapon quizically with no regard for the hand that guided it.

Clayton Patterson said of his documentary, "Captured," that captured 30-years of LES history: "It's not an archive of the rich and cool. It's about the tragic, glorious, sometimes depressing history of the Lower East Side." Price's "Lush Life," unlike "Captured," takes that history of the Lower East Side and smashes it up against the "archive of the rich and cool." This struggle is the subtext of "Lush Life" and it is the book's motor. The only real direct confrontation of those two worlds is Marcus' murder. Beyond that, both spheres are warily aware of the other; one arrogant and dismissive, the other resentful and clueless of the forces bumping against their borders.

Nobody wins or loses in this push and shove, people just get hurt in different ways. The young and upwardly mobile gain ground, lose perspective (if they had any to begin with). The young and hopeless are pushed against, will be removed to some outer-borough eventually, but are already at rock bottom, have nowhere further to drop. The only thing that comes out worse in the end is Patterson's neighborhood.

Cafe Berkmann, a bar central to the action of "Lush Life" which is a clear stand-in for the real-life LES hip-spot, Schiller's, is the neighborhood's time capsule. Its basement is littered with century and a half old hearths where Jewish immigrants once huddled for warmth, carved their names into the hefty wooden I-beams that were the four-foot high ceilings of their lives, and became the subjects of Jacob Riis photography. Upstairs is the dining room of the beautiful and young, where 30 is well-past over the hill. Everyone on the verge of sex, high on each other, about to be great.

"Lush Life" is part of a giant sigh that the LES has been exhaling for years. Its breath is short, and when it's out, the contributions of Price and Patterson will join the work of people like Jacob Riis in the archives of a neighborhood stomped, crushed, and distorted by arrogance and entitlement.

Detritus

2008-05-19T09:44:00.003-04:00

Monday morning. Well, at least our internet is back up at work. Friday was a pretty scary day. Here's a recap:

From Friday, May 16

I sat down this morning to check my e-mail and partake in the obligatory Friday morning two hour warm-up to doing any work – a practice which includes offering my roommates shitty trades in our fantasy baseball league that they won’t accept in an attempt to wrest away a star shortstop, reading the New York Times, Talking Points Memo, The New Yorker, checking Google Analytics, and posting something nasty on a message board somewhere out there in internet world. I opened my browser and the New York Times, my homepage, failed to load. I turned off my computer and tried again. No luck! Then, my phone rang. It was one of the IT guys, Chip:

“Alexander.”
“Yes?”
“Are you on the YouTube?” (Yes, our IT guy refers to YouTube with the same comprehension as George Bush who calls Google “The Google.” And yes, usually I am on YouTube at some point, but not today. My homepage wouldn’t even load.)
“No, I’m not Chip.”
“Well it says you’re on The YouTube on our computers.”
“Well I’m not.”

I hung up, and a few minutes later Chip sent out an e-mail: “Sprint says there is something wrong in one of their circuits in our neighborhood. We have no internet access. I will update you when it is fixed.”
It is now 3:09 pm. We still have no internet.

9:37: A half-dozen attorneys and partners wandered out of their offices over the past thirty minutes to ask if we, too, had no internet access. Yes. Read your e-mail. I haven’t seen the upper ranks so disgruntled since the time our coffee machine broke because someone poured water into the wrong hole. And that just got replaced forty minutes later.

11:08: I’m so bored I’m doing work. I can see my Gmail in basic HTML view. I have no new mail. Otherwise, still out of contact.

11:19: I have no more work.

12:48: I’m leaving for lunch. Usually, I am for 1:30-2:00 as the start of my lunch hour. My deli clears out and I’m pretty much the only person there to read and eat in peace and quiet. But today I need to get the fuck out of here.

----------

That's as far as the running log got before everyone freaked out and smashed their computers hoping to plug the wires directly into their brains for internet connectivity. It didn't work.

In further news, my friend Ike and I went to an LES favorite, Schiller's, last Thursday and met a couple of women who work for the UN. We asked them if John Bolton had been as big an asshole as he seemed. "Oh yeah," they said, "huge asshole, we all hated him." Then we asked what countries' delegations had affairs going on in-chamber. There were a lot! I'd tell you, but these people do have diplomatic immunity. We all saw Lethal Weapon 2. So I'm not tempting fate.

"The Sopranos has nothing on Friends"

2008-05-15T10:08:00.006-04:00

Well, I was going to post a link to this new Ghostface and Raekwon track - "The Raw G Hide" - thereby staying ahead of your tastes in music (unless you saw the track posted on The Fader before me... let's not consider that) and proving that my tastes reflect independent judgment and not just my inevitable location on a chart where everybody's "favorite" music and books correspond exactly to their income level and education.

But then I went to n+1 to check up on the Intellectual Scene and I was informed that, "Staying ahead of other people's taste is how you show that your taste reflects independent judgment, and not just your inevitable location on a chart where everybody's "favorite" music and books correspond exactly to his income level and education." FUCK!

Why do I love hip-hop? Maybe n+1's argument deromanticizes my fascination, although I hope, and think, not entirely. Maybe, as a rich white kid, liking hip-hop is just a savvy play on my part. No more interesting than if I happened to get in on Google stock at $200/share. Not even groundfloor. High, but low enough and fortunate enough, for me, that I'd look like a genius, and be rich, when the shit started trading at $750.

I got lucky, had a good friend that got me hooked on 36 Chambers freshman year of high school and by the time every white kid junior year of college knew all about the lyrics to T.I.'s "What You Know About That" I cashed in: A hip-hop question? A word on a new album? "Where's that rich white guy from Princeton? He knows all that shit." My cultural tastes distinct, refined, and respected.

By the end of senior year I could pack 70 people in a classroom to listen to me talk for an hour about Nas, Scarface, and cultural imperialism like I was Frantz Fanon reincarnated in a vessle that would suggest Fanon had quite the sense of irony. I traded on the hip-hop hype cycle with the dexterity of Mike Milken in the junk-bond markets.

"The problem with hype," writes the n+1 crew in the Intellectual Scene, "is that it transforms the use value of a would-be work of art into its exchange value. For in the middle (there's no end) of the hype cycle, the important thing is no longer what a song, movie, or book does to you. The big question is its relationship to its reputation. So instead of abandoning yourself to the artifact, you try to exploit inefficiencies in the reputation market. You can get in on the IPO of a new artist, and trumpet the virtues of the Arctic Monkeys before anyone else has heard of them: this is hype. Or you issue a "sell" recommendation on the overhyped Arctic Monkeys: this is backlash. But there are often steals to be found among recently unloaded assets: "Why's everybody hatin' on the Arctic Monkeys?" says the backlash-to-the-backlash. The sophisticated trader is buying, selling, and holding different reputations all at once; the trick in each case is to stay ahead of the market. And the rewards from this trade in reputations rebound to your own reputation: even though the market (i.e., other people) dictates your every move, you seem to be a real individual thinking for yourself."

Well, shit.

Of course, by writing this, one could say I play even more craftily on the hype markets: "Nothing equals the pride of the self-lacerator." But I'm still gonna listen to Ghostface and Raekwon. And you can, too. I don't think I'm cynical enough, sociopathic enough, to simply trade on hip-hop. But I can't say it's not there either.

Damn. I'm hungry. Why do I want a steak from Ruth's Chris so badly? (Listen to the track)

Your Summer Guide to The Real World Brooklyn

2008-05-14T11:47:00.006-04:00

If you haven't heard, or heard, or heard, or heard, the end is nigh, Brooklyn Bumpkins. Yes, that is The Real World that will be filming in Our Fair Borough this summer. How sweet it is, indeed! I've heard of this show before, I think, when I was one year old and The Real World was cool and novel, just like Crystal Pepsi.

How apropos for the show that started in New York City 21 years ago to come of drinking age in the borough those first participants all now inhabit, laden with Baby Bjorn carriers and associate positions at firms in the Financial District.

Of course, this isn't the end of the world for Brooklyn. The Real World taking on your town is post-apocalyptic - these are Brueghel's skeletons in "Il Trionfo della Morte" come to gather the earth's last souls and drag them into Lucifer's realm. The Real World in Brooklyn is no harbinger; it is so far past the end of the book it's the backside of the back cover.

The big question is in what neighborhood MTV's esteemed producers will decide to open the Hell Mouth. Most blog activity points to, duh, the Bedford L area. This is fine with me, and I'll openly lobby for it. If that's the locale, then when a critical mass for the Trash Bar accumulates it can be deflated with the hope of avoiding the film crews. Poor indie rock bands. Poor, poor indie rock bands. Your shows will be ruined. Unless you're into that kind of thing, in which case your shows were ruined long before.

As entertaining as it would be, I somehow doubt the execs will go for Dave Chappelle's "Mad Real World" model and stick the rubes in, say, Brownsville:

Chad: Tyree, you stabbed my dad! And you had sex with Katie.
Tyree: Hey man, you got that all wrong. I ain't had sex with Katie. Lysol had sex with Katie. I just filmed it.
Katie: No, Tyree, you had sex with me too.
Tyree: Correction: I had sex with Katie.

For my sleeper neighborhood pick, I'm going to go with the Prospect Heights region. Somehow I can't see a season of The Real World warping through Brooklyn without it ruining my weekend night at a Bar That Will Remain Unnamed So You Fuckers Don't Go There.

Of course, the benefit of all this, is our opportunity to visit physical harm on the bodies of Real World participants. Get your ice-picks and prison-yard shanks ready, Brooklyn. And like that dude in The Sopranos said, "Aim for the fleshy part of the thigh."

But keep in mind, while you sharpen that spork, that a shanking of a Real World cast-member, is really just a shanking of yourself. They're here, because you're here. We've visited this upon ourselves. As Mephistopheles said to Faustus in Marlowe's "The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus" when Faustus asked how Mephistopheles came to be out of hell if he'd been banished there for eternity: "Why this is hell, nor am I out of it./ Think'st thou that I, who saw the face of God,/ And tasted the eternal joys of heaven,/ Am not tormented with ten thousand hells/ In being deprived of everlasting bliss?"

We've all got Mephistopheles in us, now.

Justice - "DVNO"

2008-05-14T11:35:00.001-04:00

We've had our fill of serious discussions on music videos for the next minute here at The Skillman. For a change of pace, check out this kitschy Justice video for their track "DVNO". Gotta say, their videos sure can cover the whole spectrum. "Details make the girls sweat."

A Clockwork Grand Theft Justice - The Kourtrajme Crew and Justice's "Stress" Video

2008-05-13T14:35:00.025-04:00

"Is it real?" A lot of people asked me that after they watched the Romain Gavras directed music video for Justice's track "Stress". The video for the French electro-DJ-duo's track has spread about the internet by way of Kanye West's blog* and is now surrounded by online chatter thanks to its graphic violence.

So, is it real? Who cares. Yes. That one dude puked on himself. It is real. The Kourtrajme Crew are guerilla filmmakers - Larry Charles ("Borat" director) with a chip on their shoulder. But that's beside the point. More importantly, let's talk about what, if anything, watching young kids in Paris beating people up accomplishes. Does it need to accomplish anything?

Might as well start at the beginning: The band and the song's title. A professor of mine once corrected a statement I made about the first sentence in a book being the most important by noting that the book's title might make a claim to that significance as well. In the case of Justice's "Stress" that is definitely the case. Those two words, "Justice" and "Stress," are so present during the track they may as well have been watermarked over the whole video's footage.

Whose stress does the title address? It is present in at least two forms; the stress of the group of kids, out of which comes the catharsis of beatings and robbery, and the stress which is felt by the recipients of that violence. The only moment when the kids feel stress - most of their action is cool and composed, effective and vigilant - is when they are confronted at the elevator by the police like a Roman legion and a Carthaginian horde meeting mid-battlefield. At that moment, the kids erupt in screams, push back on the police wall and then disperse. They are guerillas; hit and run tacticians effective when striking and disappearing quickly. When they get a cop alone, separate him from the strength of the group, they beat the shit out of him and take off.

Justice leaves a more elusive mark on the footage. Stress is fairly objective. The evidence is almost quantifiable. Justice is subjective. A very lazy person can make a case that will be widely accepted that the term "Justice" here is sarcastic, heretical. "There is no justice, they're just hooligans," they will say. But we are not lazy people. Watch the faces of the people in "Stress". What stands in starkest opposition is how calm the kids are as they slap a bewildered diner in the face, rough up a couple pedestrians (one of whom pukes on himself out of, what, fear? confusion?), and smash some Asian tourist's camera to the ground.

The black and white faces of the kids are placid, the faces of the people they encounter are wracked by confusion and dread. Language appears to fail these people. Their jaws hang slack. Their brows are furrowed as if they have just heard the voice of God and this is the moment before their over-matched brains explode like Matt Damon's in "Dogma".

Are those looks of shock, incomprehension, the "why me?" attitude, that far off from how it must feel to have the shit-dumb-luck to be born and raised in the notorious Clichy-sous-Bois to Arab or African or Arab-African parents who struggle to find work in Paris?

The catharsis in "Stress" is not the simple release of frustration through violence. The catharsis is in the familiarity of the twisted up I-don't-understand sensation that you have felt your whole life, manifested on someone else's face. Just for the few seconds the look is on that face, that person understands what it means to have shit-dumb-luck. The person knows how it feels to not deserve what you know you've got coming. The catharsis isn't for those kids. If they're willing to accept it, if we're willing to accept it, it's the first step to catharsis for the people they beat up.

We have no objective information that tells us that these kids come from French ghettos and are economically and emotionally depressed. Yes, the video starts in a Parisian slum that looks like Clichy-sous-Bois, but who knows, maybe these kids just go there to hang out and group up after their school day at some prestigious French high school ends. Maybe all their parents are computer programmers and lawyers. But I doubt it.

If we take our narrators - Justice and Romain Gavras - at their word, then the terms "Justice" and "Stress" are as sincere as the footage in the music video. We are watching Justice born from Stress.

"The only thing you need to understand is that there are only three ways out of the ghetto for people like us: sports, music or fashion," said Guy Diaz, a first generation son of Ivory Coast parents, who lives in Clichy-sous-Bois, to Frontline reporter Darren Foster in 2005, shortly after Paris' last big round of ghetto-born riots. Do those words sound familiar?

It was only - what, fifteen years ago? - that Notorious B.I.G. cemented into the hip-hop psyche that, "the streets is a short stop; either you're slingin' crack rock or you got a wicked jump shot." Bed-Stuy is different now. Not because the problems that plagued Biggie's upbringing were solved, or addressed, but because they were shipped upstate; to prisons, and towns like Schenectady (places that aren't dissimilar). The violence and riots in Paris' recent past betray similar problems there that were, and still are, unaddressed. Problems that take death and riots to acquire attention that is, at that point, reactionary and unproductive. Attention that seeks to meet out justice rather than address the causes of stress.

The end of the video shows the kids burn a car before turning on the camera filming them. Not the cameraman, but the actual camera. One kid spits on the lens while another brings a glass bottle down on the lens as well. The cameraman is not the subject of their rage, the camera is. How do we understand this? The camera is dangerous, the footage it contains is dangerous for the kids. But it also provides them with voice, an outlet; we are watching the footage after all. I think that the assault on the camera is an assault on us watching the video. It's confusing, why are they hitting the camera? And so you wind up with the same screwed up look on your face, "huh?" that every other victim in the video does. You've been met with random violence you don't understand. It's left, then, in your hands. Do you react to the action, or consider the cause?

When you ask "is it real?" to the video "Stress," you're asking the right question and you might not even know it. The answer, regardless, is yes.

*Bizarre, yes. But perhaps it was a bit of recompense on Kanye's part after he ripped off ODB's patented "Excuse Me While I Interrupt Your Lame Ass Acceptance Speech And Explain Why I Am Better And, Oh, By The Way, That Wu-Tang Is For The Children"-Move at the MTV Europe Music Awards in 2006 when Jeremie Rozan accepted best music video award for Justice's track "We Are Your Friends" and Kanye begged to, publicly and at that moment, differ.

Ain't Nobody Dope As Me

2008-05-08T11:16:00.004-04:00

What happened to you, Barack Obama? I had such high expectations, I thought you'd given me a promise of change, and hope.

Hope that I would never have to tie another goddamn Windsor Knot again.

Nicholas Antogiavanni, in a recent Wall Street Journal article, stated that, "Barack Obama -- unquestionably the hippest candidate for the presidency since John F. Kennedy -- may do to the tie what Kennedy helped do to the hat."

At the beginning of his presidential run, the tie hardly made an appearance around Obama's neck. Look at the cover of The Audacity of Hope - no tie. Out campaigning in Iowa, nary a tie. But as soon as the primary wins started rolling in, every victory speech was neatly circled with - admittedly dapper - neckties.

In August of '07, I went to a snooty Princeton, New Jersey fundraiser for Barack Obama to be attended by, among many others, Newark mayor Cory Booker, former Secretary of the Treasury, Michael Blumenthal, and, of course, The Man Himself. "Excellent!" I thought, "I'll have an immediate in with Obama. I'll eschew my Cam'ron-Pink DKNY, and we'll bond the moment he sees me, tie-less, around all the other tied-up blue-bloods!" But he arrived and there it was; a powder blue Gucci. Even Booker had one on!

What happened? Did the images of Ahmadinejad, collar open, at the UN give Axelrod and Co. the jitters? No flag pin, fine. But no tie? When we're about to nuke the dudes who shun the tie as a symbol of western cultural oppression? No go, Barack, lace 'em up.

It's really a shame. I was pretty excited about the idea of Obama not only changing the direction of American politics and policy but also getting us on-board his Chi-town style train. As long as it didn't include those damn Kanye "Stronger" shades...

Presidential fashion moves at a tectonic pace, true, but it's been 50 years since Kennedy did away with the hat - the man had no choice, it would have been sin to cover up that coiffe - I think we're ready for the next step. So I'm calling you out, Barack, inauguration day, let's get the shit to pop: No Tie Do Or Die.

Lurn Inglish Dum-Dum!

2008-05-07T09:28:00.004-04:00

Thank you to Brad in Missoula, MT! His comment in reply to the "Ni****fication of Barack Obama" post - "Pat Buchanan hasn't said anything about black people that haven't been true" - proves once again that xenophobes can't speak English. Keep up the bad work at http://www.goodoleboybumperstickers.com/, yokel!

The Ni****fication of Barack Obama

2008-05-06T12:11:00.010-04:00

It is now clear why America has been hedging its bets, keeping Hillary Clinton around, keeping Barack Obama at arms length - our first black friend and we're still not comfortable; wary of a yoking, a request for our lunch money. We've been waiting for the Michael Richards moment when the media could stand center-stage, point to the YouTube clip in the balcony and shout to the country, confirm what we suspected:

"Ni****!!! HE'S A NI****!!!"

Jeremiah Wright gave the media their opening and they ran with it like pitchfork-toting Dixiecrats to a Mississippi lynching. The calls for Barack Obama to distance himself from Wright were answered long ago. If distance from Reverand Wright is really what this is all about, then Barack's hilarious retort to Hillary's juvenile semantic quibble at a debate a couple months back - "If Hillary thinks 'denounce' is a stronger word than 'reject,' then I concede the point, I reject and denounce [Reverand Wright's words]" - should have been case closed.

But for CNN, MSNBC, Fox... it was never about allowing Obama to distance himself from Wright, it was about tying the two as close together as possible. "Look at the scary black men," whispered Wolf Blitzer's beard subliminally, "you were right, you still can't trust them."

MSNBC's disasters for analysts talked and talked and talked about the "Wright Controversy" (How apt a name? They should have just gone all the way; "The Right Controversy") while they sat shoulder-to-shoulder with Pat Buchanan.

Ol' Pat must be giddy on the inside; the white answer to Wright and instead of an end-of-the-line finale of embarassing YouTube clips, shunted by cable news, there he is. A daily fixture on cable news.

"How much time is the mainstream media going to spend castigating, dissecting, digging into Pat Buchanan for being the racial arsonist that he is?" asked Tavis Smiley on Real Time with Bill Maher. He continued later:

"What troubles me is that Jeremiah Wright gets dismissed as cuckoo, as being crazy, as being anti-American and now we want to poo-poo Pat Buchanan by saying 'oh, that's just Pat being Pat.' No, that doesnt work. If youre going to go after Jeremiah Wright the way they have, let's dissect what Buchanan has said."

Furthermore, let's discuss the apparatus that condones Pat's saying those things in front of a nightly, national audience.

But Buchanan is the authority here. The soothing fatherly voice assuring the good people of Pennsylvania, Indiana, Ohio... that "...no people anywhere has done more to lift up blacks than white Americans. Untold trillions have been spent since the '60s on welfare, food stamps, rent supplements, Section 8 housing, Pell grants, student loans, legal services, Medicaid, Earned Income Tax Credits and poverty programs designed to bring the African-American community into the mainstream." It's not you, assures Pat, it's them.

We knew it all along. We just needed a man in a dashiki to confirm our suspicion.

Justice - Stress

2008-05-06T11:42:00.001-04:00

The video for Justice's track "Stress" is part Grand Theft Auto, part A Clockwork Orange. It's all mayhem. Those jackets. Badass. The video is directed by Romain Gavras, of the Kourtrajme Crew, around Paris. We might need to go into youth in Paris recent history on The Skillman pretty soon. For now, try not to break a sweat watching this.

A Burnt Out Case

2008-05-05T14:58:00.010-04:00

I walked through "Boerum Hill" yesterday with a friend of mine who just moved to Park Slope from Manhattan. We joked about people who ask if The City is easily accessible from our Brooklyn digs. "Yeah, I guess." Or, "I sure hope not." Snarky and sarcastic. Fuck Manhattan, me Brooklyn. Bridge And Tunnel People And Proud Of It.

We stopped off at a few of the myriad antique stores that clutter Atlantic Avenue looking for furniture for my dude's still-bare apartment. All the stores seemed to have the same coporate distributor - all littered with the same weird crap store-to-store carrying the same $495 price tags. "Antique Crap Inc. - Supplying Brooklyn yuppies with a lot of whack shit."

The whole scene was only a step or two removed, repolished, and de-crackheadified from what the same block in Gowanus must have been twenty years ago when all those posh antique stores were pawn shops, probably stocking the same stuff as today with the decimal moved over a couple places: $4.95 - A lamp from a one-night stand picked off early the next morning and flipped for a fiver to score a rock. Brooklynites "on a mission."

We're the Axis force in the midst of its scissor grip on Paris in the spring of '40. We swing down the elite SS forces from Williamsburg - all answers and no questions, they may look, and be, malnourished, but they're ruthless; we pivot on the axis of disturbing DUMBO, and Tai-Chi-in-the-park-friendly Downtown Brooklyn; extend a reluctant arm south through Cobble Hill, Carroll Gardens, tip-toe into Red Hook. We've taken Clinton Hill, Fort Greene, Gowanus, Park Slope... To the east is the Soviet front, a still insurmountable urban frontier armed for a war of attrition with apt and ominous titles like "East New York" (some sort of Bizarro Manhattan no doubt?) and "Brownsville." "What age is a black boy when he learns he's scary?" Asked Jonathan Lethem brilliantly, ruthlessly.

The girls in Manhattan are stuck up and cynical. With good cause? The targets of a hundred billion dollars of advertising focused on getting off their pants spearheaded by the fine chauvinists at Axe. Perhaps. Nevertheless; to greener pastures. In Brooklyn there is still room for freedom, a new patch to cultivate into something cool until the resources come to a boil, the money changes hands too freely, somewhere there's a reason to cash in: Scorched earth policy.

In Manhattan, there's no more space. 125th Street will be Disney-fied, too. The Dominican neighborhoods on 155th Street sure seem far, but haven't you heard? The South Bronx is the new Williamsburg. We've already forgotten the ghosts of 24-hour pornos, Kung-Fu movies, vibrant drug trade, and murder charges that littered Times Square just fifteen years ago, haven't we? I mean, Ghostface Killa, The GZA, Method Man, ODB... those guys weren't hanging out on 42nd street in the 80's to go to TGI Friday's.

I wear Brooklyn with pride. I love to say the word. Ask me where I live. Brooklyn. All pop on the front end and a garbled, Germanic crush of the middle consonants "kl" comes out something lethargic and phlegmy. Brukhcln. No time for prissy, syllabic annunciation like, "Man-hat-tan."

The Bronx is a vague idea. An itch that doesn't need scratching. Queens, you mean, like, where Frank and Estelle Costanza live? Staten Island may as well be Atlantis.

This is between us and Manhattan. "Strike me down with all of your hatred, and your journey towards the dark side will be complete."

"Turn your pager to 1992..."

2008-05-02T11:46:00.007-04:00

I came home the other night in a cab, late, driven by an eastern European guy who, in retrospect, sounded a lot like Roman Bellic from GTA IV. Or maybe my memory has just cast him that way. Anyway, a block or two from my house my cabbie said, "This place, it used to be a jungle, my friend. I would not have driven you here a few years ago."

The refrain is nothing new and I've listened to Ready to Die enough times to know that, in Bedford-Stuyvesant of old, "****as is gettin' smoked G, believe me." But I wanted some specifics, so I trolled the internet for news stories about my street from back in the day. I woulda liked to have seen you, just for a minute, old New York.

Drug Ring Is Accused After Years Of Luxury
By JOSEPH B. TREASTER
Published: October 6, 1994

"After running one of the biggest heroin operations in New York for more than two decades, Charles Galletti tried slipping away to Puerto Rico three years ago to live a kind of early retirement, Federal law-enforcement officials said yesterday.... "I'd say if he was not running the major distribution group here, it was No. 2, and it was probably No. 1," said Carlo A. Boccia, the head of the Drug Enforcement Administration in New York.

Mr. Galletti started selling heroin on the Lower East Side in the late 60's, Federal authorities said. During his peak years, from 1985 to 1991, they estimated, Mr. Galletti was taking $800,000 in profits every month and living as lavishly as the Colombian drug lords who dominate the world traffic in cocaine....

Mr. Galletti spent another $50,000, she said, to build a private playground, complete with artificial turf, special high-intensity lighting and brightly painted fiberglass and metal swings, merry-go-round and jungle gym next to the Bedford-Stuyvesant house, at 69-71 Skillman Street. The only one who played there, unless especially invited, was his 8-year-old daughter, Christine."

Dealer Is Guilty In Gun Slaying Of Drug Battler
By ARNOLD H. LUBASCH
Published: January 30, 1991

"A man with a criminal record as a drug dealer was found guilty yesterday of the murder of a Brooklyn woman who had become a symbol of citizen courage in fighting drug traffic.

The victim, Maria Hernandez, was killed when she was struck in the head by one of five bullets fired from a car through a window of her first-floor apartment at 105 Starr Avenue in the Bushwick section early on Aug. 8, 1989.

The authorities described the shooting as retaliation by drug dealers for persistent efforts by Mrs. Hernandez and her husband, Carlos, to rid their neighborhood of drug dealing. At the end of a three-week trial in State Supreme Court, the jury convicted 28-year-old William Figueroa of murder in the case. The Brooklyn man, whose address was given as 253 Skillman Street in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section, faces a maximum of 25 years to life in prison when sentenced Feb. 19 by Justice Francis X. Egitto, who conducted the trial."

Here's a bit of way back Skillman history:

From: "Rudy! An Investigative Biography of Rudolph Giuliani"
By, Wayne Barrett and Adam Fifield

"Rudy Giuliani's maternal grandmother Adelina Stanchi came to America with her family from Naples in 1884 when she was two years old. Her mother died young, when she was thirteen, leaving her with the responsibility of raising her younger brother and sister, Andrew and Louise. Her father, Vincenzo Stanchi, who would eventually remarry, was a cigar manufacturer in Brooklyn. A tall, husky man, who favored pipes over cigars, Vincenzo owned the building at 206 Skillman Street where his family lived. He also owned a bar in the basement, as well as a stable in the backyard that housed ten horses, which he rented out to coach drivers."

From: "A History of the City of Brooklyn" - By, Henry Reed Stiles
Published 1869 - University of Michigan Press

"In East Brooklyn, were the whisky distilleries of Charles Wilson, Messrs. Wood & Co., and the Messrs. Bache. The first named was the oldest establishment of the kind in the city, having been in operation during a period of about seventeen years, and was located on the corner of Franklin avenue and Skillman Street. It contained accomodations for 800 cows, and consumed 120,000 bushels of grain a year, valued at $72,000 and 700 tons of coal, worth $3,800. Its products were 480,000 gallons of whisky per annum, valued at $120,000; and 165,000 barrels of swill were annually disposed of, for $9,150. The establishment had a capital of $50,000, and employed 18 hand, at an annual expense of $6,000, its works being operated by a 20-horse power engine."

More recently, this is the kind of press Skillman Street receives:

Taking the Two-Family Path
By JOYCE COHEN
March 9, 2008

"As natives of Seattle, where they paid $1,100 for a one-bedroom rental in a downtown neighborhood called Belltown, Brandon and Jette Starniri faced culture shock when they moved to New York three years ago and settled into a Brooklyn Heights walk-up.... After visiting open houses, they realized they needed help, so they made contact with Nahid Mollah, an associate broker at ReMax Today in Astoria, Queens, who had helped good friends of theirs find a house in Woodside....

Discouraged, Mrs. Starniri declared, “I am not looking at another house to fall in love with!” But Mr. Mollah insisted. He took them to a two-family house on Skillman Street in Clinton Hill [ed. note: it's Bed-Stuy, motherfucker], listed for $839,000. “Jette was so mad at me,” Mr. Mollah said. “I said, ‘Listen, this is everything you want,’ ” with original details and a big backyard. Mr. Starniri was still hung up on the neighborhood. “I am Google mapping it and saying: ‘No way. This is Bed-Stuy, five blocks away from the Monroe place,’ ” he said.

But, once there, they could see the beauty: plank floors, marble fireplaces, crown moldings. And this neighborhood was different. Construction was everywhere, even across the street. Though one house in their little row appeared abandoned, the rest were well kept. The day after closing, they noticed the back door was ajar. Inside, stray cats wandered. The place was empty, so there was nothing to steal. “I thought, this is good,” Mrs. Starniri said. “We are getting the break-in out of the way.”

A week later, it happened again. This time, the front door was open. “My heart just sank,” she said. The burglars had apparently entered through the roof hatch, a piece of wood with a hook. The kitchen counter and cabinets, which they had been planning to move upstairs, were gone. So was her toolbox and even her snacks: Diet Coke, Sun Chips and oatmeal cookies."

Finally, and most depressingly, we have this bit of brand-new news. This information comes from the folks at Brownstoner.com:

"Bed-Stuy Church Sold To Developer"

"The Metropolitan New York Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church recently sold off its big church on Skillman Street and Bedford Avenue, in Bedford-Stuyvesant. The property fetched $4,100,000, according to public records. A representative for the church said the only section of the property that it will retain control of is the parsonage, and that it hopes to continue to provide housing for priests there. One of the investors who purchased the property is Michael Lichtenstein, who is also currently involved with a planned development at 681 Driggs in Williamsburg, a building that may not happen as originally conceived because of the recent rezoning of Grand Street. The DOB hasn't issued any permits for work on the property. Let's hope that whatever's planned doesn't involve a wrecking ball."

-------

It is difficult for me to live on Skillman Street. As much as I love my neighborhood - from the stray cats, to the dead pigeons in our backyard, to the arabic spoken at our bodega, and the "Fuck College" tag on a nearby house - I know that I am not a positive force for Skillman Street. There's not much besides a wedding ring and a slightly higher salary separating me from those renovators who got busted into twice.

I want to be a part of this neighborhood and its culture, but I don't think it's possible to do so without actively destroying it as well. My mere presence, a white college grad who leaves every morning in khaki pants and a blue dress shirt, makes the street palatable to douchebags looking to buy black churches and flip them as condos. I abet the Daniel Rat"fuck"ners of New York City. Short of planting IED's designed to target McLaren strollers and tossing molotov cocktails into the renovation projects around us, I don't see how I can have an impact on Skillman Street that doesn't assist its transformation to "Clinton Hill Extension Part 1" or, as I mentioned in an earlier post, "Southwest Williamsburg."

The best I can do, I think, is know what I'm a part of, what I contribute to and detract from; the history and the people around me. The burden is on me to be a part of the neighborhood, not on everyone else to accept me. Which is why I kind of don't think that those suckers who had their house broke into get to complain. They are the others, they're the invading force, and they're not welcome. Nor am I. But you made the decision to live there so if you get yoked for cab fare, you got robbed... tough shit. You chose where to rest your head. No one needs to feel sorry for the white couple making $75 grand or the college kid commuting daily to the richest acre of real estate in the world. Like Chris Rock said, "White boy, you gonna be alright."

It wasn't Rudy Giuliani who cleaned up NYC. It was two things: abortions, and the shipping off of a hundred thousand black youths to human holding pens in Podunk Buttfuck, Upstate New York. People addressed this city's disenfranchised, unmotivated youth indeed; stripped them of their rights, and sent them away for 15 years for smoking a blunt while listening to Biggie on their stoop. You don't get to benefit from that silently, without understanding your context. "The hottest places in Hell are reserved for those who, in a time of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality."

Excuse Me, New York City, Where Do I Live?

2008-05-01T12:15:00.011-04:00

New Yorkers have this thing about their neighborhoods; they're like brandnames. "Ooooh, Chelsea, nice," is only a degree or two away in the socio-economic psychology of a New Yorker from "Ooooh, Michael Kors, nice." Real Estate agents toy with this psychological tic by doing stuff like advertising apartments in "East Williamsburg" which is a location as fictional as Tatooine - it's just Bushwick.

Since I've been living in Brooklyn - on Skillman Street between DeKalb and Willoughby - I've been in a bit of a geographical phantom zone. Is it Bed-Stuy or is it Clinton Hill? Fort Greene might make a bid too. And those Williamsburg borders, ever extending, why not "Southwest Williamsburg"?

For the first couple weeks of my Brooklyn life, when asked, I went straight for "Bed-Stuy." After a couple dozen icy side-glances from my then girlfriend (who suspected, not incorrectly, that my desire for Bed-Stuy status was linked to the rapper/arts contributions of the neighborhood) I refined my response to "the Bed-Stuy-Clinton-Hill border." Since then, with the girlfriend out of the picture, my line has leaned back into "Bed-Stuy on the border with Clinton Hill," and I think that's the response my roomates use as well. But if I'm going to buy this E-Bay Radio Raheem "Bed-Stuy Do Or Die" t-shirt straight out Spike Lee's classic flick, I better be certain about my borders. So I did some research.

Until 1930, when Bedford and Stuyvesant Heights merged to form "Bedford-Stuyvesant," our street seems to have been in Stuyvesant Heights territory. The Wikipedia entry for Stuyvesant Heights reads, "Recently the area was again referred separately as just Stuyvesant Heights."

Indeed, the new Kick subway map labels the area as "Stuyvesant Heights" and encompasses the Bedford-Nostrand subway stop (our closest train) and everything around it, including our street. I don't know where else the Stuyvesant Heights name is being used (Rapid NYC real estate?), if anywhere, but maybe it's an "East Williamsburg"-like balm for the McLaren stroller crowd queasy about living in "Bed-Stuy". However the Stuyvesant Heights Wiki entry lists as zip codes for the hood "11213, 11221, and 11233." So it doesn't include our zip code, 11205. Odd.

Further complicating the Stuyvesant Heights scenario is this entry for the neighborhood in the 1939 "WPA Guide to New York City":

"Stuyvesant Heights, a flat region of brownstone fronts and two-story homes lying east of Nostrand Avenue between Fulton Street and Broadway, contains the city's second largest Negro population. A few imposing church structures, the homes of some old families, and St. John's University are all that remain of a once prosperous middle-class neighborhood. The poorer Negroes, many of them on relief, are largely concentrated in such business and shopping centers as Gates and Sumner Avenues, Fulton and Jefferson Streets, Flushing, Lexington, and Myrtle Avenues--districts which for poverty and squalor are as bad as the worst areas of Harlem."

This would leave us outside Stuyvesant Heights as we are about four blocks west of Nostrand Ave.

The Wikipedia entry for Bedford-Stuyvesant defines the region's borders as, "Flushing Avenue to the north (bordering Williamsburg), Classon Avenue to the west (bordering Clinton Hill), Broadway and Saratoga Avenue to the east (bordering Bushwick) and Atlantic Avenue to the south (bordering Crown Heights)."

The entry cites the New York City Department of City Planning, and the Brooklyn Community Board as its sources for the boundaries. That definition leaves our Skillman Street inside the Bed-Stuy borders; we are four blocks east of Classon Ave and four blocks south of Flushing Ave. Notably, the western-most border of Bed-Stuy, in that definition, leaves Pratt outside the Bed-Stuy limits - Pratt's campus starts at Classon and extends west. But doesn't Clinton Hill sound so much better on the brochure for the $30,000/year college? It makes you think of the nineties, Bill Clinton, the internet... rather than "Bring your paint set to Pratt: Bed-Stuy do or die, white boy."

So I suppose we're Bed-Stuy material. I can drop the whole "on the border with Clinton Hill" bullshit, finally. Or, at least, I can do it until the whole deal is re-relabeled "Stuyvesant Heights" for the stroller-and-small-dog crowd. Just like how they chopped up Gowanus to make space for the more cosmopolitan sounding "Boerum Hill."

Snoop Needs A Powder Actuated Nail Gun

2008-04-30T16:11:00.001-04:00

This is my favorite scene in television history. Snoop's accent just about rewired my brain first time I watched this.

Grand Theft Auto IV

2008-04-21T22:33:00.004-04:00

It's all about Liberty City come April 29th, 2008. Hey, sometimes you gotta break some omelets to make some eggs. Splash dat'!

All The Sad Young Literary Men

2008-04-21T10:45:00.003-04:00

I don't think I can improve upon Judith Shulevitz's Slate.com review of Keith Gessen's "All The Sad Young Literary Men". The only thing I would add that she didn't mention is that the mushy, love-stuff sits around the book too long past the half-way point and gets tiring. Otherwise I think she's on point. An excerpt:

"Don't let the smug undertone alienate you overmuch, though. Gessen earns it, more or less. He is, in fact, a very good satirist. He skewers with glee, like a latter-day Mary McCarthy. He knows things about today's young male literary journalists that the rest of us suspect but lack the means to confirm. He knows how overconfident they are and how easily overcome with self-disgust. He knows that they're starving to be told that they matter and must tamp down the certainty that they don't. He knows that they're ferociously career-minded, and terrified of being labeled as such. That Harvardian conviction that one's every utterance partakes of genius? He grasps that it is more likely to be a trait of men, or at least he does not attribute it to the book's women."

Rappers Makin' Money... Literally

2008-04-16T14:40:00.004-04:00

Hip-hop trailblazer and Harlem's emissary to the world, Cam'ron, has, in the words of Kanye West, gotten "the shit to pop" once again. In a bold move by Secretary of the Treasury and gangsta rap enthusiast, Henry Paulson, a new line of rapper-designed United States currency is about to flood the streets. Already, finskies bearing Cam'ron's signature "purple haze" hue are in the hands of Park Slope 'tweens looking to trade the duckets for dime bags.

In a ceremony at the US Mint in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Cam'ron rolled up a limited edition $500 bill emblazoned with the rapper's visage and all-purple ornamentation and sniffed a line of that powder-powder with Secretary Paulson to commemorate the rare collaboration. Not since the Iran-Contra arrangement that used South Central dope boys to flood Los Angeles with crack cocaine, which in turn provided clandestine US military groups funding to purchase weapons for the Contras, has the government and the rap community put forth a united front.

Said Cam'ron of the moment; "Poochi, baba, butta got the hardest shells. We the Midwest gun cartel." Secretary Paulson, wiping the China China from under his nose, elaborated saying, "Our clams were getting clammy, Gods, so I brought in some outside consultation because at the US Treasury we've learned that pink polos didn't hurt the Roc, so maybe this input will prove to the world that a US dollar is useful for more than just wiping your ass widd'it." Cam'ron then threw on a pink faux-fur coat that ineffectively concealed two 5-gallon trash bags filled with newly minted bills, and left the Mint with a, "You ain't gotta stare, go cop a pair."

The innovative move from the stodgy and historically least-hip branch of the federal government, the treasury, includes more than just Harlem's first son. Ghostface Killah, Wu-Tang Clan luminary and enthusiastic vegetarian, will also contribute a line of custom bills to be named "Killah's Kash." An ebullient Ghostface said, "we gon' do Jacksons like we did Clarks, son. Woooot! Gon' be like, you want that blue and cream? Splash that, a little whateva, whateva, whateva. You set, shit."

Also involved in the project are Raekwon the Chef - whose all-white design is still getting the kinks worked out - Snoop Dogg, in charge of revamping the hundred dollar bill with a custom "Scratch and Sniff the Dogg" campaign, and king of crunk, Lil' Jon, whose bill does not have a prototype yet but All Al is told it will make "the sweat drip from your balls."

Obama Gaffs Again, Says Racism, Anti-Immigrant Sentiment Due to Lack of Education

2008-04-15T11:47:00.009-04:00

Speaking at the Movementarian Church on Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Barack Obama dealt another crushing blow to his own campaign today. Asked by a Sarah Lawrence grad in a Bright Eyes t-shirt whether, "white, middle-American anti-immigration sentiment was something that could be solved or a permanent condition," Obama's reply was sure to stir up more criticism of his now wavering campaign.

"I think what you see today in a lot of these small, middle-America towns," said Obama, "are people, you know, who haven't seen much beyond their sordid burgs, who haven't experienced the diversity and knowledge of a college campus, and so they become bitter and blame a lot on foreigners, on immigrants, because they're an easy scapegoat, and these people believe immigrants don't share their ideals and values."

The comment immediately stirred up a backlash in Frank Gehry designed newsrooms and the well-appointed desks of Upper West Side bloggers. Said blogger Melinda Mellefluous, a Harvard Law grad working at a prestigious white-shoe New York law firm, "if there's one thing I know, it's that middle-America, small town Ohio and Pennsylvania, won't stand for this kind of accusation. My $250,000 law degree has equipped me to understand the sentiments of lower-class white America, and Barack Obama has betrayed himself here as clearly an elitist."

On MSNBC, reporters in $5000 suits also debated whether this discovery of Obama's elitism had tarnished him permanently. "I think that ignorant, unhealthy, poor, white Americans and I," said bloviator of the decade, Chris Matthews, "are very similar people and I identify with them and their experiences fully. I think it's safe to say I speak for them. They've got some hispanic chick lined up to take over Hardball next year, after all. I don't know why anyone would listen to this elitist bullplop out of Obama anymore," said Matthews while he licked his silver pate knife clean of the last few specks of Iranian caviar.

William Kristol, recently hired by the New York Times' Opinion pages because some people are familiar with his name, said while he was stepping into his Maserati on the way to the Gridiron Club annual dinner, "lower-class white America and me, like this," said Kristol as he crossed his fingers on both hands, "I'll be cooking up some squirrel with Mike Huckabee's old hunting buddies down at the VFW in Scranton tonight and you can bet we'll be slugging the Rolling Rock and taking Obama and his elitism to task, that shit makes my head spin."

Meanwhile, in Bendersville, Pennsylvania, a group of native white people gathered around rarely seen television reporters as they exited their Mercedes SUV's. The group jumped up and down and appeared to try to lick the cameras, perhaps believing them to be a food source. One began to fornicate with the exhaust pipe of the Mercedes until he found the metal tube quite hot. When the apparent tribal leader emerged, wearing a scapular of Ring-Dings around his neck and a headdress of newspaper clippings with a TV-dinner tray for a brim, he approached black conservative token TV personality, Amy Holmes, and bit the top off the microphone she produced. Undeterred, Holmes asked if, "Barack Obama no longer seemed to understand the interests of main street America." The chief responded by smearing feces on the Mercedes.

Stay Juicy, College

2008-04-10T14:59:00.010-04:00

I don't know if you know, but between you, me, and the internet; Edith Windcap is the easiest ass at Brown University. That's according to the savvy participants on the internet's latest college-aimed circle jerk, aka http://www.juicycampus.com/. We graduated too soon, friends.

If you haven't heard of it, Juicy Campus is, as the International Herald Tribune put it, a website "that cultivates and distributes gossip across a network of 59 college campuses." Those colleges include such venereal institutions as Harvard University, Princeton, Brown, Columbia, and Bob Jones. Juicy Campus is a one stop shop for information that, in our old pre-Iphone college days, would have been distributed through "text messaging." Talk about precious.

Now, whether you want to find out (through anonymous sources, of course) who at Colgate; has "the best tits," or, "gives best head," or, for those Ivy students, "what did the Brown grad say to the Cornell grad?" (answer: "hey bro, you want fries with that?") Juicy Campus is your one stop shop. A veritable virtual Mike Milken of insider college sex trading.

Take this from the line of replies trailing from the 2400-times viewed Brown University "easiest ass on campus" post: "Edith is a fucking high class girl, and none of you shits would ever hope to get with the likes of her cause she is just so out of your league. you can tell yourselves that shes easy, if thatll make you feel better about being the sad and pathetic people that you are, but you all know that you couldnt pay to get with her cause shed never give you the time of day."

Well, what's your guess? Ugly guy with a crush on the girl? Or the girl defending herself through the beauty of anonymous posting? That's half the fun! Who knows who said that thing about your girlfriend and the hockey team's innovative use of the penalty box, a puck, and the goalie's mitt? Bet it wasn't you or your girlfriend.

Juicy Campus has taken a lot of heat lately. There was the guy who some dudes identified in a gay porno and outted him to the rest of the school with a link to the video on Juicy Campus. Oh, and the guy who threatened, on Juicy Campus, to bring in an AR-15 and kill a bunch of fellow students for some reason or other.

But I'm standing up for Juicy Campus. Where else can I go for an informed discussion on whether or not Andrew McGwire, of University of Miami, is in fact "cursed by mummies":

"yeah - I saw Andrew at the Rat, and these girls were totally macking on him, but they kept getting dragged into the lake by the mummies."

Juicy.

It's Complicated With...

2008-04-09T16:50:00.002-04:00

It is very fashionable, these days, to be anti-Facebook. Fair enough. I’m sure the FBI has struck some data sharing deal with Zuckerberg Inc. to compile a database of all the freshmen at Oberlin who have posted Facebook photos of themselves smoking joints. So screw Facebook, I’m on board. But by complete accident I think Facebook stumbled on something insightful that, as of now, is misused.

I noticed a friend of mine, as I perused her Facebook page, selected Facebook’s “It’s complicated with…” option to describe her present romantic entaglement. I started thinking, doesn’t that describe every romantic relationship? Isn’t entering a relationship an acknowledgment that things with your partner are now so confused – he’s still sleeping with an aboriginal pygmy on the side, while you still live in your ex-boyfriend’s shoe-closet and things get awkward when the current amour stays over and the ex- needs his Air Jordans – that your choices are reduced to murder or an exclusive arrangement? Like Chris Rock said, “If you haven’t bought a bottle of rat poison and a carpet to roll their body up in and the only thing that stopped you was an episode of CSI – ‘Man, they thorough!’ – then you ain’t been in love.”

I mean, I’m in a relationship with my Playstation 3; I feed it video games, and it feeds me reduced brain function and low-wavelength radiation. But with a girlfriend? Unless you’re really in love – and you’re not, you’re 23, and you’ve never contemplated murder – what do you have to say to a friend who asks about your girlfriend or boyfriend besides a head shake and, “that shit’s complicated.”

Relationships are symbiotic. The shit we do? It’s just complicated.

Metropocalm

2008-04-04T15:29:00.005-04:00

It’s 8:36am on Monday morning in New York City. You’re a block away from the truncated, four-car, G-train. It lopes off and leaves you breathless on the platform sweating in your Bruno Magli’s and late for work. You pull out your cellphone to call the office and it slips from your clammy palm onto the tracks where a rat the size of a skateboard clamps on it with diseased jaws and hustles into the nearest hole in the wall. A hipster steps on your foot. A frat-boy on a three-day bender pukes on your shoes. A train comes, twenty minutes later, and jumping in front doesn’t sound like such a bad idea.

But wait!

You’ve forgotten. Yesterday you filled your prescription for the Metropocalm City-Living P.I.L.L. Cocktail! Three red pills, a blue horse-pill, and a red, black, and yellow striped capsule shaped like a question mark later and you’re on the next G-train smiling, drooling blithely in a pool of your own feces. You – One; New York – Zero!

The Metropocalm City-Living P.I.L.L. Cocktail is available only in NYC. So fuck off, Portland, Oregon!

Are you an investment banker? Paralegal? A paralegal representing investment bankers? Or just a person living in New York City with a soul and empathy? If so, the Metropocalm City-Living P.I.L.L. Cocktail is for you.

The Metropocalm City-Living P.I.L.L. Cocktail consists of three unique Proactive Imminent Lash-out Limiters: Transicalm, Manhattatrol, and Quinboroughdine. Remember, they’re not pills, they’re P.I.L.L.’s!

Transicalm severs the neural pathways that send signals from the Medulla Oblongata to the rest of the body. Don’t think of it as bringing you perilously close to death by deactivating the thingy that controls your heart rate! Think of it as giving the angry man that shouts at you in your head a nap.

Manhattatrol takes over control of your heart rate from your brain, pumping a steady stream of P.I.L.L.’s to even those “hard to reach” vital organs like the feet.

Quinboroughdine induces a waking-coma which allows for continued movement and control of various muscles with the added benefit of having no memory of anything that happens for approximately 36 hours after taking the P.I.L.L.’s. How did I wind up in this motel bathroom in Akron, and where are my kidneys? I’m sure glad I don’t remember!

Metropocalm City-Living P.I.L.L. Cocktail: ‘Tis Nobler To Suffer The Slings And Arrows With Brain Damage-amage!

The All-Singing All-Dancing Crap of the World

2008-04-03T14:42:00.006-04:00

Remember when every guy in our generation's favorite movie was Fight Club? This was back in '99 through about '03, my freshman year of college. Improvisational fight clubs popped up around the country. Some chumps at Princeton University even tried to start up a beat-down club 'til the cops shut them down. During my freshman orientation at college, 70% of the favorite movie responses were Fight Club.

For a minute there, it seemed like we had some hope. A new generation of anarchists seemed willing to set their parents' duvet covers on fire, blow up their laptops, and feed the closest guy in a suit a knuckle-sandwich. Well, maybe no one was going to go that far (except Luke Helder) but a reaction against McMansions, upper-management, and stock indexes seemed possible. Now we all wear the suits, drink the Starbucks, and fuck each other silly under the hand-me-down duvet covers. What happened?

9/11 didn't help. All the sudden all that shit that Tyler Durden railed against seemed a little too delicate, the duvet covers a little too warm to give up; "In the world I see - you are stalking elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center. You'll wear leather clothes that will last you the rest of your life. You'll climb the wrist-thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Tower. And when you look down, you'll see tiny figures pounding corn, laying strips of venison on the empty car pool lane of some abandoned superhighway."

And we blinked.

But 9/11 is taking the easy way out. It's a part, though - the visceral manifestation of those exploding credit card company buildings in the final scene, but without the safety of end-credits and The Pixies track on top.

We never really had it in us. The schizophrenia that brought Tyler Durden into the world from the contradictions in narrator Ed Norton's brain is a metaphor for how we related to the movie's anti-hero. We admired Durden, he looked "like you want to look, I fuck like you want to fuck, I am smart, capable, and most importantly: I am free in every way that you are not."

Our relationship was vicarious. But to watch Durden beat the shit out of a priest, make bombs in a bathtub, and wear little more than a perpetual film of sweat, dirt, and blood was cathartic. The farther you were from being "of" Fight Club (Princeton douchebags, I'm looking at you) the more you had to embrace it, keep it close to your chest because you knew it spoke to something in you, but you didn't know what, and you didn't know how to talk back.

Mark Edmundson said of his University of Virginia students in 1997, "they are aware of the fact that a drop that looks more and more like one wall of the Grand Canyon separates the top economic tenth from the rest of the population. There's a sentiment currently abroad that if you step aside for a moment, to write, to travel, to fall too hard in love, you might lose position permanently. We may be on a conveyor belt, but it's worse down there on the filth-strewn floor. So don't sound off, don't blow your chance."

Those Princeton kids, and the rest who started the little fight clubs, missed the point. Throwing meek-muscled punches while pursuing your IA degree at Princeton isn't quite the idea. "Sticking feathers up your butt doesn't make you a chicken," as Durden said. Fight Club was about saying "no" to the inexorable American "yes." And you can't say that from the halls of Princeton, Skidmore, Yale, or the law firms we work for now.

Now we're past it. Some of us have bought our own duvet covers and sent our parents' off to Salvation Army. We have apartments on the 38th floor of buildings on 60th and 11th Ave in Manhattan and we look down from our vantage point atop the Grand Canyon to the filth-strewn floor.

We are the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world and we still haven't figured it out.

The Hardest Record Out Part III - "Give them all the pain you can"

2008-04-03T14:28:00.003-04:00

Straight out the motherfuckin' streets of Lagos, Nigeria; Billy Bao is harder, angrier, louder. Check out the man's website and listen to "Fuck Separation" or "My Life is Shit" off Dialectics of Shit. What's more: "BILLY BAO DOES NOT GIVE A FUCK ABOUT COPYRIGHT SO YOU CAN DO WHATEVER THE FUCK YOU WANT WITH HIS STUFF."

You can't fuck with these lyrics:

Now you see that you are part of their fashion
Now you know you can be controlled

by entrepeneurs who get money out of your distraction

hey yo

Get Them Down

Give them all the pain you can

Hipster Muscle

2008-04-02T09:10:00.010-04:00

Each hipster clique is pretty much homogenous except for one person: the Hipster Muscle. This guy is fat, drunk, and, more often than not, eastern European or Russian. At my college he was a year or two ahead of me and I knew him only as, what else, Tank. Tank’s functions within his hipster crowd included; drinking a dozen beers, and throwing up on his white t-shirt. His t-shirt would invariably be white and, by 2:00am on Saturday morning, invariably streaked with dark brown puke.

What is the genesis of Hipster Muscle? These kids aren’t quite Tony Soprano or Marlo Stanfield – no one has ever put a hit out on a hipster (the bullets would be a waste, a strong gust would bring most of them down). Maybe it’s some sort of collectivist thing – these waify kids feel bigger than their 20-inch waists when there’s a 280lb Andre the Giant around to lift the average Body Mass Index of the group.

Though I’ve never seen the Hipster Muscle engaged in violence against anything but his own liver, there is nonetheless a colonial aspect to his existence. The clans of hipsters that roam Williamsburg pull their Hipster Muscle along on a leash of Colt 45 tallboys like a caged bear brought by the Spanish Conquistadors to the jungles of the Amazon to inspire loin-cloth soiling in the natives.

I passed some Hipster Muscle on the way to work today. A kid in oversize blue sunglasses, a bright green Members Only jacket, and size-20 jeans skipped past me trailed by a round head atop a vast girth covered in an oversize gray trench coat. The Luca Brasi to the hipster’s Michael Corleone.

I’ve tried to find an equivalent in the Eurotrash scene – as these two groups share many conventions such as tight jeans and gaydar-scrambling – but I think the hipsters are a step ahead on this one. So in the Battle Royale between Eurotrash and hipsters that I’ve envisioned for a few years now, I think I give hipsters and their muscle the edge. Of course, ahead of the hipsters, I give the edge to lung cancer to fell all these fools thanks to their prolific cigarette consumption.

If only all obnoxious cultural types could be so unoriginally self-destructive.

"You may be interrupting" On Away Messages and Busy Notices

2008-04-01T11:02:00.005-04:00

Of AIM away messages and their precocious GChat descendant, busy notices, I am an over-user. The drop-down list of saved away messages on my AIM account (now seldom used, supplanted by all things GChat) expands, at full length, to about a half-dozen windows. Hundreds of away messages crafted over a decade of sometimes prolific instant messaging. Their contents range from the douchebaggy literary quotation - "TE OCCIDERE POSSUNT SED TE EDERE NON POSSUNT NEFAS EST," (From "Infinite Jest" Translation: "They can kill you, but the legalities of eating you are quite a bit dicier") to the celebratory - "Atlanta Braves back in first! Do the chop, bitch!"

I fear my use of away messages is historically extreme - my ex-girlfriend cited them as a quirk that inspired a desire to choke me with the one's and zero's which constituted the messages. But I don't think my approach to them is unique, which is to say, it's rare to see an away message or busy notice that has anything to do with what is occupying that person's time at the moment. Those kinds of explanatory messages do exist, but more often away messages seem to be perpetually "on" even while the person is at the computer, carrying on multiple online conversations.

There are a couple reasons ChumbyGal8632 has chosen, today, to post an away message - "The beauty of life, is that you don't have to be modernly beautiful to live it." (Ed. Note: So you're saying you're ugly?) - even though her activity notice shows that she is at her computer, probably chatting with a few people.

The utilitarian reason is plausible deniability: ChumbyGal hates talking to MustangMan69 so she leaves the away message up whenever he's online to ignore his incoming IM's ("yo cheeks, whatchu got cookin 2nite??? wanan stop by my pad w/ the lax bro'z 4 sum -ruit?"). Fair play, but for my taste, just ignore the guy. The away message just leaves him with a sliver of hope that you are, in fact, Batwoman and you happen to have been called away from the computer by the bat signal - so try again later.

More prominent, though, than the utilitarian heritage (my generation- the practical is rarely at the root of anything... except vaporizers) is the television commercial. Away messages are our own pithy commercials. The hook-line-and-sinker, should anyone of consequence be listening. Or, as a character in Dana Spiotta's novel "Eat the Document" notes of his late-teen clientele, "...for all their sarcasm and easy, shallow irony, there was still not enough self-reference for him, not enough wit. There was self-obsession, yes, self-conciousness, sure (after all, they always lived as though their lives were all on the verge of broadcast), but no concern with self-implication. Just that ungenerous righteousness, as if merely being young was somehow to your credit."

Our away messages are meta-commercials; commercials about the type of person the consumer culture and advertising has produced delivered in the form of a personally crafted, 5-second-spot advertisement. Perhaps we won't all agree that we've been produced by this culture of ads and irony, but the style we've adopted in our away messages, and the way we use them, certainly takes its cues from that niche of our upbringing. Or, as the Simpson kids put it, "it's just so hard not to listen to TV, Dad: it's spent so much more time raising us than you have."

So I'm going to take it easy on the away messages and, instead, just leave a link to my blog.

Wait, that's even worse...

The Serious Relationship-er

2008-03-27T15:16:00.012-04:00

Why is it that many a woman of the Serious Relationship ilk - those who only enter a relationship if they feel confident it will last as long and be as perilous as Odysseus' return to Ithaca - brandish their membership to the group like a Vietnam Vet talking about his six tours in Khe-San?

I sat near a couple today at lunch at the Landmark Deli and overheard a conversation about a friend's faltering relationship. The man made a few points concerning his perception of the relationship downfall. The woman brushed these opinions away; "No, no, no. Look, I've been in serious relationships since I was fifteen." She appeared, now, to be all of 23, which gives her as much experience running relationships as George Bush has had running the country.

For her men's sake, I hope her learning curve is not as steep.

I consulted two experts in my search for origins and understanding of this phenomenon; a woman, and Google.

I Googled "serious relationship women." The results offered me some insight. The first informed me that, "Hand in Hand will introduce you to beautiful Czech women, unspoiled by feminism. Your true life partner awaits." So feminism is to blame. Is that second or third-wave, specifically? The second result offered this sly riposte to my query, parrying my question with a question of its own: "Should you get into a serious relationship with a woman who participated in a ten man gang bang?"

From the woman I encountered stiff resistance. She told me, "Fuck off, I've been in serious relationships since I was fifteen!"

Are we so terrible that women look back on our times with us like a marine recalling Guadalcanal? Yes. But I'll shirk the psychology and take the easy route: I blame television. If it wasn't for shows like Party of Five and Saved by the Bell, no one would have the idea that a serious relationship by fifteen is something to strive for. Or maybe they would.

Perhaps the best tack for a friend mixed up with a Serious Relationship-er is G.O.B Bluth's:

"Her?"

Hip-Hop is Dead

2008-03-25T13:00:00.014-04:00

The landscape of music history is littered with the death knells of critics who proclaim the end of a genre as an old guard fades from relevance. As Homer Simpson said, when he decried Bart and Lisa’s obsession with rock bands like Sonic Youth and The Smashing Pumpkins, “What’s with these new bands? Everyone knows rock attained perfection in 1974, it’s a scientific fact!”

So I’m not here to tell you, “Hip-Hop is Dead.”

Instead, I will work with the postmodern concept of double-coding to explain the dynamic of the hip-hop audience and will then explore the birth of the hip-hop nation in one of its most hallowed of high codes embedded in the cocaine, guns, and blood of Brian DePalma’s Scarface. Finally, I will explain how, by declaring his music dead, Nas actually carved a new space in which it can live.

But before we go forward, we’re going to need to go back. Before I get into this discussion of the dynamic of the hip-hop audience I want to provide some historical context by discussing where Nas grew up.

Nas, born Nasir Jones, grew up in the Queensbridge Projects, located in Long Island City, New York in Queens. Construction on the projects was completed in 1939 and when World War II came to a close, the government built projects were expected to provide temporary residence for returning troops and their families. But during the 1950’s all families who lived in Queensbridge and made more than $3000 per year were transferred to middle-income projects. Most of the families moved were Caucasian and by the 1960’s Queensbridge was populated almost entirely by lower-class blacks and Latinos.

Today 15,000 people are permanently crammed into the buildings that were intended for only temporary residence. Queensbridge is the largest public housing development in the United States. It offers 3,142 rentable units. In 1986, when Nas was 13, there were more murders in Queensbridge than any other NYC project. In April of 1994, Nas released his first album, Illmatic, at the age of 23.

This is what one hip-hop critic wrote about Illmatic: “Nas is a genius introvert who rose out of the rubble of Reaganomics… His narration glorifies the emergent poetic self as a creative state that is potentially attainable by any ghetto child… his narrative voice swerves between personas that are cynical and optimistic, naïve and world-weary, enraged and serene, globally conscious and provincial. Throughout Illmatic, listeners are implored to embrace his hardened upbringing as an imperative to move on to bigger and better things.” Today, Illmatic is one of the few albums on every knowledgeable critics top five list.

Nas poured his life into the album. In an interview with Vibe Magazine, this is how Nas described the feeling of looking back on Illmatic ten years on: “When me and my friend listen to Illmatic, we think about America and about how we had to live at such a young age. I was just barely 18, and I was already thinking about being retired because of the life you’re forced to live in a neighborhood like Queensbridge. I saw my best friend die before my eyes. I saw my little brother being shot up… And I’m starting to realize my mom can’t spoil me no more, I gotta go out and get my own. Becoming a man is what I learned. And I put that into my music. And when I listen to it now, I say, God… How can it be that this is what my reality was?”

Nas’ music was motivated and informed by a desire to improve his life and escape the violence and insecurity of the projects. He did so by rapping about what he knew. Take, for instance, these lyrics from the title track on Nas’ latest album, "Hip-Hop is Dead": "What influenced my raps? Stick-ups and killings / Kidnappings, project buildings, drug dealings."

Who doesn’t follow the advice “write what you know”? This progression, however, in which you live in the projects, want to escape the projects, rap about what you see and experience, and finally make money and achieve the goal of leaving the projects results in a bizarre sort of irony: The trail that Nas, Notorious B.I.G., Tupac, Schooly D and countless others blazed, required an experience of violence and the projects and subsequent exposition on these experiences in order to escape those conditions through the medium of hip-hop.

There are rappers who are exceptions to this and are commercially successful, perhaps De La Soul and Kanye West are the most significant, but they are the exceptions to what has become the rule.

Today Nas looks back and acknowledges that he was a part of creating this path: “Everybody’s album is a street album today." He told Vibe Magazine. "But back then you had no manual to learn how to make an Illmatic… this wasn’t even about necessarily being a nice rapper. It was [about] being able to describe my life and the life that kids were living in America at that day and age. There was no script for that. Now, everybody knows how to go in there and make a Ready to Die or Life After Death or make a fake Makaveli album. Illmatic… was raw, out of the heart. Out of life.”

This progression from violent projects upbringing to hip-hop fame and riches is so well worn and well known that it's ingrained itself into other contemporary American cultural products. There's a pretty great subplot in The Sopranos season four episode "The Fleshy Part of the Thigh" that deals with the way to success in contemporary hip-hop and puts it into perspective.

Tony's in the hospital for a gunshot wound and he's in a room next to a rapper named "Da Lux" who's been shot multiple times. One of Da Lux's crew members, named Marvin, complains to one of Tony's guys, Bobby, that Da Lux will now be a hugely popular rapper because he’s been shot and Marvin bemoans the fact that he's never been shot himself. So Marvin and Bobby strike a deal and Bobby shoots Marvin in the "fleshy part of the thigh" in the hopes of upping Marvin's street-cred and jump-starting his career as a rapper. It'd be easier to laugh at if it wasn't so close to real life.

Now this is only one half of the equation – how a contemporary rapper may come to be successful and escape his or her “Queensbridge” through the trail blazed by Nas and others. But now I want to offer a theory of the dynamic of the hip-hop audience and its music – the second half of this equation.

There is a so-called “fact” that has infected discussions of hip-hop’s audience for some years now. This “fact” is that 80% of hip-hop’s audience is made up of suburban white kids. But, as Bakari Kitwana points out in his recent book, Why White Kids Love Hip-Hop, no one really knows where this fact came from – it just sort of popped up and took on a life of its own. Indeed, a large portion of hip-hop’s audience is white – in the early 1990’s Public Enemy front-man and hip-hop legend, Chuck D, estimated that 60% of his audience was white. And that’s probably closer to the actual number.

But the number is under serious dispute. What is clear is that hip-hop has the ability to speak to audiences with very different backgrounds. And, in the United States, there are at least two large sects of hip-hop listeners with major differences in their backgrounds.

So how does the music speak to these very different groups?

Charles Jencks coined the term “double-coding” in reference to postmodern architecture but the concept of double-coding works well to understand the dynamics of hip-hop’s audience as well.

Jencks, in The Language of Post-Modern Architecture and What is Post-Modernism?, explains that double-coding in postmodern architecture, “speaks on at least two levels at once: to other architects and a concerned minority who care about specifically architectural meanings, and to the public at large, or the local inhabitants, who care about other issues concerned with comfort, traditional building and a way of life. The post-modern building or work of art addresses simultaneously a minority, elite public, using ‘high’ codes, and a mass public using popular codes.”

Similarly, the hip-hop track offers different codes that are appreciated by different audiences.

In terms of double coding we have several possibilities of listeners. Umberto Eco in his book, On Literature, offers these three possibilities for readers of a double-coded text which describes fairly well the possibilities for types of hip-hop listeners if we just substitute “listener” where Eco uses “reader”:

“When we come to double coding, we can have: (i) a [listener] who does not accept the mixture of cultured and popular styles and contents, and who therefore refuses to [listen to] it, precisely because he recognizes this mixture; (ii) a [listener] who feels at home precisely because he enjoys this process of alternating between difficulty and approachability, challenge and encouragement; and lastly (iii) a [listener] who perceives the entire [track] as a pleasant invitation and does not in the end realize the extent to which it draws on elite styles (so he enjoys the work, but misses its references).”

Now I want to apply this to an actual hip-hop track. Consider Notorious B.I.G.’s “Juicy.”

“Juicy” appeared in 1994 on Notorious B.I.G.’s first album “Ready to Die.” The album went quadruple platinum and the single “Juicy” went Gold. “Ready to Die” is ranked at 133 in Rolling Stones’ list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time – those statistics certainly suggest mass popularity and therefore the presence of popular codes but I want to show the high codes that are present here, too.

So, take these lyrics from the first verse of “Juicy.”

It was all a dream
I used to read Word Up magazine
Salt'n'Pepa and Heavy D up in the limousine
Hangin' pictures on my wall
Every Saturday Rap Attack, Mr. Magic, Marley Marl
I let my tape rock 'til my tape popped
Smokin' weed and bamboo, sippin' on private stock
Way back, when I had the red and black lumberjack
With the hat to match
Remember Rappin' Duke, duh-ha, duh-ha
You never thought that hip hop would take it this far
Now I'm in the limelight 'cause I rhyme tight
Time to get paid, blow up like the World Trade
Born sinner, the opposite of a winner
Remember when I used to eat sardines for dinner
Peace to Ron G, Brucey B, Kid Capri
Funkmaster Flex, Lovebug Starsky
I'm blowin' up like you thought I would
Call the crib, same number same hood
It's all good

These lyrics ask something that the production of “Juicy” doesn’t. “Juicy” samples the Mtume track “Juicy Fruit” for its production and it’s a very listenable track – one described in the hip-hop magazine, XXL, as “radio friendly… in contrast to the grim depiction of urban hopelessness told in one of the most immediate voices the form has ever known,” that characterizes most of the rest of the album.

But while the production, the beat, may be a popular code there are high codes here, too. To understand the high codes of these lyrics requires a fairly extensive understanding of the origins of hip-hop: DJ’s like Kid Capri, Funkmaster Flex… Rappin Duke who was releasing albums in the mid-80’s… and the reference to Mr. Magic’s Friday and Saturday evening radio show on WBLS-FM in New York City, “The Rap Attack,” which aired in the late-80’s with legendary DJ Marley Marl. These are all references to hip-hop’s adolescence – not widely known outside the black community of New York City at the time. But what’s more these are codes that are directed at, as Jencks requires of high codes, “a concerned minority that are specifically concerned with [hip-hop related] meanings.”

So “Juicy,” therefore, is a track that offers room for Umberto Eco’s second and third types of “readers”: Those who can speak and understand this language of Biggie’s and feel at home in this song’s lyrics and its beat, and those who let the lyrics pass over them but enjoy, perhaps, the lyricism of the words and the beat if not their meaning – “He enjoys the work but misses its references,” as Eco wrote.

I mentioned earlier that part of this project is to try to reach an understanding of what makes or made hip-hop “alive” to begin with. So, now that we have a way of understanding different types of hip-hop listeners, I want to turn to a specific high code that is pervasive, almost omnipresent, in hip-hop. It is a high code that Nas helped make famous and it has a history much deeper and older than hip-hop and in it are, I believe, the seeds that made hip-hop grow – what brought it to life.
In the 1983 film Scarface there is a climactic moment when Al Pacino’s Tony Montana stands in the art-deco living room of his coke baron boss, who he has just murdered, and looks out onto Miami Bay. Giorgio Moroder’s synthesizer tune pulses and a Pan-Am blimp floats above the bay flashing a marketing slogan: “The world is yours.”
“The world is yours” is the tagline of the dramatic story of Tony Montana’s rise and fall. One that piqued the passions of millions of disenfranchised urban youths looking for social mobility and a way to assert themselves and escape a repressive milieu.

Those four words, “the world is yours,” and the Scarface story as a whole, left a profound mark on the adolescent hip-hop nation and I think the birth of the contemporary hip-hop moment can be traced back to Tony Montana standing in that living room. It’s hard to name a rapper over the past 20 years who doesn’t in some way allude to either Scarface the film or those four words specifically. More over, the sort of litmus test, I think, to see if a hip-hop fan is Eco’s type-two listener, one who understands and engages the music’s high codes, that litmus test is whether they understand and can discuss the significance of Scarface and specifically that line “the world is yours.” These are the sort of keepers of hip-hop’s birth, those that keep the genre vital and relevant. Without them hip-hop has a foundation of air.

But if we’re only looking back to Scarface, for the significance of the line “The world is yours” in hip-hop history, then we’re missing a big part of its history that is critical to understanding the birth of contemporary hip-hop. For this, we need to go back to the British Empire.

In 1910, fifteen years after a disastrous and failed British invasion of Johannesburg led by Sir Leander Starr Jameson and Cecil Rhodes, Rudyard Kipling wrote a poem called “If –” that commemorated what Kipling saw as Jameson’s fortitude in overcoming the difficulties of the invasion.

“If –”is a poem about the traits that make the strong, imperial, British man. “If you can keep your head when all about you/ Are losing theirs and blaming it on you/ If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you/ But make allowance for their doubting too,” the poem begins. The poem progresses in this tone, laying out conditions until the last two lines of the poem which are: “Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it/ And – which is more – you’ll be a Man, my son!” The words bear a striking resemblance to Scarface’s “the world is yours” philosophically as well as literally.

Was Oliver Stone reading Kipling when he wrote the screenplay for Scarface? In a sense that question is more interesting than it is relevant. In fact, “the world is yours,” appears on a billboard in the 1932 version of Scarface as well as the contemporary one so perhaps it was the first writers of Scarface that nicked Kipling’s words or were inspired by them. However it is definitely the second incarnation of Scarface which made the line “the world is yours” famous for the hip hop generation.

Kipling was a conscience for his nation’s imperialism; he celebrated and criticized it. But while Kipling’s characters come from Britain, an imperial power, and colonize outwards, and this is why the line is so significant, Scarface is a story of reverse colonization.

Though it is simplistic and wrong to understand Kipling as a one-dimensional imperialist, this particular poem certainly does champion the imperial spirit of the late 19th century British male. The poem is a celebration of the man who shoulders the White Man’s Burden – to “civilize” the “uncivilized.” But Tony Montana flips that around.

Montana seeks vengeance for the colonized. In a famed speech, drunk and high at a fancy Miami restaurant, and awash in cash, Montana tears his table apart and jumps to his feet. “You don’t have the guts to be what you wanna be,” he shouts to the diners. “You need people like me. You need people like me so you can point your fucking fingers, and say ‘that’s the bad guy.’” Affluent white faces surround Montana during the speech. Montana taunts them and says he has succeeded where they have failed.

When Montana says “you need people like me so you can point your fucking fingers, and say ‘that’s the bad guy,’” he strikes chords that should remind us of the imperialism of Kipling’s poem. Without the “uncivilized,” which Montana represents, the “civilized” would not be able to define themselves. It is only when Western society confronted the “other” that notions of superiority based on civilization and race could come into play. The one is defined in opposition to the other. Montana pays homage to that dynamic and, at the same time, carves out his own space as one branded as “uncivilized” who comes to America and creates an empire within an empire, turning the imperialist agenda on its head.

Like Montana, rappers are defined as the “other” in relation to, in this case, “civilized,” white, bourgeois America. Just as Montana created his own identity through the role of the “other” so, too, did hip-hop. When Nas, in 1994 escaped Queensbridge and found a massive niche in the capitalist market that would gobble up his storytelling he declared “The world is yours.” His declaration was the creation of hip-hop’s nation, it’s identity. He celebrated the national identity he and others had created for young, black, urban-American youth. He celebrated that hip-hop had turned the tools of the colonizer against it and created its own empire.

Today, though, Nas has this to say about the nation he helped found: “Everybody’s like microwave music now, know what I mean, ‘cause it’s the way to eat. When I was doing this early on, [I did Hip-Hop] because I loved it. Now, they’re not artists, they’re opportunists. So it’s just a way to eat now. And that’s cool. But then of course, the music is gonna suffer.”

And it has. The result of this microwave music has been the starvation of those high codes and the first fractures seen in decades amongst the core street audience and the type-two listeners who engage the high codes of the music.

Though record sales, of course, should not be the sole indication of a music’s health they are useful in the case of hip-hop because the music has, traditionally, so warmly embraced its commercial appeal where other music forms, such as rock, have traditionally rejected it. “Selling out,” until right now, has never really been an issue for rappers. This year it came out that hip-hop sales declined twenty-one percent from 2005 to 2006 and for the first time in twelve years, no hip-hop album was among the ten best sellers of the year.

So now we need to turn to Nas’ new album and specifically the title track: Hip-Hop is Dead. Keep this quote in mind during the video. Nas was asked in an interview, when Hip-Hop is Dead came out, what kind of music he was making if not hip-hop. Nas answered, “I dunno what it is. Some shit right. Crack music. It’s fucked up.” That term, “crack music,” is an important one.

"Hip-Hop is Dead" Video

Nas smothers this video in the imagery of crack houses and dealing crack. But instead of vials of crack cocaine we see Nas’ albums “The N” and flash-drives marked with “The N.” But the imagery is clearly that of the crack industry.

By declaring hip-hop outlawed and dead, Nas allows for the music that he is making to take on a new name. He gives his music a new domain: Crack Music.

This is music no longer sanctioned by the mainstream that hip-hop embraced. This is music that is dusted with one of the most culturally unacceptable and destructive drugs: crack cocaine. Here Nas is making explicit that which was tacit for so long – that the music he helped make mainstream has gone too far, that rappers need to push back on the audience dynamic they have ignored for so long. This is a conservative movement in hip-hop. Rappers like Nas say the music needs to get back to the no-exit desperation that first made the music passionate and a voice for the members of Queensbridges of the country and the world – those with whom, according to Nas, the music no longer connects.

Nas is courting those type-two listeners in the lyrics of Hip-Hop is Dead by rapping about where hip-hop was and where it is now and how it got there. “Everybody sound the same / commercialize the game / reminiscin’ when it wasn’t all business / and forgot where it started / so we all gather here for the dearly departed.” These lines are his invitation to those type-two listeners. He commiserates with them, understands their criticisms.

Other rappers have identified this same need. Kanye West, mentioned earlier as a rapper who hit the mainstream without the project-trappings of a rapper like Nas and yet is wildly commercially successful and well-respected amongst hip-hop purists, had a track on his 2005 album, Late Registration, called “Crack Music.”

In the track Kanye raps: “We took that shit, measured it and then cooked that shit / And what we gave back was crack music / And now we ooze it through they nooks and crannies / So our mommas ain’t got to be they cooks and nannies / And we gon’ repo everything they ever took from grammy / Now the former slaves trade hooks for Grammy’s / This dark diction has become America’s addiction / Those who ain’t even black use it / We gon’ keep baggin up this here crack music.”

It’s not hard to figure out who that unnamed “they” is in Kanye’s lines. He’s referring to the predominately white base that makes up his audience and to white America in general. Some rappers are now turning their music on the predominantly white commercial base they once more or less ignored or did not address in their music but from whom they reaped financial windfall.

Whether or not hip-hop is dead is debatable. What that even means is debatable. But I think where people like Nas and Kanye go, the genre should follow – these are the sages of hip-hop. The questions we’re left with, then, are; will this stuff, “Crack Music,” succeed in revitalizing hip-hop’s base and pushing away the commercial embrace? Will it fracture out of hip-hop and create a new sub-genre? Can Nas and Kanye redirect the bulk of hip-hop’s artists? For that, we simply have to wait and see.

This essay has explored Nas, the birth, death, resurrection of hip-hop, the dynamic of its audience. But I should discuss me, for a second here, too, because I’ve always been, when it comes to hip-hop, hanging out at a party I wasn’t exactly invited to. I didn’t grow up in the South Bronx, and I get lumped into that suburban white kid statistic pretty nicely.

In the last track on the album “Hip Hop is Dead,” in its last verse, Nas says: “If you’re askin’ – Why is hip-hop dead? / It’s a pretty good chance you’re the reason it died, man / It’s a pretty good chance your lame ass, corny ass, is the reason it died, man / You don’t give a fuck about it, you don’t know nothin’ about it.”

Now, Nas kind of hands off a lot of blame here where I think he and his peers deserve some too because they were at least complicit in the death that Nas is talking about – they turned a blind eye and accepted gobs of money from the people he’s accusing of killing hip-hop in that quote. But that doesn’t mean that I am free of culpability here. I do think, although I wouldn’t quite characterize myself as a lame ass, that I am part of the dynamic that Nas believes killed hip-hop.
And I understand where he’s coming from when he says if you ask why hip-hop is dead, you’re the reason it died. I think he’s saying if you’re the kind of person who had no idea anything was wrong and this corpse of hip-hop is a big shock, then you probably haven’t paying attention and you’re not too up on the high codes of hip-hop.

But I also think his statement is misleading. Because I think someone like me has to ask that question and try to answer it. That’s why it’s so crucial to do write things like this if you’re a fan of hip-hop – I think if a kid like me is going to listen to this music you can’t do so passively you need to understand and earn your place, you need to understand your context, otherwise you’re exactly what Nas said – a lame ass, corny ass, asking why hip-hop died.

In So Many Words

2008-03-20T14:25:00.013-04:00

"Political language – and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists – is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."
George Orwell, from "Politics and the English Language"

Any positive change in American politics will begin with an improvement in the language of political discourse. Hillary Clinton often attempts to write off Barack Obama's campaign with her now polished by overuse "just words" accusation. Meanwhile, she partakes in the political language favored by George Bush; tired, stock phrases used repeatedly that convey little or no meaning and always leave room for a speedy escape, stage left, from accountability.

Barack's speech the other day, in contrast, did as much to plead for a new, reasoned and informed political discussion in America as it did to address race in America. As much as I hope Obama is succesful and Americans move from discussing whether Saddam had WMD’s to whether the Fed should bail out banks for bad investments, I don’t think it will happen. Obama may be elected president, but it won't be because Americans reached a higher plane of political conciousness.

Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama delivered speeches this week on March 17th and 18th, respectively. Both were billed as major speeches. Clinton's, delivered at GW University, purported to detail her plans for Iraq. Obama’s addressed the comments of his pastor, Jeremiah Wright.
Hillary’s “What I Say I'll Do In Iraq, Maybe” Speech

"Now, withdrawal is not risk-free, but the risks of staying in Iraq are certain. And a well-planned withdrawal is the one and only path to a political solution. The only way to spur the Iraqis to take responsibility for their own future and to ensure that we don't bear that responsibility indefinitely. The only way to spur other countries to do their part to help secure stability in the region. The commitment to staying in Iraq has driven President Bush's foreign policy. It looks like it would drive Senator McCain's foreign policy as well, but it will not drive mine. My foreign policy will be driven by what is in America's national security interests."

This statement falls about ten paragraphs into Clinton's lengthy speech. After it, she launches into a detailed nine point plan and meticulously describes each action she would take to end the war in Iraq and bring our troops home while leaving a "small, elite strike force" behind for certain operations. But she's invalidated her entire plan in that one paragraph, and she knows it.

Clinton sets herself up nicely until the last sentence of the paragraph when one should expect a strong, declarative statement that breaks her with the disaster that is President Bush and the calamity that would be President McCain. But she skirts the opportunity: "My foreign policy will be driven by what is in America's national security interests." Contrary to what Clinton states in the two sentences prior to that statement, every single claim to power, force, and illegal use of executive privilege that Bush has made, and McCain would continue to make, has been in the name of "national security interests." Neither one has ever said they want to stay in Iraq for the sake of staying in Iraq, they both justify our occupation by saying it is in our national security interests to be in Iraq.
Clinton then launched into her detailed plan, but she'd already made the plan irrelevant. If she were elected, and decided to renege on any aspect of her plan – or all nine of them – she would simply say that her former plan is no longer in our national security interests. As Orwell writes in "Politics" – "The great enemy of clear language is insincerity." Clinton accomplished that in a single sentence and layered the rest of her speech with an impenetrable fog of uncertainty; would she keep her word, or make use of her handy escape route?

What’s terrible about Clinton is she’s smart and doesn’t have to use these tired images and flakey promises. Bush has to use that stuff because he’s an imbecile on the level of the one in Cormac McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian” who sits in a cage covered in food, flies, and feces “chewing on a turd.” That’s not Clinton. She uses this phraseology strategically. She thinks she’s on the side of good, so she can use Bush’s powerful tools for the good guys and do good things with them. As Anakin Skywalker taught us, though, that is a sure path to the dark side.

An Eloquent President

“For we have a choice in this country. We can accept a politics that breeds division and conflict and cynicism. We can tackle race only as spectacle – as we did in the OJ trial – or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina – or as fodder for the nightly news. We can play Reverend Wright’s sermons on every channel, every day and talk about them from now until the election, and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words. We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she’s playing the race card, or we can speculate on whether white men will all flock to John McCain in the general election regardless of his policies. We can do that. But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we’ll be talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And nothing will change.”

Consider that passage next to Clinton’s opinion of Obama’s speeches:

“Senator Obama has said often that words matter. I strongly agree. But giving speeches alone won’t end the war and making campaign promises you might not keep cetainly won’t end it. In the end the true test is not the speeches a president delivers, it’s whether the president delivers on the speeches.”

Tim Russert asked Clinton in one of the debates why she thought she could create jobs nationally when she failed to do so in New York state after promising she would as senator. Clinton replied that she would “have more tools at [her] disposal” as president, with which she could stimulate job growth. This is the danger of Hillary Clinton in combination with her prepackaged, hazy speeches. Hillary and her second wave feminist friends believe that tools, that power wrested from those who’ve carried the batons for so long, is the way to affect change. But it is not. This struggle for the tools of power leads only to the dark side. It is not the person who wields power that corrupts, it is power that corrupts those who wield it.

Obama, on the other hand, knows, and has epitomized throughout his campaign, the maxim with which Orwell opens his essay, “Politics and the English Language” – “[The English language] becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts… to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration.”

Obama’s campaign is not about the tools of the presidency – signing statements, the purse, executive privilege, influence, power… “a Jedi craves not these things.” Obama’s campaign, and his speech the other day, is an attempt to raise political discourse to something above the worn, meaningless phrases of Clinton, Bush, and McCain.

Our Failings

“In our age,” writes Orwell, “there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics.’ All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer.” Obama is not interested in political conformity. His speech laid that issue to rest. No politician interested in political conformity would deliver such a sweeping indictment of American political involvement through the lens of our squirmiest of squimishnesses; race.

And so, rightly, Obama’s speech was called brave. And, ignorantly, it was called “risky.” Risky because it was not politically expedient, and he said as much himself. Risky because the journals and outlets which called it risky – The NY Times, WSJ, MSNBC, CNN – do nothing to challenge the status quo themselves.

The misfortune of Obama is that his speech may pass over the heads of Americans like a lofty breeze amongst the leaves of trees. In my generation, for every one person who supports Obama with a deep understanding of our nation’s position and our opportunities and needs for the future; there are ten who support Obama because Scarlett Johansen and Will.I.Am sang a pretty song about him and put it on YouTube. This generation of mine has not suddenly awoken to politics thanks to Obama, they’ve simply engaged in a cult of celebrity. This is his good fortune, of course, and I am glad they happen to support Obama in this instance but what does it mean for an election to be won on the votes of people who cast their ballot for all the wrong reasons? Or for no reason at all beyond celebrity? To be so uninformed makes one an easy target for demagogues and zealots, as a professor of mine once said. That said, I’ll take that over Hillary Clinton or John McCain any day.

Political change can do very little to affect human misery. And what it can do, tends to introduce new flavors of misery alongside any accomplishments. Perhaps this will hold true of Obama if elected, it most certainly would for Clinton, whose ambition is on perpetual and gaudy display. But if there is hope in our political future, words will not just be a part of that hope, words must be the sum of that hope.

Port of Miami

2008-03-18T21:14:00.006-04:00

Some photos from the annual Spring Break Miami trip. Spring Break is the only religious holiday I observe.How was the beach weather in New York City this past March weekend? Oh yeah? You got hypothermia and almost died swimming off Far Rockaway? Not in Miami, man. Evy be swimmin' e'ryday.

Evy making faces.

Mom, Dad, Evy, Miami Beach.

Evy and Baby Jo-Jo. Is that spelling right? Or is there an "e" or two I'm missing in there... Baby names are so hard to spell.

Evy's new soccer jersey, straight from the streets of Hanoi on Uncle Alex's voyages. Baby Jo-Jo got a Zippo lighter with this engraved on it: "Live like a dog, work like an ass, fuck like a mink, die like a rat."

Word. Miami.

The 18th Amendment

2008-03-18T10:32:00.006-04:00

"Top o' the morning to ye on this gray, drizzly afternoon! Kent O' Brockman reporting live from Main Street, where today everyone is a little bit Irish, except of course for the gays and the Italians."

There hadn't been any Patty's day celebrations planned, but a bump into at the gym and then another on the sidewalk and you end up at Jeremy's Ale House on the Sea Port with their calamari, a bunch of people, and 32 oz. styrofoam cups of beer. "To alcohol! The cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems."

You Don't Know Juno!?

2008-03-17T13:14:00.006-04:00

After WFMU’s Tom Scharpling dressed me down on-air for potentially liking the movie Juno (I hadn’t seen it yet but said I’d consider watching it) I finally saw it last night. I decided that even though I didn’t know anything about the movie at the time and hadn’t yet seen it, I deserved The Scharpling Best-Show-Bitch-Slap.

Juno would have made sense if it came out somewhere in the 1994 – 1997 range (like when the adjacent Time Magazine article came out). But a 2007 film about the angst of a 16-year old kid who gets pregnant and gives it up for adoption? Yawn. You could have watched that movie every day of your life as a social worker in Baltimore 20 years ago and it would have been more dramatic (less funny, though). This speaks to the allure of Juno; why did all those people watch it and the New York Times Magazine drool on it? Because it was about a cute little white girl amongst the evening breezes of Any-Town USA. How precious.

Put a black girl from Brownsville in that movie and it's a no-go.

The more interesting story shoved aside in Juno is between Vanessa (Jennifer Garner), a yuppie sell-out upon whom God has, presumably, exacted revenge for her lame ways by making her infertile, and her classic American I-don’t-wanna-be-a-dad-I-still-wanna-be-a-rock-star-but-I’m-36 husband Mark (Jason Bateman).

Mark and Vanessa’s relationship would have offered a more interesting and relevant story-line about the (nod to the knowing) arrested development that seems to plague many an American male these days.

There’s also the matter of the awkward attempt to capture American-teen-talk. “Swear to blog!?” It is rampant through the first, oh, nine minutes of the film and then Cody Diablo (stripper turned bad scriptwriter) must have exhausted a meagre Thesaurus of the Retarded American Teen.

Juno’s kind of funny, sometimes, I guess. But hardly worth it for that. Why did it get all this attention? Maybe there were a lot of producers that owed Diablo money from the old days.

Mr. Spitzer's Privates Matter

2008-03-11T09:55:00.004-04:00

New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer could not have been more wrong in his brief public appearance after the world learned that he was suspected of patronizing a prostitution ring. He did not just betray his family, but his constituents who would have also enjoyed a reprieve from their own taxing jobs with some hot, $5,500/hour sex. It is hard to see how he will recover from this mess without some tissue paper and one of those hookers as his press secretary so at least his horny citizens get a taste.

"I have violated my obligation to my family, in addition to several young women with 20-inch waists and 34-inch chests," said Gov. Spitzer before pushing his hands together to depict the various positions he had mastered for these encounters which appeared to include, "The Flying Dutchman," "The Ant-Eater," and "Mrs. Butterworth's Maple Syrup Slurp."

Gov. Spitzer went on to explain that politics is not only about "big ideas" but also "large breasts, well-appointed motel suites, and body chocolate." His short, arrogant statement was simply not enough from the Sheriff of Wall Street (which apparently is a moniker that featured prominently in his trysts, if you're picking up what I'm putting down), the folks at the press conference also wanted pictures, movies, and the Emperor Club VIP phone number.

On Wall Street, where Spitzer rammed through reform with the same vigor we hope his soon-to-be-public text messages and e-mails display he used in the company of high-class whores, investment bankers reveled in smug satisfaction as they railed lines of coke off hookers' tits in celebration. Said one zooted-up member of the Blackstone Group, "Spitzer? I hardly know her!"

No "Master of the Senate" Says Times of Obama

2008-03-10T15:55:00.008-04:00

If you catch Barack at his relaxed moments – away from superdelegates, CNN cameras, and Ohio laborers – you'll find the man will discuss his feelings toward the Senate. Take his latest appearance on The Daily Show; that Delphic beacon of ironic truth that rises above the fog of misinformation roused by the Visigoth hordes of cable newscasters:

Stewart: Can a Senator [bring the country together]? So often now it's the governors. Is there something about – because the Senate – it's very hard to run on your record in the Senate because the Senate is so paralyzed and nuanced.

Obama: Well, it's paralyzed and it's designed for you to take bad votes, right… You know, with Senators you end up having to actually vote on stuff that has no relevance whatsoever, but can be used later on to attack you.

The NYT article, "Obama in Senate: Star Power, Minor Role," published March 9, 2008, as part of their "The Long Run" series portrays an Obama who is "frustrated by his lack of influence" and viewed within The Chamber as "naïve" and a "dilettante" by some Senate elders.

Kate Zernike and Jeff Zeleny, the writers of that NYT article, focus on the establishment's story line for their article – that of a freshman Senator, 99th in seniority, who confronts the Senate's "glacial pace" and jumps ship for high-office on a wave of popularity rather than become an obedient lubricant for the gears of The Chamber.

Whose party-line are Zernike and Zeleny towing for this article? Perhaps Bill "I-Can't-Believe-I'm-A-Hillary-Hawk" Keller's? Whoever it is, they betray their antiquated mode of political thought. The truth is Obama is neither a dilettante, nor is he naïve. The truth is the Senate and the House are malfunctioning bodies.

What are the great legislative accomplishments of the past eight years? They are those drops of poison that tipped George Bush's Sword of Patriotism which was thrust through the gut of liberty by an obliging and distracted Congress: FISA, The Authorization of the Use of Military Force, the Military Commissions Act, the Patriot Act… oh, and No Child Left Behind.

James Madison, in a speech for the Constitutional Convention, wrote, “Liberty may be endangered by the abuses of liberty as well as by the abuses of power… [men are] liable to err… from fickleness and passion and the major interest might under sudden impulses be tempted to commit injustice on the minority.”

Could Madison have imagined that abuses on both counts, with consent of the people to the abuses of power, would render neutered the House and Senate? That the mandate he imagined for the Senate, “first to protect the people against their rulers; secondly to protect the people against the transient impressions into which they themselves might be led,” could be simulatenously felled?

The histories that conspired to bring us to these times – an epoch which deserves an-etched-in-marble title consisting of Benjamin Franklin’s best aphorism, “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety” – are diverse and complex. But Barack Obama has found a way to synthesize them when he wrote in The Audacity of Hope, “I sometimes felt as if I were watching the psychodrama of the baby-boom generation – tale rooted in old grudges and revenge plots hatched on a handful of college campuses long ago – played out on the national stage.”

That psychodrama is now winding down, but not without a fight. The average age in the Senate is sixty and these aging legislators have fought their battle royale over the past eight years and brought the people of the United States careening along as both unwitting spectators and minor accomplices.

This election will decide whether the American people are ready to say “enough,” to the baby boomers with, finally, a profound youth vote for Obama, or whether Hillary Clinton or John McCain (products that are the opposite side of the same coin) can wrest one final bout for their side of the 1960’s ideological divide – a battle rendered irrelevant as good and evil in that debate devolved into a single entity under Bush’s patriotic gaze.

The only chance for a new debate is to elect an intellect that was not sharpened by the now-rusted sabres of the sixties. It is a shame The New York Times does not seem ready to take that step.