Cobb

I Am OWS (Twenty Years Ago)

In 1992 I wanted Jerry Brown to be President.

I was a performance poetry artist who just moved to Brooklyn from Los Angeles. I hated Los Angeles, but when the riots broke out, I felt that I was somehow connected. I walked the streets of Brooklyn at midnight looking for somebody to celebrate with. But I had to wait until the next day. I had a very complicated and sophisticated message to bring to the people of New York City, but I was frustrated. 

I wound up joining the legendary William Kunstler on the stage at Times Square at a rally in solidarity with the activists in Los Angeles demonstrating against police brutality. It was a complicated matter, but what they really wanted me to do was to pump my fist and get the crowd rowdied up for a rambunctious, but peaceful, but noisy, but legal, but revolutionary, but non-violent, but angry march. 

My gripe at the time was that the subtleties of the problem in Los Angeles were not being addressed by the media. I was correct about that then as now, because I am a writer of some subtlety. My gripe against the mainstream media was in effect then, my understanding of the power of computer networks was just beginning, and complete one year later. 

The following rambling essay called White Flight Friday shows my state of mind. In fact, I just want to excerpt one little part. 

Thus I felt haughtily superior in my pity and disgust for the clutching yuppies self cornered behind the caged storefront cafes and restaurants along the parade route. Trashcans flew into windows normally employed as stages of vanity. Now the sybaritic know nothings seek the protection of proprietors. Maitres D' were suddenly stripped naked. Of all the things to do on the Friday evening after America suffered another painful plumbing of its uglier soul, dining in an upscale restaurant with big windows seemed the most foolish. But folks of this particular stripe seem to enjoy making victims of themselves. I consider it a complete waste of time, this useless simpering guilt of individuals coddled by the political majority. They all could have easily come outdoors with a raised fist, or an intelligent political statement of solidarity against the travesty of injustice and police brutality. But their fear outran their good sense and citizenship. This demarcates America's immediate political future - the privileged having the intellectual and political wherewithal to stand in the streets for noble reasons and instead remaining physically caged behind boutique security and politically bound by fluff/fear journalistic interpretations of those on the street. How many horror stories have you heard about the mob that almost got me? Political actors mere yards from each other in completely different dimensions. It makes me want to puke. I imagine their thought balloons; "Who's backyard? Not my backyard!"

I have sought out reporters this time trying as I might to inject a bit of fact and background into the stew. I was compelled to ask sista to give me a moment to speak back at Times Square because I felt nobody in this whole metropolis had any clue that white men in Volvos were looting computer retailers, ailing businessmen were allegedly torching their own inventories and college students were assiduously dismantling ATMs and burning the contents. Nobody realized that what happened in Los Angeles portends political chaos of Russian dimensions. But my spoken allusions to John Slaughter's words, Melanie Lomax's words and Mike Woo's words have been drowned out by soundbite editorials voiced over the infamous visual. I keep waiting to see amateur videoist Holliday responding languorously to "So, set up the clip." on some talk show. Someone other than the most critically affected will have the last words. I myself didn't help much were mooted by the mute response and a bad case of nerves. My speech to activist New York prompted by "Pump 'em up" petered out. Next time perhaps I'll conk my hair or come in a Kunstler mask. I keep trying to get to speak to people and Press and Police press and police.

Anyway, those from the print media all carried the same notepads and pens. They dressed down, some wearing 35mm cameras. All wore the ubiquitous badges that rendered them immune from police batons if not flying bottles. I plainly told them that they wanted to hear me out. I, after all, was a young black man from Los Angeles who from age 17 through 29 had been detained 17 times and cited only twice. But most of the print journalists didn't walk far past Madison Square Garden, where I chortled with glee at the Rangers fans watching us like a pack Midwestern zoo goers. I wanted to give the sportos violence for real, but guessed they'd love returning it. They alone were the only white folks not a direct part of the parade who didn't cower in fear. I told a woman reporter who paid the most attention to me that I didn't think the violence in Los Angeles would last very long. Mostly I was concerned that New York wasn't concerned.

You should know that there is a place in NY called Thompkins Square Park. And if you ask enough of the right people, you'll find out what went on there of symbolic import to connect police brutality in NYC with the police brutality in LA that people around the nation were rioting about. And so as I marched, I found out from fellow marchers that under no circumstances were the NYPD going to let us reach that place. The legal advisers to the march let us know that ahead of time and made it clear that if we weren't in the mood to break through police lines and get our heads busted and be arrested, (i.e. if you were just a Sunday driver kinda protester who didn't already have a legal fund with bail money ready) then you should not try to get into the Park. They were right. 

--

Not having engaged this thread of my own youthful anarchic / bohemian desires for what I once called the 'noble arena' over the past week, some of the juice in the overarching theme of this essay has escaped me. So I'll just jump to some bold declaritive statements.

1. OWS suffers a great delusion that it can counter the forces of global corporate oligopoly non-violently. The more they describe the great evil of bad corporations and corrupt pols in Washington and every other capitol, the more they must inevitably begin bombing. 

ows^pepper_spray < sqrt(rodney_king/2);

2.OWS must face the fact at the core that the American corporate oligopoly stands in service of the consumer economy. It must not fail if they are to deliver middle class goods. 

3. There are rarely national improvements made by local protests. OWS holds the admirable goal of ridding excess money from influence in national policy.  I wish it all the luck in the world in reforming democratic politics here in America. But nobody local can pull that off. OWS needs to be more organic and start where the rest of America has given up building from there. 

 

Dealing With The Dead

Since 1991, I've had a policy for dealing with the dead. It is simple and effective. It is to carry on the legacy of the dead by incorporating aspects of their lives into one's own. It has always worked for me, and it has always seemed appropriate advice for others. Today I have many dead to think about some whom I knew, others whom I mostly did not. These deaths remind me, not of my own mortality, but of my own responsibility to live.

Steve Jobs came close to being my boss, and I came close to being someone a lot wealthier. You see, I received the news second hand when Jobs cursed out my actual boss, telling him that he would bury him. The controversy was about the fate of the Xerox Systems Group and my boss was Bob Adams. I was the sysadmin for what used to be the largest LAN in the world at the company that invented Ethernet. I didn't beleive that Jobs could do it. I was wrong. 

Fred Shuttlesworth stood for his rights and suffered for it, but survived to have them all. He was a small man with a big mouth.

Black Cherry was the closest my family had to having a dog. It was a female who thought it was a male. We watched her put down at the end of suffering from cancer in the dusty basement of dear friends. Four score things were said about the life of a dog and you probably know them all. 

--

The Cotton Gin Story

A dozen or so years ago, I attended a funeral in Louisiana for my last grandmother. One of the men told me a story one day not long after driving across the bridge of the Ouachita River. 

When he was a young man, he was enterprising. Like the others, he picked cotton and he picked plenty. He decided to organize some of the others and pick multiple fields. This was the way to make extra money, as the landowners only needed so much. He and his brother got the trucks together and picked one of the biggest loads anybody in the area had seen. He took it to the gin to be weighed and sold. The family that owned the gin was different from the family that owned the land. They controlled the wholesale market for the county. When the young man's cotton was weighed, the gin man said 1500 pounds. The scale said 1800 pounds. 

The young man considered his situation at length right there on the spot. He decided not to burn down the gin. He decided not to shoot the gin man. He would never pick cotton again. Instead he left for the city the next day and had not returned until the death of my last grandmother about forty years later. 

We drove by the gin several miles across the river. The man, no longer young, was wary of the local police. That seemed out of character for him. He was angry that the place still made him nervous and he didn't want to be around. He knew the whole county to be corrupt and there was the gin, just off the road still with the name of the gin family in white letters on the roof. His breathing became short and he told me the story as I sped up the car heading towards the airport. He couldn't be out of this place soon enough and hoped never to come again.

I've taken that story to be the story of many thousands of men. It is the story for me of the origins of the Great Migration, and it is the story of those who moved beyond and those who stayed behind. 

Central Parking

It took me about three hours to appreciate Central Park in three ways I really never had before. It was a good day.

Item 1: Cycling & Benching
Just across from the Tavern on the Green the busy bike path has a great deal fewer rollerbladers than when I last got here on a regular basis, circa 1994. I cannot tell you what a singularly purifying impact that has on my estimate of Central Park. It is a treasure slightly beyond reckoning. It shows something about my twisted psyche that I think Osama would have been a damned sight more clever to hit the park than the towers. I took in a wash of humans and noticed several things about New York that seem new but that's just me.

First of all, I think NYC has become the capitol of Men Pushing Strollers. For the past ten years or so, I have been shouting out to dads anywhere out in the son walking with their offspring. Hey Dad! I know the joy of that exercise, but these newbs are a bit too much for me. A backpack or a frontpack? Yeah, that's the way to do it. And I can even go with the jogging deally with the three big pram wheels, but the standard stroller? Sorry, but the man card is called.  

And an equal percentage are walking the small dogs. Hoboken and the Upper West Side are pug central and miniature bulldog central. Just once I would have liked to have seen a Jack Russell, but no. So I'm just wondering what the hell is going on here, and I never got the answer. What I did get was the dude with both the stroller and the dog. Oh the humanity. 

I guess I just have to give props to the old men (just 15 years my senior) sitting on the bench next to me reading the NYTimes old school style - the two of them sitting side by side open to the same page discussing the stories.  

Item 2: Vollyball & Sheep
The Sheep Meadow was right behind me, and across in the distance I could see volleyball courts. Since I was wearing shorts, I decided to see if the players had improved any since '94. What in fact has happened is that they have mutated the game. It's street volleyball of an odd variety.  

The ball is bouncy and since I could only get into one game, I didn't have enough time to adjust. My sets and serves were off. They play let serves and rally point scoring to 21. We played fours on the asphalt except there was me, the fifth. I never got a good hit, but punched a few tight balls and managed a number of fine digs, but my whole timing was off. Plus I was wearing my glasses and couldn't move quite as quickly as I wanted. It made me mad. I want to get into perfect shape just to show these cranks a few things. So I suppose I have that mission in front of me again.

Item 3: The Ramble
It's hard to imagine that I have never been, but it's true. Maybe it was closed when I first started coming. My favorite spot had been a rock outcropping over near the Belvedere Castle with a great view of the Beresford Building. But that has been replaced by all the simple wonderment the Ramble offers within a city of concrete canyons. Yes you've heard the metaphor before. It still functions, as an eternal human constant loves the garden near the bricks. 

What a perfect romance. Fountains, boats, paths. Aww.

 

News & Notes for a Lazy Sunday

There is so much to talk about, now that I have come back from Germany. But I'm taking it light this weekend whilst I get back on a normal schedule and unjetlag myself.

My General Impression of Europeans
Their Slice is much smaller. Their infrastructure for that Slice is very cozy, but the members of that Slice are prepared for the worst. However, they have no illusions about their ability to hole up and survive and are thus grasshoppers wishing fervently that their winters of war never come. So far, the wishful thinking is working. I think they think that they are very civilized to the point of decadence, and having survived that before, are not peculiarly hesitant to admit that decadence. But they perhaps make some mistake in assuming that the immigrant impulse is to become civilized, a mistake anyone in the first world is likely to make - after all, our lives are so sumptuous. 

Everybody speaks English. But suggesting that's extraordinary is a mistake. After all, every contemporary operating system speaks FAT. 

Don't Call It Ground Zero
I wasn't really prepared to come up the PATH train at the WTC and have the emotional thing happen to me on the way to work. But there is something about the huge amount of air and light in the middle of Lower Manhattan, filled with the noise of construction that threw me a one-two punch Friday morning. I returned yesterday to take a few photos, and try to get closer, but half of that task was impossible. A stream of pilgrims will be making this journey for decades to come and there is no way to jump the lines. 

What's going up is much greater than what fell down, and the bulk of the new 1 WTC, now over 80 stories tall and still under construction, has begun to dominate the skyline. What surprised me more than anything is how clearly and singularly it will stand and be seen straight down the axis of Washington Square Park so many miles away. 

I see the new World Trade Center in my mind's future eye, and I don't think I can ever look at it backwards again.

Thinking Too Much About Europe

This time next week, I will be in the town of Freiburg in the Baden-Württemberg state of Germany. I'm there on business to learn a new suite of software that our team will be selling, but I'm a bit overwhelmed about going. It has been quite some time since I've been over to Europe and it strikes me that I'm obsessing a bit.

One reason is that I am going to have to take a train from Zurich over to Freiburg, and I always feel awkward on trains when I'm ecumbered by baggage. Nothing spells tourist like luggage on a commuter train. I have no idea how many people commute this route, and then again it will be on a Sunday... OMG do they even run on Sundays?

The problem is, ich matte gern ein Gepackschliessfach. Well now that I can say it, it doesn't seem so bad. And I'm going to be trying to get this locker for my huge bag on 11.09.11. It's freaking me out. 

Anyway I keep thinking about how much German I should bother to learn, what to where, what to eat, what to say about Angela Merkel, what to say about football, Greece, Obama.. But the thing that's freaking me out the most is that I'm not going to have much connectivity. AT&T is going to bone me to the tune of 50 bucks for 125MB of data. 

Was kann ich tun?

 

Cow Poke

Spent all day yesterday tagging, branding, fixing and inoculating cattle.  Just wow.

Mercury in Retrograde

We had a power outage this morning onsite. A thoughtful gent tells me that this might be related to Mercury being in Retrograde, which will continue to be the case until 8/26. I have seen enough systems to know that sometimes a dumb explanation is better than none at all, and immaterial causality is better than explicitly wrong causality. So I have begun to pepper my vocab with phrases like 'swing a dead chicken' and 'the plate in my head' more often. And even though I did buy a nice I Ching generator for my iPad, never have I considered astrology.

But do you remember this?

 

Wow. I know every lyric. And I used to swim in that soup as a teen. Incredible.

The Man With The Camera

He sat at the table next to us, looking to be about 56 years of age, with a new Canon digital camera on a bold black strap. His hair was thinning but not quite grey. He was of average height and wore a pale yellow polo shirt and sneakers. He didn't belong at this California beach, and he kept staring at the viewfinder.

You could see his cell phone in its belt holster. It was the most noticeable thing about his hips. He was armed with the technology. But he did not aim and shoot. He did not send or receive any signals. He merely an air of hesitant confidence, like the driver of a new 1967 Cadillac who had never had power steering before. Empowered. 

I look at men and women and imagine their histories, especially the older men and women. 

The Asian woman in dark blue shorts walked talking with her Caucasian friends. Her legs were stout but beginning to lose their firmness, and her bangs were now more grey than black. She canted her head at an angle that seemed puzzled that they weren't hearing what she was saying. She was a fifth wheel on an automobile that had lost its pizazz which only made her more their equal than she ever was in her younger days. 

The multi-million dollar houses along the Strand have a studied kind of clutter. The grizzled old man who sits staring could be the father of the owner although he looks like he was just rescued from the gutter and hastily cleaned up. There was resignation in his eyes barely following the joggers. He could be jaded beyond the ordinary world of the beachcombers, or he could be hung over, or he could be the owner. There's no guarantee that a conversation with him would yield any greater knowledge of anything. He was just one of the few privileged to be welcomed on the deck, and he didn't have any reason to say anything more. He was there, everyone else was not.

--

Everyone rests on laurels. Sometimes it's difficult to belive they are earned by acts of greatness this foggy morning on the beach. Everyone has their little crutch that gets them near to the sand. The tourists had their ITALIA shirts and colors. The girls volleyball team had their engagement. The Six Man teams had their warmup exercises started and stopped by the command of a shaken cowbell. 

It's a free country and so many people are literate and diversely employed that there is no discernable order in their social intercourse. We seem impossible to judge.

Franklin Canyon

Yes this is Los Angeles.

The Old Man Statement

I rented a red car today because my black one is broken. But I didn't want the red one, I wanted the white one. The white one was in need of an oil change. The man behind the counter figured that I wanted the white one, given the choice, because the red attracts cops. I wasn't thinking about cops in particular, but being an old man in general.

You see, I've done pretty much all the things I wanted to do.

I find it intriguing still to be low-key while still maintaining many of my hunter's instincts, and over the past several years it has become something of an ingrained habit. But sometimes it's useful to remind myself and others where I have been to become so peaceful.  

White water rafting, rock climbing, surfing, water skiing, jet skiing, skiing, snowboarding, skateboarding, cycling, scuba diving, paintball, racqetball, motorcycle street racing... hmm.. it doesn't sound like such a big list now that I start writing it down. I've flown a single engine plane, hiked to the top of Mt Whitney, wrecked my motorcycle a couple times only to discover my broken kneecap 20 years later. I made a tandem dirt bike, gone parasailing, faced a rattlesnake withing striking distance and danced with Rosie Perez. I've been on television. I've been on radio. I've been to London, Milan and Paris and all over America. 

Two things I always wanted to do but never quite got around to is learning to ride a unicycle and getting a black belt in aikido. I've never fired a sniper rifle and I haven't driven faster than 140mph. I have forgotten most of my bucket list, and I'm pretty sure that I destroyed my evil one. But now I'm a little curious as to where I might have kept a backup.

But there's the other stuff too. I had chicken pox, measles, mumps, rubella, impetigo, and a textbook case of pityriasis rosea. I've had probably six different kinds of knock-you-on-your ass flu following each move to a different part of the country. I've been detained by cops about 30 times for no good reason. I've been in the middle of an armed robbery complete with flying bullets, several bar fights and I almost drowned on vacation in Hawaii. I've had my nose broken by a wild pitch and got bit in the face by a German Shepherd. I crashed a minibike into a chainlink fence and fell down a concrete staircase like an idiot. I dropped a car jack on my big toe that put a crease in my toenail that took 18 months to grow out and I've driven three BMWs into the ground. 

I have saved a drowning kid, been nominated Outstanding Young Man of America, and been elected National Finance Chair of NSBE. Twice. I sang in my church's Gospel Choir and once soloed at the LA Cathedral. I've been on the Dean's List of every school I ever attended and made National Merit Semifinalist. I stopped a bicycle thief. 

I had an opportunity to be a training master of a crazy new product called Visual Basic. But I didn't want to live in some town called Redmond WA. And when Florida A&M University offered me a four year undergraduate scholarship, I said 'who'? I could have gone into business with my cousin who is now CEO of a company worth God only knows how many millions. 

But I married the right woman, and never had a cavity until 2 years ago. 

I have said on several occasions that I feel ready to die. Not that I want to, by any means, but that if I did, my only regret would be not seeing my kids and their families become what they will. But here's the thing for now, and I like remembering it:

a> focus
b> fiscal discipline
c> commit myself to do the most of the unique things only I can do. 

And it's the last one that makes it all feel right. I'm on the verge of being annoyingly uninterested in people's opinions of me. That's what happens when I read historical fiction. 

 

The Luxury of Utility

It may take some time before I finish my Go Bags. I have decided to get my biggest piece of ruggedized equipment a little early. I figured it would be Christmas before I got the Beast but apparently the Transporter wasn't concerned. I had gotten to the point at which I found myself making excuses about getti>ng from Point A to Point B regarding the increasingly sorry state of my previous car's condition. But it decided for me. So I bought this on Carmageddon weekend when nobody left the house, and I got a pretty good deal. I forgot that this puppy had suicide doors, and I got a pretty decent package all in all for a certified used. Still, I bought a little bit more car than I originally wanted. On the whole, I'm very satisfied. The ride is way smooth, and it bounces nicely when you take it over curbs. The stereo plays MP3s and the subwoofer woofs pretty deeply. It's not the 4x4 but it does have the compass and inclinometer package, the differential lockup and the 400W 110 outlet. And cupholders!

The guys at Carson Toyota did a fine job. Chuma the sales guy was just my speed, and Nader the finance guy got me through that process with a minimum of pain - considering the dude at Wells Fargo who didn't get me butkis. So I suppose I will be charitable this week since I just raised my credit limit and did my part to stimulate the economy. I'll shutup about the Resident.

As you might expect, I am seeing yellow cars everywhere now.

The Narrative of the Frankfurt School

For those of you who don't know, this is the drug that Breitbart is high on. And while I haven't gotten a chance to meet a lot of my philosophical compatriots face to face, I suspect that many of the more thoughtful ones might have a course or two at Claremont in common.

I've been waiting for Bill Whittle to get his proper funding so as to not be under the financial thumb of PJTV or whatever the reason was for this video to only recently become freely available. This is one of his more inspired 13 minutes - which covers a lot of ground. You're not likely, I think, to see anything this good on television of any sort. Yet.

Declaration Entertainment is the new home of Whittle and he's taking a slightly different tack from what I've seen. He's getting better. And again this particular message is the one that strikes home for former Progressives like me who were never quite comfortable with all of the Commies who show up for the MLK Day Parade. 

Interestingly enough, the Frankfurt School was exactly where I was pointed when I wanted to understand and make more sense of everything I had been trying to learn outside of my profession. And 'Critical Theory' is a category in this blog because it was the black critical theorists that I began reading back in '90 when I decided that being part of the Talented Tenth wasn't quite enough for me. Since it is Julyteenth I should expand on that a bit.

I can recall the day when, unlike just about every summer weekend before, I began wanting to enjoy the company of books to the company of my black yuppie compadres. I was at a pool party and a day or two before, I started reading Beloved by Toni Morrison. It was the first book by a black author that truly captivated me with its content and style. So much of what I had read before was so shallow by comparison - here finally was the intellectual level of black literature I had been searching for. As I had previously read Gloria Naylor's "Women of Brewster Place" and some others I forgot - I had been so embarassed. There seemed to be nothing to quench my thirst for art and literature above the level of BET, and I spent a lot of time and money looking for black highbrow culture. That Naylor had won a prize as one of the best American writers, I was more than disappointed. It was this kind of disappointment that was more indicative of my needs rather than Naylor's mediocrity. I began to head towards all things Asian, impressed as I was by the films of Kurosawa, the biography of Mishima, the philosophy of Sun Tzu, the manga of Otomo, the fiction of James Clavell and this chick named Maiko. At the same time, I was mightily impressed by both the Graywolf Annual on Multicultural Literacy and the original Cultural Literacy by E.D. Hirsch Jr. 

I was ending my 20s and I wanted more. I figured I had done quite enough of the buppie thing and it wasn't very satisfying. I wanted more than ski trips and a BMW. Well, I wanted those too, but also more. I wanted my black culture to be the ultimate black culture. And when I finally read Toni Morrison, and I finally saw The Colored Museum by George C. Wolfe, I began to see where it was. In fact there was something in academia, and I was introduced to the formal Critical Theorists through my associations with UCLA's black professoriate. So I read, in those days before Skip Gates had compiled the selections for the Norton Anthology, those considered on the leading edge of black scholarship Kimberle Crenshaw, Audre Lorde, Derrick Bell, bell hooks, Stephen L. Carter and the lord and master of all, my new hero Cornel West. It was Cornel West who finally gave me the understanding, at a philosophical level, what my American intellectual inheritance was. Without any idea that there was any substance to Conservative thought in America or Europe at all, I came to know the American Pragmatists through his survey, 'The American Evasion of Philosophy'.

Amidst the brain rot of Afrocentrism and the 50 page books of rabid bloviators like Juwanza Kinjufu and Francis Cress Welsing I came to the Progressive edge seeking Praxis.

Praxis is a specific kind of obedience that organizes itself around a social theory of reality in order to implement in the society the freedom, inherent in faith. If faith is the belief that God created all for freedom, then praxis is the social theory used to analyze what must be done for the historical realization of freedom. To sing about freedom and to pray for its coming is not enough. Freedom must be actualized in history by oppressed peoples who accept the intellectual challenge to analyze the work for the purpose of changing it. -- James Cone, Speaking the Truth

That was something I could sink my teeth into because Evasion showed me without question that all the philosophical basis for 'freedom' and 'liberty' were the All-American ideas of Emerson, Dewey, DuBois, Mills and Neibuhr and further that there was nothing other than pedantic epistemological nonsense coming out of Europe. I was basically in thrall to this mindset until my son was born and I had to get real. 

But there were cracks in the armor I could perceive before the beginning of the end. The post-modern deconstructionist babble was its own worst enemy. I understood Eco's semiotics well enough to tell that a lot of baffling bullshit was being sold. So when I finally got the recommendation to follow up on Adorno and company (not surprisingly from a friend at Columbia U.) I had just about had enough. Morrison had ironically showed me that good writing was better than coherent Left theory, so as she went off the deep end of suffering and started Playing in the Dark, I was ready to walk away from it all, which I finally did in about 96 in the midst of my Boohabian playground. The last blackified book I (sorta) read was 'Volunteer Slavery', which although it was about Corporate America, also pretty much summed up too much of black writing's intellectual direction. When I moved to the South and started reading 'Pushed Back To Strength', after about eight years of reading, I was pretty much done. 

I settled on reading James Baldwin as the last of my black literature knowing it would return me to the subjects of love and integrity. At least those were the books I wanted to read of Baldwin's. And having done so, I abandoned all of that Progessive philosophy to make money and raise a family in Atlanta, the black mecca. But the last of my high energy New York intellectual pursuits led me to the source and all I could hear was that Marx didn't get everything right, but the only way to really understand capitalism is to master Marxist thought. Therefore, Frankfurt School. Which is kinda weird considering that I actually wanted to get an MBA from Columbia and become a quant programmer on Wall Street. 

I was quite fortunate to have made my first six figure year in 1995 as an independent consultant. And that year I learned what it felt like to walk around a city in a suit because I wanted to, on a day I didn't have to work because I didn't feel like it. I was my own boss. The seeds were sown and the practicality of being that kind of breadwinner set me up for my conservative conversion several years hence. But I had stepped outside one main stream of The Narrative when I left New York. 

Bokeh and Chromatic Aberration

So I've fallen out of love with the Fuji X100 and in love with the Olympus E-P3, but I still have a long way to go in figuring out how I justify spending 900 bucks on a camera. Things were much easier when the kids were little and you could satisfy them with small toys. But today my daughter is thinking photography will be her thing. She collects photos and graphics from all over the web and posts them to her blog, so I want to help develop in her a sophisticated eye. But I think it's going to be expensive.

We went to Samy's in Culver City last weekend and found for a modest $150 the great film camera bodies of old. Nikon and Canon 35mm SLRs. I reminesced. The guy behind the counter didn't take my bait - he wasn't in the mood to talk technical about the differences between this and that camera. Basically, if you're not going to spend 1000 bucks your choices are pretty limited and you can't expect a 60 year old man to give a snort. Within 20 seconds of me opening my mouth, he ran off into the back and brought back the $500 Canon Rebel Jr or some such, with all the lines on his face saying, OK just buy this now. 

Oh no, I'm not going to buy it now, I'm just wanting to put my hands on the thing so I can connect that to my online shopping and research experience, I shot back with the lines on my face. You are inferior to Amazon, that is unless you talk to me and explain the minute technical differences. But the fact of the matter is that we went in cold and had no real sophisticated questions. We were just nimrods wasting everybody's time. But now I'm armed with two technical terms that I can throw around and be a further jerk the next time I go. 

Bokeh is the characteristic of items in frame in the secondary focus area. Good bokeh gives such objects a soft blur, bad bokeh gives them an edgy blur. Chromatic aberration (is when) the edges of objects look prismified. 

In my mind's eye, my daughter is staring at negatives on a light table with one of those magnifiying jobbies that look like an upside down shot glass. In reality I can sense the need for a $1500 monitor for her new Apple computer and a ghastly amount of expensive software, on top of the 900 bucks for the camera I'm buying for me but allowing her to use. I can't put a price on the experience of passing along what I know about photgraphy, but everybody I need to buy something from can, and they will. 

I watched a couple videos which have completely demystified what goes on in a darkroom. I cannot believe how boring that is. It took 20 minutes to kill a lifetime romance with red lights and mysterious liquid-filled trays. Now that's done, I'm all about the digital. (Sigh)

Ordinary Patriots

There's one new thought that I had on this Fourth of July. That is that with as many cameras and recording devices we have, it's going to be difficult for anyone to forget how we lived.

Big Mother

Over the past couple of weeks I have been indulging the warrior sentiment. The last book I finished was the new SEAL Team Six memoir of Wasdin from Georgia. Just before that was the extraordinary King of the Vagabonds and now I'm a third way through the latest Tom Clancy. Last night I watched True Grit. All of this is making me wonder what the point of feminism is in our civilization. 

True Grit has one of the most extraordinary characters I've seen, Mattie Ross a fourteen year old girl out to avenge the murder of her father. Smart as a whip, crafty and headstrong she is a gal of grit herself. But in each of her bold actions in the Wild West, there is a power behind her words that come indirectly from the barrel of a gun. She threatens with a lawyer. She employs with money. She understands her claims. True Grit does a great deal of justice to the genre of the Western which,  I think my generation never learned. We have outsourced the word of the warrior to Bruce Lee and his descendants, the Kung Fu film. Steven Segal never made it. Jet Li did. And so what we mistake for something Asian, courage, honor and determination is something we had in Westerns all along. I didn't quite know it until I started watching the best John Wayne films, the finest being Red River, and in this, the Coen Brothers remake, the workings of honor and deceit are sparkling. 

Mattie Ross was not made for the trail, nor for hunting down fugitives in Indian territory. She was made for exemplifying and enforcing those edifications our civilization and our human nature demands. Sobriety, honesty, thrift, industry. 

We have made another mistake. That is to call the tyrannical forces that array to stifle our freedoms in masculine terminology. Our enemy is not Big Brother, but Big Mother. In every way that we might conceive as artfully as the Coen Brothers have presented, a woman child leading two bickering bounty hunters on a mission of deadly revenge, we are reminded of the tyranny of order, logic and justice which is so often pursued against our lazy wills. There is no romance in it. It is as searingly compelling as the demand of a child for protection against monsters. 

There is something useful in us, I suspect, that resists duty. I am reminded of Aaron from Titus Andronicus. The world is upside down often enough that slacking is equally often the best protector of our souls. Moral discipline is exhausting and its rewards are inconsistent. We too should be so inconsistent so as not to grow completely weary of seeking those rewards. 

It has been said that a soldier's experience of war can be accurately characterized as long periods of interminable boredom interspersed with moments of extreme terror. That sounds about right. And so too it is not romantic. We have been inundated with myths of warrior mentalities - of constant vigilance. Let us put that myth to bed. There is nothing for it. Constant vigilance is the enemy. It is paranoia. It is Big Mother.

Instead let us be the periodically brilliant but generally sated lion. Let us enjoy our rest and let things go to shit while we snooze. We'll wake up and clean up, but now we relent. I think it is more manly. 

I'm on vacation this week. 

Dimensions of Heroism

It has been some time since I read Iron John. I ought to re-read it before I finish this essay, but I'm impatient. 

You see we went to see Green Lantern and we had to decide if he was a better hero than Spiderman. I can't say for sure, but I have some feelings on the subject. Since we've been inundated with comic book movies, we sooner or later have to choose. Courtney brought up the subject, and Chris had the best answer. 

From the movie perspective, the original Spiderman set the standard. But the greater standard is the videogame drama. In that regard, the greatest hero is probably going to have to be Shepherd from the Mass Effect universe. To go into all the reasons why is an essay in itself. Suffice it to say that Halo's Master Chief lacks an heroic arc. He's just the ultimate soldier - he has no weakness to overcome, he's all duty and capability and humble arrogance, a human wrecking ball out exterminating bad guys. 

Green Lantern is a more likeable Thor. Thor has got this ridiculous Puritan streak. We Americans don't like our gods ravenous. Hal Jordan, the human Green Lantern has a fear to overcome, it being fear itself, but the movie didn't do justice to that narrative. I kinda like the ledgend of having the universe split up into 3600 sections, each to be protected by some kinda alien freak allied with the Corps, and of course I dig the idea of the triumph of Will over Fear. I think it was a very appropriate lesson for the younglings. But.

Batman is a better hero than both Green Lantern and Superman because he puts himself more at risk. Spiderman only has to deal with his apathy and small mindedness, but he learned that lesson the hard way in episode one. Keeping a friendship and a girlfriend in episode two was just too cheesy, but it did make for a very good movie. Oh yeah and Harry Potter.. You know, he's still just a kid and as much as anyone can find him admirable does he really scale? I mean from a British author, you'd think he'd compare favorably to Churchill, but you have to say he's still just a kid - what world does Voldemort actually threaten?

So that dimension came into things. Batman doesn't venture beyond Gotham and after all what is the real purpose of being Clark Kent? Maybe he actually has a thing for Jimmy Olsen. Silver Surfer on the other hand, now he has to deal with very large enemies on a planetary scale. 

In the end, Chris and I had to agree that it was Xavier, the head of the X-Men who deserved the honor. He rescued kids, trained them to use their powers for good against a world that doesn't appreciate them, that in fact hates them. In addition he must keep them from the temptations of Magneto. Yep. I think Chris gets it. 

All that said, we pretty much agreed that it would be the most fun to be Ironman. 

Getting Truth's Pants On

"A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on."
- Winston Churchill

I was explaining to Jake the other evening. Explaining to Jake is one of the world's great pleasures. Why? Because Jake gets it. If I have any claim to intelligence, it is only that I am recognized by other people that I find intelligent, and I don't have to wear my sociable skin. That counts for Brinkman and it counts for Ro when I'm talking about systems. It counts for Jimi and it counts for Courtney when I'm talking about people and character. It counts for Benzon and Yllona when I'm talking about music. It counts for my man in Florida when it comes to power and the evil that men do. And it counts for Gerard most of the time when I'm talking Epicurean. But I never get to talk to all of these people enough. I'm spindrift without an institution to gather me mateys and so I drift towards that 20th century sulk, the mind it its garrett.

These days I get weary. But I was explaining to Jake that I don't have an elevator pitch for my Peasant Theory, and I'm not sure I've ever required myself to make it more clear. So tonight's essay is to explain all that and update where I am.

I quit The Barbershop because I kept feeling 2007, and I still do. 2007 was when gas prices went ballistic and I was commuting over 100 miles a day but not really caring because I made that much money. 2007 was when I seriously considered buying a Hummer because it was just that audacious. But then I suddenly stopped wanting to be audacious and actually become sensitive to how much I exhibited various forms of lifestyle bling. It occured to me that it is a sensible thing for a rich man to drive a pickup truck when times are hard for the working man. It is a lesson I learned from observing the Christianity of a man who orders Budweiser in a French restaurant. Even though I prefer to remain a lot cooler than he, I took the lesson to heart. And so when it came to the Barbershop, I realized after a bit, that there were people who needed to advance their career in media more than I needed a cool high profile second life. I didn't really want to half-ass a media spotlight and so I couldn't see myself arguing just for the sake of argument - at least not in the format I was afforded.

But I also realized that I didn't quite care as much, and I had to get back to my own basics.

Peasant Theory came about primarily from the realization that war is always with us. And when you realize that, then you come to appreciate that you ultimately will have to choose sides. Whom do you expect to defend your life, and that of your family in wartime? In lesser degrees we all have that problem. Who cares what you know? So who will defend all the truth you possess? Do you even have a purpose and a reason to get to the truth? Does anybody even care if you know the truth? These are the fundamental questions I think most Americans do not ask themselves because we are cozy enough in a nation without starvation or slavery. But then there was 2007, and I had to start thinking about good reasons to do without. 

So Peasant Theory is about the difference between the free man who knows enough truth to recognize those fragile things upon which his freedom depends and the other man who doesn't think enough about the truth to realize his position in society is completely leveraged. The first man understands the conditions under which his flexibility is compromise, the second man beleives that flexibility is a skill. The second man is a peasant because he is always at someone's service.

Let me get into that for a moment. If you've read much of the writing of people who lived under monarchs, you recognize how obeisance to the feudal hierarchies establish one's station in the lives of yore. You had to believe, of course, that your leige served Truth and God. So to bend one's ways to one's lord was, hopefully to bend toward The Lord of Lords, etc. And this is all the honor afforable. All honor came from living the truth of one's masters. And before the Reformation and the Revolution this was all most of humanity knew. Feudal. 

Today we are largely feudal, because we have a slimy layer of corruption in the Baby Boom Generation and they haven't loosened their grip. So it is no surprise that all American journalists want to be Woodward & Bernstein because all American politicians want to be Nixon and Kennedy and as David Brooks so astutely noted, they're all bush league observers of the Wealthy who get away with everything. So the pols and journos establish the narrative of American life, bullshitting the masses who still tend to believe, unlike more wary Europeans, that their betters are actually running a meritocracy or anything actually resembling an ethical McMansion. 

You can take this as a roundabout way of saying that there is some fraction of Obama's aims that make sense. On the other hand he shouldn't have won because he really had no idea... more on that another time. Having gotten into it for the moment, this is what you should take away. All who follow do not follow truth. Your station in life, borrowing from Neil Simon, isn't all you think it is, American. And that is because you're not as American as you believe yourself to be. That is precisely because you are a follower. You are an urban dweller, skill seller and you buy your clothes off the rack and your food in a box.

--

It wasn't a great disappointment to find that the American Right is full of half-assed reactionaries. It took me only two years to find, love, tolerate and get sick of Hugh Hewitt. But Dennis Prager is as wise as he has ever been, and Dennis Miller is still the man. So when I consider the fact that I probably will not read Mamet nor Breitbart's books, there was a point some time ago when I knew the moment would arrive. I would understand the American Left and the American Right and become disgusted with both, but not in the way that Dawkins' Dorks are self-righteously disgusted with all religions. They can only be that way because they are peasants following Dawkins. Peasants follow and they mark their progress ll the time. Peasants must always have something to prove, which is why they are only half fully human, and why they pay attention to the Kardashians and the Hiltons. The Wealthy get away with everything - they represent our understanding of the power of Will, something peasants do not possess. Peasants possess the power of Want. 

Peasants Want to be like Mike. Peasants Want to get into Harvard. Peasants Want world peace. Peasants Want meritocracy. 

'Power to the people' should hereby be pronounced. Markets to the Peasants. Peasants never get any real power; they wouldn't know what to do with it. Peasants only know how to get what it is they want, such as they are allowed and or encouraged to do so by their superiors. If you are unclear about how this operates, then just stop and listen to the Narrative of American pols and journos. The 'answer' is out there somewhere. And somebody clever will tell you what it is for a small fee, and then you will Want it and you'll find a way to get some small fraction of it (or the designer version if you are an affluent peasant). 

Aside from all that, Peasants don't want any real power anyhow, because that would necessitate killing people. When you understand this, you recognize that you are a peasant because you want your Lord to do your killing for you. Remember what I said? War is always with us. All you get to do is choose sides, or by degrees, choose who will defend all you have come to be with your flexible version of the truth. 

--

So it has been a couple years since I was on the air discovering the hard way how much attaches to the various Peasant cults of Wanting. Nothing seems quite so lame today as Will I Am's "Yes We Can" video. Go ahead. Watch it. I dare you. It's not about what anybody can do, it's all about what peasants want. That's the bottom line.. you have to wait and listen to it, after all the poofy phrases. Hope for change that the peasants will actually get more of what they Want. Peasants always can get what they want, but it's never enough. What never changes is that true power requires that you kill your enemies and frighten your rivals into submission. It's a lesson that peasants stubbornly refuse to learn and that is why all they ever have is hope. Hope that they can get enough so that the wanting goes away. 

 

Can you smell the paradox? I mean all humans desire something. But only peasants organize their Wants and pile them all into one giant Grinchbag of narrative. Or policy, or manifesto or declaration or some other whereas filled gripe with fancy dropcaps. The Wealthy get away with everything and they don't bother to write it down for posterity. 

There are in America, Republican and Democrat cults of Wanting and they keep offering us miniature Lords and Ladies for us to idolize and subsequently serve. They're not doing us any favors. They're all just trying various methods of Acting Presidential without getting caught up in a Gate of some slimy sort. But really that's all peasants want is that endless churn. A peasant cannot stand to be reminded that there are free men out there... so watch your back.

--

So there it is, basically.  It takes a bit of precarious hopping around on one foot to get truth's pants on, because a peasant will run out of the house in a New York minute with the latest new song on their lips. It's a catchy tune not because it is, but because you want it to be. 

Flippin' Fathers

Thanks for the Prayers

Impatience & Wisdom

By the time I finish writing this, it will officially be my fiftieth birthday. I got a card from my aunt. And so I know there is a lot more for me to do.

I took a longer than usual look in the mirror this morning on the last day of my 40s and I recognize that I have accomplished something in my life. That thing, which is elusive and becomes more solid only as I reflect and write it down, has something to do with a kind of impatience with the present. 

When I was 21 and reading Tracy Kidder's Soul of a New Machine, a piece of doggerel sprang to life when I thought about my father. Live for tomorrow, today we are dead, a father to his young son once said. The idea became something of a principle and I believed in the future as much as any young man grown up on Heinlein, Bradbury and Asimov could. I saw a future, but not this one. Still, it was real to me, and foreign to the world. I never realized how much I had to make it happen as an exercise of will. I wasn't raised to think of myself in that way. 

I used to believe that integrity was its own reward. I still do, but mostly because I have it and have decided to love that about myself. But a part of me knows better. The part of me that is fearless when not sober. That part of me that is defiant and stubborn and disrespectful. I forgot the word they used to beat it out of me in elementary school, back when I was reading third grade books at the age of five. I didn't ask to be a smartass, I just was and thought everybody wanted to be smart. Smart for me just means spending more time thinking than playing around. Anyone who listens to me speak knows that my brain doesn't work very swiftly, it just knows dark alley shortcuts that most people are afraid to walk down. Isolation is what you get for being a smartass. If you keep it up, you might forget how ordinary people think.  

Nobody ever convinced me that I could do as much as I have done. I thought I would have to be a rebel just to get respect. I thought I would work twice as hard and get half as far. I thought nobody would or could ever understand what I've been through. It turns out that those were the very myths that held me back, and for what is still more than half my life I didn't care what people thought and didn't think I could ever convince people anything, except with science maybe. I was impatient to get on with the future. 

I remember that I never did my homework. I just wanted to know. I didn't want to write a whole bunch on stuff down just to prove I knew. Ask me the question and I'll answer. See? I know. Homework is a waste of time. I could be knowing more. I didn't study, I just needed somebody who actually knew what the hell they were talking about to explain it to me. I get it. I always get it. What I don't get, and never got, is how to keep track of the collective irrationality of what people actually desire. I call it irrationality because I've got a lot of nerve.

So that is where I am today. I've done most of the doing people ever expected me to do. I've been looking to jump ahead and set up a toll plaza on the road everybody is going to figure out they must travel in order to progress.  But I can't reckon that so well. As you get older and more 'set in your ways' you lose the ability to see things from other people's point of view. It doesn't mean that you're unsympathetic, but that it's mentally difficult not to take those dark alley shortcuts that your experience brings. You have to guess and imagine what you would think like if you didn't know what you know.

For that, I just look at my kids. 

So I hope that what I do for them is what the world needs. Other than that I have to read books, and then I hit the wall. There's only so much you can know. A human being becomes something else out of balance by knowing too much. You then need to control too much. Nobody's jokes are funny and you only laugh at the truly perverse. 

What I want is to live in truth, to never have to lie to myself or anyone else. I want to be wise and honorable. That means I have to figure out a way to be gracious in the presence of people who don't know what I know. It means letting other people say what they will say and do what they will do. It means avoiding their implosions and explosions. Maybe I live like an old farmer, because I'm not particularly addicted to power and I haven't schemed enough to get me some. 

When I had my first child, somehow I intuitively knew that I would have to stop being a bohemian social critic. I knew there was a class of books that I had to put down and a new set I needed to start reading. I now have a similar sense that I have to watch my health, prepare for disaster, and say words over the dead. I will work another 15 years, I figure. I will downsize my life. I will render myself into certain perfections of character and behavior. 

I am living in that unimaginable future and I live in the moment, never expecting much more than what is. I consider myself slightly paranoic, preparing to keep a cool head and steady hand in the face of disaster. I take comfort in small blessings knowing that things fall apart. 

Today I was surprised. Somehow the bank made an error and deposited 20x my paycheck in my account. I'm not going to fly to Brazil, but figure out how to correct the mistake. I am becoming less impatient with the ways of the world. Perhaps life itself embodies justice. 

Gil-Scott Heron: Dead

There is a poem by Nikki Giovanni that sums up in about 25 lines everything I think about black consciousness. I could write about it for years, but the essential thing to say doesn't take more than 30 seconds. There are lyrics in a song by Lionel Ritchie that sums up my confidence that I would grow to be the man I expected to be despite all the odds. There's a song by the Isley Brothers that puts me immediately at peace every time I hear it. If I didn't know better I might say that everything I needed to know about black culture could be summed up that way. 

Once upon a time I didn't know better, and in those days it was important for me to find a way to express every emotion and cultural concept in my shared black language. I called it, as I finished my last experiments in it The Well-Wrapped Universe. I would never have to use any metaphors besides those invented in the 'hood to communicate my humanity to all of humanity - and as Earth Wind & Fire said, "If you don't understand me, it's your fault."

I knew I was being selfish even as I over-exaggerated self-referentially in post-modern blackness as a 'Boohabian persistent black object'. But it was still charming and fun in the 90s. I felt the beginning of the end when I found myself, a bit to my surprise, across in Europe trying to make myself understood. I knew I couldn't be so persistent when I found things I was looking for in Borges' poetry and in the lamentations of Chinua Achebe and spiral tales of Carlos Fuentes. Yeah, I was that multicultural. 

The problem with Gil Scott Heron is the same problem as with John Cheever. It's the same problem as with Issac Hayes and with Jesus Christ Superstar. He's too damned specific. It's like saying New Orleans and then humming When the Saints Go Marching In. You can't get away from the fact that Gil-Scott Heron wrote 'Angel Dust', 'Whitey on the Moon' and 'The Revolution Will Not Be Televised'. You might want to think of Curtis Mayfield in some broader context than the Superfly Soundtrack. You might want to try to extend the cultural significance of The Wizard of Oz, but it's still always "I'll get you my pretty, and your little dog too". And Vince Geraldi will always be Linus and Lucy and Mikey will always be Life Cereal and Wil Wheaton will always be Ensign Crusher. Forever.

Issac Hayes is the big bald black man who made the ungh sounds of the 70s like a natural man was supposed to. And Jesus Christ Superstar made all pop culture Jesus freaks and hippies approachable for a moment. But what I didn't know when I was 13 years old was that those symbols wouldn't last forever and explain more about the world than just that moment. It was hard for me to accept that Kwai Chang Caine's grasshopper lessons wouldn't serve me long after the show was canceled - especially when I learned that role was supposed to be for Bruce Lee. 

And I began to become resentful of all the things I knew to be true but only for my Well Wrapped Universe. I began to hate the fact that the world couldn't catch the flavor and it didn't want to study. That there is what Gerald Early calls lure and loathing. But I played in all sections of the orchestra, and mastered all the languages and idioms. 

Still. I was prepared to hear that Marvin Gaye's 'Whats Going On' was not the greatest album ever recorded. I was prepared to hear that Alex Haley's Roots was not the greatest American story ever told. But it was hard to give up the arcane gems. It was hard to have to explain The Last Poets. It was difficult to remind people that LA had KDAY, KGFJ, KJLH and KACE, each a different flavor of black radio. And as time went by, it was disappointing to explain Yellow Back Radio, you know, and break it down. It was painful to read High Cotton alone. It was ridiculously hard to give up on explaining George C. Wolfe and so now I explain the real killer. 

The real killer is when, above and beyond the Well Wrapped Universe you find superior examples. It's like dissing Michael Jackson in 1982 when John Landis was just discovering him.

So I look back on Gil Scott Heron and what can I say? He was deep to me as a teenager when I sat in the back of the bus and recited him and Richard Pryor like the perverse psuedo badass I was, or pretended to be. When the world was ruled by The Funk, and when Issac Hayes said ungh, you said ungh back. When you looked with admiration at the matron in the white uniform and 14 inch arms who stood in the back of the church and swung a mean tambourine; when the hardest working man in show business dropped to one knee and the sweat on his forehead let you know he was The Godfather; when all you had to do was say Aretha and everybody shutup. That was the day for Gil Scott Heron and all the ghetto poets of America. When Flip Wilson was preaching in The Church of What's Happenin' Now. When the New York Times used slang words to let the reader know that a Negro was speaking. That's when Gil Scott Heron's message to the masses was a thing to hold in reverence. When everybody had the expectation that some wino had more humanity in him than the President, when hippy dippy weathermen were funny, when you were excited to see Goldie Hawn  pop out of a little door and say 'sock it to me'. That was then. 

It's all so specific that unless you're over 40 years old, you probably have no idea of half the things I'm talking about. Just like I didn't get Bugs Bunny jokes about A ration cards or victory gardens or the aphrodesiac powers of nylon stockings until I went and studied. 

You can go and study Gil-Scott Heron, but his world is over. It's just taking up space in a part of my brain I don't use much any longer. His voice is coming out over the transistors of my old leather covered Federal radio on 1230 AM, hot times soulin' on the weekend, KGFJ.

A rat done bit my sister Nell
and Whitey's on the moon.
Her arms and legs began to swell
And Whitey's on the moon.  

There's some things you remember for which you'll never need Google. I'm prepared to accept those things only mean something to me, and only because it used to mean something to the me I used to be. That's what it means not to be televised. 

The Jughead

I'm going to a Prince concert tomorrow and I'm thinking about my favorite albums and songs of his. As I upload my collection of almost 3GB of Prince music to Amazon's Cloud Player I happened across The Jughead.

This was, without a doubt, the very last dance song I ever loved. By loved I mean, went out to a club with the hope in my heart that the DJ would play it, and I could dance with that girl to its beats. It was an unrequited love, alas. Only my lonely bedroom walls of my Brooklyn apartment shared the tune with my soul. If you ask me the day the music died, it wouldn't be after Diamonds and Pearls - there was surely other music and there still is for me, but not for dancing. I remember standing somewhere in a packed Manhattan dance club shaking my head in shame when they started playing some character named Woody Wood destroying that song by Frankie Beverly. There was no more joy, only pain. It was 1992. It was the end.

It sounds incongruous when you play Jughead today. It's hard to remember when the hip lingo talked about 'kicking the jams' and 'low pro' was a flavorful description. Back in the day, people were still 'clocking freaks' on the dance floor, and the best rapper money could buy (as Prince did for that album with his band, The New Power Generation) still sounded something like Chuck D.  Even as I heard it the twentieth time at my lonely pad, I knew it was the last gasp of funky dance music. It felt like a last ditch by Prince himself hearing him say 'Get stupid!' and then passing the mic. 

But at least there was that bit of New World Afrikan flavor in it. Marbella was one of the shout out cities, as was Stockholm; a far cry from New York, Cackalacka and Compton. That was then. 

A Question of Evangelism

"Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men's blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency. Remember that our sons and grandsons are going to do things that would stagger us. Let your watchword be order and your beacon beauty."

I'm not going to be involved with the Runaway Slave thing today. An unfortunate series of events have conspired to keep me home working. And yet I am relieved to be in my hidey hole and not part of that thing which I think begs me to answer questions I'm not sure I have answers to.

It is part of my dilemma as a writer, that I am of a particular sort which defies explanation, except for those of my rivals and opponents who all feel confident that they've got my number. I have a love-hate obsession with describing myself and my purposes because I know them so well, and I fear others know them so tangentially. What am I doing here? Why can't I just do x? These are not questions I ask myself very often because I know the answers - it's just that I don't think anyone else wants to hear them.

Yesterday I went over to Booker Rising and read some of the comments that people over there have been making about what I write here. I have this oddment of conviction about myself that I acquired when I turned 30. I stopped qualifying my statements with 'IMHO' and just said what I meant, and let the counter arguments fall where they may, correcting myself as logic dictates. So I tell you what I really think, all of the time. The problem is, that's all it is. Whereas I think most people assume that I mean to tell other people how and what to think. I don't. I only presume that others might be doing what I do when I speak, which is give them the benefit of what makes sense to me. Still, when I say it, I don't mumble and I guess it sounds evangelistic.

I am quick to take correction when I am mistaken and to de-emphasize my conviction when I am wrong. These are not the qualities of what we tend to call 'Alpha Males'. The assumption, like the social prohibition of fat hairy guys in Speedos at the beach, that only certain types have any business speaking out in a non-subversive manner. So to hear me proclaim loudly some thing, and then to hear me disallow that speech on another occasion augers against the sort of heroism I gather people expect of one so bold. 

Which brings me to my relief.

At some point, I'm going to get out to meet Hindraker and Ponzi and other fellows at Claremont. In another life I was destined to attend college there, recruited as I was to the first coed class of Pitzer College in consideration of a Philosophy major with computer classes over at Mudd. It would have made a world of difference to me, I think in retrospect, and I would not be so much of the streets. On my credenza is the Rand Experts Guide 2010. I am open to the page with Eric V. Larson and I sit here with some consternation at the fact that I sat through a Meetup yesterday at Coco's in Manhattan Beach discussing our Afghanistan policy with people I know don't know our Afghanistan policy. When was the last time I read something by Eikenberry or Crocker on the matter? I hate forgetting. I hate not knowing. I hate spending time listening to people who don't know. 

But in the mean time there's this place I can walk up to, take a seat and be considered. It's called 'black Republican' and it is essentially meaningless because it is essentially derivative. I know that and I don't believe I can be convinced otherwise. For me to speak up on the matter, as welcome as I am to do so, comprises some element of compromise. That's because I'm not really seeking an audience. I'm not out to gather support for my position. I'm merely curious, and as usual, I'm saying what I say because I'm a writer. 

Of course that's not all there is to it, and it's not entirely under my control. But I have a conference call in 3 minutes, and I really have to go...

One Day of New Orleans Eats

 
 
Morning:

Carrot juice with ginger.

Bluebarry, Banana, Strawberry, Soy Milk Smoothie

Shrimp Creole Omlette

Bloody Mary

Grits & Hot Link

Biscuit with grape jelly

2 Glasses of water

--

Noon:

Pint of Milk

3 Beignets

Six Coors Beers

Soft Shell Crab Po Boy

--

Afternoon:

Two Cranberry & Vodka

Six BBQ Chicken Wings

--

Night:

Two Grey Goose Martinis

Glass of Chardonnay

3 Cornbreads

Fried Green Tomatoes

Roast Beef Po Boy

Crabcakes

Gator Souffle

Scallops & Pears with Blue Cheese & Pralines

Greens

Red Beans & Rice

4 Glasses of Water

 

Trombone Shorty

Saw him yesterday. One of the best live performances I've ever been to. He straight rocked it out, funked it up, and blew the crowd away.

There's a Band in the Backyard

It must be New Orleans

 

Making Up With Bernard

Bernard and Shirley Kinsey & Son were at the Festival of Books this weekend. It was always good to see them. This time around they had a scribe on hand with his iPad and I cut a short promo highlighting the virtues of Mr. Kinsey and his excellent coffee table book. I hope and expect that it will show up on his website as a testimonial bit, and now I feel a lot better for missing his February tour.

Ouch

So I've got some kind of defect in my body that is causing me pain. Not agonizing pain. but disturbingly sharp stitches of pain at close intervals. I am in a PPO and so I am using the shotgun method. As many doctors and specialists as possible followed closely by yours truly. It's under my bottom rib on the right. So here's the details: 

The doctors are puzzled but determined. 

I met with Dr. Matsuno on Tuesday:

Dr. Matsuno is my regular doctor and he has four threads he is following.

1. Heartburn - therefore Prilosec and no greasy / fried food. 

2. Liver and or Kidney - therefore bloodwork taken Tuesday, results soon.

3. Gallbladder infection or stones. - therefore ultrasound.

4. Muscle pain - therefore ibuprophen

Matsuno's best guess is #3 and so he ordered me an ultrasound. That is scheduled for 5/25. That was his best guess because I felt pain when I breathed in deeply while he applied pressure under my right ribs, and there's not much stomach up in that area.

--

I met with Dr. Jyotheesarma on Friday:

Dr Jyothee is a Gastrointestinal specialist. His idea is the following.

I did not feel pain in the same way and place as on Tuesday although I have been experiencing it regularly. He said that ibuprophen wouldn't help. His theories are as follows:

1. Gallstone in blocked bile duct - therefore ultrasound.

2. Bile duct infection / bile duct spincter spasm - ditto ultrasound

3. Upper GI infection or Heartburn - therefore Prilosec

4. Liver PH imbalance due to Pravastatin reaction. - therefore bloodwork

I noted today that none of this pain is gotten after eating. I didn't eat breakfast Tuesday morning when I had the problems, nor did I have pain today at this morning's appointment. However I got some sharp shocks just before lunch. And Thursday morning at 10:30 I was feeling it, again having had nothing more than a Red Bull that morning.

--

Dr. Jyothee, being a specialist, got me a better date for the ultrasound (I though I could get it today, but anything is better than waiting until the end of the month). That is for Tuesday morning 5/2. 

I began taking the Prilosec anyway on the off chance that I'm just overanalyzing and overeating, which I doubt but you can't be too safe or sure.

--

Today was a fairly decent day, I only got two or three attacks, none of which, I note, are in any proximity to my meals. So I'm taking it one day at a time, and with Prilosec just in case I just don't know what heartburn is.

Or Leave It

My (new) boss gave me something to think about the other day as we were eating Bahn Mi at the local Pho joint behind Walmart. He said, why don't you go and work in Singapore for a month, you know, when we get the right engagement? I love my new boss. Finally, somebody who thinks like me. What have I been doing all these years?

Thsi morning's Bloomberg News had me reading about a gent from 'Middle Africa' who owns a pineapple farm there. He got his loan from Ecobank in which Mark Mobius is a stakeholder. 

Pineapples grow in Africa? Mark Mobius is still around, in Singapore? I clearly have been out of touch for a long time. My latest podcast download from the RSA featured an enviro-wackjob who nonetheless provoked me into thinking that it might not be a bad idea to live in Asia. I might like it better than I like a lot of things that I don't like in America. 

I say 'in' America rather than 'about' America, because the things that I love 'about' America I love anywhere they can be found, like a good Bahn Mi, and enough wifi to get me Bloomberg News on my iPad, and people who ignore Donald Trump, and a nice hotel room with all sorts of pillows. And obviously everything that's in America isn't what America is about. I think that's something a certain class of obnoxious and objectionable Americans don't understand, and I'm happy to leave them behind - just to get their noise out of my head.

I have a lot of what I call external imperative noise in my head these days. It makes me a very inefficient me. I'm going to air my brain out in the next couple of weeks. It should be good.

In the meantime, it makes sense to keep in mind what it is that Asians and Africans are trying to acheive and at exactly what cost. It might very well be a low cost with a high reward, and it seems to me that I need to figure that out. 

Imagine, if you will, the following scenario. Bernie Madoff is the tipping point, or worse yet, the tip of the iceberg and the guys at Zero Hedge are right - that the only thing left to do is wait for the rest of the sucker to pony up. The affluent and lumpen rich get soaked over the next decade and the the Obamaheads get exactly what they want, a big fat stupid undifferentiated middle-class with very little more prosperity than there was in 1952. Which was good if your idea of luxury was a Packard. America goes back to Fred and Wilma-style one car, one kid families and you have a great ocean of grey equality. There will be haves and have-nots, but no more have-mores like me. We'll all be in Singapore with Mark Mobius. 

That's a crazy scenario. There's no way I have the capital to be a baby banker chasing waterjug moms in Emerging Markets. But I can start to think along the same lines as my (new) boss, who has coders in South America, family in Bangalore, and an office in Lower Manhattan. 

Illogical Hateration for the Other King

This weekend I went cruising through the old 'hood looking for people who have forgotten me and I have forgotten. This time, for the first time in a while, I felt that my hooptie was a bit too shabby to show off. But I was feeling very good anyway. My old street looks small, but maybe that's because more people have cars parked on it. I suppose that's a good thing. 

I spent the most time at Rancho Cienega Park. Sometimes we called it Rancho, but most of the time we called it Dorsey Pool. l spent a lot of time reminiscing about the good times we had there and most significantly about the great moment I had remembering something in particular about the pool. I have several fond memories of the place, but I just want to go into one which was about the lifeguard. I will never remember his name, but he was one of the first young adults I met in the neighborhood that had visions beyond. I remember one time that he walked a bunch of us over to Thrifty and bought us all triple cones, and it was no problem for him. He was nice, he was cool, he was smart. But most of all, he understood jazz. So he would play stuff like (I presume) Roy Ayers at the pool instead of the normal stuff. But there was one particular song that he played that I loved. I remembered the intro for many years afterward but never knew the song. Like the beginning of Flashlight or Strawberry Letter 23 there was that palpable excitement. It couldn't less than 25 years later when I discovered that the song was by Herbie Hancock, a version of Watermelon Man, now as then one of my all time favorite Jazz Fusion songs. But I'll always remember The Lifeguard at Dorsey Pool.

But I don't have any similar memories, nor am I inclined to consider many about the person of Celes King III who died at the age of 73 in 2006 - give or take. I did know that he occupied this building on Santa Barbara and then King Boulevard right next to a police station, and like many other mysterious men and women of color was said to be one of the great leaders of Black America by such publications as Ebony Magazine. He was a bailbondsman and from that came his fortune.

Celes King III was many other good things, but from my point of view no great thing. If I knew the name of The Lifeguard I would name Dorsey Pool after him, but as it stands it has been named after Celes King. Somewhere in the annals of the meetings of the bureacrats of the 10th District there is the glorified set of whereas clauses that show why above all other men in history that pool should be named after Celes King. Such words will never be emotionally compelling to me. I just won't be able to get over the fact that he made money as part of the "Prison Industrial Complex". 

I know he was CORE. I know he helped a lot of people. In fact, I think he was a Republican too. I have that vague feeling that I wrote about him somewhere back in the mists of time. But Google doesn't remember and there is no Wikipedia about the man, so I speak my ill and that's what we get. 

The Rancho Cienega Pool was by far, the most beautiful building in my neighborhood. It cost a quarter to swim there when I was a kid and 50 cents if you were over 18. Now kids under 18 swim free and adults cost 2.50. There used to be three panels in the roof that could retract and let the sun directly in, but that mechanism has been broken for decades. And oh by the way right next door are the Arthur Ashe Tennis Courts at which Venus and Serena spent a lot of community time doing clinics, or so I'm told. So King is in good company. One day, they may restore the pool to its former glory. I hope so, and maybe King's good name might aid in that restoration. But I tell you what. I hope I get to be that big a millionaire first, then they could rename it after me. 

Big Time

Can you find the successful black man in this picture? It's going to be really hard to find him, but not for the reason you might think. It's not because the resolution on the picture is not high enough. It's not because it's whites-only night at the ballpark. It's not because there's no such thing as a successful black man in Amerikkka. It's because the successful black man in this picture is the founder of the company whose sign you see in the middle of the frame. He's there, but he's not actually where you might expect him to be. 

The Sunset Mission

I haven't been to many funerals, but this marks the fourth year in a row that somebody I know has died. Chances are there will be two deaths one of these years and then I will be a different man. This time around, death evoked a sort of strange sadness, an inexplicable hilarity and an embarassing dissonance. I reflect at arms distance.

Two or three weeks ago I began writing a journal entry on Dissonance. I didn't finish it for a while and the ideas in my head dissapated. I came back around and then pushed it out the door, backdated appropriately. It is only slightly ironic that no comments have emerged. I didn't alert Facebook. But that sort of solitary feeling I had then has come in and out of focus as I read Jim Butcher's Harry Dresden and Charles Stross' Bob Howard. Howard, much more than Dresden is located, in a whirlwind of un-self knowledge as a trembling practitioner of arcane arts that are connected to unthinkable horrors. Both Dresden and Howard, by a combination of bad luck and usefull skills wind up working in parallel worlds with the rest of us civilians. Many are the days they wish they didn't know what they know, and everyday as they walk amongst us muggles they suffer a solitary dissonant distance.

When I got married in NYC, my cousin was the DJ and although I had the CD track listings fairly well documented, it did happen that an inappropriate cut of music interrupted the flow of our nupitals. The incongruity of the song was jarring.

So I'm at the funeral and this is what happens. 

The dearly departed was not buried in the ground but entombed in a mausoleum. The service was brief, in one of the marble corridors. To my left and right are three foot squares that go from the floor to the 21 foot ceiling, each either blank or with the plaques of the dead and a holder for flowers. I can read the names and the dates and the seven word epitaphs as I walk towards our ceremony. There are words said. I recognize the rite. There is a song sung. I know the lyrics. There is a long mourful saxophone solo played echoing off the polished walls and floor. I've never heard it before and it goes long enough for me to believe that it is not a song at all. And yet, it sets all of the tone perfectly. It makes you want to have known someone in life who would play for you in death, and never worry about a CD player or a program guide. The pallbearers take the coffin and place it on the device, and rows of men in dark suits look at the wood of it. It is dark brown with brass, but the device looks like something that belongs in an auto mechanic shop. 

The ceremony ends and the gravediggers engage the device which begins to scissor lift the coffin three squares up the West wall of the mausoleum. It groans like an old elevator filling the hall with the moan of its electric motor and the gravediggers adjust the safety bars with clanging as they ride up. The noise is startling and the crowd mumbles. The gravediggers are outfitted in dark blue coveralls and they move with a practiced casual efficiency. You immediately know they are in a union. They mix the tub of spackle as the device rises higher. They stop at the crypt and lock a mechanism in place. The push the coffin in on heavy rollers and it sounds like the clatter of the giant aluminum storage containers they roll into aircraft, and it is just about as solemn as the movement of freight. One of the gravediggers follows the coffin in. He must have a secret exit. They place the slab, and then jack down the device. It makes even more noise going down than up. It's all inappropriate noise, jarring and incongruous. 

I must go. I move to another hallway of the Sunset Mission Mausoleum. It is where the more expensive crypts are. There are fresh wreaths. I sit alone, exhausted. I really didn't know the man that very well. We were distant family but he never gave me a lesson to carry on. None of this makes sense. It's just that sad. All of the old men there, I second-guessed them saying who's next, hopefully not me. Who will come? What song will they play? I sit sprawled out with the program in my right hand and the tears come very, very slowly. I am wearing dark sunglasses. Inside. I hadn't seen Frank since the last funeral, or was it a wedding? Just as I walked away from him, I recognized him staring halfway up the marble wall. Half of his life is entombed in the very same hallway; the mother of his two sons. I sit alone staring at my shoes. The fragrance of the gardenias is overpowering, and the people in the other hallway are now back to conversational volume, and now I sob. There is no rhyme or reason here. It's all just inappropriate. 

The sax player espies me in my state, he shuffles up to me in his red and brown houndstooth jacket, fedora and bluetooth. He offers words of comfort, that I remain to carry on. I sniff a thank you and he moves on to the next corridor. I don't have anything to carry on, but the musician must have thought I was a son. I am not. I am a grandson-in-law and I didn't know Edward's name was Edward until today. I never got past the family appellation. And suddenly I feel as though I'm a minor character in a disjointed French dramatic farce. 

And everything is hilarious. I begin to chuckle and then I am laughing like a madman - like a murderer let go on a technicality. Nothing makes sense and nothing has to make sense, all that truly exists is the lot of us desperately trying to make sense of things. We're pattern making, socializing, inference engines spread across the inversions and chaos of life trying to pinky-swear our way towards confidence. But there's always a gravedigger. Even when there's no grave, there's always a busy, harried, gravedigger into whose eyes you can stare for a moment and tell that he'd rather just have a sandwich. 

I don't care for the irreverent. I'm done laughing and I'm ready to drive away. Nobody came with me so I get out to the car and curse the heat. Nothing's funny any more. I drive to the next node of the day's ritual and arrive before the crowd. There is Jack Daniels, bleu cheese and carpaccio. I have all I need and I want to get seriously plastered, but I cannot. There are other distant relatives in town from another arm of the family and I have obligations to the living. I beg off early and head to the 405. 

I've never felt so full every little moment and of nothing in particular. I've never felt so moved by the idea that it might just be completely impossible to make sense of anything in human life. I cried because I was truly alone in the Sunset Mission and I knew it, and I laughed at the idea that anybody could make that better. I'm not quite old enough to worry that I might be next, and yet somehow I know that I'm as ready to die as I'll ever be. I'm not quite sure that the acceptance of my inevitable death makes me appreciate life any more - so many of us fuck it up so completely. So many of us exist trying to get a clue and never communicate jack. So many of us spend our entire lifetimes never connecting with any permanence.

I feel only the need for judgment in the immediate. Ghost Dog Samurai life in the moment, ever telling the whole truth to yourself and acting on what you know to be true. That very well may be all there is. 

Missions fail. 

It could not be proper for me not to draw a lesson, even that there are no stories worth retelling and that all human meaning is the integrity of action. But that is the square I land on, naked without a homily. You can life your entire life and nobody knows you but you and your faith that God knows you, or your faith that there is no God to know you. Either way the last hands that touch your body will very likely be people you could never know. Make of it what you will. Make of it whatever you can.

Staring Down the Barrel

I love the mechanical coolness of firearms, but somehow I haven't managed to get one. I'm rather in a survival mode of thinking these days, sensitive as I am to the lies and distortions coming out of Japan as regards the actual status of their reactors, and the to the lies and distortions coming out of Washington as regards the actual status of their deficit reduction plans. The latest news is that somebody in Texas with the last name Bass, has got the temerity to take delivery on 1 billion dollars worth of gold. Not trading futures, taking delivery. This, I gotta see.

Anyway, my experience with guns is mixed. I remember not having one and witnessing an armed robbery, wishing I had one, and then regetting the knowledge that I would have not hesitated to use it. I remember being under fire from the retaliation of somebody who just got robbed and who couldn't shoot straight and I was mad as hell. I remember shooting a couple different pistols at a range and realizing how difficult it actually is to shoot straight, and I remember being bored to tears plinking with a bolt action .22 and wanting a serious sniper rifle. 

What kind of gun should I get? 

I've answered the question several different ways. For self-defense the answer is none. Pepper spray and eskrima are all I need. For that I'd have to spend a few bucks and then a few years for the second level. There's a blade ops meetup in the area. I'm not really that interested. Pepper spray is plenty. 

For traveling and shooting with gun enthusiasts, some match 22 pistol is what I hear. Never followed that up. 

For home defense, it's all about Mister Mossberg. Not interested. 

For concealed carry, I don't know if I can get that in California, and I almost never go anyplace I feel the need to be strapped. But I figure a snub .38 revolver. 

So really I'm most interested in getting something for the cool factor and the mechanical knowledge of how to take it apart, put it back together and gather some competence in firing the weapon. But also for the fraternity of Second Amendment free men. And I've sorta answered that question in two divisions.

In the pistol division, I like the Baretta P92. In the rifle division, I like the AR-15. What do you like? What should I get?

Abandoned Amusement Parks

There are more than you would think, and the only thing we are missing is nostalgia.

These days I have been gathering a different kind of junk to fill my garage. I'm putting together emergency go-bags and survival kits. I spent a couple hours browsing last weekend at the local Fry's and REI to check out the gear. My next major purchase is going to be a good two-way radio. Funny when I think about how I want that vs my desire for an iPad - a thing that gives me no more function than I already have. I go to Consumer Reports and there are no listings for walkie talkies. And that's not odd either. After all, what is CR, but something you spend money on to help you spend money?

It started with me looking for Marineland. It was the world's largest oceanarium (yes there are words for such things) back when it opened.

Coincidently, 'All My Children' goes off the air this year after 41 years. That is a thing I never paid attention to, nor much respected people who did. And yet it was just another frivolity that stands as a kind of ironic testament of the strength of America. America is still a country where people can afford to waste money, and yet with systems in place that are brutally honest. It seems like an irony that you can go to prison for stealing a car worth $500 measly bucks, or do five years in the penitentiary for stealing $100 cash with a $50 gun, and yet we have a Federal government that has spent 20 years worth of everybody's future taxes already and it doesn't get shut down. Last time I checked the debt was something like $36,000 per household. Yet somehow you have to marvel that we had that much to steal, and still we hate theft. We can still get our emotions involved around the principle of very small things. We can care about that $500 car that much. People talk about 'my' soap opera. We are an ownership society.

There's a great documentary by Niall Ferguson about the divergent paths of the New World. The English idea of property and landed gentry vs the Spanish idea of property and the rights of the crown. The English idea of property was inherently more democratic, so more people had the right to make money first through ownership of land. Naturally we should all be quick to point out the difference between more pople having the right and everybody having the right, but more is much better than 'select few'. The point of natural rights is that success is possible *from* everybody but not *by* everybody. The important thing to note here is that that when more people can have and do have, more people can fail and the costs of failure don't decapitate society. It is a fundamental feature of robustness.

As well, one can naturally expect that some of the many who  succeed do so in a surfeit of goofy ways. That's the downside of having an ungentrified aristocracy of merit. Lady Gaga, whomever she is, merits the attention of the vapid millions. But how could she outlast any other goofball amusement park? Lion Country Safari seemed like a good idea at the time. People could be amused by feeding sardines to seals, once upon a time. But when times get tough, all that crap fails. Well, most of it. And still people will hold true to the principles, no matter how small the amounts.

So if we have an earthquake in California (ya think?), people who let the water run in the shower for ten minutes just so it can get warm enough while they're running water in the sink to shave their faces, all in order to be presentable for meetings that accomplish one or two things after lunch, will scramble looking for a clean, clear pint to drink. Water is still water.

Land is still land and groceries are still groceries. Houses made of bricks will always be better than houses made of straw or sticks. Amusements will be abandoned, staples will not.

These days I'm thinking about the value of things I know and the absolute value of things I have.

Two Harvards

I don't know that I ever wrote about a particular day that I can still remember clearly. It was the day that I went to the Harvard Business School orientation seminar at the Airport Hilton some time back around 1985. I had become something of a star at Cal State, making Dean's list, holding 18 units, having gotten my third internship at Xerox, being the chapter secretary for my frat, national officer for NSBE and the Engineering School's rep to the Student Finance Committee. And my girlfriend was bangin' too. I saw the future with perfect clarity, and I knew my path.

Now this HBS seminar happened to be given by one of the black Harvard organizations, and it was led by a young woman who was in the Public Health specialty. And I learned some very important lessons that day. The first was that there was a (light skinned) black woman who felt her duty to tell all of us perspective masters candidates that racism was alive and well in Boston and at Harvard. She told the tale of unendurable pain of being questioned all of time about whether or not she was an actual Harvard student. 'They take one look at me and assume that I'm from Northeastern'.

I was sitting in the front row and I turned around to see the reactions of the others in the room. I caught two reactions and that was all I cared about. My own impression, as you might guess, was to do all I could to suppress a verbal slap. Here she was at Harvard and she had the nerve to complain. WTF! 

The first reaction was something I didn't expect at all, but man was I happy about it. There was a super cute girl who was from Spain in the room. If you can imagine Rosie Perez with firey red hair done up 80s style, that would be close. She was like an Almodovar bombshell and she was giving me the eye. Holy smokes. We exchanged big grins. Man was I going to enjoy Harvard. 

The second reaction was from a black man who looked to be soemwhere between 28 and 32. He was wearing a suit, although I seem to remember him in a vest and tie with his jacket over the back of his chair. Or maybe he was wearing braces, like many MBA types did in the mid 80s. Either way, he was shaking his head slightly. At the end of the seminar I spoke to him. He intimated to me that he was running something on the order of a $400 million budget at Ford Aerospace. I was tremendously impressed, and although he had other reasonable things to say I heard all I needed to hear. 

I knew that at my school, there were seven year students who were officers in the Black Survival Union who had no compunction in telling anyone who would listen how corrupt the system was. I just never expected to hear the same kind of noise out of Harvard. It reinforced something I realized. Sometimes people are their own worst enemies, and Joni Mitchell never lied. 

Sometime later, I fell off my own fast track and never made it to Harvard. It wasn't until six or seven years that I got a chance to actually live in Boston, and I spent some time poking around Cambridge. By that time I had the twin experiences of having someone with an MBA report to me, and having had Microsoft recruit me, both being rather dual-edged. Watching 'The Social Network' last week reminded me of running through the streets of Cambridge and making social connections from a different perspective. Remind me to tell you some Boston stories...

To that dude and that babe. Thank you. You reminded me that I always have me.

Solitary

Today I am home alone. Last night I was home alone. I looked around and I played my time travel game and then I did exactly what I wanted to do until I could no longer stay awake. I settled into bed at about half past midnight listening to a Dan Carlin podcast knowing that I could sleep in.

My time travel game is something I play from time to time. About a third of the time, I take an historical figure from the past and introduce him to the marvels of the present. It challenges me to figure out what they might have known and what they might find intriguing about our current situation. But most of the time I just take a younger me from the past and update him on my own life and circumstances. That variation allows me to check myself and see if I'm living the way I should be by my own standards. Most of the time it's all good, which is why I still play.

Last night's installment was about the marvel of two Big Macs for $3.50 and the slide show presentation I made of my sixteen year old daughter. Then parts of it were about GPS and flat screen hi-def. I was talking to my 24 year old self who was reading Henry Miller. Sometime during the day I had used the phrase 'Monsiuer L'Econome' in a conversation about backtracking my overtime for the first quarter. I owe paperwork. But I used to be very wary of bean counting, as any fan of Henry Miller would, and the thought of paying rent back in 1985 brought on some interesting dorm-room conversations between myself and my two frat brothers. So the first thing I told Mike was that D. was correct when he predicted that I was never going to get into Harvard Business. I had the nerve to consider myself fortunate in that regard in retrospect over the drama of 'The Social Network' that I watched last weekend. In fact I have been meditating on the portrayal of Zuckerberg in so many meetings where he is giving people the least amount of consideration possible - how many times have I done exactly that? Scary. I hope that I am not trying to be an asshole but I have absolutely no assurance that I am not.

That is why I am writing this essay this morning when I could be a bit more productive considering that I owe about 4 more hours of work for my quota of 40 this week.

I shaved my head again after two years. I'm trying to let go of that thing inside me that wants to be the practice director of a consulting firm. I'm covering up the grey that I wanted to show off a few years back. Right now I am getting back to my core energies as a high geek programmer. It's slowly working, but this quarter I'm stepping it up.

On Cobb, folks have been coming at me with what I consider to be half-assed arguments. And just last night I heard words said of Christopher Hitchens that I beleive are also true of me. He assumes that you know much of what he knows and so writes in ways that imply what he believes to be obvious with an pithy set of words that lack necessarily short declarative sentences. I do that with my writing. I do that with my speaking. I'm convinced it makes me appear to be something I am not, which is an asshole.

A couple years ago I thought it was important to balance this sort of dissonance with a number of video clips. So when things got hairy on the blog, I would cut a YouTube. I may or may not return to that practice. The question for me is whether or not I'd be wasting time explaining again what I have already explained.

I can be selfless, but not a nullity. I must decide the balance and in the end I have to just say what I mean to say and not take any real responsibility for whether or not people get it. I do the work and leave the commentary for people who desire to do that. I am shedding my managerial layer in life and trying to focus on being a doer, a producer, a solver of problems. There are personalities much more fit for the socialization of ideas, I truly do not have the patience for it. I could grow it and I could do what I call 'heads up work'. But I'd rather not. I appreciate those who do it - I've been in sales, I've done it. But I prefer 'heads down work'. I have great powers of focus and concentration, and when the time is right, I can do some pretty cool, fairly precision crafting of logical paragraphs and code. It's what I do. That's why people call me. Nothing new this, code vs documentation. Selling vs building.

But I rather accept the dissonance now, sometimes all you have to do is be calm and honest, say what you say with a straight face and let people who want to go ballistic have their trajectory.  

High Flight

 

I'm thinking about old TV & local stations on Los Angeles, KTTV (11), KTLA (5), KCOP (13) and KHJ (9). And of course KCET(28) and Channel 52. High Flight. I can't remember which station played this one before signing off, but when I was a kid, it was the most inspirational thing I can always remember.

We Are Powerless Because We Are Landless

A Letter from Robert T. Bowen
Black World/ Negro Digest, August 1970

Dear Black Americans: . . . And now the tumultuous 60’s are gone. All over this country and all over the world men are taking a look at what happened and what it means. Perhaps more than anything else the recurrent conclusion is one of intense and unprecedented human change. We have seen men do things which even in the occasional wildness of our dreams we did not see them do. New blood spilled, new tears cried. Change and struggle. Oppression and abuse. The order of the day, the law of too many places.

It is no coincidence that much attention during the 60's was on Black people in America. The high- pitched demand for freedom and justice was heard everyday and in countless forms.

And right now the decade which we have just entered is faced with the monumental task of resolving the imbalances which for too long had been a way of life for Blacks. What of it, one migl1t say. The problem has always been here and there is little reason to think that drastic changes are just around the social-political corner. Perhaps so; but there is no precedent in human behavior which restricts man’s thinking to problems. Progress and movement and development are each tied directly to solutions. If our concern, then, is legitimate and if we are truly worthy of the designation, Black men, our attention must shift to solutions. lf human imagination was sacriliced during the 60’s to poverty, employment, housing, education, etc., then the commitment of the 70’s must be the reawakening of that same imagination. This we have to do, but not for the sake of proving that we are as good as somebody else or that we have not been totally defeated by all that has been heaped upon Blacks in America. At this point in history we really don’t have to prove anything to anybody . . . except ourselves.

Now . . what about ourselves? What are we supposed to do? Are we foolish enough to review the 60's and become so dismayed by our actual immobility that we idly follow the same useless pattem of getting nowhere with rapidity? Are we still going to demand better street lighting, faster rubbish collection, black Santa Clauses, and a host of other mundanities? ls this what the struggle has come to mean after all this time? Hopefully, we are able to respond in the negative.

Amidst all the rhetoric of the past I0 years we have heard talk of “self-determination.” Basically this involves the “freedom” of a people to decide how they want to order their lives. This never was (nor is it presently) the choice open to Black people. For years most of us have missed this absolutely critical point. What we have been haplessly doing is responding to the dictates of others. Even integration is a response on our part! Responses to others is not self-determination.

The heart of the entire matter is our “position” of powerlessness. There is no haste on my part here to proudly allude to the phrase “Black Power.” We saw the term move from a verbal dynamic to something short of a uniquely American joke; moreover, the fact of numbers (from 22 to 40 million Blacks) has certainly not been our salvation; and by now even the most outspoken elements of our people are fatigued with the diluted mystique of “soul.”

I am not attempting here to negate each and every part of the putative Black Experience. I am suggesting, rather, that our histori- cal trek has been unbelievably bogged down because of our reluc- tance or unwillingness to concern ourselves with the real bases for human freedom. It all comes down -or moves up-to one critical concem: LAND. It would not be an oversimpliication of our plight to say that we are powerless because we are landless. A people not in control of the land they inhabit is a people at the mercy of others. Generally speaking, this in and of itself may not be so very bad. ln the particular case of Blacks in America the matter has revealed itself to be both critical and dangerous. Black children in the rural South, for example, are not malnourished because white people are inherently evil. No, Black children “function” with little or no nourishment because Black adults don’t grow the food. And unemployment ligures are so high amongst us not because American industry and organized labor are infested with racism, but because we are not in control of the factories. We have always been at the mercy of those whose concern for our well-being could be questioned. And almost every significant statement we (individually or collectively) have ever made has been addressed to that same atmosphere of indifference.

In America we have become a clear and present social problem, and social problems are never solved. Furthermore, this country in reality has no obligation what- soever to “resolve us,” the key social problem. If our condition exists to prove that the American Constitution is a lie, then America canlivewiththeliewithminimal diiliculty. But the question is can we live with it? Are we willing to hang around and shout or write inanities simply for the purpose of demonstrating that what is proclaimed is not real? Our children would never forgive us and there is no cause for them to do so. For much too long we have declared our responsibility to “the country” without giving even a fleeting thought to our responsibility to ourselves. We should have done this willingly and consistently. It would have been obvious and common human sense. Has the American tragedy made us lose even that? Contrary to what is usually said there are not many ways of looking at our perpetual slippage. We have just exited the Era of Errors during which there were both blatant and subtle manifestations of folly. That we are still faced with the same issues clearly proves that all meas- ures taken were stop-gap measures or less. We cannot allow this to happen again. lf history must repeat itself, so be it; but let that repetition not be at our expense. We must have land. We must dedicate ourselves to building.

I have purposely avoided use of such terms as “states,” “nation,” “separation,” “exodus," etc. Because of the great clouds of programmed confusion regarding words, most of us are immediately inclined to respond in the negative to these words. That’s the way we have been trained, and up to now our behavior has been rather consistent with our training. In addition, I have not pointed to the experiences of other peoples who have taken control of their own destinies and have subsequently moved from the position of pawns to the status allorded to men. Again, we are inclined to say why their experience is so terribly different from our own here in America. And finally, l have not requested a written response or commitment from you (although I would be pleased to hear your ideas).

All that I do ask is that you psychologically remove yourself from the futile morass of American “race relations” long enough to consider the fact of land ownership and control by Black people. (The Kennedys, the Rockefellers, the Longs, “Indians” and hundreds of midwestern farmers understand exactly what this means. There is no reason whatsoever why we shouldn’t as well.) Despite all the guilt-ridden optimism now in evi- dence, the 70's don’t have to be years of promise. And in spite of the “great black hope” which from time to time swells our own hearts, we don’t have to be free simply because America is attempting to search her troubled soul. Our victory-however we come to seriously define it-will come only because we have made the dedication to do what has to be done. Not in the tired terms of conferences and seminars and ever-growing organizations. Not by the questioned virtue of new. legislation or expanded poverty programs or retraining projects.

We will truly know manhood and live as men are destined to live when the land on which we walk and watch our children grow is the land to which we can point and with deserved pride say, “This is ours.”- Robert T. Bowen


Robert T. Bowen is founder of the Institute for Black Studies in Los Angeles, Calif.

Michael and Bernard

I am embarassed to talk about Bernard Kinsey now that it's April. That's because I didn't return his phone call from February. 14 months ago, I enjoyed an old school evening back in my old neighborhood attending a review of the Kinsey Collection for Black History Month. What I should have done was go again this year and do my small part in writing up once again that which the Kinseys have done to preserve critical parts of American history in a collection of artifacts of historical significance. 

Last year, the Kinseys were proud to announce that their collection was set to be featured at the Smithsonian in the upcoming Fall. This year I don't know the exact fate of the collection, but I do know a certain something about it. It's the kind of thing I would expect, automatically, for black old money to take care of. Boom. But it is not taken care of and for that I have regret.

It is presumptuous of me, but then again, I'm me, not to have the significant kind of role in this matter that my ambition has demanded of me. Starting with my own father's collection and with my association with Dr. & Mrs. Alfred Ligon, there is a part of me that weeps for not having become the wealthy philanthropist I always wanted to be. When I looked at Ebony magazine back in the day, my hero was the black man who ran the Ford Foundation, Franklin A. Thomas. But somehow, for all the blackified recognition I got here and there, I never got the hookup, nor did anyone I know really get it. A lot of us have done very well, don't get me wrong, but all the young, gifted and black never got the Aggregation program together. The meeting on Wednesday night, as much as everybody talked about it, never got off the ground. 

It didn't hit me until I was about 26 that black unity was never going to work out. I understood it intellectually, but emotionally I viewed it as a problem until I was 32. And even though I gave up on the impractical dreams of Chocolate City (or at the very least a nationwide network of Brewster Places, hooked up with the Boule) I've always felt that there should be some black old money taking care of certain significant business. Right now that sentiment centers on a private initiative that could build a museum for the Kinsey Collection which, among other things contains personal letters written by Zora. 

That intellectual understanding recognizes that Michael Jordan, sitting on hundreds of millions, is not likely to reach out to Bernard Kinsey and build that museum. Unless he reads Cobb and is moved to tears thinking of something more purposeful to do than selling underwear. I am embarassed by my poverty in this regard. And at the same time I recognize that Kinsey himself hasn't made the Jordan connection either. It's that kind of thing that is painful leaven and why I have put aside dreams of Aggregation. 

Michael Jordan and Colin Powell probably could hang out. But do they? Do they have an obligation to? What about Spike Lee and Wynton Marsalis? At some point the speculation gets ridiculous, and yet if Kinsey's original print of Equiano's book falls into anonymous bureaucratic hands, whose fault is that? 

I would be remiss to not mention the fact that it was Paul Simon who introduced us to Ladysmith Black Mombazo, and even though we knew Hugh and Miriam before, somehow a generation who didn't play Sun City didn't get the word out to KJLH and V103. I can't tell you how many black folks paid the price of the ticket at Newport all those Jazz Festivals ago, but does it really matter? The facts survive, the people survive, the artifacts will survive and with any luck the curators will have the right love. 

The world is still worth living in, even when it's not black owned and operated. 

Closing in on T50

Several years ago, I launched a project for my future learning and reference. I called it T50 which has to do with numbering out fifty thinkers whose works I would follow on my path to wisdom. Driving to work this morning I thought about those I have accumulated. You'll find them often cited here as regulars to Cobb would be familiar with most of their names. So here's the update in no particular order.

• Christopher Hitchens
• Thomas PM Barnett
• Malcolm Gladwell
• David P. Goldman
• Iain M. Banks
• Craig Venter
• Niall Ferguson
• Clay Shirky
• Nicholas Nassim Taleb
• Richard Fernandez
• Steven Berlin Johnson
• Michael Pollan
• John Boyd

All of those are pretty much on the permanent list. I'll pretty much be assured to read every book they put out from now on. Then there is a secondary conditional kind of list of folks who are near, but in whom I may lose interest over time.

• Nouriel Roubini
• Dan Carlin
• Victor Davis Hanson
• Michael Totten
• Gerard Van Der Luen
• Danny Hillis
• Stewart Brand
• Daniel Pink
• Dan Ariely

Then there is a pantheon of dead folks from whom I think I'll find something interesting, although that's harder to tell.

• Spinoza
• Karl Popper

OK well, basically Spinoza is all I can think of at the moment.  Oh yeah and Popper. It's also interesting, I imagine to look at some of the folks I've consumed on my way to where I am now.

• Cornel West
• James Baldwin
• bell hooks
• Derrick Bell
• Umberto Eco
• Noam Chomsky
• James Littel
• Eugene ONeill
• JL Borges
• Carlos Fuentes
• Robert Ludlum
• Moliere
• Ishmael Reed
• Chinhua Achebe
• K. Anthony Appiah
• Hugh Hewitt
• Martin Amis
• TC Boyle
• Nicholas Negroponte

The trail behind me is longer than the one in front of me for sure. And it's interesting to look back and speculate on what I thought I needed to know from each of those, what I got and how much it means to me now.

One of the more profound effects of T50 on me is that I have less patience for the interactivity of blogging, but that really started when I got interested in Ferguson and history a few years back. So I expect to continue to get less and less satisfaction from this kind of interaction and more from finding like-minded folks IRL at various meetups. One of these days I'm going to find the right clique -  it will save me a lot of time and give me a great deal of comfort in reading away from the screen.

Someone To Watch Over Me

Everyday Sunshine

You can't possibly know me unless you know Fishbone.

Virtuosity's Inspiration

Last night, for the first time in a while, I took a break from thinking about thinking about thinking about work. It has been something of a rough week, having been sick with a bad cough and dealing with looming deadlines, tax preparation, technical snafus and my oldest son's decision to trip-out. The bad news details of all of these matters suddenly materialize in my head at 5AM every morning and the suffering of another day begins. 

So last night, with the aid of Southern Comfort, XBox and Robitussin, I self-medicated. And then I started coming back to gritty awareness via YouTube. 

You see there's actually some really good stuff on YouTube, and this time I chose musical virtuosos starting with Victor Wooten. From Victor Wooten, I went next to Stanley Jordan, and from Stanley Jordan to Tuck Andress. After Tuck, I jumped over to Vladimir Horowitz and then to Lang Lang. Next came Herbie Hancock and finally Chick Corea. I went to bed at midnight. I still wasn't sleepy so I put on the Freakonomics podcast. Talk about the NFL crumbling put me to sleep. This morning I woke up at 7:30 and started work, feeling refreshed and purposeful.

Something happened in the middle of watching Horowitz. I realized that he was probably one of the greatest piano virtuosos I'm ever going to see - spanning generations perhaps even moreso than the other super extraordinary talentes I watched and would watch. His ability is so incredibly far from what I could achieve. Starting with Wooten, my mouth was open and I was just embarassed. With Jordan it was the same thing. With Horowitz it suddenly occured to me, as it must have to Plato, that I should just shutup and do the absolute best I can do with whatever it is that I do. As long as greatness exists and is recognized, then merit has its place.

Virtuosity inspires.

Dear David Horowitz

You may or may not remember me, but I remember when you and I used to trade barbs over at Salon's open forum. It was in the early days of that online community, before you had begun Front Page. Most of our discussion surrounded attitudes and interpretations of the LA Riots and matters tangential to race and politics. It had to be over 9 years ago. I found you to be an admirable foil to my activism of the time and I can remember one particular compliment you gave to me, which was that I was a good writer and could probably capitalize on that.

I never was particularly interested in capitalizing my writing and there is no simple reason I could give as to why. Every writer's 'why' is certainly in itself a painstaking work. I'd rather simply just write. Moreover, I sought to become wise rather than to spend a great deal of time preaching. I was fortunate that the technology of blogging allowed me to do exactly the sort of writing I felt compelled to produce.

Today finds me looking up information on Pavel Stroilov and landed me at Frontpage. It strikes me at this odd moment that I have come around to your side of Americas red & blue duality. I am a reformed Progressive, and the result of my writing and quest for wisdom I have arrived at some conservative enlightment. I can't describe all of the reasons, nor does that thing which I have previously referred to as my epiphany seem so extraordinary to me now. Still I am very clear and have settled a large number of questions and frustrations and find myself quite comfortable with what I now understand.

It occured to me that I should reach out and let you know that as pointless as I may have found your arguments a decade ago, I am glad to have been the recipient of their reasonableness. You might find it interesting to read through my blog, which I have maintained since 2003, and observe how I acquired some of that wisdom. Whether or not you do, thanks for having been a stumbling block on my old road. Thinking is hard work, but the rewards are great.

Daddy's House Is Full Of Love

When I was 13 years old and my afro was long enough for me to see my own hair I won a dance contest. I'm sure that there were some bellbottoms and pop locking involved. My prize? It was a 7Up electric popcorn popper, which was about as cool then as an iPod is now. You see in 1974, dance contests were socially important as was 7Up. It sounds funny, but I know it to be true and I am about as proud of that accomplishment now as I was then - it got me the girl. 

I just finished reading the WSJ article by Amy Chua about the Tiger Mom. The story has been on the periphery of my mediasphere and intervened at a low level yesterday afternoon. As I was driving home from work I remembered that I am about as happy as I can be, basically except for the fact that I would horribly miss watching the rest of my family's life play out, I would die happy today. What's importantly implied in that fact is that I am confident that I have been a successful parent. The Spousal Unit and I are tremendously proud. So yesterday found me considering for the nth time, but for the first in the 'Tiger Mom' context, thinking about writing up book about 'parenting', a verb that didn't exist when I was a kid. I think that I would name the book, Daddy's House is Full of Love. So here's a brief sketch of the big themes I can pop off the top of my head. 

Themes and frameworks is how I do things, and The Unit and I have collaborated in our own way just about every practical arrangement. So while you could say that we are nominally rule based, our rules come in terms of phrases that we can all recite, like the title. But the themes are how we work.

Royalty
Royalty is a theme in our house and in our family. That means we parents are King and Queen. This is not a democracy in any stretch of the word. We are benevolent dictators with the right to be tyrannical. We have never had to be. But everybody knows that we can. 'Because I said so' never has to be said because the way we have run things, there has never been any example or assumption that there was another way out. You are loyal to the king and queen, period. 'Or else' doesn't even have to be said. We simply stare our kids down and state things matter of factly. Sometimes, the 'No' comes out before the question is stated, but we always listen. We always consider, and we let our logic in making decisions out in the open. The result is that we don't hear 'But what if I don't want to do it?' instead we hear an alternative. Not an extensive bartering negotiation that goes back and forth, but a concise promise. And so we run off a checklist to see if our requirements are met based on the following rule:

Do what you have to do, and then you can do what you want to do.  

And then the right things happen. This also means that you can never play 'Uncle Bill'. Uncle Bill is my internal way of remembering a story told by Bill Cosby about a stingy relative who couldn't wait until his nieces and nephews screwed up so that he didn't have to deliver on the miraculous promises he made to them. We don't play carrot and stick. We play duties and liberties. 

The other part of Royalty is extended family. When the Spousal Unit and I had access to luxurious living conditions in Georgia that put 3000 square feet of new construction for the price of about 9 months of our combined annual income, we were apart from family. So we decided that we would take the hike to California so that our kids could grow up with their cousins. Right decision. Our kids are close to their cousins and they know each other well. It is a different quality of play and looseness that they have with their kin that they don't have with other kids. It's respectful but ends up in horseplay. There always ends up being a knot of girls tickling each other on the floor. 

Best Friends
Each of our three kids has a best friend. And these best friends have been so for quite some time. We have always played intelligence officer roles when it came to relations between our kids and others in the neighborhood. We asked our kids to know kids by first and last name, and who their parents are, where they live, and to give their relationships hierarchies. We literally had them draw up lists for concentric circles. C-Zero was family. C-One was the closest circle of friends. You know them, their personalities and you like them and they like you. You know where they live and their parents recognize you. For our kids they each had about 3 or 4 C-Ones. C-Twos were kids that you saw on a semi-regular basis. Maybe at Church, maybe in Scouts. If you didn't see them for a month, maybe you would wonder what happened to them. They are on your team, in your class. You speak. C-Threes are everybody else. C-Ones can come by our house on the regular. Your best friend is always welcome.  C-Twos can come over with permission and they are greeted and introduced at the door. C-Threes, not so much. 

Yes we do sleepovers. With the best friends, it's a regular thing. We are on a friendly basis with the parents of the best friends, even as they have changed. Our youngest has several C-Ones. Our oldest has one, but they are the closest and longest of best friends, as much as boys admit. But he has many more C-Twos, some older nerdy geeks that give my wife the creeps. 

Grades In School
Every C is a problem. Every B is an opportunity. Every A is a celebration. A D stops the world. And we never see Fs.  We require a 3.0, period. We mostly get Honor Roll. For that we celebrate. Your job, we told the kids early on, is to succeed in school. Outside of this house, that's basically all you have to worry about. 

I don't know much about raising girls, but I've learned a lot. I do know about boys, being the oldest of four. I raised my son to be what I have striven to be, a scholar-athlete-geek. It worked but it turned out that he did so with a lot more mellow personality than I expected. I'm more hard-boiled than he is, but some of that is by design. Every day when I dropped my kids off to school, which was basically every day of their elementary years I gave them the following sendoff:

Be smart, be friendly, keep sharp, stay focused. 

The verbs may have changed, but the four adjectives never did. I tell my children, because I absolutely know it to be true, they are some of the best people I know. And why wouldn't they be? They reflect what I find important and valuable in people, and the three of them express the complete spectrum each contributing a unique combination of strengths, virtues and values. I take them places and walk with pride amongst them. That is the vituous circle that has become easier as time goes by. Which gives me a moment to think about something else I recognized early on that changed my approach to being a father.

Babies are completely uncivilized. Part of my responsibility is to civilize my kids, which brings us to the transition. I'll soon be send my puppies into the world. Where I have to be tough is to let them fail and start regarding them with the cold disdain that the world does, and give them an inside track. That's all for now...

 

 

Front Page News, Main Street USA

I think this is the most press anybody on our family has gotten in a long time.

The Semiotic Swamp Returns

When I was 31, I read American Mythologies. It was one of the great intellectual moments in my life, an dit helped me to understand the power of what I can probably describe at length but will not. Let's just call it 'virtual truth'.

A great deal of what I experimented with in my early web writing days was a riff on this problem, which was that there was very little 'authentic' culture in American culture. There are signifiers built on top of symbols, which leverage metaphors that are bolstered by analogies all based on myth and urban legend - and this is what most Americans believe. Education is all trivia. You can't walk into a bar with physics degree and find a mate. You have to play the game and it is a mind-numbing game because everybody is hooked into American 'culture' and not much of it is real. This was my attitude towards that called the semiotic swamp. I followed Umberto Eco and Marshall Blonsky for a time and insisted that they knew what was up. Foucault's Pendulum was my favorite fiction just before reading Blonsky. But the invention of the Internet was about to happen, in the mainstream. So I invented Boohab, who was the perfect kind of character to inhabit such a realm, a post-modern racial essentialist. In a world where influentials like Howard Rheingold encouraged the reality of virtual life led by the guiding light of McLuhan who's mantra was 'the medium is the message', there needed to be a black trickster out there keeping it real.

A lot of people resented the idea of bringing racial realism to the new digital frontier, but the fact that I did so persistently was very useful. I sought to inform my experiment with a bit of philosophy which I found in a book called The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality. I excerpted something I thought was very important from that moment when there was still a question in the public mind about whether or not blackness belonged in cyberspace.

 

"According to Heidegger, we notice the eclipse of the truth of being occuring already in Plato's metaphysics. Once the truth of being becomes equated with the light of unchanging intelligibility, the nature of truth shifts to the ability of statements to reflect or refer reliably to entities. With the steadiness of propositional truth comes the tendency to relate to being as a type, a form, or an anticipated shape. With being as a steady form, entities gain their reality through their being typified. Already in Plato we see the seeds of the Western drive to standardize things, to find what is dependable and typical in them. Truth as the disclosure process, as the play of revealing/ concealing disappears behind the scene in which the conscious mind grasps bright objects apprehended as clear, unwavering, rational forms. As humans develop the ability to typify and apprehend formal realities, the loss of truth as emergent disclosure goes unnoticed. All is light and form. Nothing hides behind the truth of beings. But this "nothing" finally makes an appearance after the whole world has become a rigid grid of standardized forms and shapes conceived and engineered by humans. As the wasteland grows, we see the devastation of our fully explicit truths. We see that there is, must be, more. The hidden extra cannot be consciously produced. Only by seeing the limits of standardization can we begin to respond to it. We have to realize that each advance in typifying and standardizing things also implies a trade off. When we first reach forward and grasp things, we only see the benefits of our standardization, only the positive side of greater clarity and utility. it is difficult to accept the paradox that not matter how alluring, every gain in fixed intelligibility brings with it a corresponding loss of vivacity. Because we are finite, every gain we make also implies a lost possibility. The loss is especially devastating to those living in the technological world, for here they enjoy everything conveniently at their disposal -- everything that is, except the playful process of discovery itself."

It turned out that only applied to the static web. When the web became dynamic, and populated with jillions, emergent disclosure returned. As it became even larger and more distributed, and as it will be in the future, the only findable stuff will be more and more static. People will need larger narratives to deal with its interminable complexity. The web itself will sustain more and more of these narratives. Certifications will become more important and/but they will tend to be more localized. "Word is bond" will become more important.

But my point here is that for the most part, people will require more and more skill to make sense of all of this meta-literacy. I happen to think it raises the value of war. But during peacetime, the swamp is filling up and overflowing.

This morning it took me almost an hour to find Ms Dewey, and I had lost her before. Her real name is Janina Gavankar and as Ms Dewey she exemplified the sort of woman that is my perfect mate in look, attitude and all that. I used to worry for most of my life that the woman I married would suffer a heartbreaking fate if I were to find 'the perfect woman' sometime during the course of life - and I had this odd premonition that it would happen around when I turned 35. It never did happen with the exception of the fictional Ms Dewey with whom I promptly developed a completely nerdy crush. And so I was a bit extra frustrated when, this morning for some reason, I could not for the life of me remember her name and none of my usual methods could suss her out of the incredible shitpile that is the world wide web. I finally found her.

 

 

It turns out that Ms Dewey was the creation of a marketing outfit known as EVB, short for Evolution Bureau. They are also the creators of Serenading Unicorn

 

And so we are most definitely way, way down the long tail. At some point it must be asked whether or not large fictions are not more useful than small ones. But I'm going to leave that as an exercise, depending upon how many people respond to this particular essay.

I no longer have much of a cultural project out here in cyberspace. I went from the responsibility of Mellow Mike to put a black foot out here, to the provocations of Boohab to get all post-moderny and interactive, to whatever it was I was doing at Slate, Salon, & Utne, Brainstorms, The Well, Electric Minds and then finally to Meanderings, Vision Circle and now Cobb. I have come full circle to the sort of peeved skepticism about the quality of knowledge purveyed on the Web, now that there is so much and the cost is so low. I perceive that the big hunking narratives are larger and more false and that the smaller ones seem more infinitely clever. It's different but the effect is the same. Truth is hard to find. That's because it's so easy to get everything else, so much of which is layered like the Juicy Fruit advertisement, upon very little else but the simple longings of an individual. There's nothing universal in that at all, which is why we'll all end up killing each other. I know it's difficult to understand why that's my conclusion, but trust me on this one. I'll explain it all later.

In the meantime, I will continue to write here, while writing more software code, and attempt to keep my perspective on the world historical, and ignoring that which is right in front of my face.

The 4000th Orgasm

One of my peeves is the extent to which our culture has been overrun by what I'm saying amounts to a bunch of louts with cheesy business models. Ahh the amoral marketplace. Can it only dominate an amoral population? Hard to say, and I don't even know why I ask such questions. But the signal effect that gets to me about this cultural bogard is the lack of good stuff in the long tail that's free. Or maybe it's the difficulty I find in finding all that good stuff. 

Part of the difficulty is that consumer markets are profitable for the cheesy louts because they are taking advantage of human nature. To wit, romantic comedies will always be a source of profits in the movie business, so long as you can find cute actors playing shy, confused and oblivious to what's right in front of their faces. Just like in horror flicks, we sit there impatient for the movie to get to the good part, but being deliciously teased is what makes a rom com something other than porn, despite the fact that the money shot is, after all, the money shot - even if it's only implied. In other words, sex sells. 

But how much can sex sell, or how much should sex sell? Those who know me find that I have long subscribed to Aldous Huxley's defintion of an intellectual (and tried to be that), someone who after all finds something more interesting than sex. I doubt that he meant eating as that something, but thinking, but he was clearly immersed in some context of society that must have seemed to him what ours seems to me: overrun. 

Did I mention the demographic? Oh. I should have, it was a lurking assumption. If you want to maximize your market you go for the bell curve, a target market with disposable income for your cheesy business model and an easily identifyable human attribute waiting to be indulged. So is American culture obsessed with sex because so many louts sell it, or because our demographic is sexy? Dunno. What I do know is this: It's hard to be a fan of Vladimir Horowitz when you're in your 20s. I was and still am, though I still haven't bought the Deutsche Grammophon box set. Maybe for Christmas, I'm still diggin' on Ella's. It's hard because Horowitz is dead and not sexy, and it might take a little doing for you to appreciate what he does (did) so well. A little doing means Apple doesn't pony up the electricity, servers, bandwidth and all that so you can preview it on Apple TV from the comfort of your living room. Vladimir Horowitz is not a hot meme and is never going to be a hot meme. You have to seek him out. If you have sought out Vladimir Horowitz or perhaps somebody even a bit more obscure like one of the authors mentioned in Niall Ferguson's history of WW1, you're likely going to have to do it the hard way. 

If you have sex three times a week for 20 years you would still have several hundred orgasms to go to reach the magical 4000. Much likely more if you're a woman. You might never get that many. I've been thinking about this because I'm a guy, and most guys do it for the bang. In that I'm like most guys, if my theory about guys' purposes is correct. But I'm also like Huxley, who might likely suggest that sex is a fairly interesting human activity, for what it's worth, but there are much more interesting things to consider. With that distance, I can objectify it like RBIs or some other statistic. Since I think economically, I also think about the marginal value of the nth bang, which for me is starting to rapidly diminish. I know some of my readers may think I'm a bit odd (although the thought crossed my mind of using the word 'queer') in that I don't find sex particularly.. compelling. For me, I'd say that sex is like driving fast. It's a dangerous game that's exhilaratingly boring. You do it because you can and because you're used to having the privilege. You are simultaneously amused by how simple and stupid it is and repulsed by how people get wrapped around its axle. What is the purpose in having a 'healthy' attitude towards sex? To make yourself sporting, I think, and to provide the louts with market share.  See how blunt I am? I happen to think that sexual bluntness is unbecoming, and by my style I'm alternately a rake and a coquette but that was back around number 1200. A long time ago, when it mattered. 

I'm fascinated in the same repulsed way about how the mattress manufacturers have managed to sell us another statistic about ourselves. To hear the louts blather, we all have a 'sleep number'. Well, we also must certainly have some inflection point at which the marginal utility of another sexual encounter heads south, and suddenly the overrunning of culture by the louts and their cheesy business models goes 'whoosh' right over your head, or under your feet as the case may be. All the gyrations on 'music' videos seems pointed to a completely alien demographic. When I got married 16 years ago, it's true, I really stopped buying a certain kind of shirt. I have not purchased cologne in a very long time. In fact, I think I may have the last two bottles of Kouros on earth, or at least the oldest. 

So there's all this energy and money and ego out there in the culture selling and influencing and intimating everything about what's supposed to be so.. compelling about sex, all the personal drama, all that 70s Me Generation stuff that's rolling back around, and it's all beginning to look extra strange to me. 

Let's take this into one more dimension which is the dimension of 'sexual liberation'. At what number might we suggest that an individual is sexually liberated? I mean all have come to recognize what the government tells us our caloric intake should be. We've been roundly seduced into what Michael Pollan calls 'nutritionism'. We know what vitamins and minerals and calories and carbs and anti-oxidants are supposed to do. But are we hungry? I mean statistically how much do we have to eat to qualify as off the critical list for the UN Special Committee on Hunger? There must be a number for that. Similarly there must be some amount of sex we have to get in order not to be sexually repressed. There's a certain amount of bang we have to get, presumably for the least amount of bucks if any at all, such that we pass. When are we into the meat of the curve? (Now there's a double entendre for you.)

You see it's not enough for the louts with their cheesy business models to exploit our own anti-Huxley-intellectual hungers but the culture has to make us 'healthy' in our attitudes. But we all know deep in our hearts that there's just something wrong with the fine print in the Viagra commercials when it has to be said that one should consult your doctor to see if sex is alright for you, you old horny bastard. We know somehow that there's a limit. Or do we actually think porn stars might really be making all those noises because they are.. compelled. It seems to me that somewhere after 2000, nobody should be able to tell you anything or sell you anything about sex. At the very least, you should know that you're being sold. And yet I continue to be amazed by the prodigious amounts of time, energy and money are expended on capturing the attention of the bazillions all upon the basis of this 'healthy' sexual identity we're all supposed to possess. It's unhealthy. 

So there are 1200 channels on my television, and 1200 times that many coming over the internets. I'm old and tired but not jaded. I've still got Vladimir Horowitz and Bud Powell and Art Tatum and others similarly lightning fingered. Although it's difficult, the bandwidth for high culture is crowded out by the lazy loudmouths, it's not impossible to get off the beaten track and put aside all that co-opting of basic instincts. But it must be hard for the new suckers of Me Generation marketing to imagine themselves beyond the faux diversity of the same sexy sales. But the crazy thing is that it's even harder for me, approaching 4000 to care about what so many evidently care about. 

Then again, I've managed to speed quite a bit without getting wrapped around the axle. 

 

Classic Bloviation in Long Beach

There is, my gentle friends, a difference between bloviation and blather. Bloviation is the process of expounding upon passionate intellectual subjects without any sense of purpose. Blather is the product of purposesful rhetoric that has no real intellectual substance. While I enjoy bloviation, I try my damndest to stay away from blather.

After enough alcohol, any discussion of a serious subject descends into bloviation, or bloviated debate. At some point, bloviated debate devolves into blather. I had the good fortune last evening to get into an almost unending zone of bloviation that never dropped off the precipice into the blather zone. My interlocutors were, The Large Professor, Red and Doctor V.  (The Kid left early).

Doctor V offers me a challenge which I am eager to understand completely and I am wary of earning his distrust. You see, he represents the humanist I think it should be my duty to reform. He is a person centered person who requires a revolution. The sort of expectations he has of people and society are both annoyingly high and benign. And so as with most humanists, he requires a thorough undoing of what has evidently been done wrong. It probably wouldn't go too far afield to say that the good doctor is a Liberal, but I am no longer interested in means, so all those political matters are tending towards the insignificant. I hope earnestly that I can learn the proper meaning of revolution and understand exactly how much directed chaos we can sustain for the sake of Progress. But I sense that our great difference may lie in the following matter of principle.

Mankinds great challenge is not with the nature of civilization, it is with the very existence of civilization.

It is for that reason I seek to concern myself not with matters of reform but with the consequences of that with which we don't control. I am conservative because I doubt that we can control what we learn and direct in society in revolutionary ways. But more importantly our economics and wars reflect exactly what mankind actually does, all intentions aside. To talk about reform and making humanity better without any consideration of war and deprivation as the means to that end is naive and shortsighted. My humanist friends don't seem to recognize that they are the scions of victory in war and business, and they are deluded by the promise of improving that which has been achieved by war through peaceful means.

Which puts us on the doorstep of the Large Professor, who is a cherub of deliberate delight. But I'll talk more about those guys next time.