One of the things I did this weekend was to go through all of the scanned pictures I have of myself and pick the one that best describes me professionally. I don't really have one. The picture I finally selected was this one to the right which I took for my 10th wedding anniversary a few years back. I 'shopped it with the best whiteboard photo I could find in my library, and this is what I got.
My stellar and stunning weakness is that I am unable to stand still without overthinking the moment. Every snapshot of me is incomplete, whether it's for the purposes of a resume or a posed picture. It's a rather disturbing thing for me, and I think it is one of the reasons that I seek uniformity in life. I recognize my fluidity. There are only about four pictures of me that I find accurate throughout my life. Others find me in a strange mood specifically for the camera. None of them seem complete without a backstory. In that I guess you could say that I'm non-trivial, which is to say that there is no single interesting fact about me that can be memorized and said representatively of who I am, or who I've been. So searching thousands of pictures and finding only a few iconic ones that are truthful is stranger still.
I expect that a small mob may come to Cobb as Michel Martin's show kicks off. For that reason, I'm sprucing things up a bit. I'm trying to kill dead weight off my blogroll and make it more representative of the stuff I actually read. I'm replacing the banner with apologies to the reader who helped perfect it, with one a bit less stereotypically Malcolm-y. I'm looking to actually spend some time conveying a more accurate sense of why I'm here and what I'm trying to accomplish, and in light of my Cotton Update, I'm convinced that the best way to do this is visually.
I've written over 6,000 blog entries over the past few years. It was Charles Cameron who convinced me that my opinion would be of use in the larger world, and I took him seriously. The larger world has taken me seriously to the extent that the blogosphere is the larger world. And now I am faced with the challenge of being a recognizable conduit for the ideas I profess. I need to take my image a bit more seriously. I like 'essayist and political cartoonist', because I think it accurately describes my approach and demeanor. One without the other isn't quite balanced or fair.
I don't want to be a humorist like PJ O'Rourke, but I love the space that is his. I'd like to think that I can be that kind of funny. I like the space inhabited by Stanley Crouch, and I can only hope my first book will be as cool as his "Notes of a Hanging Judge", but I obviously don't need to take a swing at effeminate literary types. But at some point in my life of writing, if it is possible within the medium that online is or may become, I would like to have the stature, or at least the contextual shadow of one of the great wise writers. In that way, part of me resents having to take pictures at all. I've always wanted to be older, wiser, wealthier and more influential than I am. I never liked being a child. I never liked being led.
All of these pictures of me are cute. And I was cute in that way on that day.
The first I've explained. The second perfects me in 1983 when I was a sophomore in college reading Thomas Sowell's Ethnic America. It was the second year of me considering myself a neocon, after Sowell. It was the year I started thinking of myself as a new kind of immigrant in America. That was Easter, but I didn't marry her. In every way that me was living the kind of Old School that I thought everyone would always appreciate, in the way you think Frankie Beverly and Sade would never go out of style and the Talented Tenth would always be in charge - I took that bearing for granted.
T
he third was me in full buppy mode. Black urban professional, dancing in suits. All very smooth and sophisticated. The year was 1987, the town was El Segundo. I had yet to meet the love of my life and I was a member of the Babeless Crew. We gave the coolest parties in upscale black So Cal. I was still me, but I was enjoying life a whole lot. I was playing fast and loose in the go-go Eighties. It was an arrogant time for all of us. I drank, I smoked, I danced to Housequake. Politics didn't matter, what mattered was self-improvement. It was a great time to be in your mid twenties. Nobody had heard of AIDS, even Reagan got busted partying with Iranians, no worries. I was making up for lost time, all the hard work it took to get the right kind of education.
Before then times were hard. I worked basically four years after highschool. I clerked, I tellered, I sold radios, I did ten key by touch. I sold toner from a boiler room. I was a union employee. I had a dozen odd jobs with a private prep school background. I took a picture of myself in black and white trying my best to show that there was more to me than a black kid with a high school diploma. That was my most expensive sweater from Alexander Julian, and those are the lace curtains in my parents' bedroom. I took the picture with a Minolta SRT-101. I made a calendar of pictures of myself in black and white. I was solemn in the way that only 20 year old black man knows. I couldn't afford an apartment, a car, a suit, and I just got sick of partying with the guys in the warehouse. 
But after the yuppie partying was done, after dancing on the speakers with Rosie Perez, I read Toni Morrison. And Audre Lord, and Cornel West, and Gloria Aldanzua, and bell hooks, and Derrick Bell. I caught the fever and buried myself in T. Boyle and Threepenny Review. I had to make sense of the world of the liberal arts. I stopped wearing the Nordstrom shirts and ties. I started wearing the bandanna. I became an intellectual insurgent, an organic, a roughneck poet, a guerrilla videographer of potentially rogue cops, a groupie of black intellectuals in academia, a diarist gone public. But I still drove the BMW, and I still lived near the beach. I opened my eyes past the point of dilation and became suddenly disgusted with everything and everyone. That which allowed me to ignore IEDs in Afghanistan and the poverty of South Central LA, I cast off. I became sensitive, and my writing became like a socio-economic seismograph. I went Boho.
I moved to the East Coast and realized that there was some glamour in writing. I found all the wannabes who hung out with the junior staffers from the New Yorker. I knew the clerks in the black bookstores by name. I had met Haile Gerima, Trey Ellis, Greg Tate, Lisa Jones, George C. Wofe and... I finally realized that it was not my career. That when the chips were down, as they always are for brilliant black writers who suffer in penury while knucklehead rappers like Onyx shit diamonds, I wasn't going to stick it out. Besides, I was now better able to distinguish important writing from existential bloviation. I had figured out the identity game. It wasn't for me. The time was nigh to find a wife, and put all this nightcrawling to bed. So I did.
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