Cobb

The Iz Biz

Jimi Izrael is kicking butt and taking names in the media, and there are few who are as responsible as he is when it comes to representing the flavor of my old school demographic. He's good people, he's my people and if there is any justice in this world he will be righteously famous. I think he's on the right road.

So he let it leak through some ghetto downloading service that he's coming up with a new vehicle called 'First Chair with Jimi Izrael'. I'm going to tune in. I hope it finds the right host and distribution, it would be a disappointment if it were not produced as professionally as his current NPR gig. 

I would love to do a podcast with Jimi sometime in the future and I went over the transcripts of his last three NPR shows just to remind myself of the texture and tone of the verbiage we used to throw down. Brought back fond memories, because we had really good laughs. (Check out Radio Recap)

Anyway, be on the lookout for Jimi. He's real, he's wise, he deserves a listen. 

The Freakiest Friday

Yesterday has to be the most extraodinary and ridiculously exasperating day I can remember.

1. I get up early in my hotel to the smell of burning toast. Oh I see they have finally gotten rid of the floor blowers that have been running half the night because of the rain soaked carpets. 

2. I cannot find the syrup for the French Toast at the continental breakfast.

3. Upon checkout, I am given the wrong receipt. 

4. I get to the office but forgot my badge in the car. I have to walk back across the parking lot to get it. And after all, this is my last day on the contract, I have to turn in the damned thing anyway.

5. Neither my immediate supervisor or the project sponsor are in today. Oh well, I'm just working a half day anyway with not much to do besides cleanup my cube and desktop.

6. Well what do you know. AMZN pops 15%. I just made a pile of money in the stock market. And Walmart is back too. I feel like I can pick 'em.

7. Horrible news. The death of a close friend. One of the best people. I am deflated heading towards despondance. I shuffle papers on my desk.

8. I leave without saying goodbye to the one person I wanted most to.

9. I hate New Jersey road construction. I find myself lost again somewhere between South Orange and the 78. This time it's the desolate corner of Muhammad Ali and Irvine Turner in Ghetto Newark. 

10. I'm in the spaghetti of roads near the Avis drop-off and another friend calls about the tragedy. I am on the edge of not wanting to do anything but scream. I try to business-like. Business-like? WTF?

11. The Avis girl makes me fill out a form about the dent in the driver's door. I'm still on the phone talking about death. I am reminded that I picked up this car, a shitbox Hyundai, at 2:00 in the morning, in the dark, in the rain. I'm still on the phone.

12. I am the Foursquare mayor of the Avis Rentacar at Newark Airport. Still. I mention this to one of the attendants. He has no idea what I'm talking about and tells me he sees celebrities all the time, like Hal Holbrooke. 

13. I look nothing like Corey Booker.

14. I stop off at Terminal A out of habit. But my proper terminal is C, I'm flying United. I have to get back onto the next shuttle train. Well, at least I am ahead of schedule. 

15. My credit card is not working at the United kiosk. I have to fumble and find papers. I hate looking like a rube traveler. I'm really starting to wonder about this day. My friend is dead. Pause. Breathe.

16. I get through security. I call the Spousal Unit. Should I eat now or wait until I get to LA? I decide to eat now, but not at the Oyster Bar.

17. A couple of TSA workers stride past me, one of them grumbling that he knew he shouldn't have come to work today. TSA workers, walking fast?

18. I finally find a Chinese food place - I sit with my General Tso's and Bourbon Chicken and somebody in a red jacket about 10 yeards away is saying "OK if you're with the restaurant you can stay... everybody else needs to evacuate." 

19. So I'm evacuating. Calmly. With my Oakly bag over my shoulder, an orange Vitamin Water in my left hand with my plate of lo mein and chicken. I can eat and evacuate at the same time. 

20. I'm sitting in the wind-blown and chilly smoking area outside security checkpoint C1 with one bar of AT&T 3G. None of my tweet searches are coming back. It has been an hour now.

21. The bomb dogs are leaving the building. I return to the crush of 10,000 people going back through security again at Newark Terminal C. I try to think about my Amazon stock.

22. I am in boarding group 8. Eight!?

23. I hobble off the plane 7 hours later at LAX. My legs are killing me, my cellphone's battery is dead. I am in Terminal Seven at last. 80 minutes late.

24. They sent my luggage to Terminal Six.

Self Determination vs Marxism

A blast from the past.

His Name is Shusei

in my generation, there were certain images that sparked the imagination. None were so thrilling to mine as the artwork of Shusei Nagaoka. I have just discovered that this was the man. It happened almost by accident. 

At all of my remote assignments, I keep track of where I am and what city by changing my desktop wallpaper. Generally, it will be something iconic about the city. This last time around, I changed up because I had two screens. I saw that somebody else used the Pink Floyd Dark Side of the Moon LP album cover for their desktop, and I thought that was pretty cool. So I thought, hmm, what's the coolest album cover ever? It was pretty simple. Earth Wind and Fire's All N All. 

It turns out that Nagaoka also did the the Out of the Blue space station for ELO, and the legendary album cover for Jefferson Starship with the dragon holding the glowing sphere. Next to Star Wars and the space ships from Superman vs Muhammad Ali, these EWF album covers by Shusei were the epitome of my teenaged aesthetic. 

It wasn't until the 80s that I got into Moebius and Geiger, despite Heavy Metal, the movie - but we could talk about that. 

Obligatory Seriousness on Boycotting the Bahrain Gran Prix

Somebody is torn, yes in an emotional tizzy about whether tis more noble to make some point against the political capital of Formula One racing, vis a vis its determination to procede this weekend against the turmoil of a continuing 'Arab Spring' in that chaotic nation. I put it bluntly.

Let me be blunt. Your argument is 'we are the world' politics. You are wanting consumer economic things to do the political. It doesn't. It's just self-congratulatory conspicuous politically correct consumption. 

Here's the analogy. There is nothing you can say about the political capital of F1 that doesn't apply double to The America's Cup in yachting. So lets just imagine that you are a British peer writing to your cronies in 1901 whether or not it would be fair to America's Negroes if you were to attend the event that season. As if it mattered. 

It doesn't. If you're not going to put military boots on the ground to overthrow the tyrant, everything else is just hot air. Drop the pretense. Enjoy the show.

Tax Time!

Everyone Benefits

Keepers

626 Night Market

I just woke up from a moderate nightmare. I was in this huge indoor clothing store in China with me and my cohorts being chased around.

We had just made a deal with the head laundress to process our bulk clothing at $3 per 20 pound sack. She had the hots for my young, aggressive associate Yung, so I encouraged them to indulge themselves. Just after the deal was sealed, Yung decided to stir the pot by spitting on the sacks of our Japanese rivals. (Their sacks are bright red, ours are white with three blue stars and an outline of California). Yung goes left, I go right, the Japanese are chasing us. Meanwhile the people who run the joint are trying to find out what the chaos is all about. So Im scrabling through aisle after aisle packed with shoppers trying to get back to my American group and maintain some dignity and not have to whip out the pistol...

(cliche of man rising up in bed, breathing deeply covered in sweat)

Last night I took my daughter and her friend out to Pasadena for the 626 Night Market. There was no chasing, but there were huge crowds of Chinese people everywhere. The traffic was horrendous, but it was indeed a spectacle. 

The Night Market is an old Chinese tradition and if people have any sense whatsoever, it's going to be a new huge one in the San Gabriel Valley. It was a shopkeeper's nirvana. The foot traffic was Times Square intense. For a measly one block setup of no more than 30 odd tents, you had easily 15,000 people.

It was nostalgic for me to get out to Pasadena. I used to live in Altadena and in South Pasadena so I have more than my share of memories about the place and its affinity for Asians of all flavors. The girls, by showing up, practicing a little of their Mandarin and taking photos will get extra credit for their class and there were certainly plenty of opportunities to overhear conversations in all sorts of dialects. 

We ended up eating down in Old Pasadena six blocks away to get away from the swell. Great steaming bowls of spicy ramen could be had at Naga Naga. So we had ours after a 40 minute wait. I say go for the kimchee + beef, and the green milk tea is great, but too small - you should order two, or just get a Sprite. The huge fishtank in the middle is cute for about 10 minutes and then you start noticing how disgusting it is in the nooks and crannies. That is if you are sitting at the bar that surrounds it. My advice is to get a table far away. 

Ont the whole, it was nice to get out of the house and into the street, but I hate crowds and there was absolutely nothing worth buying. Not even a cool T-Shirt. The experience was rather like Venice Beach, but not as well organized. 

Baubles, Bangles & Fields Medals

I wondered when at last it would happen. But somebody decided to take Derbyshire up on his assertion that the fact of no black Fields Medalist is 'civilizationally ...' something. Significant, I think was his word. Well it turns out the Fields Medal has something to do with mathematics, and mathematics has something to do with civilization, therefore..

Sine qua non is perhaps the logical cliche that Derbyshire was attempting to dog whistle, wink wink, nod nod. Insults and insinuations don't have to be logically precise, and sly implications are part of the joke but Derbyshire's syllogism doesn't parse. I leave it to you as an exercise.

Now it's time for my dog whistle. Two words. Dick Feynman. 

There is a community of black folks out there who would pay attention and would be genuinely proud of the author and I'm almost one of them. In my race man days, I would always cite some black American mathematician at the U of Chicago who corrected Edward Teller's homework although he was not specifically invited to be on the Manhattan Project. But all such proving is unnecessary unless you are racialist in the first place - which is that you believe the acts of the one reflect on the capacities of the many and therefore the illogic of the enemy of the many.

On the other hand it's possible that by citing examples of racist discrimination you mean to suggest that it is racism and only racism that keeps the other man down. Fortunately the author doesn't make the logical error of citing a lack of proportional representation as significant because that too fails serious scrutiny. 

It doesn't present itself as a compelling question to me to find the exact person who convinced me that in order to undermine the fallacies and immorality of racial reasoning, one must behave *as if* the proper actions will make for the proper environment. But I know this to be true - it is as axiomatic as any profession. And so black apologetics remains to me, something of a pedantic exercise riddled with futility. 

(Full Disclosure)
Two weeks ago I was reminded by the presence of an old clunker automobile with a Harvard sticker of the snide kind of statement that would be. It was something I always wanted to have. I grew up thinking that the coolest job in the world was to be a tenured professor of philosophy at Harvard. The man who helped me believe that was Dr. Alfred Ligon.  

Reflections on The Conservative Mind

There used to be something called blip.tv. The link is dead.

Borky's Beach

I'm writing again. But in a different form. I'm writing a novel. 

I've decided that I'm probably going to keep the blog at the volume I'm currently doing, which is about 3 posts per week, and then dedicate some television and gaming time to writing my autobiography and my sci-fi novel. The sci-fi novel is tentatively titled 'Borky's Beach'.

Borky's Beach is an investigative mystery through a post- pseudo apocalyptic near future Los Angeles. It's half mystery thriller, half speculative social science fiction. The environment makes the book and so far it's pretty exciting.

After a catastrophic plague decimates the coastal communities of Los Angeles County, a brilliant scientist discovers the cause and cure. His research leads to a revolution in Life Sciences that has captured the imagination of the world. He has figured out a way to regulate and control the microbes and flora of the human body. People can now have perfect skin, perfect teeth, and alter their personalities through the use of bioengineered microbes. In fact, he has integrated new digestive enzymes into human biology so that we can eat a wider variety of food. He has solved world hunger and made everybody beautiful. Naturally he is the richest and most powerful man on Earth. Consequently all of the information revolution abrubtly ends and recedes, rather like the end of the Gemini program did for manned space exploration, or the Oil Crisis did for the American Muscle Car. Into this situation steps our protagonist. All of the IT that's left has turned society into a panoptic nation of sexy, healthy stool pigeons. Wary of the new ways and adept at the old, he is assigned to find out if it's true that some people live off the grid in the original area of the plague. What he finds there is even more shocking and threatens to change the balance of power of humanity once more. 

 

Suicide: Erasing White Privilege Since 1994

Deaths by Suicide By Race Los Angeles County, 1994 - 2003   Race   All Races   White   Black Hispanic Asian/Pacific Islander Suicides Rate* Suicides Rate* Suicides Rate* Suicides Rate* Suicides Rate* 2003 727 8 442 12 55 6 163 4 65 5 2002 727 8 401 11 72 8 171 4 81 6 2001 762 8 443 13 51 6 188 5 78 6 2000 711 8 434 12 57 6 155 4 61 5 1999 732 8 449 13 52 6 154 5 75 5 Because of changes to the International Classification of Diseases (ICD), 1994-1998 may not be comparable to 1999-2003. 1998* 794 9 510 14 65 7 156 5 62 7 1997* 776 9 474 13 59 7 166 5 75 7 1996* 873 10 537 15 72 8 181 5 81 7 1995 954 11 610 17 82 9 188 6 72 7 1994 902 10 559 15 72 8 199 5 71 7

 

I know that people like this guy want to make white Americans feel guilty about all the racism that is harshing the mellow of people of color. And of course everybody in the nation is in tune with the outrage of a single needless death. But you might wonder, given all of that, what kind of penalty the white collective hive mind should pay for its evil and sinister oppression. Well, how about death? Better yet how about suicide?

Turns out that in LA County, white Americans have been killing themselves off at double the rate of blacks and at triple the rate of hispanics. 

Who would dare call this justice?

And in case you didn't know, there are about 17,000 murders every year in America. There are about 30,000 suicides. Satisfied?

ME3: Ended

Before I read the spoilers, I want to put down my thoughts about the ending of Mass Effect 3. I heard that there was a great deal of consternation and dissatisfaction with the ending of the game. People were saying that it didn't matter what they did at a certain point, they would get to the same ending - which was inevitable. 

I disagree that the ending was bad, and I discount the complaint that any sort of behavior in the game made not enough difference.

It was when I finally battled the Ninja dude at the Illusive Man's headquarters that I realized that I had taken the step that pushed me over the edge of the story into the concluding parts. It was just before I did so that I decided to be a complete renegade. I felt that after the fall of the Asari homeworld that there was no reason to be anything but survivalist. After all, the Asari were pretty badass. So from that moment on, I started to get tingly about what might happen next that would sour so many gamers on the conclusion to ME3.

It finally seemed to me that in London there might be one more boss battle against the main Reaper whose defeat would make the rest run away, or that suddenly that defeat rallied Earth troops. But it wasn't that bad ending. Then it seemed to me that the Crucible would destroy Earth as well as all of the machines in the galaxy, something like the dreaded Halo firing. No it didn't go pear shaped that way. Then, as I approached the beam in London, I thought maybe Shepard would die and the story would have no resolution - naah. Couldn't be that, but it came close.

The end that happened was good enough, but also confusing enough not to have been supported by the ledgends and dialog in the playing of the game. In other words, it kept me guessing, and now gives me time after the end to consider whether or not it sits well with me. Let me immediately contrast that with Skyrim.

In Skyrim, all you have is the fate of Skyrim, relatively speaking. There was no do or die situation - and so its main quest could be completed and you could still have things to do. This was not the case for ME3. And in that way there was but a singular destiny for Shepard, the consequences of which changed everything. The Reapers were so overwhelmingly successful that their conquest was part of a cycle, and this cycle had to continue or the galaxy would be transformed.  This was the revelation that was flubbed with the Illusive Man and finally given to the Catalyst-Child, and yeah that was kind of awkward if logical. But it all ended up with Shepard shutting down the Reapers via the Crucible because that was the only way Shepard lives to the conclusion - a conclusion which he couldn't live past. 

I think it's safe to presume that the Normandy landed on some planet other than Earth. It could have been made a bit more clear that the Crucible forced the Reapers to flee the Earth and then chased them down with a secondary blast of some sort and it was this secondary blast that blew the Normandy out of the sky. But that's a minor dig. The point was that it laneded in the next Eden in a galaxy with no mass effect relays.

Now that I think about it, this is rather like the ending of Fire Upon the Deep, which I finished a couple weeks ago.

Anyway, there's no DLC and the Mass Effect galaxy is dead, which for all the advanced fighting controls, got a little tiresome by the time I got to London. On the whole, the game held up well, and allowed me to get through it without being bogged down by tiresome intrigues and side-missions unrelated to the big picture. I can't tell you how annoying it used to be finding planets and buying probes and looting eezo just so I could fix something on the Normandy or amp up a pistol. I liked the characters better in ME2 and solving their problems was more interesting than listening to Anderson and Hackett jabber on. But that drove the plot that had to be driven.

In conclusion, it did really have to end this way, and because it did and because Shepard had to live to the end, the inevitability of shutting down the galaxy had to happen. Interestingly enough, I think it makes the Geth and the Quarians the new rulers of the Galaxy, as they are more accustomed to living in far flung spaces without contact to the Council.

Sobeit. 

Derbyshire's Miscalculation

I've only read that John Derbyshire has been fired from National Review a moment ago. That's a nice gesture and one that is entirely reasonable considering the depth at which matters of intellectual and moral import ought to be taken. Thoughtful men such as myself see this as a small victory, not against racism or against an individual racist, but against sloppy thinking that begins and ends with facts and ignores humanity altogether.

I was thinking today while waiting to get a haircut in Inglewood how foolish is The Root for announcing once more that there needs to be an ongoing national discussion on race and until such a thing happens we are doomed in some embarassing and even perilous way. But I think it is most fair to say that this is a species of the Root's failure to realize that it already encapsulates that discussion, it has for years, and it is not ever going to get any better. The editors of The Root are mad that everyone doesn't obsess, debate, pontificate and otherwise take advantage of every 'teachable moment' on the affairs of race. To be honest, there is no good faith anywhere. 

People who want to talk about race actually just can't shut up about it - they get mad and stay mad because the others are not up on the theory. People who don't want to talk about race actually depend too much on shortcuts - they get mad because the others are too deep into theory. 

The shortcut John Derbyshire has taken is one that is familiar to me. Me speaking as someone who used to spend a lot of time talking about race and even more time being sick of listening to people talk about race. Derbyshire's shortcut is what I call 'Statistical Morality'. It is a social error that has become more acceptable under the banner of 'racial realism'. Racial realism suggests there are no hard and fast doctrines about genetic race, but beaviourly speaking that which quacks like a duck...The error of statistical morality as I think of it today is much like the error of the neo-atheist who believes the errors of religion invalidate moral discipline established by reglion. Thus a new logical regime of moral discipline must supplant the old. So, any way of thinking about how to deal with black Americans must follow a new regime - one that is fact based. Since it's impossibly difficult to treat people as if they had no group proclivities, dispense with the old abstracts about blacks and use these statistically proven ones instead. Imagine yourself going to a country of black Americans, which 40 page brochure should you read? Heaven forbid you use anything but the properly derived stereotypes, all in the name of 'statistical common sense'.

 

• Stats and Morals
• Statistical Morality: The Logic of Life
• More Statistical Morality

 

As the characteristic moaning and groaning about how unfortunate this is drones on, the great irony (whether intended or not) in Derbyshire's piece is that the exact same logic is treated with great reverence when the shoe is on the other foot. But nobody is going to fire this guy for the talk he has with his son about rolling the dice in mixed(!) company. (Can't find the video somebody showed me last week - but it was basically 'wise' black father telling black son (for TV cameras) that what happens to TM can happen to him because white cops can't be trusted)

But there is a higher standard for nationally syndicated writers; the greater intellectual error suggests a moral failing which sounds rather obvious when stated like this: Let's come up with a mathematical formula that allows us to make an exception to the Golden Rule when it comes to black people. It will be factual and scientific, and people will doubt their intelligence if they defy it.

That is not incorrect, but it is wrong. And that is exactly how I came across 'The Talk - The Nonblack Version' on Google Plus this afternoon. Via an article posted on a blog which asks questions about intelligence, facts, hypocrisy and that level of bourgeois sensibility. (Oh, that was Eric Raymond)

As for Derbyshire himself. Well he's had a similar problem for a long time. IE, he thinks he can make sense of a nonsensical problem. 

• Derbyshire's Dilemma

The Coming Rule of the Market Quants

All I have to say is this. Google getting into the consumer survey business is the beginning of the end of marketing as we now know it. This was something I rather expected to see and because of that I started fleshing out an idea a few years ago called WWID. 

WWID stands for 'what would i do'. I describe it at my other blog. 

Individual Mandate?

“This is not real reform,” said Howard Dean of Obamacare’s mandate in December 2009. “You’re going to be forced to buy health insurance from a company that’s going to take on average 27 percent of your money so they can pay CEOs 20 million dollars a year…and there’s no choice about that. If you don’t buy that insurance, you’re going to get a fine. This is a bill that was fundamentally written by staffers who are friendly to the insurance industry, [endorsed] by Senators who take a lot of money from the insurance industry, and it’s not health care reform. And I think it’s too bad that it should come to this…I’d kill the bill entirely.”

The Purpose of Identity in Fiction

Not the monkey but my friend George makes something of the shock some New Yorker readers got from discovering that Tweeters were dismayed to find that Hunger Games protagonists weren't all white.

You can't make anything of this without considering the purpose of fiction writing itself. The catch line in the New Yorker article is the last - "“But then again, whenever I read something, I wonder, ‘where can I find the character who represents ME?’ ”. 

The way multiculturalists have politicized the 'problem' of identity in fiction is to respond with a call to a new representational flowering of fiction writing that must be both exceptional and broadly accepted. It does so with the presumption that there is an element of unambiguous oppression in such writing not deemed appropriately representational. This underlies the assumption that there is something *wrong* with the idea that internalizing a 'white' character is somehow detrimental for a reader who is not nominally white. The irony of course is that it can only be detrimental when the principle of modernity is erased - that principle that says human experience is human experience and not essentially racial. If my terms are somewhat off, it is because I associate and equate modernism with humanism. 

The multicultural argument is familiar to me. I have made it myself, but in service to an agenda of cultural production that was conceived to be both one of anti-racist and ethnic chauvinist intent. While the first component is admirable, the second cannot be ignored. I don't have the time nor inclination to demonstrate the extent to which multicultural literature and literacy are chauvinist but rely on the reader's familiarity with the term 'positive role model' when considering the ethically correct sort of fiction. 

But let us consider what I consider to be the neutral case - which is that authors need to make fiction writing with respect to the complexity of their characters fit into a more rainbow like spectrum. Even the color of that rainbow is biased by the American black/white polarity and other politically charged dimensions of the multicultural agenda. If you doubt this, consider the reaction you would expect if you were to suggest that authors would do just as well to make complex characters to be Czech or Eastern Orthodox. It's all rather well to consider that the Ezra Jack Keats Foundation makes its point until you try to consider a Ludwig Bemelmans Foundation making a similar point about childrens books featuring young Catholic French girls like Madeline. And what, pray tell are we to think about Bugs Bunny? Is there something fundamentally wrong with the fact that we learn and internalize stories and lessons from talking rabbits? What about curious monkeys? 

If it's OK to learn from an animal, is it OK to allow readers to make racial and ethnic identifications of characters read from text? I mean is there anything that tells us quite specifically what Sherlock Holmes looks and sounds like? I've read several of Conan Doyle's books and I'm still stuck with the images I had gotten earlier from TV. And now I particularly favor the spin I get from Guy Ritchie's two films. It is difficult for me to imagine Robin as anyone other than Burt Ward. Is it OK for the reader to make what they will of a fictional character? It seems to me that the best way to answer that is to consider the alternative, which is that an author must make racial and ethnic choices for all of their characters and the reader must not stray from that interpretation. That doctrine seems further than any other in the pursuit of anti-racist aims.

It is my opinion that the best thing is done by the 'counter' fiction which is unselfcounsciously that, but it's difficult to unring the bell of political correctness. So I expect to find those black Americans writing about people they knew personally, before there was any call in the literature for such characters, to be what's best - for what it's worth. Surely those readers feeling the oppression of absence or over-simplification would find libraries worth recommending. As one who has used the multicultural argument, my recommendations are as good as any. What I have found then, is a set of a few books that makes the case, the implication being that there were so many others which ended up being a waste of my time. And then of course even as I wrote the recommendation, it was in the context of a cultural and political project, this blog. 

I am finally apt to say, paraphrasing Hugh Laurie who was likley paraphrasing someone else, that there are exactly two types of fiction, good and bad. I think that what has stood the test of time as good is all we should concern ourselves with when it comes to picking what to read and how to assess them. It is only when our heads are full of that which we know to be good that we can say with any certainty whether 'the character that represents ME' is a a good character at all. After all, if ME is so damned important, then ME should write a book about ME.

Triangulating Boohab

The problem with famousity is, of course, that you cannot get unfamous. Neal Stephenson notes that you can become remarkably inconsistent with your Wikipedia page. And so I recall being Boohab.

I ended up writing 'Today's Blackification' instead of this post in the context of that age-old problem of reconciling blackness of the sort I acknowledge with that marginal subset portrayed in the media. But that's all external. What I actually did as Boohab sitll echoes from time to time and I haven't bothered to comment in some time. 

Boohab was the identity I took on many years ago - circa 1995 to be more precise - as what I called a 'persistent black object'. The purpose of Boohab was to be a character that always and everywhere on the net reflected and signified on a particular flavor of black cultural nationalism. Boohab was in your face to remind you of race. 

I always wrote as Boohab in lower case to remind myself and everyone that this was an alter-ego, a character of my creation. It was the black part of me that needed to fulfill what I considered the public imperative of my generation of black Americans. The following was my full word, mostly written in retrospect on the headstone of the grave that is now Boohab's Factotum.

i'm michael bowen, creater of boohab and his website, boohab's factotum. i've been discussing social issues of all sorts online since about 1985 and began concentrating on black cultural production around '93.

my day job is business intelligence. i am a data architect involved with orchestrating information systems designed to help corporate folks make better decisions. i'm a proponent of weak ai, a devotee of the parc school of augmentation and the deming school of continuous quality improvement. i am fascinated by the ways people use computing systems to help them think (or not think).

i began to get involved with black cultural production back in '89 when somebody asked provocatively why black people get all upset when white people say rap 'is not real music'. my response took about 1700 words and a poem. i was an early participant in the open mike circuit in los angeles, and have also performed in nyc at nuyorican, st. marks and various other venues including the infamous march down 7th avenue headed by william kunstler and others following the los angeles uprising. my form of activism has a highly literary bias, but i am formally unpublished.

i took my writing and activism online having considering several venues of 'guerilla media' including spoken word, multimedia and cable access. so i began showing up in all the 'black' spaces online including some old forgotten bbs sites like idette vaughn's bbs, alex hartley's place. i ended up on 'the well' expecting a warm welcome and discovered that a LOT of people needed schooling on the basics. so following in the footsteps of my intellectual mentors, i dedicated myself to the practice of defining and teaching 'anti-racist praxis'. and so i have been a provocative figure in usenet, and various web-oriented discussion spaces for years.

i'm 36, married with 3 kids and recently moved 'back' to los angeles, having lived in atlanta, brooklyn, harlem, and boston. i'm an obsessive news junkie and compulsive reader. i'm the product of a new haven family and a new orleans family ("would you kindly pass me somadem mudbugs, sir?") i consider myself old-school socially, i'm an episcopalean with a jesuit education and i expect my kids to go to jack & jill. intellectually, i wish i were edward said - i very much dig on the model of insurgency outlined by cornel west. i know when to clap in jazz clubs and would consider any evening perfectly spent which includes at various points: whiskey, cigars, jazz and embarrassingly arcane debate. (oysters are optional)

it is my duty and pleasure to serve the public good through our joint creation. i am singularly committed to anti-racist activism; in concert we can move mountains.

It becomes clear that much of this was about being, and that is perhaps the prerogative of young middle age. How can I get people to accept that thing I want to be and almost am? At least that was the question for me. But I understood that Boohab was not all that I wanted to be, just the particular flavor of a particular time that needed expression. 

In that expression I see the consistency of academic friends in my generation. It is with confidence that they must convey the spirit of Boohab, to beat the last bugs from the screens - the bugs of racism and the unsure identity. It is a project for modernism against tribalism and I think it may be doomed. But that depends upon how much faith one feels one must have in modernism. I like Baldwin's take on idenity - let it be like the loose robes of the desert, so that one's nakedness can be lived and perceived. Humans are tribal and hierarchical down to our DNA, and Dunbar's number ain't no joke. There's only so much xenophobia we can train out of our systems, and I despair that my academic bug beaters don't despair of their own project's Canute-like futility. 

I have the fortunate position of not having reduced Cobb to a racial battle royale and not necessarily being known as a race man. But I'm not necessarily in control of those perceptions. But the Boohabian history remains influential in having been done. I don't do it now because I did it then. And just as I predicted with some confidence, America has not fallen off the cliff. I was hella pessimistic after the LA Riots and the rise of Gangsta Rap in those days, but from my perspective the country has never been so bad as in the bad old days. Despite the fact that pop culture has become debased beyond what I thought possible, the important things have held together, and yes Denzel did get his Oscar. So I laid down my racial sword and sheild, down by the riverside. 

It wasn't difficult for me to find the transcendant values. Community is a necessary but insufficient condition, so is middle class stability, lethargy and status quo. Steaks and bourbon help, mostly singly, sometimes in triumphant combination. The future of Boohab? Respect for the dead.