Thanks to Boingboing for the link. My only gripe is the description of the hammer strike as “pansy” from our exuberant host, but hey, good math and nice camera work.
Category Archives: art
Onion tweet and visibility of hatred of women
Thanks to the potent Feministing column “Your daily feminist cheat sheet,” who recommended film critic Maryann Johansen who coordinates Flick Filosopher. The title of her article is: “a feminist film critic defends the Onion’s Quvenzhane Wallis tweet.” Her title is inflammatory, but I’m a little intrigued by the notion of some idiot was going to parade their shadow representation of feminism to justify calling a nine-year old kid a misogynistic insult.
I could not have gotten it more wrong. Turns out that Maryann Johansen is not only on-point, but seems to be the kind of really smart feminist critic who can help make oppressive discourse visible, able to be mocked and defeated. Thinking about it, the denigration of Quvenzhané Wallis is only visible because the insult doesn’t work against regular celebrity women — they are often called terrible names. Johansen explains that the Onion tweet is visible precisely because the message (hate women) has suffused mainstream culture.
That gets attention in a way that calling a famous adult woman the same thing never does. Because it’s clearly outrageous in a way that, apparently, isn’t quite so clear-cut when it comes to an adult woman. But she asked for it by wearing that dress. She’s an attention whore. She likes being in the spotlight. She can stop being famous any time if she can’t take it. We should see such rationales as ridiculous. We can see it when they’re applied to a nine-year-old. But we don’t see it in general.
What a smart argument. I still don’t see any need to defend the tweet. I’m not going to cheer on hatred of women in order to make hatred of women more visible. We work with the tools available to us. We read the signs available to us. We dismantle systems of oppression as they are described and spoken into being.
Filed under art, communication, feminism, learning, media, representation, resistance
Harlem responds to the ‘Harlem’ Shake
Dang!
I had been thinking about posting about the Harlem shake meme videos — I was going to talk about the Waka Flocka Flame effect of enjoying music that makes you dance and have fun — considering the bodily invitation of Baauer’s nice tune. I was thinking about mapping how many ways we are constrained in movement and how nice that these videos offered a chance to have fun and simply go dumb (Rest In Power Mac Dre).
But of course, the reason why people feel so seemingly liberated is that there is a script to follow — the dances are mapped quite carefully. Check a couple of the internet meme videos and you’ll see the similarity in the costumes, poses, the points in the song where people are ‘allowed to dance,’ the invitation to unique foolishness is certainly there — but it is a copy of a copy of a copy. . . .
And in that copying is the insult for people who live in Harlem. The mockery and lack of respect for an actual dance form is central for many of the folks interviewed. I bet most of the people who are in Harlem shake videos would respond by saying: ‘I didn’t know about the history and the ties to the location.”
Which is precisely the difficulty with internet meme videos — the absolute disconnection from context at precisely the time that we are inundated with thousands of replications of the image, each one loving re-embraced by the local players who perhaps (put new text around a much loved image) or (prepare to do the Harlem shake with their buddies arguing over ‘who get’s to wear the mask?’). In most cases, the internet teaches us that what was once singularly owned or identified can be swept into the internet-o-sphere and assimilated, free of context or culture to become a clever short-term joke.
Thanks to Okayplayer who had the best coverage on this subject including a how-to on a slightly more authentic Harlem Shake.
Filed under art, communication, cultural appropriation, funk & soul, hip hop, learning, media, music, representation
Is pre-written a freestyle? MF GRIMM to the jugular
We get some nice attention paid to one of the greatest: MF GRIMM in this interview in Unkut. Robbie, the president of the conservative rap coalition, rocks a two-part interview with GRIMM.
I get offended when people say, “You’re not an MC if you don’t go off the top!” Making like writing is a crime. As a Black man in America, I take that as an insult, I feel like it’s subliminal bullshit where people want to get you away from a pen and paper. Back then, freestyle was two different things – it was a written that no one ever heard before, or it was off the top of your head. How dare some one say that because I have seven thousand rhymes in my head that I’m not equivalent to somebody making something spur of the moment! From the moment I lost that battle with Supernatural, I dedicated myself to being a writer. No more battling. I’mma learn to be like Edgar Allen Poe.
via unkut.com – A Tribute To Ignorance (Remix).
Don’t sleep on the new GRIMM LP! “Good Morning Vietnam” is strong as hell and made by GRIMM and Drasar Monumental. Drasar’s beats are really hard — and GRIMM showcases some serious wordplay. And if you aren’t following Drasar’s hip hop battlefield your homework is lined up!
Cool “Disco” Dan documentary promo
Hell yeah! Thanks to Dante Ross for the tip!
Filed under art, communication, documentary, funk & soul, graffiti, music
Documentary on the Ghetto Brothers
Nice documentary on the formidable culture changers the Ghetto Brothers. Filmmaker Andreas Vingaard has seven wonderful short films up on his page dedicated to New York City community activists and hip hop pioneers. I appreciate the editing and the focus on the subjects telling their own stories.
And don’t sleep on the interview with Joseph Mpa who is a black panther organizer who becomes the manager of the Cold Crush Brothers.
Filed under art, documentary, funk & soul, graffiti, hip hop, music, protest, race
Colorlines on Django – can we critique a fiction?
Colorlines have the *science* on Django Unchained and slavery. Among their “Top ten things you should know about slavery but won’t learn at ‘Django’ are the following crucial insights:
3) Africans possessed unique expertise which Europeans required to make their colonial ventures successful. Africans knew how to grow and cultivate crops in tropical and semi-tropical climates. African rice growers, for instance, were captured in order to bring their agricultural knowledge to America’s sea islands and those of the Caribbean. Many West African civilizations possessed goldsmiths and expert metal workers on a grand scale. These slaves were snatched to work in Spanish and Portuguese gold and silver mines throughout Central and South America. Contrary to the myth of unskilled labor, large numbers of Africans were anything but.
via 10 Things You Should Know About Slavery and Won’t Learn at ‘Django’ – COLORLINES.
And this nice reminder about the violent disciplinary work of slavery economics:
6) The brutalization and psychological torture of slaves was designed to ensure that plantations stayed in the black financially.
Slave revolts and acts of sabotage were relatively common on Southern plantations. As economic enterprises, the disruption in production was bad for business. Over time a system of oppression emerged to keep things humming along. This centered on singling out slaves for public torture who had either participated in acts of defiance or who tended towards noncompliance. In fact, the most recalcitrant slaves were sent to institutions, such as the “Sugar House” in Charleston, S.C., where cruelty was used to elicit cooperation. Slavery’s most inhumane aspects were just another tool to guarantee the bottom line.
via 10 Things You Should Know About Slavery and Won’t Learn at ‘Django’ – COLORLINES.
And key to remember that many of those who made profits from slavery continue to be the global elite:
9) Many firms on Wall Street made fortunes from funding the slave trade.
Investment in slavery was one of the most profitable economic activities throughout most of New York’s 350 year history. Much of the financing for the slave economy flowed through New York banks. Marquis names such as JP Morgan Chase and New York Life all profited greatly from slavery. Lehman Brothers, one of Wall Street’s largest firms until 2008, got its start in the slave economy of Alabama. Slavery was so important to the city that New York was one the most pro-slavery urban municipalities in the North.
via 10 Things You Should Know About Slavery and Won’t Learn at ‘Django’ – COLORLINES.
I like this list and would only add an eleventh argument – fleshing out some discussion of gender. I agree with Angela Davis that a lot of the violent responses by white folks during reconstruction was mobilized around the representation of the threat of black men raping white women. I think we can track some of current American tensions about sexuality to this decade of image/cultural construction: white male supremacy, female purity and implications of criminality associated with black skin. Despite being incorrect and made up, these ideas stuck around.
In the comments section of the Colorlines article, one person asks:
‘Django Unchained’ was FICTION why does everyone want to hold it up to fact-checking? These 10 points are correct but had nothing to do with the film. I know so many people that have been discouraged from seeing a great film because the net is flooded with articles about how historically inaccurate the film is. It’s a cowboy styled revenge film where the hero is a black man…
via 10 Things You Should Know About Slavery and Won’t Learn at ‘Django’ – COLORLINES.
I wouldn’t speak for the Colorlines author, Imara Jones, but in my opinion the importance of Django is precisely that it is a popular fictional representation about slavery. I don’t think it’s real, but Django, along with a long-line of films (Gone with the wind) about slavery can be probed for shared themes, threads, preferred representations. The fictional liberties are worth examining not for historical accuracy, but for current political implications.
Nostalgia: robots and heavy metal
I’m impressed with Compressorhead — the three-piece robot band (three and a half if you count the little robot who drives one of the cymbals). I went to their website to see if I could discern the origins of the project, DIY, corporate, academic, or whatever and couldn’t really find anything on the makers.
Then I tracked down the drummer.
Stickboy was created by Robocross Machines and a whimsical roboticist named Frank Barnes. A quick tour through the other robots created from this shop and you get the robot tent intended to “hunt children.”
And of course, the robotic shark.
Reminds me of the Survival Research Labs robot machines, built for public performance and disturbance.
When my old band couldn’t find a drummer we used a computer to make some mediocre drum tracks. Will the future hold the chance for fourteen year old folks to go to the robot shop and rent a bass player robot?
I can also imagine the perspective of my uncle, a working musician who would immediately complain about humans losing gigs to this robot monstrosity (despite the fact that he doesn’t know how to play ‘Ace 0f Spades’). When I lived in the Hudson Valley I remember friends who hated the automated toll booth (EZ Pass?) and would prefer to wait in line for humans to take their money.
I appreciate these perspectives which all seem to be anchored in a nostalgia for the real. But of course in 2013 all of these experiences are reflections of an ideal of the real — with no real connection. Real isn’t a human taking your money at the toll booth, it is certainly more human, but it isn’t a move of resistance commensurate with the degree of changes toward digitization and computer-mediated life. Nostalgia is getting to choose between having a human taking your money and a machine and preferring the machine. Of course, the ability to have a human-to-human interaction with the toll booth operator is a sincere and real advantage to those who choose that lane. But since the exchange is one that takes place at someone’s workplace, you have to doubt the sincerity of the exchange (in these cases, the employee is often not permitted to speak their mind while at work).
In this case the machine is humanized and the human is made mechanic.
I”m not trying to emphasize the division between human/machine but suggesting that it is more complicated. Are the humans at the toll booth in part using machines in the booths to keep track of money, time, and vehicle size? Of course they are. And in the same way that the new human-free check out stations in grocery stores require a human to staff them (to check IDs, troubleshoot machines, and help confused human customers), the humans in the toll booths support their digital replacements.
The human is made mechanic — we long for the cool replacement. Of course I would like to be in a band that I could program. Plan their every note and move for a performance. But I doubt I could keep up with the robot bass player, so I could imagine slowly moving from participant to planner, and making my own robot replacement in the band. Wizard of Oz-like, one becomes the master controller who programs all of the moves and music, even for your own character. They are simultaneously something new and a reflection of your genius.
There is something about the setlist (it includes Black Sabbath’s ‘Iron Man’) and the note-for-note simulacrum that is played to copy sloppy that is digging at me. The distrust to let the machine make it’s own music. I guess that is the moment where you give your Robot musician some degree of autonomy and we probably head toward the world of the Terminator movies.
But I’m curious about the sound. What comes out when we let the circuits overheat and do their own thing. A guy built a random shopping robot for himself. Consider Darius Kazemi:
In the recent year he and his spouse have bought a house, and with it comes increased thought on the conscientious couple’s part to ideas about consumerism, “things.” Kazemi noticed how the occasional sudden arrival of back-ordered Amazon products he’d long since forgotten about ordering feels somehow more exciting, “like a gift you bought yourself,” and wondered what it would feel like to design a program that buys you things seemingly at random?
The bot’s purpose, in Kazemi’s words, is largely to “fill [his] life with crap,” to see if somehow those purchases feel more or less meaningful than something he would have conscientiously chosen himself; a way, if you will, of exploring his attachment to that “crap.”
Thus Random Shopper was born, complete with controls that keep it from buying anything too expensive or too physically large (spouse Courtney was “supportive,” Kazemi says, but “was also like, ‘I don’t want skis showing up at the house.'”). Random Shopper has its own Amazon account, and its budget is limited to a set amount on a gift card. For now, Kazemi’s restricted its categories to CDs, DVDs and paperback books — that keeps the size issue under control, and limits purchases to stuff that’s easily digitized, consumable and can be given away or donated, “as opposed to, like, a plug for a device that I don’t own,” he explains.
via Meet the random shopper: Amazon gifts bought at a machine’s whim – Boing Boing.
Sounds like it’s time for Robot Insurance!
Filed under art, music, representation
Life of refinement 