Category Archives: learning

April 12, 2012 · 3:12 pm

Insights from Lil’ B

Thanks to the Fader for the photo of Lil' B.

The Based God, Lil B gave a lecture at NYU a couple of days ago.  Here are a few of my favorite gems:

I tell you, bruh, I was looking at insects. I do my observations when I go out. If I become a neurosurgeon or I’m about to come into some bugs, I’m rocking. With the bugs, man, you just be looking at them. Because I was having these big ant problems in my house. It was crazy. And these are people in their own way, too. As I was studying these ant colonies infesting my house daily, I’m not kidding you, I left food out and 20 minutes later r-r-r-r-r and I’m like, man, they already know! They get it down pat! And real talk, like, seeing these ants and studying them and respecting them, it’s like, man, they’re in their own community too. They’re trying to survive. They love. They fight. They telling themselves something. We can’t understand, but one day we will. I’m trying hard to figure it out. I’m there with them. We’re very smart animals, you know, or whatever we are. Organisms? What are we? What do y’all think we are? Is there like a fact? Does anybody have any proof what we are? Live that life, experience it, travel, and come up with your theories man. Read the books, too, but experience your own. It’s crazy.

via Based Scripture: The Full Transcript of Lil B’s Lecture at NYU « The FADER.

Real talk: Don’t ever deny the voices in your head either. When you’re sitting at home alone, right, we all go through depression, anxiety. You’re by yourself and you hear those voices going wild in your head, in your unconscious, those angels by your side, your mental, your gut feeling, your heart. Listen to them. Let your mind tell you how you feel. Let your body tell you. Be in tune with your rare—this is a very rare thing. I’m like a robot. Hey look, tell your hand to do this. [Raises hand]. It’s like, man, that’s amazing! That’s amazing to me.

via Based Scripture: The Full Transcript of Lil B’s Lecture at NYU « The FADER.

I was a product of the media and my environment. I seen the people I like with gold teeth, and I was like, man, I want gold teeth. He looked like me and I wanted gold teeth. Everybody can get a grill in here. Everybody should embrace that. Get gold teeth! Don’t be thinking so hard, like, “Oh, man, I can’t get gold teeth.” Who is going to say what to you? We got love in our heart. We good people. Can’t nobody tell you nothing if you doing it from the love and you’re embracing people. Try to have fun and try to be as less ignorant as possible and meet people. I’m trying to set a tone for the younger generations.

via Based Scripture: The Full Transcript of Lil B’s Lecture at NYU « The FADER.

My grammar and spelling and how I say things might not be technically what we hear or textbook, but as long as you understand me? You have to work as a human with empathy and love in your heart, staying positive and staying based and staying normal. You have to make an effort to learn about people. You have to make an effort at your job. You have to make an effort to care.

via Based Scripture: The Full Transcript of Lil B’s Lecture at NYU « The FADER.

[Audience member: “Do you like to paint?”] I definitely do, man. My mom was a painter. Ay, bruh, feel me. But you know what I do rock with? My favorite is watercolors. I’m a watercolors type of dude, so definitely collect some of my rare paintings.

via Based Scripture: The Full Transcript of Lil B’s Lecture at NYU « The FADER.

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April 10, 2012 · 2:59 pm

Caine’s Arcade

Phenomenal short film about a 9-year old boy and his cardboard arcade.

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April 5, 2012 · 9:10 pm

Andrew W.K. and different ability

What a nice quote from a fascinating party monster/charming lout.

Was it hard to play in a wheelchair?

It was actually easy to play. I was on crutches during the day but I couldn’t stand with the mic, play keyboard and do my headbanging on the crutches. So the wheelchair became this amazing tool that let me spin, roll around and completely isolate my leg so I could keep all the energy into my playing and singing. I had so much fun at those shows because it was a different way to use my body. It was interesting to experience how it felt to be in a wheelchair. Some people were freaked out by it and didn’t want me to play. We did a TV show performance and when they saw I was in a wheelchair they just wanted me to cancel. I said: “We’ve been playing this way, if anything I can play better. And I think people will find it interesting and exciting.” They said: “No it doesn’t look good, there’s a reason why you don’t see people in wheelchairs performing on telly!” I was just baffled by that and then I realised, holy smoke, you really don’t see people in wheelchairs on television! Why the fuck is that? Afterwards the guy apologised, he said he was wrong, the show was amazing and thanks for doing it. I realised if you’re injured it’s not just getting around that changes, it’s the whole way you’re treated.

via Andrew WK: ‘Music is a healing powerball of electric joy’ | Music | guardian.co.uk.

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March 31, 2012 · 5:22 pm

Internalizing ecological fear: toxins and early female puberty

Elizabeth Weil has an interesting essay in the The New York Times about girls entering puberty at a more early age.  Many suspect (and I agree) that the primary causes of this change are toxic chemicals in the things we eat, play with and live around.  Weil points out that this change leads caring parents to want to slow puberty and try to prevent the effect.

Over the past year, I talked to mothers who tried to forestall their daughters’ puberty in many different ways. Some trained with them for 5K runs (exercise is one of the few interventions known to help prevent early puberty); others trimmed milk and meat containing hormones from their daughters’ diets; some purged from their homes plastics, pesticides and soy. Yet sooner rather than later, most threw up their hands. “I’m empathetic with parents in despair and wanting a sense of agency,” says Sandra Steingraber, an ecologist and the author of “Raising Elijah: Protecting Our Children in an Age of Environmental Crisis.” “But this idea that we, as parents, should be scrutinizing labels and vetting birthday party goody bags — the idea that all of us in our homes should be acting as our own Environmental Protection Agencies and Departments of Interior — is just nuts. Even if we could read every label and scrutinize every product, our kids are in schools and running in and out of other people’s homes where there are brominated flame retardants on the furniture and pesticides used in the backyard.”

via Puberty Before Age 10 – A New ‘Normal’? – NYTimes.com.

From my standpoint, U.S. citizens are usually positioned as responsible for their own environments. This is a particular political articulation which inverts the responsibility for illness associated with household toxins.  This both excuses the actual makers of those products for their genuine harmfulness and creates the next to impossible job of cleaning up living spaces.

This induces a kind of ecological fear — to be scared of the place you live or work is terrible and to be saddled with the responsibility for having caused your own illness because you ate something sold at your local grocery store.  I imagine that for those sick with a illness, you have little ability to contest the illness, so the desire to clean up the house might take over — because it is one of the few tangible strategies for which you can see results.  As Weil and Steingraber point out in the quote, it is next-to impossible to actually protect yourself from toxins in the modern world — purity is an impossible state.

So is the solution nihilistic abandon?  A woeful sadness that we are doomed?  Naw.  That doesn’t seem all that productive.  What people need is useful, clear information about living a healthy life that isn’t pure.   Consider the suggestions of the Critical Arts Ensemble in their book The Molecular Invasion.

The classic example of the hiding strategy is clear when we think of all the Americans shopping at major grocery chains who are nearly oblivious to the fact that nearly 100% of the packaged foods that they are purchasing is genetically modified. This is the extent to which industry has managed to keep the intensity of the GM transition under wraps. In the end, capital has no desire for public education on such matters (perhaps some indoctrination would be useful). All it seeks is for the public to feel a sense of security that will neutralize any doubts along with fear. Consciousness raising, on the other hand, removes fear through the realization of individual agency and collective power—the ability of people to understand and thereby
affect situations allows individual participation in shaping the policies, laws, products, etc., concerning the biotechnological. In the pedagogical process, only the fear dissipates, the doubt remains.

– Critical Arts Ensemble, The Molecular Invasion

We can’t extricate the task of sharing information about GMOs or toxins from the responsibility of reducing the fear.  We need to get better understanding of risk, learning information about what chemicals actually do and sharing strong ways to communicate that with each other.  The ability to make choices and empower people with information is the only way out.

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March 25, 2012 · 4:28 pm

Trayvon Martin and victim blaming for hate crimes

Plies is one of the least conscious rappers I know.  Despite his cultural fifteen minutes crossing over with Gucci Mane’s fraternity party anthem “Wasted,” Plies has made music discussing his problems associated with the representation of young black men and violence. His song about Trayvon Martin covers some of the predictable landscape and I find surprisingly poignant.

Perhaps the massive resonance of the murder of Trayvon Martin is because the crime is so obscene.  The victim seems so innocent and the killer seems so enthusiastic to kill.  The crime is enraging because of the 911 tapes, the images of Martin in his football uniform, and his desperate phone call to his girlfriend.  We are invited to view a real injustice.

But of course racist killings take place all the time.  The difference is the victims are often blamed for their killing.  The usual way this is done is to associate some socially unacceptable behavior (sex, drugs, rap music, clothing) with the murdered victim and call them a “suspect.”

For people who regularly experience police harassment, the inaction taken probably seems like a confirmation that the system works against you.  For people who do experience privilege of not having to regularly deal with police (corrupt and otherwise) the inaction taken against Zimmerman probably seems like a grotesque aberration of the system.

Both of these groups of people will don hoodies to march for justice for Trayvon.  A big part of that anger is fueled by the perception that this violence was exceptional.  I would argue that it is ordinary.  What is exceptional in the Trayvon Martin case is that the victim blaming is particularly hard. *

Lets take a quick look at the ways the press and police did Sean Bell dirty after he was killed.  Undercover police officers shot fifty bullets into Bell’s car the night before his 2006 wedding.

Five of the seven officers investigating the club were involved in the shooting. Detective Paul Headley fired one round, Officer Michael Carey fired three, Officer Marc Cooper fired four, Officer Gescard Isnora fired eleven, and veteran officer Michael Oliver emptied two full magazines, firing 31 shots from a 9mm handgun and pausing to reload at least once.

via Sean Bell shooting incident – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Although Sean Bell’s case is used as an example of police misconduct, there was a lengthy series of public relations attempts to blame Bell for the murders.

Initially it was claimed that the officers were afraid of gun violence from Bell and his companions.  Never found a gun or evidence that there had been a gun in the car.

Then the press and police pointed out that that Bell had been legally intoxicated at the time he took the wheel, usually adding in that he was drunk at a strip club.    In essence suggesting that Bell had been shot because he had been drinking and driving or cavorting with strippers.

Michael Wilson from the New York Times makes this idiotic statement:

Further, trial testimony showed that Mr. Bell may have played some role, however unwitting, in the shooting, as he was drunk by legal standards when he pressed down on the accelerator of his fiancée’s Nissan Altima and struck Detective Isnora in the leg in an attempt to flee.

via Sean Bell Case.

Despite being a poster case for injustice, the victim blaming helped to let the police killers go free.   The cops were acquitted because they were found to be confused and it’s okay to kill people if it’s a mistake.  Scratch that, it’s okay to empty your magazine into a car and then reload and empty the second magazine into the car before figuring out what is going on.

But yesterday something interesting happened.  The cops who killed Sean Bell, some eight years ago were finally released from their jobs as cops.  One is getting fired!  Huh?  I wonder if the public scrutiny in the Trayvon Martin case raised up enough public discussion to pressure the New York Police Department to clean house.

 

For an interesting view on the construction of public information.  Check out the discussions about the editing of the Sean Bell Wikipedia page.  Note the battle over how to talk about Sean Bell’s arrest record.  Fascinating discussions about what to include and how to write the information.   A great place to view the articulation of victim blaming.

 

* Of course victim blaming isn’t impossible in the case of Trayvon Martin.  Check out Geraldo Riviera making the worst version of this argument.

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March 19, 2012 · 9:23 pm

Read so hard . . . that shit cray.

I’m feeling the lyrics:

“Nerdy Boy/He’s so slow/Tuesday we started Foucault

He’s still stuck on the intro?

He’s a no-go . . .”

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March 16, 2012 · 3:41 pm

Understanding gangs of starlings

Starlings above Rome. Photo from the Telegraph.

Rather than affecting every other flock member, orientation changes caused only a bird’s seven closest neighbors to alter their flight. That number stayed consistent regardless of flock density, making the equations “topological” rather than critical in nature.

“The orientations are not at a critical point,” said Giardina. Even without criticality, however, changes rippled quickly through flocks — from one starling to seven neighbors, each of which affected seven more neighbors, and so on.

The closest statistical fit for this behavior comes from the physics of magnetism, and describes how the electron spins of particles align with their neighbors as metals become magnetized.

via Starling Flocks Behave Like Flying Magnets | Wired Science | Wired.com.

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March 15, 2012 · 4:28 pm

Cultural assimilation vs. Marketing: the Nike Black and Tan edition

Thanks to kicksonfire for the image.

Nike’s new shoe, the Black and Tan, has been released presumably to take advantage of St. Patrick’s day drinking/marketing opportunities.  Whoops.  Turns out that the Black and Tan is a sour brand in Ireland because of the hated military/police group which murdered and terrorized civilians during the early twenties.

The Black and Tans were a colonial army recruited from England ostensibly to police the people of Ireland.  The lack of oversight and genuine racism in the face of a guerrilla uprising led to a terrible disdain for civilians.  The roughshod police force (their name is a reference to the haphazard uniforms of the unit) was almost 7-10,000 strong and recruited from former World War I veterans.

In retaliation for attacks on police forces, the Black and Tans attacked civilians, burned homes and businesses and in one case refused an entire village food.  Consider the documentary The Burning of Cork.

The Nike marketing error is evidence of the smooth appropriation transforming actual Irish history into a bizarre tourist narrative emphasizing drinking, leprechauns, and Irish-affiliated brands.  These tourist realities corrode against the actual history of Sinn Fein, Home Rule, and the bodily struggles associated with Irish Nationalism.

The assumption of Nike, that their party, party, party language was the universal meaning points to a kind of linguistic arrogance. NPR’s Melissa Block and Robert Siegel interviewed Brian Boyd of the Irish Times on the Nike apology.

BLOCK: Now, Nike has released a statement saying: We apologize, no offense was intended. At the same time, Nike says the sneaker has been, quote, unofficially named by some as the Black and Tan.

SIEGEL: That said, if you look inside the shoe – as we have done with online photos – you see an image of a pint of beer with two colors, black and tan.

BLOCK: Brian Boyd of The Irish Times has reported on some outrage over the shoe. But really, he says, it’s not about a shoe. It’s about a holiday.

BOYD: It’s how the Americans view Saint Patrick’s Day and view Irish culture and history. And it’s the very fact that some people are saying that these are beer-themed sneakers, that the only way to celebrate a national holiday of a country with a very rich culture and a very rich history and literature, et cetera, is to pour massive amounts of alcohol down your body.

It’s how the American treat St. Patrick’s Day. So we’re using this story to say, look, it’s the silly Americans, stupid Americans, look what they’re doing again. They’ve got it all wrong.

via Nike Kicks Up Controversy With ‘Black And Tan’ Shoes : NPR.

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March 13, 2012 · 4:31 pm

Gou Miyagi, the best skateboarder I’ve ever seen.


Glen E. Friedman has two more of Miyagi’s videos at his blog.  Go there for the rest of this series.

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March 13, 2012 · 3:57 pm

No Malice: feeling guilty over the Clipse

Seems like someone is struggling with the cannibalistic weight of the language of the Clipse.  Two brothers: Pusha T and formerly-Malice make up the Clipse.  Relentless, talented, ruthless, and grimy were the hallmarks of this duo.  2011 saw Malice reject the image and the name (he now goes by No Malice).  Here is Malice renouncing his past.

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