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ebogjonson's March 2007 archive
March 30, 2007
la bella mafia
Me, Mike Vazquez, Anand Balakrishnan Sukhdev Sandhu and Binyavanga Wainaina are all in the new issue of Bidoun.
Mike is also in Slate this week.
What's that Ice Cube lyric again?
A piece of cake it was just like a party
Cause in the county you know everybody
Posted by ebogjonson in internet tubesme me mescreenedvideogames and other cracks at 1:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)
March 26, 2007
me and shirley q liquor
Not really, but I did get quoted in a Lexington Herald Leader article about Charles Knipp's blackface act:
The debate over Shirley Q. Liquor -- for the most part previously confined to the black and gay media -- is about to spill over into the mainstream, with among other things a profile in Rolling Stone magazine. The issues have raised questions about whether Knipp is shining light on something that the rest of the country has politely refused to discuss for decades. It has called into question the motives, as well, of his audience. That is, if we laugh at Knipp, who are we deep down, anyway?"Blackface is a charged and wild symbol," says journalist Gary Dauphin, who is black. "It gets out of your control quickly no matter your intentions."
Dauphin, a film critic for The Village Voice and for Essence and Vibe magazines, has written extensively on race and blackface. The problem with Knipp is that he doesn't realize that "things are bigger than his intentions," Dauphin says. "You have to have the maturity to say some things are bigger than me."
[...]
Many in the black community, even when not backing Knipp, do not support Cannick's protest.
"I'm not interested in banning and boycotts," says Dauphin, the journalist, adding that he doesn't think Knipp is a racist, but "I do think he's being kind of a jerk." [full article]
[Sweet, sweet networking! Those of you wondering how they found me in Kentucky can blame this gent, as he also writes for the Herald Leader.]
Three comments: First off, I don't remember, but I hope that what I really said was "I do think he's being kind of an asshole," as that gets you closer to my thinking than the wan, family-paper-friendly phrase "jerk."
Second, I was a film critic for the Village Voice once upon a time. I'm not any more and although I worked at the Voice for about a decade my back goes up a little anytime it shows up in a bio, especially after Voice stalwarts Greg Tate and J. Hoberman chose not to include me in their Voice 50th anniversary recaps. Such are the vicissitudes of institutional memory and crewism, and, anyway, given the VV's current sorry state I'm fine with striking it from the record. Was, is what I'm saying.
Lastly, it's not that I "do not support Cannick's protest," it's that "I'm not interested in banning and boycotts," especially media-related bannings and boycotts. I know I'm splitting a hair, and that I blog about media-related outrages all the time, but I'm pretty much of the First Ammendment absolutist, "bad speech calls for good speech" school. I also view the boycott as being most appropriate for addressing corporate, institutional or labor-practice level issues. Boycotting, like, a dude strikes me as being a bit like breaking-up with him; it's personal and involves dynamics of betrayal and rejection that make me hesitant to label my refusal to consume or patronize said dude's comedy a "boycott," this even if I get a 1000 other people to join me.
I also have to confess to long harboring a fear that we go after offensive images only after we've lost every possible other battle. (That, or we've won every other battle, and so have the leisure to focus on glamour outrages like who won an Oscar.) Happy-go-lucky media people tend to be more liberal, more susceptible to shaming and easier to stare down than, say, fundamentalist terrorists and warmongers who think god talks to them, and so whenever I meet a self-described "media activist" I'm like: what? Working on housing equality involve too much heavy lifting?
But I'm exaggerating and self-denigrating, of course. Keeping folks honest about their racism is important work and I'm glad people like Jasmyne Cannick are out there doing it. I think it's fine to educate people about Shirley Q. Liquor and to also urge them not to give Charles Knipp their money, I just dunno if you will be able to get me up on a Saturday morning to physically picket a comedy club. But e-picket? (iPicket?) Absolutely. That not only jibes with my own slothful, late-sleeping habits, but the frame - word vs. word, image vs. image, code vs. code - strikes me as being better aligned as well.
Posted by ebogjonson in me me memediarace and other identities at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)
March 25, 2007
michiko yao 004
I'm not really qualified to explain it, but what I've seen of Michiko's work is about global images of Japanese womanhood, the funny field effect you get when domesticity and and fantasy and cuteness and active rebellions all get mashed together and projected across borders.
Posted by ebogjonson in artcity of angels at 7:43 PM | Permalink
michiko yao 003
Michiko and Ingrid at LAAA / Gallery 825 in Hollywood, where some of Michiko's work was showing.
Posted by ebogjonson in artcity of angels at 6:01 PM | Permalink
was that really a fire, after all?
"Say something about the method of composition itself: how everything one is thinking at a specific moment in time must at all costs be incorporated into the project then at hand." - Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project
LA C, who took those fire haircut pictures wrote via comments in to say:
Thus far I haven't met a single person who didn't say "OH SCHNAP" when I showed them the pictures of me having my hair cut with fire. I thought it was cute too, perhaps in a different way.
She's absolutely right, of course - I'm not looking to police anyone's reactions (except Mel Gibson's, Nikki Finke's and the commenters on the HuffPost), and snaps of someone getting their hair cut with a flame is definitely OH SCHNAP worthy no matter what color you are. In so much as my comment constituted a light, winking dig, it wasn't directed at anyone in particular, and certainly not at LA C, without whose pictures we wouldn't be having this conversation.
The difference in reaction that I was suggesting exists isn't located at the OH SCHNAP layer but in the sentence that follows it, which, in my case, was "is that dude's hot comb broken?" I don't think "hot comb" is an unreasonably, overly encoded reference, and I don't think its unfair to want to get "hot comb" built into the post at the level of amplifier, by which I mean at the level of the boingboing's of the world who shared LA C's photos with the world. One of the reasons that I love sites like boingboing is that they have a knack for succinctly pointing us towards the proverbial cool link of the moment, but, at the risk of overgeneralization, I find their process can be a little lazy when it comes to the identity stuff - posts not digging or directing enough, or presenting items "as is" to an audience that can be trusted to know an awful lot about everything except (surprise!) black life.
Ideally there would be an update post to the boingboing item that showed us the fire barber where Cory or whoever would write, "reader blah-blah says: there is a long history of use heat in black hair care..." but that's not going to happen is it? Besides the fact that the boingboing's pool of reader blah-blahs equipped to make these kinds of connections is tiny, that kind of update would suggest the possibility of racialized and socialized forms of knowledge, a circumstance that is pretty contra-aesthetic to the whole boingboing schtick, where the world of wonderful things belongs equally to all and there are no barriers to access except a lack of enthusiam or crippling DRM.
I guess I am basically pointing out a tiny obvious: that community is not my community. Oh, well.
--------
BTW: I read that Benjamin quote copied above in this book, which I in turn read thanks to this dude.
Posted by ebogjonson in internet tubesrace and other identities at 11:25 AM | Permalink
March 24, 2007
michiko yao 002
Among other things, Michiko paints tatami mats.
Posted by ebogjonson in art at 11:23 PM | Permalink
asymetrical nikki
I'm not really surprised that Mel Gibson told Cal State Northridge assistant prof Alicia Estrada to fuck-off, this after teach called his Mayan blood-orgy Apocalypto racist. What does surprise me is that usually tough-minded folks, like, LA Weekly's usually spot-on Nikki Finke (or some HuffPo commenters), think Gibson was "provoked." Showing the proverbial white slip Finke writes:
Yes, it's true that Mel Gibson cursed an assistant professor and Mayan community leader -- but only after the duo disrupted a question-and-answer session at a Southern California University which was screening his Apocalypto Thursday night. [full finke]
The awful, awful disruption that so provoked Gibson? The worst I've been able to gather from published accounts is that the two protesters refused to give up the mic and read "a lengthy statement in Spanish." I guess Gibson's defenders must be part of the "English-only" crowd, as when I was in college no disruption worthy of the name "protest" didn't at least involve shouting and blocking entrances, maybe a chant and a pie. Not to defend youthful indiscretion, but in contrast poor, poor Mel only had to listen to a translation.
Tellingly, Gibson's didn't seem to boil over until after the so-called disruptors were being led away by campus rent-a-cops. Finke again:
Gibson was asked if their mike should be turned off. "Let them continue," he said. But some students yelled out "shut up" and "sit down" at the protesters. Finally, a campus police officer ended the disruption by leading Estrada and her friend from the room. About half the class applauded. Gibson, his face now red, fired back with his expletive. "He told her to 'Fuck off, lady, get a history book, and read," student Guagan recounted. His parting shot was "Make your own movie!"
What a complete, punk, coward move! Gibson maintains his cool throughout but for some reason just can't keep it in his pants at the sight of two brown folks being led away by the police. This is classic, yahoo-racist behavior: act all friendly and professional, and then, once you're absolutely sure the crowd and the fuzz are on your side, go all red in face and the give the offending coloreds a proper what-for.
The real provocation here as I see it isn't two people holding onto a mic for too long and forcing 130 people to listen to Spanish, it's the persistent, unbearable whiteness of Hollywood. (To her credit, Finke has written well about these issues previously, but not today.) We're supposed to take as neutral and non-provocative the fact that hundreds (if not thousands) of (mostly) white folks in Hollywood diligently devoted years and tens of millions of dollars to making, distributing, marketing and defending a racially-charged, pretentious and ultimately middling adventure flick, but god forbid someone hold onto a microphone for 20 minutes, at which point folks come down with cases of outraged, wilting vapors. The underlying assumption is that Gibson is somehow being mau-mau'd by media coverage of his outburst, i.e. he's a victim, which is as much of a crock as his movie.
But, of course, this is a Hollywood kerfuffle, so the rights, freedoms and fragile temperaments of rich, moronic movie people are - no pun intended - paramount. Those who claim Gibson was provoked make the same defense of white privilege that John Ridley made in the HuffPo when he asked re: Kramergate:
[W]hat exactly do you call a couple of black guys who go to a public place where people paid money to enjoy themselves and who then begin to yell and scream at the person on stage who is trying to do his job? [full talking androidery]
Right. I guess there's no reaction that's out of bounds or unprofessional when you're white and in show business and there's money changing hands.
The F-Bomb aside, Gibson's parting shot - "make your own movie!" - may be like shouting "win your own lottery," but it also gets us closer to his (as well as the rest of Hollywood's) underlying anxiety about our increasingly multicultural market-place: if Mayans are making movies, who the heck needs Mel Gibson to make Apocalypto? Be careful what you wish for Mel; you wouldn't want to end up as the D.W. Griffith of the Mayan cinema.
Posted by ebogjonson in city of angelsrace and other identitiesscreened at 1:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)
March 23, 2007
if they're so smart why does the movie suck?
from gaming site kotaku:
Reign Over Me must be one of the first Hollywood films, if not the first, to deal with games thematically and intelligently. While other industry pundits try to figure out how to take the latest blockbuster game and turn it into a movie or vice versa, Reign Over Me already has an insightful leg up: Let the games speak for themselves. Characters bond through games and lose themselves in them, only to find themselves again. They enjoy the simple act of play. "We're starting to get people in Hollywood who have perspective of what the video game experience is like," says Roush, "what it can feel like. And all that gets integrated into Reign Over Me." [full article]
The writer of the above article is right to key in on the fact Reign Over Me uses an old game - Shadow of the Colossus - as opposed to promoting a PS3 title, but too bad the rest of the movie seems to be sentimental pap. I haven't seen Reign Over Me, so maybe the whole thing will turn out to actually have something novel to say gaming, but I somehow doubt it.
Sometimes gamers are so desperate for to be taken seriously that we'll see profundities where there's just a game. A crap movie dealing might deal with your pet interest "thematically and intelligent" is no breakthrough.
Posted by ebogjonson in screenedvideogames and other cracks at 7:10 PM | Permalink
March 22, 2007
now that's a fire
Apparently this gent in North Memphis does hair using fire. (Another boing-boing hat-tip production!)
The full photoset is here.
I have to say that it's kind of cute how our dear white friends are all like 'OH SCHNAP" about these images. Although I have never had occasion to get my own hair cut with a flame (I got my hair cut just like a regular man once-upon-a-time, put my pants on one leg at a time like the rest of you before I grew the locks), the relationship between potentially dangerous heat and black hair care is fairly well established.
I was going to make a Madame C.J. Walker joke, except that I keep forgetting she didn't really invent the hot comb:
ESSENCE: People who have heard Madam Walker's name, think, Oh, she invented the hot comb. But that's also a myth.Bundles: Straightening combs were first advertised in the 1880's and 1890's in catalogs for White women. Madam popularized their use among Black women with her Walker Method of hair care. She thought the comb was an improvement over another process promoted by Black hair culturist Annie Pope-Turnbo Malone. The claim that she invented the hot comb probably originated in 1922, three years after Madam Walker's death, when the Walker Company purchased the rights to the patent from the widow of the man who had manufactured hot combs for the Walker agents. [full story]
I guess that leaves the jokes to youtube:
Posted by ebogjonson in race and other identities at 12:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)
gems from the collection
this cat (flickr user gems from the collection) has a pretty amazing flickr photostream, mostly of pulp novel and magazine covers from the 50s. h/t: boing-boing
50s and 60s futurist aesthetics have a way of always seeming fresh. Is that the Jetson's fault?
Posted by ebogjonson in next levelish at 12:26 PM | Permalink
March 18, 2007
lady art 004
Not the best angle on this one, but you get the idea
Posted by ebogjonson in art at 5:23 PM | Permalink
lady art 003
Ingrid standing next to one of her paintings, to give you a sense of scale
Posted by ebogjonson in art at 4:54 PM | Permalink
lady art 002
Another piece going in the lady's thesis show.
Posted by ebogjonson in art at 4:36 PM | Permalink
lady art 001
Spent the day hanging some of the lady's thesis show work. These strike me as being crosses between cornrows, astronomical drawings and fireworks.
Posted by ebogjonson in art at 1:47 PM | Permalink
March 17, 2007
thanks for asking!
I just wanted to thank everyone who wrote in ask how my nana was doing. ("Called in" for those of you I trust with my cell number.) The shorthand answer that I've been relying on is "as best can be expected," and, despite its aspects as autopilot, I guess that's as true as anything I could say. Diabetes, three heart attacks (well, one heart attack and two "cardiac episodes"), a non-functioning artery in her gut, a month in the hospital, 89 years working at thankless, largely manual labor on the bottom social rungs on ye olde Planet of the Earths: I should be grateful Saint Anne is just plain alive, in no pain and (relatively) mobile, that she is able to rouse to varied levels of excitement whenever the one-minute-to-the-hour teaser for her favorite re-run comes on. (Monk and any Law & Order show, basically.)
As best as can be expected, like I said.
Me, I'm doing as best as can be expected as well (thanks for asking!) which is to say I'm not exactly sure how I'm doing. First there has been the problem of recovering from the specific, unsettling horror of having spent all of Black History Month 2007 in Kendall, Miami. I mean, I can't really begin to describe how much energy it took for me just to get up to the humid Kendall morning, this given the choking, ground-hugging miasma of family BS and social pollution that hangs the place like a malevolent, soul-stealing fog. H.P Lovecraft's tombstone sez "I AM PROVIDENCE;" and effective description of the terror that is being stuck in Kendall could only be approached by a writer with contemporary Lovecraftian instincts and illnesses, someone who could legibly claim "I AM KENDALL" as his or hers. Calling Kendall a locus of ancient, corporate, mall-ish, suburban, unthinking, bourgie, non-black Hispanic, post-Cuban horror just scratches the surface.
(There is also a whole post to be written in the aftermath of my time in Kendall about the maddening judgment/mis-identification hijinks that occured whenever I encountered certain types of older, conservative Cuban folks, racist Cuban folks in a word, who thought I was some kind of bedredlocked rebel from their lifelong campaign to escape various forms of darkness. This post ain't it, however.)
Part of my problem is that thinking about all this provokes random, largely inexplicable fits of anger in me. The classic feelings of helplessness, as described in the relevant literature. For example, I literally wanted to write above: "AS BEST AS CAN BE EXPECTED, I said. Are you fucking deaf?" I wrote the line in and then deleted it, completely baffled by myself. Grief, no grief; sadness, no sadness; stress, no stress, helpless or helpful: I'm not so much confused by the fact that my head is fucked up (as worst as can be expected?) but by the specific contours the fucked-uppedness takes, as in the above almost-outburst about people not listening. Who could I possibly be yelling at in that highly specific way? Who isn't listening? Who strikes me as akin to deaf? Everyone has been pretty much grand, and those who haven't, well, they acted just as I expected them to, so really: no skin off my nose. So why the rage? I can't get mad at inaction from a god I don't believe in.
Like most everybody I have a hard enough time processing abrupt familial deaths, but the process of taking a slow stroll up to one involves its own series of wild, conflicting confrontations. Last time I posted I was grateful to have made it to Miami in time. Now my unique damage (maybe; incorrectly claiming uniqueness is a bad look for spring) is that I am, well, outraged that she's dying, this because it strikes me as an injustice even with the 89 years and counting. I'm not dwelling on all this in full-on rage, not letting existential anger distort my day-to-day living, but my adolescent science-fictional (luciferian?) impulses remain strong enough that my default thinking about the whole, er, death thing is that it's fundamentally unnecessary.
There are a lot of people I like who view my kind of wants - long life, going to Mars - as irresponsibity akin driving a Hummer, another set who thinks you can't be a card carrying member of the African diaspora without a firm belief in highly specific forms of hoodoo. And that's fine, really: you all can stay behind if you want to. Our conceptual tribe shares a lot of opinions, but self-consciously "responsible," non-science-fictional progressives often tend towards a zero-sum worldview that I reject, a guilt-driven mythology where the good are poor, denied and martyred, while only vampires, racists and thief capitalists live well and long, this at the cost of innocent human lives. Whatever. The way I see it it's always possible to live well and honestly and decently all at the time. Our choice isn't between, say, war for oil and a reduced, but "sustainable" standard of living; it's between making oil companies rich and doing the hard, largely scientific and technical, work of figuring out how to get exactly what you want without killing people or wrecking the environment. So why not try to live forever? Those stem cells aren't people like some claim they are; forever only requires drinking blood in the movies; I promise to remember you if you insist on dying like you were told to.
And despite all that random techno-optimism l am still angry. I guess the thing is that in addition to thinking it'd be great to live forever, I also genuinely don't see any reason not to assume future generations won't get what I want, on average having impressively longer life-spans than we do and making the accident of me riding on the historical-living shortbus akin to being cheated by history. Being one of those people who has always identified with Paradise Lost's Lucifer, I tend chafe whenever I feel forced to make peace with anything that strikes me as random, structural or circumstantial. I want to spit at anyone (especially anyone looking forward to a good 40 more years) who tries to tell me a "mature" reaction to Saint Anne's involuntary, pre-ordained decrepitude involves bending the knee to something as dumb as a number. (89 in this case.) I want to shout at people who think there is something greedy about wanting to live. I'm not really interested in the number unless it adds up for me, which is why I tend to want fourth, fifth and sixth opinions, why I think NYC beats LA because the last call is later/bigger. I'm perfectly willing to keep rolling the dice, keep seeing the doctors, keep refactoring the parameters until something gets fixed or something runs out - money, time, life. I wouldn' t want to bankrupt my kids or my neighbors to pay for my medical care, but if I already have a wad why not peel some off and toss it at the doctors? (Which is another way of saying: we haven't come within a mile of being financially burdened by Saint Anne's care. All we've risked so far is our comfort, and yet everyone is making peace with the idea that her fate is sealed. She's 89, you know. She's doing as well as can be expected.)
And don't get me wrong: I'm also completely down for accepting/defying the death sentence by throwing a party. There is a blog meme out that has involved asking the classic "what would you do if you had six months to live" question, and me, I would go sit on a beach (Lamu?) and read, get high, surf the web, play videogames, eat shellfish, do some writing and (Sweet Lord Jesus willing!) get laid pretty and plenty. You can join me or you can collect my corpse when it's time if you feel so inclined, or you can let it float out to sea, not my problem, I'm dying so I'm kind of focused on myself these days, sorry.
(Although, if you were able to collect my head, I would greatly appreciate it, as I'd like to have my brain frozen on the off chance that it can be reanimated at a later date. Thanks!)
I asked Saint Anne what she most desperately wanted to do when she got home and when she said "change into my own clothes," I have to shamefacedly admit I was disappointed in her, angry even. When it became obvious during Black History Month that she was going to survive, part of me fantasized that she'd jump up from her hospital bed and take up roller-skating or something, that having hit a kind of rock bottom she would now bounce, that some long unresolved, lifelong desire would come into focus and that she'd get her GED, see the pyramids (I'll push the wheelchair), do yoga, learn how to make the perfect soufflé - who can say for sure but her? Just something. Instead, she walked through and out of the shadow of the valley of death in order to watch re-runs and sleep in Kendall (aforementioned hell-on-earth Kendall!), every day receding just a bit more from us, her body and mind failing in tiny stages.
I know it's not her fault. She's just too tired to take up roller-skating, too beaten down by the facts and the numbers. (Let's not even get into a month on your back in a hospital in Kendall.) When Saint Anne was 88 she walked, talked and carried herself like a 65 year-old, but one year later time has finally caught up with her. Now she seems like what I imagine 89 should seem like: her movements are tentative, she uses a walker. She sleeps half the day and even though her lassitude alarms me, the second and third medical opinions (my mother is of a mind that fourth and fifth opinions are selfish and extravagant) view her decline as natural. It's not as a form of theft, I'm told, it's the inevitable end to a sort of bonus ++ period of sprightly-ness, Saint Anne's strength up to now an overtime that the universe had gifted her with and that had now expired. Turn that frown upside-down, little one, is what they are saying. To every season, turn turn, etc.
My sense that she has suddenly, abruptly declined hinges on the fact that I only knew and believed what I could see about her health. Saint Anne only seemed like a 65 year old when she was 88, she only looked that way to a me stuck there observing with mere human eyes, an amateur's mind assessing the situation without the aid of a medical degree or advanced diagnostic equipment. All these years that I've been smiling at her with such smug paternalism, marveling at how black really didn't crack, at how fresh and young she persisted in being while I (me!) was getting disturbingly older, there beneath the surface something was slowly unraveling, failing, running out, waiting for 89 to blow up in our faces.
Maybe if I'd had eyes capable of seeing beneath surfaces, see down to the unraveling in real time, she'd still be looking like a 65 year old. When I was in Miami I was in her hospital room late one night when a technician came in with a fancy sonogram machine to check for blood clots in her legs. (This was early on when no one knew what the fuck was happening.) I stared over his shoulder as the machine peered into her and for the first time in my life I desperately wished I'd become a doctor the way my parents had wanted me to, because if I had I'd be able to read the sonogram and maybe help save her life.
(That said, I don't think a hypothetical "Dr. Me" would have been able to save my father's life, Dad being the Thomasian sort who only trusted the results of his own experiments. He got himself killed when he ignored his doctor's orders and started tinkering with his heart medication dosage, this because of some advice he'd picked up on Google. Not likely he would have taken my medical advice or aid, but there are timeline paradoxes aplenty there: he wouldn't have taken my advice, but Dr. Me's? Dr. Son He Alway Wanted? Hmm...)
When I asked the sonogram tech what the results where he told me that a doctor would have to read it, which really made me want to weep with frustration. Like my father I have a hard time trusting in anyone's competence, starting with god and my parents and going right down the list. It's complete hubris, I know, a real pain if you have to work with me, but my core belief has always been that if I want something done right I really need to do it myself, forget prayer or parents or co-workers or Saint Anne's doctors or any of it. Forget even myself as currently constructed, by which I mean screw getting that medical degree I mentioned earlier. What I really need is the as-yet-unmade ebog of the future. The post-singularity, more-better one with X-rays eyes and six robot arms, each limb a surgical tool, or a drug factory, or a medical tricorder, maybe a mechanism for the delivery of healing nanomachines. That guy even has a seventh arm with a spike at the end that (this is going to pinch a little!) goes in at the base of the spine and allows for full sensorium, networked VR, the better for him and Saint Anne to spend all day at the beach in Lamu, for him to help her with her GED homework, to make that perfect soufflé. He would hold her gently in those robot arms and she'd live forever, which would make him feel useful and proud. He'd think: it really is just the least I can for the woman who raised me, who wiped my bottom. They would not live in Kendall.
But I don't have the time or the resources to be that guy, so instead I guess I'll have bend the knee afterall, say thanks and goodbye, Saint Anne, make soothing, cooing sounds at her like a good little mammal, like the word-less, animal sound was some kind of appropriate exit music. It really makes me want to scream.
Posted by ebogjonson in biologicblood relationsbrain maintenancenext levelishplaces at 11:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)
March 10, 2007
let a thousand flowers bloom
I think I mentioned earlier that I am going to be building some websites for as-yet-unamed (doh! how long has that been on our to-do list?) collective of literary magazines. As part of that process I've been looking at open source content management systems like Plone, Drupal and Joomla, trying to decide which platform might work for my far-flung collection of peeps. (If anyone has had any experience with any of these tools feel free to let me know.)
Anyway, I bring this up because the pace at which enterprising ladies and gents are setting up their own a niche communitys (using one of the increasingly easy to install/use turn-key CMS's listed above) seems to increase with every passing week, the launches of entire (would-be) online communities now as easy as the launch of blogs or (reaching back in the crate) personal web pages.
(Pointless distinction alert: There are no any strictly-defined "personal webpages" left in the world that aren't in some way or another blogs.)
Take the Black Writers Network, which seems to be powered by Joomla. Heavily promoting the tschotske-making powers of Cafe Press, BWN seems interested in being a home away from home for the black self-publishing set. Still relatively ghost-towny, there doesn't seem to be much on it that didn't come out of the box with Joomla, meaning that once the admin (and there can easily be just one) has worked out the kinks of the install they can basically let the thing percolate in perpetuity, which, between low hosting costs and an admin gainfully employed, can be an actual long time.
It takes kind of a shit to handicap the prospects of completely harmless labors of love like BWN, but: the prospects for a site like BWN are hard to handicap these days. It costs so little to launch and maintain such sites that a dedicated admin willing to eat the hosting costs could maintain BWN indefinitely without quitting their day job. Ideally the point at which BWN requires full time attention is the point at which it (kind of) (maybe) (begins to suggest ways it) can support itself. (Someday.) That, of course, if the site can connect with enough of those self-publishy folks to last. Because sure: a thousand community-site flowers may now be able to bloom on any given, but mostly so that they can die and fertilize the next generation.
I want to write that people will set up Drupal communities the way they set up blogs, but, of course, that is bullshit. Besides the simple fact that the numbers don't work (it would be an online world full of corporations instead of users, each site "member" just another community), the peculiar temperament that makes you desperately want to host a party is not universally distributed among the species. (Forget about the skills.)
Posted by ebogjonson in internet tubesthe collective at 4:38 PM | Permalink
March 2, 2007
frabnabbit
Despite the fact that the ebog blog has updated, like, all of four times in 2007, it nonetheless finds itself the victim of a super-annoying and rather debilitating comment-spam attack. Until I get a handle on it, I am disabling comments. So sorry, friends!
Posted by ebogjonson in ebog housekeeping at 7:27 PM | Permalink
March 1, 2007
purty
The above image is a time-lapse photo of a session of the game Tempest, done by an artist named Rosemarie Fiore. (hat-tip Grand Text Auto)
Tempest was one of my favorite games growing up (along with Robotron.) There's something terrifying about it: the vector-graphics are chilly, frighteningly minimal, and the combination of crescendo and crashing during gameplay suggested to me that there were horrors worse than losing. Like playing forever, for example, finding yourself eternally pitted against nameless, implacable, completely schematic enemies. Denied rest or aid.
My love of Robotron, with its similarly stripped down, unwinnable and burdensome mandate to save the last human family, strikes me now as being a way to work through a mix of domestic and social condundrums. These ranged from the ways I didn't fit into my own family, to the pressure I felt as the black kid at the white school to love the white people around me as desperately as possible. Our pluckly, loyal, traitorous little hero (radioactive mutant? Alien? Only wikipedia knows for sure.) inevitably gives his life holding what seems to be his own kind back as long as possible, this while the idiotic last family he's defending (sworn to defend? drafted? coerced?) bumbles stupidly about, blind to both their own peril and his heroism until (of course!) they turn on him at the drop of a hat.
Although I don't remember these as simultaneous events, I read Soul on Ice about the same time Robotron came out (1982), which maybe explains why I would often make a perverse, completely opaque point of only saving the blond mother, leaving the dad and the son what I imagined were just deserts. The white kids at school had, of course, not read Cleaver (neither had the black kids back home, for that matter), so they just thought I was being typically weird. But playing that way always cracked me the fuck up, the desire to rescue/run-away-with white women while whole generations of white men disappear around you adolescent racial fantasy at its finest. "Insurrectionary act," indeed!
Posted by ebogjonson in artvideogames and other cracks at 9:49 PM | Permalink
on the radio 002
I recently had a chance to help a bud - jimi izrael - out with a new radio segment being putting together for Michel Martin's upcoming NPR show. jimi was asked to convene a group of gents willing to engage in some free-wheeling smack talk and have it recorded for posterity. In addition to me, Eugene Robinson, the good Dr. Lester Spence and Alvin Patrick of ESPN's Cold Pizza agreed to act as crash test dummies. (God help us all!)
Michel has taken the unusual (but super-smart) step of documenting her show's development on a blog, meaning missteps, growing pains, trials and brave new directions are all being shared with the audience before the show's launch. The results of our particular experiment can be heard here. I haven't listened to it yet, largely because my recorded voice sounds painfully nasal to me, but you guys can tell me how I did.
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