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March 25, 2007
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.
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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 tubes, race and other identities, on March 25, 2007 11:25 AM
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