1
Very important piece by Harry Allen about Kanye and Taylor, Twitter and the N-word. I tend to think it's easy to get overheated about these kinds of pop culture flare-ups, and my initial reaction to Kanye's bumrushing of Taylor was a hohum mix of "What a bad look" and "Kanye just grows more fascinating by the day." I did not, therefore, dash off a quick tweet about how Kanye's action merely confirmed his innate racial inferiority.
Harry meditates on the racial implications of the Kanye moment, and he has some incredible things to say about "post-racism" (it refuses to die...) in the age of Twitter...he actually collects tweets that feature "Kanye" and "Ni---er" within their 140 characters. Most of them seem to originate from users who, based on their profiles, don't seem "racist" in any obvious way, whatever that would mean.*
A question has emerged as the readymade response to any accusations of racism, and it's the one that many have long feared: if there is indeed racism in America, then how did Obama win the election? No amount of data or historical analysis, no lesson in argumentative reasoning, not even a time machine, probably, would satisfy those who use this question as a defense against the claim that anti-Obama disrespect feels profoundly different. It certainly looks different. Reading Harry's post and watching something on CNN earlier about Jimmy Carter's comments on the possibly racist subtexts of current anti-Obama, it seems that our understanding of the Obama moment has shifted from one in which racism is merely "over and done" to one in which black privilege reigns supreme.
The tweets Allen collects are pretty fascinating. I remember writing a piece about hip-hop in the digital age in the early 2000s--kids who would "battle" over chat programs, or message boards where strangers would argue about purity of form or historical minutiae. At the time, I thought that the Internet complicated hip-hop by raising the stakes on authenticity--the Internet opened up new possibilites of performance and masquerade, it allowed the trying-on of different, distant identities. But maybe this assumed a set of impulses--a desire to know the Other; a passion for love and theft; a firmer sense of space and difference--that no longer apply. Instead of kids pretending they're The Other, it feels like you're more likely to see the kind of trigger-happy, contextless, self-excavating performances that Harry discovers, ones that can be quite chilling at their worst.
*-Related but tangential: what kinds of "archives" will researchers in the future consult? Is our faith in the cached and the trackbackable a bit haughty?
As a sucker for print, I will buy almost any magazine at least once. I just came across Chimurenga, an excellent biannual (?) out of South Africa and I am at least one-dozen issues/three years late. It's a smart mix of fiction, reporting, essays, manifestos and art, all pegged to a vision of the pan African. In particular, the futbol issue -- which features fantastic interviews with Lilian Thuram and Diego Maradona (on his way to an anti-poverty rally) and intrepid reporting from throughout the continent -- and the "black technology" issue are excellent.
The Chimurenga Library is an astonishing resource. It collects cover images and selected article reprints from independent pan African print periodicals from around the world.
The magazine's website has a bit of content, but seek out physical copies for the artwork and photography. It's not terribly easy to find, but New Yorkers can pick up back issues at Other Music, St. Mark's and the New Museum.
Related: the Pan African Space Station sounds amazing
* * *
One way to keep publishing afloat: a judge sentences a crooked exec to write a book.
* * *
In 1983, Motorola introduced the first commercially available cellular phones to the United States. Here, their designers imagine what we might see in the next twenty-five years (but possibly never).
* * *
And the "worm" in question:
Results tagged “the future”
Very important piece by Harry Allen about Kanye and Taylor, Twitter and the N-word. I tend to think it's easy to get overheated about these kinds of pop culture flare-ups, and my initial reaction to Kanye's bumrushing of Taylor was a hohum mix of "What a bad look" and "Kanye just grows more fascinating by the day." I did not, therefore, dash off a quick tweet about how Kanye's action merely confirmed his innate racial inferiority.
Harry meditates on the racial implications of the Kanye moment, and he has some incredible things to say about "post-racism" (it refuses to die...) in the age of Twitter...he actually collects tweets that feature "Kanye" and "Ni---er" within their 140 characters. Most of them seem to originate from users who, based on their profiles, don't seem "racist" in any obvious way, whatever that would mean.*
A question has emerged as the readymade response to any accusations of racism, and it's the one that many have long feared: if there is indeed racism in America, then how did Obama win the election? No amount of data or historical analysis, no lesson in argumentative reasoning, not even a time machine, probably, would satisfy those who use this question as a defense against the claim that anti-Obama disrespect feels profoundly different. It certainly looks different. Reading Harry's post and watching something on CNN earlier about Jimmy Carter's comments on the possibly racist subtexts of current anti-Obama, it seems that our understanding of the Obama moment has shifted from one in which racism is merely "over and done" to one in which black privilege reigns supreme.
The tweets Allen collects are pretty fascinating. I remember writing a piece about hip-hop in the digital age in the early 2000s--kids who would "battle" over chat programs, or message boards where strangers would argue about purity of form or historical minutiae. At the time, I thought that the Internet complicated hip-hop by raising the stakes on authenticity--the Internet opened up new possibilites of performance and masquerade, it allowed the trying-on of different, distant identities. But maybe this assumed a set of impulses--a desire to know the Other; a passion for love and theft; a firmer sense of space and difference--that no longer apply. Instead of kids pretending they're The Other, it feels like you're more likely to see the kind of trigger-happy, contextless, self-excavating performances that Harry discovers, ones that can be quite chilling at their worst.
*-Related but tangential: what kinds of "archives" will researchers in the future consult? Is our faith in the cached and the trackbackable a bit haughty?
As a sucker for print, I will buy almost any magazine at least once. I just came across Chimurenga, an excellent biannual (?) out of South Africa and I am at least one-dozen issues/three years late. It's a smart mix of fiction, reporting, essays, manifestos and art, all pegged to a vision of the pan African. In particular, the futbol issue -- which features fantastic interviews with Lilian Thuram and Diego Maradona (on his way to an anti-poverty rally) and intrepid reporting from throughout the continent -- and the "black technology" issue are excellent.
The Chimurenga Library is an astonishing resource. It collects cover images and selected article reprints from independent pan African print periodicals from around the world.
The magazine's website has a bit of content, but seek out physical copies for the artwork and photography. It's not terribly easy to find, but New Yorkers can pick up back issues at Other Music, St. Mark's and the New Museum.
Related: the Pan African Space Station sounds amazing
Rapper: This is Hua.
Rapper's mother: Hello there, Hua.
Rapper's aunt: Hi.
Rapper: So this is where I grew up.
Rapper's aunt: Hey, aren't you doing an interview today with Vibe?
Rapper: Yeah, this is him, I'm showing him around the block.
Rapper's aunt (to me): Oh! You're Vibe! So are we vibin' now!? We're VIBIN'!
* * *
Jeff posts a fascinating roundtable (all done on Twitter? How ironic...) with Alan Light and Raymond Roker about the future of magazine publishing and the death of VIBE Magazine. Some highlights:
TOTALLY unrelated (via Harmon): "Emails from an Asshole"
Rapper's mother: Hello there, Hua.
Rapper's aunt: Hi.
Rapper: So this is where I grew up.
Rapper's aunt: Hey, aren't you doing an interview today with Vibe?
Rapper: Yeah, this is him, I'm showing him around the block.
Rapper's aunt (to me): Oh! You're Vibe! So are we vibin' now!? We're VIBIN'!
* * *
Jeff posts a fascinating roundtable (all done on Twitter? How ironic...) with Alan Light and Raymond Roker about the future of magazine publishing and the death of VIBE Magazine. Some highlights:
Jeff Chang: I could live with a smaller media landscape-but we need that middle between 1m+ circulation mags and circs of less-than-100,000 zines back.
(...)
Alan Light at 1:35pm June 30no more, no less - we're all out here together. but you isolated the exact right issue, in all types of media. you can be mega or you can be niche, but very difficult to play in between. magazines, movies, music...all the same drill.
Jeff Chang at 1:54pm June 30
(...)
Yes. How do we get it back? My first gut instinct is stronger anti-trust enforcement, but that's just one side of it. Plus how does one begin to reverse consolidation? After all it's a global thing. I worry we come out of the depression and the big are still bigger and still stepping on or casting long shadows over the seeds of the new stuff. You all have any ideas?Raymond Leon Roker at 12:25pm July 1
We embrace the new. Don't lament too much on the past. There will always be old media support groups and once URB's archive site goes live, you can relive the rave scene virtually
But today, it's about social media, shared content, multiple distribution channels and creative financing.
As someone who used to write a zine--circulation: "nine-hundred-and-ninety-nine thousand short of a mil"--I found this conversation to be smart, nuanced and occasionally inspiring. I encourage anyone interested in the future of print to check it out. For some reason, I can't see the word "middle" and not think Pearl Buck.
I'll have more to say on the sad death of VIBE in the coming days.
TOTALLY unrelated (via Harmon): "Emails from an Asshole"
While I was sitting in Huerequeque's bar, next to me a pig kept rubbing with self-absorbed persistence against a case of beer. Then it disappeared behind the counter. A broom was lying on the ground as if felled by an assassin.-from Werner Herzog's astonishing Fitzcarraldo diaries (in the current Paris Review)
* * *
One way to keep publishing afloat: a judge sentences a crooked exec to write a book.
* * *
In 1983, Motorola introduced the first commercially available cellular phones to the United States. Here, their designers imagine what we might see in the next twenty-five years (but possibly never).
* * *
Sophisticated nuclear strategists also speak a language all their own. They are gradually evolving a terminology which is free of moral, or even human, connotation. They do not, for example, use any form of the word attack, but use instead the term preempt--which of course sounds like something in a bridge game rather than what it is.-Terry Southern, quoted in Bilge Ebiri's essay on Dr. Strangelove and the "dead serious" novel that inspired it
What's still interesting and valid in futurism is just a desire to make and hear something, and combine and synthesize things that will produce new sensations, new feelings, new rhythms. That's the core of futurism for me, not some fantasy of how the future is going to be. The minute you hear someone trying to get squiggly with a guitar, you can't help but see a fucking guitarist doing it. But a synth, because the sound is more abstract, because it's not made by someone hitting something, it's someone modulating a current, it's a more abstract sound, so it's coming to you less overcoded with the image of the person making it. So the 'worm' can manifest itself in its true alien glory.Kode9 (from the May 2009 issue of The Wire)
And the "worm" in question:
« Previous 1 Next »
