En Espanol, Por Favor

Hot on the heels of Sinical's Hip-Hop list comes my addition to the Pam's Europop Picks: Miguel Bose's Velvetina. There are a few video clips but I can't seem to find any MP3 downloads. This could be for one of two reasons:

1. I can't locate the link.
2. The lable is Time Warner and the tracks are locked down.

Still, I love the heavy beats and sweet sound of this stuff. I find it, well, sexy is the word that comes to mind.

So what?

You know what's getting on my nerves lately? I'm gonna tell you. It's this: The flap about the "Bush Tapes." You know what I have to say about the Bush Tapes? Big fucking deal.

So W. might have smoked a little weed. Is this at ALL surprising from a Skull and Bones mediocre frat boy who was already known for doing blow and getting hammered and going for a drive?

So W. made some vaguely disparaging remarks about homosexuals. Once again, like this is a surprise from a guy who wanted to amend the Constitution to outlaw gay marriage?

There's just not enough here to grab on to. Is this because I'm already so outraged about the things that have come out of the "President's" mouth in the present that I don't give one good goddam about what he might have said in the past? I've heard excerpts from the Johnson tapes and the Nixon tapes, now there was some nasty stuff. But anything I've come across from the W. tapes just leaves me apathetic.

The media I'm seeing is really hyping this release of information like it's full of shocking surprises. But as far as I've seen, there's no there there. My inner paranoid freak makes me wonder if this administration isn't a player in this. "We gotta give them something so it looks like there's still a shred of independent reporting out there."

Naming conventions

So, I missed the autocomplete when I typed in "hardto" & came up with a search result. This one caught my eye, a Rick James tune with the same name, you know, of the blog here.

The name for this blog here, was Drew's idea. When I asked for the reason, he said that he liked the idea of being "hard to get" and it's multiple connotations. Jump in if I'm wrong here, Drew. Not sure what other connotations folks get, if you know what I mean.

Having Rick James in the mix kinda warms my heart. It reminds me of sweaty Forestville nights dancing The Freak to P-Funk, Rick James and the Commodores (think, Brick House). Those were some of the most confusing, murky years of my life, but dancing is the blessing I got from it all. Not being afraid or unable to dance to me is more lifesaving than knowing how to swim, for example.

Ah, Forestville. Drew's been there with me. We even stayed at my childhood home. It felt like I was walking him through one of my paintings... through veiled memories and tangible presence. It's just a government suburb, outside of DC, but no one's childhood is limited by geography these days... take a look at where I grew up, I circled the shool I attended through 6th grade:



I walked over a bridge to get to school, you can see the little path near the bottom left of the circle. Before I went, I think I was four, my brother & I were walking around & playing in the creek. I remember feeling impatient to go to school. There were a few mornings I spent, catching minnows and frogs, near the bridge - while kids ambled across in school clothes, with books in hand. I thought they were so fancy!

In elementary school, we were more likely to dance to Baby Come Back then anything as rowdy as RJ - Hard to get, hmmm?

Under My Thumb

The folks at 43 Folders had a clever idea-Google "rules of thumb" and see what comes up.

They found rules of thumb for flirting, evaluating a pet store, building a church (balconies? not hot) and selling remote controls.

We all have personal rules of thumb, of course. For instance:

-If Ice Cube is in it, I won't be renting it
-Brown clothes in my wardrobe are too much hassle
-Buy the canned tomatoes; the ones in the produce section will just break your heart.

These are fine but they aren't a system, they're just ad hoc ideas. But I know within me, there are rules, rules I follow, some I've developed and some I've borrowed and many of them make systems.

Between the time I started typing this post and now, I went back to the posting at 43 folders. There are many comments from readers including this helpful hint:

If a helicopter is bigger than your thumb held at arm's length, you can bring it down with ground fire.

For any of you who are too distracted by the concept of "the rule of thumb" because you are busy thinking about how the phrase "rule of thumb" refers to an old law requiring men to restrict themselves to beating women with a rod no greater in diameter to their own thumbs, this site claims that story is bogus. The site goes on to say that, per the O.E.D., "rule of thumb" has been used at least 300 years to refer to any method of measurement or technique of estimation derived from experience rather than science.

Y tu?

The truth about love

Happy Valentine's day everybody!

I have spent the day putting hearts on all my powerpoints & finding out what folks are doing for their celebrations. We hope to do some decorating. I'm getting stencils of hearts & spray paint. We're bringing cameras.

Some thoughts on love:

My father-in-law loaned us a book on Shackleton, early in our relationship - along with the admonishment that "marriage is hard"...

Here's from Rumi:
Bouyancy

Love has taken away my practices
and filled me with poetry.

I had to clap and sing.
I used to be a respectable and chaste and stable,
but who can stand in this strong wind
and remember those things?

A mountain keeps an echo deep inside itself.
That's how I hold your voice.

I am scrap wood thrown in your fire,
and quickly reduced to smoke.

Here's a Neruda thing:
The Table

"...The World
is a table
engulfed in honey and smoke,
smothered by apples and blood.
The table is already set,
and we know the truth
as soon as we are called:
whether we're called to war or to dinner
we will have to choose sides,
have to know
how we'll dress
to sit at the long table,
whether we'll wear the pants of hate
or the shirt of love, freshly laundered.
It's time to decide.
they're calling:
boys and girls,
let's eat!"

How's Your News?

Journalists spend a lot of time worrying about the decline of print journalism. What this really means, of course, is that print is evolving, not dying. In a world where the act of knitting can become hot, hot, hot, it seems premature to declare the death of journalism that you read yourself rather than having someone else read it to you.

One piece of the evolution is the end of objectivity. Chris Anderson describes objectivity as a product of scarcity. If a community has very few sources of information (a paper, a few television channels, a radio station or two) then those sources are obliged to be objective, if only from a business standpoint. In contrast to the U.S., English newspapers have always been national, not local. Papers distinguish themselves by taking sides.

Since news is now a commodity, Anderson suggests that aggregators differentiate themselves in the marketplace not just via opinion and partisanship but through sensibility and worldview. He breaks down the difference like this..."sensibility" would be The New Yorker, Maxim and MTV-if you are this kind of person, you'll like this kind of information. "Worldview" is more like a lens for viewing the world, often expressed as an "-ism"...enviromentalism, libertarianism, etc.

This seems intuitively correct. A mass media produces "Happy Days" while narrowcasting can produce "Straight Eye for the Queer Guy"; why should news be any different? Make a liberal FOX News, an enviromental Rush Limbaugh, etc.

This is a long-ass post but I have one other idea to pass along. Cass Sunstein thinks that all this fragmentation is a bad idea. "For democracy to work, people must be exposed to topics and ideas they would not have chosen in advance." says Sunstein.

The essay is, like everything he writes, sharp and well-reasoned. He ends it with this sentence:

The task for the future is to find ways to ensure that the Internet reduces, and does not increase, the risk of social fragmentation.

Fragmentation: hot or not?

The Cabinet National Library

I love this. I can't stop looking at it. I really can't.