Cobb

To Spend More Time With the Family

I have about 6 posts in various forms of draft, and I'm probably not going to make them real until the weekend. Maybe.

This is about the time to retire. I am really not so much interested in the daily spew of political news, nor do I think I have left a great deal of ground uncovered. I've got to work on my XRepublic project and look at the Best of Cobb and see what might be published.

So this is the time when I say goodbye for now. I'm going to repackage everything to make it available but I don't have time for it now.

Basically I realized that when my kids get a 3.2 GPA and I think that's not good enough, then I have to spend more time with them than with you. It really boils down to that.

Cartoon Nostalgia

My wife and I just made the ultimate podcast, except we didn't record it. But we walked all the way back down memory lane thinking about all the old TV shows and cartoons we used to watch when we were kids.

But we had to turn to the internet when I rattled off a few of my all-time favorite characters some of whom were unknown to her. The one that I have had countless controversies over was Super President. Nobody but nobody remembers Super President, who was pretty much the most invincible superhero ever. See, most of the superheroes have some weakness. When Super President got rid of his costume, he was still the President of the United States. He could change the molecular structure of his body, and even when I was a kid, I knew this was the coolest power around. I had figured out the periodic table and realized that gave him over 200 elemental powers, plus unlimited molecular powers. So if he wanted to defeat Superman, he could just turn himself into Kryptonite. If he wanted to defeat Green Lantern, he could turn himself into wood.

The other great cartoon that the Spousal Unit didn't remember was Gigantor. Gigantor, of course, had one of the three coolest theme songs in all of children's television. The other two being the theme song for the Amazing Three and the mod jazz of Hoppity Hooper. What? You don't remember Hoppity Hooper? Next to Snagglepuss, another favorite, Hoppity Hooper was one of the coolest of the hokey characters. I preferred them straight, which is why like many of my geek bretheren who grew up in Atomic America, I am in agreement that the greatest cartoon of all was Johnny Quest.

Oh but those hokey characters. Remember when cartoons went all soft? I mean we started off with cool superheroes like Thor, Hulk, Captain America, Ironman and the Flash. Then they gradually got softer. First they added sidekicks, which wasn't so bad if they were like The Mighty Mightor's flying dinosaur. But then they sprouted families with half-powers. On the one hand it could be great like with the Herculoids because most of the time even the gloopy characters could do cool things, on the other hand it could be completely ruinous. This is where I part company with the fans of Space Ghost. I say Space Ghost was lame because of his dependence on those dumb kids and their monkey. What was the point of them anyway?

It reached complete lows by the 70s when you had doofus 'heroes' like Hong Kong Phooey and Inch High Private Eye, and by the time we were beyond cartoons our poor baby brothers sucked up reprocessed French cheese like the Smurfs. But even in the early days we got goofballs like The Impossibles, who were fun to watch, but no contest to The Amazing Three or The Fantastic Four. Then finally the whole thing died at the birth of Super Friends with the Wonder Twins. Holy crap, Batman. Super Friends? You call that the Justice League of America?

Anyway, I wasn't all hardcore. I mean I could dig the irony of Jay Ward so I did like Super Chicken, Tom Slick, George of the Jungle and Roger Ramjet. Even though there was no greater whipped character this side of Pepe LePew, I actually did like Underdog. But whatever happened to the great off-beat cartoons like Winky Dink?

You realize of course that it took the Japanese to bring back power and justice to cartoons. And what did that better than Space Cruiser Yamato? Once we decided to go limp with our heroes what could top the moral clarity of Kimba the White Lion, or the upbeat grit and determination (as well as homage to hijinks) that was Speed Racer? Also, if you ask me, I'd take Marine Boy anyday over Aquaman.

I could go on and on, but I have to push the G button in my own Mach 5 and hop to work (if you didn't realize what that graphic was all about). Meanwhile, psychoanalyze yourself over at Toonopedia. I guarantee you will waste half your day.

What Do You Mean We?

For the past several months, there have been race riots all over California inner-city highschools and jails. This is no coincidence, the link between the two is fairly well established. They are the facilities charged with the care and feeding of thousands of blacks and hispanics who have no other distinguishing characteristics as humans other than that they actually represent the ugliest stereotypes.

You would think that this is a matter of urgent concern. It's not mine. These are not 'my people'.

My people are in close proximity to millions of other Americans in the gap between mystery and understanding. The mystery and the myth are the second and third degree accounts of ultimate success in America. Understanding is defense of that ultimate success. Most of the American middle class, if not all of it, lives in that gap.

This is something of an extension of what I've written about before in 'Assume the Position' because it is that assumption we have to deal with when looking to the connection between the putative 'black community' and those African Americans now rioting with their fellow inmates in jail or ghetto highschools.

But enough of that pontification. Right now I just want to give the Biggest Bitchslap Imaginable to Bol for his completely craptastic defense of 'stop snitching'. His bottom line, in order to protect your stash of weed from the cops, it's worth it not to assist them in finding a killer.

Busta Rhymes didn't want to talk to the cops because he's smart. He knows that the hip-hop police's feigned interest in the identity of this bag handler's killer is no more than a simple ploy to glean the contents of The Bag itself and its exact whereabouts. Cooperating with the police in this case, as in most cases, would serve no purpose other than to give them the drop on your stash.

Now that you know what a load of methane has passed through his brain in defense of hiphop, go curse him out on his website and tell him I sent you. He's lost his frickin mind.

A Daddyman Weekend

Friday my back was killing me. I slept on the sofa last Tuesday and the pain in my lower back was getting progressively worse. Friday morning I had to engineer, as if I were wrestling, some escape from bed. If I moved this leg out, then twisted that much, I could flip over without much pain and then scoot out this direction. I had to get assistance to put on my shoes and socks. It was, without question the second worse back injury I'd ever suffered. The first was gotten the same way, falling asleep on the couch. Well, it's more like crashing on the couch in a position that could only be gotten to unintentionally and sleeping so soundly that you're stuck in that position half the night.

The Sprite, aka F9 had baseball practice on Saturday, and despite my incapacity, I am assistant assistant coach. Her best friend had been over since 10 in the morning and by 1 we were supposed to show up for practice. The problem is that there are too many teams and not enough fields in town for every team to practice. But Coach Brian has a familiarity with odd spots in the community and found us a lovely diamond in a secluded part of the South Bay. I've lived there for about a total of 7 years and I've never been within half a mile of this particular neighborhood which is really stunning considering how close it is to everything. It's just a turn that nobody makes, there's no reason to drive through this area unless you live there. It's a fabulous little area. So after a few McBurgers and several wrong turns, we found the secret spot.

It turns out that F9 has a great swing and won 2nd place in the hitting derby behind the Coach Brian's own daughter who is a chatty prodigy. But she definitely needs some help on catching. It's partially the glove's fault. We're going to have to beat it to a pulp so it will close nicely. Mink oil is supposed to be the cure. I'm just going to run over it with my car, that's what we used to do back in the day and baseball is all about tradition. This is softball though, and watching the Coach teach it is reminding me of several things. One, how much we had to figure out for ourselves when we were kids. Two, how fundamental the fundamentals are. Three, how lousy my own baseball coach was when I finally got one.

F10's clarinet tutor didn't show up, so she continued working on deconstructing the life of Phyllis Wheatley for her school project. She's tooting along OK but gets rather screechy every once in a while. I was happy to not have to deal with hearing much more of that. As long as she shows interest, we continue our parently duties. We found her and the other F the avatar maker that I used to craft the face of 607 on my left sidebar so they continued to dress virtual dolls and create characters and people.

This was a big weekend for the boy. Sunday was Scout Day at the local United Methodist, and he was invited to do a couple things. First, he and his best friend did their now famous rendition of the theme from Veggie Tales on flute and trombone for the children's procession. He then led a call to prayer and then performed a solo at the end of the service. Some cat named James Swearingen is extraordinarily famous if you're in Band, but if you want to download an MP3, you're out of luck. I think this is music only public school music teachers and church musical directors know. Anyway, his rendition of 'Follow the River' was perfectly amplified in the sanctuary and got a big hand. Outside on the front grass, they continued to play for coins.

Then we had a four-way family lunch down at the retro burger cafe in the Riviera. The eight of us adults rambled for a good 90 minutes about New Orleans, international business, children and some other stuff I probably should have paid attention to but didn't while the various widescreen TVs blasted and children took up two other booths. The clam strips were perfect.

Later in the afternoon, sister came by and my dad and I hooked up. He's looking to learn to play piano, so we jetted over to Sam Ash to check out the keyboard selection. It turns out that you can get some very nice feeling Casios for 600 bucks. Makes me want to play. But maybe I ought to stick to bass guitar. Not that I have one, but I miss the fact that I used to be pretty good and now I suck completely. I can't even do 'Good Times' which is your basic staple. Then we swung by Borders to pick up my Ruby books and headed back to the pad.

When we got there, I worked for a while to help F10 plan the garden we're going to build. She's picked out several types of marigolds and sunflowers including a stunning chianti hybrid we found at Burpee.com. Next week we head to Home Depot for the planter boxes and various tools. This should be a great project.

I got in some good ripping and added another 500 tracks or so to the collection. I've decided to up the ante and use 320 kpbs for M4a for any song I think I might burn to CD to play in the car. The difference is audible and I've got disk space to burn.

Finally, we all watched Nausicaa, which is a fabulously good tale. Miyazaki does it again. This one is a bit darker than his other works and not quite as nuanced but still excellent. These are a class of stories we simply don't approach for American kids. I don't know why not, but I do know why my kids prefer The Avatar over all other kids' programming.

Just Another Wednesday

The Brother's Cup
This morning I've been wasting a lot of time reading and writing when I should be studying MDX so I can write some cool database extracts. And I've taken a tree-lined bourgie path amongst the black blue bloods. Namely I've been checking out the 100 Black Men websites as well as those for Jack & Jill. All of this following up on reminescences about the Wilfandel Club which I mentioned this week.

I thought about whether or not I should attempt once again to launch The Brother's Cup, a black men's social club in LA. (And I'm bending towards that considering the age of some of those 100 black men, damn I ain't that fogey yet.) There are several difficulties with this idea, most of them logistical. Most of the fellas I know who aren't married don't want anything to do with hanging out with brothers who aren't active wingmen. Most of the fellas I know who are married can not, repeat can not, get away from the wifeandkids, much less cough up 50 bucks or so for the monthly dinner. So where does that leave me? Humph. Blogging and programing the Tivo. But it's a new year and I'm going to give it another shot.

My Son the Geek
I always thought it was in him, but now that he's expressing it the effect is a bit startling. My son actually bored me stiff with his excitement over a Discovery Channel mockumentary called Supervolcano. He has been learning plate tectonics and so every time we get into a fun game of trivia, I have to answer unanswerable questions about slipstrike faults, fracture zones and harmonic tremors.

Reading Time
I have instantiated reading time chez moi. Two of the kids stay up after 9pm. So they have to read now. No idiot box, no Walkman, no phone calls. Just reading. If you don't want to read, go to bed.

All About the Bits
I've set my iTunes rip dial all the way to the max on AAC. 320 is the magic number and it's really a whole lot better. I'm going to re-rip my favorite tunes and re-reap the benefits. If you haven't tried the making M4As instead of MP3s, you ought to try it.

Fires in my Hometown
The weather out here is all bizarre. There is no reason for thousands of acres in eastern Orange County to burn and then for Malibu to catch on fire in February. This isn't fire season, but suddenly the temperature is high and the winds are blowing and crap is burning down. Just as surely as it stops being foggy and rainy, I feel like it's safe to wash The Transporter and sure enough now it's covered in ash. I live thirty miles away from all this, why should I suffer?

Work
I haven't been so challenged with work in a mighty long time. It's really cutting into my blogging and thinking and everything else. I am accustomed to being underemployed. But all the other things I want to be doing, like keeping the TCB portal moving forward, learning Ruby so I can start building XRepublic (I have given up on building a sweat equity collective - eff y'all, I'm taking all the credit), and watching all that crap I recorded on my Tivo. It's not as if my customer is grateful for my blood... Oh well, at least it's not roofing or some other Dirty Job.

Time to listen to some Eric Sardinas.

Super

I don't remember if it was last year or the year before when Janet Jackson did her thing, but I do know that people are still talking about it. I sincerely hope that Gray's Anatomy got the ratings boost it deserves from all that advertising. Oh yeah, and there was a Super Bowl game yesterday too wasn't there?

The single most significant event that I can imagine coming from the victory of the Steelers is that Lynn Swann will get more votes and eventually win the election this year. All of us dark Republicans are squirming in our seats. Other that what is there to be said but trivialities?

I'm rather astounded at the pro-forma feeling that his SB had. I think it takes a lot of nerve to do the Avedon portraits of the players done with the trophy before the game is over. I wouldn't even let the players touch it before the game much less have artistic photo shoots with it. Even as Bart Starr marched the Lombardi up to the pedestal after the game, they touched it before Tagliabue awarded it. Not only that, the whole rehearsing the "I'm going to Disneyworld" thing was really 30 feet over the shark. When are we going to get tired of that?

Here's what I would do. And let the world know I said it here first. Make something really big out of the GoDaddy girl. Maybe get a third set of cheerleaders - the Go Daddy Girls. Run up to the winning quaterback and ask him what he's going to do and he'll say "I got a date with the Go Daddy Girls". Or if he's married, have his kid run up and ask him, "Where are you going to Go Daddy?", and he gives a knowing wink, and he says "Disneyworld", but you know what he's thinking.

As for me, my brother says I look like a football coach. I do. I don't understand what a little hair manipulation can do. We chilled out at his new pad way out in the boonies. He's got the big project HD DLP but dammit the Super Bowl is not presented in HD. What's up with that? Well if it was, it didn't look like HD to me. Maybe bro was lying about the HD. He wasn't lying about the 919 though. Yeah. He let me take a spin on his new Honda 919. I want one. What was amazing to me was the brakes. I almost stoppied just with a few pounds of squeeze on the right caliper. It felt amazingly light and... well I haven't been on a motorcycle in a while. The technology is stupendous these days.

Riding the 919 was definitely the highlight of the day. That and the cocktail franks. I also liked the FedEx commercial. You know you can see them all at Google Video. Cool.

The Man Who Thinks He Can

If you think you're beaten, you are;
If you think you dare not, you don't.
If you'd like to win, but think you can't,
It's almost a cinch you won't.
If you think you'll lose, you've lost;
For out in the world we find
Success being with a fellow's will;
It's all in the state of mind.

If you think you're outclassed, you are;
You've got to think high to rise.
You've got to be sure of yourself
Before you can ever win a prize.
Life's battles don't always go
To the stronger or faster man;
But soon or late, the one who wins
Is the man who thinks he can.

Music Marathon

Right now I am listening to my whole collection of Bobby McFerrin music. I had unchecked all of the songs in iTunes so as to somewhat skew my Last.fm stats and lay off the McFerrin for a while. Now I'm back with a passionate vengeance. It's not that I had fogotten what his Medicine Music could do for me, it's just that I was in need of stress. Now that I have it in spades, Bobby is equalizing my spirit, putting me back at ease.

The bad news is that after all this time (since 2002) there has yet to be another McFerrin album. He's overdue right about now. The majority of folks have no idea what McFerrin is capable of, which is a shame.

In addition, I have discovered the genius of Keith Jarrett. Apparently, I have the patience now that I never had for that which rambles. I got about 2/3 the way through the documentary DVD about him, and I'm not surprised that some of Jarrett's early work would have turned me off. See I remember crawling through Tower Records Sunset in the bad old days desparately seeking some solo jazz piano. With my limited vocabulary I was trying to find something unboring. So the skinny geeks pointed me towards Jarrett and Cecil Taylor. Then they would throw in Don Cherry and Ornette Coleman just for kicks and I got ill. What I really wanted to hear was Bud Powell and Art Tatum. something crisp and dripping with virtuosity. What I got was some Jarrett with Charles Lloyd banging random shit and some Cecil Taylor that actually registered something on the verge of comprehensibility. And Liz Story. Ain't that a blip? The year was 1987. I went back to Starfish & Coffee. Now Jarrett's renditions of standards makes perfect sense to me and I plan to get my hands on some more.

Also on the straight up tip, I am so loving Nancy Wilson that my head hurts. There's nothing you can do but cry when you hear the purity and sweetness of her voice. I begin to think that there will never ever be another you Nancy and I weep for my country thinking she might die broke. If I were the millionaire I should have been by now, you would find Nancy singing at my club, Mr B's.

Someday. Someday in the future, in New York City, there will be a joint on 57th Street. Maybe on the very spot of the Russian Tea Room, I'll have my club.

Link Storm

It's still the beginning of 2006 and I have not yet broken any of my resolutions. I don't miss Pringles and I haven't eaten any french fries. But what I haven't done enough of is link up to people I ought to, including blog readers and league-mates. So. On the off chance that any of you all have accounts on LinkedIn, get in touch with me via my email and we'll extend our network. There's a lot of business opportunity out there and I said I wanted to get networked for real. Now is the time and LinkedIn is the right place.

Michael George Johnson

We say good bye to the Mike of the other Cynthia & Michael. He was taken by cancer last week. I can't ever remember this guy not working. It seemed to me that he was always busy about something. He was a good looking guy. Quiet, serious, polite, but never dorky. He and Cynthia were a great match. Both dedicated workaholics, always pursuing the dream. The news was a shock and it's still hard to believe. Mike appeared to be in perfect health, but the cancer was found much too late.

When someone I know dies, I take it upon myself to assume part of their character. That way they live on in me. So i will attempt to be more 'about it', because I knew few people who were as dedicated as Michael Johnson.

Born to Sonny an Elseta Johnson on September 14, 1961, Michael George Johnson was a father, a husband and a friend to many. Determined to reach success form a young age, Michael's journey began in London, England where he attended Tollington Park High School and graduated early to got onot Kingsway Princeton College.

Michael was an avid photographer. He worked in the heart of London for several years as a graphic artist specializing in photography and advertising. At age 38 Michael decided to take a risk and try life in America. He went on to reside in Redondo Beach, California where he met an married is wonderful wife Cynthia Moore in 2001. Michael was a very intelligent, strong and driven man. Never taking no for an answer and always striving for the best he used his artistic ability to start his own company disigning and creating hand crafted iron doors and railings.

Amongst many relatives he is survived by his mother Elseta, his sister Patsy, his brother John, his three chldrenn Jarrell, Natanya and Jasmine, and his wife Cynthia. Michale will always be remembered by his family and friends as a quiet yet ambitions, strong and determined soul.

His life journey came to a close at the tender age of 44. He will be deeply missed by all.

How To Be A Black Snob

The first thing you have to do is dismiss Erika Badu. It helps if you don't know how to spell her name, as I don't. Then all you have to do is talk about how idiotic her song about 'Darnell' or whomever it was was back in the day. Then you compare her to somebody equally skillful, say Stephanie Mills and say that Stephanie would never be so crude. There you have it. Substitute something classy for something trashy.

The proper expression to do while expressing this dismay at the confusion of the person who suggested that whomever black is worth respecting is to peer over your reading glasses. Your expression should say 'no you didn't" without verbally expressing it. You then immediately offer something nice. The model in this matter should be the late Gloria Foster when she meets Neo for the first time as the Oracle in the Matrix. "Not too bright though.." Offer the dunce a cookie and let them come back another time.

Since I've got years of doing this, it's kind of second-nature. The point is to be superior and gracious at once, to make erudition attractive one must be attractive and one must make one's students enthused to become more thoughtfully erudite themselves. But you must also realize as BeeJiggity has, that there are some poor souls who are beyond reclaim. Don't lose sleep over this. It's the way of the world, there have always been and will always be people who are best suited to be bad examples for the children. In fact, that is their role, like the big bad wolf. But insure that they get their verbal thrashing as a matter of course.. don't get to exercised about it. As I said, I've done this and it can be interpreted as sangfroid. Not a good thing. That's why you offer the cookie.

However, if you feel that there are certain matters that must be attended to with the accompanying swift kick in the pants without delay, you must apologize ahead of time. A nice way to do this is to bring forth the image of someone a bit more crude though certainly no less right-minded than yourself, an Uncle Max, perhaps. It's a pity Uncle Max isn't here, you might say, because he'd - excuse my French (and then in Uncle Max's voice) "knock your ass into the middle of next week". And then with appropriate humility, express your concern that you stay as far away from such nonsense lest you become a bit more like Uncle Max than you care to be.

After some time of working such curmudgeonly ways, you will come to a certain peace with yourself, and your friends and associates will know what to expect from you without you having to be incessantly outspoken, like us bloggers. Which brings me to the point of this discussion: Booty Books.

As I alluded, BeeJiggity takes issue with the clustering of all things African American into a book ghetto at the B&N. I hear you B. I hear you. But you know what? I don't believe there are any more black books to be read. I mean after about the 40th one you get into overkill. So while I'm down with the spirit of the complaint, I have to say that we don't want to sound too much like Uncle Max on this one. Propriety dictates we offer a cookie, in the form of a be all, end all compendium of erudite reading material.

So I humbly offer the following reading lists. But I know they are missing stuff. So we ought to talk about good black fiction. What is it and why?

A Conservative Conclusion

At Cobb, I came to represent the Old School and have done so for the past several years primarily through the personal and the political. In making a lot of noise about my conversion from the standard 'black Independent' to throwing in my lot with the GOP, I have learned a great deal. At this juncture, I can't think of anything in particular that I haven't covered or that compels me to say much more on that subject, although I'm certain that I will again from time to time.

Over the past year, I have gone from self-employment, which began in 2001 to working for a small corporation of about 700. Consequently, I have gone from having plenty of cash and time to having less of both and from rising through the upper middle class to settling into the bottom of it more or less comfortably. Therefore my ambitions to organize GOP politics in Southern Cal and online have taken a back seat to more conventional concerns, like overtime for the bossman.

I have gone through a generation of the blogosphere having created and witnessed the birth and maturity of my progressive group blog Vision Circle which is now hobbling on the legs of one author. I have also created The Conservative Brotherhood which ambles on with its new portal despite defections. Here at Cobb where I spend the overwhelming majority of my time I have been very pleased to join in with the Bear Flag League and attain and maintain Large Mammal status. Although I was invited, I declined membership in Pajamas Media. I don't do ads. I have benefitted greatly from the support and sponsorship of Scott Peterson's Punditdrome, frequent mentions by Shay Riley's Booker Rising and inclusion in Black Blogger's Association syndications. A considerable debt is also owed to my three greatest blogfathers, DenBeste at the late USS Clueless, Sean-Paul Kelley The Agonist and the ever mellow and indescribably warm and collegial George Kelly of Negrophile and all points sophisticated. A special shout out goes to BTD Steve too.

I would also like to spend a moment thanking my most faithful supporters and faithless detractors. You know who you are. Temple3, Matt128, Memer, Southernxyl, Prometheus6, Spence, Brown, Anderson, Dean, Nulan, Dell, Ed, T-Steel, Liz Ditz, Caltechgirl, Brotherbrown, Unclesmrgol, XRLQ and whomever slaps me for not recognizing...

OK stop biting your lip. This isn't an obituary. I'm just done with politics as a prime motivator. Cobb will remain and continue. But I'm probably going to change the tagline. If I deal with politics here, it will be dealt with in wry and snarky rather than arrogant and paternalistic terms, most likely through the comic. I'm still a Republican. Call me an ordinary political animal rather than a predator.

Here's what I conclude at the end of several years of blogging more or less politics vis a vis where I'm standing regards to black politics. The consensus political sensibilities of black folk are in line with the economic positions of black folk, most of whom are blue collar folks. There is and remains no great consequence to the difference between blue collar and white collar politics, the American system is designed to work out compromise. Nor should there any great surprise about those differences.

What remains critically important and has since the devolution of the Black Power Movement is that the failures of Nationalism to do an economic and political race raising are reconciled to American standards of class. They have been, with rare exception, those exceptions primarily being those Progressives of the white collar class who adopt the political sensibilities of the blue collar class and/or the poor and indigent. This, of course, raises the burden of proof of the legitimacy of the Progressive agenda since they work against their own class interests for collective aims, however there is ample precedent and parallels in white Liberalism.

The primary burdens of upper middle and upper class blacks whose politics follows their class interests are mostly existential, which is to say that while their class status is not in question, their blackness is. But that is an inappropriately political question begged by the imposition of identity politics. It should be clearly self-evident that the political ambitions of socially and economically advanced blackfolks are reality-based. This question of blackness, however stems from overworked notions about the unifying ability of Progressives who intend to inherit the mantle and the following of Black Nationalist politics, long after its economic failure. The extent to which either American political party recognizes and deals constructively with the rift between Progressive and Conservative black elites, however is minimal. In the end, I have concluded that the debate is mostly between these two groups and that either party will do what they will. What remains is what to make of this rift. It's an answer that requires perhaps 300 pages I have no interest in writing. In those 300 pages each group would be reconciled to the historical development of their various political positions and everybody will stand on their square and be square, or at least they should.

Whether or not that reconciliation happens, as a Conservative, I am greatly consoled by the reconciliation of my philosophy with the Western concept of the individual. If there be only 2% of African Americans who stand behind Bush, I'd be prefectly happy with those 600 thousand people. That I have personally met with individuals such as Michael Steele of Maryland allows me to be perfectly content in the knowledge that however small my minority is, it is not lunatic nor on any fringe. It's not about the numbers, it's about the principles. In the context of the history of African Americans I'm on more solid ground than those co-hackers of Nat Turner. I hardly need to be militantly righteous. I am perfectly willing to accept the bourgie differences between various black political positions and philosophies. I'm betting against it coming to militancy in my lifetime. In the end, I've got other things to worry about.

I will continue to monitor the barkings and ravings of my political opponents with amusement, and I will continue to make as crystal as possible those principled differences between us. I'm not putting down the verbal sword by any measure, I'm simply not leading with it. I will however be less likely to get caught up in the struggle at the blogospheric level as I am convinced there is no political forum of substance, depth and popularity here which is capable of changing the dynamic of what goes on in the greater public. I have seen the black blogosphere and it is what it is. But it is hardly the catalyst for change I might have imagined, nor is there any indication to me that may be in the offing. Practically speaking that means I will spend a whole lot less effort making writing things 'for posterity'. With black and other politics, I will be in Popeye mode. I yam what I yam, and iffen you don't like it, prepare for an impatient ass whoopin'. So long as I have kids at home, they deserve my wisdom more than you. Bite me if you don't like it.

What will occupy that fat end of my brain fat will be the more philosophical matters attending to the nature of Religion and ethics here and abroad. I am fully satisfied that American politics, being that it represents the art of the possible, is about as ethical as it needs to be, which is to say sufficient to keep people with pitchforks and torches off the streets and other nations from wiping their asses with our leadership. I am absolutely convinced that there is no impending crisis which makes cops question their loyalties, nor ordinary middle class folks to consider the necessity of taking up arms against the powers that be. In other words, as implied by my lack of tears attending taking up the bossman's business, I can give up studied bloviation because in the end, well it's all just studied bloviation.

The Revolution won't be televised because there is no Revolution. What goes on in the heads of those who believe there will be is beyond my concern.

Pure Joy

I have never heard Fishbone's 'Black Flowers' quite like I did last night. I heard it as a song by Radiohead. As I listened to it about three times on the drive home, and to Rite Aid and Whole Foods, I reimagined the whole thing that way. It's a perfect song for Radiohead to remake, beginning to end. If you're listening out there, Radiohead...

Speaking of Whole Foods, I find it to be the polar opposite of Wal-Mart and yet both I think are critically interesting parts of our economy. Every time I go to the Whole Foods in Redondo Beach, I see some man or woman in the joint who looks like they're just dripping with moola. I mean why would anyone else pay 5 bucks for a loaf of bread? The place just looks delicious, and it's obviously piercing and tatoo friendly. It's ironic that people who apparently care so much about what goes into their bodies have so little respect for their skin. Nevertheless, I picked up a relatively cheap loaf of organic honey wheat and a six pack of (I kid you not) Hairy Eyeball beer. The bread was delicious. The wife fried it in butter and I ate grilled American cheese and baloney sandwiches for dinner.

After 938 minutes and 32 seconds, or so, I completed Half-Life 2. That game was astounding, and now I see what all those people were talking about. Yes I do see how in many ways it is far superior to Halo 2. The narrative is more compelling, the interactivity with the environment is far superior and the ways in which your character plays the game is more varied. I'd have to give Halo's AI the slight nod, simply because there are so many more enemies that it manages, although I also have to recognize how HL2's AI deals with hiding its injured characters and attacking turrets you control.

I've never been in a game that induced vertigo so well. In the Highway 17 segment with the battle against the gunship from the girders under the steel arch bridge, the effect was dizzying. Just as I realized what I was going to have to do, I said to myself that it's a good thing that I'm not afraid of heights. Two minutes later I was afraid of heights. Same thing with clinging to the edges of the hole at the foundation of The Citadel. There is really jaw-droppingly awesome stuff in this game, reminescent of the Krell Machine's core.

I'm kinda mad at Adam Sandler and Morgan Webb for not putting enough scenes in their reviews of the game, because I definitely slept on this. Damn. Now I'm going to have to have another look at Counter-Strike.

I still haven't finished reading Overworld, which is about three times more complicated than Syriana. Just how I like it. I think I've done my share of gaming. Plus I'm giving up french fries and potato chips this year. Honey roasted peanuts and beef jerky will have to do.

The Death of Sixo

People who have hung around me long enough may have a clue that one of my handles is 'sixoseven'. Sixoseven is the name of my band (which is just me but my kids will be joining soon), and it is my XBox Live gamertag. But it also has a deeper significance.

One sunny day in 1989 I came across a passage in 'Beloved' that knocked me off my feet. It was the beginning of a new personal journey for me. I don't know how much or little I've written about Sixo, the character in Beloved, but I took him to be an inspiration. When I moved to Atlanta and got an email account, back when such things were a great deal more rare and important than they are now, I decided to be sixo@mindspring.com which over time became sixo@earthlink.net. That superceded my first true internet email which was mbowen@panix.com, a vanity domain if there ever was one. (I would think that only well.com and world.std.org would be more prestigious, but that's just me).

Anyway, I don't need Earthlink any longer and after almost a decade, I've cut sixo loose. So over the weekend I had to go find all of the places I used it so that nothing I might have gotten will bounce. I just found it in, of all places, my signature to The Cluetrain Manifesto. I can't say that I ever got squat out of signing that - it never connected me to any VC money, but that's another bit of faded glory. It's interesting company even in retrospect. I oughta look up some of those people...

Speaking of death, I'd bet a good 80% of the companies listed are dead and long forgotten. The one I was with actually more than doubled it's net worth since I signed and is still going strong today. Not bad. Now that I think about it, the homepage that I pointed to still exists in a slightly modified form, here.

Needed: Six Hiphop Listeners

The Cobblers-Hiphop Group currently has nine members. Our sophisticated tastes in music are now being compiled but not yet published on Last FM. We need six more members for our group to be making a difference. You know who you are. You're serious about your musical taste and you know hiphop, for real. So please, bring our total up and reap the benefits.

Benefits? Let me just put it this way. Sharing is good.

100 Songs from 1978

It's only upon reflection at this list, picking up the meme from Professor Kim, that I realize how hard it must have been for the people who were screaming 'Disco Sucks' all those years. I didn't pay attention to the pop charts at the time. I didn't have to, I was a DJ in the 'hood. I knew all the good music that people actually danced to. I don't mean people who suddenly upped and decided to dance because of John Travolta, but people for whom dance is a fundamental part of life. If 'something about the music, got into your pants', then you know I'm talking about you.

So I look at this top 100 from MusicOutfitters and I'm thinking, how is it that the number 100 song is about 100 times better than the number 1 song? Are these people nuts? This pop culture needs a diaper change. But I've seen it before.

It's astounding how upside down America became because of Grease and Saturday Night Fever. It just ain't right. Now there's quite a few songs here that I actually liked, but the instructions say 'loved'. So here it is.

1. Shadow Dancing, Andy Gibb
2. Night Fever, Bee Gees
3. You Light Up My Life, Debby Boone
4. Stayin' Alive, Bee Gees
5. Kiss You All Over, Exile
6. How Deep Is Your Love, Bee Gees
7. Baby Come Back, Player
8. (Love Is) Thicker Than Water, Andy Gibb
9. Boogie Oogie Oogie, A Taste Of Honey
10. Three Times A Lady, Commodores
11. Grease, Frankie Valli
12. I Go Crazy, Paul Davis
13. You're The One That I Want, John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John
14. Emotion, Samantha Sang
15. Lay Down Sally, Eric Clapton
16. Miss You, Rolling Stones
17. Just The Way You Are, Billy Joel
18. With A Little Luck, Wings
19. If I Can't Have You, Yvonne Elliman
20. Dance, Dance, Dance (Yowsah, Yowsah, Yowsah), Chic
21. Feels So Good, Chuck Mangione
22. Hot Child In The City, Nick Gilder
23. Love Is Like Oxygen, Sweet
24. It's A Heartache, Bonnie Tyler
25. We Are The Champions / We Will Rock You, Queen

26. Baker Street, Gerry Rafferty
27. Can't Smile Without You, Barry Manilow
28. Too Much, Too Little, Too Late, Johnny Mathis and Deniece Williams
29. Dance With Me, Peter Brown
30. Two Out Of Three Ain't Bad, Meat Loaf
31. Jack And Jill, Raydio
32. Take A Chance On Me, Abba
33. Sometimes When We Touch, Dan Hill
34. Last Dance, Donna Summer
35. Hopelessly Devoted To You, Olivia Newton-John
36. Hot Blooded, Foreigner
37. You're In My Heart, Rod Stewart
38. The Closer I Get To You, Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway
39. Dust In The Wind, Kansas
40. Magnet And Steel, Walter Egan
41. Short People, Randy Newman
42. Use Ta Be My Girl, O'Jays
43. Our Love, Natalie Cole
44. Love Will Find A Way, Pablo Cruise
45. An Everlasting Love, Andy Gibb
46. Love Is In The Air, John Paul Young
47. Goodbye Girl, David Gates
48. Slip Slidin' Away, Paul Simon
49. The Groove Line, Heatwave
50. Thunder Island, Jay Ferguson
51. Imaginary Lover, Atlanta Rhythm Section
52. Still The Same, Bob Seger and The Silver Bullet Band
53. My Angel Baby, Toby Beau
54. Disco Inferno, Trammps
55. On Broadway, George Benson
56. Come Sail Away, Styx
57. Back In Love Again, L.T.D.
58. This Time I'm In It For Love, Player
59. You Belong To Me, Carly Simon
60. Here You Come Again, Dolly Parton
61. Blue Bayou, Linda Ronstadt
62. Peg, Steely Dan
63. You Needed Me, Anne Murray
64. Shame, Evelyn "Champagne" King
65. Reminiscing, Little River Band
66. Count On Me, Jefferson Starship
67. Baby Hold On, Eddie Money
68. Hey Deanie, Shaun Cassidy
69. Summer Nights, John Travolta and Olivia Newton-john
70. What's Your Name, Lynyrd Skynyrd
71. Don't It Make My Brown Eyes Blue, Crystal Gayle
72. Because The Night, Patti Smith
73. Every Kinda People, Robert Palmer
74. Copacabana, Barry Manilow
75. Always And Forever, Heatwave
76. You And I, Rick James
77. Serpentine Fire, Earth, Wind and Fire
78. Sentimental Lady, Bob Welch
79. Falling, LeBlanc and Carr
80. Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood, Santa Esmeralda
81. Bluer Than Blue, Michael Johnson
82. Running On Empty, Jackson Browne
83. Whenever I Call You "Friend", Kenny Loggins
84. Fool (If You Think It's Over), Chris Rea
85. Get Off, Foxy
86. Sweet Talking Woman, Electric Light Orchestra
87. Life's Been Good, Joe Walsh
88. I Love The Night Life, Alicia Bridges
89. You Can't Turn Me Off (In The Middle Of Turning Me On), High Inergy
90. It's So Easy, Linda Ronstadt
91. Native New Yorker, Odyssey
92. Flashlight, Parliament
93. Don't Look Back, Boston
94. Turn To Stone, Electric Light Orchestra
95. I Can't Stand The Rain, Eruption
96. Ebony Eyes, Bob Welch
97. The Name Of The Game, Abba
98. We're All Alone, Rita Coolidge
99. Hollywood Nights, Bob Seger and The Silver Bullet Band
100. Deacon Blues, Steely Dan

A Day in the Sun

A long time ago when I used to use Nix Check Cashing and drive a 1971 Ford Galaxy Custom (aka the FBIMobile), I recall drving north on Crenshaw Blvd. As I pulled up to the stoplight at Slauson at the foot of the hill they are now calling View Heights 90043, I peered over to the left. In the left turn lane, heading up that hill was a young woman in a brand spanking new Volvo. It had to be a Sunday because her hair was flawless, and she had two young children in the back seat who were immaculately dressed. It was one of those moments that shook my single life mentality to the core. I stared for what seemed like an eternity. I want that. I want that. I want that.

I got that, sorta.

This weekend, the wife went to get her do did off in Pasadena, so I had the kids all Saturday. We knocked around the house all morning, playing some videogames, watching some TV, then it was off to my buddy in PV. We hung out in the park just behind his house with his two tiny young daughters and enormous old dogs. They're like a cross between Weimeraner and Great Dane, the dogs, not the daughters. The kids had a ball with some pirated bottle of silly string and absolutely destroyed dog chew balls and we talked about nothing for a fun change. I don't know where I put the digital camera but somewhere on the chip are pictures of the most precious and precocious 17 month old I've ever met. Soon it was time for the SC game.

We caught the first half on the HiDef and swilled Snapples while USC snapped the heads of the Bruins. At halftime it was time to jet. We piled into The Transporter and flew down the coast to Rosa in Hermosa for shrimp tacos. As we munched, UCLA continued to get crunched. The dudes catty corner from our table were wearing the new broad style of sunglasses that mask the side of the face, and were polite enough to chill on the profanity. But there was no denying that UCLA was getting the shit beat out of them.

Next we headed out to Santa Monica. My son sitting in the front seat twiddled the GPS and my daughters snacked on Nerds in the back. Somewhere heading West on the 10 and rolling off at the Lincoln exit, I suddenly thought that people were watching me in the same way I was watching that woman. It happens to me more often when I roll up to school and drop off the kiddies. When it first lauched, I got the full tilt Turbo Beetle. People used to ask me how it handled and did it have a lot of room, when I would fill up for gas. At the gates of Arroyo Vista Elementary School, little kids would punch each other in the shoulders when I drove up. It's an LA thing. You know the effect you have socially on other people when you're driving the slammin ride. Soon I found myself in a neighborhood where I haven't had an opportunity to drive a sweet hooptie since... ever.

Sometimes it's difficult for me to make sense of progress. There are about 3 new luxury hotels at the Santa Monica Pier that simply didn't exist back in the day. The big building used to be the West Coast HQ for Narconon or Alanon or some such drug rehab palace. Now they've got doormen and valets scrambling around the joint. I pulled past into a lot which rather complex parking instructions and no attendant. Instead there was this computer thing. I ignored it, parked the hooptie and the kids sped off to the jungle gyms in the sand. When I finally caught up to them they were climbing ropes. I don't seem to call the ropes or the nice spongy mats for tumbling when I was a kid. Harumph. Back in my teenaged youth, I used to come right down to that little spot of grass in front of the main lifeguard station and do tumbling runs for the locals and tourists. Today I completely forgot how to lock my feet on the rope and only got up about six feet.

We headed over to the pier where there is a rather impressive construction project afoot. With a checkerboard stack of shipping containers, a museum is being architected. Meanwhile, although the tide is low, the pier was in full glory.We went out to the edge as the sun had just left its orange glow in a strip along the horizon and Venus shimmered. The kids screwed up enough courage to ride The Dragon and screamed through the whole pendulous zero gravity experience. After a few raucous games of air hockey, we were ready to hit the road again.

This time we headed to my old neighborhood. Progress again. It looks as if it has turned the corner and people are investing in the houses. The guy that lives in my old house is an actor on The Sheild and he's adding a second storey. Old Mrs Stanley can't get over how fat I've become. The kids couldn't stop giggling. But now it was time to eat. After a trip to Denny's (kids eat free on Satuday, but you still pay for the drinks) and some classical music, they were knocked out and in a deeper sleep than the UCLA Bruins. The weather had turned cold and windy but we were warm and cozy in The Transporter. I sped down the coast highway watching the bonfires at Dockweiler slowly roll by. It had been a full day, and I felt like a great dad.

It's days like Saturday that I hope continue to live in memory. I am thankful for the ease with which it was accomplished and the opportunity for simple pleasures. I thank God for the blessing of children and the complex ugly beauty that is LA County. Our town.

Wayback Machine

I just met somebody on the blog that I went to elementary school with. Gerald Brown is another brother who stops by here every once in a while. He too grew up in my old neighborhood and incidently has no use or tolerance for Crips. But this coincidence has released a flood of memories of my old stomping grounds, well actually I had little feet, but I stomped nonetheless. In fact, we had stomps on the playground at Virginia Road. And we played suicide and open chest and bb-britches and all kinds of Tom Sawyeresque games.

One of the biggest pastimes for a while, especially after the Symar earthquake in 71 that destroyed the cafeteria, was to stomp on the little packets of French dressing we got with our sack lunches.

I still remember all of my teachers. In Kindergarten I had Miss Hallenan, then for first grade I had Mrs Kissick and Mrs Pleasant. In the second grade I had Mrs Pollack, the wonderful Jewish lady who said I shouldn't rub my nose side to side but pinch it so it wouldn't get flat like a..oops! Why I remember that I don't know. She was cool. Not like Mrs Hoskins that everyone hated. Her nickname was 'Bullface' because she had huge jowls. In the third grade I had evil Mrs Byers. She got fired after I left the third grade. She used to deny kids the chance to go to the bathroom during class, made us pee ourselves. She said our parents were ignorant for not sending us to school with our own pencils. In the fourth grade I had Mrs White, who was black but could pass for white. She was incredibly strict, but never unfair. In the fifth and sixth grade, I was in Miss Milliken's class. She was without question, one of the best teachers I ever had, and was the first one who told me without question that I should go to college. USC, specifically. She was the kind of teacher who would make bets with us that we couldn't do something she knew we could do. She paid us money to find mistakes in the textbooks and rewarded us with a Big Mac if we finished a color group in the SRA reading lab.

There were a bunch of kids I remember from school. Doreen Horn, Pheobe with the big mouth, Diana White with whom I had an almost fight. The kings of the school, Ebon, Daniel, Mark Vincent, Mark 'Baby' Bavis. A kid named Danny Henderson whose ass I kicked and later really felt sorry for. Shermalyn Thompson, my first girlfriend. Pamela Pratt. Nudie, Suitcase, all of the Arnold Kids, Verdis, Derrell, Teresa, Rabo, KK. Jerry who lived right across the street from school. August Lewis and his foine sisters. Tracy the kid who made Eagle Scout. Mario Nesbit and his little badass brother Marlon. There was Chuckie McDermott and the kid who stole my bicycle whose name is blocked in memory. There was Freddie, the Japanese kid who didn't play football, and all the kids my younger brothers and sister knew. There was Margaret Chung and all the adopted kids, plus her blood sister Vivian. Mark Levi, Deet's best friend. There was Cherry Lewis the smart girl whose face got burned in a fire and her big brother. There was stupid Marcella and her even stupider brother Richard. Their father married a white woman who never came out of the house. She was so stupid that when Richard got a 8th percentile on the SAT, she thought he was in the top 90%. There was Lonzo, Frankie the pimp, the low life Chambers family. There was Caroline and the Turners, all them redhead frecklefaced blackfolks. There was nasty Anita and her sister. There was London and his brother whose dad worked at Mattel. There was Kevin 'Winky' Brooks who was my best friend who moved away. Kevin had a tall skinny sister and a big curly headed brother. His dad drove really fast. Then Tracy Caldwell who became my new best friend then he moved away to over near Sportsman's Park and then to Ohio.

Our principal was Edna Cohen. She was also president of the Links of West Adams. She was a black woman who could pass. Her portrait hung on the wall at the Wilfandel Club up in Arlington Heights. She was part of the reason my parents chose our neighborhood which was full of every kind of fruit tree that grows in Los Angeles including the plum tree next door. Oh. I forgot Roosevelt Ivory whose grandmother grew the sweetest peaches on the planet. We called Rosy 'Tank'. He ended up coaching football in Hawaii and then at Santa Monica College. I could tell his parents thought we were all little rowdies. We were. But Tank was a real freind.

Charles Rixter was the neighborhood Crip. He got Wanda pregnant when she was 16. I have to think, in retrospect that Pops was afraid of Rixter or that at least it came to a threat of violence that Pops was unwilling to face. We know he broke in our house once. But he wasn't around long enough to cause too much trouble. So off to jail he went. We were a neighborhood of sports roughnecks as well as dirtbike mechanics and skirt chasers. Me Tracy and Verdis thought about forming a gang - the Travermike. But when Tracy moved away that collapsed. While he remained we had our secret handshake and basically ran things around the neighborhood. But that was before Mr. Arnold died and Rixter came around. The Arnold's 8 kids came apart and poor Mrs. Arnold was overwhelmed. Verdis, who was a brilliant mechanic and always QB of our football teams, oldest boy of the Arnolds collapsed under the strain. He got caught up in the stolen cars game as far as I recall.

The neighborhood maintained until Verdis and I and all our cohort left for college or the military. 80-82, Crips, crack, guns, boom. The place was never the same. The very thought that there would be a murder on our street was unthinkable back in the 70s. A fight? Hell, every week. A knife fight? Only if maybe some Mexicans brought them. But a gun? Never. We knew old JC, Mr. Arnold's brother had a shotgun. But he was an old cuss from Texas set in his hunting dog ways and regularly brought rabbits for Mrs. Arnold to cook up with her homegrown mustard greens. You could have thought of Kool Moe Dee's Wild Wild West as our theme song, except that nobody ever brought static. Nobody except the cops, who made us give up our homemade nunchucks and gave us tickets for riding our minibikes.

We were skinny tough kids in sweatpants, Chucks and t-shirts with sweatbands and ankleweights, heading over to Dorsey or Vineyard for pickup ball. Football, Basketball, BMX, Skateboard, Swimming & Gymnastics. That was us. Pickens made it to the Buffalo Bills, Nudie became a BBall coach in the Valley. My late brother Scoobie played semipro football and he and Doc both played in the Inglewood Basketball League. Donald and Cragie Shane could do nohand wheelies all day long. Donald and I build a tandem dirtbike and rode it up and down Crenshaw to applause. Everybody could swim. My brother Deet and I both had full twisting back summersaults and ruled flipflop grass from Centinela to Sportsman's Park to Dorsey Pool.

I used to think of us all as kids in the form of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. We grew up on the Three Stooges, Little Rascals and Speed Racer. We ate Cheerios for Go Go Go Power and we busted the Presidents Physical Fitness test ready to kick Russia's ass if it came to it. We always watched the Indy 500 and cheered the Miami Dolphins through their perfect season. We smoked weed out of the shoebox and got our hair braided sitting on the front porch in the late summer evenings. We wore fat leather wristbands for our Timex watches and puka shells around our necks. We slow-danced to 'Wildflower' and pretended to be Jim Kelly in Enter The Dragon. We snuck into the Baldwin Theatre to see Chinese Connection five times and stole the flashing yellow lights of the construction sawhorses and put them in our bedrooms. We ogled Angela Davis' blacklight poster and made lamps in electic shop out of 7up cans. We drew afros on all the athletes on PeeChee folders and thought Muhammad Ali was the greatest who ever lived. We watched all the moonshots, listened to 1580 KDAY and rolled six deep to KACE concerts in the park. We had chinaberry fights, played doctor in the garage and mowed the lawn with pushmowers.

We put money under Free Parking and never paid the interest to get properties out of hock. If you landed on Go, you got $400. We slammed bones, ran Bostons and played Tonk for quarters. We ate Bomb pops and played 'intendo. We got grease and gasoline from the junkyard up the street, took apart the guts of our kickback threespeeds and put them back together with chickenwire when we lost the bolt for the brake brace. We traded Wacky Packages and peace patches for our notebooks and jean jackets. We read Mad Magazine, ate Chickosticks and spit poly seeds at each other. We popped M80s and did street luge down Arlington Doubles. We rode bikes up to the broken Baldwin Reservoir and hiked into the bowl.

Somewhere along the way to adulthood we learned lessons that seem to defy all the poltical correctness of today's America. We were all about living as large as possible, our way, with no shame and no hesitation. We didn't know a whole lot about the world except that it better be ready for us, because we ain't backing down. People tell me 'we didn't know we were poor' and we didn't walk around making excuses about being oppressed. We sung the black national anthem and we prepared to look the white man in the eye. I don't think we realized how strong we were. I don't think the world realized either.

Black youth in the 70s - that's my generation. There will never be another quite like it.

From My Family to Yours

May God find you safe and in good health. Peace.

Sisters & Daughters

Is there any question that I have a great deal to be thankful for?

Under A Bushel

Well it turns out that I wasn't so unpopular after all.

Suddenly my blogging has had one of those Claritin moments. What I thought I saw, had only been vaguely perceived. Whereas I thought that I was very influential but surprisingly unpopular, it turns out that I'm way more popular than I thought. About five or six times. Thanks to a cat names James Joyner, I have discovered that I really should be putting some hit counting code in more than one place on the blog. Ya think? Now I can actually count those hits that go anywhere else but the front page. It really does make sense.

I'll have to wait a few weeks to get a solid idea of what kind of traffic I actually get, but I basically doubled what I thought my avarage daily traffic was before lunch today. So even though this is something of a holiday, it's clear that I do more than 1000 hits a day. It's a sigh of relief, I guess. Now I have to seriously think about what opportunities I've been passing up because I thought my duckling was more arcane and ugly than it actually is. Namely PJ Media. (sigh) Mo' hits, mo' problems.

But it's a good problem to have.

The Return to Saint John's

This has been an emotional month for me, and I think I've finally had the incident that's going to kill Cobb and bear Lucifer Jones. Perhaps it will find fulfillment next month as I volunteer for the Adams Harbor.

Adams Harbor will take place at St. John's Episcopal Church on December 17. There will be about 1000 children who will show up, poor and hungry looking for Santa Claus. I'll be there. At the Peace on Sunday, I went up to shake Larry's hand and he embraced me instead. I asked him how he was doing and he said he was feeling lousy because a crack addict he was expecting didn't show up for the 10 o'clock service. It hit me all at once, thinking about Ted Hayes and people on the ground, and during the announcement when Larry said we were 10 people short for the Adams Harbor, I knew I had to be there.

Not only that, I'm inviting you.

I'm going to bring a bunch of people to the Adams Harbor and I'm going to return on a more regular basis to St. John's. It has really crashed and burned as a parish. The scandalous failure of Lynn Collins has wrecked the place and I cannot allow that to continue. . Why? Because, of every church I have ever attended, St. John's goes the deepest with me. There's a lot of ways to explain that but it doesn't really require an explanation. When I returned to my pew near the front on the left where I always sit, I just had a 'Bad Lieutenant' moment. I broke down and cried like I haven't in years. It was not about anything in particular, it's just that at that moment on my knees in the house of God, I felt that I could. It just occured to me that there is no other place where I am capable of having such humility set upon me. And so I weeped for 15 minutes, coughing and snotting and snuffling like a boy who has seen his dog run over in the street.

I was confirmed into the Episcopalian faith at this parish when I was 16 years old by an archbishop. That's almost 30 years of history for me. I can still remember giggling with my best friend Richard in the Gospel Choir where I was a reluctant alto hoping my voice would break so I could sing tenor. I can remember the processions on Palm Sunday that began down the street on Adams Boulevard. I can remember counting money with the Vestry and making the deposits at Bank of America. I remember winning a 7up popcorn popper at the disco dance contest. I remember the youth group, 'The Images of the Future' with Gwen and Valerie and Kevin and Bea and all the others. Kevin still comes; he lives in Cerritos now. I have to take him to lunch. I have to hug these people.

Most of all I have to engage the my destiny as the KFSC. I said that if I had all the money in my imagination, I would become the Kung Fu Santa Claus. I need to balance the ass-kicking and start distributing largess. I'll start there and then.

I of the Norm

While Googling Danziger I found his Normblog interview and I realized that I'm probably not fulfilling my chatting class obligations. Nothing so reminds me of this as when I find myself in the company of charming couples who don't actually bleat on about their equity. So there are a dozen questions that nobody actually gets to ask me and so I presume that nobody knows that I care. Well, about the poetry they're probably right. I realize that I am not humble enough to wait my turn to be recognized, so I do my own Normblog interview. Sorry Norm.

Why do you blog? > I'm unable to overcome my compulsion for writing and I actually believe that I can attract Socratic dialog. Plus somebody told me that I can actually turn a phrase.

What has been your best blogging experience? > Periodically, I am able to make sense of two or three previous posts and weave them together in such a way as to confirm my own speculations in light of what has transpired. I think I'm typical in that I really enjoy when I get good comments and somebody sets me straight in a way I can understand and respect.

What would be your main blogging advice to a novice blogger? > Talk about what you see, then look for something else to see.

What are your favourite blogs? > Avery Tooley, American Digest, Dan Drezner

Who are your intellectual heroes? > Freeman Dyson, John Boyd, Borges

What are you reading at the moment? > 'Overworld' by Larry Kolb & 'Bonfire of the Humanities', by Hanson et al.

Who are your cultural heroes? > Denzel Washington, Brian Lamb, Wynton Marsalis & Desmond Tutu

What is the best novel you've ever read? > That's a tough one. After some consideration I'd say 'Cryptonomicon' not because of the writing, but because of the way it engrossed me. It's the largest book I simply could not put down, although I could say the same thing about 'Underworld' by DeLillo or Russell Banks' 'Cloudsplitter'.

What is your favourite poem? > My vocabulary in poetry is very slim. I'd have to say there is very little outside of 'Father William' from Alice in Wonderland that I can even recall.

What is your favourite movie? > My kneejerk reaction is Kurosawa's 'Ran' and it has been for years, but I think Julie Tamor's 'Titus' takes the cake. It's very nearly a perfect movie in every way.

What is your favourite song? > This is impossible. I'm going to say there's a three way tossup between Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, John McLaughlin's version of 'Django' and SRV's 'Little Wing'.

Can you name a major moral, political or intellectual issue on which you've ever changed your mind? > Lots. I don't know what that makes me, other than scientific perhaps. But I think the major issue upon which I've changed is the sanctity and centrality of the middle-class, which is to say that I embrace it whereas I had always rejected it.

What philosophical thesis do you think it most important to disseminate? > Perfect is the enemy of good.

What philosophical thesis do you think it most important to combat? > Eclecticism and empowerment of the alternative.

Can you name a work of non-fiction which has had a major and lasting influence on how you think about the world? > 'The Mind's I' edited by Douglas R. Hofstadter pretty much launched my own intellect in my profession. It gave me a way to think about thinking and consciousness that informs the theoretical boundaries of computing and what created intelligences are capable of imparting to us. It's literally about the thinkable.

Who are your political heroes? > I don't generally think of politics as heroic, or rather I should say that I am not particularly attuned to heroic sacrifices within politics because it seems to be little more than the persistence of simple morality against subtly powerful corruption. However given what I know of Churchill's struggles I'd have to give him the nod. I'd also say that Stephen Biko is also extraordinarily laudable as is Medgar Evers.

If you could effect one major policy change in the governing of your country, what would it be? > Mandate some kind of citizen service more demanding and informative than jury duty - something that illustrates the centrality of the Constitution. Perhaps caring for the victims of extra-constitutional abuse.

What would you do with the UN? > Narrow its charter to nation building, period. Make the UN the transitional authority for the systematic dispossesion of despots. Pick a Least Favored Nation, assemble armies, and go. Make it like the Olympics on an 8 year basis.

What do you consider to be the main threat to the future peace and security of the world? > The opacity of the several classes above 'American Rich'. The good and bad that they do in the world is too much driven by personalities. The world needs a global middle-class.

Do you think the world (human civilization) has already passed its best point, or is that yet to come? > There are much brighter days ahead.

What do you consider the most important personal quality? > Integrity.

Do you have any prejudices you're willing to acknowledge? > I don't like dainty people. I am particularly perturbed by spoiled dainty people. Spoiled dainty people who complain are begging for a knuckle sandwich. There is nothing so annoying to me as a Mercedes-Benz parked in the handicapped zone.

What commonly enjoyed activities do you regard as a waste of time? > Gossip.

Where would you most like to live (other than where you do)? > This may sound strange, but I've always fantasized about having a castle / underground complex built on top of one of the great mesas in the American Southwest.

What would your ideal holiday be? > Horseback trek across a continent.

What is your most treasured possession? > An old Seiko diver's watch.

What would be your ideal choice of alternative profession or job? > Nothing would please me better than to be able to play jazz piano or roadhouse blues guitar.

How, if at all, would you change your life were you suddenly to win or inherit an enormously large sum of money? > I'd become the kung-fu Santa Claus, wandering the earth alternatively kicking ass and bestowing largess.

If you could have any three guests, past or present, to dinner who would they be? > Winston Churchill, Thomas Jefferson and Richard Feynman.

What animal would you most like to be? > A hunting dog with a proper master. It means I would completely understand my purpose, I would remain close to both the best of humanity and of the wild. I could meet the demands the instincts I was bred for and think I was the luckiest creature in all creation. I'd dream of chasing rabbits all during the week, and actually chase them on the weekends.

Eating Nemo

The third thing that you notice about Marc Danziger is that he's older than he looks and he has probably heard that amusing anecdote you're about to tell before. The second thing you notice is that he's totally unphony and genuinely interested in holding court, and he's good at it.

Last night, court was held at Ocean Seafood, downtown in Chinatown. We expected a couple dozen but became about 10 gradually thinking we might only be five. Among the courtesans as the Moscone-Schmitz Roundtable were Flap and his better half, Dave who remained rather reserved through the evening, Pamela the Kerry Goddess, Rand of Interplanetary Musings, Juliette, my brother Doc, Marc and myself. The guy whose name I forgot set me straight on some Long Tail implications, but he was on my bad ear side and some of his wisdom was garbled in translation.

There was nothing that quite got us rollicking but it was a pleasant kind of disjointedness to the whole affair. I was in desparate need of the distraction since spent all of yesterday on a conference call from hell. And I'm sure I've repeated that enough times so that it's all anyone will remember besides my 'Republican-mobile'. BTW, I wasn't the one who said that it's the door-prize for the black republican club, that was some snarky trackbacker.

The food went from pretty damned good to excellent. My pick was the pan-fried oysters in black bean sauce. The squid in ginger and garlic was the bomb, and Nemo was delicate and crispy at the same time. In the old tradition of Chinese seafood restaurants, our host picked out a fish which was brought to our table in a ziplock bag and displayed proudly. It flopped a bit gasped for breath a couple times while the waiter held it high. Marc stared it down, eyeball to eyeball and proclaimed that it should be sacrificed for our benefit. It came back deeply tanned from the fryer. I didn't get any of the cheeks, and they left most of the head off, but there was some sweet meat near the gills.

As the lazy susan spun our jasmine tea and delicacies, and my head spun a bit after a couple Jim Beams, we loosened up and discussed a million things from strange combinations of food in exotic locales to politics and blogging. (Ya think?). I'm surprised to find that the Dems in our presence tend to believe that Hillary might actually do something. Considering that the Left is out of ideas and really just need somebody popular, she might do. Flap says some guy named Allen might be Giuliani's Veep to satiate the insatiable Christian Right. We mumbled about other causes and effects of Bush Derangement Syndrome, and Pamela reminded us poignantly that the myth of the nuclear family is a myth - so who gets the tax cuts? We mused about the electability of Angelites, who has all of the charisma of Nemo there and the inimitable weiniehood of Grey Davis. Notably Marc reminded us that indeed the Democrats have been spoiled by success and their ability to fight Vietnam over and over again is one note that is beginning to sour all of us. Amen to that.

Danziger is a walking encyclopedia of Cali politics. He's a good guy to have around because he's been around. It turns out that his wife and I have a mutual acquaintance in a Superior Court judge, and that we probably see eye to eye on some matters of technical management. One of these days I'm going to find out if they can cook. In the meantime I'll be trying to read more blogs. I know, I keep promising.

We broke up around 11, and lagged around until they threw us out. All promised to return. I'm in.

Things I Learned Today

Today, I learned that there is a Java packing utility in the JDK called jar. And I can use jar to create jar files - it has pretty much the same syntax as tar. If you use tar, or zip, you'll never get your application running. Why they created this weird standard is beyond me. Doesn't anyone trust zip?

2.
I also learned that the new version of Websphere is very nice and the interface has all of the bugs worked out that I remember from 2003.

3.
Never underestimate the power of habit embedded in bureacracy. When the problem is glaring, and the solution is obvious, but there's a very good bureacratic reason, people will pay for consultants to stay in Seattle an extra day. I'll never go broke being a consultant.

4.
Sears kicks ass. Two Arrow sweaters for 50 bucks. I was going to go to Target but I said what the hey. I recall that Mr. Lewis was taking over the joint, so why drive all the way of to Redmond when there's a Sears right here in Bellevue? It turns out that I'm digging the new Craftsman fashion work duds. In the home of grunge, I could see this happening. Or not. The point is that there's serious competition to Target, and I'm down with that.

5.
Prime rib at Stuart Andersons is pretty damned good, but much better after two doubles of Jim Beam.

6.
My boy lost his flute. I'm going to strangle him.

7.
'Family Guy' is pretty damned funny.

8.
Axe body spray has the coolest commercials on TV, next to Scion.

9.
Politics is not as rewarding as reading spy novels. Soon come, a review of 'Overworld'.

The Transporter

I deserve a break today. So I went out and bought the car from one of my favorite action flicks. This is my fourth BMW. I decided against the sportier 540, which was actually less. It had flashier rims and the tiptronic transmission, but I don't need a chick magnet at my age. This 740il is plenty roomy in the back for the little Bowens, and the stereo is adequate. Now I have to figure out the GPS and all the other knobs...

Crossing the Rubicon

I've been too blackified these past two weeks, and now I'm getting ill. The reason is because of my immersion in a shark tank of crude black liberals and wannabe progressives of dubious distinction. My fault for wandering into the cave with my conservative flashlight, like some suburban teen in a horror flick. I'm accustomed to getting dents in the dome, but I'm afraid my old age has given me too much self-respect and now I ain't havin' it.

Yet it is with some bit of surprise that I found myself writing the following bit:

let me suggest that the black man's ability to survive in America depends upon his ability to manage his affairs with dignity in the face of racial prejudice and bigotry. This facility either exists or it doesn't. Joining one party or another has no bearing on the skill. If one develops the skill in earnest, then his facility, like any other, grows sharper with use. I am coming to the point at which my own skill is more exercised by black attacks on my person simply for having joined and defended the Republicans, than by Republicans of any stripe. And it is this facility that is making me weary of you feeble attempts to paint our political ambitions in terms of some subservience to 'the white racist enemy within'.

It is with that that I have crossed the Rubicon and joined the ranks of overexposed black conservatives who speak spitefully of their alienation. It is a condition not to be envied, but edifying nonetheless. Although its liberating qualities have yet to give me peace, I anticipate this soon. Nevertheless, I intend on remaining chilled out. I know who raised me and what I'm supposed to be - I got too much family to heed those threats.

This is very much reminding me of my days of wearing the backwards baseball cap with my email address on it, back in 1993 - before the theory of the Digital Divide was invented. Liberal black professors didn't even realize the sinecure possible pimpin' that angle. So when I recognized their antipathy, I just had to come out and say the Internet was for me and people like me, the rest of yall can take the bus and thus gave up a possibly lucrative gig building websites for black American institutions.

So when the first search engines were finding my stuff on Toni Morrison before Toni Morrison's own stuff (and the SPLC and god know who else), I was off in another direction. Saying I told you so doesn't make me feel good now, I told you so over a decade ago.

And so it is today with the Republican party. I'm doing what I do because that's how I do. Haters are part of the game.

So the identity politics of some black progressives have it in their interests to assert that the normative whiteness of America is not only a fertile breeding ground for white supremacist politics, but that it is a fait accomplit, and that the Republican Party is the party of white hegemonic domination over blackfolks. This thinking is so deeply ingrained that a measured evaluation of the actual policies of the GOP is not even considered reasonable. But most importantly, black conservatives are singularly unqualified to provide that evaluation. Why, because by any number of definitions, we are unsuited to the task of racial meliorization. Speaking for myself, I'm not in it for the sake of 'brokerage politics'. I'm in it because it makes sense to me.

What the black progressives want is a capitulation by whitefolks in the GOP. They want nothing less than a host of apologies and initiatives that will wash America clean of its racist past. The very idea that blacks have to DEAL, is not part of the program. That's why black conservatives (all us Toms) get no play. Because we presumeably don't need the anti-racist mojo of the Left. And to a certain extent it's true - at least I wouldn't mind claiming this to be true of myself. I'm where Ralph Ellison was. Nobody can make me feel less of a man because of my black skin. Nobody. So I walk without fear of inferiority anywhere. Lily white doesn't bend my psyche. So I don't need apologies, nor do I need the apology extraction industry. I don't need white America to be any better than it is for me to succeed.

But I have not lost my facility to be anti-racist. I'm the one who was taking that message to predominantly white areas while others were fertilizing yet unhatched schemes in their pitch-black caves. So it shouldn't come to me as a surprise that I see through their provincial racial prejudices. That doesn't change the fact that it comes as a disappointment. And while I realize that this was the work of a half-dozen or so within an online community of a hundred or so, it's the way I learned this lesson.

As for the rest of black America - those who don't see it my way, what is their fate? I don't know. I don't second-guess blackfolks. It might be appropriate for me to say that I don't care, because I have concluded that African American destiny is bound to America's fate. To the extent that 'black' is not an organization capable of going in another direction, there is nothing to care about. There is no program with which to disagree. There are just self-identified black folks of various political stripes exercising their rights, and sometimes wearing on my nerves. But that's all good because I don't need black America to be any better than it is for me to succeed.

At other such junctures, I would say that it would be about time to write a new version of my "End of My Blackness" essay. Except that my own blackness never ends, it just fails to resonate with whatever prejudicial assessments of blackness predominate at the moment. This is no longer painful. All I need to do to endlessly confound and confuse my critics is to gather them in a room and issue the following two words: Define Black.

I can feel the peacefulness start to creep into my system

A Black Day

The kids are home from school. I'm on the beach. I have some expense reports to complete but otherwise I am free to indulge the braincells. So here's what I've decided to do.

I'm going to have a Fishbone marathon on the iTunes and read something from every black blog on the Negrophile blogroll. I am therefore going to create, my own instant Carnival of the Darkside.

For some reason, I have a creeping sense of claustrophobia in the black blog world. I tried to get a million people to pay attention to the fact that John Conyers was online, and nobody cared. Or so it seems. OK so let me plumb the depths and see what I come up with. In the italics will be the Fishbone song which may or may not have anything to do with the blog excerpt of the minute.

Subliminal Fascism
(damn that was quick)

Bonin' in the Boneyard
When was the president really going to fire Karl Rove, asks Blackprof.

Jai has got some kickin' gear. Portable DAT. Me like.

Mighty Long Way
Allison bemoans life in NYC. But at least there's De La Soul and Lauryn Hill.

I'm not sure what to make of Faye Anderson. Is she turning into another bitter and ineffective clone of Julianne Malveaux? This week she's full of piss and vinegar. Nobody meets with her satisfaction. She just cries out for outrage. Yeah well I have those weeks too.

Change
Shana cracks me up with her parody of Kirk Franklin. I've had those weeks as well.

Hey Ma & Pa
Now I know what the baldheaded dude was all about when I cruised through Oprah yesterday. Thanks Rod.

Pouring Rain
The Brotha Code is dead. Don't bother.

Chippla is all over the world. Too deep for me.

Dell Gines wrestles with a moniker. I hope he keeps conservative, for a number of reasons that I won't go into. I like his stuff a lot.

Ghetto Soundwave
There's a huge group blog Global Voices which ain't black but brown. What to make of it? Too much to tell. Just know it's there.

Dare Obasanjo hipped me to upcoming.com. Cool stuff

Love & Hate
Mz Powderpink is partying with Brey-Brey and also putting hilarious words in GWB's mouth. Damn. My eyes hurt after reading that blog.

Cool photos at Bluemoaner.

Servitude
The Humanity Critic tracks the faded careers of Da Brat, Saigon and Royce da 5'9.

Somethings just defy my sense of the real. One of those things is that it might be actually possible to write down a recipe for gumbo. I'm looking at it, but I just don't believe it.

OK it doesn't matter what Honeysoul has to say, just check out the mugs on the sidebar. Damn, where was the blogosphere when I was single?

Nuttmegg
Obsidian Bear explains 'hasbiens'.

Planet Grenada is in the same place as I am. Time to review what the blogosphere is.

Wait a minute... I just realized how huge the Negrophile blogroll is. I'm never going to finish this. I guess that's going to have to suffice for the moment. Maybe I'll update some more later today. My head is starting to swim...

2 Cops, 1 Night, Alright

My loyal opposition reminded me today that he has had something on the order of 21 DWBs in the 'burbs. I had one tonight, or did I?

My brother Doc, the LAPD cop, came to pick me up at 8:30 this evening. I was just indoctrinating my daughter with the Western scientific method and helping her understand which way the wind would blow on a hot day at the beach. Once she figured it out, Doc and I headed downtown to pick up the Batteram.

Pops old Dodge Ramcharger has been in the family since I don't know how long. Now it's time to cycle to me, since we are now in the unenviable position of being a one-car suburban family. How do we face the Joneses? At any rate, it hadn't been started in about three weeks so we had to jump it. The location? Top level of the police garage downtown LA.

As we pulled into the structure, I noticed the large SWAT truck parked under the bright lights over near the mechanics' bays. Doc swung the El Camino in and parked at an erratic angle, jumped out and went to get some jumper cables from the on-duty mechanic. I sat in the passengers seat of an obviously illegally parked car as officers of all descriptions rolled in and out of the garage. I suppose I'm more or less used to it, but it was an unusual situation.

On the way downtown, Doc complained about illegal immigrants, blackfolks in New Orleans, the black man whom he stopped for speeding in an AMG Mercedes who called 'DWB' although he had burned rubber at two successive intersections. He told Doc, 'they didn't hire you for your winning personality did they'. Doc replied, 'please sign the summons'. Doc vented some of his frustrations and gave me his theory about violence. Violence, he says, is the inevitable result of people who refuse to back down in arguments with people they can't stand. Makes sense to me. Crime, he says, is the result of individuals who have no skills to work within the economy. They simply use force instead of skills, then force becomes their skill, unless I do my job.

But what stuck with me most was his understanding of the problem of homelessness. The real problem is joblessness, says Doc. But there's an embedded bureacracy that provides homes and shelter for people who don't work. They therefore have no incentive to work. It's not a police problem, but a problem of political will. So around skid row, where he works, it manifests itself in a municiply sponsored permanent underclass. When the Olympics came to Los Angeles, there were no bums on Skid Row. We clean up for foreigners, but not for ourselves. Ourselves, we have no law enforcement against people who crap on the streets. You see, there is no city department chartered to clean human wasted from the sidewalk. It's classified as a biohazard, so it's illegal to hose it down the sewers. The Fire Department won't do it. So it sits. Nobody wants to be responsible for doing the right thing, and would-be educated people obfuscate and say there is no right thing to do.

These were some of my thoughts as the mechanic fashioned jumper cables out of an old battery charger.

We drove up to the top floor and found the Batteram on a clear fall evening. Doc pointed to the red lights on the top of his highrise apartment near Bunker Hill. But then he walked me over to one of the training areas. There were cones and a couple of squad cars in one corner of the roof of the parking structure. He showed me the basic changes in police policy since the Devin Brown shooting. What officers now do takes them more out of harm's way in a felony stop. They take different tactical positions around their vehicle and better understand the dynamics of what damage a stopped vehicle might do if the suspect decides to use it as a weapon. Cool stuff.

The Ram turned over on the third try, we moved the needle 1/8 of the way off E with $20 of regular and I dropped him off home. I then headed back to the beach amazed that it's going to cost me 90 bucks to fill up that beast, plus it needs a new battery, an oil change and the registration needs to be updated. Well, at least the truck itself was free. Can't complain.

I got used to the gears and found myself oddly comfortable in the behemoth 4WD beast, sitting up in the air grumbling down the Harbor Freeway at 55 mph. It was just about 10 something when I noticed a cop noticing me about a mile from my house. He took his time and then lit me up after sitting behind me in the left turn lane four blocks from my crib.

I spoke to the youngish officer through the windlet, the main windows don't roll down. So he asked me to open the door and turn off the engine. I told him I can't because then I couldn't get it started again. No registration, I know. No proof of insurance I know. I just got it from my brother and I'm taking it home. He said he pulled me over because my registration was over in March. I said I thought it was February, he said 'same difference'. I handed him my license and answered one or two other questions. I tried not to think about the fact that I couldn't see his partner although I knew he was there somewhere. Immediately it reminded me of something Doc said about officers' orientation at stops. We're predators, we keep things in our sights. Officers stay behind stopped drivers so they can see everything the suspect does, but the suspect cannot see the officers.

I got my license back and the officer told me not to park on the streets. I could get a ticket. "I'm not going to give you a ticket but somebody else might, even if it's not street cleaning day." That was the end of it. I drove home and parked it on the street. If I have to bump start it in the morning, I have some hill to roll down. Now I really have to go to Firestone.

As I told the spousal unit why I was late, it occured to me to write this blog entry. I realize that some people would think that this evening was utterly remarkable for a black man. I think that such people don't have a very good idea of what a black man is. But that's the country we live in.

Triangulation & Greensboro Wrapup

This week, having spent more time in close proximity and spirited debate with liberals that I have in quite some time, I have a new way of understanding our differences. The good conservative, like the good programmer, is lazy. The good liberal is tireless. Liberals appear to us to be like dogs chasing their own tails, or visionaries on a quest for the impossible, and I find myself thinking (but not saying) when do you have time to bring up your kids? But all that is beside the point. Debating current events is always great fun, and if I like you, I like you no matter how wrong and foolish you are.

I mentioned something during introduction the other day that I suppose makes me a bit more unique, and I only got to explain it at length to George Entenman. That was the fact that I run both a Progressive blog, over at Vision Circle as well as a Conservative League. My views, are more clearly conservative and I think that conservatives have more to offer, but that takes a little explaining. You see, as far as the politics of blackfolks are concerned there is a progression from that of human rights - fighting against slavery and lynching. After those battles were won, the Negro proceded to work for Civil Rights and beyond that to Black Consciousness. I say that the battle for Civil Rights is won and needs marginal defense and now that the edge of the struggle is for social power. The politics of social power are what certain classes of African Americans are engaged in, but for the overall population, the politics are in transition. My aim here is to make the differentiation between Liberalism, Progressivism and Conservatism clear such that it shows that that what is in the interest of certain blackfolks is not in the interest of all. If we are not to accept a racist reduction of the complexity of black life, then we cannot say one size of politics fits all. Too many Americans don't understand that.

My session went very well. I had about 30 people in the studio. I didn't think that many folks were going to stick around for the last sessions on the last day, but they did. It turned out that I got a chance to cover all kinds of things that were fairly well recieved. Stewart caught me in a pose I've never seen of myself which proves something uncanny about photobloggers that I hope draws more attention to their work.

It turns out, much to my surprise, that I was on. Days before the conference, I wasn't quite sure what I was going to do. It turned out that I had a couple of evenings that rival the last time I was on. And have been in that groove, make more of an impression than I thought possible. So at this time, I'd like to explain any elbows thrown, but also clarify in general how it is that I bridge the gap between black conservatism and black progressivism.

What I think it's difficult to understand about my perspective is that I am in the business of helping people make decisions. So I first find out what is important to them and then try to find all the information relevant, then apply the necessary discipline to a sound decision-making process. Finally, I give them some perspective on what others before them have discovered, especially in the process, then I turn them loose into the undiscovered country. It's not all about me being right, it's about injecting confidence into what many percieve as a shaky system - because they haven't been using the system correctly or with the experience of a veteran. It's what I do professionally, and it's what I do in my online writing. I am a facilitator of analysis. Personally, it means I'm in the business of attacking people's conclusions based on the lack of discipline I am able to percieve in their thought process and scope of data. But since it's not all about me, I attack with subtlety, 'like a splinter in your mind'. Basically, I like to accellerate people to their destinations, wherever that destination may be. So I wish all earnest people success, I just don't always want to go there with them.

Triangulation is not really what I'm all about, I'm seeking clarity and differentiation, not so much a Third Way. Still, it's a good way to approach the subject.

NC Shoutouts

Here is my carnival of shoutouts to my new friends met in Greensboro.

First I have to thank Ed Cone for inviting me to Greensboro. It's clear that he's the man, and in many ways the kind of enabler I would hope to be.

Shoutouts go to my three new families, the folks that made me feel comfortable by putting up with my big head througout the weekend. Dan & Janet from down the Peninsula way. We cracked some good jokes and had some good drinks. Janet, there was nothing wrong with your eye. Dan, it's a good thing we didn't have to close down that bar, I was getting a bit wobbly. You would have had to deal with the Army Shirt, yourself. Dave & Jinni from Aycock. I'm not going to forget your hospitality and you have definitely put Greensboro on the relocation map for me. One of these days we're going to have to have a kid's concert. In the meantime I'm going to get you postage so you can get me some pork. Also David and Lisa hanging out after dinner. Good convo - I wish we could have brought it back around to Diebold code and dogs, but I imagine that we would have sooner or later. I dig you all's passion but I was getting worn out.

Other shoutouts, to my hometown homie Cutler. To Jill and Joya, more power to you. See you after victory, which is no doubt coming soon. To Mickey, thanks for your gracious offer. It turns out that I have a 10:30 flight anyway, but I look forward to the day when we can get fairly deep into our questions. Maybe before Lucifer Jones.

To Duncan & Mathew: Conquer Mexico! It's absolutely shocking to me that you got over 500 comments. It is like a strange disturbance in the force. Anyway. Death to post-modernists, and explain why you suggest VDH is not worth reading.

Shoutouts go to Tiffany for keeping a level head during a semi-hijack. You handled it like a pro. Also thanks for the plug. Christy, sorry about the mixup and thanks for the correction. A toast to real mountains. George, thanks for stopping by, it's always good to hear from engineers. To Michael, I didn't get to follow up on your Panthers theory of literature. Some people don't know when to shutup. To Chris Nolan for injecting some much needed skepticism and some historical perspective. To Stewart for the flavor of repetitive motion and to Chris for the interview. Thanks a million - hey can I get a copy of that tape? BTW, now you know that I give better soundbites than Sharpton. tsk tsk tsk.

Shoutouts also go to Arthea, Ms. Rose and the other gracious staff at NCA&T. You guys have got it going on, and your students are unsung heroes for their tech support. To Chaka for finding my schwag and to JC for the lift.

A special recgonition and thanks goes to all of you who showed up at my session. You know I could have kept talking forever... Thanks for your questions and all the directions we went. Remember to trackback!

Also shouts to Bora, Napolitano, Roch, Shu, Lex (dinner was the bomb), and a double shout out to Dave Hoggard for the hugs and hospitality. I had a blast.

The people and community of Greensboro are lucky to have all yall, and I guess I've gotten out of here with just enough reality to keep my vision of Greensboro properly romantic. Next time we'll do the full tour. Oh yeah and who called 'Miles Ahead' Blues and Jazz? Man you can keep that folksy stuff.

Greensboro NC - Day One - Afternoon

Shu
Shu is the 'Blog Hunter'. He tells me that Drupal and CivicSpace mak a good combination for a community portal. This is his platfrom for putting together some support for the VFW.

The Ethics of Blogging
Quote of the day "Big media tells you 'Trust Me', a blogger says 'Don't trust me, here's what I think, find out for yourself.' The hilarity contained in that from the POV of an ex-New Yorker, is that 'trust me' translates in yiddish to 'fuck you'.

Nothing else from the afternoon stands out particularly. My experience of Rosen's lecture was sidetracked by the burning question in my head that was deferred until the end - although it didn't dry up like a raisin in the sun.

Greensboro NC - Day One - Morning

Two minutes, she said. Ten minutes later, I realized that she must have thought that I was driving. But I walked the distance from Downtown to NCAT where the conference got started. I was hoping to make it in time to get some sausages and orange juice. As it turned out, I found a nice lady, Ms Rose who was driving over to the conference center from the office of University Relations that I just happened by.

So I got here. But there were no sausages.

I caught the ending part of the opening session, and it became even clearer to me that this conference is definitely of some benefit to the NCAT students who comprised about a good third of the audience.

Voices from Iraq
Two young ladies spoke about their experiences with communicating with American soldiers. There wasn't a great deal of surprises in their stories. They were stationed in Baghdad inside the Green Zone and were decidedly about blogging about the lives of the soldiers. By avoiding the politics of the siutation, they tried to humanize the situation. Me, I need some hardball politics to get me interested, but there were some interesting revelations.

My quersion was bout the character of reporting and the contrast between American journalists vs foreign journalists. They said that they never left the Green Zone, and quite frankly I couldn't see either of these two young women wanting to even if they could. But that there were a good number of foreign correspondants who were going to the badlands.

After the sessions, a guy from the local Fox affiliate gave me a 5 minute interview. He had recorded some of my keystrokes for the audio track, and then asked me a few questions. Being the guy from Los Angeles helped, not to mention my photgenics. So watch Channel 8 tonight. You might see me.

Community Building
I know that I like Dave Hoggard for a number of reasons, but I can't remember the reasons. It doesn't matter because he's here, I'm here and we're happy to be here together. Tonight he's got the BBQ going, so I'll be happy to be there too. His was the first presentation in the Community Building forum. Dave is one of those people for whom 'guileless' applies nicely. His honesty is refreshing, and that's why he's the man giving the party. It turns out that there were people from all around who threw a party for his family to raise funds to help meet some cancer bills. Talking about a family member's cancer is not the easiest way to make friends, but one whiff of Dave's enthusiasm shows that he deserves it.

I think I finally understand Carnivals. I never even bothered to check it out. But now, thanks to a guy named Bora, I understand. I'm going to have to figure out how to get a few going.

It turns out that Bora is doing some interesting work to hookup people in the sciences through his connection to Tangled Bank. So the trick about Carnivals is that a different blogger will host a linkfest and rotate on a regular basis. You submit your best blogpost and that works anthropologically. Hmm.

Quote of the day "Glenn Reynolds is standing in the middle of the merry-go-round with his hands up."

I got into it a little bit about our conversation with each other that the blogosphere is enabling, very much in line with what I said in Las Vegas. Fortunately, Dave Winer piped up with the monkey wrench of the day. Unfortunately it happened at the end of the session just when time was about up, and then the room spilled over into his corner instead of to the dais. Since I have a bit to say on the matter, I'll take it up in a separate post. His question - "What difference does it make?"

A cat named Doug recorded a touch of our conversation. Winer's idea that died at the 'Altamont of blogging conferences' was about a couple of respectful disagreements as a blog. Left vs Right with respect. I could do that, and I believe that's what's going on at Begging to Differ. So while I grant Dave is not being disingenuous, I'm not sure what a public display of civility is going to do. Will people care?

Greensboro NC - Day Zero

I'm sitting ate gate C27 in Chicago belching up the last remnants of hotdog and Coke, wondering if I actually have a hotel room. It's not that Ed hasn't been organized, it's just that I don't have my normal emailed itineraries downloaded. I know the hotel is supposed to be cozy and funky, but I don't know the name of the hotel.

I'm a bit scribbleheaded but glad to be out of the ordinary grind. I won't miss that air-conditioned supercomputer center much, but at least I had fallen into a groove. Greensboro is going to be free-form, loose, give and take. I'll speak, I'll listen. It will be good. I'm into the entire improvisational mood of it already; my flight is an hour late and that's OK.

Tomorrow is the journalism part of the conference. Tonight when I get to my room, I'll sit up and blog some more and map out a strategy for my session which I think is an hour. An hour is no time at all, really. I need to come up with a distinguished soundbite and several useful anecdotes. The difficulty in the timing of all this is that I'm doing a complete review of multiculturalism in reading Hanson, Heath and Thornton. It's taking me back to my strong defense of Allan Bloom in the 80s and my original affinity for Bill Bennett. To the extent that Identity is part currency of blogging and some of the subject of my presentation, I'm going to be more provocative than persuasive. Identity and politics mix, but in the abstract they raise conflicts with classic ideas and modernism. In other words, does it matter who you are (vis a vis multiculturally privileged categories) when blogging. Yes and no. But which ways should it matter and which ways shouldn't it?

You can see this may be difficult, considering I have stopped being a black Republican and am only a Republican. There are no existential goodies left, only politics, values, principles and flux.

My seminar is entitled (something to do with branding). I am branding with my face, with my byline and through various devices. But mostly, I beleive that I am read because of the Socratic and analytic nature of my writing. Which is dead spot on with regard to Hanson et al. And yet, in fighting for and defending the Old School, I am doing a bit of identity blogging too. I am very aware of this knife edge, let's see if I get cut. Some of the branding is mechanical as well. Blogrolling, tactical trackbacking, folding in email sources, participation in surveys, blog leagueing, getting into blogstorms, and topics of the day, technorati keywording, typekey registration, RSS feeding... did I forget anything? But if you put me into a naked pyramid, I'd confess that it's all about the writing, and the fundamental relationship forced upon a conscientious person who has readers.

Tonight, I'm going to add a new entry to Cobb's Rules. "Eventually, you get the audience you deserve." Right now, it's time to get on the plane. See you in 3 hours...

Holla South

If there is anybody I know, or even vaguely know out in North Carolina, won't you give me a shout. I'll be in Greensboro starting tonight through the weekend. It's always nice to put faces and bodies and narratives in place with cyber abstractions. Send me an email or text me at 310 872 7373 (which is also my mobile). I'll be liveblogging Greensboro and taking a hatload of high quality pictures - the kind I wish I had taken in New Orleans.

After this weekend, I'll be back off the road and that means the comic will return.

I'll then begin focusing on The Conservative Brotherhood, which is going through some changes as we speak.

BTW, if any of you got the LATimes yesterday and read the story about dumping indigents on Skid Row, you probably saw a picture of Doc, my brother. It was from the rear, which was a trip because although I couldn't see his face, he was clearly recognizable to me.

Thinking about Greensboro

Finally, things are starting to wind down and I can begin to focus on my trip to Greensboro. I checked out the 'Ahead of the Curve' piece and the opening jazz and the easy pace of it got me in the mood to meet some fine folks, have some good food and enjoy some stimulating conversation. I'm thinking of a tree and a breeze and a smile on my face as I take a couple of days vacation from this crazy world I'm hooked into right now, to connect with some other human beings on a level not directly tied into... whatever it is I do 9-5. Or should I say 7:30 to 9, as it has been for the past 3 weeks.

I actually heard something on that video that I don't think I've ever heard before: 'Local Blogosphere'. The very idea that a city has a concept of a local blogosphere is a fairly great development. It's making me think that we're going to find out something about people power from the smaller cities and towns where 100 people can make a difference. I've been thinking about this concept for at least 20 years, or at least since the advent of the free bulletin board service and the $75 modem. I first proposed it to Theresa Hughes, who was then just about to be appointed to the California Public Utilities Commission. At the time, it must have been around 1987, I wondered if she'd mind setting up a computer and having all of her issues and schedule on it for the public to see. Little did I know at the time, there would hardly be any public to look. The idea never really got off the ground, but the City of Santa Monica did some experimenting back in those days. I suppose it wasn't until MoveOn.org that any real online politicking got noticed, but that really skipped over the municipal. I think it's got to go back.

I want to get a flavor that when I head back east in a couple days. I'll report back.

100 Things I Love About America

I've never been one for starting a blogmeme, but I think I'd like to see this one grow. In no particular order. Do it and trackback!

1. Watching kids fix their bikes.
2. Gumbo.
3. Spring Break.
4. Easter Egg hunts.
5. The John Muir Trail.
6. Frequent flyer miles.
7. Johnny Cash
8. Liquor stores.
9. Magazine Racks
10. Leather furniture.
11. Malls with Ice Skating Rinks.
12. Midwestern plain spokeness.
13. Budweiser.
14. Blue lights in the basement.
15. ATM Machines
16. Blockbuster Movies
17. Public Libraries.
18. Charity car washes.
19. Farmer's Markets.
20. Chinese delivery.
21. Flavored toothpaste.
22. Six Flags.
23. Rotating restaurants.
24. Sumptuous lobbies with receptionists.
25. Wal-Mart.
26. Free seminars.
27. Science fairs.
28. Speakers on a dais.
29. Dog shows.
30. The new fall season.
31. Treehouses.
32. Trout fishing.
33. Extreme sports.
34. Elections.
35. Top Ten Lists.
36. 'New and Improved'
37. Western movies.
38. Roadhouse blues.
39. The Great Salt Lake.
40. Mt. Rainier.
41. The Pacific Coast Highway.
42. The Fort Pitt Bridge
43. American River - South Fork
44. Menemsha Bight
45. The Back Bay Fens
46. The D Train.
47. 7th Avenue Park Slope
48. South Pasadena, CA.
49. 1957 Corvette Convertible.
50. Air Shows.
51. Martin Luther King.
52. The Gentlemen's Club
53. Jim Beam Rye.
54. New York Strip.
55. Corn
56. The Bacon Cheeseburger.
57. Laptop Computers.
58. Roadside Hotels.
59. AAA
60. The Boy Scouts.
61. Harley Davidson.
62. Denim.
63. Cotton Candy.
64. John Phillip Sousa.
65. George Clinton
66. Thelonius Monk
67. Humphrey Bogart
68. Catholic School
69. The Breakfast cereal aisle.
70. Christmas
71. Picnics
72. Memorial Day Weekend.
73. The School Play.
74. The Wall Street Journal.
75. PBS
76. HBO
77. Muhammad Ali
78. Vodka Martini
79. Oysters Rockefeller.
80. Lemon Meringue
81. Fallingwater.
82. Mark Twain.
83. Tupelo Swamp.
84. Carnegie Hall
85. Ohio Stadium
86. The Rose Parade
87. The Three Stooges
88. RJ45
89. Rent a Cars.
90. REI
91. Bean Bag Chairs
92. Whiteboards
93. Hardware Stores.
94. KFC
95. Amazon.com
96. Taking the family to Church on Sunday
97. Thanksgiving
98. Birthday Parties
99. Highschool Reunions
100. Leisure Time.

Of Assimilated Negroes, Cabbages and Kings

The thing that you should not first do is start reading this negro and not finish the wonderful post I am about to write. After all he did call my blog poop. Not intentionally, but he should have known that it would get back to me. Such is the uncanny claustrophobia of the Kwaku Network. Sooner or later you get to meet everyone except Zadie Smith. Oh why didn't I meet Zadie Smith?

On the other hand I can't blame you if you do want to sneak a peek over thataway because I've been a serious dorkwad for too long over here. Katrina sucked most of the humor out of me and I've been working too many 12 hour days. Plus a friend of mine has disappeared, or just kind of gone to that place where all friends who drift apart go - into the zone of civilized nonchalance. If I see my friend again, I'm sure to get a handshake. Big Whoop. And so for a plurality of reasons (Oh snap, I owe Ambra a happy birthday and an essay on pluralism) it's all coming to a close, but I don't know if it will be glorious or not. 'It' being the dreary outlook and lack of comics.

I've been thinking about my BMW again. It has been a long time since I've driven my own beemer and I'm starting to become frumpy again. I can tell. I haven't worn the Hollywood Suit in months and I haven't had a good straight razor shave in a coon's age. I can feel the biorythmic convergence coming - it's just around the corner, the day when my phone rings off the hook from people I actually want to speak to.

Yet tonight, spending the first weekend away from the crib in memory, I'm catching up on my blogging only to find myself getting sucked into discussions which are beneath me. So I wander around the 'sphere and discover that I haven't updated my Blogger profile - not that I really care, but now that I have Audioscrobbler / LastFM, I really can answer with some accuracy what my favorite music is. This time I actually remember my favorite books too, and most of them are fiction. I discover that I need the edification of a good fiction, and I haven't had one since Baudolino, which was a good two years ago. Tsk.

So there's Martin Amis, whose latest adventures left me dead flat, and there's his Wikipedia page which cite him as influencing Zadie Smith and Will Self. It turns out that Will Self's 'Great Apes' was a smashingly great book - and I felt that I would get in trouble for liking it, yet I read this for Amis:

Amis's raw material is what he sees as the absurdity of the postmodern condition and the excesses of late-capitalist Western society with its grotesque caricatures. He is the undisputed master of what the New York Times has called "the new unpleasantness."

Fuckin' A! That's where I'm at. I've gone all political and lost my sense of humor but not of the absurd. It's got me bending my ear towards Hitchens instead of Amis. And what about my old buddy T. Boyle? Maybe he's got something up his sleeve that's not entirely to cynical. But then there's Zadie. Zadie Zadie Zadie. I don't know why I wait so long. I haven't read an inch of her, I just collapsed at her photo. Well, who wouldn't? All the cretins I'm sweeping off my porch that's who. And it's no wonder Memer isn't posting here so often.

Anyway, I have the rest of this weekend to make a supercomputer jump through the appropriate hoops. As enticing as that sounds (I've time-travelled a memory of an earlier me into the present just to show me how much we've progressed) on the whole I'd rather be curled up with a good..Zadie. But that life has been cast aside. The good news is that my boy made the football team. I should be home for that but that too will come in due time.

In the meantime, we ought to spend a bit more time sending hostile subliminal messages to Hugo Chavez instead of beating up on Bill Bennett. I haven't felt rogueish enough lately, but am feeling more and more certain that my uppity elitism needs some sharpening. Perhaps I can find a good P.J. O'Rourke at Borders tomorrow before I check out the new Cronenberg. Oh wait. I've got that damned supercomputer thing to do.

I named the big one Potter and the little one Hagid. We're running benchmarks from Snape. Potter is a temperamental one, doesn't like my 32bit text editor and won't synch IDs from my database to the Deployment Server, so that when the applets go a-calling, they get rejected out of hand. But Potter hasn't given me a real fit like Hagid did this evening. Three tests. One gives 40% errors I can't explain. The next one goes flawlessly. Then I change one little parameter and the whole craptard goes zombie. This, ladies and gentlemen is why NT sucks, no matter how hefty the hardware. I've got 300 databases running simultaneously and the agent freezes. Can I kill the zombies all at once? Noooooo. NT has no such animal as a kill -9 (the lung ripper). It just sits there and divvies up the full weight of 8 3GHz Xeons burning 100% across 300 processes that I've got to kill one by frikken one. With a mouse and four clicks. Warning, killing this process may cause system instability. Are you sure?

Anyway. Next time I'll keep Load Runner throttled and not try to launch 300 databases all in the same second. Lesson learned.

Monday night I had a way-too-expensive dinner. It looked like a fairly ordinary upscale steakhouse, but I underestimated. The cheapest a la cart entree was 29 bucks, a fairly decent prime rib. And wait, they didn't even have anything as low class as Pellegrino. The waiter is doing this elaborate dance in refilling my glass with sparkling water that comes in a container that looks like a cross between a bank vacuum canister and a lava lamp. I order the oyster appetizer for 12 bucks. I get these tiny things that are the size of quarters in a chopped up bed of seaweed and tiny diced tomato on a platter the size of Venus. I must be in California.

So the rest of the week I use my suite hotel to my advantage. I went grocery shopping. I picked up a package of clams, two bottles of Powerade, some beef jerky, a couple cans of corn, some Zatarains, some Rice a Roni, a bag of frozen shrimp scampi in fettucini, frozen mixed vegetables, a bottle of Sutter Home White Zinfandel, a half gallon of whole fat milk (whoohoo!) a dozen Krispy Kreme glazed, a bowl of heat & eat clam chowder, and one box each of popcorn shrimp and breaded clam strips. I couldn't find any decent maki and I forgot to get some lox, but I did get a fourpack of Red Bull. All told $60.

It turns out that the breaded seafood shouldn't be microwaved, so I ended up at Wendy's tonight. I swear.

It took talking with my colleague to discover that I really do count Creole cuisine among my favorites. My mother didn't truly enjoy cooking for the lot of us brats, surely we made it more of an industrial chore than a gourmet experience for her. But when she did throw down the down home cooking - lookout. So I guess I'll always love red beans and rice. That's for Saturday night, if I get out of the lab before 9pm.

That's the news from 95014. See ya.

Cobb in the Spotlight

Dell Gines has done me the honor of an interview, and Booker Rising has covered it as well. There are some interesting comments on both sites. This is a good preparation for me as I go to speak at ConvergeSouth next week.

Of course it always seems that just before or after I'm in the spotlight, I am in a temporary blogging slump. Not much to blog early this week as I huddle over my keyboard doing overtime in yet another strange city.

Interestingly enough what I'm most proud of this week is the number of folks who have sought and/or found work through this blog using the Katrina Cleanup Jobs thread. Those three words in combination have put me at the top of Google.

An Old School Anthem

All My Money, by Jeffrey Osborne

(I'll bring it home to you baby)

1.
I get out to work, every day
Because I believe in getting paid.
Got a sexy woman I want to keep
She's always waiting home for me.

I work eight days a week
Cause I want to take care of your every need.
And when my work is through
I grab my pay and run home to you.

(Chorus) And I'll bring you all of my money Bring you all my pay. Cause I want you to be happy. I will do whatever it takes.

2.
I'm up early moring. Six AM
I'm up and ready to begin
Got me pumping iron twice a day
I've got to keep my self in shape.

I want to look good for you
Any man who works his body wants to look good too
I want you to be proud
And run to me when I get home

(Chorus) And I'll bring you all of my money Bring you all my pay. Cause I want you to be happy. I will do whatever it takes.

And I'll bring you all of my loving
Bring all that and more.
Cause I want you to be happy.
Whatever it takes girl it's yours.

(Bridge)
(Damn, I'm bringing you all my money!)

I work eight days a week
Cause I want to take care of your every need
And when my work is through
I grab my pay and run home to you.

(Chorus) And I'll bring you all of my money Bring you all my pay. Cause I want you to be happy. I will do whatever it takes.

And I'll bring you all of my loving
Bring all that and more.
Cause I want you to be happy.
Whatever it takes girl it's yours.

(Ad lib to fin)
(I'll bring it home to you baby
And you know that I will

And I tell you girl
I'm going to bring you all my money)

This song is one of the happiest songs I know, and I don't find it one bit corny. So until I am asked to desist, I want you to have it too. Grab the link and play it and see if you don't find yourself uplifted.

JOMoney.mp3

Talking to People Without Looking

(from the archives: Oct 2000)

i've been told that my face betrays a great deal. i notice that it is rare that i look at people directly in the eye, which i know that i do whenever they have 100% of my attention.

sometime back in the late 80s i spent a lot of time learning to multitask. (now that i am in the mind to think of allan bloom) in my daily journal, i often would take four things that were happening at the moment i started to write and find a way to relate them all together. i would generally do this while listening to music and watching television (preferably news). i am so accustomed to working in this way - rarely does anything hold my attention in that way. i'm sure this isn't unique, but i'm told that i can be very annoying, because sometimes i actually *do* tune people out.

anyway, i'm also not afraid to let things drop. knowing myself that i am generally a very earnest person, i have no overwhelming guilt when i fail other people. it's simply a matter of bandwidth. (you can imagine what my credit rating looks like).

in general, i am very stingy with my time. i am one of those people who requires a strategy that fits with my worldview before i take step one. otherwise whatever it is doesn't get taken seriously. so when i want something done, i focus and do it. again, when people see me get off my ass for something it pains them that i don't do it for them. on the other hand, when i ask about fundamental motivating principles and intellectual frameworks excitedly, i don't get much reaction irl. this is the reason that cmc is so compelling for me, why i am having this conversation in community-time rather than in real-time. i can joots (as hofstadter says) multiple frameworks of reference and go humorous and serious as my mind goes. context can be captured at your leisure. i've always said that this is a wonderful place for people who don't rate a biographer.

on the other hand, cmc life is compartmentalized mostly. i have been a member of [an online community] for just about 18 months or so, i guess. and prior to that i had always purposely crafted personnae for all of my interactions. a significant part of the reason i write in lower case here is to distinguish it from my other writings. for me lower case represents streams of consciousness. although i would say that i am a lot closer to me, and attempting continuously to unburden my more private self in this forum (in this thread in particular), there are still limits. however i am interested in jumping out again, in the context of my dealings with and membership in the middle class, and recontextualizing that which i feel comfortable revealing about my life.

fzample: saul bellow is an interesting point in time. without fail, everytime i have decided to be patient enough to read something considred 'important', it has reached me in precisely the way i imagine i touches those folk paul fussell would call the 'x' class, one of whom i would presume to be. if you understood that i fell off the track of intellectuality somewhere around my 15th birthday for lack of the proper mentorship, you could see how being *actually* brighter than average and rebellious outside of the comfort of academia could isolate me. and although i think there is much more to be detailed in that dimension, suffice it to say that i have this personal history of 'bright moments' in which i confirm my own sense of self in certain writings and yet find those moments devastating. at times i console myself with the notion that the pain of individuality is inevitable for the western man (sophomorically eliding what i perceive to be the message of a yet unread thomas mann). at other times i anguish in the possibility that my would-be colleagues and i have fallen irreparably out of step, and while i scribble within a predictable circle all these years on the internet, they are living cozily within a respectable ghetto. if i were not making 6 figures by this my upcoming 40th birthday, i would certainly be ready for snatching myself out of america. so reading bellow is at once liberating and painful because i recognize that i am ultimately, if not consistently, shutting down the tolerance i must bear for my mediocre company everytime i receive the elevation good writing brings.

Moving Up Gracefully

(from the archives: June 2000)

I met with my boss today. He is considering hiring someone between myself and him. I am disturbed.

I am stumbling a bit on my quest to become wealthy, as I have decided most definitely not to move to the Bay Area. Fuck it.

Some time ago, and I cannot pinpoint the exact moment, I woke up from the hard charging rage. Perhaps the rockslide began as I recognized my old buddy in a new light, as he changed clothes in front of me as we discussed his plans to remodel his bathroom. It was a perfectly casual and intimate conversation, the kind one expects from good friends. And I realized after a time that this guy was, in a unique way, my kind of guy. Unpretentious, smart, humorous and well-mannered in that inimitable Southern California way. In that way, he embodied his neighborhood in a way I hadn't noticed before. His neighborhood? Palos Verdes Estates, where two bedroom cottages go for 700,000. If there is old money in Cali, this kinda seems like the place, even though I know that it's more in San Marino and Pasadena on the other end of the county. Still, the entirely comfortable, friendly feel of this particular conversation, surrounded by the kind of wealth which, while not obscene, remains potent, left a punctuation mark on me. It was that somehow, I absolutely belonged.

And somehow, the work that lie between myself and that place became evermore obvious. I relaxed, took a deep breath, and measured myself. I felt good. I haven't ruined myself in my alternate paths. This, or someplace like this, is my home waiting for my arrival.

Then some weeks later, the market crashed.

The market crashed and I was nervous and yet I was at peace. I had seen the promised land. It wasn't all that, but it was comfortable - a comfort worth summoning strength and discipline for.

As time has progressed, and I settled my soul in the measures of the Dalai Lama's recent literary structures, I have exhaled. I had been holding my breath. Somewhere in a fine film, the likes of which I have been denying myself with my appetite for action, it was said that the man who makes best use of the moment is at peace in every moment of the present. Thusly, the future takes care of itself. In the moment, you can make your most important decision within 7 breaths, and it is only for this duration that you must calm yourself and suspend time. The moment is then recaptured. And since then, I have not been held breathless at the prospect of wealth. I have merely stepped forward into my discipline knowing that there is no guarantee either way. Still, I belong.

So I picked up a Linux book, a Perl manual and a spare computer hanging around the office and started back into my old habit of writing, not for people directly as I have been doing on the net since '93, but for the machine itself. I am imagining myself into the satisfying solitude of coding, of architecting a masterwork. And in doing so, I have imagined a world of dedicated mastery, not over minions who would provide legs for my march to wealth, but over myself and that subtle connection which generates trust and loyalty. How can I express it? Being a conduit of principle begins in accepting the principle as the spirit and the self as the vessel. It is only as a conduit/vessel of principle can one...

This is only one abstracted side of the story, one that I suppose could begin and end with my happiness. I am finding ways to become happy and radiate that feeling. If I can become that kind of success, then I only need live long enough and keep my wits, and my new home will present itself. In this way, there is no need for jealousy or envy - which I always considered beneath me anyway.

And so I have stopped being impatient. But then there is this meeting with my boss this afternoon. He wants to hire somebody 'seasoned'.

Just the other day, I met with the Wall Street Analyst at the Trade Show in lieu of my boss who was unavoidably detained. Even as he arrived, he deferred to my descriptions of the business as the three of us sat comfortably in the shadow of our new titanium-tinged Trade Show Structure. The Wall Street Analyst said that I spoke well, and I know he meant it the right way, that I know how to talk to Wall Street Analysts. Inside, Michael X, told me that this honky bastard was searching my teeth for spinach. The boss and I ladled out quips, laughs, facts and nearly insider info as the Wall Street Analyst listened and queried intently. I continued to dominate his time and walk him through an extraordinary demo. I expect his next dispatch to quote me word for word, then well get a nice bump on Wall Street. This is the order of things. Nevertheless, I am an 'articulate black man', an unexpected pleasure.

The New York Times' extraordinarily frank discussion of race has come at an odd moment. In one of its fascinating stories is the tale of the black man who has made his Atlanta millions with a white face man as his CEO. In his next venture, he is failing. People have referred to him as someone who 'helped found' his old company. The details of this story are annoying in a way that I transcend, yet crippling of ambition in a way that I cannot evade. Now this black cat appears from my angle to be of the sort who has a burning and dysfunctional desire to be king of a small hill. A grubber, the singnificance of whom is really only symbolic for people who really cannot see deeper than skin color. This is how I have always viewed feudal millionaires, why I continue to have more respect for career military officers, priests and philosophers. The bounder does what he must to get over, then he starts a foundation for kids. Hmm. Sounds like something I might do.

And so I need to determine whether my peace is sublimation.

The beauty of being Puff Daddy is that your greatest enemy is yourself. So I suppose that the lesson to be learned for the Atlanta Millionaire is that if you use a white man just because he's white, then you are doomed to die by the sword of a game whose rules you don't have the balls to change. Nevertheless, it is a lesson he will have the luxury of learning reading some book as he floats on his mansion's pool.

Still I have yet to determine if my easy breathing is one of denial.

Patricia J. Williams was on the radio yesterday evening. She reminded me of how I used to pull ideas from all over the place and relate them to standing. Somewhere on the web, there is a site with (perhaps) some record of her lecture to Columbia students about how NYC black cops were teaching young black males how to behave around cops: teaching them like they teach women who are raped. This is how you should dress yourself (so as not to draw improper attention). This is how you should walk (so as not to draw improper attention). This is how you should speak (so as not to draw improper attention).

So I have yet to determine if this adjustment to my comportment is proper for me.

I'm all out of paragraphs this Friday evening. It's 9pm and the sun hasn't gone down yet. Seems oddly light. I told Room Service that I spilled my wine by accident and to bring me another glassful. I figured they would see the sop towel and pick up the tab. No such luck. It's my mistake for not paying attention to the basic forces of nature. I should have known better.

Understanding Phoenix

I don't understand Phoenix.

I've been there for two weeks in a row now, and I still can't figure the place out. Far more than Los Angeles, there is no there there. The major east-west highway goes north and south. Their river is a lake. The freeway loops don't loop and there are no mountains for 20 miles in any direction and they call the place 'the Valley'.

It was 97 degrees on a good day, down from 109. In the middle of a day when it's 104, there is a 15 minute thunderstorm with 30 mph winds. The only public service announcements on the radio are soundbites from the Christian Right.

I've been in the southwest of town. In Chandler, everything is new and expensive looking. The many Mimi's-sized restaurants have halos of mist spraying from the rain gutters in order to keep the temperature down for those souls brave enough to eat on the patios. There is an extraordinary variety of desert flora that grows out of well manicured dirt which looks orangish and simmers in the heat. All is stucco and tile and people drive slowly.

'Nola' Speaks

I don't have a nickname for my close auntie. She's my mother's sister and the one whom I've mostly be sweating about in the past week. She asked me to publish her letter to us in the family. I will but will call her my darling auntie 'Nola'.

Dear Family,

I have never felt more connected to all of you than I do at this moment. I am deeply touched by your love and generosity at this time of crisis.

My departure from New Orleans was totally spontaneous. I was not listening to my rational mind. It was on Saturday, and a day when very few people were seriously thinking of leaving. Even those of us who drove toward Baton Rouge as I did, did not find any long delays in traffic. I fully intended to be away no more than 48 hours.

I left without such essentials as telephone numbers, personal papers and not even the barest essentials. I found myself responding purely on intuition for the next six days on the road. The worst part was the endless back roads I took; especially thru Louisiana, Arkansas and Mississippi. I was so grateful that I am pretty proficient at reading maps and used to driving the blue lines on the map. I was surely operating on automatic for long hours.

The traffic was horrendous on all paths leading out of the Gulf States. The gasoline lines in some places stretched over a mile in both directions leading into a station. Each day at sunset came the arduous task of trying to find a room; preferably two since I was traveling with 'Cousin B' and I desperately needed the privacy to follow the news into the night as I fell asleep and the first thing in the morning as I prepared to leave. Each day I checked from one station to another trying to find a clear channel on the radio (which was difficult on the back roads).

I began to not recognize the haggard face I saw in the mirror and even more disturbing was the feeling of “being an observer” of this haggard stranger that spoke and acted in a monotone, and that the stranger was me.

One afternoon in Tennessee I went to Wal-Mart to pick up some essentials and I found myself inside of my car and totally ignorant about what had happened to my purchases. After frantically searching the parking lot for my basket, I finally checked the trunk of the car. I had loaded my purchases “on automatic” without remembering.

That feeling of disorientation continued. It was a relief when I was finally able to cry after the fourth day. I have not cried like that since I was a child. I was totally overwhelmed with grief.

All of the above said, I am well aware how blessed both [your cousin B] and I are. I am also happy that in some way, my leaving as I did inspired 'Uncle C' to convince his daughter 'GG' to leave with him and with her four children on Sunday morning.

Even in the middle of it all, my mind kept returning to an inner dialogue of how I can help. I believe that I will go back as soon as it is safe to do so. The work that I have been involved in for the past 10+ years has given shape and meaning to my life. I cannot “not go back”.

In the meantime, I’m here and I’m taking one day at a time. This is only the end of Week 1 and I already feel the effects of a “time slow down” that happens in times of crisis.

I love all of you!

I’ll stay in touch,

'Nola',
Milwaukee, WI

PS Please copy this letter on the web to everyone. Thanks!

We are surely blessed.

Heartbreak Arrives

I don't know what's wrong with me. I cannot get away from this computer. This has got to be the worst Labor Day Weekend ever. I'm emotionally drained and just really can't take it any longer. This is about the third time this weekend that I've just broken down in tears and I'm not sleeping well and I need to take a shower. I'm going to go out and get some sunshine and try to recover. I know I'll be back here tonight...

Rush Limbaugh gets it right on race. I'm a little bit surprised, but not entirely. I like his rant.

Ann Rice recalls the flavor, and shames America's slow response.

David Brooks says:

Reaganite conservatism was the response to the pessimism and feebleness of the 1970's. Maybe this time there will be a progressive resurgence. Maybe we are entering an age of hardheaded law and order. (Rudy Giuliani, an unlikely G.O.P. nominee a few months ago, could now win in a walk.) Maybe there will be call for McCainist patriotism and nonpartisan independence. All we can be sure of is that the political culture is about to undergo some big change.

Oh man I agree with that. Here's where we talk about leadership. Ask yourself in all seriousness, in New Orleans, what would you expect from a man like Tom DeLay? Nothing. Exactly.

Bob Herbert says what Kanye West thought he was saying. Both of their bashing is an embarrassment.

Updates and Rumors

I've been hearing things about people on the ground from associates and friends. None of it is particularly good, nor particularly different. People have lost 'everything', job, home, car. So I'm trying to scope out a little charity budget and send a piece here and there. One of these folks is Cassandra Henry, one of the reviewers from 3blackchicks.com. Good writers. I'll be sending along a little something.

I have heard that GMAC has not officially said to the victims "you don't owe us for your car". So people whose cars are under water still have to pay their car note.

I heard that there is a guy who runs an underground ISP and has generators, He's trying to get some webcams up and running in the city.

I think my aunt's house might not be too badly damaged, but the most recent satellite pictures confirm that there is no place in this town that was really spared. It's got to stink to high heaven out there now. Gators, dead bodies, god knows what all in that nasty water. Wednesday I kept having visions of people walking through the water barefoot and stepping on nails or wrenching their ankles in unseen potholes.

While I still have a very hard time with the necessity for martial law, the notion that people can shoot at rescue helicopters and get away with it is crazy. If it take 1500 troops to put down that kind of insanity, do it. I heard snippets of panicky dainty journalists on the radio Wednesday talking about how they got out of Dodge and I really didn't appreciate that. (Especially considering Michael Yon). I've also made it clear that grabbing staples is justified.

These refugees are so sorry looking it just breaks your heart. Quite frankly I think we Americans are a bit soft and I won't be surprised to see the numbers of dead approaching 2000. Clearly, there were a lot of people out there surviving before the deluge on the slim margins. What I was seeing was a visual manifestation of the poor health of many African Americans. One poor woman's grandfather couldn't survive without a steady supply of oxygen. One particularly rude cameraman got 8 seconds of footage of a little white dog without showing the faces of the two obese black women it was sitting between. There were people in the streets who looked as if they have been in death beds for a while.

The NYT or the WaPo, I forget which, is covering the other angle on this matter which is that there are a dozen towns who haven't gotten the attention they deserve. In light of Bigfoot's story, it has become clear that people have to start misbehaving to get authorities to do. This is exactly what I was talking about two days ago when I said 'for shame'. The ridiculous media concentration on 'looting' has turned a bad situation into a distrustful one, and now people are suffering because of it. Somewhere between laying and waiting to dehydrate, breaking windows and shooting guns is what's necessary to get rescued. Let me say it plain and clear, the next reporter who tells a story about how scared people are from gunshots and looters is going to get poleaxed in this blog.

Meanwhile out on my end, I've been tasked to find out how people from LA might get on board a volunteer train. Updates will be right here.

Relatives Found

I have been on the phone with my mother on and off since about 4pm this afternoon, and we have been able to confirm that my aunt and cousin are OK. Right now they are Gonzales which is about halfway to Baton Rouge. I'm sure that I'll have stories, but for now I'm just glad that they're OK.

More later.

Invisible Threat

M11 gets back from his summer vacation today. He'll be flying into LAX when he comes. But his coming was delayed by a rather untraceable fact which was that at least one terminal was evacuated this morning at JFK. His flight was delayed almost 3 hours.

I got the cell phone call and talked to him, so I found out in rapid succession that there was a bomb threat and that he wasn't scared. So I went online immediately to find out what I could. I found nothing. Homeland Security said nothing. The NYTimes said nothing. The AA.com site said nothing. The Port Authority of NY & NJ said nothing. The FAA said nothing. I guess they're supposed to say nothing.

So the Spousal Unit and I had a discussion about who should say what and when. We concluded that knowing is better than not knowing, sorta.

Ghastly, Heavy Rain

(from the archives - my first nightmare about September 11)

My First Nightmare.
I was at the ground floor of Ground Zero dodging bodies. Nothing moved in slow motion, instead it was a grisly example of cartoon physics. The people plunging towards me were warning me to get out of the way knowing themselves doomed. But no matter how fast I ran, no matter which way I dodged, there was yet another bound to hit me. I kept escaping narrowly as they slammed into the concrete just inches away from me. As soon as they hit with a sickening crunch, broken in their business wear another scream from above would alert me to look up and start running again. Nobody fell straight. I watched in horror as their wildly waving and sometimes broken limbs caught the wind and changed their direction. The women’s hair seemed to fan out wildly; I could see their necklaces whipping. They stared into my eyes as they fell or turned over backwards to avoid my stares. Then glass fell, then shoes. It was a ghastly, heavy rain.

Got To Get Over the Hump

(from the archives, September 1999)

i've been thinking a little bit lately about my ability to cash in on the silicon valley thing, and having read a bit of correspondance between nora ephron and some other literate chap, kurt somebody of the new yorker, over in slate it occurs to me that i'd better make hay. people like me are not supposed to get rich, or even wealthy. if the fashion turns against conspicuous spending, all started by the wall street boom way back when, i'm going to be boxed out. these days, it's ok to be rich and black. soon 'we' may all look back on puff daddy and ask, what were we thinking?

i say we in quotes because i've pretty much made up my mind that no matter how ugly i have to be, socially speaking, i'm going to get my goddamn share. i'll be the george jefferson of the 00s by gum, and i don't care who knows it. i'm moving on up, larry ellison style if need be. some of us may laugh at puff daddy like our laughter means something, but i hope to get up above all that, hopefully with better financial sense than hammer. i don't laugh at puffy. puffy's over the hump.

i reckon, that and a few other character flaws will be sufficient for a number of people to judge me by the angle of my nose, especially if i do the right thing by bringing along some of those young men and women who believed in me - who just so happen to look as if they vaguely resemble me in that caste called race. i don't know how it happened that people who know how to cha cha to marvin gaye's 'give it up' groove with my soul, but it's like that. and considering the size of my hometown, it's still a bit surprising to me that there are so few who know *exactly* what i'm saying. yeaah, you remember the dj at moody's? yeah, but do you remember the second floor of dillon's? i catch a big butt and a smile at starbucks la tijera over in ladera heights and the groove is immediately rekindled. magic, that bond. i'm not going to resist it. i've been fourth man on enough golf foursomes to know every club ain't clubby. i'm taking my homies on the ride.

but i know there's some paranoia in there. i'm not too stupid or ugly not to know how to make new friends. i just often wonder how many 'its' i don't get - things perfectly obvious to those up there somewhere who get invited to write for slate magazine. i don't have enough time to read all the articles; i can't reinsert myself into gary trudeau's yale class and remember what kind of guy g.w. bush actually was - back when he presumeably spoke his mind. i don't get to sleep with jane pauley. (and i think about how miserable it must be to be bryant gumbel, arguably the finest interviewer alive on the planet, yet for some reason untouchable by the networks, languishing on cable. what? is he too difficult to work with? did he ask for too much money? did he object to matt lauer's sex appeal? what?) i don't want to end up that way. like gregory hines. like debbie allen. like so many incredible talents left out there without a corporation behind them. like arsenio hall. i've got to find a balance so that when my time expires, i won't expire too.

there's this window i'll have to make money in front of whatever section of the american public recognizes me. it will expire. not like pierce brosnan. pierce has love handles, but he's got something permanent. not like sean connery. sean doesn't even have a proper english gentleman's accent, but he's got something permanent. it's the uberroth factor. any day he can step out and be somebody again. i've just got a short window to dance in. i've got tighter scrutiny. i'm probably foolish just being a human being about it honestly here. some phonies are more equal than others.

i've got to cash in on this silicon valley thing. i'd feel stupid if i didn't. some people don't want to be ugly grubby and unfashionably rich. i don't mind. i won't feel guilty about it. i'm like the biafran refugee in this. more is ok for me, i promise not to be embarrassed. i'm not likely to go off wife-swapping or pretending that sailboat racing is a true test of character. i just don't want to miss my window. i've got to get over the hump. i've got to get over the hump.

How to Get a 'C' in Drama 101

[from the archives - circa 1985, a letter to my theatre arts teacher]

context - my drama teacher told us that we should pick a scene for our final, but not anything from tennessee williams, pinter, arthur miller or ibsen because the themes were too complex. i said out loud that was rediculous, snorted and walked out of the class. i only showed up 3 or 4 times in the second half of the semester after i picked my scene and was paired with a partner.

Success has many forms.

In the matter of my elementary theater class it appears as though i will receive a less than honorable mark. This is clear to mea and i understand the justification. Pith this is not an acting course or perhaps one in the study of drama. By your own admission, it doesn't work. Nevertheless, there exists an organized course of study - outlined in the syllabus for all to see and follow. Then there is Mr. Bowen...

I'm certain that you don't take my attitude about the class as a personal affront, yet I recognize you as the actor - completely aware and somewhat put off during our terse exchanges. It is my failure that it is so difficult for me to shed my aggressive intellectual hat for such a general and elementary course. It is my failure that I discount attendance simply because I understand the general direction of the discussions and tend to learn very quickly. I'd rather be absent than rudely studying some other material in class. Yet these fundamental differences and the others that keep me from truly pursuing the top grad in the class are best left in a clarifying afterthought rather than a qualifying preface. It is for that reason that you should not receive this letter until the end of the semester.

I recognized this difficulty last week when I requested to take the midterm at a rescheduled time. It was all there, we tried to act anonymously, but I knew you recognize me and I your attitude towards the dissident. It is nothing fabulously new - many times persons are opposites on issues. I must face you and your class but then I must face myself.

Even in this letter there should not be room for criticism. It is not my responsibility to teach you to teach or to reshape your course or style. I have only the scantron of evaluations as that forum. Yet I must tell you how frustrated I have been to attempt to show my own dramatic ability within the context of this class. That I know I am capable yet have no chance to show how I am, is the conflict that did keep me enrolled. In short I felt that for me to be able to show myself acting (or anyone with real abilities) is beyond the scope of Theatre 111. But I had to be there. Attendance is not drama. This you know. Talent is not manifest in "putting childish qualities into the scene". It didn't work for me. Further, I don't believe it works at all. Further, I believe you know that it doesn't. Yet it’s in the syllabus in essence. I write this having a gut feeling that you are above this babysitting.

My only chance then, is my scene. My five minutes. A shared five minutes actually. My choice of roles is limited as is my choice of partners. I must consider the audience, the availability of props, the absence of time for exposition. Yet whatever I do – this letter is my subtext. I recognize the futility with a smile, for you indeed will see me as the dissident.

So, the irony of my selection comes out. I am Felix Unger. I must play absolutely pristine, neurotically so, simply to prove something basic about myself. In a comedy yet. In a failing situation that goes for laughs. Unrecognized pathos.

Does Oscar know what good a man Felix really is as they play neatness games? The subtext there is marriage and the strategies are blurred by Simon’s characterizations so that the audience may laugh at itself. The tactics are cigarette butts, linguini, poker and slang. All comedic. Not comic but comedic; not actually funny but played for laughs.

And so the analogy is complete, I play for your, for the class for a grade on the surface. Yet the conflict is between myself and the form. Is this the intellectual vehicle of choice? Is this class, this semester at this school in front of these people what I am? Certainly not! But even for drama is it accurately testing me? Sadly not. I’ll barely pass. I’ll learn the terms, the technicalities but the spirit does not flow there.

It makes little sense for me to pursue the point. This paper is not graded. Nor is it type, It may not even be considered tactful. I am a scientist by profession, I take fact over tact. I should not care about drama but every day I play roles to save people the pain of horrid letters such as this. Drama is in me. I would probably like to see your face. But no. I’ll play it for laughs. I’ll be Felix and no one else. This is what will pass me. I’ll smile and ‘walk on the papers’.

mb

Shy Town

It's past 11 and all I have tomorrow are meetings, but I've had enough nightlife for one evening. I'm concentrating on doing the social thing tomorrow rather than going in my own direction.

I can't even remember which night I wrote that, but it probably wasn't Friday. Now that I think about it, it was definitely Thursday. Here's the dilemma, and I put it to you as a question of manners and morals. You're out at a business social with a bunch of colleagues, many of who are younger than yourself. To what extent should you be honest and outgoing in the context of the situation? Should you:

A. Be yourself?
B. At all times act reserved?
C. Do as the Romans do?

The thing is, it's a nightclub. What does one do in nightclubs? What is one supposed to do? I don't know about you, but the answer for me is, drink, smoke, be merry and engage the crowd. Now when one nightclub turns into a crawl, things are getting a little out of hand. Yes or no? Hard to say.

I found myself answering one colleague whom I find particular likeable when she asked if I smoked. "I smoke in Chicago at midnight in nightclubs", was my reply. I also chase broads in similar situations. Of course for pudgy old married me, chasing broads has a distinct hook, which is like the game of 'If'. It's satisfying enough to size up the situation and recognize whether, as they say at Cape Canaveral, "We have a Go situation." Nothing ever gets launched, of course. Nevertheless it is a rather disturbing mindset that I personally have not been able to quite shake. The problem was, that this was a nightclub whose only attraction was as a drunk tank. A very nice one, but strictly for the purpose of the hookup, or the odd out-of-town-business social. Don't blame me, I didn't pick the joint.

Still, something about the music it got into my pants. So I found myself with another charming young lady investigating the dance possibilities. She suggested The Leg Room and so I did my best to suggest loudly that we get outta the first joint, The Grotto, and get to where dancing could be done. At the very least I could get some fresh air after my 7th drink, or was it my 9th?

So this motley parade of professionals in khakis ambled down State Street to Rush. They headed immediately into the queue for the next bar at the corner, as if it were raining outside or there was no oxygen to be found except at the bottom of the shot glasses. I told them that I was going rogue, but I'd be back. This was my chance to smoke another half dozen cigs and check out the action on the street. As is customary on nights like these, I am very generous with the Marlboro Lights, and at least 4 beggars cadged a square off me. Believe me none of them was cute, and though their cups were out for moola, none of them refused. Cigarettes are an alternative currency for denizens of the night, and I keep it handy like cash when I'm doing the dark prowl. Alas, there was no talent in Chi-Town that night. At least not my speed.

This is my marriage's built-in insurance policy. Not that I didn't goose it a touch by whipping out my Treo pictures of the Spousal Unit and my babies, but 98% of females leave me flat. I am both jaded and picky, which is exactly the right attitude for a man of my maturity. I never see the kind of women who seriously tempt me, and most of the time I don't look. This is a consequence of both my upbringing (Catholic), my geeky career (Software) and my compensation (Night Mastery). I told my friend that I couldnt' stand the place any longer - I've already gotten the names of all the girls I could have possibly been interested in within the hour. It was time to go.

I rejoined the wolfpack at the door of the Leg Room. I'm pretty sure they paid for my cover but at least I saved them a few bucks at the second joint. I had been around that block and I swore I saw some dancing on the second floor. The music was loudest out of the Leg Room so I figured that was it. So I get to my spot after doing a lap and then see that this has got the right dive groove going for it, but I've definitely had too much fresh air. So I'm a bit snapped out of the prowling mood, especially considering the good casing I've given the neighborhood. There were two other joints on Rush at which I made my presence known to the bouncers, but I decided against it all. For a moment, I was envious of the guy in the convertible Bentley with the two blondes, but then I thought better of myself.

The Leg Room seemed much more of an anything goes kind of joint, and I was digging that. The bartender at the register, after delivering the Jack & Coke and recieving a nice tip, lit my cigarette. He understands the business. The business of the nightclub is to cater to the fantasies of all these kids on the make. It was clear to me in that moment in a way it hasn't been since my cousin regaled me with stories of $500 tips when he tended bar on Wall Street in the 80s. I have the eye. I can tell who's having fun and who needs to do what to make their evening right. And I remember that there is nothing too weird. Night Mastery is about wish fulfillment. Since I'd mentally checked out, not having found the appropriate trust-funder to play bad boy with, I continued watching other people watch each other and occasionally make moves. Now it's a blur. Then it was pure enjoyment. I really love people.

Nothing is too weird in the clubs, but that must be hedged around your colleagues. I popped over to to where the gang was to have one more shot of something profoundly citrus, like an orange Altoid crushed into an ounce of Cointreau and vodka. Then I split without goodbye. Twelve drinks is the limit, and I had to pack the next morning.

It has been quite some time since I've had a good prowl in a strange town, and I had a riotously good time with a solid 4 hours of carousing. I only wish I had some people I knew a tad better and people who knew the town a touch better to crawl with. That and the freedom to not worry about retouching the rep. Everything I do works when I've got millions and titles, but I have neither, just.. a past colored by a certain lack of social fear.

I've decided that I very much like Chicago and aim to return. I know I can get a good steak at the Chop House, and a decent margarita at the Grotto. I still have no idea which way the river flows, but I'm going back into Project Gotham to see what I can recognize.

Liveblogging the Cass Tech Reunion

As I sit here at 11:24 Eastern, I'm surrounded by one of the coolest Old School crowds I've been around in quite some time. It's the Class of 1980 and the party is jumping off.

These are the friends and classmates of the Spousal Unit. I extended my business swoop through Chicago to get over here to Motown and complete the weekend. Tonight was the dinner, tomorrow is the picnic. Monday is for sobering up.

There are a remarkable number of talented people who have their roots here at Cass, and I met a good number of them. A cat name Boykin who is a senior law partner in DC was at my table. Another brother named Webb does M&A work. I met a brother who's working the number 10 furniture chain in the US whose 30 stores are all in Michigan. There was a Canadian Mountie as well as a true Echelon Van Eck Phreak specialist in the house. Then there's a bit of celebrity in the crowd too. The lovely star of Access Hollywood co-MC'd the evening's festivities. There are showbiz folks from Interscope, a cast member of the Lion King and probably Cass' most famous graduate, jazz violinist Regina Carter (who was rippin' up the floor with a suave brother in a grey suit and Prada glasses). Right next to Regina was Carla Cook. Of course our old friends the Easleys were in the house and it was good to see them after all these years. Too bad Mike Traylor didn't show up..

Introductions went around and the crowd was full of impressive, not to mention good looking folks. The DJ cranked up the volume and the floor was packed. I'm fairly sure that people know that I'm from Cali by now because I worked up a serious sweat. I've got movies of the Cha Cha Slide that should go into the Smithsonian.

I've got a ton of pictures and business cards, and we'll get some of those uploaded in the morning. Right now it's time for slow dancing.

We remembered Bonnie & Clyde the security guards, the elevator operator, Miss Harper who kept saying "squeeze in". There was some character named Ed Woodruff who would 'fix' your report card, driver's license and everything else. Where is he now? Who started that food fight? Cyndi says it was probably one of the football team guys, but nobody will know for sure. Who could run from the basement to the top of the seventh floor for gym? Most of the jocks would stop on the way to smell the cookies baked in Home Ec.

Mike Lewis, the MC (and quarterback back in the day) is now a big shot at Delco and responsible for the launch of the Pontiac G6. (I like the G6, that's a sweet ride.) He said that Coach Spivey is his neighbor. People in the crowd figured his wife was about, what 12 years old? Speaking of freaky deaky, what about Coach Fears. He finally got the boot for trying to make kids swim naked, or so it was rumored. But there were fonder memories of English teacher Shakey Shirley, and the tough love given out by Mrs. Branch. One alum recalled that she wouldn't give him his test unless he buttom up his shirt 'and cover up your bony little chest'. She also got Colleen in big trouble spotting her from the sixth floor after Skip Day. Mike recalled that you basically failed if you got under 75 at Cass Tech. His neighbors at other public schools were happy to get a 74 which meant a C. Not at Cass.

Cyndi broke out the yearbook and people were glued. We checked out the big hair of the 70s. Areesa got a standing ovation for her efforts in pulling this thing together. But it ain't over yet.

Seventeen Years

17 years plus of incomplete poems
Bold legacy of my halfwit journal.
Some raps in rhythms unrecognizable.
Confessions, impressions I’d rather deny.

Life's a complaint of itinerate storms
Downpouring madness and leaving me soaking.
Giving me weight so I feel myself walking
Dripping by conscience I’d rather be dry.

Dozens of dozens compacted with winzip
Clutter directories deep on the drive
Squirreled and squished away squelched in my memory
Leaving a deepness I dropped for my babies

Inward summations delivered to no one
Or no one to puncture my aura for fear
I grimace and stomach and savor my bile
And smile as if Charlie were actually here.

The Almost Collective

Something I just finished by Jimi Izrael has made me change my mind. That, and several other things have conspired to make me drop the idea I said I was going to take up in the blog - that of 'relationships'. As he was writing about Danyel Smith, which took me around the 'sphere to Mark Neal and Bomani Jones, I thought about my old buddy Sheryl Huggins and the black literary collective that never was in the New York of my dreams.

It just so happens that I considered doing an open mic performance yesterday. So I sat for two hours in my empty house and read aloud all the poetry I had written oh so many years ago. This time, unlike times previous, I wasn't afraid to edit it and make it better. As well, with a fresh face, I wasn't afraid at all to call a great deal of it stinky. In all the time I was reading, I never once thought about Sheryl Huggins and that's a damned shame.

You see, Sheryl was my sort-of muse in Brooklyn. She was the brains behind a magazine called Shade. It was going to be the sophisticated urban upscale fashion and culture magazine that was going to rip a chic hole in the space-time continuum of America. It didn't. You haven't heard of Shade Magazine have you? I wasn't much help. In the moments where I could have and perhaps should have made the hookups real with Greg Tate, Sekou Sundiata, Omar Wasow, Lisa Jones and others interesting, I walked on bourgie eggshells. I was writing poetry and love songs for them and people like them. People like the 22 of you who read this blog - a discerning minority on the fringes of the margin. It's not that I didn't have the heart, but that I didn't have the audience and I couldn't wish it to be any larger than it was, or is. I look at my poetry today and know what I wanted people to know and feel. It's still raw and powerful under the surface, but I ran out of motivation to polish it. I found Sheryl when Shade was failing and the bank officers were calling. That's what kept me out of it all. Shade was a debt as big as a house in California and I knew I wasn't prepared to play in that league. Not with mine or with other people's money.

I looked around the offices of Shade. It was a PeeWee's playhouse of magazine clippings, artwork and a thousand snippets of creativity for which my vocabulary had no buckets. The office was shared with McLean Greaves who lived in some corner of nirvana unapproachable by negroes beyond arms distance. The entire setup had the aura of gorgeous futility, a tragic kind of beautiful stillborn thing. Whenever Sheryl entered the joint, her brow knit up like a crumpled lunchbag. We wanted to be the substrate of desire of new black dreams, all that and gay friendly too. Sheryl took me to upper-eastside poetry readings and cafes. We met genuine African-American Wall Street types with genuine African business connections. If we could only put it all together. But my arms were too short. The cash wasn't flowing. The audience wasn't listening. We were the hip center of a universe in which there was no gravity.

My uncle once told me "Hollywood is like any other business, except the people are twice as flaky." That was a night we sat up waiting for a phone call from Stevie Wonder. Everything is possible but nothing is real. The reality of the failure of Shade pushed me over the edge into the punk zone of cultural production. What are the chances that I would want to mortgage half a million to build a big glossy instantiation of black high culture? It all seemed suddenly impossible. There was no chance for melioration in text and graphics - all we could do was go to the right parties and catch the vibe face to face.

It intensified my longing for the purest literary endeavors. Serious people read, they didn't need to be seduced.

A great deal of my vehemence against hiphop has to do with Sheryl's debt. In the days when people were still shocked about a group like Onyx, in the days when Spike Lee was about as controversial as anybody black could possibly be, there was a time when people held out hope for the enlightenment of all my folks, as Speech of Arrested Development once said. Before the New Media had names like Razorfish, when the NetNoir deal was all the rage - there was strong component of faith that those of us on the funded side of the digital divide might make a bridge. But there are always the millions who don't care, and they are always willing to drop 17 dollars worth of respect. That's 17 million we never got, and probably never will.

I'm not going to write in this blog about boys and girls. I already know that anybody who's ready for gay marriage finds the concept of sanctity ridiculous. I'm not even trying to convince them. I'm not going into any debt to try and elevate with elegance - either we'll meet at the same party or we won't. I had felt, for a moment, a sense of obligation to the fatherless millions who are my African American brothers. But now is not the time to talk about love or high culture. I leave that for another day, perhaps for Lucifer Jones. How you get your inspiration, I'm sorry, that's your business. I bled that gallon 14 years ago.

The last we heard from Sheryl was NiaOnline.com. I hope you have landed softly Sheryl, whereever you are. I'm sorry I never had the million bucks.

Chicks & Dudes

I spent a lot of time listening to Tom Leykis while I was in Seattle last week. His was one of the many shows on 100.7 The Buzz that was the basic radio oxygen sucker during my drive-times.

What is wrong with people that they don't know this stuff? I mean this guy calls in and he says he's got this woman and her kid living in his house and what should he do? Leykis walks him through the finer points of his stupidity and sends him off with an understanding in no uncertain terms that it's her or his career. In my 20s I was so persnickety about women, some people thought I was gay, but it sure is good to this kind of flat talk on talk radio.

Leykis is murder on single mothers and everybody who listens to his show knows it. His position is basically this: IT'S A MISTAKE. No argument here. The intellectual in me wants to second-guess him, but I know he's right. In fact, the second-guess argument in me went back to the question of abortion rights during the beginning of the Culture Wars. I had the balls to suggest, without much proof either way, that black families persist because black women are not as afraid as white women to be 'burdened' with children. So our abortion rates are much lower and our 'extended families' are more real. That was 1986, and I haven't gone there much since. Instead, I turned to more macroeconomic explanations of poverty. But I'm probably about to turn all that waffling on its head this month as I revisit Moynihan. But I can tell you confidently on the gut level, that Tom Leykis has it dead right when it comes to dating, sex and family values. I haven't heard him misspeak yet.

Although I don't listen as often as perhaps a conservative pundit ought to, I do sense something conspicuously dysfunctional about today's relationships. Cobb's Rule #1 is that "There is marriage, and there is everything else. Everything else doesn't matter." So I don't really give spit credibility to 'relationships'. As I was saying not long ago, you would think with the diseases and trifling people out there, young folks ought to get it through their heads that it ought to be all about getting to the alter in one piece. Nevertheless, they amazingly seem to sidle half-assed into 'relationships' and wonder what's wrong.

So I'm thinking here, as I look at Ambra's talk about what men do wrong, that I should jump onboard this meme and take it to the next phase. Because clearly, if Leykis is making money, there's not enough daddy work going on and perhaps I can be of service.

The more I think about it, the more I need to slap myself for not doing more. Especially as I get into this gay marriage discussion, it sounds like all I am is 'against' while not saying what I'm for. Furthermore, a lot of confusion surrounds my position as conservative, as if conservative blacks have the same exact puritan hangups as our non-black cousins. And so I think I'll start a new category, Boys & Girls. I'll test it out with the readership and use the best of it for my own kids.

The Press Kit

Michael David Cobb Bowen is the blogger and political cartoonist 'Cobb'. He writes from the perspective of a moderate conservative Republican representing the 'Old School' of African American culture and values. In his 15 year career of writing as a poet and essayist he has been called the Ralph Ellison of his generation.

Bowen was raised in middle-class black Los Angeles the oldest of five children by Catholic and Episcopalian parents who worked civil service jobs and engaged in grass roots political activism. He attented Catholic schools and went on to pursue his degree in Computer Science after a distinguished highschool career and a series of odd- including union jobs.

In college he was twice elected National Finance Officer of the National Society of Black Engineers. He went on to work for the Xerox Systems Group, Pilot Executive Software, Arbor Software and his own consultancies. He is currently a Data Architect for a major US consultancy specializing in Business Intelligence and Sarb-Ox compliant systems.

He is a free-lance writer of note in internet circles. Never far from issues of race, politics and culture he has written extensively in public online spaces since 1993 from The Well to Cafe Utne where he was host of the Society Conference. He is the author of many controversial websites including Boohab's Factotum and the Race Man's Home Companion.

Today, he is a Large Mammal and member of the Bear Flag League of conservative California bloggers. His current projects include Vision Circle, a black progressive group blog and XRepublic, a model for a virtual parliament. Most notably, he is the founder of The Conservative Brotherhood whose 15 blogging authors have become the defacto voice of the Black Conservatism online.

(and then Charlie Rose says: Welcome!)

Other interesting facts:

Bowen was an original member of the Young Simbas and still celebrates Kwanzaa.

Bowen is a member of Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity, the frat of Thurgood Marshall, MLK and others of great distinction.

Bowen has an insider's acquaintance with the black upper-middle and upper class and their organizations such as the Links and the Boule, as well as the black private school cliques of late 70s Los Angeles.

Bowen considers himself a Hayekian, a pragmatist, an economic Chicagoan, and a solid geopolitical neoconservative. He is a civil libertarian that supports civil unions for gays but not 'gay marriage'.

Bowen maintains strong ties to the black progressive political tradition and is trying to influence it and reconcile the strengths of black nationalism and black consciousness with what he calls the "politics of social power". He is a strong integrationist and remains weakly positive on Affirmative Action.

Ambra & Macaroni

I had no idea that Seattle had a monorail, and if I hadn't gotten temporarily lost with Ambra Nykol the other night, I never would have known.

In the end we found a joint called the Ikon Grill which looked like something of a cross between a circus tent, a grandmother's living room and lamp museum. The scallops and wild rice were the bomb. She had a $12 bowl of their legendary macaroni & cheese.

Ambra's cool. She impresses me as a wonderfully independent minded person who has time to be curious, but not time to be wasted. She'll go anywhere once. I probably spent more time shooting off my mouth than I should have, and on retrospect I would have liked to have asked her a bunch more questions - interview style. But I do know that like me, she's an east-coaster at heart, though she stays in the west. She comes from a family of over-achievers and sees through most people's BS. She knows about that crowd who used to instigate paper bag and ruler tests and like me, quickly tired of it. Well, maybe I wasn't so quick, regressive as I am becoming.

We talked about so much of everything it's hard to remember what. A lot about blogging cliques, the future of TCB, the Blogher conference, XRepublic, my Ex (see, I should have shutup) and the philosophy at Google. I also know that I don't know Ambra's real name. Apparently, she has experienced cyberstalking headaches on occasion. She's not phased by it but, better safe than sorry. We both wonder what the Mac Diva looks like and agree that Oliver Willis is a basketcase and that EJ Flavors is cool.

I felt the need to expound upon the lonly existence in the margin of the fringe of the fraction of the minority of upper-middle class black life on the right as we sat at the table in the front in the corner in the light. I think I turned a bit sentimental reminescing about love lost and found. How many times have I met brilliant, beautiful black women in the American diaspora? At the level of seeking company, I almost sympathize with Debra Dickerson's latest complaint. Of course it's not enough simply to be wanted, but to be wed. And while I have no doubt that Ambra will land on her feet, I couldn't help but recognize how outnumbered we are - especially earlier that evening at the bar of Wild Ginger. Perhaps I speculate too much about how much of single life is spent in the ultimate pursuit, but then again I was being a bit too much about my past instead of her future that evening.

We must have spent a good couple of hours at the grill, I had a glass of port while she lingered over a bowl of fresh strawberries that our itchy waiter kept trying to snatch away. Time flew and soon it was time to break out. As we walked through the homeless jungle, I kept trying to switch sides to insulate her from various mumbling miscreants without seeming too obvious about it. Finally the weather was just about right for the Eddie Bauer turtleneck I was sporting, and the fresh air was getting crisper. Just right to clear the webs and alcohol.

I met Ambra Nykol! I feel so cool now, and yes she is that smart and does look that good.

High & Low

Now that my entire family is out of town and the house is clean and quiet, I am at liberty. But since I've got the the need to blog, I may as well make my phonecalls redundant by chronicling my inane activities.

All morning I've been shooting cops in the head because they have the nerve to interrupt my mindless criminal activity. For 90 days in Los Santos, I've known where to find grenades. Today, finally I've gone buck wild. Nobody was safe, not civilians, not fellow bangers, not firetrucks putting out the first of the exploding cars. I played for 6 hours and now my thumb hurts.

This afternoon, I'm heading downtown to MOCA and then to a chamber orchestra concert. Mladi is performing. It should be good to be downtown in the evening. I'm anxious to see glitter. Blog at 11.

Workin'

I have been working my butt off for the past three weeks. There doesn't seem to be an end in sight, but finally I'm getting to the point where it looks like there can be some payoff.

As I write this, I'm in some mall town called Federal Way in the glorious state of Washington. Off in the distance is Mount Rainier looking like something out of a picture of paradise. It's an astoundingly massive mountain standing alone. It locks onto your eyeballs like a campfire. You just can't help but stare at it. It gives you a sense of, if I wasn't so sophisticated I could see myself worshiping it.

By some freakishness explained better by geographers it doesn't get dark around here until 9pm. The weather has been perfect. Everybody says that this is the best time of year to be in and around Seattle. The Blue Angels are coming to town and this weekend are the hydroplane races. With any luck, I'll be hooking up with TCB mate Ambra Nykol. I've been eating on expense money, shrimp, steak, oysters, margaritas and more shrimp. It's almost relaxing and refreshing. But I'm still not out of hell yet.

We're competing with Microsoft for a massive contract at this rather large aircraft manufacturing company which shall remain nameless. The pressure is relentless, and as alpha geek, I can't afford to lose my touch - even though I did this morning, big time. It was one of those days when the smallest change throws everything into chaos. We've regrouped of course and are back on track, but today at lunch I wanted to flush myself down the toilet.

It turns out, fortunately, that some of the new technology we have is astonishingly fast. Although I haven't had much occasion to use it, I engineered a database with it this evening that turned a 15 minute chore into a 7 second blink of the eye. I don't quite understand the technology, but am satisfied that it's magic. I kinda like to leave the mystery.

Last night I fell asleep with the television on. So I dreamt that I was a fitness instructor and people around me kept saying how many pounds they lost with my amazing new method. I fell asleep face up and so I woke up this morning with a twisted ankle. The sheets at the bottom of the bed wouldn't budge and my foot was heeled over at a bizarre angle. I limped into the shower at 5:30am and found out how cold the water gets. Very. But it still didn't wake me up.

Nothing wakes me up these days except for anxiety. I keep thinking about how I might have solved that technical problem that I still haven't fixed. Why don't those JDBC drivers work? Which instance of Tomcat is actually running on my PC? How am I going to load those rate tables? I know I'm sleepy but I can't go back to bed. It's morning, and a dozen bored engineers have to listen to me demonstrate.

I didn't expect to demonstrate. I expected to walk people through a build. But they've got people on Webex and I've got to narrate to an agenda. I hereby create a new acronym: 'IGTOFTS'. I'm getting too old for this shit. But it pays well. Not well enough for me to raise and house three kids in Southern California, but objectively well. I don't want to live in Seattle - not right now I don't think, but I considered it once.

I think the people up here look like small town people. That's the downside of putting away the stress. It's really not necessary for me to get that BMW 540 I'm pricing out, but it's what I ought to have in Los Angeles. Up here, it would be extravagant. Up here, I'm too good looking. I'd get too bored. At the mall food court, a kid was wearing a T-shirt that said "I make the rules because I have the dick." I kid you not. I don't mean to be uncharitable; there is surely good living up here. But part of the point of Tacoma is that it's Tacoma. The skyline is beautiful but not intimidating. I was raised to live in cities with intimidating skylines.

No matter how many extraordinary systems I architect in my current job, the sales guys will make more money than me. They all expect to retire in 10 years. I'm not a proprietor any longer. I work hard, but not as smart as I used to. But it satisfies my inner geek. I don't have to speak up and be sparkly, I don't have to arrange the meetings. I can be crabby and not worry about all the angles.

The spousal unit and the rest of the family have taken off to their vacation destination. When I go home Friday night, it will be me in my nice quiet house. I'm going to sleep 'til noon like Yogi Bear. I'm going to have beer for breakfast and play Green Day at -2dB. Then I'll start blogging up a storm and maybe do some work on XRepublic. It will be a nice relaxing weekend. Then I'll return here and finish up.

Seattle.

Power Moms: The Wisdom of Breeders

The first time I travelled to Houston I was surprised by a number of things, but the biggest surprise was with something I discovered about myself. I didn't understand children.

I married when I was 33, relatively late, but right on my schedule. I had a ball as a single guy, and I lived in all the cool places. I can recall checking through trashcans looking for empty Haagen-Dazs & Lean Cuisine packages to see if a neighborhood was yuppy enough for me to move in. A decade of that kind of living made me oblivious to the very basics of children. A particularly lazy weekend found no seminars, gallery openings or decent movies. So I ended up wandering to, of all places, a shopping mall. As I stood relaxing over the bannister at the ice rink at the Galleria in Houston, I realized I had no idea how old the children I was looking at were.

Although I haven't made much of it here at Cobb, I can say most decidedly that raising children has made me a much wiser person than I might have otherwise been. It defies the sense that Bhudda might have brought forth, but he was a man out of his time. It's difficult to imagine in the time of Bhudda there might be so many people living a decade of 'single life' before having children. So I wonder if the enlightenment of Bhudda couldn't be matched by anyone today with access to a wealth of research and an extra decade of family-free life. The greatness of the discoveries of the ancient world was that those innovators put together their insights in the absence of clues, whereas today it all seems obvious. Yes, now that the original deed has been done.

The other day at the Bear Flag League Meetup, TCB colleague JC Phillips said something which impressed my by its simplicity. "Community is the first political entity." I've been thinking about how implementations of XRepublic can affect bottoms-up representation. I expect new dense networks to emerge as people start using computers to mediate more of their communications. In fact, this summer I intend to build a parent's networking portal for the folks in my neighborhood. So when polling organizations become disintermediated by groups like this, interesting dynamics will ensue.

As we began discussion about community over at VC, the issue of community organizing arose. My response was this:

One of the fundamental questions is the role of the mom. Having lived in So Cal for 8 years in 3 different neighborhoods, I can tell you that unless and until you have moms sharing responsibilities for each other's kids real community isn't happening.

In the first neighborhood, we had our kids interact with other kids at the public park through their various public programs. There were maybe three full-time staff, and my wife made pals with the number one woman who ran the program. We had her over for my barbecues and we wer basically tight.

In the second neighborhood, more of our kids were in school and most things were school based. There was a real friendliness among the parents at school but we weren't there long enough to establish a lot of bonds.

In the third neighborhood, where I live now, we can see things coming to a real fruition at about the fourth and fifth grade level. This is where kids really start to choose their friends, have sleepovers and parents are making the commitments to get to know each other. (You have to if it's going to be a sleepover). There are three or four families where we are close enough to spontaneously have their kids over our place or ours at theirs. This is a very different level of cooperation than just doing the 'activity based' relationships. When kids are playing sports on the same teams or scouting or going to the same church school, that's one level, but the sleepovers and family outings - that's a different level.

So for me personally there has been a progression of integration with other families that really doesn't seem to get into gear until kids are in the third grade. It becomes clear after a while, who the power moms are in the community. It's all about knowing the power moms.

Now I would say there's going to be a big difference in the quality of community based upon how many women are working. In the last two neighborhoods, there were plenty of stay at home mothers, and if you ask me, that is the single most important determining factor in the quality of community life. It's all about what's going on at 4:20, and if mom is not watching... well, you know what happens. If you shift the burden of organizing and watching children to public institutions, you will by definition get results that are not up to par. I don't believe you can invest properly without fundamentally altering the relationship between kids, the school and parents - which is to say that the school has to be greatly expanded. Where there are working or single mother families, the school has to be day care, park, babysitting, homework monitoring, communications exchange and trusted surrogate. I don't think that there is enough public money for that or that there ever will be, but I could see how making school a place where parents can pick up their kids up to 9pm at night would work.

The term 'community' gets applied to just about every group imaginable here in this country. Yglesias has been mentioning SuicideGirls as porn, but I know that there are such communities of 'pierced lesbians'. What has Conservatives behaving defensively with such things as the Defense of Marriage Act is their interpretation of how politically valid all such communities aim to be. And of course since Liberals tend to speak for everyone, they have managed to pervert, if not invert, concepts of liberty and equality to suggest that all communities are of equal value. Anyone on the outs from the central and traditional core communities are considered political allies, even and especially when those communities of interest are counter-cultural and anti-social. All I need to say is one word: 'Insurgents'.

Despite the popularity of extended childhood and bohemian living amongst our nation's youth, it is reasonable to assess their political value to society independent of their popularity. If they are given political 'voice' which is disproportionate to their contribution to society, then we end up creating democratic institutions which are caustic to the fabric of society. Let me not get to Randian here, but it is not logically consistent to have disinterested parties determining the fate of society. Equal time is not the proper principle, but balance and perspective. Mark dissent for what it is, dissent. Not an equally valid position if only society could be reconstituted.

My personal tar-baby in this discussion is that acerbic comic Janeane Garofalo. While she may or may not be a pierced lesbian, she strikes me very clearly as a chick, in otherwords the anti-mom. She appears by my eyes both intellectually and physically incapable of motherhood, but I am not shunning her for a handicap. Rather I'm saying this is a choice. She needs to be childless and has decided to be precisely that, in persuit of her happiness - the kind of hip happiness that spits at the very notion of taking her kids ice skating at the mall.

I argue for the humility of parenthood, and in fact I take not a small bit of pride from the fact that as a father of three, I am outnumbered. I cannot exercise control over my children at all times and yet I am constantly providing for their safety and upbringing. This is the humility I find directly incompatible with the hipness of American alternative culture. In other words, hippies make lousy parents. And the whole Hollywood vibe we conservatives can't stand is the self-righetousness of selfish, stylish loudmouth people who believe their politics are the substance of American life, and not the dissent from it. They believe that their alternatives are a flight from oppression, more often than not it is flight from humble responsibility. Doesn't Sally Struthers have her own children?

I am interested to see how the gap is bridged between the priorities and emergent politics of a networked suburban power mom framework and that of the dual earner or single parent framework. When these groups aggregate, howe will their direct priorities influence local politics? Moreover when they inevitably conflict with those who are antagonistic to the fundaments of straight marriage with children, how much leverage is going to be taken by the bohemians? How much will our society give?

It may take a village to raise a child, but let's make sure that the village elders are parents.

Time the Avenger

How on earth am I going to get through it all? I have no idea. There is so much going on that I'm about to pop.

First of all, I just finished up at my last assignment. So now the design doc is done and we sit on our hands for several weeks while the sodbusters in procurement decide whether or not we who have done the brainwork in Research get to do the moneywork of Development. On the other hand, the whole point of this farce is to let the Indians do it cheap. I'm starting to become a red-blooded American asshole. But I'm trying not to got nativist all at once. I'll let the next contract lost push me over the edge. For the moment I am just on edge. That's one.

The new gig has got me wheeling my hooptie all the way out to Westlake Village. Close but far, and they've got the nerve to want me out there at 8am sharp. Damn! Well, at least their spaghetti isn't so tangled as others I've seen this year. It's hands-on for a change. I'm actually building stuff. That's nice. On the other hand, they've got my sites marked as verboten by that firewall dingus, so I can't update pieces of drafts during the day. Not good. That means the 4 day forecast for blogging is dreary. Ahh well. That's why they call it work.

I'm never going to have enough verbiage to describe all the camaraderie at the Summer BFL gathering this weekend at Cal Tech. It's a damned shame because that's at least one thing I know that will get trackbacks. Be that as it may, there are others capable of handling that action in general. Nevertheless, there are some standout moments that I absolutely must address.

Firstly, J. Craig Williams, the fiercely sharp guy who runs the new blog May it Please the Court, helped adjust my thinking on the issues surrounding the Shield Law. I like his attitude, firm and assured. That's what does the convincing - he's not merely logical, but an advocate. What sticks is the notion that one should talk what one knows as a blogger / publisher, for we are called into account for the information we release. You need to understand the import of what communication you do on behalf of sources, whether or not one might be compelled to release their identity. You simply can't get off scott-free; nobody is 'just' a messenger. This is a responsibility that lies independent of one's right to be shielded.

Schneier never answered my question about the self-shielded whistleblower, but I am becoming more convinced that such a thing is possible in the web. Somebody like Cryptome who has decided to be something of a secrets clearinghouse may very well prove to be a precedent sometime in the future. But there are interesting possibilities to be decided when a self-cloaked blabbermouth engages a semi-witting agent to publish news special somebodies want kept quiet. It's a tricky road, but I am more convinced now that there are real possibilities. I am also more convinced now that we may begin to tread into spycraft, and the legal stuff behind that is deadly - just ask Plame or Rove.

Speaking of which.. naaah. Later.

It turns out that just the very kind of guy who ought to get it, it being the future of voting, computer mediated deliberation and all, is too something of a gamer. Marc 'Armed Liberal' Danziger and I will be throwing ideas around to look at the next level of blogospheric organization. If I can manage to crawl out of bed early enough, I'll explain XRepublic to him.

I don't know how I got it in my head that I'd be tossing bourbons back with Gerard. It just seemed like a good idea at the time. He was kind enough not to look at me strangely as I publically persisted with that notion. I simply find it odd that this guy, whom I've known in various joints on the web going back a dozen years, have not met much less had a drink. Maybe I've been watching too many Western movies. Cheers anyway. Maybe it'll be motorcycles in the end.

In typical style, I was bursty at the joint, alternatively being extraordinarily attentive and breathing people in and then doing a ventriloquist whistle to make it sound like Miss Attila is from Brooklyn. I had a ball all in all. What a bunch.

Now I have to go check my head at Dreadnought according to the Gay Patriot. Damn. It's midnight.

What do Black Conservatives Look Like?

This.

Young Republicans in Las Vegas

I'm back from my sojourn in Sin City, and I am naturally struck by the contrast of the nature of the town and the fact that the primary reason I was there was to present in a panel discussion to the Young Republicans National Conference.

At the invitation of Nelson Taylor, I and 6 other panelists engaged a small but curious crowd about the perils and opportunities provided by the New Media. I had worked myself up quite a bit in anticipation of this, my first television appearance in many years. In the end, it was a brisk hour on the dais, with only perhaps about 15 minutes filmed for the ever-curious eye of C-SPAN. The program should be broadcast for American Perspectives sometime in the near future.

Sitting next to me on the panel was Bob Johnson of Right Talk and Free Republic. He was a right amicable fellow who hails from the same part of SoCal where I live. We traded quips and made small talk during our off mic time. He seems like a good guy to know and one who has been around the block. Also on the panel were others interesting, CEO Ravi Singh of ElectionMall, college speaker and ex-hippie Chris Beren, young upstart Nathan Tabor of The Conservative Voice and Bob Eberle. Eberle's GOPUSA.com has a rather massive audience, of course not big enough to satisfy anyone's ambition on the panel. In addition was the very serious Don Irvine of AIM.

The star of the show from the moment he arrived was Bob Eberle who jumped into the middle of conversations whose beginnings obviously had deep roots beyond my ken. Eberle, it turns out, is the owner of the Talon News Service whose employee was the star of one of those huge controversies the blogosphere seems to love so well - none other than Gannon-Gluckert. So it took a moment for me to put two and two together as I overheard him say something to the effect that the Left wanted to try and prove that Bush and Cheney were gay. Eberle was clearly steamed about getting the bad end of a great deal of lefty sharp sticks and I have a feeling that the bad blood left over from that unpleasantness is not going away any time soon. Such matters make me very glad for my day job, because in the end, I could hardly expect less from inside the Beltway.

Of all the panelists, I was clearly the one with the fewest partisan axes to grind. Certainly mine is the smallest of all their websites - as these gents seemed to be angling more towards media mogul end of the business. I knew that coming in and decided to play the techie role ahead of time. I actually expected a smaller panel and a larger audience so I was a bit disappointed that I didn't get to go into more detail about the future I see. Nevertheless, knowing it was just an hour I figured I could get only a bit in edgewise anyway.

What I didn't get a chance to say which needed saying was anything about Creative Commons when the question of copyright was raised. I got the feeling that it was something of a softball aimed at the big publishers in the group. I believe it was Eberle, although it might have been Tabor who made a very explicit point of declaring his 100% support of current copyright law. It is perfectly right and proper that any CEO of a media company should, but it rather cut to the heart of what would have been a very interesting discussion, had we the time and opportunity to do so.

I would contend that in the bottom-up world I would like to see coming from the citizens of the United States - those of us who are the most demanding and persistent participants in democratic politics in the world - that our net output far exceeds that of the big media. And since most of us bloggers are aware of the Creative Commons, as primary sources, we can control copyright through our choices which will become ossified by convention. In other words, who cares about the 500,000 words copyrighted daily in the NYTimes when there are 1000 times that amount coming through Creative Commons in the blogosphere? Sooner or later the expensive words won't count and the cheap ones will prevail, which was a point I wanted to make by saying 'We hold these truths to be self-evident' and then mockingly adding 'TM'.

Since I for one consider myself quite strongly in what we often call the 'reality based world' and am probably a bit more scientific than the average panelist, I'm not particularly concerned about a subset of the blogosphere's willingness to undermine copyright per se. There is value in a writer who interviews a subject matter expert and then copyrights that interview as a matter of course in doing business with his publisher, but there is perhaps greater value in the subject matter expert speaking directly through the New Media. This, in my estimation, is the whole point, and I wonder if the implications of this inherent conflict is apparent to those who would cannibalize the MSM with their New Media methods. Or as Ravi Singh put it so eloquently, do you want votes or money?

As for myself, I'm analytical and an idea man. As I arrived early to the forum, I wandered around as the Young Republicans themselves were gnashing through the parliamentary moshpit of credentialling and standing of their member organizations and delegates. It took me back to my own college days and memories of interminable meetings seemingly tailor-made by lobbiests for the caffiene and amphetamine industry. While I hope the grinding continues, it would be much more efficient to do it online so as not to mess with the schedules of the queues of panelists who drive at breakneck speeds across the desert Southwest. Another point of XRepublic. And so while there are a host of points of orders and arcane etiquettes still very much in action in the halls of power in this nation, I am hopeful that the 60% who sit out most elections are of the same sentiment as I. Show me the bottom line and let me vote, and stop wasting my time with all the foofoo. I think the ideas will come through if we are courageous and bold enough to speak the truth and commit to be reality-based. An idealistic position which I quite well understands suffers in the face of the fact that the unwashed millions very often require direction and prodding from those of us who bother to lead. Nevertheless as for me and those like me, I'll have my freedom thank you.

I have come to understand and respect the opacity and purposeful indirection in law. It's confusing so as to dilute and diffuse the power of those who would just as soon bull through it. But when it comes to citizens coming to concensus, I much prefer discrete clarity. Then again, that's why I studied computer and not political science. So out in this world of citizen activists, a bit of plain speaking is a damned good thing and to hell with the shackles of copyright. Take this from the great-great grandson of someone who was forbidden to read by law. Our words will be free.

The spousal unit crossed me on this point all the way to dinner at the Luxor Steakhouse that evening. She said that if my book or my words were being used by somebody else and taking money out of the Bowen Family Trust, that I'd be running around looking for brains to splatter. She's probably right but I wouldn't let her have the moment. After all, I was paying for the steaks. Which I guess made her point after all.

All in all I had a fabulous time in Las Vegas, whose large contingent of average-looking people on the make never ceases to amuse. It was a good weekend, and I thank Nelson for the invite - big time, as well as Bob Johnson for all the pizza.

It Ain't Apple Pie, but..

For the Banger

Lee continues with her emails and we have some hella deep discussions. She has informed me that she has referred some of her old clients toward the blog, and so I feel obligated to recognize. This one is for the ex-gangbanger.

I am the oldest of five kids, four of us boys. I grew up in a knuckle-up neighborhood in the 70s. No knives, no guns, but on any particular day you might find yourself on the bad end of a flurry of fists. I wrote about two of my notable encounters with bangers, but it doesn't really end there. I also knew a kid named Dana, who was as far as I knew, the founder of the Gangsta Crips. Dana was scared to death, and he never wanted to be scared again.

The reasons for banging are always as simple as anything a 7th grader can understand. Necessity. Tradition. Respect. Protection. It's the choice between being a man or a mark when the man's way is the gang. I think it is practically impossible to choose another way when you are a boy, because there is nothing a boy wants more than to be a man. Boys always follow men.

Back about 8 years ago, I had a brief correspondance with Monster Kody Scott, LA's most famous gangbanger and late resident of Pelican Bay. He was just getting out and had been putting together his prison writing - he sent me a package for review. Reading what I did of his work and knowing what I did of his life story, I realized that he understood deeper than just about anyone the Code of the Warrior. Except he wasn't anyone's warrior but his own - the leader of an outcast tribe. But Kody's most important lesson for me was that of the affinity of boys to manly deeds and the absolute need they have for each other.

If it was my job to tell how to keep an ex-banger straight, I would offer the same advice Kody did, in reverse. Understand the effect you have on a young man and be his leader.

Nothing keeps a man on a path as knowing that his example is being closely followed by others who want to be just like him. Nothing dogs a man like knowing that he's being scrutinized by others who hate his guts. For us men, this is what makes us or breaks us. Our reputation, our word, what people know us for. That's what we're all about. This is a harsh and cruel world, and all you've got are your few skills and strengths, and you need a space where those count for something, where people give you a break because they understand what you're all about.

No man wants to start from scratch, ever. It means clawing your way up, like a boy, all over again. Why? Necessity. Tradition. Respect. Protection. But if your reputation is broken and you know it, there is no other way. If and when you know you have got to change, then you have to start at the bottom of something new and work your way up. There is no such thing as conversion. You make yourself into something by doing the work. Than you become this larger being that contains the old thing but feeds itself only by the new thing. And in that you become wiser than you thought you could be.

Anyone who gets much past the 7th grade mentality and sees more than just one 'hood, knows that the gang is the way of the mark, and not the way of the man. There are only three gangs that survive in America. The cops, the military and the CIA. They rule. Nuff said.

And do check out Solomon.

It's All About the BBQ

Why Is This Man Smiling?

80s Party Vibe

Once again I watched with the spousal unit PDiddy's new comedy showcase. It's almost impossible to imagine, given how he poses in this joint that he got his start as a dancer. Not that I've been watching any videos lately, but I'm fairly certain that the only rapper with any cred on the dance floor is Usher, and well, is he a rapper? If the death of R&B foreshadows the death of black dance music, we've got a bigger problem.

So right now I am listening to Tracie Spencer and it's about one of the very last vibes of the mid and late 80s. So I'd like to take a pause for the cause and bow my head in a moment of silence for the age when being a popular black muscial star meant you were serious about dancing and making music to dance to.

Nocera - Summertime Summertime

Lisa Lisa & Cult Jam - I Wonder If You Take Me Home

Paula Abdul - Straight Up

RFTW - Oh Sheila

Orbit - The Beat Goes On

My Prerogative - Bobby Brown

Teddy's Jam - Teddy Riley

Hashim - Al Naafiysh

Aleem - Release Yourself

Twilight 22 - Electric Kingdom

Klymaxx - The Men All Pause

Cybotron - Clear

Zapp - I Can Make You Dance

Morris Day - Tricky

Critical Mass

It occurs to me that I have compiled enough material to write a small book. I've already got the title. 'Keeping It Right: The Future of the Talented Tenth in the Post Civil Rights Era'.

Or something like that.

From the pages of Cobb, I'm going to assemble and repurpose 40 to 60 essays and reviews, and try to get published. I really have no excuse not to. It's time to wrap this up and create something for the non-blog universe. Especially now that I'm getting invited to conferences and whatnot, I should have an artifact.

What should I cover?

Music & Books Meme

There are a couple memes floating around about books and music. I'll bite.

I'm reading Julio Cortazar, and that's about all.
His collection of short stories are fairly interesting but leave me a bit cooler than I thought they might. He has a sense of existential irony which is something like that of Borges. It's been a while since Borges has intrigued me so seeing it in Cortazar makes me wonder if I might still be the same me who was so intrigued with Borges or has Borges changed me into someone who is disturbed by the sad insight that self is not self? See, I can do this stuff too, with smaller less sophisticated words. In my realm these are strengths.

I own probably only 400 books which is something of a shock, because I thought surely I had double that. I just talked to Pops the other day and he's trying to get his library up to 1000 from 750.

I have about 13000 mp3s but they're not all scanned. I lost half of my collection to hard drive failure and now have to re-rip. However I gave a couple crates of CDs to my sister after my last ripathon before the crash. Having survived the wake of that disaster I find myself in the zone of Not Wanting. So I get along with less.

I find myself attracted to Jay-Z and Linkin Park's Collision Course CD which is the latest thing I purchased. Before that I bought four CDs by guitarist Paco de Lucia.

I'm kinda into soloists these days, so I'm listening to a lot of:

Vladimir Horowitz

Marcus Roberts

Bill Frissell

I've got a feeling that I'm going to be looking for some contemporary Jazz soon. Something like Lounge Lizards, Bad Plus... Either that of Klezmeric jazz of some sort. Also for some reason I'm just stuck on Cibo Matto's 'Moonchild'.

Oh yeah this: Last week at the Proud Bird, for Father's Day, we had a jazz quintet that had a Mexican dude on trumpet. I have now heard a new possibility in Jazz that I've never heard before, and I'm looking for anyone who knows what I'm talking about - I'm talking about a ripping stentorian trumpet leadership with the kind of blisteringly fast staccatto reminescent of Mexican troubadour bands in the cast of jazz improvization.

Too Real for Memos

The other day I surprised myself by recalling a couple incidents in my youth that I don't often think about: two fights I had with a couple of gangbangers. Not for any good reason, though. I have very few thoughts worth supressing. But these two fights reminded me of the kind of person I am, tough. I probably haven't given myself enough credit for their influence on me, nor have I spoken much about them to anyone to see how others might reflect on them.

The first incident took place just off Crenshaw Boulevard one block south of Adams in the mid 70s as my brother and I came back from a church dance by bus. It was about 10 or 11 at night. Some Crip named 'Punkin' or 'Pookie' tried to jack me with a knife. I told my brother to stay on Crenshaw while Pookie and I took it to the alley. I basically told Pookie that he was chickenshit for fighting with a knife, and he wasn't going to get my money. Pookie was stunned that I never heard of him. The fact was that he was in my turf, and sure enough some of my buds happened by. Pookie took off.

The other time was at Vineyard Playground where we had supervised play. The Parks and Rec guy, having seen myself and another Crip trading blows offered to hold my glasses for me. I was a horrible puncher and wasn't doing a good job blocking blows, but the kid couldn't hurt me. He kept getting tired and asking if I quit. After a while the Parks and Rec guy got embarrassed and made us take our fight to the bathroom so we couldn't be seen. I emerged bloodied and defiant. The other kid kept talking shit but he knew he hadn't beaten me.

I know what it's like to look at my face in the mirror and marvel at the pain I feel even though it doesn't show other than black eyes and bloody nose. After Vineyard I remembered that my friend Teedee's father taught him how to box. My father never showed us how to fight with our fists, though we were naturally gifted wrestlers. I always thought that if I didn't wear glasses, the Vineyard fight would have been more completely mine. I wonder if I should teach my son how to fight.

I imagined that my own son might fight someone at school causing the lot of us to be lectured by a middle school vice principal. I could not forsee anything but a pseudo-intellectual drubbing including all of the dainty drivel that accompanies such conflict avoidance. And so I envisioned myself replying in kind with the following threat:

I'm going to write an essay with your name in it that will keep you awake at night and plague you with self-doubt for the rest of your life. You have studiously avoided physical conflict your entire life and you have no concept of right and wrong when fists start flying. All violence is senseless to you because you are willfully ignorant of the dynamics of combat. You are ruled by fear and you lackadaisically punt off your responsibility to third parties who take your outrage at face value. You are the kind of people who get people like me killed.

I imagine her face going pale and having the same sort of bewilderment as those two Crips. She is beaten in a way she never expected. This is part of that essay.

My daughter and I spent last Saturday together hanging out. She was wearing 'baller bands' from her Awana and Score classes. She gave me one of the brightly colored rubber wristbands to wear. The blue one said 'Strength' and 'Courage'. Even though it was missing 'Wisdom', I thought it very appropriate.

Lately, I haven't been able to get juiced up over any of the (insert insulting phrase here) that passes for political discussion these days. Especially over the Downing Street Memo, I simply cannot grasp the motivation of those who get amped over the 'smoking gun'. It's not a smoking gun, it's a memo. But like vice-principals, for these people a memo, a vitrolic essay is the currency of note. The Blogosphere self-ignites over these words and battles with words. I find myself just about as indifferent as the Cisco routers that spit and multiplex the bits across the fiber.

They say that nobody who survives to adulthood has weaknesses, per se. They simply overuse their strengths. When there is a crisis, people respond to the crisis with their strengths. Legislators legislate. Warriors war. Whiners whine. Bloggers blog. Everything just goes a little faster, and people are just that more passionate about their own passion. Very few actually change direction. Everybody who was a baby Bin Laden before 9/11 is just a little more encouraged. As MLK said, the test of a man comes during the crisis. Everyone is a bit more true to their true selves.

During war, people have their excuse. Somewhere on the planet there was a man who has lived all of his life in fear that his holy book would be pissed on, and when he heard the news he went out to fulfill his destiny. The Crip, the Vice Principal, the Secretary of Defense, the Memo Leaker. They are all doing what we expect them to do, and for most of their lives they will be meeting their expected opposition with their salient yet conditioned responses. How rarely are they gobsmacked with the unanticipated. It is said that you can see in 3D if your glasses are Red and Blue. I doubt it.

On the tube last night was 'The Girl at the Cafe'. It's a pretentious romantic comedy written and produced by Hollywood people doing what they do. And yet there is that juxtaposition of destiny and the unexpected truth in the moment we are all conditioned to know and never express or acknowledge.

In the news today is 'news' via Kelo that the Government can appropriate private property for their own ends without offering compensation. What a shock!

How Americans stand in abeyance of the fact of Crips wanting to take you to the alley and steal your money at the point of a knife is beyond me. We have so many laws and so many movies and so many essays and so many history books and so many memos. We have so many interpreters and critics and pundits and evaluators and negotiators. Where is the Strength, Courage and Wisdom? Where are the people who turn the desk upside down and stand eyeball to eyeball with the enemy?

There's no way to finish this essay. It was finished before I wrote it. I know the answer. I know that the answer is not a memo that keeps you awake at night riddled with self-doubt, and I defy anyone who says it is.

Since the 70s, I've never walked the city streets at night without a knife.

Happy Dad

Pops

The best thing about having the kind of father that everybody loves and respects is knowing you can do it too, and sometimes even thinking that you can do it better. Today I'm going to think about Pops in the ways I know I will never match, because it's all about him today.

I often think about my father not in terms of who he was or is as a man, but in terms of what he made us do. They say you've got to break down a person in order to build them up. It's not my turn to do that with my kids yet - they are still in elementary school so that's mom's job. Pops didn't wait so long or so I seem to recall.

When I got straight As and a C in handwriting in the 6th grade, my father made me practice my handwriting every night. He made me draw precise loops on page after page. When we moved to our new house across the street, the weeds were taller than I was and the house was pink. None of those things lasted long. My father who served with the Marine Corps at Pendleton was all about discipline. And so we learned the discipline of cutting weeds and painting houses, and painting sidewalks, and trimming trees, and replacing windows, and carpentry.

We four boys were addressed as 'The Crew', which meant working crew. On the refrigerator was the infamous 'List'. We not only had to make the house spotless, we had to clean the neighbor's side yard and the gutter. During the summer months, Pops would make an occasional 'pop call' driving home the County issued 1975 Chevy Vega to make sure we weren't just playing football and Monopoly, but actively showing off to the neighborhood how tightly the Bowen family was run.

Our driveway consisted of two strips of concrete with a path of grass in the middle that extended back to the garage. In the front yard, the grass remained. Behind the redwood gate (that we installed) (yeah it was fun using the pole diggers and setting the 4x4s in concrete) Pops had us rip up all of the grass and have a six inch deep trench between the concrete strips. Into this trench was placed four 50lb bags of ornamental tree bark. The bark filled the spaces around a dozen geometrically shaped stepping stones like a sea of Lucky Charms. Every summer we had to wash the bark. Each piece was about the size and shape of a computer mouse. There were thousands of them. We picked them up and washed them in one of our 30 gallon trashcans, set them out to dry and then replaced them in the driveway of Hell. Then we closed the redwood gate so nobody could see it.

This was one of many construction projects at Wellington Road. We converted the garage twice. Once into a neighborhood theatre complete with custom built seats and a stage, and then later split it in two into an office and my bedroom. We placed the studs at 18 inch intervals and braced them so that the wall would survive an earthquake. For the Bicentennial, we painted the back of the house and the garage red white and blue. We dug out the rose bush and poured a couple of tons of concrete to extend the patio. We built several basketball contraptions, none of which survived the slam dunks of the neighborhood kids. We built various fences and even a tool shed.

Our two favorite projects were, of course, the go kart and the Two Storey. The Two Storey was our playhouse, complete with a trap door and a hangin' post. It had, of course, two stories and from the top which was a little over 8 feet off the ground (with 2x4x10s from Cooper's Lumber over next to Sears Pico) we had a nice view of things. The hangin' post was a 2x4 that overhung the concrete path that led from the patio alongside the garage to the back corner of the yard where the Two Storey stood. We arranged triple pulley rigs and jacked up objects too heavy to lift; we swung from it. The Two Storey was orange and green the first time, then dark red later. We cut geometric and puzzle shaped windows in it. It was our castle.

The go kart was slow, converted from an old power mower. We cut the blades out and left the axle intact but didn't regear it to do much more than 5mph. Steered with ropes, even the little guys could drive it. Not that we let them often enough.

We were a building family. We even re-creosoted the telephone pole in our backyard. The Wellington house still frequents my dreams. I lived there from 66 to 82. It was in the 'hood, but we were its creators without question. This is what Pops gave us. A home of our own creation, driven by his discipline and determination.

There's so much more I could say about Pops, and inevitably will have to. I could talk about the Angeles National Forest, the jogging at 6 in the morning, the incessent letters, the library, and Saturday morning trips to the film library. He influenced us in so many ways. But today, I'm just thinking about Wellington House and what we made it, because he's the kind of man who leaves things better than the way he found them.

What I Think of You

If you ask me, I'd say that I have been a mediocre blogger for the past couple of months. I've shown some bright spots here and there. At least one or two posts per week have been something to chew on, but the fire that was once Cobb has seemed to have been put on simmer. At the moment, my writing is in something of a transitional period. I have not recently provided enough coverage of the Old School perspective on current events. I let things go to the comic that I should be writing on. I hope to turn that around and pump up the volume.

Still, new people are finding Cobb every day and now that the comments work pretty much like I want them, I am getting real feedback. Furthermore, I am hearing from folks out of the blue (who are not actually all about Texas HoldEm). This has provided me with a great deal of encouragement, so I wanted to send an appreciation.

I think my readers are people who want to challenge themselves to think outside of the box. They want detail and novelty but they also want me to get to the bottom line. I write for people who are constructing a vision of the world and I want to provide them with the raw materials of argument. What I often hear that gives me a great deal of satisfaction is that people don't often agree with me, but they appreciate my clarity. That's just the right balance.

I've heard from many journalists, once. I often wonder what it is that gets them halfway to me and then throws them off the trail. I've been invited to provide material for an interview or guest write and then suddenly they disappear. Whenever such rejections occur and no reason is given, I am left to search my insecurities. I don't search long, but do have a theory which is that my novelist's sense of profanity and self-depreciation leads journalists to believe that I am some sort of rap figure (I dunno), seemingly articulate yet profoundly retarded or abrasive and rude. Or it could just be spelling. Perhaps they consider me hostile to journalists. Well who knows, because they don't say. The notable exception would be Grace Lee, who lives up to her name. It's annoying being teased and I wish you journalists would cut that out, especially since nobody has really covered what The Conservative Brotherhood is all about. I find that relatively astounding.

Now that I think about it, this would be a good time for me to compile a 'best-of' so that people can examine my fundamental cases for conservatism and the Republican party, which is very close to the center of why Cobb was initiated. Once I tried to assess the most popular posts (by number of comments) at the blog. I'd probably be wiser just to pay my host to enable their hit counter. But my preliminary results told me that 'Mystery of the Black Blogger' was a biggie, as was 'Man on Fire'. I only remember the silly ones that blew up at the moment, but I do recall that the specifically racial stuff was a bigger draw. I don't consider Cobb a race-man's work but I don't avoid going there. Instead I prefer to focus on culture and politics from an analytical perspective. I am rather espcially proud that recently, my recommended reading list for college-bound black kids has been getting a lot of hits as well as 'Return of the Bogard' my advice to the young brothers on success in America. I very much appreciate that. I don't think that I sustain enough readers to post an open thread, but you can consider this one open. Tell me which subjects you'd like to hear pontification about, friends.

I have successfully launched my professional websites, and like LL Cool J in that movie with Robin Williams, I like to keep my peas and potatoes in separate piles, only to mix in the stomach. I have no way of knowing who frequents both but I do know there are a few people at work who know about Cobb and Cubegeek.

I am bouyed and sustained by my readers. I am happy to make you laugh with The Comic, associate new ideas with Critical Theory and walk you a mile in my shoes with Diary of a Black Man. I'm going to try to do a bit more with Local Deeds and Domestic Affairs in the coming months. Thanks to all of you for stopping by.

The Natural

Ah the existentials of blackness. So complex. So unnegotiable.

I'm annoyed again, this time because I hear little history in the blackness stuff. But let me say my few things then shutup.

Blackness leapt into existence a generation or so ago. It was constructed. It was an intellectual and cultural construction, not simply a response to 'conditions'. Nor was it a part of the 'legacy of slavery'. It was an action, a project, a mission, a Struggle. It was about asserting pride, political cohesion and a new outlook on self, power, brotherhood, integration and religion. The creators of blackness were an intellectual elite. Interestingly they were not so elite then as they are now, but they were an elite. How soon we forget.

Fortunately, I have some photographic evidence to present in the form of these covers from the Johnson Publication of Negro Digest. There was also Freedomways and The Liberator. If you were to be black in the ferment of the Black Consciousness Movement, you had to be intellectually sharp and you had to keep up.

There is no such ferment today, and most African Americans wear blackness like an old suit. People consider themselves 'naturually black' and black can be anything anybody African American wants it to be, generally posed in defensive terms. But I say there is nothing natural about blackness and anybody who says so is ignorant, lazy or both.

So here's the soundbite and anchor of this talking point. That thing which we now call an 'Afro' was once known to all of us who wore them in the 70s as a 'Natural'. The point of calling it a 'natural' was to distinguish it from permed and processed hair. Thoughtful decisions were made to understand the implications of accepting European standards of beauty and after this thought was born the natural. The Dashiki fit into the same framework. But if there was an existential breakthrough to be had in doing all of this, I don't think we have to consider it that much of a trek. How long does it take to 'get it'? How long? Not long? The Natural was not natural any more than dreadlocks are natural or cornrows are natural. Wearing a natural was a sacrament, on outward expression of an inward commitment. Today, the afro is just another hairdo.

I hold, and have always held, that the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Arts, Black Consciousness, Free Speech, Gay Rights and Feminist movements were all resounding successes, and what took place in the streets and universities have changed our society for the better. We're all multiculturalists now. But like rural electrification, it's done. We're all on the grid and dependent on it. We can't take it for granted although we do, but we also can't keep pretending that it's as electrifying today as it always was. Somebody telling me today that they are proud of their blackness runs my temperature up about as much as hearing them describe the three prong outlets in their house. If you're not an electrical engineer you don't know anything about electricity worth knowing. If you're not in the intellectual elite, there's nothing about blackness you know worth knowing. OK? Blackness is no longer a revolutionary concept, it is a commodified consumer good.

There's a reason that Amiri Baraka is not heard. He said what needed to be said when the time was right. That time has passed. Johnson Publications ain't publishing. The world is no longer interested in the plight of the American Negro. A more interesting question might be, what hasn't Toni Morrison said that needs saying in black literature? I think that no further ground needs to be broken, but that we should be building upon the foundation we know. It's not about being black or getting to blackness or even defending it. It's about moving up.

Blackness is not over. We are not at the end of blackness. Black pride remains. But the Black Consciousness Movement is over, and blackness is not going to undergo a radical revision. There will be no new Black Nationalism, there will only be conservatism of the best of the old black nationalism. There will be no new Black Arts Movement, but there will be an auction at Sotheby's some years hence of Murray's manuscripts. There will be no new Black Consciousness Movement, we can testify that as cool as Soul II Soul, Junior and Loose Ends were, they couldn't bring British Blacks closer to American Blacks. Despite the hopes of the 90s, the New World Afrikan Diasporan Hookup did not materialize. It's just Dave Chappelle going to Durban, not them coming here (Mark Matabene notwithstanding). For all the hype of hiphop's revolutionary power, the indisputable fact is that it has brough American whites closer to black culture than it has blacks in other nations. Black culture and blackness are dispersed like pollen in the air, but that's not agriculture.

I'm going to stick out a complaint which has been irking me for a few days and leave it. I've googled the Great Plains and found fascination in the flow of the Missouri River. And my gut tells me that I could flow along that river for days without passing any land on any side that belongs to African Americans. It takes me back to a painful subject which is how the West was Won and blacks lost out on getting land. It's a reason I am not compelled to watch whatever emotional whining is coming out of that new show on television called 'Out of the West' or some such melodramatic schmaltz. There could be great lands here in the US with African American deedholders. But there is not, and someday that bill will come due.

It will come due because human ambition is what it is, and while some are satisfied with just human rights, some will strive for civil rights. While some will remain fixated there, some will want more. Many will be comforted by social equality, integration and acceptance, but some will continue to desire and amass power, wealth and influence.

When I speak of the Old School I am working an intellectual patch which is itself a construction. It is a direct outgrowth of an integrationist, soft cultural nationalism of a scholarly bent. It is elitist, intellectual and literary and bears a burden that hiphop cannot carry. I tried, really I tried. It is conservative of African American patriotic traditions (like Booker's ethos) and it is also modern and integrative of the Western world, (like James Weldon Johnson's ethos). It is nationalist and conflicts with my globalism I must confess. It is also ideosynchratic and flavorful (like Jess B Semple) which conflicts with my appreciation for the classics. I haven't figured the whole thing out. But I know that it resonates with blackfolks who are on similar intellectual journeys, as well as with a class of African Americans I believe I know well.

The Old School can be said to be a faction in an African American Culture War. On some days, I'm not entirely sure that war should be waged, and yet I believe it to be inevitable. But like the Natural, it isn't natural. It's a construct, it's a framework for understanding - a solution to a problem developed by thinking ahead and generating ferment you believe people will understand and engage. At bottom, I don't think it takes long to understand. How long? Not long. People will 'get it'. It will provide what people need, and if it works, I'll go the way of Amiri Baraka in due time.

I want people to leave blackness alone. It cannot bear any more overloading with meaning, especially since it has been so commodified. We need to recognize new distinctions which are applicable to out contemporary lives, and simply being black and proud doesn't cut it. As long as we've known rivers, when will we control a county off the Missouri? It doesn't seem to me that talking about being black outside of the historical context will deliver.

Abbreviation

If I were working for a sane organization, I would be in London this week. But if the organization were working for a sane customer, there would be no need for me to go. As it stands, I need to go but I am not going - a victim of dueling insanities. As such, and having watched Steve Zissou, I am likely to get on people's nerves this week as I crank up the persnickety machine.

I don't like the unpleasantness of failure, and I don't like telling people they are behaving stupidly. But I'm going to have to do the latter or suffer the former.

Pray for me. I might not blog much this week.

Music in Context

Pops dropped by the other day to give me a chocolate cake and hip me to Zocalo. I was too late to get a seat for this cat named Gary Phillips who is a writer and associate of Jervey Tervalon. Tervalon rememebers Los Angeles just like I do. He and Wanda Coleman don't get enough attention when it comes to portraits of LA. Perhaps those days will come to a close. I won't be there to edge the momentum tomorrow night, but clearly the joint is sold out.

What suprised me about Pops this time was that he has gotten into hiphop. Now I don't know why a 70 year old man needs to be listening to Jay-Z for so I had him explain this to me. He does it because it's new. He's looking for context.

We're a lot alike in that respect. We go sometimes on a musical tear and try to absorb some new artist or sub-genre. For us, jazz is second nature. While I had my back to the TV which was tuned to the digital cable jazz channel, I quickly identified Wayne Shorter and a couple others while I mistook somebody for Joe Zawinul. I didn't know that I didn't know Chet Baker, so at the very least I've got one more thing to learn. It's so easy, Pops said, for him to talk jazz and make all kinds of associations. All of the greats are gone and so they're easy to contextualize. Their body of work is complete, finite. Living artists, hiphop artists in particular, are in flux. It's much more mentally challenging to talk about hiphop in context.

So basically, my pop, the New England liberal scholar likes Ice Cube. He has absolutely no patience or use for Snoop Dogg. Outside of that, he likes Common, doesn't like 50 Cent but won't turn him off completely. He likes DMX but not Jay Z. Although I didn't bring it up, he has raved in the past for Eminem so I wouldn't be surprised if that hasn't changed. He and I both think that Tupac is quite overrated. I didn't catch his opinion of Biggie. He hates Ludacris.

We got around to discussing the 'even white kids listen to hiphop' argument. I think the 'even' is superfluous. Picking up on Jimi Izrael's milestone, even though I disagree with his theory, you basically had to drop the 'even' when the Beasties dropped 'Licensed to Ill'. By that late date, all the crossover has been done both ways. And since then every white kid that listens to hiphop is authentic, says me.

Put it this way. Everybody who rejected black music basically made all that achey-brakey happen. Put that at an arbitrary 30% of the white listening audience who go straight for country. The other 30% went down the grunge and goth track to the exclusion of hiphop. That leaves 40% of whitefolks who, basically by the time Janet Jackson broke out in 92, were already there. Jackson's rebirth was the final straw. Now you can say that Janet Jackson isn't *real* hiphop. By that standard 'hiphop' radio stations aren't 'real' hiphop, because there ain't one of 'em that plays strickly conscious, underground stuff, with the possible exception of one or two 500 watt college stations and podcasts.

Pops listens to KIIS 102.7, 92.3 Hot 92, the new KDAY, 100.3 The Beat. They're all 'urban contemporary' and 'hiphop' according to the Radio Locator. KIIS is Top 40, but that means mostly hiphop these days. You don't have to go far to get your hiphop.

Pops had recently been to Seattle during their Drum Festival. He was pleasantly surprised by an African Drum ensemble comprised of a dozen white kids in West African garb, with mad skills. Their mentor was an old brother who had taught them djembe as well as lyrics in original languages. When they played, according to pops, it was serious indeed. For this reason, as well as the trees and an invitation by UW to extend their classrooms into housing projects, Pops is enchanted by Seattle. I said he could borrow my flannel.

On the grunge note, we found that we like the same new rock, which we divided into the 'intelligent rock' and the 'gothic'. On the intelligent side, we both dig Coldplay, Modest Mouse, Radiohead & Stone Temple Pilots. On the harder side I pointed out Korn, Papa Roach, Linkin Park. He anted up Nine Inch Nails, to which I raised him a Rammstein. That took me back to Skinny Puppy and Bauhaus... whoa.

He suggested a project 'Music in Context' because as strange as it sounds for old black men to be discussing this kind of music, much less listening to it, is because we have our reasons. The reasons oftimes, as well as the associations, are more interesting than the collection of songs. I suggested a group blog, he nodded. If we get Dutz and Deet involved, it would be the bomb, because we always have things to say about music. God knows we can't talk politics for long.

We shall see.

Wanting What You Want

I'm not going to pretend that I understand a damned thing that William S. Burroughs says, but it makes for a damned fine monologue in the music of Bill Laswell. One thing that he said in 'The Road to the Western Lands' went something like, why doesn't a man know that he can't want what he wants? I think I understand that, even though I don't want to.

BTW, The Naked Lunch was one of those movies I used to be embarrassed to say that I was embarrassed about. Now I know it's expository crap.

Aside from all of that, it's my birthday tomorrow. The Spousal Unit was well on her way to taking care of me, as she does so well, but we ran into a budget issue. So now she had to ask me, in lieu of the surprise she had waiting, what I want. What do I want? That's impossible to answer.

I recall believing only one fortune cookie. It said that I will never be a millionaire, but I will be so accustomed to living low that I won't care. I think that it's coming true. I think I have found my place.... Naaah. But what do I want? There has only been one person who has ever come close to giving me exactly what I wanted, and he flaked out on me big time. If he hadn't, I'd be writing this blog from a penthouse in Beijing. Nobody can give me what I want. You can't afford me. Listen to my attitude. Who in their right mind would give me what I want?

So I have a level of desire which is moderated, as well as a sense of humility and practicality which has to do with the Way of the Servant. I am the master of my fate, and I find myself managing and moderating, having experimental mental flirtations with the dark side. I watch the fictional character Vic Mackey and even though I want to be a crusader for justice, I let him do it. I am vicariously satiated, because I have to run in place. I am a river to my people.

My people are my family, and they get all the rest of the chicken after I take the big piece. I don't often want chicken *and* steak. I'm cool without it, in fact I'm happier when I announce that I will be providing steak for the fam. That's more fun than eating my own.

I know that selflessness is self-destructive. Ayn Rand wasn't wasted (or overspent) on me. I love myself in the mirror, but I'm Daddy. It's not about me.

But what do I want?

I want a bike, but I know that my wife knows that my kind of bike is too expensive. I'd have to have a Trek or else it wouldn't be worth it. Why? Because I had a Trek back in the day when biking was important to me, when it was what I really wanted. Do I want to relive my past? No. Been there, done that. Who cares what I do next? Nobody really. So what difference does it make what I want? I only thought about a bike because of the guy I saw on the cover of Men's Health yesterday at the drug store. I ought to look like that. It's something I want for myself, but like Neo in the Matrix, it's just my reflexive self-image. It's how I see myself even though I don't look like that. So what would I be trying to prove by looking like that? Do I want other people to see me as I see myself? I guess I'm not sure I care enough to find out.

I have a right to be demanding. I know how to get what I want, but the fact is that I mostly do get my way, and I am satisfied enough so that I don't feel like I have to prove anything. I don't have anything to prove - there's a formula for a lack of desire. But there must be something I want.

I want a million dollars to fall into my lap. If I wished for this and got it, it would probably be in the form of my neighbor's house in Laguna sliding down the hill. I don't engage in wishful thinking. I don't really want what I want.

You see, I'm in transition from feeling relatively assured that I was going to get most everything I could wish for. It was right there in the palm of my hand. And it failed in the best way, in the way that I could take none of the blame for the failure. I had my moment of glory in knowing that my moment of glory was close at hand. I had the moment before capture, I was like the youth on the grecian urn with success in my grasp. And then the urn shattered but it was not my fault. I was liberated by the prospect of liberation. And now I am living that down, knowing that I am just one or two degrees of separation from my destiny - the alternate destiny, the wealthy and international me.

I wanted it. I had it. I simply didn't realize it. Now I feel lucky and unlucky about it. But what do I want?

I think it would be interesting to get what I want just to see what happens. I really want to be Santa Claus - a rogue philanthropist with the juice to play Mr. Rourke of Fantasy Island. But see, that's not about me, it's about me giving people what they want.

This sounds so very uplifting and charismatic, but it makes me prone to the Dark Side. I am a prisoner of good character because I am genuinely empathetic. I like helping, and I rarely get in a mood to be destructive. Wreckless perhaps, but never purposefully destructive. I like Adam Sandler's Mr. Deeds. I like Adam Sandler - the very idea of him getting drunk and wrecking his girlfriend's new Lexus. That's funny to me. Wreckless...

Perhaps what I want is license to be wreckless. That requires more money and time than I can afford. It would be a luxury for a responsible ass like myself. I don't mind that I can't afford it because life has luck ahead for me - good or bad, it will be a surprise, and I am confident I'll pull through. So I just want to be around to be a good example for my kids. I need the good health, that's all. It's not about me.

On the other hand, there are always fine watches. A Hamilton Trent would be nice right about now. Eh.. maybe I'll just get the XBox fixed. No, scratch that... What I need is more socks. Socks and underwear. ..and this chair. That's all I need. But what do I want?

I guess I'm like a reverse Hall & Oates, singing 'I could go for that'. Let's just see what happens.

Wikipedia, Finally

These days I find that I don't have much time or energy for thinking outside of my box. Everything is coming in fragments. However one thing that I find myself doing repeatedly is consulting the Wikipedia. It is easily becoming my favorite spot on the web. So I have signed up as a member and am working to add a some dimensions to it in my areas of expertise, beginning with OLAP.

I'd also like to expand a bit on bits and pieces of Johnnie Cochran because I think it's more important for people to know the details of some of the cases that made him infamous with local law enforcement than what made him famous in the mainstream media. But I need to get a feel for how good the fact-checking is on the site and what is and is not considered relevant to post. For example, Cochran was the man who got the million dollar judgement in the case of Ron Settles, which led to taking the LAPD's infamous chokehold out of their repretoire. An unintended consequence of that is that cops were more edgy and tended to rely more on batons than before. Result? Rodney King.

There's an interesting entry on Subhas Bose, whom I often compare to the shock and delight of many Indian friends, to Malcolm X. He's quite the controversial figure.

As I retreat from the hash and rehash, I am finding comfort in my geek hat. Nights like this I wonder about the future of the blog and whether or not the Cobbian mission is accomoplished. I'll know for certain by the end of the summer. Right now the direction is towards more technology and research and less politics and current events. That means I'll spend a lot more time at Cubegeek and at Wikipedia.

Bookworms

Lee told me, and Lee should know as a slightly waifish Armenian woman, that men with my appearance tend to intimidate. Although I tend to notice that people seem to say 'Oh excuse me' a lot unnecessarily in supermarkets, I am completely oblivious to the Large Black Man Effect Field that I apparently generate. Nevertheless, I do recall walking my boss out to the parking lot way back in '92 and her confessing to me that every night she brought a pair of scissors for self-defense.

I just do not have any sense of the danger that women and dweebs must feel at night in areas where bad people might be. However I've always attributed that to street smarts, which I know that I possess; I've never attributed much to my ability to appear intimidating. Sure, I have the homeboy suit and I can dress up to be perfectly at home on the set of American Chopper, but me? Threatening? I chuckle.

Nevertheless, as Matt Yglesias mentions books that he should have read, I begin to wonder about such matters, but it wasn't until somebody mentioned Catcher in the Rye that the angle for this post hit me.

I've always kinda not read books because of the thrill that books give me. Counter-intutitive eh? Until you realize that most of my life I've struggled with my concept of the 'noble arena'. It goes a little something like this. I'm single and I'm living in my two bedroom apartment in Park Slope. I ask myself, self, what should I do this evening? Should I head out to the city or should I stay home and read a book? This is a dilemma because I generally stay home and read the book, which only makes me want to go out to the city and find some people to talk about the book with. Except that there is no place for me to go where anyone ever talks to me about books. In my life, there have been about 12 people who have ever asked me what books am I reading. That includes every job interview, every cocktail party, every poetry reading, every co-worker, blah blah blah. I've lived with this

As far as I'm concerned, the noble arena exists merely as a construction of like minds in cyberspace. It's why I have spent so many years here, because when I walk out that door, apparently people are too busy trying not to piss their pants much less ask me my preferences in literature. It's not as if I hadn't spent the requisite hours trolling Waterstones on Newbury Street in Boston, or Coliseum off Columbus Circle in Manhattan. Then again, I do use the term 'dweebs', so perhaps it's entirely my fault.

There was a cat named Black who once worked for The Nation magazine. We taught Saturday school at St. Luke's up near City College, back in the day. He gave me the impression of being the kind of dweeb to whom I generally refer. I told him that the Nation should run personal ads and publish a version on the Internet. He thought that if I ever had a mind, I had lost it completely. Then again, I thought he lived in the wrong part of the Village and that perhaps his judgements were dismissible. After all, I was right and he wasn't long for The Nation.

On the other hand, I could just shutup and answer the question in the form of, "No I haven't bother to read Dostoyevsky and I don't really think I'm missing out." But the fact of the matter is that I am still at a loss to say what society I am missing out on for not having done so. This has been the case for so long that it makes me doubt two things, firstly the value of the books themselves, and secondly the extent to which the value of those books imparts themselves onto their readers. This is problematic only if those readers are not dweebs and actually do hold court and sway some real flesh and blood places. I remember being told that it helps to know Shakespeare because your boss might drop the phrase 'There is a tide in the affairs of men..' and I should know the implication. More likely I'll hear co-workers mumble quotes from 'Office Space'. And so while I don't tend to hold people in contemtuous disdain, I have rather given up the idea that I'll be hearing from the more literate end of the spectrum outside of my cyberconnections.

My other observation, which I've made before, is that I've never met any black man who said "I am Holden Caufield!" And while I expect that may change over time, and I don't often ask, I have also never met any white man who said "I am Bigger Thomas!". And so perhaps there is a real gap between those who would wax literate in any particular direction.

I am not convinced that some intellectual and cultural unity is a necessity for civil society. Even the sappy Lionel Ritchie knew that everyone finds their own way, somehow, some way, some day. So I suspect we'll all zoom the points familiar and kind even though different books and dreams take us there, and what gets said in American interpretations of English translations of Russian novelists could be recognizeable as a rhymed couplet in a rap I know, or a Gospel song I grew up with. We're all human after all. Experience teaches.

It certainly makes sense from the point of view of academics that if we're ever going to get anywhere, knowledge needs to be codified and ranked. There are roccocos and their are efficiencies, and a troubled world needs efficiency, or so it's been said. So there may be a real sense of a missed mission in all our relatively illiterate heads. But I think we'll all float on alright.

For the record, I wish I had come to understand Maxwell's Equations, and I still believe I could have saved myself a life of questions had I read my basic philosophers. I purchased the Decline and Fall of Rome, but never got anywhere whatsoever, and I'm sure I would like to be, on occasion, the devil quoting the Bible to suit my own ends. But hey, at least I read Ravelstein, and guess what, I'm just like those guys.

99 Problems

Spence tells me that he's falling in love with Hiphop all over again. I had one of those days when it's absolutely necessary to listen to loud music and drive 90 mph. So I called him to find out what kinda beats I could buy - it being Friday and I just got paid. No answer.

So I head down to Fry's off Edison north of Irvine and pull up my rented Pontiac G6 in the lot. I've got to get yet another hard drive for my wobbly home network. This time I'm getting a Seagate Barracuda. No more Maxtor for me, ever.

Unfortunately, as the case may be, I have found the right music to speed to, remixes of Jay-Z and Limp Bizkit. Or is it Linkin Park? Whichever. It was loud, it was vulgar, it was rude and it was rockin'. Just what I needed at the end of a long ass day.

This morning, 5% into the recovery of my machine, I tried to get the OS to recognize the video card. No luck. I enable the ATI drivers, it only allows it go secondary. I disable the primary, the secondary doesn't engage. Now I have a black screen. I can't RDP into the machine, I don't have a VNC server running and I can't think of another way in. If I had a S-channel or other converter, I could stick in a second monitor and fix the first. No such luck.

I'm behind in everything except for my big proposal for Monday. I'm not getting enough sleep. I have to get on the road tomorrow. I'm losing my mind.

Not Having Fun

I just finished working on a piece of a proposal that can make me a star, but I'm starting to feel like Dean Martin in the original Ocean's Eleven. Maybe I'm a little bit too old for this.

My sales shark called me this morning and reminded me that Utah is a great place for mountain biking. And so it hit me like a ton of copper ore that I'm not really having fun on this trip and I'm not going to. The locus of my discontent which has overcome my otherwise sunny disposition is a particularly gimpy data pump created by Vignette that the mother company has decided to OEM. Why? Because you don't have to write code! Which means it's a perfectly idiotic tool for those of us who do write code.

So I have come to discover that this gnarled piece of caca between an AS/400 and a SQL Server doesn't pay much attention to SQL code if you don't also draw the little field connector lines in it's idiot proof visual drag and drop fecal-torium. Instead of something simple like just writing a spool phrase as one would in Oracle's SQL dialect, this crap collector makes you grab a little text object from a toolbar. Try to imagine a DTS connection object with about 50 properties. IT'S A FLAT FILE FOR CHRISSAKE! I connect this monstrosity to my query object but not before I have to manually click the 'add field' button as many times as my query is bringing over columns.

Now here's the killer. Imagine you determine, an hour and 3GB later that you'd like to make your query results a little smaller. It's not enough that you remove fields from your select statement in the gawdawful query object, you also have to pretty much destroy your flat file object and recreate it from scratch. This is something it takes a veteran like me all day to figure out.

What a waste.

I take that back. What's so absolutely perfect about this product is that it allows you to generate executable code that you can drop into obscure directories on your customer's servers. Only you know what they do and only you can fix them. That's evil genius.

The Moment of Death

(from the archives, may 2000)

so let me tell you a story.

i have moved to new york and it's about 2 months into my stay. i am becoming familiar with the nabes in and around park slope brooklyn. i'm enjoying the proviciality and the crust of the people and the architecture, especially the stark desolation of the 4th avenue - 9th street F. the F is probably the most used, yet slowest and therefore most frustrating train in the mta. foggy mornings headed inbound found me staring across double sets of deserted tracks at odd individuals who for reasons known only to themselves and god were headed deeper into the bowels of brooklyn. this was an attractive mystery which i contemplated often in the piss aroma of the stairwells of the 9th street F.

one evening i was going by train to festivities somewhere in manhattan that required my homeboy suit. the homeboy suit in early 90's brooklyn involved black silvertab levi's, tall matte black leather laceup boots fashionably splayed, a tight fitting black or stark white tee and long flowing black duster. at times the duster could be exchanged for a 3/4 length leather coat, but it was not that cold this early evening. in previous incarnations of the homeboy suit i had fingerless gloves; this occasion was lighter, yet my bowie knive was ever present. years later i would reflect on the fact that this knife made me and my homeboy suit the most dangerous man in the thames river valley, but this was 90s new york. i was considered unarmed.

if i had ever considered arming myself more seriously, what happened that night changed my view forever. i still hadn't memorized the trains and retained a bit of anxiety about the frequent yet petty crimes i had already witnessed in my first 8 weeks; the occasional, even gracefully choreographed chain snatchings, the in-your-face threatening mendacity of panhandlers and the wicked yet almost comic squabbling between two ham-fisted nigerian watch peddlers the other day on 42nd and lex. yet my anxiety was a product of my willingness to step in and stop that violence which was still only verbal. i have a gut instinct for stepping between combatants. i don't know where it comes from, but i must fight myself to resist stopping fights between others. i'm like the fonz, believing a well place 'hey' will cool hot heads. yet i know deep down that i should know more kung fu in order to satisfy my interventionist urge. i want to be a bhuddist cop because i hate the destruction.

so this on night, headed more or less fearlessly downtown i was shocked. a young black kid on a dirtbike heads up the ave towards my position and stops at the back door of a chinese takeout as the man steps out. the old chinese man and his old chinese bicycle are preparing their way to deliver a handlebar-bike-basket full of food somewhere in brooklyn, but they are stopped by a 9mm pistol aimed straight at his head. the dirtbike kid's heft of the glock is practiced as he pulled it from his backpack while coasting to a stop. he is as focused as any 14 year old can be, silently laughing his ass off at the terror he sees in the old man's eyes. he barks something threatening as i move slowly out towards the curb, nearly parallel to the chinaman yet still behind him enough to see over his shoulder the grinning face of his deadly teenaged adversary.

within the space of 2 seconds i realize three things. one, the kid was paying no attention to me at all - all he wanted to do was scare that man. two, i could have gotten at least three bullets into him and used the fire hydrant for cover before he realized what was up. three, if i had my own gun there is absolutly no question that there would have been another dead black teenager in brooklyn this evening. i would have killed him without hesitation.

the event was so clear, so perfect that it felt like a scenario described on usenet as a strawman. as the tears welled up in my eyes and the kid turned his bike and rolled back downhill, with his 'ha ha made you flinch' laughter, i asked myself if this was what i was put on earth for. my desire for peace led me to the unequivocable destruction of the kid with the deadly sick sense of humor.

i don't know where i went on the F train that evening. i kept playing the scenario back in my mind, a prisoner of the moment. yes. yes. no doubt yes. the answers kept coming back in the affirmative - i would have shot him, i would have felt good about it. if the situation presented itself again would shoot again. the only thing that saved that boy's life was the fact that i didn't have a gun.

some people tell me that i think too much. perhaps like a bhuddist, i am constantly refining my mind so that in every moment i can act with the discipline that my moral soul requires. i do not live in the active moment, it simply procedes from the many rehearsals in the passive hours. such is the well-considered life i hope to lead. i am never one to look back in regret - it is the great benefit i have discovered now in middle age. tears spent promptly and properly never cleanse in vain. this is one of the lessons of mourning my younger brother's death. and so in that moment, while i felt powerless, i soon realized that power was not properly mine. i didn't lose the moment, it was as it should have been and now serves as a powerful lesson to me.

it's almost cliche to think about great efforts being worth it if their benefits changed just one life. so too must go the thinking of the assassin. the one life properly taken justifies a life of disciplined struggle. i can respect the ethics of a warrior - there are those whose duty it must be to engage battles. in my longing for kung fu intervention, i have felt the pull of that duty. but oh the mindless ranting of bourgie american voices defending deadly force at their fingertips. these are not warriors, they are cowards, afraid to even live on the same side of the bridge as places where dirtbike drug couriers are known to operate.

god does know why people take the desolate train deep into brooklyn on foggy, lonely mornings. there are human beings there who must be cared for. it may be a complete turnabout from our standard notion of rush hour into midtown, or perhaps it's a contiunuum of the same idea of daily work. as proud as we are of our job struggles, our creativity, our productive lives, we must realize this as our great contribution. for most of us, this aggregation of work does not result in life or death of our creation outside of our own families. this is as it should be, for we are not all warriors or shaolin priests. so taking the gun in hand cannot be a part of the same rote commercial exchange as the rest of our consumer activity - because the most disciplined mind i possess or can imagine possessing will, mastering the moment, use it for it's ultimate destructive purpose, without hesitation. even if we had no such mental mastery, the gun directs all of our passion to the single end of spitting deadly projectiles. we, like the dirtbike kid, are not meant for such things. our contemplation is too shallow, the meaning in our lives would be shattered and squandered by killing. killing is simply too large a deed for us to bear. we would be rightly crushed by our own action.

and so, almost ten years later, i have finally put these thoughts to the page. i suppose i would just be getting out of prison now, hopefully with the same wisdom. or perhaps i would have been released long ago, or perhaps never even arrested by a society eager to see me as a 'warrior'. but my mamma didn't raise me to kill black children, or any other kind of human being. so i reject such instant, fake honor. and i reject it when people tell me it is my right to bear arms. that's not what my arms are for. i could only accept the honor of being a warrior as my duty, and i know that this is not my life's duty.

i might hope to learn a little more kung fu, but perhaps if these paragraphs can touch just one person...

Another Failure

A power outage has destroyed two more of my hard drives. Blogging will be light.

Utah Moments

So today I'm struggling with my diet and did something unprecedented I had a salad for lunch and a salad for dinner.

I saw my first black person today in Utah. Now there might have been some at the airport, but that doesn't count. She was the speaker-girl at the McDonalds drive through. As I pulled up to the window, I overheard her saying to her co-worker, "I knew he was black!". That was funny.

The nightly news is actually bearable here. The big news is that there's about 8 feet of snowpack in the mountains and farmers in the flatlands are getting flooded out. The local flood control folks didn't bother to notify people downstream that they were lifting gates on the dams and now people are snarling. They say in 6 months, they'll put together a notification system.

The mayor of Salt Lake is increasing property taxes to pay for 15 new bicycle cops. It doesn't seem controversial.

Some small border town has a polygamist municipal domination by the a sect of the LDS. The feds are cracking down.

The LDS Temple, just a few blocks north of where I'm staying is a gorgeous set of buildings. But I don't have time to do much sightseeing at all. I'm working overtime.

I'm generally unselfconscious to a fault, but I notice the hotel staff freak when I dance around naked as they bring up room service. No, wait. I'm not naked, just black. Who knows? Who cares?

I've been noticing a number of strange germanic accents around here. I'm not sure if it's a Utah thing or if there are a number of out-of-towners. I know that there are many Basques in Boise...

On the whole, the town has a strangely empty feeling. Main Street has empty storefronts, and those annoying chirping traffic signals. The light rail goes down the center. It's busy but not crowded. I haven't been out at night. This place is a bit too far west to be on Mountain Time, so it doesn't get dark until past 8.

I don't suppose one could be in three more different places in a month than Salt Lake, New Orleans and Santa Clara. What a country.

Who Do I Know in Salt Lake City?

I am on the road yet again. This week's work takes me to Salt Lake. I've never been out of the airport before and it just figures that I didn't bring my camera because let me tell you something, this lake is massive. If I had three wishes, one of them would be to fill up the Great Salt Lake, it would make this place one of the most stunningly beautiful places on earth. The ring of snow-capped peaks is just dramatic. It helps that I got up a bit into the hills and looked out. Wow.

As it stands, Salt Lake City looks just like Boise, only bigger. The food is better too, or at least this time I can afford a better class of restaurant, which brings us to Bambara.

I just had one of the best soups in my life. I am ready to say that it is number two, just behind the lobster bisque at the Copley Plaza Hotel in Boston. This was the Utah Corn Bisque. Remarkable. It has got to be the most satisfying bowl I've ever tasted, but nothing's going to outdo the smoothness and flavor of Boston. Still. What's so extraordinary about this is how it just filled my mouth with a kind of warm popcorny flavor. And it had heat. It was as spicy as anything could be without actually being spicy and this just added to the sense of fulfillment. The bisque was very smooth but not buttery so. It was filled with soup, not butter, so everything was flavor and nothing was filler. The texture was perfect, and then the bits of crab were delectable. Add a touch of sweetness with the cilantro oil and it just becomes a miracle. The whole bowl had a beautiful mustard yellow color. Considering that I was 15 years younger when I had that lobster bisque in Boston, this has got to be the better bisque to my more jaded palate. Congrats, Bambara. You are it.

With my Sonoma-Cutrer I had their scallops which were fine, and their nicely spiced mashed potatoes with the bursty bubbles of caviar burre blanc and port wine syrup. I think I'm going to go back Wednesday for the duck.

The service was exceptional and flawless. The attitude was cheery and attentive without being bothersome, you know like when they ostentatiously scrape the breadcrumbs off your table in other restaurants? They went out of their way to mix me up a Ceasar even though it was off the menu. Next time I'm sticking around for dessert too.

The atmosphere was just right, bright with big windows above ground level, not too noisy. They clearly have improvised the place which was not always a restaurant. Yeah. I'm going back, which is rare when I'm out of town.

Hmm. Doug S. is the only person I know here, but I'm stuffed. Time to watch TV and crash.

So That's What It's All About Alfie

From the What-I-Should-Have-Said Files in the All-Men-Are-Dogs Department.

I have been run ragged this weekend, but I did get a quick mo' on the couch with the spousal unit. The object of observation this time out 'Alfie'. (What, you think we do anything else on the couch but watch TV?) I'm a big fan of Michael Caine, and I always knew he had a bit of the devil in him, but I had no idea how much of the in jokes about him were a result of his debut(?) performance in this drecky diary. I come to this realization admittedly late, but what a revelation. OK I'm also the guy who didn't know that Freddy Mercury was gay and kept wondering aloud why he wasn't a bigger star. But there it is.

Not withstanding the fact that I was dead tired, I just couldn't keep watching. I wasn't in the mood to deal with the lovable scamp, and he didn't seem likeable at all, much less lovable.

Have I been feminized or is this guy a real cad? I got up to the part where he starts playing with the kid, so I guess I didn't get to see much of the redemption of his character, if there was any later in the film. But I was just not entertained. For the first 15 or so minutes, I'm cracking up, and then it comes to his attitude with his pregnant girlfriend and I'm ready to crack him one.

Although I'm not feeling particularly racial, I may as well go there. It's the gut again. But I recall suffering through so many what-is-wrong-with-black-men discussions that I wish I would have had this movie to shove in the faces of all those annoying people. Now I don't know how the movie wraps up, but the opening bits are enough to make any judge of character wince, even though it's all a sly joke.

You can be sure Alfie's a seminal moment in white male dog history. I just have to make sure I rip it from my Tivo before they never show it on TV again.

Danger of Depth

I have bumped into several modes of learning the past week that are a grave threat to my blogging. According to Ambra, it is a good rule not to talk about blogging, you just do it. But there is a significant chance that I will be getting deep.

There are several reasons, they constitute my post-China Deal agenda and will be done in the spirit of The Way of the Servant.

Orthodoxy
I have begun to read that brief text by GK Chesterton and am awaiting some revelation therein. I further am extending my mutual culture hacking with Lee and will be attending an Armenian Orthodox Church. Further, I am looking to understand more deeply this matter and consider reconciliation between the African Anglican tradition, black Episcopalianism and Benedict XVI. This is likely to go on for some time without me getting any blogable insight. It is not as likely to get me flaming feedback as has Black Republicanism and so that will be the reason. It will be like going back in time to the days of the solitary journaling. We'll also have to make sense of Rudolf Steiner and Gurdjieff.

Quant Jockeying
Emanuel Derman is messing with my head in a particularly nasty way. He drops all the right names and has created in himself a kind of person I imagined I might have been, had I the patience and fear of the common intellectual from a neighborhood without tough guys. Which is to say, as long as I have been reconciled to my education in the world, he is getting under my skin in revealing the details of my academic career manque. Aside from all that, it's likely that the new set of tools that I am playing with will give me some opportunity to build something relatively interesting on par with junior grade quant-ing.

The Warehouse
I am dedicating a couple servers in my house (and will be expanding them) to building a test bed for a full suite of tools. Most importantly, I will be organizing a great deal of data and metadata I have collected over the past decade or so for a library of pro-forma analytic models across the various industries and applications of my career.

Guest Blogging
I have recieved several offers to do some guest blogging. I haven't determined whether or not I will actually have time to do so, but as (and if) I do, it will certainly drain this one a bit.

The Extended Vision Circle
A weekly podcast is the first in a series of productions coming from a currently anonymous but power-packed gang currently known as Five Guys Named Moe. This commitment will extend me into alternate media and some serious cell-based organizational progress. My angle on this multidisciplinary project will be working on a conceptual framework for identifying spheres of influcence and circles of trust. You will not hear me talking about 'grass roots' anything any longer. Especially after hearing Fred Hampton Jr on commie radio today in the Bay. Black politics is most definitely in the 21C. We are a cutting edge.

Analytical Domination
By no means least on my agenda will be the face of my current professional endeavors, which essentially consists of using all of my talents (if not time and energy) in wrestling to the ground all of the obstacles I face in dominating the BI market for the Western Region.

Retirement Weight
Concurrently with this direction will be the goal of getting down to about 185. That's 30 pounds. No mean feat, but entirely doable.

Pretty Pictures
I will also stop to take pretty pictures of the flowers. Smelling them seems to be going a bit too far.

A Journey to Oaktown

George is dangerous. Like Lee, he lets me talk. When I talk I can get an enormous amount of meditation out of my system, some of which is worth listening too. I take the cues of the listeners to make associations and we jump from subject to subject. It's a kind of love that I don't often get, and I much appreciate. Ask anyone who knows me. I can talk a blue streak. I notice this most as I am still on the edge of a conversation getting out of the car and walking up to bed and suddenly it's quiet. Like now. So now I write.

George and I had a man date. We went to Yoshi's in Oakland and had drinks, dinner and partook of the Jazz. We talked about the Pope, Lake Merritt, Wal-Mart, the Causeway, the Quik Way, the rimmers and the slot, Freyer, Bomani Jones, Lisa Jones, Greg Tate, Jerry Brown, Antonio Villaraigosa, San Diego, Brooklyn, Walnut Creek, New Orleans, New York, South Africa, Brazil, steaks, tea, katsu, tequila, Buddhist vegetarians, the inevitability of India, the New Standard, the LA Times, UPI, SWSX, sex and car wrecks on the Bay Bridge, SROs and rooftops, cars that got keyed and trainproof buildings, Jack & Miles, Galveston, prison health care, farms in Ohio, chemical plants in Kansas City, podcasting, XRepublic, Six Apart, T-Mobile, Anil Dash, Earl Dunovant, Scott Patterson, Cecily, Gerry Mulligan, Bobby McFerrin, India Irie, Erika Badu, Onyx, Wiggers, Clorox, online auctions, old neighborhoods, Al Jarreau, Emir Deodato and the beauty of eating small portions of food.

Fortunately, our gabbing was interrupted by a extraordinary sextet led by Michael O'Neill and Kenny Washington.

OK. First off they started with a number that was pedestrian and sounded a lot like Gerry Mulligan and Paul Desmond. I kept waiting for somebody to bite a riff from The Joy Spring, but it didn't happen. They're playing fairly tight. So far it sounds like it's going to be a fairly competent, if soulless affair. Then they start cutting loose a bit and Washington comes to the stage. O'Neill introduces him as the finest singer he had ever heard. Yeah right, I think to myself.

Washington is phenomenal. Right away he makes Al Jarreau sound like he's stretching and reaching and basically trying too hard. Washington is effortless and precise, but very smooth. He's a small man, and you can hear how that makes his voice unique. He's got the purity and straight-ahead sensibility of Bobby Short, he's got the playfulness of McFerrin, he's got the soulful sensibilities of Donny Hathaway and he's got the Jazz like no one else.

They say that Lush Life is one of the most difficult standards to sing because of the way it blends chord changes into off keys and back in every other phrase. Washington inserts that kind of change into his balladeering to astonishing effect. He makes every common song an adventure.

Michael O'Neill sounds as if he could improvise all night without ever repeating himself once. He hovers between mastery and greatness. His saxophone work is extraordinary. He plays with almost orchestral diction yet with classic jazz chops. It makes him a rare treat - it's almost as if he's not only playing but he's teaching saxophone on stage.

The rhythm section was superb. I was telling George how I prefer to sit on the piano side of the stage and not on the drum side, because it's rare that the bass and drum vibe so tightly and remain understated. But when the bassist broke out with swift, funky phrasing it had everybody swiveling in their seats.

I could spend the rest of my life doing just this, wine, jazz and sushi. With a friend like George, one night is enough to generate a great number of pleasant memories.

The Return of Dogtown

The other day, while watching the previews at the showing of Kung Fu Hustle, I discovered that Hollywood is bringing back the 70s, or more properly, one of the few things that were actually cool about the 70s. I don't mean John Travolta. I mean Dogtown.

I wasn't hip to much of cultural geography when I was 14, but I did know that there was some crossover that I liked and some that I didn't. Once upon a time I had a pretty cool conversation over at the Well in the GenX forum about what it was like for me to be one of the first group of black kids to get bussed to school in Pacific Palisades. Around that time was the first time I stepped out of black only environments, some kids were easier to get along with than others. I hung with the longhairs.

When I first saw the documentary Dogtown & Z-Boys a couple years ago, I was shocked into recognition of my old ethos and what it felt like to be a California teen when I was growing up in the era of crossover. I was flooded with memories of skateboarding at Paul Revere during the summer of 74.

In my own neighborhood, I was the best skater, and I got everybody on the block riding on Stokers and Chicago trucks. Me myself, I had whistling Stokers on a Bahne board that was flourescent green with rainbow tape. My brothers all had GTs with the kick lip on the back. I've always been a self-taught goofy footer but I didn't know what that meant until I started hanging at Paul Revere. The dudes at Revere skated backwards to me. I had my left foot towards the rear of the board, pushed off with the right than put that on the front. They looked at me like "what's this"? So I started skating both ways. I also did a lot of straight crazy street luge back in those days. But it was all about swooping and ending whatever you did with a sweet 360.

The surfer dudes at Revere were mellow and perhaps some of them were stoners. I didn't know or care. What I knew was that they were definitely about style, and so was I. So I was going to get a new wooded long board cut by whomever it was at Revere that did that out of wood shop. I can't remember exactly how it happened but my board got split. I just remember being heartbroken and without a board and the bright red and yellow paint from it still on my bomber jacket that shared a locker.

I ended up at a Jesuit prep school instead of Pali High where I wanted to go. This actually felt like culture shock. One of my Revere buds came to Loyola freshman year, but he was out of there after a semester. None of our cool worked at LiHi at all. But I was saved from being a complete geek by another dose of Venice.

In the Summer of 75, I was a Junior Guard at Venice Beach. The attitude resurfaced but not quite as strong. We definitely represented the 'outlaws' at the Taplans and the rivalries between Venice and the other beach's Guard programs was palpable. When our group went to Zuma or Rogers, it was our duty to dig huge holes in the sand to trap the real lifeguard trucks. So we basked in much self-made glory as Venice Locals.

Later at Episcopal Camp Stevens in East San Diego County, I hung out with some Dogtown stoners. I wish I knew whatever happened to those dudes. They were good friends, and they had the serious thai stick. Tad Drivas where are you? Dan Heffernan, where have you been? Our football team, The Roaches, won the all camp football competition. I was QB and taught everybody how to do the Hustle. Ah those crossover days.

It would be good to see the true spirit of Dogtown get its due. I was not a true rebel with noplace to go. I can't represent like I was one of them, but I was there and would have been tight with them had I continued at Pali. The fact was that I have always cleaned up nice, and with a blowout and my puka shells, I had my share of female attention. Plus I had other crossover duties in the world of upper-middle class Catholics that snatched the pure spirit of rebellion out of me. I was getting around and didn't need the loyalty. Besides, I lived in Crenshaw, not Venice, nor Palisades nor South Pasadena. Still, I hated Vals.

From my perspective, Dogtown was about aggressive style with a lighthearted sense of personal aggro. I was 'Bo' and my role in those days was to be devastating with the dozens, and I was. I could make you cry with laughter or shame depending on whether you were audience or target. That worked straight out of the hood and was righteous with the surfers, skaters and jocks at Revere and Pali, as well as the San Diego kids who puffed, spun around looking up at the stars and danced on the tables in the mess hall to the sounds of Pink Floyd's Animals. We were California teens of a new era and we were crafting our own style of expression. It was strong and natural and much of it has survived to today.

What you don't often hear is where the cool black guy was, but we were definitely a part of the flavor. There was soul in that mix. You probably won't hear in in the Hollywood version - it will all be about the personalities of the kids that made money or fit nicely into the characters that Hollywood writers understand. I just want you to know that brothers were also real brothers in the larger Dogtown story.

Blacklight 50's Bowling

Need I say more? Well actually, it was for a good cause, as in Father Daughter day with the Girl Scouts. Met an interesting gent who raves over a medical records system called Practice Partner. I bowled a 93.

In the Wind Again

This week I will be on the road again. Destination: Santa Clara. It's nowhere near as picaresque or historically significant as New Orleans so you cannot count on any spectacular blogging from ground zero. However I will try to hookup with a couple legendary folks and spread the word of the new Vision Circle podcasting series, those folks being George Kelly, Art McGee and Bill Berry.

Also it will be a trip to have dinner at the Faultline again after all these years.

The Smartest Barbershop in the LA

Yesterday Ford cut the shizzle out of my head.

I was sitting at home, minding my own business and surfing around the news when I came upon this video from the LA Times. This was about barbershop politics and according to Steve Lopez, and now me, Tolliver's is the best.

So since I'm heading up to Santa Clara next week - hey, maybe I can hang out with George and A. - I decided to get my do did. For me, that means a straight razor in the hands of a black man at least 15 years older than I. So I braved the Friday traffic and commenced to commute the necessary miles from my homey beach digs to where the homies hang at Florence and Western.

I don't know the neighborhood very well over near Horace Mann Jr. High, and it was a completely frustrating experience trying to find a real Bank of America so I could avoid some gas station ATM fees. But I managed to find the joint itself without any problems. The big American flag was right prominent on the old blue storefront on Florence just east of Western.

Now I felt a little twinge heading in, because this constitutes a betrayal of Nick at Shelton's. As it is, I only get my head professionally shaved for special occasions and including this (which isn't actually so special) it has only been twice this year. Nick has been my barber for over 15 years even if I only see him once or twice a year. It's not like the old days when I actually kept my hair nicely. Well I might as well go there. You see, blackfolks can look at me and see the redbone in me. I'm a reddish brown and my hair is straight at the roots. The hair on my arms is rather wispy. These are things that will let a good black barber know some things about how he has to approach my head. For example, I would never get BBs in the back of my head - there are no kitchens in my family even though we are not high yellow. If you don't understand this lingo, then maybe Fantastic Sams is for you, but for me, I got to go where old black men understand a few things. Nick has never cut me wrong and I was feeling him when I crossed into Tolliver's shop.

One of the things I have never finished was my guide to all the black barbershops in Los Angeles. Now is probably a good time to do it even though I started it in 1986. Odd because I just drove past Mr. Johnson's the other day hanging with Lee. Johnson was a boxer and had a 170 pounds on the bench press in the front window of his shop on 11th Avenue and Jefferson. He used to grip my head with massive hands and just rip those clippers across. Johnson was a he-man barber and he gave severe military clips that were cheap and rough around the edges. He wouldn't finesse the fade, but he was quick and you didn't have to sit around all day waiting. He had black and white pictures of famous and not so famous boxers all over his wall. I haven't been to Johnson's since 88, but I see that the salon behind him did a good business, and his building has a fairly extraordinary mural.

It's settled, I'm going to do this. Starting next week.

In the meantime, all memories of barbershops past and present are intermingled with the feeling of stepping into a new one. The thing I remember about Tollivers with the greatest intimacy however were the two long black floormats. You see six of us got into a putting contest. Rico started it. He's the big guy in the brown three piece suit who's a 25 year veteran of the Sherrifs department. He's got classic white on the sides of his head, just like all the police commissioners they put on TV, and yes he has brown shoes.

Anyway, I had a classic black barbershop time and a great cut. Next time however, I'm going to buzz myself down a little bit more so that Ford doesn't have to sharpen his blade so much next time.

A Shout Out to the King

Today is the birthday of one of the coolest web designers out there. I owe him a bottle of Pinot, but somehow a combination of brain farts and negative cashflow have conspired against this gift being sent. It is in fact at least 6 months overdue and the fact of the matter is that I feel like a real schlub about it, or as PK might say, a reprehensible twat. At least we both know the feeling.

Once upon a time, I was CTO of a nascent company called xxxx. I managed to get several people excited about the possibilities of a new kind of interactive usage of web and mobile services. It's still a great idea and nobody has yet managed to pull it off, but like most of my great ideas, sooner or later it's bound to make somebody else rich. One of those folks was Patric King, web designer extraordinare and associated with the successful look of a number of very popular blogs.

I sent him pictures of my curtains, fer chrissake, because the way the spousal unit and I agree on colors and themes for the house is precisely the kind of mellow, warm and ethnic spice we wanted for the project. Before you could say 'cascading style sheets', King had come back with a very nice theme that worked. We had a good level of communication and collab going on, and then I disappeared along with the funding. It wasn't all that dramatic, but it may as well have been.

King was a good sport about it, and fortunately he hadn't spent a whole lot of hours. So I owe him one (or two), and I haven't felt right about my inability due to a number of rapid transitions in my career, to do right by him.

I'm sure he has more work than he can handle and isn't aching for a lack of activity. I only wished our thing would have worked out. So here's to the King. You're going to get yours...

A Suburban Moment

So we did get a new couch, and man is it fluffy. The spousal unit tossed our old sentimental red leather couch and brought in an olive one with a kind of corduroy texture. I actually love it. It has brought my Tivo watching to new levels of suburban comfort.

It was from that decadent position, after Oreos and milk, that I watched the latest episode of The Amazing Race last night. The ending was perfect. The black couple won, the yuppies (who were dressed like red and blue teletubbies) tied for second, the oldsters hung in there and broke a record and the gay couple got the boot. Oh they were *so* gay.

I take this to be a sign that all is right with the world.

In other news, The Shield is by far the most byzantine and intense drama to be found anywhere. Last night's episode was so frightfully delicious that it's hard to imagine that they could put any more suspense into the genre of police drama. These characters and stories are astounding, there is tension everywhere between everyone and it drips with intrigue, deception and danger. These are what you would call ripping yarns. Sometimes it's difficult to believe you are watching actors. It just resonates so closely to all of our perceptions of urban dysfunction and moral ambiguity. The cast of The Shield this season, featuring Glenn Close and Anthony Anderson has to be the finest bunch of actors to mesmerize TV audiences since the debut of Hill Street Blues.

This suburban moment brought to you by The Bowen Family Trust.

Oh The Shame of It All

My Body Mass Index is 30.4099. It's official. I'm obese. This time next week, I will not be. I swear to God.

I figured out how to calculate this number (pounds/inches ^2)* 703 from the NYTimes article which tells us that the CDC has changed its mind about the overweight. Evidently, they have been juggling methodologies and have determined that the one they use for cancer survival rates is the best one for predicting the effects of weight on mortality.

The breakpoints (18.5, 25, 30, 35) mark their five categories, underweight, normal weight, overweight, obesity and extreme obesity. As you can see, I'm in the fourth bucket, which is not so healthy. What is interesting about these new findings is that they confirm something a I've thought true for a long time which is that when I was 168 pounds, I was too skinny. I wanted, like most young men, to be bigger, stronger, faster, sexier, and 168 just wasn't cutting it for me. Even though I cycled 70 miles a week and played at least 5 hours of beach volleyball every Saturday & Sunday I wanted to be as fit as a special forces Ranger.

When I landed my first managerial position I had just turned 31 or so, and I knew it all. But somehow I didn't think I possesed the authority I needed. So I embarked on my 'Huge Project'. The idea was simple, get big & buff. So I changed my eating habits. The first time I had this idea was with my best friend when we were about 27. We were both programmers in a highly geekified area of LA, El Segundo. (He was by far the superior programmer, but I was the better beach volleyball player). We thought it would be extremely cool idea (after drinks) to become the twin bouncers of the South Bay. We would buff up, shave our heads, wear a single hoop of gold in our ear and wear gold lame shoes with pointy toes. It would have been a great second source of income. Unfortunately we sobered up before we could get our piercing.

Jack LaLanne said something famously. You can eat double cheeseburgers every day, that doesn't matter. What matters is that you exercise. I remember him like it was yesterday, he said diets just don't work. You have to feed the body, but you also must work the body.

The Huge Project turned out to be a moderate success, but I didn't get huge, I got ripped. My basketball game rebounded and I got all kinds of twitchy nervous energy. All it took was about 20 minutes a day on that old 'Body by Jake' rig and a couple good games of hoop. Within 2 months I was done, but that was 40 pounds ago.

The last time I got in shape was about 18 months ago when I was dead broke and smokin'. I did some pretty good blogging back then too, and I went to the gym on the regular for court volleyball and cardio kickboxing. I dropped about 10 pounds and got my breath back, but I pretty much destroyed all of that during the holiday season when I got work. Since then I haven't done much exercising at all and food has become an adventure. So now I'm at an elegant yet elephantine 215, and I have to yell stop.

Today, I'm going to Payless and Champs. I'm going to get some gym shoes and some shorts. Now is the time. Plus, my XBox is broken so that will help too. The spousal unit is on notice to alter the menu and we're going to get some results. I love the pressure.

Okolo

Okolo is a man, I have to confess, who puzzled me for quite some time. You see he's one of those guys that you think you know until you try to say five hundred words to and then you realize that you've embarassed yourself. At least, that's the way he made me feel one time.

When I die and go to heaven, Okolo will be my unix sysadmin. There's probably nobody on the planet this side of Kernigan and Ritchie who know it better. He knew how to build an ISP from scratch before the idea of an ISP became a commercial reality. But I didn't really go to him for unix advice back in the day.

Instead, I did one of those stupid things back in the day which was to assume that since he had this African name and his mother (if I remember correctly) was from the Continent, that he had all his afrocentric polyrhythms in full swing and that the best of them would rub off on me. Yes I actually thought maybe I could catch a bit of the flavor just hanging out with a dreadlocked brother. But like most suburban posers, I was just projecting. Fortunately, I think I was able to keep it a secret from him and he didn't kick me out of his apartment in uptown Harlem.

I'm sure I was one of those annoying black equivalent Andy Rooney types just trying to put on a show, so I have this distinct feeling of frustration that Okolo didn't help me assemble the great black cyberhall that would be the virtual equivalent of a meeting with Malcolm, Martin, WEB and Booker 24/7. Though that dream has never quite disappeared, the expectation that Okolo was on point for that did long ago. I just never wanted to impose on the brother, and this confession has remained subliminal until this moment.

What I knew then and know now to be true is that Okolo is one of those rare, individuals who is gracious first and always. There's something about him that, I don't know, struck me as healthy and pure in the way most Americans are not. I sometimes worried that the evil of the world would crack open and swallow the brother. Maybe I'm completely and totally off about this, but he always impressed me as that kind of nice guy. At least the fact that he resisted my cultural/political fanaticism of the early 90s is testament enough to his levelheadedness.

Anyway, I got an email from him for the first time in a coon's age and he turns out to have a gut! Huh? What? He's blogging a reverse-Supersize Me, in which he's going to shame all us in the pajama corps by doing some fraction of a triathalon, maybe even a whole one. Any fraction is too much for me, but his is all for a good cause, to fight leukemia.

Okolo is one of the mellowist and coolest people you'll ever meet, and you ought to support him.

Return of the Bogard

This is for the [black male] youth.

What I can't do is undo what I've done. I can't go back before the age of 14 and be back in all black schools in the hood. I can't unlearn what I've learned. I can't suddenly put the fear of whitefolks back in my head, but I can try. Hanging with Lee helped remind me of all the distance I've travelled, of all the hard work that put me in my happy spot, doing what I never thought probable or even possible back in the day. So thinking about what I think is real for young black men today whose future is dicey, I'm going to come up with my best advice. For what it's worth. And I'm thinking in particular about some of my young cousins down south, whom I don't really know, but I'm just guessing.

As usual, I start with Baldwin.

All you are ever told in this country about being black is that it is a terrible, terrible thing to be. Now, in order to survive this, you have to really dig down into yourself and re-create yourself, really, according to no image which yet exists in America. You have to impose, in fact - this may sound very strange - you have to decide who you are, and force the world to deal with you, not with its idea of you.

Probably the hardest thing about being a young black man in America is that nobody believes anything you say or do that doesn't confirm some stereotype about black men. It's like you simply don't exist and nothing you say or do will make you seem real to people unless you add something typical at the end, nah mean? You don't have to say a word, and the cop thinks you're a suspect. But you can go to a job interview and talk all day about your real character and they still don't hear you. That's real. And guess what, it never ends. You are going to have to talk your way into every situation and keep reminding people honestly about what you are expecting, even if it sounds stupid - like damn, why do I keep having to explain this to you?

#1 Bogard
You have to Bogard. You have to talk your way in, even when you're not sure you have what it takes. You have to get into a situation where you can try and fail until you get it right. You have to let people believe that they're a little bit more responsible for your success than they actually are. After all, you're doing the work. But that's how people are a lot of times with black men. They don't believe we can do without their assistance because they can't just look at us and percieve our skills and potential. Bogarding means trading on your potential, never forgetting your potential, not being worried about hearing 'no', and never stopping pushing the envelope. As soon as you fail, and you will, you're going to hear the same old crap, and the moment you start to believe it, then you actually will be heading in that direction. There are 6 billion people on this planet. There are at least 1000 who have got your back and can help you. Find them. They're waiting to hear you.

#2. Listen and Learn
You're young, and you don't know anything. What you have going for you is energy, ambition, and nothing to lose. Therefore you need to soak up knowledge in every form that's related to your ambition. Be all about it. Get the magazine, watch the TV show. Read the books. Find the experts. Become a geek about it. Show your love for that thing, because this country is big enough for you to make your fortune in it, whatever it is. It's almost scary how much you can accomplish just by listening. You really have your whole life to learn it. That's why you follow your love.

#3 Get Out
Get out of your comfort zone. Get out of your old habits. Billions and billions of burgers have been sold at McDonalds, and everyone knows what's on the menu. But I bet that you order the same thing every time. Order a vanilla shake from McDonalds next time. I bet you never have. Watch a TV show you never watch. Buy a shirt you would never wear and see what happens. You are more flexible than you think. Listen to me, I sound like Morpheus. But it's true. You have to be able to think on your feet, because you already know the same stuff that's coming to you where you are. But the most important thing to do in this category is to travel. If you have a car, get a map point your finger at a place and drive there. Get out of your car and walk. Be there for a while.

I remember several years ago talking to brothers in Oakland who went to the Million Man March. One of them had never left Oakland in his entire life, he was in his 30s. They rented Ford Explorers, him and about 10 partners and drove clear across the country. He said that the trip was far more interesting than the destination. Why? Because he couldn't have, in a million years, guessed how people across the country would have treated him. He told me about stopping at a truck stop in Iowa and a conversation he got into with some white truck drivers, and he couldn't believe how easy and friendly the people were. But he needed that excuse, 'going to the MMM' to get him out of Oakland.

This is not about making friends with white truck drivers in Iowa, this is about expanding your social ability. Making friends is going to be one of the results. People trust people who feel they can handle them. And the only way to be able to handle all the strangeness about people is getting out with people different than yourself. I go to Baldwin again:

Identity would seem to be the garment with which one covers the nakedness of the self: in which case, it is best that the garment be loose, a little like the robes of the desert, through which robes one's nakedness can always be felt, and, sometimes, discerned. This trust in one's nakedness is all that gives one the power to change one's robes.

#4 Be Intimate
Everybody thinks they know who you are and what you're all about. You need to have imagination to get out of that. But you also need to be intimate with people. You have to let people into your sphere. That's difficult.

I hated people all up in my business. I liked handling my own business because almost nobody could give me what I needed. So why bother telling them about yourself? Because everybody knows somebody, and that somebody might be the key. So you should let people know what you're all about, even if you think they disrespect that, or can't help you in any way whatsoever. At the very least, you get associated with your ambition. It's better than the alternative which is they make up their own minds what you are all about without any real input from you. People talk. People can't shut up. Use that to your advantage.

#5 You Are Not The First Black Anything
And the cieling gets higher every day. What do you think blackfolks who've got it going on have been doing all this time? There are miles and miles of headroom. There is no place I've been and nothing I've studied where there haven't been blackfolks with great accomplishments. Anybody who tells you different just hasn't been out much. But you're still going to be outnumbered. That's neither here nor there. You are responsible to the people who are responsible to you. There is not a great big club out here waiting... well, there is the NBS Summit, but just take it for granted that the black race is doing just fine. You just need to get your hookup in order.

#6 Save.
Handle your money well. Get into a relationship with your bank today. Read everything possible about money and remember this. The best feeling in the world is walking through a mall and knowing you can afford anything in it that you want, but not buying one thing. Save your money. The only way to get money is to keep money. Buy savings bonds, and live low.

#7 Don't Doubt America
America is the country where things work. Whatever it is, if it's possible, then it's happening here somewhere. If it doesn't work in your neighborhood, then you're just in the wrong part of America. The fact that you can read this is proof. If you think you can fight with 'America' and win, you've got it all wrong. Lose that attitude because America is a lot bigger than you think. You'll find your place in it.

#8 Do Not Ignore Luck
You have to learn how to handle misfortune, and good fortune. That was hard for me to learn. I wasn't prepared to take advantage of any situation that wasn't completely in my control. Why? Because I assumed that the outcome would always be bad. I wasn't prepared to be surprised either way. In the end I would just end up mad because I couldn't take all the credit. But sometimes you just have to take the leap of faith.

#9 What Goes Around Comes Around
It's true. You will pay for your mistakes with people. You need to apologize and move on. Don't try to make your enemies pay. When you are actually powerful enough to do so, others will gladly do it for you. But until that point, you need to just collect your stuff and walk away. Don't give anybody a reason to do dirt to you, because you will be in delicate situations.

#10 Find Your Chillout Zone
You must find something you can do, on your own, that chills you out. You cannot depend on somebody else for that. You need to be able to get into your chillout zone when life throws you a knuckleball. For me, it changed. When I was in college, I ran. I could run for 10 miles and just leave the whole world behind. After that it was cycling. Then it was writing all my demons out on paper. But whatever it was, I knew I could come to that thing and find peace. Nobody had to come and restrain me, I didn't find myself on my knees like Usher begging for forgiveness for my own peace of mind. It had to come from within.

#11 Recognize
If you can get half of these things right, you have a good shot. But it won't change the perception of black men in America. So you have got to do a little to recognize others who have their heads on straight. And this is more than just a head nod in passing. It's affirmation of good work or a good deed. It's not paranoid, we brothers got to stick together when you know you or this other man is wrong. It's acknowledgement of achievement, not just survival. A black man can survive in jail. That doesn't mean anything. It's not just about living, it's about living right. It's about making a social space for doing good and keeping that space clean.

Men make choices and live with their choices. These are all tools that I think can help young black men keeping in mind the specific things I had to learn as a young black man. I come from a strong family, but these things still weren't obvious. But look at these lessons closely, see how universal they are?

Dancing on the Third Rail: Part Three

You can sing the words to 'Amazing Grace' to the tune of 'Gilligans Island'. Try it. It works perfectly, and it kind of destroys the purity of both songs. It's completely unexpected and it stays in your head. I think that's what a black Republican is. The first time you see it, you don't believe it, because it seems wrong, and whenever you think about it, it makes you angry because it disrespects tradition. And as long as you've learned it the way you've learned it, it will seem that way.

I believe the future of this country is like that, with regard to race. We are going to have to expect the possibility that all of the different colored square pegs belong in the square hole. We have to stop mistaking color for shape. It requires an honesty that seems wrong and disrespects tradition. It requires an honesty about color and an honesty about shape. But there's still a lot of mending to do because we've all been getting bent out of shape over color.

The Existential Shape of Politics
I've talked about the mending in terms of healing and curing. Since I'm a conservative, I think that the primary burden of healing and curing lies with the self. I have come not to expect a fair society, I've always said that you cannot wish for a better public. As my new pals in the Mother Company salesforce say, 'It is what it is.' I prefer the Run DMC version myself, but the point is exactly the same. We live near the end of an awful history that has taught valuable lessons. That's good and bad. The bad speaks for itself, but the good is found in those lessons - after all, somebody succeeded. But since I believe what I do when it comes to race it puts me in a peculiar if not precarious position, with regard to whom I feel my responsibility lies. I say this understanding that it's a fair guess that most of my readers might consider themselves to be whitefolks. I'm shouting out to the public. The bottom line is that I'm trying to direct black politics into a direction that speaks honestly to self-representation that allows the truth about blacks to be said, and I'm trying to influence white politics into a direction that works in honest coalition with black interests as expressed through those black politics. We've had a liberal white coalition with left blacks and that produced the mandate for Civil Rights. Now that Civil Rights is baked that coalition is in shambles and everybody is wondering where to go next. So far they're regressing. That's why I think the progessive side of the Old School is in a unique leadership position now that Republicans control American politics, but that connection has to be done right.

You see, I am a nationalist and a globalist. I believe that I am a citizen of my nation and I inhereit its traditions and laws. I have a duty as an African American to reconcile myself to the history of my country. I make sense of it and I locate myself within a thread of its development. I am an African American raised as a black nationalist in Southern California during the 70s. When I was driving Lee around and showing her my Los Angeles, she found it remarkable that I knew so many black Catholics & Episcopalians. I really never thought much about that fact in isolation, but it's a very real part of my association with the folks in The Dons. Many attended mass at Holy Name, or Advent or with Reverend Stallings. That's part of it as well. And I also look very closely at my family. I am part of them and I am responsible to them, not just the nuclear family but my entire extended family. That's hard. My family tree is deep and wide. There's a lot to say here but the point is that there are significant contexts within which my identity is subsumed and these are the contexts I expect others to represent as we all work as citizens in the public sphere. When we talk about simple matters like Affirmative Action, I don't want to hear just 'white' or 'asian', I want to hear second-generation vietnamese whose family ran a restaurant.. and that whole nine yards.

So when we talk as Americans about race, a lot of it comes back to the personal, and I know sometimes I get upset when people say ('oh by the way I'm white') and just leave it at that. I say that's hiding. If that's all you say, that's all you can be. But I'm trying very hard to get the energy of black nationalists who led back in the 60s & 70s to work on this new politics of the 21c. I can't do that if whitefolks are just going to be 'white', because that's problematic with regard to multicultural ethics and anti-racist principles that are non-starters in the coalition of color.

There are a couple of huge conspiracy theories in operation today with regard to American politics, and one of them is that all Republicans and folks on the right are like 'Goldwater' and that Goldwater was opposed to Civil Rights for racist reasons. So while a significant number of Old School blacks have basically opted out of mainstream politics for this reason, the Republican agenda has a big gaping default. And from my perspective, all the Pat Robertsons in the world do not add up to one TD Jakes - the conservatives of color, not just blackfolks, but conservative immigrants in generation one and two are a huge flavorful coalition that ought to be the more proper multicultural coalition on the right. But you have to play whack-a-mole on a lot of knuckleheads like Phil Gramm & Tom DeLay before that message get through their thick skulls. They think we're going to assimilate and they're dead wrong. We don't have the ethics problem. They think we're going to get stronger by beating up on homos. Wrong again. They think we're going to sell out to high stakes influence politics. Nope. They just don't have their marketing right, although Christie Whitman does. I think GW Bush started off on the right track with regard to 'compassionate conservatism' but global events took over his domestic agenda, and really this Republican congress defaulted big time. I think history will show that the focus on terrorism and the war allowed a high quotient of mediocrity to set the domestic legislative agenda...

But I digress.

The American mainstream is wide open and accomodating to ethnic flavor, but the issue of race is more than just flavor. That's not anybody's choice - but it is deeply embedded in the way we talk about social justice. It's an important shape, and we shouldn't let color distract us from the content of that discussion. There will always be people who have grown up singing Amazing Grace to the tune of Gilligan's Island for whom there is no resonance of the way things were. That's not what we want. We want people who understand the effort with which things were changed who are comfortably fluent enough to put the same words into the tune of 'When the Saints Go Marching In'. So this is not about colorblindness, it's about color competency and cross-cultural fluency. It's about understanding both history and possibility. It's about knowing enough about why people made political coalitions in the past and how they view their progress from there in order to make new ones in the future. It's about living with the public we have and incorporating their aspirations into the society they would have for their children. It's all going to come together and come apart again. That's why integrity is key.

I have thrown in some Cobbian politics above, and I am negotiating some complex dynamics. I am convinced that the leadership of black political coalitions will be of a certain type of elite. You cannot dredge up the 'legacy of slavery' without the understanding that through it all, the African family persists. And you cannot talk about oppression in the world without recognizing the possibilities of Africans on the world stage. So in solving problems for a particular class of African Americans, black political leaders are going to be thrust quickly onto that world stage. The Congressional Black Coalition appears to me to not be forward thinking in that regard; they're thinking small and as such are going to be marginalized. The context of race is political and the political power one can obtain by wrangling that context well is outsized, but the end goal has little to do with race, and it is a mistake to think otherwise. So how we spend the political capital of making the ethnic vote produce is of critical import. I worry that those who believe the 'Goldwater Theory' are all too ready to pay it all back, that is a strategy which will devolve into an Israeli-Palestinian situation.

Failure is Not An Option
An enemy is somebody who doesn't mind if you fail. And since white identity and all American identity depends very highly on how well our ethnic politics go, everyone has a stake is making this work. Nobody wants to go back to the repression of the 50s, well nobody sane anyway. Neither do we want to go back to the chaos of the 60s nor the sappy accomodation of the crossover 70s. And while I don't wish to overstate the import of how black politics gets its act together in the context of the American economy and geopolitical destiny, it is at the very core of the world's experiment with democracy. We are the leading example of how democracy can empower. If it weren't for what happened to Emmitt Till and how we worked America because of it, the Minutemen at the Mexican border would be shooting first. If African Americans had failed in their demand for universal public accomodations, this society would be a great deal more closed and this nation would be unable to lead the world in any way whatsoever. Just count the American cities that burned in 1968 and imagine where we would be if it got worse instead of better.

It took 26 years to free Geronimo Pratt. Certain key things simply must happen in order to sustain our faith in law and order. One of those things is that we must be free to stake our claim in this land. We must be able to sustain our families as we believe they should be in a place we call our homeland. We cannot sacrifice ourselves into la vida sin corazon. Rather we must draw strength from a society that grows respect of its people. When it comes to American identity, that means respecting the aspirations of freedom and accomplishment for which our emergent populations struggle. It means not only, in the way Malcolm described, are we diners at the American table, but our recipies are on the menu. In that and only that way do we secure the blessings of liberty.

"Humankind still lives in prehistory everywhere, indeed everything awaits the creation of the world as a genuine one... if human beings have grasped themselves, and what is theirs, without depersonalization and alienation, founded in real democracy, then something comes into being in the world that shines into everyone's childhood and where no one has yet been -- home."
--Ernest Bloch

Hanging With Lee

I did a lot of talking yesterday, and Lee did a lot of listening. I told her she was destroying my blog for all the things I might have said here went only to her. Lee is a protege of sorts. I'm showing her my Los Angeles. She comes from an extraordinarily sheltered world that I didn't know existed, and she wants to bloom under a different sun. She takes notes.

So we drove all over. We met yesterday afternoon at the foot of the hills of the Doheny oilfield and went first at the top of Hahn Park looking across the city. We cruised through the Jungle, to the Fox Hills Mall, up and down Crenshaw, to West Adams, up into The Dons, View Park and Ladera. We went to Farmers Market for my favorite Korean BBQ and watched the odd black woman scowl at us. She noticed how white men were looking at her, and we talked about all that. We went up into Hollywood and then down to the South Bay, to the Hermosa Pier and then up to Marina Del Rey. It was all new.

We talked and talked. The interesting thing I learned was about how men want to own women, and the rules that fathers and mothers make to conspire control of their bloodlines. It's makes for a wicked conservatism, and I can see how it had crushed a little life out of Lee. But she's gaining confidence in this world and she wants to be a part of all of it, not just her own well-wrapped universe.

She helped me realize how fortunate I have been at a young age to be exposed to a wide variety of whitefolks. Because she looks at them and she sees nothing. We didn't talk about white women more than once in 12 hours, but of white men and how they do nothing for her. Of course she's never been down South and you might imagine the sort she met at her elite New England college. "75% rich and 50% gay". So one can hardly blame her, as sheltered and protected as she has been, both by her parents and by her own mind. And while there's nothing particularly special about whitefolks, it's always useful to recognize them for the way they recognize themselves, which is what traveling among and between the various cliques can do for a young person.

But Lee only traveled from the old country in Eastern Europe to America as a child driven from oppression. And so she has remained close to her parents for all of her 2 dozen years, without much freedom at all. She said that if you took the African American out of the Conservative Brotherhood creed, you would harness 70% of her countrymen. And she knows of black men who hang with them finding much in common.

I say we are all emergent in America, and sometimes we clutch at ourselves when encountering cielings and walls against our ethnicity. Sometimes we hold our loved ones too close and create in them a fear of the unknown that is easily knowable. On the pier we stared into the cold black water. The sea is massive, powerful and all encompassing. But you can never trust the sea. All you can trust is your ability to swim.

Dancing on the Third Rail: Part One

(Today and tomorrow, I'm going deep into racial territory)

The problem with learning and caring is that you can never shutup, even when you want to. Even when it's better to let people be wrong, and misinterpret, to be committed to what you know to be true forces one, in the end to add another straw to the camel's back, hoping it will balance the odd one someone else put on a moment, or a millenium before.

So it is with race in America. The conversation never stops.

What I understand about race in America is that it involves two sides, and that neither side can win. Black and white are like twin brothers wrestling on the floor. But I think the most true thing about race in America is that it inhabits all of our metaphors. There are so many stories and so many reasons and so many prayers bound up in the drama of race. For anyone who truly cares about the American condition, the state of our union, the meaning of our values, race is always intrinsic, ever puzzling, ever revealing, ever punishing.

I shake my head because I have not yet reached that time in parenthood during which my children rebel. So my instinct remains at the patient-explanation-for-your-own-good level rather than the, fine-do-it-your-way-you'll-see level. And so I am taking an hour or so to respond at length to some straws I see poking out.

Two cats respond here at Cobb on the regular. One is Dave, the other is Chap. I don't really know them. I don't really know anyone in cyberspace, and it's difficult to explain how much of an in-your-face person I am, how I am such an acute observer of people. The web and all computer mediated communications represent to me an abstract medium for the expression of (more or less) pure thought, and it is perfect for certain things, but doesn't begin to approach what I can remember when watching a man or woman walk or listen to them speak or read their faces. So I am something of a bull in a china shop of ideas out here on the web, I am an arrow on a path. I redefine and correct, and I don't listen as much as I would face to face. And it is that gap bewteen the person and the virus of an idea inhabiting their minds which may or may not express itself clearly in the digital realm, that I both recognize and obliterate. So if it sounds like I am beating up them, or whitefolks, or blackfolks, I am, but only in digital bits, only in the realm of ideas. I am a great respecter of people, but when I see a bad paragraph, I am compelled to attack. I don't know that I will find one, but don't hold your breath. This is not about you guys in particular, it's sorta about your being a part of this thing that I and the Brotherhood, and America is going through. I understand your stake as Americans in the reconciliation between all of us.

The best defense, they say, is a good offense. And I really have no need nor cause to be defensive. I'm already here, on the other side of the mountain of personal achievement that unleashes a man's spirit. I have been unleashed for a dozen years and then some. It is how I have managed to take the diary I had been writing in college, to the public - to stand in front of hungry patrons and recite poetry from the heart - to write the unspeakable memo, to correct the man who thinks he knows it all. I care deeply for people, but I only answer to God. Engagement with me is an exercise in honesty, it's about how real I think I can get with you, it's about how much truth you show that you can handle. Sooner or later we get to that place called intimacy. It's a quick jump to there when I write. And I am true to myself and therefore not false with my readers.

So what is this racial thing and why do I bother? I thought about that at the baggage claim this morning after a good 4 hours of sleep. Why is it that this black experience thing is so difficult for my white cousins to understand? Why do I appear obsessed? Why even use such a word? The first answer that passed back through my mind was that it only seems obsessive if you don't see the value in it. But like breeding sows or birthing cows, somebody has to stick their whole arm into uncomfortable places, and once you have learned to do so everything is different. I think whitefolks depend on blackfolks to stick our arms up into race, and they take our civility to be a sign of forgiveness. That's partially true. But there is also a science of husbandry in this, we bring it along generation by generation. But that is always done by engagement, and never by distance.

Represent
Speaking for myself, and I think for many in my generation, much of black culture has been about representation. We have been engaged in a struggle to be a different we. We were like stowaway children under the tarp of the horsecart of the Underground Railroad. Our parents rode shotgun with their hats down low, not speaking too loudly less they draw too much attention. And yet we were their joy and it was our brightness, sheltered within our humble homes, that gave them the courage to take that road to freedom. But my generation crawled out from under the tarp and started talking loud. Yeah! We're free, and guess what you don't really know about us? We've been representing black culture, we've been blackety blackety black black y'all. We've been painting the white house black, and we've dared you to say anything about it. And it was necessary, God knows what the world has been missing in the wake of our parents' silence. And you've been discovering it from Eddie Murphy to Joe Jett to Serena Williams to Condi Rice. The Negro is dead. Blackness is about busting out of jail, about bringing music to the Nowhere Man, about never letting anyone forget about our flavor and unlimited potential.

The success of blackness is demonstrable but its task is not complete. It will take another two generations I think. When my grandchildren purchase banks in Chile or Ghana perhaps. When there's a country club in Georgia where two black ex-presidents hang out. When the Kwaku Foundation awards it's million dollar grant for the 40th time and the networks celebrate. These are my expectations of a fulfilled African American destiny. But lots of African Americans have their own. These hopes and aspirations were forged in different fires and every family's history shapes them, but there is a direction to it, and a common kind of struggle when it comes from African American history. In our generation, it has been to represent - to come out and be loud and proud. As Rick James said, we're bustin' out of this L 7 square, done braided our hair and don't mind if you stare.

The Balance
James Baldwin said:

Take no one's word for anything, including mine-but trust your experience. Know whence you came. If you know whence you came, there is really no limit to where you can go. The details and symbols of your life have been deliberately constructed to make you believe what white people say about you. Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure, does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity and fear. Please try to be clear, dear James, through the storm which rages about your youthful head today, about the reality which lies behind the words acceptance and integration, There is no reason for you to try to become like white people and there is no basis whatever for their impertinent assumption that they must accept you. The really terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them. And I mean that very seriously. You must accept them and accept them with love. For these innocent people have no other hope. They are, in effect, still trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it. They have had to believe for many years, and for innumerable reasons, that black men are inferior to white men. Many of them, indeed, know better, but, as you will discover, people find it very difficult to act on what they know. To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger. In this case, the danger, in the minds of most white Americans, is the loss of their identity.

And so I know that American destiny is not complete until African American destiny is complete. And we keep working, we blacks and whites, we keep working each others nerves until we reach a settlement. Today the settlement is an accomodation, a compromise, a tenable peace which is both uneasy and comfortable. We still live in a society where OJ makes a difference. We still live in a society in which Colin Powell's wife fears for her husband's life. We still live in a society in which Camilla Cosby was considered crazy when she said race mattered in the murder of her son. And whitefolks know very well, as they look at their own families and friends and associates, that something about them is unfinished and unreconciled to the rest of America. It's nothing a simple as 'discrimination'. Hell, nobody I know is a racist. Everybody I know hates racism. But only few can talk about it in mixed company for more than a minute.

Online is a different story. I've proven that, because I wanted to and I paid close attention. But the fact remains, there is still dissonance, sometimes it is as clearly defined and significant as the street between a white gentrified enclave and the beat down streets of chinatown. Sometimes it's as subtle and insignificant as choosing the right beer when ordering Thai food in New Orleans while listening to reggae music. I don't mean to be cavalier, but I'm not sure that we know what to do with our Multicultural ethos or exactly what it buys us in the post 9/11 world. I'm not sure we know what to do with our new sensitivities. Today, 3000 gay couples had their marriages annulled by legal fiat in the state of Oregon. Online we can talk about all this stuff, but what do we do?

More later.

New Orleans Diary: Day Five

This is the last entry. I feel like one of those idiot film students walking around taking video of everything around him. It's not going to capture the flavor, especially as close to real time as this is.

I found my mother's house's in the projects at the corner of Claiborne and Orleans. My cousin took me around all this afternoon and we visited the places where they grew up over in that neighborhood. It's funny when I look at the place now as symbolic of the lowest class on the totem pole: projects. Funny because she kept telling me about the movie theatre that used to cost a nickel for all day, that's now a converted church, and the other theatre that's now a converted church and the old bowling alley which is now a converted church. Then she showed me the old church that's now a middle school, and the high school where a kid got shot not long ago. Nothing is the way it was. The streets haven't been paved and the shutters haven't been repaired. There are too many holes in the infrastructure to hold the same quantities of hope and aspiration, or so I presume.

Poverty of this sort would not work in Los Angeles. Very few parts of my hometown get as rundown as these have, and yet there's something magical about that inversion - the charm of the Drop Squad value the whole place holds. I don't get the feeling this place is dangerous, then again, my sense of dangerous is fairly different from most folks.

We visited another cousin briefly. Somewhere in my family tree file are the digital connections. It's so embarassing when you don't know and can't place the face. But now that the physical connection is made, everything makes sense. It has depth you can't get from a family reunion because it's about place as well as face.

Cousin showed me the park where they played 60 years ago at the southern end of the Laffite projects. Just as quickly, she pointed out the twin park, 'where the whites would play' on the other side of Claiborne. The Two Sisters Restaurant was closed so we headed back up to Galvez. Then over and across to Esplanade, the burb quickly transformed to exactly what you could expect - gentrification. Not so fast, Cousin said of the house at the corner of Esplanade that a white somebody has lived there all of these years. An odd thing to know, but coming with the territory of a woman born in 1940 in this part of town.

As we drove further up Esplanade we got into a stretch of nicer houses that rent for 'as much as $700'. For a three bedroom? 'No a three bedroom would be $1000'. I'm freaking out, silently. These are very nice houses. Finally we arrive at my aunt's building. She's somewhere in Europe this week, nobody quite knows where, and so I missed her tour of the city. Instead, I'm checking out her building, the Esplanade at City Park where she lives on one of the top floors with a view of the lovely park. In the distance to the left across a lagoon is a stand of magnificent homes, one of which must be the Pitot House. As we cross the lagoon towards City Park, nearly clipping a duck, Cousin explains how 'we couldn't even think about crossing those gates'.

Just around the corner is another cousin, and the sun is going down and the breezes are warm. Lovely. He chills my enthusiasm for the idyllic spot by bringing back the reality of New Orleans' own recent school shooting. Every place has it's plusses and minuses. In the end, we had a nice fish fry down at a joint called The Trolley. And I met yet another couple of young cousins.

It has been a great trip. Now I gotta sleep. I have a 5am wakeup call.

New Orleans Diary: Day Four

.0930
What's that in my eyes? Ouch, it hurts. Damned sunlight! My mouth tastes like the floor of a cheap Dominican cigar factory. I was awake at 7 but I went back to bed. Now I overslept and am going to be late to my first breakout session. Drat.

Well, it's nothing I don't know anyway. The good one is at 11. I guess I'll just use my new password and download several hundred MB of software.

.1600
Everything is boring except meeting new people. A couple of the seminars I signed up for were bogus. Well, not bogus but a little underneath my feet. So I took off and checked out the city for a bit in between the time of the last good session and now.

Poverty is the same where ever you go in America. It's instantly recognizeable. You get off the grid and suddenly people are hanging off stoops where the houses have no A/C. The day after rain, the curbs are still flooded where the pavement turns to dirt.

I took Canal up to Rampart Street and took it out to where it splits off with St. Bernard. By there I was in the heart of somebody's hood. So I took Elysian Fields north to Claiborne and flipped some circles around there and hit ghetto. It was around Derbigny that I dropped off the precipice into that 5th Ward Houston look and feel, three classes below the middle where the streets ain't paved. Sure enough the horse cart clops by.

I couldn't find the right part of town Moms pointed out to me a week or so ago. Half the problem is that I'm using three different map programs and the streets I recall go halfway across town.

So I decided to go random and headed down Dauphine because I remember it from the Quarter. But I was going in the wrong direction and ended up at some Navy yard. So I flipped around to Chartres and headed back the other way. Not long afterwards I was on the waterfront boulevard, Decatur, and there was a Hooters to let me know I had left one kind of poverty and entered another.

I'm happy to get back to my hotel room and play with my downloads, but that's partially because I let the spousal unit have the good digital camera. I'm stuck with a miserable unfocusable blurred and distorted view of New Orleans reality, and I know that's the best I can do for the moment. But I know a lot more than I did yesterday.

.0125
Schmooze. 6 Hours straight. I'm losing my mind. I didn't realize that I had such good friends in high places. It's nice to know, otherwise this whole evening would have been a total, complete, utter, bore. I'm getting old and experienced and I see this whole thing in a new light. I get a good understanding of how the schmeer is applied. So tonight it was the devil suit. Black on black on black. Sorta like the Hollywood suit but with no blue whatsoever. Streaks of red instead. My whole attitude was "I'm sick of all this and I'm going to be unique, but I'll pay attention to you". I'm full of shit. Not really, just for the moment.

I drove my car fast down the narrow streets of the Quarter. I eyeballed the hookers and spring break girls gone wild with knowing looks. I stared down every hombre in the streets. I gave a pound to all my homies in the mother corporations. I was this close to buying drinks but everyone was still talking business, even after their fifth drink. I have the insight about this but I'm not going to tell. It's too simple and embarassing for those who have pierced the veil.

You see, worlds have collided. I've been recognized by one of the young guys at the mother corporation as a blogger. It was like a splinter in his mind as I sat at his booth and watched his neighbor's demo. He caught me on the way out. Hi reader. I wanted to come back to him and ask what he'd like me to write, but I kept thinking why 'When Worlds Collide' would be such a cool, yet inappropriate title about the encounter. But I'm cool with all that. Let everyone know everything I always say.

The funny thing, which another long lost associate reminded me, was that I had a well-deserved rep as well as an undeserved rep, for speaking out. I had an infamous HR red-flag moment for a percieved use of an inappropriate metaphor in a business communication. The very idea is so fricken bourgeois it makes me choke. Nevertheless, calmer heads prevailed at the time. But I also mouthed off on a public forum under a pseud. I haven't written there in years, or so it seems, but some people remember me for that. So I have a number of reputations, most of them stellar with the old gang.

Tonight's fare was pedestrian but the best yet. Fish tacos & BBQ ribs with peanut sauce. In fact, it's probably the most imaginative buffet this company has ever produced.

Over in the Quarter, I schmoozed even more. I returned to the 544 and the waitress remembered me. I had 3 drinks and once again I missed the traditional jazz band. The flashing girls were out, but there were only two of them and I have the feeling they were paid by the local Chamber of Commerce. Cops on horses pooped up the streets. Crowds gathered around to laugh and point at suckers who stepped in it.

I am solitary.

New Orleans Diary: Day Three

.2009
OK if there's only one thing I'm going to talk about, it may as well be food. Dayum! But first let's dispatch with the business.

This conference is rocking and rolling. I got my proposal put together last night at about 11:30p while all my colleagues were at some club called 'Bombay'. Apparently, that's why I was fairly bushy tailed this morning and one or two others were MIA. Nevertheless I got in touch with a whole passel of folks I haven't seen in over four years. Mad, Rishi, Dan, Trevor, Rich, JP, Johnny, Jose, Kathy, Rudy, Rob, Brett.. hell I can't ever remember them all, Al, Mark... I'm wondering where big Charles is. It shouldn't be hard to find him, but yet I haven't seen him or Leah yet. But there was Eric, Jean-Paul, Allen, John, Bill.. a huge party. What's best is the chance to keep these professional relationships rolling. Straight awesome.

All the products that I stuck into the proposal actually work the way I thought, and better. The company has done a bang up job on their technology roadmap and the picture is clearly in focus. They are evolving the platform to do the impossible. I'll tell you what I think, and that's that only Teradata understands data better than we do, and that's why they're partners. We've hit some awesome scalability points.. blah blah blah.

Now embedded in this business blather is the following restaurant review:

The joint is called K-Paul's. I got a tip that it was the bomb, and since my crew had abandoned me by 6p when I was starved, I didn't wait for the dinner invite and cabbed over there just before the rain came down. I beat the rush and got a table unannounced so I decided to go spicy. Starting off with a Ketel One martini, I scarfed down their hot and fluffy jalapeno muffins. They are sweet and hot at the same time, and just irresistable.

I got a nice firm andouille sausage in dijon mustard to warm me up and switched over to the molasses muffins. Now I was really ready to go. I picked a mediocre gevertz to hang with the spices and ordered their duck & shrimp remoulade. The rice was a perfect into, kinda dirty but not too, sucking up the gravy just nice. Now this is the thing. You've got this really spicy duck, in which you can taste edges of pate, and the sauce is like a light brown gravy but watered down to boulliabase consistency. All you taste is the warmth and savory of the gravy which is like a perfectly familiar base onto which the spicy meats are dancing. The green beens had teeth squeeking texture and the carrots kept their backbone. The shrimp was light and just another texture in the mix, nice and firmly chewy but tender and succulent.

I think I ate more than I should but I didn't even care. Halfway through, my buds called and said they were heading to Antoine's around the way. By this time it was just getting dark and the rain was coming down. I spoke briefly with the proprieter (I think), a kindly woman with bright inviting eyes and I told her that I'm writing her up. I thought at the time that I would do a little hopping and compare, but I didn't really need to go there. My buds weren't even out of their hotels by the time I footed it to the front door. That joint looked like a jacket only affair, but everybody was wet-dogging it at the front door so I could have stepped in with the leather. But since the guys aren't going to be done until 10p, I decided to get back here to my lil ole room.

On the way I walked a goodly length of Bourbon, but not before checking out Buck & Pops who did a little BB King for my two bucks and the love. They were on St. Louis just before Antoine's.

The French Quarter reminds me a lot of Greenwich Village, except with better music and sweeter drinks. I'm heading back out there tonight, as soon as I belch the stress out of my gut and find my black bandana. I need to sit down. Whoo!

.0100
I did go back out and I'm not to druk t blg abot it. but t wud be bttr if i follwd up on this smtim tomroow. i cn see why popel love this place.

Seriously, it's just too bad that there aren't any people that I know here tonight to hang with, especially when I put on my bad boy gear. (See Photo). Every American man should own a black leather jacket. Most of the colleagues settled in at the overloud Famous Door or Pat OBrien's. I walked the whole quarter. The rain put a damper (ha) on most of the evening's walking but my legs do hurt.

I found all the decent jazz joints too late to enjoy a set, but The All Purpose Blues Band was rocking Club 544. I smoked my way through three stogies and had a Budweiser Select which was icy. There were lots of wet t-shirts but no flashing of any substance. I forgot that it is Spring Break. Tomorrow evening should be more enjoyable. Now I know where to go.

Ha. I see that The Donovan else has got pictures of Buck & Pops.

New Orleans Diary: Day Two

.0420
It's 4:20 in the morning and I can't sleep. I thought I put down enough OH to keep me knocked out, but for some strange reason, perhaps the shouting in the street below and the boomin' system, I am wide awake and parched. I dreamed about a sentence fragment, but then I had a better dream.

It was New Orleans, artificially small. I kept seeing the same people and they kept wearing the same clothes. So I couldn't be clever or snide. They would know it was me; they would see me again. I was narrating a PBS documentary about a girl named Cinnamon who worked the McDonald's drive-thru window. Except that she did it while singing rhymes on the center divider. She had a face like Halle Berry. I dreamt up my insomnia. I suddenly had the voice of Billy Ocean, or Peabo Bryson or Jeffry Osborne and so I sang a song about lost love to the apartment block. I sang that everyone was lonely and tossing uncomfortably in bed. And I could see everyone watching me out of their bedroom windows, wide awake at 2am. It started at closing time which was 1am and so I sang that song, they finished their whiskeys and beers, and marched off like zombies to the apartment block, all just as lonely as they started.

There's Aquafina on the table near my baseball cap. Maybe a swig will help me sleep. I fell asleep to Whoopi Goldberg's latest HBO Special. The first third of it was retarded. The second third of it was brilliant. The final third was excellent, but I had seen it before, and it was too sentimental. I don't like ordinary celebrations. Birthday cake in and of itself doesn't make me happy. So a story about a physically deformed woman who gets to have a disco pool party wedding doesn't do it for me. It's still an excellent bit, but I remember it from her first act which was almost 20 years ago.

The dent in my thumbnail has almost completely grown to the edge. I hammered it several months ago putting together the desk in the living room. I'm noticing the way that I age. I still have the skin of a young man, but I don't know why I can't sleep. Maybe it's this refrigerator. It's empty and loud. I am completely sober and thinking about my children who are off cruising on ships, as I tap alone in the wee hours in the city where my mother was born.

New Orleans Diary: Day One

So I am in the Crescent City. I'm hungry as all get out. Just got into the Residence Inn on St. Joseph and the valet wasn't around. So I just dropped my rented Monte Carlo right on the curb and got up to my room. It's nice, meaning the broadband works and it doesn't smell funny. So I'll fill you in on all the details of getting here later on. Right now I'm in search of some fried oysters and a drugstore.

Weird. I have no idea what's going on in the news. Don't tell me. I'm actually digging the beads in the trees and people walking slow.

.2007
On the way to getting here, here being a software conference at the Morial, I had to close down a number of issues on the West Coast. You see, as everybody goes their separate ways, I have to notarize some documents to say that the parties involved have permission to be shepherding my offspring hither and yon. When it gets international, you never know. So I am taking this leap of faith and swearing oaths etcetera. Sorry Nolo Press, but I ripped off your verbiage. It would be nice to have an attorney in the family to deal with such matters, but it's just another lesson of emergence. Nobody pays attention to black things at this level, but enough of the self-pity.

Since I'm on the hook for delivering a consulting proposal for a huge company that's going to tie up a bunch of resources, I had to send out my spreadsheet on Thursday. I wanted more time, but everybody is on vaction or indisposed or otherwise out of pocket. I make my best guess, understanding that it's supposed to be a high level draft, and I make a huge mistake. Fortunately, the bossman catches my error. Somehow I calculated that we would be working 40 hours days. Aha. That's why adding bodies cost so much. Dumb spreadsheet error.

But it also turns out that I am not following protocol. Well that's to be expected, I haven't been on the job a month yet and I haven't even met more than 3 company employees face to face. I'm starting to learn the downside of the virtual and distributed corporation. No sweat really, but these are things that could be communicated instantly if it weren't for emails. What do I know about protocols? RTFM? More like download it.

So just 30 minutes before I get on the plane Saturday morning, all the stuff I did wrong Thursday afternoon comes back to haunt me. Fortunately, were' still ahead of the deadline. Unfortunately it means I have to put in work tomorrow.

Tonight, on the other hand, I was ready to party. I met two lovely ladies on the flight over here who are also going to the conference, one of whom is... OK I won't say it on the off chance that she discovers my blog-identity. I will say that she's a neck-snapper. It turns out that she happens to know some other ladies that know me. Damn. This world is too small among the young gifted and black. Anyway, I was expecting this to be the cool and casual, pre-conference chillout day. Everybody is out of touch. So it's just me in alien inspection mode, categorizing the life-forms of southern Louisiana.

My frequent flier miles have all expired and now I am at beige level. So no seat upgrades for me. No express car rental service either. I had to wait in line yet again, but I did get the silver Monte Carlo. I actually fantasized that I was driving a NASCAR auto on the 10 East to New Orleans. I suppose that a brother like me should be ambivalent about recognizing that my driving needs are fulfilled by Chevrolets. Sobeit. I'm cool. I realized, playing my time travel game, that only four years ago, one couldn't be sure that the car you rented would have a CD player. I brought some Biz Markie, so who cares about the outside of the car when the inside is bompin'?

The X calls. I haven't mentioned the X much. She's M11's biomom. She has him for Spring Break and they're cruising the Carib. She's a nervous wreck and didn't know I'd be out of town. So she's calling me on the cell for the fifth time telling me about his proper packing list. I mumble assertions. At least I hit the big thing. He's got to have new white sneakers. You have to understand that she is an ex-diva. Think Zsa-Zsa Gabor in high yellow with crinkle waves and attitude with a capital A. In truth, she used to be hotter than Lil Kim, but even Lil Kim had business sense - well until the conviction. Now she is all high maintenance attitude without the payoff. And more than a little bit batty. Not many men know what it is like to be stalked by a neck snapping psychotic. Buy me three martinis and I'll tell you the whole tragic story. Now suffice it to say that listening to her on the cell phone was quite sufficient to make me miss my exit, so where the hell am I?

I swear to God that if she cuts M11's hair just to satisfy her vanity she's going to have hell to pay, but I wouldn't put it past her.

I ended up in the Garden District 4 miles west of where I'm supposed to be. I finally grab a map. You see, my laptop has no batteries. Despite all the last minute BS I put the spousal unit through to get my boss's complaints onto the proper email address that could be retrieved on the plane, there was no way I could make use of the 3.6 hour flight for business purposes. So I ingested some Dan Brown. Decent stuff but I'm sure it would have been more powerful in 1998 when I knew less about Digital Fortresses than I do now. I'll still finish it. Just not tonight.

Tonight I'm going to watch Heat because I'm too damned drunk to make project plans on my laptop. The fault lies with the Rio Mar Restaurant on St. Peter Street which is more faboulously delicious than I expected to find wandering around the Warehouse District looking for an ATM. Well, it's also the fault of my colleagues who didn't bother to hookup with me on what I expected to be a casual night. Did I say that already?

So I'm right at the moment when the wine has entered my limbic system and the flavors are meshing just right and the cell phone finally rings. Boss Man says, have your shit ready. We have to nail this for Monday. Fine. I SMSed three colleagues for dinner plans and the worse call comes back in the middle of dinner. But nothing could spoil this meal. It's that good.

I've got this oyster etouffe that's the bomb. You know how macaroni and cheese casserole is kinda extra good when it's just a little bit crunchy on the edges? The chef at Rio Mar has taken the essence of that special flavor and turned it into a majestic assault on the senses. You've got oysters, you've got chorizo(!) and you've got spinach and cheese burnt just perfectly in this mix. Awesome. Then I've got the perfect consistency of sticky saffron rice on the side of my surgical stainless bowl of bay shrimp in boulliabase. Incredible. The apple-y chardonnay works right in, and I end it all with a martini and stagger back to my hotel. Yes ladies and gentlemen this is what it is like to be a middle-aged man, when you start thinking that sex is inferior to food.

And suddenly I'm thinking of fat people in a whole new light. You know the ones. Not the midwestern housewives who are just 30 pounds overweight, the morbidly obese ones who have made a deal with the devil. I've known the kind of dog-men that don't care if they get HIV, they just have to do chicks just to see the looks on their faces. They throw their hands in the air and boink 'em like they just don't care. Why? Because they're aesthetes of acrobatic sex. I used to be. Buy me an ounce of coke and I'll tell you the whole bloody yarn. Now I understand how people might do that for food. Like those two English birds. What's life if you can't swill the butterfat? I was like that tonight with shrimp heads and tasting the seawater in the 'base and in the salty sweat on the spinach. And I've got pornographic pictures of my food on my cell phone, so the waiter at the next station mistook me for a food critic. He actually wiped my Palm stylus for me.

I wobbled back to my hotel, a blessed five short blocks away, in one of those moods where it doesn't matter that I might get mugged. I just had a magical meal, dude you just don't understand. If I had my knife you'd be missing your bozack right about now, but today is your lucky day. Here's 93 bucks, go buy a hooker you piece of shit. I just ate my way halfway to heaven and everybody deserves a piece of happiness like that. Besides, I get to expense it.

So now I am back safe on the fourth floor listening to my suite's refrigerator make ice and coming out of the Smirnoff & Chardonnay buzz. And I'm not going to crack the frickin spreadsheet. And I'm going to go to bed early and get up tomorrow and find out how to register for this goddamned conference. We'll deal with business tomorrow. Good night dear readers. Too bad you couldn't have been with me in person.

Gee, I Dunno. Where's the Starbucks?

Doc is back from Brazil. He was gone a month. This was the last message he sent me.
This is beach I had house on on Isle Santa Catarina. House was 250 yards futher inland from perspective of this shot. House was 2-story with a pool and jacuzzi. Cost was $30 a night. Waves were 6-8 feet. Beach is hard and flat. You can drive your car on in. Dogs are O.K., and nobody sweats you for swilling beer on dunes as you watch yet another incredible set roll in. I'm returning in 2007.

Are you game?

Who Do I Know in New Orleans?

I have been run ragged the past few days. I'm rather amazed just looking at myself in a state of run down disrepair. I actually have an unruly stack of papers on my desk that's been there for two days. This is obscene.

I have kids' papers to review, a sister's PC to finish upgrading and my room is a mess. I have to pay bills, do a couple loads of laundry and find my other pair of glasses. Most importantly, I have a big proposal to get out today and I'm not sure what all goes in it. It's basically a number and a promise, but there are a thousand details. I just keep running out of time.

It's the damned commute. I've got a customer in San Diego and I'm on the road from 5 to 6 hours a day just getting back and forth. It's cutting into my life like a rusty knife.

But I can tell you that a small revolution is under way. All I can say is that it should send small shockwaves through several nodes of the blogosphere. Actually, there are three bloggy dealings that should come to fruition pretty soon that are all good. Damn. I gotta do that too.

At the end of this week, we're going to do the typical family vacation thing which is head in three different directions. The boy is going with biomom on a cruise, the spousal unit and the giggle girls are also going on a separate and unequal cruise. Me, I get to go to lovely New Orleans, where it has been confirmed that everybody I'm related to will have abandoned for spring break. The good news is that I will make reunions with a bunch of old professional cronies. The bad news is that they'll all be old professional cronies, plus I don't give a rat's ass about golf these days, and I'm quite sure that I cannot crawl the