It's not easy being green, but they sure can flap their yaps about it.

I forgot to mention I went to this thing. Kucinich, Hilary and John Edwards showed up out of all the candidates on both sides of the aisle. I think you can watch it online here.

My thoughts:

-Does anyone seriously think that solving the massive damage on the scale of "global warming" lies in the hands of a president? If so, holy ghost help us all.

-Assuming that it's at least important what the candidates think about global warming, given the fed's track record with handling disasters in light of the Katrina fiasco, what possible action plan can we even reasonably believe makes sense and is do-able when addressing such an imposing topic?

-Kucinich came on first. Says some okay things. (particularly about impeaching Cheney, but that's outside of this forum) He doesn't stand a chance.

-Hilary was next. It was weird, because as someone who is a native Angeleno, I don't get starstruck. Two exceptions were when I met Scorsese and Magic Johnson. And this isn't leading to being starstruck by Hilary, no way. But before her entrance the intensity level rose at least two levels, and it was palpable, like waiting for the band to come out. The Wadsworth Theater is a stately, intimate theater that holds a few thousand, and when Kucinich was talking the aisles were empty. With Hilary, the aisles filled; pr flacks, aides de camp, assorted indie reporters (mainstream ones got seats, of course), and the rest of the assorted plebes.

-Hilary, chugging along, then had the misfortune to have a heckler stand up and begin a tirade that went on until they bounced him on his ass. What was interesting was to watch her and her escalating reactions; 1) She just kept talking! No shit, as the crazy heckler was shouting away with all eyes on him, she just kept right on going. 2) Then, she got her hard-ass on. Leaning an elbow on the podium, she stared this dude down. This of course made every male in the audience grab his balls while images of Bubba, cowering on his knees in front of her danced through the air. 3) Finally, she blurted out, "Were you invited to speak today?"

-John Edwards - a decided letdown, came on and proceeded to put his hands in his jacket pockets while he spoke. Weird move, that. But the weirder thing is that the dude was frumpy. I mean, for all the dough he has, you'd think he'd have duds that are hand tailored. Oh yeah, a lot of peeps left after Hilary.

Basically, it was mildly entertaining, but for anyone at all interested in global warming, yer better off reading a book.

I also think that this is a critical time in our history, not just because of the environmental challenge, but because of whatever response we put up. Because part of the reason we're in the mess we're in - and I mean everything, not just the environment - is because we place the potential power we have in synergy into leaders. To be fair, part of that equation is by default, because the powers that be have rigged a really hard game to unravel.

It's gonna take strategic, hard work, something that scares both left and right alike.

You reminded us that new worlds do not come delivered on silver platters. New worlds, new ways of living do require getting the hands dirty. New worlds require more than lip-service and appearances.
-Essex Hemphill, to Audre Lorde

Hurry up and slow down!

Something that I think is important to be inculcating our young folks with are the ramifications of our actions as consumers. While certain of the baby-boomers have begun rolling their own balls, the problem of market share looms, and speaks to some fundamental historical forces that aren't necessarily in alignment.

Incidentally, at this very moment I have on "LA City View," a channel devoted to programming by and about the City of LA. The show just beginning is, "Women in Entertainment," moderated by City Controller Laura Chick. In her prolegomena, she mentioned that for the first time, in 2001 the City of LA appointed a woman to one of the top 3 City positions - that was her (Chick).

This is a succinct illustration of the odds of grabbing even a slice of the pie from the power mongers. Dolores Robinson, mother of Holly Robinson-Peete and an entertainment manager, just right now said that "things are pretty much the same." I couldn't agree more. Over the holidays I happened to see a ceremony that our Chicano Mayor, Antonio Villaraigosa, presided over. It celebrated "Native American History Month" by citing the usual; X number of NAs in LA, how "vital" (whatever that means) their culture is, how they were the first Americans, blah blah blah.

The young NA girls come out in tribal garb and proceed to dance for whitey. And so, whites are entertained, feel enlightened, progressive even, by looking at their brown mayor, their brown ceremonies... and yet remain blissfully ignorant of probably the largest concentration of Mexicans/Mexican Americans outside of Mexico, East LA, where, of course, the social barriers and challenges are long-entrenched. Despite all of the ceremonies.

Now, I am all in favor of civil disobedience as public communication display, but generally don't think it's a very practical tool for substantial change - it's a demonstrative tool, but here we are, forty years after the halcyon 60s & 70s, and Laura Chick was barely elected.

This also supports what I have experienced with the left, how they love the pomp of demonstrations, their Weberian charismatic leaders and mob-think. This of course applies in equal measure to the right, but oddly, leftist orgs are always embroiled in "the good fight" and strategy is this fuzzy cloud never to be broken down, deciphered and deployed in practical, concrete, logical, business-driven and grounded ways. Thus, unless you're the NAACP, ACLU or GLAAD, these orgs typically fall in to the "begging syndrome" where they are devoting large resources toward raising money, typically, fundraisers or grants.

Let's be straight: Begging.

And if begging is not one of the most embarrassing forms of infantilization, I don't know what is.

Back to the aside fork in the road I took... For NOW, one white woman in half a century isn't even tossing someone a bone. It's table scrap. Think about women of color, long-subjected to seeing the fight for "women's rights" in this country boiled down to white women's rights.

This aside is providential, because it supports what I feel and preach about indies; that the fight is indeed with the "powers that be," but that fight can only be meaningful if strategic ways are employed to gain market share. It's also as basic a principle as there is in this fight; after all, what is the definition of "conglomerate," and "consolidation"?

Take the mass-media congloms who've concentrated unprecedented media power; whose side is the FCC on now? Whose concerns will the FCC take lightly or not? More importantly, what are the hard realities for indie media practitioners?

So, to be utterly crass, I think it's silly to think that a local indie paper can fight a Rupert Murdoch or a Viacom. Yes, ultimately, that's where the problem lies, but the fight is not to be fought strategically by indies there - you don't even rate the attention of a pimple on Murdoch's ass. And even if you did, there's the FCC, there're the lobbyists with deep pockets, and ... well, you get it.

Now the segue,; because of Turkey Day yesterday, and our annual ceremony of stuffing birds and ourselves silly. So it's apropos that this turns to the Slow Movement.

There's plenty on the web about Slow, but one of the interesting manifestations of it is in food, and how it is proposing and practicing ways to combat agri-biz. One of the champions of the Slow Food movement is Alice Waters - there's a link to her in my sidebar, and her award-winning eatery, Chez Panisse. She also happens to be a big-wig of the Slow Food movement internationally, as I recall.

She really is something else, and an indie triumph of taking one's passion, plugging in where they can on the local level, and along the way, forming synergies and building out toward the bigger picture. Indies of any stripe, take note.



Btw, for those interested or who missed it, check out Nick Geyrhalter's, Our Daily Bread, a great documentary on food production that has the bonus of being very well made aesthetically.

Nunna daul Isunyi, or, Gould is God

Nova, the long-running PBS series, is running Judgement Day, a fantastic doc on the controversial Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District case. Not only is the doc well-produced, but I think it clearly illustrates the war of ideas at work in my country and how that penetrates to the very bedrock.

Let's be dead honest about it folks, "my" country is, after all, founded upon the principles of greed, genocide and theft.

Outside of superior technology (and the will to use it), Christianity was a pillar in the preamble to slaughter and re-construction via indoctrination. Easy enough to see.

With that bit of a preamble of itself out of the way, it's weird to think that we're coming up on the two year anniversary of this case. It drives home my point about how this fundamental war is indicative of tectonic shifts now, hundreds of years after the establishment of the colonies.

On a personal note, I've raised my daughter to be analytical about everything, from the schools she attends to the kind of music she consumes. To do any less is, methinks, a crime, because to not be so is to be lazy. It also makes one a doormat. And I'll be damned if my daughter's gonna drink the Kool Aid of American-easy-living-through-not-worrying. Or, like crazy liberals, worrying about the wrong things, or even the right things, but doing stupid crap in the name of good causes. Fuck that.

I say this in light of encouraging discussions we've been having about the church. Renee's a teen now, and she's coming of age.

[written to X; particularly, Johnny Hit and Run Pauline, White Girl, Universal Corner, Adult Books, The Once Over Twice, and one of my all time fave X tunes, The Unheard Music]

Amazon's Kindle (& Darabont's "The Mist")

I was going to write about Frank Darabont's film of King's The Mist, but it just got trumped for the lead. I saw the front bumper for The Charlie Rose Show on Jeff Bezos'/Amazon's "Kindle." Intro'd today via Newsweek's cover, it promises the future for digital reading.

As an avid reader, this thing sounds really cool, but a couple things worry me: (1) It's $400, and (2) It's still too big.

So, given Moore's Law, price should fall. Size? Well, hopefully they did their focus groups.

But let's give Bezos/Amazon the bennie of a doubt here. Let's assume mass-traction happens. What are the implications?

The obvious things that Bezos cites (saving trees, ready access to about 90K books and no doubt growing, publishers not having to guess at book runs...) are cool. What I'm interested in knowing is will this open up the barriers to entry for indie writers in the same way that MP3s and portable players (no people, believe it or not, Stevie Jobs did not invent the MP3 player) did for music? That's not just a tech question, that's a business question. In other words, having the technology's one thing, but having access to it as a distribution platform is quite another. Bezos seems like a cool enough guy. So time'll tell.

There's also a difference maker here in that unlike music and unless you have bank, books are a muthaphuka to digitize. However, contemporary writers (I'm factoring out the Luddites) write on computers, so their stuff's already digital. So, score one for the current crop. (Boring note: Truth is, any analog media is a bitch to digitize.)

With that stuff out of the way, something Bezos said stuck out:

How do I know that we have the best customer experience?
1. Price
2. Get it fast
3. Huge selection

I disagree; Amazon's customer experience is great because it is highly "intermational" - interactive and informational. (Well ain't I the clever marketing jerkoff?) One of the things I like to talk about to peeps when it comes to business is to find out what their customer experience was like. This is a big part of the reason that I think Yelp is far and away above other social networking sites.

And it's also why I think Amazon's retail experience is so satisfying, because before you know it you're knee deep in relevancy. Truth is, tons of consumer-oriented sites give you recommendations, but Amazon was a pioneer in relevancy in regards to recommendations. Then they hit upon the idea of tying in your likes to those of others through their lists - thus, it became an intermational experience.

That's what Yelp has done by synergizing the social networking model with the intermational model of Amazon.

Bezos said that as tech advances that more power is being transferred to consumers. I think I know what he means, but we're still a long way from home insofar as the control of all this cool stuff, let alone a true democracy where young and old folks alike can have an equal chance of entrepreneuring their way to the next big thing.

ps: I haven't forgotten about Frank Darabont's The Mist. If, like me, you're a fan of suspense flicks, see The Mist. I'd planned on writing a diatribe on why this kind of flick blows movies like Saw or Hostel out of the water, but I'll spare y'all. Just check it out; a real popcorn movie. It's good.

He's listed as day to day, but then again, aren't we all?

With all of the bluster about the way "new media" is changing the info landscape, the real challenges to the old guard seem to be - surprise surprise - in music. Witness Radiohead's latest distribution play. Go ahead - Google it - there's tons of stuff, from major mass media to pundits like Gerd Leonhard or Chris Anderson.

As someone who exists on the margins of this, pontificating till I was sick of it to so-called indie filmmakers, it's all quite amusing. Many of the principles remain the same between music and film and indeed with any artistic medium on the indie level.

But music has a different dimension than most others, and that's concerts. For musicians, this is where the money is. This is why the Stones, who by now are probably mainlining Geritol, are still touring and indeed in their recently completed world tour set a new gross record of over half a billion. That's a ton of Geritol.

So while all of the talk about the "innovation" (hint: it's not) of Radiohead's distrib strategy is bringing this discussion to more public light, the key thing to get is that recorded music (herein, "records" or, "a record") in the new age of new media is, in the purest marketing sense, collateral. Think of it this way: If a company takes out an ad for its latest widget, its sales expectation on the ad is based upon market research, and the price for the ad is a marketing cost. The difference is split between the two models, stone age and new media. What the mass media congloms of the stone age fail to understand is the stone age media's aside but a new media bedrock: the model of records = marketing cost in the age of new media; they are stuck in the stone age where, first and foremost, records were a revenue generator, instead of a cost center, ie: marketing cost.

In its most basic light, the stone age media's failure is in their out-moded, out-entrepreneured thinking, their perspective, the way they look at, perceive and understand the world. It's the Peter Principle all over again. (from the citation: This is "The Generalized Peter Principle." It was observed by Dr. William R. Corcoran in his work on Corrective Action Programs at nuclear power plants. He observed it applied to hardware, e.g., vacuum cleaners as aspirators, and administrative devices such as the "Safety Evaluations" used for managing change. There is much temptation to use what has worked before, even when it may exceed its effective scope. Dr. Peter observed this about humans. [emphasis mine])

And not to cast aspersions, but new media has its long list of wacko tries - witness the dot-com boom, but that's not un-expected. However, when a would-be king such as Yahoo goes and hires an old stone age patriarch like Terry Semel, (from the largest stone-age conglom on earth! No doubt the Yahoo-ers thought that was a great selling point, but in reality, their thinking as well was stone-age) it more than raised eyebrows with me. (Although I have no eyebrows to brag of) My expectation at that point was for Semel to not get it, and sure enough, in a re-tread of John Sculley at Apple, (Yes, even the mythic Steve Jobs had to re-tool his thinking. Remember his now legendary pitch to Sculley at the time? You want to sell sugar water or change the world?) Yahoo has "failed" spectacularly. I say this in light of the fact that Yahoo could have been the kings - they were positioned to be so, but then their lack of innovation killed their chances, and in a confluence of now history, Google out-entrepreneured them.

LHOOQ: Kang Youwei Readymade, Even

Here's an example of a readymade I found that I did while in school. I remember the circumstances: It was a class on China's transition into the twentieth century, and was quite boring. Not because China's transitions aren't fascinating - they are - but the instructor was run-of-the-mill. But I did come across Kang Youwei, an interesting character during this period.

This is a poem Kang wrote while overseas, in Canada, desperately by some sources, trying to raise funds for his pro-emperor aspirations. The poem - written in August 1899 for the celebration of the imprisoned Emperor's birthday - speaks to the incipient dominant culture and the longing for stability, familiarity, conservatism... represented in his endorsement of the monarchy. Oddly enough, Kang would go on to champion very progressive social ideals. Here's his poem:

Far across the seas we celebrate Your Majesty's birthday,
The dragon banner unfurls above the white men's buildings.
White people, clinking their glasses, assemble grandly beside us;
While the yellow race squeeze, with lighted lanterns,
through narrow lanes.

The Lord on high grants You life, and has pity on us here below.
A petty official, prostrate, in tears, lies in bitter obscurity.
Far from this distant Canadian island I gaze toward Beijing:
Waves around the Emporer's palace-prison; how often I return
in my dreams.

I recall being struck by this poem at the time by the conflict, and its economy; there's quite a bit going on here within two stanzas.

At any rate and at this time, I'd been deeply ingrained in Surrealist principles, so I thought I'd make a readymade. Here it is:

Far across the sea I celebrate her
the banner unfurls above buildings
there is no clinking of glasses assembled grandly beside us
while the race proceeds with lighted lanterns through narrow lanes below us

Life on high has pity on us below
A petty official, prostrate, in tears, lies in bitter obscurity
From this distant island I gaze toward her
Waves around her palace
How often I return

-11/13/89

While I don't think Kang's poem is bad, (my only knock is that it's a tad obvious, but on the other hand Surrealists can be really abstract and obscure, while the creme de la creme is very lyrical and sometimes, a'la' Peret, funny in ways beyond recognition by traditional "umor" - [sic: yes, this is an obscure allusion for my benefit]) bad poetry is particularly good insofar as readymades are concerned. At least that's been my experience. In fact any bad text will do, poetry, songs, proclamations, transcripts, lectures, speeches, essays... blogs...

Orale pues, Marcel, ella tiene una cula calor, verdad!