Anti-Social Media

So recently I upped my involvement with Twitter, and it was fantastic, and then it was an absolute disaster.  Read on, and learn from my mistakes.

First of all, like a lot of folks, I have been a long-time user of facebook, and I have a really good community there - lots of ongoing conversations across the spectrum of opinions and politics.  I pop on for an hour, here and there, and maintain ties to this community with ease.

Twitter ain't like facebook.

Or rather, it is and it isn't.  And learning the similarities and differences has been a painful process.

First of all, I should point out that I am not tweeting as an individual, but instead on behalf of my radio show, Things Not Seen: Conversations about Culture and Faith.  This led me to think about numbers, numbers, numbers instead of people.

I was going a little nuts, sending out blasts of tweets about various podcast episodes and adding hashtags galore.  For a few days, the response was incredible.  The downloads jumped from a couple dozen to hundreds a day.  It was addictive - the higher the numbers grew, the higher I wanted them to go.  So I tweeted, and retweeted my own tweets, blasting bigger and bigger each time.

Two days ago, the numbers stopped rising.  In fact, they dropped off entirely.

What happened?  Well, Twitter throttled me.  And with good reason.  I was acting like an ass.

You know that guy who shows up at a party, or a funeral, and starts handing out business cards?  You know that "long lost friend" who reconnects out of the blue, only to start trying to sell you on some multi-level marketing scheme?  Yeah.  On Twitter, I now realize I was That Guy.

I never had difficulty understanding how facebook is social media.  To be honest, though, at first Twitter just seemed to me to be a big free for all, a meet market where you threw 140 characters out again and again because, after all, they would blast through the feed and disappear in the noise if you didn't.

The problem, I discovered, was not trying to cut through the noise.  The problem was I had become the noise that needed to be cut through.

So, gentle readers, I am offering this public apology.  I didn't do Twitter right.  I treated readers like numbers, and not like people.  I added to the noise.  I am sorry, and I will not do it again.

I stayed up pretty late last night, thinking about all this.  Lots of friends on facebook gave me some great advice and pointers, too.  I went to bed feeling just like I would have felt if I had been an ass at a party.  Because, in a lot of ways, I was.

What have I learned?  Well, first, that short term explosive growth is exactly that: short term.  It comes at the expense of what really makes social media work, namely relationships and trust.  I learned that just showing up on Twitter and blasting and then disappearing is about the equivalent of drinking too much and insisting folks listen to you sound off about politics loudly in the kitchen.  Folks may listen politely for a while, but eventually the host is going to shut that crap down.

So, this morning, I opened up Twitter, and instead of sounding off about the show, like all last week, I read what other people were saying.  I spent more time listening than I did talking.  I thanked people for the tweets that made me laugh or think, and I found good things to pass along that had nothing to do with promoting me or my radio show.

After a day of doing this, I am beginning to feel better about my relationship to Twitter, and to the followers who trusted me not to ruin their party.  Still a ways to go, but I will say today, Twitter has made more sense to me, and started to feel a little more like the community I value so much on facebook.

There's still a long way to go to make amends for acting like "That Guy," but this feels like a good start.

Thanks for reading.

Forward in all directions

It's a hundred-plus degrees outside. Kira is waiting to go into labor with our second child at any moment. It's the tail end of the second week of school. And I just got inside from a bout of pruning the rose bushes.

How's that again?

By "pruning," I should instead say, "butchering." There is a gnarled pile of brambled branches by our curb now, and the rose bushes look markedly worse, not better, for my efforts. Did I mention that I am also a sweaty mess? Sweaty and stinky, and punctured and itchy and a little bloodied from gargantuan thorns? I am.

This is my life right now.

My entire life is that thorny bramble of tangled and knotted branches, overgrown and without order. At least, that is how it has felt for the past few months. It's been frustrating.

So I decided, this afternoon, and with things I should probably be doing (like writing or organizing papers or getting through the overfull email inbox) to take a few minutes and hack away at the lowest-priority problem on the planet at the moment, that problem being the cosmetic state of our front yard.

And yet. There I was. And it was just nonsense, I tell you. The rose bushes have become over-overgrown, with branches heading in all directions and braiding around each other. So I just started hacking and snipping, with no plan or direction other than to reduce the total amount of thick overgrowth.

The result? A four foot pile of nettled branches, large and small. And now I can see the underside of the bush, and how bad the whole job is going to be. There's a lot more to do to get these bushes back in order. It will be a multiple-attempt undertaking.

So this was a first step - wild, no plan, just jumping in and going as long as I can. Then stopping, toweling off, and going back inside, until I build up the gumption in a few days to do it again.

This is my life. These rose bushes are my life, at least for right now. Everything - school, parenting, finances, the future - is a thorny, overgrown thickness, tangled and braided from my neglect. It's a bit daunting.

But I learned something today, with those bushes. Jumping in without a plan is not a recipe for disaster (as I initially suspected). Instead, it actually allowed me to get my bearings, and to figure out the real extent of the problem. It got me started, and that's good.

I think I need to apply that approach to the rest of these thorny parts of my life right now. Dive in, hack away, towel off, do it again in a few days. Repeat. Rinse. Repeat.

I have been avoiding all action, largely because I am afraid, and I don't have a good plan for anything right now. But what I just learned from the roses is that if I can at least hack at it a bit, there might be hope. For everything.

My wife jokingly calls this approach "forward in all directions." I used to be good at it. I lived the whole of my twenties that way. But of late I have been timid. Writers block and being the father of an infant has made me a bit cautious. Or maybe it gave me too much excuse to be too cautious.

Time for a bit of hacking away at things. Time for a bit of gumption.

Forward. In all directions. Towel off. Repeat. Rinse. Repeat.

Overheard on Limbaugh

So today, January 18, 2010, Rush Limbaugh said the following as part of his daily radio program:

The left is constantly telling anybody who will listen how rotten this country is, how rotten we are, how rotten the nation is, how unfair and unjust our economic system is. They create this environment of pessimism, self-hate, and desperation. They tell victims -- and they try to make as many people victims as possible by putting them in groups of victims.

They tell these people that they've got no chance in this unjust and unfair country. "If you're Hispanic, you got no chance. If you're African-American, you got no chance. If you're a woman and African-American, you are doomed! You have no chance. The only out for you is the military, and if you do that, you're stupid, but you really can't be blamed because this economy was so destroyed by George W. Bush, you have no future." What is this going to do to people? And this went on for eight years. And before Clinton got to ten it went on for 16 or 12 years, during Reagan and the first term of Bush. This has been a constant refrain: Uunjust, unfair America is.

What stuck me was how similar, at least on the surface, this sounds to a message written by Dr. Carter G. Woodson, in 1933, in his book The Mis-Education of the Negro:

THE "educated Negroes" have the attitude of contempt toward their own people because in their own as well as in their mixed schools Negroes are taught to admire the Hebrew, the Greek, the Latin and the Teuton and to despise the African. Of the hundreds of Negro high schools recently examined by an expert in the United States Bureau of Education only eighteen offer a course taking up the history of the Negro, and in most of the Negro colleges and universities where the Negro is thought of, the race is studied only as a problem or dismissed as of little consequence. For example, an officer of a Negro university, thinking that an additional course on the Negro should be given there, called upon a Negro Doctor of Philosophy of the faculty to offer such work. He promptly informed the officer that he knew nothing about the Negro. He did not go to school to waste his time that way. He went to be educated in a system which dismisses the Negro as a nonentity.

I'd like to suggest, however, that there is a vast world of difference between Dr. Woodson saying this from a place of oppression, and Rush saying similar things from behind the gold-plated microphone of the EIB Network. To see the similarities on the face of the messages (that minorities have been fed a load of ideological horse manure about their proper place in society) is to miss the fundamental point.

For a member of the master class to point this out (and El Rushbo is always happy to point out, with his "nicotine stained finger," that he is part of the master class) is perhaps gauche, but has no possibility of being a call to revolutionary consciousness. When Dr. Woodson names it, however, he names not only the problem itself but those who perpetrate and profit by it.

When patriotic critics speak of the inequalities facing the minorities in this country, it is not to score points in the political game. It is to name a problem that, God willing, will be rectified.

The key question, the one El Rushbo doesn't actually ask, is who constitutes the "they" spreading these messages of inferiority? Woodson knows. Were he alive today, Woodson would be pointing steadily at the man behind the gold-plated microphone, and the powerful interests for whom he speaks.

More signs of the Apocalypse

As seen on CraigsList. Oh, Lord.

Erotic Writing for Pittsburgh Blog (Pittsburgh)

We are launching a new blog featuring erotic writing and photography set in Pittsburgh and its surrounds. Our goal is to make Pittsburgh the sexiest city in the United States--heightened eroticism as regional asset key to livability. We are looking for well-written short stories between 500 and 1,500 words. All works should be prominently set in Pittsburgh. Quality of writing is paramount. Stories may feature any kind of encounter or near miss (we are GLBT-interested). We are currently paying between $20 and $50/per post and over time are hoping to build a stable of two or three writers who can keep us all hot and bothered with fantastic tells of sex in the city.

Please include an erotic work sample with your inquiry.

• Location: Pittsburgh
• Compensation: Between $20 and $50 per blog post
• Telecommuting is ok.
• This is a part-time job.

We're calling from the Pleiades, and we'd like to make a request...

So I was listening to NPR this afternoon and, as an aside to a story about water on the Moon, they happened to mention "Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft, " a rather unfortunate hit for The Carpenters back in the 1970's. Here's a little taste of that magic, for those who don't remember:



Whew. Okay. Heavy, I know. The reason I'm even bothering to post about all this is that the NPR story mentioned The Carpenters as if they were the originators of the song. Not so. In fact, their version of the song was a cover of the original version, written and performed by KLAATU.

Now, I know. You've never heard of KLAATU. Nobody has. But back in the day, when KLAATU was, you know, doing its thing, there was a pretty massive rumor that they weren't a band at all. The rumor was that, instead, they were a front for a secretly reunited Beatles project. Srsly.

It was a nice pipedream for a culture exhausted by Watergate and such. The wish for something awesome, even secretly awesome, like the Beatles being back together, was a powerful opium for the masses. It would lull us into accepting just about anything. Even KLAATU. Even The Carpenters. So it goes.

"Made in California....For Enjoyment throughout the World"

I just ran across this on David Wm. Sims's blog, Too Big to Fail, and had to share. Enjoy:

Weapons of Mass Distraction

Trust me. I have dropped a name or two in my day.

Like many academics, I suffer from an almost indescribable inferiority complex. If the world's economies aren't enough to make you feel irrelevant in your life's work, your students are always there to seal the deal. The fear that no one, but no one, will care that I am breathing has, on occasion, driven me to some gauche behavior. And, I mean, come on. I have some really interesting friends. Lots of them are quite accomplished in their fields. Several of them are famous. A handful are really famous (and one, admittedly, is infamous).

So, on those occasions when I am weak from my fears of irrelevance, I have dropped a name or two, or stretched my own importance, thanks to the borrowed importance of my more accomplished friends and acquaintances.

I am reminding you of this, dear Reader, not because I am particularly proud of this behavior, but rather to establish my bona fides for the invective that is to follow.

Some of my friends and acquaintances are in the military, or loosely associated therewith. Thinking back to the build up to the most recent Iraq war, I recall many of those acquaintances and friends taking me to task for my hesitancy about, you know, invading. What I recall hearing, more than once, was a strange form of name dropping that, I think, is akin to what I was describing in myself above.

When I would argue against invading from the evidence I had (the evidence that was available in the media and through my researches beyond the limitations of the American media), these jolly ol' Jingoes would get a knowing look on their face and a sage twinkle in their eyes. These old Hawks, mind you, are ancillary. They are factotums. They are sideliners now, and armchair warriors at best. Yet they wanted me to know that they were in the know. And they knew something I didn't.

"Well, I can't say much now. But I've been talking to [fill in the blank], and he's close to Colin Powell, you know, and he said...."

The upshot of what "he" said, in these cases, was that there was a whole lot of intelligence that was simply too sensitive to leak to the media, but if we (us common folk) ever knew the full extent of it, we'd be demanding ol' Saddam's head on a pike and thanking Dubya and Co. for invading when they did. The implication, in other words, was that the evidence I had was irrelevant, in light of the evidence that I didn't have.

Now, of course, it turns out they actually didn't know something I didn't, after all. They wanted to feel important and in the know. They (and lots of other folks) bought into a culture that was fed off equal parts fear and self-aggrandizement. That latter factor, I think, was what gave these Hawks (some of them quite well placed and influential - hey, I told you I know important people, didn't I?) the impetus to take the little crumbs of rumor they had and talk like they had fat seed cakes of certainty.

Let them eat cake, indeed. And we did. And why not? After all, "they knew something we didn't." A-yup. And we should have known better. Take it from one old name dropper to another.

But if you don't believe me, perhaps you'll believe one of the knowiest in the know fellas in the game, Tony Blair, himself. Yesterday he pretty much admitted that the whole WMD justification was a pretense, and that he would "still have thought it right to remove" Hussein regardless of whether there were WMD's or not.

This has led a prominent international lawyer, Phillipe Sands, to remark that Blair may now be open to war crimes prosecution, given that he joined into the war, and the justificatory posturing that preceded it, "irrespective of the facts on the ground, and irrespective of the legality" of invasion in light of the lack of positive evidence.

There's a full story on this developing fiasco here.

Tony Blair, however, is not our problem. He merely is a good, close friend to our problem. He had tea with our problem just last week, in fact, and they had such a fine time, and...

Let me venture this: there is a deep inferiority complex at the heart of this nation. It has been endemic for generations, and it became epidemic in the last ten years. From Enron to the housing bubble to the credit crunch, we as a nation are running amok, from one fiction to the next, trying our best to feel relevant and important without the substance of fact or character to bolster us. The names we are dropping now, however, are names like "patriotism," "freedom," "security," "opportunity," and, yes, "hope."

These are the names of acquaintances whom these days we barely know. However, if we drop the names often enough, and broadly enough, everyone will assume we're still all old chums, won't they? And if those listening to us are convinced by our associations, then that's close enough to being real, isn't it, to fill the hole?

Sure it is, chum. That's the ticket. Take it from one old name dropper to another.

Overheard on Facebook

Concerned citizens on the move, tweeting us to victory:

"Please pay attention to terriorist, they r on facebook also, I spoke to the fbi, an they said that it can be possible an that facebook has to deal with this correctly, ;-)"

The fbi is right, kids. Please pay attention to terrorist. Srsly.

Kids today, with their hard rock, and their yodeling...

I especially love the Jazz Flute break we get around minute three. Ron Burgundy's got nothin' on this guy.



Thanks mucho to Thad Thomspon and Jason NeSmith for putting this on my radar. Enjoy.

Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen.

"This is the Remix"

(The following post contains some explicit language and such)

One of my favorite moments from Kill Bill 2 (and trust me, this was a film wherein I had a lot of favorite moments) was the monologue in the final act where David Carradine's character, Bill, compares our protaganista, Beatrix Kiddo, to Superman:



"Clark Kent is how Superman sees us." This is the point I want to linger on for a moment here. I want to linger over it in the context of a music video. (I think I'm going to spend several posts talking about music videos. It makes for a good distraction from the screaming agony that is dissertation rewriting.) The video in question is one I first encountered several years ago, when I was living in Berlin. It was played on German MTV all the time the summer I was there.

The video is DJ Tomekk's "Ganxtaville Part III" (again, there is some explicit material here):



Now. let's take a look at this a moment, in light of this insight from "Kill Bill" mentioned above. What, in other words, does this video indicate to us about how American culture is seen from the outside world? What can America learn about itself from this "alter ego" shown to us by this northern European gaggle of hip-hop wannabes?

1. The Mob is multicultural - The early scene, seen in reprise throughout the video, in which the cast is dressed in 1930's gangster drag, recalls James Cagney and the G-Men, or Kevin Costner and "The Untouchables." In "Ganxtaville," apparently, organized crime has no racial tensions. Sort of a nice thought, actually.

2. Doing the "We're driving the car" motion and the "We're bouncing the car and/or we're patting the ass" motion is cool, and makes you look tough and gangsta - They don't, of course. But in this alternative vision of America, everybody thinks they do. These motions look ludicrous, and if you walked into Bed-Stuy or Watts and did these motions you would be shot and mugged, your hubcaps would be stolen, and you would be shot again. But here, in "Ganxtaville," they are a rite of passage into macho-manhood, apparently.

To their credit, they do get the authentic "We're raising the roof" motion into the video, as well. Yes, in America, we actually do that motion, and yes, it looks as ridiculous as it does here in "Ganxtaville."

3. Aluminum baseball bats are cool, and make great fashion accessories - Don't ask me. But they're all over the damn place in "Ganxtaville."

4. Women in bikinis like to writhe near, and suck on popsicles around, dumpy looking white guys like DJ Tomekk and MC Murda Weapon (The skinny guy in the glasses and the pudgy guy in the jogging suit) and will wash their cars gladly - In the real America, they don't. Unless you pay them hell of money. So maybe this is true in both America and "Ganxtaville." That might explain a lot about how, and why, these incongruous writhing women came to be in the video. Yes. They are, in fact, European porn stars. Hence doing such things with dumpy guys (and worse) is sort of de rigeur for them.

5. A brief excursus about this guy, MC Murda Weapon - He's pudgy. He's dumpy. When he does the "we're driving the car" motion, he looks especially silly. Yet he has chosen this incredibly "tough" moniker. I mean, Murda Weapon? That implies tough. So he's definitely making the attempt to be "hard" and "street." The difficulty arises, though, in the fact that he's German. His handle, which sounds tough and hard in English, is a translation of the German name "Tätwaffe" - which to untrained American ears is virtually indistinguishable from the phrase "tit waffle." And I'm sorry, but that is not tough at all. Painful, yes. Tough? No.

6. Note at 1:17 - The inexplicable, mirror shaded, uniformed officer of the law. He seems to be watching all this, unaffected by its implications. It's clearly an intentional shot in the video. I just have no idea what it means.

7. The Mexicans - Ditto these guys. In "Ganxtaville," the Latinos and the hip-hop crowd intermingle in a way that simply doesn't occur here in America. I mean, sure, there's some good Mexican gangsta rap, like Control Machete and such, but you don't really see Snoop Dog and L'il John hanging with them hombres. I mean, there's Dirty South, and then there's Really South. ¡Ándale!

But, anyway, there they are. Bouncing cars. Gang signs. Rap video. Only in "Ganxtaville."

So here is America, as seen through the eyes of crazy insane Danish DJ's and German Gangstas. I honestly do not think this is a caricature; I believe it is an homage. I'm just not sure to what. But, as they say in "Ganxtaville," kein Stress. Peace.

Business as Usual

So I was listening to NPR yesterday morning and heard the hue and the cry being issued over at the Dow Jones corporation like shares of common stock over the takeover bid being hoisted up the flagpole by rogue pirate Rupert Murdoch. He might take over The Wall Street Journal.

The fear is great. Editorial standards may be compromised. The independence of this flagship of journalism may be steered instead to serve the biased business interests of Murdoch's vast financial empire. And, most clearly, there is a fear that whoever might mount a successful takeover bid - be it Murdoch, Mordor or Moloch - will in the end slash the company and leave it in tatters and ruins, a shell of its former glory. NPR's David Folkenflik can be heard probing the gravitas of the situation, asking after the concerns of the Bancroft family, Dow's major shareholders, and wondering aloud if this "exemplar of American journalism" will be sullied.

Give me, as they say, a break.

To blanch at such possibilities is, to my lights, simply to confuse a corporate mouthpiece like the Wall Street Journal with something of actual value to the Life, Liberty and Pursuit of Happiness in the day-to-day existence of the majority of American citizens. You know, things like drinkable water, clean air, secure jobs, and affordable health care. The folks at NPR's business desk seem unable to think of this newspaper in terms other than that which one, in days gone by, would have considered reserved for national resources (which can - but should not be - strip mined) or national ideals (which can - but should not be - compromised).

But this takeover is not of that class of debacles. It is precisely the sort of thing the "independent" editorship of the Journal has been championing since...well, there's never been a time they haven't championed it, actually. Leveraged buyouts making the way for tyrant CEO's to radically gut once-proud and -prosperous companies leaving mountains of pink slips, decimated communities and worthless pension funds in their wake is the very gut and gristle of what the Journal lauds on its pages. Simply look at Flint, Michigan or listen to glib economists gush about sneaky corporateering to the likes of Tony Robbins or on financial websites: the business of this country is business, and this is what savvy businessmen do.

So, as for me and my house, there will be no tears shed for a lost Eden of journalistic independence unstained by the apple juice of Murdoch's business interests. Murdoch, for my money, is just the most recent and the most visible of the snake-oil salesmen who have been running this country since the Boston Tea Party: a bunch of Anglos who are thinking with their pocketbooks, disguised in native drag to make us all buy the ruse that they actually belong here, dumping our Life, Liberty, etc. over the side of the ship in the name of their representation and happiness.

Let the Wall Street Journal hang, say I. And may its readership - who so often seem beyond the touch of conscience or consequence - tremble in the shadow of its swaying. Now that would be an exemplar to American journalism. Wouldn't you agree, Mr. Folkenflik?

Zyklon-Barbie

Here's what worries me about America.

See, it's like this. Say that you're an ugly, mule-toothed skinhead race-baiting neo-Nazi. You are also a musician, and your career has been built on writing and playing songs that denigrate all the "mud peoples" and praises Aryan sensibilities and family values. Then, let's say, for example, you die in a tragic automobile accident. Very few people are going to notice, or care. Some might even cheer. After all, you were ugly. In our country, bad racists are ugly (natch).

But what, oh what, America, if your racists are beautiful?

The ugly racist of my example is, of course, Ian Donaldson of the white power band Skrewdriver. Outside of fringe circles of the right wing, Donaldson never garnered much notice. The songs Skrewdriver sang were not examples of high art - far from it. Humorless paens to the likes of Rudolph Hoess and testosterone pumped swastika waving were mostly the order of the day. Easy to dismiss these guys as kooks (because, um, they are kooks).

But what about Prussian Blue, my friends. What about Prussian Blue?

Prussian Blue, you see, are a folk duo made up of the teenage Gaede twins, Lynx and Lamb. They have delicate features, straight blonde hair, and winsome looks to give the camera. In its original incarnation, Lynx played violin and Lamb played guitar, though now they have graduated to a more robust, band sound. They look sweet - innocent, even.

Oh, and they sing Skrewdriver songs. Did I mention that they sing Skrewdriver songs?

The Gaede twins, y'see - in fact, the entire Gaede family - are virulent racists. Consider, for example, this selection of lyrics, penned by Lynx, for the song "What Must Be Done":

ALL the mud races must be banished,
For look at the world they have damaged.
Look around and what do I see?
Ugly brown faces staring at me.

Our people must look like my mom and dad.
They don't now and that makes me mad.
We don't want to be mongrelized,
We want to be Nature's Finest down deep inside.

Now here's what worries me. In America we seem quite eager to accept any lame or even hateful idea that comes down the flagpole, so long as the one handing it to us is attractive. We idolize the uncouth and the ill-mannered so long as they have a Hollywood address or a Prada pedigree. We obsess about JonBenet to the neglect of our own children and crave our own fifteen minute alotment of attention.

In such a milieu, it is not hard for me to see the possibility that Lynx and Lamb would get a sympathetic ear for their tripe. "After all," I can hear the voices saying, " they're so cute, their politics can't be all that bad..." At the very least, their "angelic good looks" are garnering the twins a rather high media profile - even when the media attention is less than charitable.

The media outlets in this country are notoriously fickle. In a constant craving for a new angle, I fear it is only a matter of time before some major news organization decides to give Prussian Blue a "fair hearing," in the name of some distorted notion of "equal time" or "free speech." If that comes to pass, we may find ourselves coming face to face with what America really values, as liberty and justice for all crumbles against the brute force of our national narcissism.

I mean, after all, they're only kids. And they're so cute...