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August 26, 2002

Voices features highlights


Voices That Must Be Heard ran a great article last week on the Chinatown Ice Cream Factory, one of my favorite places in the city. It's apparently 25 years old, and has some fantastic stories. The writer of the article (also the translator, an unusual arrangement for Voices) is one of the best who shows up in Voices regularly; she writes with lively style and structures her stories well.

I meant to link to other recent Voices articles, and I think I forgot: one on a guy who hired a woman to pretend she was an Orthodox Jew to buy a "Frankenfish" from a Chinatown store for his museum; and another on Julio, the guy who dances salsa with a life-size doll in subway stations. (The latter, oddly enough, is from a Polish newspaper.)

No avoiding it: I'm more interested in features than in hard news.

Posted by me at 4:54 PM | Comments (3)

August 24, 2002

dr00000l...


I swear to god, I'll never get around to applying for graduate school if I keep (re)discovering places like MIT's Media Lab, an atelier-style program housing an inordinately high number of people who seem to be studying DJing. (First saw them at the Geek Pride Festival -- which had a site that seems to have disappeared -- exhibiting various wearable computer projects.) Now I've found these guys, I'll never want to go anywhere else, because I've never seen a school which is thinking so sensibly about the ways computers are changing social interaction and learning. At the same time the Media Lab seems to be so totally quantitative in its approach, and so focused on developing new software, that I'd probably get frustrated and drop out after the first week. UGH! I'm just not convinced I'll ever find the perfect department for me. Each new department I find excites me in a totally different way.

Posted by me at 6:28 PM | Comments (4)

Modding your DDR pad


Our man in Williamsburg, VA -- the one what made the Linux port of DDR, aka PyDDR -- pointed me towards his tips on modding your DDR mat for durability and stability. I can't endorse it over other mods, since I haven't tried any of them, but this seems to be pretty much the standard from what I've heard. DDR Freak has a much simpler plan, but it looks less durable and less ergonomically sensible, and it doesn't involve any tinkering with the inner workings of the mat, so what fun is it? Brendan (the PyDDR developer) says you can even take an old fuX0red pad and rejuvenate it using this method. I'm going to give it a try.

Another development: 1.5" thick metal pads for the home version are now available, sending the prices of hard plastic home pads into a tailspin. The latter still aren't worth buying, though, according to Brendan, whom I trust, as they tend to break easily and are bad for eighth-note-heavy songs.

Posted by me at 5:00 PM | Comments (1)

August 23, 2002

Subway Sightings


Good news -- Jacob says he saw one of the ReRed "campaign corrections" on the 4 train today. He says there was one still up and then a place where it appeared another had been taken down. My reading of this is that the label stock ads stayed, while the paste-up ones were easier to remove. Good news regardless: that ad has been up for over a week! Imagine how many "impressions" and "eyeballs" it's gotten!

Posted by me at 11:02 PM | Comments (0)

Norman Rockwell's "Long Walk Off A Short Pier"

James and I were standing on a corner on the Upper West Side, at a conversational impasse. I wouldn't look James in the eye, but I knew he was sticking out his chin in that pout he has. This was it.

Behind me, someone quietly says "Don't give him nothing."

It takes me a second to sort the sentence out of the Cheech Marin growl it came wrapped in. Yes, he is talking to me.

"Make him sleep on the couch!" calls the guy who, turning, I find seated in an SUV with the faint impression of three buddies gripping the seat backs with knucklefuls of bling, leaning over to gawk from behind smoked glass.

It doesn't matter what we said back. It was all so far past the point of couch. I laughed all the way downhill. Momentum took us there.

Posted by me at 10:56 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

August 22, 2002

Social Discomfort And Social Diseases

[paragraph removed.]

We had a press club this morning in another building, during which I spent time at the security desk checking people in. There must be a circle of hell which is just a security desk. You sign your name, miss elevators, make a call to greater and lesser demons in an attempt to establish that you really do have an appointment, miss more elevators, get branded with some sort of identifier, then wait for the last sluggish elevator to descend into the flames. There are probably more security desks in New York City now than there ever have been. The situation amounts to a general slowdown in every office in the city. Every security chief seems to be convinced that terrorists are aiming directly for his building.

The one I was hanging out with today probably had more real reason for concern than many; there's a number of media outlets in his building. Still, he spent an inordinate amount of time hassling people who weren't wearing their ID tags. Then he hassled me for borrowing space in his building. Why couldn't you hold your event downtown in the federal building? he asked. (We'd been invited by one of the television stations in his building.)

Then one of our journalists showed up, wearing what looked like monogrammed hospital scrubs. I waved him in happily; he was from a Romanian paper we don't see often. The security guy snorted. Nobody wears business suits anymore, he said. You don’t know who's here for what.

I made some quiet remark, sizing up the guard. He was maybe in his fifties, white, bullet-headed, jovial in a military way, wearing his security-guard suit like it was some kind of symptom, a rash. Whatever, he said. Just as long as no Afghanis come in.

The Afghan Communicator was, of course, the first paper on my guest list.

I was so shocked that the first thing out of my mouth was a rebuke that we had more to fear from the Saudis, seeing as that was the nationality of most of the hijackers. (Never expect me to stay on message if I'm not operating in a print medium.) Then I returned to my senses and said it didn't matter, we knew all of these journalists well and my job was to be polite to all of them, no matter how they dressed or where they were from, and how was he going to know where they were from by looking at them anyway? Two especially dignified Indian journalists who are close with my boss came in. I quietly put checks by their names, hoping they’d get into the elevators before they overheard anything.

I went and tattled. I told the woman from the TV station who had helped us set up the event about the guard's comment, and before I’d even made my way to the press conference the bullet-headed man had been pulled aside by the building manager. He tried to make nice to me, but I dashed for the elevator.

I felt guilty for the rest of the day. I had a hard time explaining it, but I tried to do it for Neil over dinner. All security guards are like that, I said; it's his job to be an a$shole; they pick people like that specially, and I don’t just mean racists, I mean a$sholes. That excuse didn’t hold any water with Neil or me.

I tried again. What does he know, you know? The guard was a stupid white guy... albeit a stupid white guy with an accent that said he had lived in New York City all his life, so for G0d's sake he really ought to know better by now. So much for that explanation.

I think it's pretty obvious why I felt guilty, though; right? I lashed out at that bullethead like almighty G0d. I was already wound up from the abuse I'd taken myself this morning. I went and talked as much sh!t about him as I possibly could to my boss, and my co-workers, and the woman running things yet again. I itemized every one of his sins in the jo-jeezly fever grip of righteousness, and didn't bother to mention my own comment about the Saudis.

mea maxima fsckin' culpa.

* * *

I have found my subtle knife: he's a man with no real identifying characteristics I can name yet except he's not averse to making an inappropriate comment, loudly, now and again. I was hoping to meet him tonight at a German Cars Vs. American Homes concert, but I'd sort of botched the date, and he didn’t show.

I don't ever go to bars or clubs. Ever. Not clubs where rock bands play, at least, and if I do, there's some sort of gimmick, like there's dancing. Or the last time I saw GC vs. AH, it was an Indymedia benefit. But here I was, at the Elbow Room, standing around on my own after the band's set. It is a testament to my recent growth in confidence that I can stand around a bar without feeling awkward because I'm alone, or slouching, or not drinking as usual. I attribute this particular confidence to my changed attitude about the swing scene. I'm no longer looking for a partner to practice with, and certainly not a boyfriend; if I'm out there, it's just to have a few dances, stop thinking about anything but my center of gravity for a while. The pressure's off. I can stand around without feeling desperate, and watch.

Tonight I was able to identify other people, who were also standing alone. This is progress. They used to look like they were part of a scene. I used to think they all had friends they were with. This time there was a guy right in front of me with jock shoulders who was alone, standing with his legs spraddled a little. He looked awkward.

That's when it occurred to me that the awkwardness I'd felt for so many years while waiting to be asked to dance was probably the same discomfort most people are trying to take the edge off by drinking. I'd never thought of that, because I'd never identified the feeling as social discomfort. Awkwardness by itself has never gotten to the point where it's ruined an evening for me. (wait: Tuesday. never mind.) I thought I was immune to social discomfort. I didn't think I had inhibitions. I shake my ass, I don't care. It feels good.

Returning to the subtle knife: I went to this concert on a gut feeling that something had to change, and maybe that something was the compulsion to hole up and get work done. Exhibit A: I wouldn't normally have been there.

I asked one of the German Cars guitarists, a short guy with curly hair under a beat-up hat, what the name of the second act was. He didn't know. He asked me what my name was. I shouted it as they played their first chords. He shouted his. I asked him why the all of the fscking bands in the city sound exactly the same except for German Cars. We cursed the second act -- total pop normalia -- and fled to the lounge. We sat on a low couch and put our feet up on the coffee table. He told me about a book he was reading about the Haight and looked me in the eyes; his were doe-like, dark with the beer. I remembered what a friend who went to school up there, not far from the Haight, once told me about the rhythm of signals and the routine she had learned for preparing to make out with someone. I don't know those cues. He leaned in for a kiss as I turned. Exhibit B: These things happen to other people...

I refused the kiss and made vague excuses about my Involvements. I don't say what I think anymore; I’m thinking I'm a vector, a veritable Typhoid Mary, and I know how AIDS is spread but I know how hepatitis is spread too. I decided on my guideline a while ago: if I don't know him or his friends well enough to verify he's not a liar, I won't exchange fluids. He touched my thigh. I wouldn't let him hold my hand. (Perhaps I was a little too strict.) I told him he was moving too fast, and he agreed as if that lie had hypnotized him.

Oh well; he had a hip-hop recording gig to go to; did I want to come along? I followed him to the street where the band was packing and stood half-in, half-out of the rain, listening to the bouncers joke and slouching like James Dean. There was a swirl of women who claimed they'd be meeting with the band later. Come with us! said a redhead I'd never seen before. Exhibit C: In which universe am I mistaken for a groupie? Which?!

I let the guitarist go; he was driving to Brooklyn, and all I could think was I didn't want any part of that DWI. Told him I'll catch him at another concert.

But you know, I was a moron, and my charmed sister, the one who walked around Manhattan barefoot for ten hours one night without coming to any harm, understands that better than me. There is no catching him at a second concert. The redhead will also not ask me to join her again. I had some kind of chance at a portal into a New York that I knew was there but just hadn't ever seen before, someplace where the laws of physics are different, the social norms are exotic and weird. Next time, the guitarist will remember this time, and maybe he will be less drunk, and I'll be with someone else, and then it will be less like magic and more like a habit.

* * *

Tomorrow: I'm placing my bets on an earful of poison. Damn you St. Exupery, you killjoy: on n'est point responsable de ce qu'on a apprivoise.

Posted by me at 11:23 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

August 21, 2002

Looking for a media career in a growth industry?


Layoffs got you down? Hey, the Navy's got your number.

"What will I do?" you might ask? Well, the job posting on HotJobs replies, "As a videographer with a combat photography unit, you might develop a training video for an Explosive Ordnance Disposal team. As a Photojournalist, your images of a humanitarian-relief operation in a foreign country could open the eyes of the world. Or maybe you'll keep your fellow Sailors informed on what's happening in the fleet as a News Anchor for the Navy/Marine Corps News."

You mean I could be Robin Williams in Good Morning Vietnam?! [shriek!] Oh, I can't wait -- just give me my dishonorable discharge now!

One more observation: if you're in a combat photography unit, why would you be producing a training video?

Posted by me at 11:29 PM | Comments (1)

August 17, 2002

I can dance this!


and so could most of my fifth-grade class. Tinikling is a Filipino dance style which involves jumping over bamboo poles. (Warning: auto-loading midi file. Actually, there's a better auto-loading file -- an MP3?! not smart -- here.) One explanation is that the bamboo poles were a form of torture employed by Spanish colonialists, and the dance helped the natives they enslaved avoid being bruised and cut. I had previously heard the little bird explanation.

Posted by me at 6:32 PM | Comments (0)

Stupid Media Tricks: Hyperion Books


Where I'm staying for August the browser is set to boot to ABC's news site. I noticed yesterday that the headline news was about a book about September 11th. The headline is still there today. Curious, I thought; why is this particular book making such a splash? There's lots of books about September 11th out there.

Well, the answer is dead obvious, but here's a breakdown of the tentacles: like the ABC site, Hyperion Books, which published the book, is on the Go.Com network. Hyperion's website indicates it publishes ESPN-related books; ESPN is 80% owned by Walt Disney. Hyperion also boasts (heh) the Talk Miramax imprint; I presume this means it's the book publishing arm of the horrible synergy juggernaut that Talk Magazine was supposed to bring together (Talk was a testing ground for nonfiction pieces that could be spun off into books or -- presumably Miramax -- movies).

If I had a subscription to Hoover's, I probably could have figured out exactly how much of a stake the Walt Disney Co. has in Hyperion, or which Disney holding Hyperion answers to. Regardless, the appearance of this book on abc.com is another example of how synergy works, and why you can't just expect your book to get the respect it deserves based on its own merits these days. (It's a simple exercise, I know; some days I just like to flex my corporate research skills.)

Posted by me at 12:26 PM | Comments (0)

We Get Results

Well, lookee here!

Not sure how long these stayed up, but they went in about four or five trains on the 1/2 and 4/5/6 lines. I do hope they didn't just get taken down at the end of the line. The problem with these pictures is they don't give a sense of what the unadulterated ad copy says-- it says things like "it's like when you closed the deal wearing your new red power suit" or "it's like when you decided to become a redhead" or "it's like when you got a dozen red roses" or "it's like when the red velvet ropes opened just for you." It's red! It's every sexy feminine thing you ought to want to be! Its essence is a bottle of booze with tropical sh!t in it! $5.99 only! ok, I'll shut up now.

Posted by me at 2:40 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Testing survey software


I'm trying out some survey software. Click here to help me.

Posted by me at 1:24 AM | Comments (1)

August 15, 2002

Detritus for Elokuu

I had a thought yesterday at work as I was defying my scheduled tasks and having some fun by helping the guy installing the phones crimp some cables. Thought went like this:

The reason there's a division of labor between people who set up networks and people who code is that routine typing makes your hands too weak to use a cable crimper.

Wrong in any number of ways, but it might be fun to base some futuristic scenario in which there's two species -- hardware people and software people -- separated by genetic selection having to do with the strength of their hands. yes, yes. bogus, wrong, and Lamarckian, I know.

* * *

Went out after work with two former wards from YWW. Both of them have recently graduated from high school and are off to college in a matter of days, so they don't have much to do but pack and think about their lives to date, and the options in front of them... I was tired and frustrated from work, and it was hard to keep up with minds so clear of unfinished adult to-do lists, especially Mack's. We talked about movies, and music, and of course the workshop... At one point Mack asked Steven Marchette, the other kid (sorry, he has no website), how big his high school was, and Steven said It's in a military town, so it's a big school. But there's no Real People there. Real People, I said; those are the kind from YWW, huh. There was general assent. I thought about how many other Real People they were about to meet. It's going to blow their fscking minds. I just hope they get some work done, or don't regret it if they don't.

(This is why I make such a rotten teacher. Always projecting my life on other people's.)

I thought a lot about how I don't get weepy anymore when I don't know when I'll see someone next. Leaving the high school gang was a huge trauma, but then, in those days we didn't understand about email or instant messages. (I sent a huge "I'm leaving! Don't expect to hear from me until the start/end of the next year!" message to everyone at every ending for the first two years, before I started feeling silly about it.) And then I started feeling anxious and hung out a little overlong when I said goodbye to Mack in the subway. Sympathy pangs, I think. There was something so sweetly retarded about those months between high school and college. Next time I see these kids I'm worried their hyperactivity will have a dulled edge, and there'll be a certain desperation, something about purpose and meaning, in their eyes.

* * *

I wish Roger had a comments system on his site. Since he doesn’t, I’ll make mine here and hope he stops by. Roger has been reading The Making of a College, the white paper on which Hampshire College (new, improved/Flash-burdened website!) was founded. I read it during my early, impressionable Hampshire years, and found thinking about how it differed from the college in practice so fascinating that I subsequently tried to force it on generation after generation of resolutely un-fascinated first-years, then squandered much of the rest of my time at the school in planning, curriculum, organizing, and petty-politics gambits.

So it was interesting to me to hear Mark Feinstein’s take on the administrative structure of the college, as reported by Roger. Another of the Seven Angry Men, Lester Mazor (I count the others as Mark Feinstein, Lynn Miller, Ray Coppinger, David Kerr, Stan Warner, and Laurie Nisonoff, OG profs still at on the faculty and growing ever more curmudgeonly) once said that Hampshire College as we knew it was the intersection of two vectors: academic reflection on the horrors of World War Two, which called for a more humane system of education (which I had always attributed to the Amherst founders, although I guess that’s maybe a little romantic of me); and the first waves of students (and maybe faculty?), who introduced the 60s critiques of racism, sexism, and war into the mix. I may be oversimplifying what Lester said, but I think that was the gist.

Anyway, because I’ve been thinking along the lines of Lester’s model it surprised me to think that it would be the founders who "had an instinctive dislike of most critical scholarship." Maybe because of my own Hampshire experience -- with my peers insisting to their linguistics professors that birds had language, and claiming expertise on child development based on anecdotes about their own treehouses, and prefacing their cross-cultural analyses of short stories with "This reminds me of the time my Uncle Bob and I went fishin'," and seceeding from Hampshire to start their own colleges, and learning about film by smelling the camera, and oh good LORD I need to stop this now – I always associate the anti-analytical trend with younger generations, and had thought that trend at Hampshire had come in with the first class of students.

Another idea I want to comment on: in re: "Nobody anymore thinks that the study of mass media, film and television production has much to do with cognitive psychology, linguistics, or perhaps even analytic philosophy" – having looked recently into grad schools in communications, I beg to differ. I think there’s a few schools in Illinois, one at U Penn, and I believe USC, which have communications departments which appear to have rhetoric experts in the same department as linguists, mass media analysts, and psychologists. More than one of them bears the name Annenberg. I haven't looked into this so closely, but I do think the kind of department you describe exists. Perhaps the reason that kind of department no longer exists at Hampshire is that Hampshire professors aren't willing to put that kind of knowledge to commercial use, whereas faculty elsewhere are.

(Maybe I should disable comments on this post. This last thread is guaranteed to pull in some more troll action from Evan... :P)

* * *

You know, I get so godd^mn twee and wordy sometimes I think I should take down the Strunk and White claim at the top of this page... old E.B. would not approve.

I should have some pictures up soon. Me, and the cats, and the subway ads. Soon.

Posted by me at 1:22 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

August 14, 2002

Mr. Softee


Like all street vending, ice cream trucks are more of a phenomenon in New York City than they were in suburban Southern California, where I grew up. As a result of my sheltered upbringing, I have a tendency to see them as a nuisance rather than viewing them through a lens of childhood nostalgia. I don't understand the attraction of Mr. Softee ice cream to begin with; I had some the other night in a fit of heat prostration, and it was like eating chilled mucilage. But my issue is primarily with the goddamn awful little jingle the trucks play at top volume. Roger recalls the song with great fondness; he was telling me a while ago that he and his mom called it the "ringy padingy" song, or some such -- that's basically the melody right there, encapsulated in its own petri-dish-agar of sicky-sicky-cute.

Why the rage? OK, see, there's a particular Mr. Softee truck which hangs out on my street -- it always seems like it's right under my window -- late into the season, like November, playing its horrible insipid little jingle at hours when I'm certain there can't possibly be any more children buying. I think I posted something about my run-in with a Mr. Softee driver named Sasha earlier. I'm still convinced he's dealing out of that truck. He told me business was great.

Anyway, I've found the sheet music for that jingle online. Now all of you outside NYC can get an earful of one reed of the vox humana of our fabled noise pollution. Plug those notes into your MIDI player. Suffer!

Posted by me at 11:50 PM | Comments (0)

August 12, 2002

"No, I don't know anyone from Puerto Rico. Why do you ask?"


We get some weird stuff in the mail at work. Today it's a link to the website of Guyana, USA!, which claims to be a Guyanese political party. It suggests Guyana should become a US state, commonwealth, or territory. It would be called American Guyana (remember, it was once British Guiana) and the flag's colors would be changed to red, white and blue while its pattern would remain the same. The site claims there's only 650,000 people left in Guyana and just about all of them have applied for US citizenship. (I have no idea how bogus this claim is.) So, what do we chalk this one up to? The inexorable march of globalization? Why get shafted by NAFTA and GATT? If you can't beat the US, join it!

Posted by me at 12:10 PM | Comments (0)

August 10, 2002

Post 'Em If You Got 'Em

If you live in New York City, have a color printer, and know where the above image goes, I encourage you to download and make use of these. They're all to scale, so you won't need to resize them (though clipping them once they're printed is recommended); each one will print on a single 8.5"x11" sheet. The ones with "crop" in the name use slightly less ink. One of the first three is slightly smaller for side displays. Disclaimer: I take no responsibility whatsoever for the consequences of anyone making use of my art.

Posted by me at 5:53 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

Good God


One degree of separation from a Memepool story today was Ship of Fools, which bills itself as "The Magazine of Christian Unrest." Every earful of religious questioning I catch makes me deeply relieved. Check out their "Fruitcakes" section.

Posted by me at 12:46 AM | Comments (1)

August 5, 2002

San Diegan Teen Prigs Say "Go Back Home And Sit On Your A$s -- It's Healthy!"


From the San Diego Union Tribune: the inevitable demonization of DDR, in this case for drug images. The perps: a bunch of nervous prude teenagers. [Full disclosure: Probably would have been me as of seven years ago. Hooray for growing up and pulling the stick out of your a$s.] Way to go, Nancy Reagan; ruin our fscking fun. So, what -- they don't have issues with the overt militarization of youth through the songs of Captain Jack? Or the stereotypes? What about the stereotypes?! *I* have problems with that... grumble...

Posted by me at 11:11 PM | Comments (1)

Pynoman Back In Action!


I don't know when it happened, but the Pynoman website, devoted to a character spun off my cousins' old punky/new-wave-y band, Psycotic Pineapple (note mention on Japanese site -- is that a song title?), has gotten a makeover. Looking good, and there's even some merch. I was supposed to get a vinyl at some point.... wha happen?

Posted by me at 3:24 PM | Comments (0)

August 2, 2002

Credibility

Lately I’ve been feeling like since I left my after-school teaching position in the Bronx and dropped out of the anti-globalization movement, there’s been little in my life worth writing about. I’m not exposed at great lengths to anyone who’s really different from me in basic outlook. Nothing has challenged me to look much beyond my own navel.

Then one of our editors committed public suicide.

Early last week, the press association I work for got email from a trustworthy source within our network of friends in the organizing community saying that Rance Huff, the editor of Black Reign News, had died of a brain aneurysm. The Black Reign is based out of a long-standing African-American community at the northernmost end of Staten Island. It’s noteworthy among community papers for its vocal commitment to social justice. Additionally, Rance was very young, only thirty-three.

The spirit in our office was dampened for the rest of the day. My boss built our chapter of the association paper by paper, and she’s very close with many of our editors and publishers. Rance was one of them. Like many of our editors, he was the organizing drive behind Black Reign. There were concerns the paper would fold without him. We’d lose a member, and another African-American community would lose its voice.

Looking grim, the boss set about making calls to allies and to our national office, in hopes we could set up some sort of memorial fund or scholarship in Rance’s name. Plans were made to include a memorial in the weekly news digest section of our website.

Thursday morning, shortly after I’d settled in to my inbox and morning tea, the boss called out, “Rance isn’t dead.”

There’s always that moment after someone says that where you hesitate, not sure whether you should be saying “Yes, dear, he lives on in our hearts,” patting her shoulder with one hand and dialing Mental Health Services with the other. The office fell silent; the interns stopped shuffling papers.

The Black Reign had printed a – retraction? -- is there a name for the kind of article a newspaper prints when its editor comes out and admits he’s publically faked his own death? -- written by Rance himself. It was titled “A Lesson Before Dying: Internet Hoaxes & Embracing My Heritage.”

It began by explaining that Rance’s mother, who had him out of wedlock, gave him the last name Huff. His father’s last name had been Jackson. Rance went on to lend his wife and children his father’s last name. He explains that he didn’t want his kids to feel the “self-doubt” he did from being tagged with a name that wasn’t really his. “I would grow up in a society that would religiously and socially define me as a "bastard,’” he wrote, identifying this as one of many stigmas of poverty:

if you are lucky enough to escape and rise above your circumstances, you must still carry scarlet letters that stay with you seemingly forever. When you get to college and socially interact with people from different financial strata than you, despite the thickest of skins and most confident ego, there can still be little slivers of questions and inferiority. The food stamps. The free cheese. The welfare checks. The hand-me-down clothes. Sometimes those things stay with you longer mentally after you have left them behind physically.

With his children growing up to identify with his “nom de plume,” Rance wrote, he realized he had put his kids in exactly the fix he had been hoping to avoid. So, after giving it some thought, he’d decided to go back to being Rance Jackson – by killing off Rance Huff with a giant stunt in his newspaper.

This was a baffling explanation. Rance himself admitted that being born out of wedlock isn’t a big deal “growing up as a child in the projects of New York City... because nearly everyone else is in the same boat.” I’d hazard the claim that there’s plenty of places, your average college being one of them, where it’s not an issue anymore.

So if it’s not that big a deal, why make it one? People who have pulled themselves up by their bootstraps don’t usually go phoenix on your a$s and make headlines in their reckoning of the process. Our office wouldn’t have been caught off guard if ceremonial suicide and resurrection were a regular part of the process.

Adopting the ersatz-Victorian tone found in Onion editorials, Rance continued:

...over a year ago, a small group of editors and I discussed ending Mr.Huff's life in dramatic fashion. We are in the business of selling newspapers and we thought it would make excellent fodder to kill off a pen name in memorable fashion.

By this point, our ad co-op director was nearly leaping off the walls in frustation. His stock in trade is circulation, and he’s compelled to dramatically revise almost every publication’s own account of its circulation down. Some of the smaller tabloid weeklies claim readership in the tens of thousands, and that’s just in the city. Companies have to trust our judgement when it comes to placing ads in the generally unknown community and “ethnic” publications we work with; the papers’ exaggerations sabotage their own income stream and make the ad director’s job harder. Seeing Rance’s stunt as more of the same, the ad director threatened to quit and go work in the for-profit sector.

I tried for a while to understand the stunt from other points of view. Maybe the logic of killing off your personified stigma to teach others to question what they read makes more sense when viewed from the projects. I’m not going to be able to reach Black Reign’s readers to ask them how they felt about all this. Did my co-workers and I not read this right because, as outsiders to the African-American community, we missed some tone or other cue that would have tipped us off that this was a hoax? I would have known to be on guard if this was early April, but it was late July. Maybe I didn’t read the obituary closely enough.

Perhaps, I thought later, he presumed his readers would see him around the neighborhood and know it was all a lie, thus receiving the wisdom of the homily before Rance smacked us with it in his editorial. This would only work if Black Reign had a ridiculously small circulation. He notes that “a small handful of our readers called to determine the validity of our report,” but I suppose he could be cutting corners; maybe they’d actually called to express condolences and had determined the report’s validity by accident. What exactly did he think he was doing to the readers who cared enough to bring hot dishes or wreaths or a shoulder to cry on over to the widow Jackson, or who, like my boss, set up scholarship funds in his name? Were they supposed to take the time to reflect on their foolishness for believing him? And how were they supposed to act on news he printed in future issues?

Why melt down your own credibility so spectacularly in full view of your community? The worry around the office is that this event will damage the credibility of the ethnic press, already held in low regard in many circles and not helped any by the inflated circulation counts. It's our job to help improve their image. I don’t think my boss or the ad director will recover.

The irony here is in the moral of Rance’s editorial:

If we, as a community, are going to make the internet a tool which we use to improve our community, then we have to become a lot smarter about how we decipher and disseminate information on the internet.

Additionally, we have to learn how to question the news we receive on television, radio and newspapers. Regardless of what you may think, every media outlet has a slant on the truth. And because major media outlets have been co-opted by corporate America, we have even more reason to question what is being reported and how it is reported.

This corresponds to the “Internet Hoaxes” part of the editorial’s ill-conceived title. Rance explained that Black Reign had recently “been subjected to requests” to write articles on Tommy Hilfiger’s racist remarks on Oprah, a conspiracy to criminalize Black people through their credit card reports, and legislation which was soon to expire, costing Black people the vote. All of these were rumors, Rance says (a number of sites back him up on the Hilfiger story; I didn't check the others) circulating by email. He additionally mentions the recent headline-making re-release of a video clip in which the Reverend Al Sharpton appears to be discussing a drug deal, pointing out that not only does Sharpton claim the clip is taken out of context, but other local news sources that have run the whole video corroborate.

The latter incident has certainly presented a good moment for everyone, regardless of background, to reflect on the standards and methods of journalism. Rance’s editorial continues from that point to exhort readers to independently check what they read by seeking other sources. “The lesson here,” he writes,

is that we must always question what we read or hear in the news. It is why Rev. Sharpton is correct when he states that the media too often tries [sic] to tell the Black community who their leaders are, in the way they present information. Which is why there is always a need for a vigilant Black press.

Even so, question what you read in the Black press also. Hold us to the same standard. Which is why we opted to kill Rance E. Huff in such a public way. Who would question it if we reported it? Would people blindly accept it as fact or would they seek other sources to verify what we were printing?

I think he’s absolutely right about the need for a vigilant press, Black or otherwise. And it’s fantastic that any editorial should display such humility. Still, Rance went too far. Simply on the shooting-yourself-in-the-foot tip, he went too far. Beyond that: Every news source should be so honest, but no news source should lay down its responsibility to check its facts and then report them. A newspaper is one of the social mechanisms on which we place the responsibility for doing deeper-than-usual inquiry. (I hear you sharpening your media-crit fangs out there; settle down, I mean “in the best of all possible worlds.” A paper which makes striving to make a better world part of its mission, which Black Reign does, maybe needs to try harder than other papers, no?) We need this – we pay for this – because we don’t have time to do that inquiry ourselves. The boss really wouldn’t appreciate all the calls to Afghanistan and Washington every time there’s new bogus military reports. The more freelance work I do, the more respect I have for how much time and effort even daily journalism takes, much less investigative work.

* * *

Why should you believe anything I’ve written here? You’ve probably never heard of Black Reign News before; maybe it doesn’t exist. (Their website is a veritable fsckin’ leprechaun; I challenge you to catch it in working order. Ooh, that metaphor also works because it’s mostly green. And butt-ugly.) I haven’t given any names; I’ve been vague about my sources. The DSWJ isn’t a news site, though the fact that I work sometimes as a freelance writer may cause some confusion on that front.

Credibility can be invested in any number of human systems -- religion, government, the free market, journalistic objectivity -- but all of those have had their fallibility blown to smithereens so recently even little kids know not to place their trust in them. We are back to the basic unit of credibility -- our own word and the trust others come to place in it. Rance gambled his. I’m struggling to maintain mine.

It’s not too hard to build those units of credibility into small-scale systems. All of us know which of our friends are prone to exaggeration; who can be trusted to show up when you’re moving to a new apartment and who’s just saying they will; when it’s socially OK and not OK to tell white lies. The problem now is that our small-scale systems are, before our eyes, spiraling into their place as tiny fractals along the arms of a vast, chaotic social and informational system. That system’s influence on our smaller systems is more than any of us is currently equipped to handle.

I’ve been thinking about this lately as I consider graduate school (and how poorly set up it seems to handle these new problems). I think kids are going to need a basic toolkit. It should include, among other things:

If you have other things to add to this toolkit (or recommendations for a graduate education or communications school which would be able to handle this line of inquiry) please post a comment below.

"ethnic:" I hate the word; it’s an ugly shorthand for “immigrants and people of color” which smacks of “No Irish Need Apply” to me.

Posted by me at 8:27 PM | Comments (12) | TrackBack

Penn and Teller Rip Your Ignorant A$s Up

Lo: Teller riffs on grammarians (much more concise than my own) and Penn flashes his Fourth Amendment rights to National Guardsmen. I didn't know the two of them share a website. (insert exclamation here)

Posted by me at 4:58 PM | Comments (0)