CLASS: Midterm essay

I'm posting it here. I see no reason not to, and it was never specified in the assignment paper. No one reads this anyway, so no one will copy it. (and I feel sorry for the person who would actually consider copying my crap-ass writing...) Here it is:

Cultural Recovery Meets Futurology

The interesting thing about reading Evie Shockley's “Separation Anxiety” after Kodwo Eshun's “Further Considerations on Afrofuturism” – one after the other – is that there is a brief moment of reflection during which the reader realizes that they contradict each other. Among other things, Eshun writes about how Black history can be used to write the Black future – the very definition of Afrofuturism, “back to the past and black to the future” – in optimistic if scholarly and somewhat unenthusiastic terms. Shockley, however, writes out a future in which this cannot happen, where Black history is the future, represented in a chilling statement from [P]eaches on page 60:

“all these authenticity rules! gotta have eighty percent historical content in each program. can't change not a step in performing some nineteenth or twentieth century dance. it's like we're fossils, walking around. I need to see if maybe black dance got a future.”

Essentially, the characters are living in a situation in which even artistic representations are decided upon by the faceless government – she's talking about dance here, but it can easily be assumed that it applies universally, or rather, it would be extremely odd if it did not, for obvious and irrelevant reasons. What it hints at, with all the subtlety of a steak knife, is that they also live in a society with a legally defined history – not merely the occasional whitewashing or revisionism/wishful thinking that shows up in contemporary middle school textbooks, but a rigid definition of something that is by its very nature subjective or vague – that evidently ignores the idea of a more recent history (example: hip-hop and rap not being considered “real music” in favor of Elvis or such), or possibly even a suggestion that there is nothing in recent history with artistic merit (a self-satisfying prophesy). To put it simply, this is another way to read and interpret the definition of Afrofuturism above: pessimistic and all but ignoring any real understanding of history, but likely presented very enthusiastically to get by the various levels of government.

There is one thing Eshun and Shockley both ignore: the question of language. Eshun would particularly have to be aware of it as a nebulous construct at best (he's British, after all), and Shockley, aside from pulling the age-old trope of all-lowercase lettering, does not directly bring it up – although it isn't unheard of for classes to be taught in a particular language/dialect. Either way, language would evolve, for good or for ill, under either application of “back to the past, black to the future”, and it is odd to not see a reference in either work – probably, Eshun is looking up a bit too carefully, and Shockley is using too much of the present in her distortion. Which brings up another issue: thought 2095 is the date given for the establishment of the [DECC], the social and cultural background is too skewed to be believable (for the same reason that there will never be a serious anthology titled One Million AD) as it implies that the state of things managed to get much, much worse after the current generation – which, given the advancing state of medicine, will make up the most active oldsters to date. For this, it might be easier to consider “Separation Anxiety” a first-person record of an alternate reality 22^nd century(?) rather than the usual “significant distortion of the present”.

CLASS: "Blog Post #4 - ???"

Blog post! As far as I can tell, there is no online assignment this time, but that doesn't matter – as I type this, I have no connection to the internet. I usually leech off of a neighbor's, and I'm away from the house, so I have to switch to a LAN line. Which isn't a problem in and of itself, but my IBM T20 refuses to connect with one – apparently, and despite there actually being a plug for one in the back, it either doesn't have the adapter or it doesn't have the drivers. So I'm writing from memory, unreliable and biased (yes, thank you, Last Angel of History) as it may be, and am to link two texts, theoretical and real, together.

Deathlok. The obvious comparison would be to Souls of Black Folk – the line “how does it feel to be the problem” rings true, given that Deathlok is a walking arsenal. Or, at least, he's considered as such, but doesn't seem to be armed with anything more than a couple of energy-based handheld projectile weapons (that look suspiciously like Super Soaker 10s), impressive strength, and an interesting co-mingling of soul and software, later seen as energy cartridge-based guns and a supporting OS with hacking abilities – not quite in the same class as War Machine. Micheal Collins is a pacifist, as much as a walking weapon can be (attempts to operate with as little loss of life, is disgusted with himself near the end of his first appearance, and is explained as such in “Souls of Cyber Folk”), and he attempts to explain to his son that weapons and violence aren't the solution. I found it interesting that, while he quotes from Souls of Black Folk in “Souls of Cyber Folk”, he doesn't follow the line I've followed, instead going with the more literal “double consciousness” line. It makes sense in context – two cyborgs, both black, feeling caught between worlds – and there's nothing really wrong with it. Deathlok literally has two “consciousnesses” within him, Micheal Collins and the OS he worked on, and on his first sortie, it was the computer/OS running the body with accurate and deadly results. (Reading it metaphorically, the computer/OS is the face that is originally seen, and there's Micheal himself – they are the “American” and “Negro” DuBois wrote of.) Then Micheal takes over, and would be considered the step forward DuBois wanted. However, Micheal would rather like to cease to be Deathlok – the curious intermingling of soul and software, a phrase more accurate to his situation than “man and machine” is, I think, as it isn't even his body – and return to being Micheal Collins again, just the one, not the one or the other. (He mentions, at one point, that he was in a situation where he had to fool himself to an extent in order to go through life without serious problems and even still occasionally hit the racial wall – the general impression is that he would gladly go back to it, as opposed to being a weapon, hence my comparison near the top.) The big difference, I guess, between the way his dilemma is handled and DuBois' view of it is that, Micheal has (or has the optimism to see) the choice.

Now that that's out of the way, what did I think of Deathlok? Seems very much like Robocop, actually, right down to the helmet (which serves a different purpose here, but both are shucked, and the end result is a character who seems less like a product and more like a human). I'm also going to draw a comparison to the older Japanese transforming hero Kamen Rider (Masked Rider – remember that crappy excuse for crap Saban made in the early '90s?), who got turned into a cyborg but only just escaped the brain surgery, and swore to defeat the organization (“Shocker”, a simple yet effective name) that created him, with punches and kicks rather than guns. And then there's the android Arale Norimaki from the gag manga “Dr. Slump” (as an example of the gags, “Norimaki Arale” is a sort of cracker) – the immediate similarity is her need to consume Robovitan A on a regular basis as fuel.

Other than that, I really don't have much to say tonight.

CLASS: "Blog Post #3 - Digitalized Diaspora..."

Well. Somehow I managed to forget to post this on time. Managed to read Troilus and Cressida, but forgot to post. Bummer for me.

I might be the only one to think this, and I hope that's not the case, but the first thing I could think of when I saw the Data Thief was, “Johnny Mnemonic” (y'know, that so-so movie with Keanu Reeves?) with a bit of old-school 3D glasses mixed in. Otherwise, I actually took notes this time, so I'm prepared to comment. But before that. Y'all remember the apocalyptic-looking yellowish background? I don't know where exactly that is, obviously, but it reminded me of something I saw on the History Channel some time ago. The “Lake Peigneur” incident – what happens when you dig a salt mine under a lake, then use an oil derrick to accidentally dig a hole into it? You get this (YouTube + History Channel = Awesome, by the way). Not sure if it's actually what they used in The Last Angel of History, of course, and if not, I just gave you an excuse to take five or six minutes out of your busy life to get your History Channel fix. And I wasn't quite sure, but it looked like the NASA-demo-video stuff on the moon was from a proposal to harvest Helium-3 (it's been a while since 2^nd-year Physics, but the sun plants it there, and has been planting it there – the sequence was probably used to make it feel sci-fi-y).

Now! The main thing that didn't sit right with me was the mere idea of a “Data Thief”, which to me seems like an oxymoron (a word I always have trouble pulling out). You can steal just about anything else, and be the sole owner/proprietor(?) of that particular object, but unless you go back and delete their Data, how can you thief it away from them (and why would he need to, now that Wikipedia is gracing the Internet with its presence)? Just a thought. But it kinda relates to the Oankali, a bit, and how they didn't quite steal human data and yet kinda did, depending on which character is talking. Someone notes at some point in the documentary that WWII computers (and they really did have computers by that time, though not under the popular definition of the word – it took 40+ years to prove that it was a computer, though, for reasons better explained by Wiki than I ever could) were for military purposes, and yet here we are now, posting what one poet (he was on NPR not too long ago) once referred to as a newspaper with 7 printings a day. And, he continues, they can now be used for music (electronic music has been used since the 60s – see here, then here [creepy and atmospheric] and here [more reassuring - if Earth is in trouble, look for an old police box...] – and there is the famous case of the IBM 1401; what the article does not note is that, when the 1401 was next to a radio, and the conditions were right, it would "play" a certain cello-esque sound over the radio, possibly making this the first computer-generated sound). There's also the “Alien Abduction = Slave Trade” connection made by Eshun at one point. Nothing special about it by now, other than to actually hear it in his voice. Having read Mumbo Jumbo for my 498 class, I was surprised to see Ishmael Reed – in my mind, he was more of a Question-type person (JLU-era). I was also surprised to see Nichelle Nichols – not that her presence in a documentary tying blackness and the future together is surprising or anything. She's still hot. And finally, I was struck by the irony of the suggestion of a “Digitized Diaspora”, not because it still doesn't have a Wikipedia entry (though there is one for “postcyberpunk” - they are probably related), but because we watched it all on VHS, itself an ironic format for this sort of work.

That's really all I can think of. Honestly, I had trouble taking it seriously (that the special effects reminded me of a certain late 80's BBC sci-fi show might have been part of it).

Recommendations

So. Recommendations from me. Don't follow them if you don't want to, don't listen(?) to me if you don't want to.

First off, lunch. If I have the chance, I'll go off and eat some marinara sauce-pasta here at the UW. I don't know how they make it, or who their supplier is, but it's delicious. Really hits the spot when it's cold out, for some reason.

Okay, in a previous post, I wrote this - “We'll be fully Human and free. That's enough.” on page 531 (a page or so before chapter 2 of Imago) - and noted how it was funny. There's an anime out there called Big O (think Batman: The Animated Series with a Giant Robot), and it's set in Paradigm City, the citizens of which have lost their memories of everything beyond 40 years ago. Somehow they survive. In the last episode (13) of the first series, the protagonist Roger Smith meets up with an old man, a farmer, who gives him a tomato. It's not a real tomato - it's synthetic, made to taste like what the people who remembered anything thought it would taste like - but because it has been accepted as the real thing, it IS the real thing. It goes without saying that I highly recommend this show (I think it's on YouTube, and I know Netflicks has it), just for the atmosphere: it's one of the most film noir-y shows I've seen in a while, and there's symbolism everywhere.

As long as I'm talking robots, I also recommend a show called Megas XLR - an American cartoon, formerly of Cartoon Network. Big blue robot with a car for a head, catchy theme song (Chicks Dig Giant Robots - it's written so it could feasibly apply to any giant robot show, and there are a few Anime Music Videos on YouTube), and hilarious giant robot-related collateral damage. Pretty much the best American giant robot show, and I think it suffered from a total lack of toys - I know I'd pay for a Master Grade 1/100 scale Megas...

Oh, and this is a pretty good webcomic. Art geek jokes and Sci-fi jokes, sometimes both in the same strip. Also go here. The near-futurism is subtle, but it's there. Otherwise, this is a romance comic with Indie-geek overtones.

Comments. Are. Open.

Okay, let me make this clear, Internet. Comments are open to everyone, but I will Delete anything that is rude/crass, AND does not meaningfully contribute to a discussion I'm trying to have. (This is not a democracy; this is a democratic monarchy, leaning towards totalitarianism.) So now that's out of the way, I'll soon post something better.

CLASS: "Blog Post #2 - The 'Terrible Promise' of Xenogenesis"

I should say, first of all, that I still haven't finished the book. Sakura-Con is always... interesting like that. I'm kinda embarrassed about it, since I took Lilith's Brood with me, but I actually needed to do something else before it. Apparently, you can't save school .pdf files to disk by right-clicking on the link and hitting “save as” – live and learn, I guess. Besides that, I found myself without quite enough time to finish the book (and I had to finish the other class thingy first today). Obviously I'll come back and rewrite this when I've finished it...

For my 498 class last quarter (wanted to get it out of the way before I really had to worry about getting into one) I had to do a report on Octavia Butler, and I don't really recall coming across any materials that described her as particularly religious. Which is both odd and expected, as the Parable books are about a new religion, and Lilith's Brood... pretty much isn't. That's the thing that struck me most about it – two things, actually. First, I never saw (have yet to see...?) a strong “religion” presence – organized religion, I mean. I don't mean like just a priest or a rabbi, just that when the people were first Awakened, none of them referred to a God of any sort, and it doesn't seem to be in the notes Lilith received. And the Oankali never asked about it, either. So either all the religious people died out (religious war? no, Butler was of a generation old enough to remember the Cold War and the Cuban Missile thingy and nukes were apparently involved and it was written before 11/89) or the idea of religion was not acceptable to the Oankali – probably the second, since it involves the whole hierarchy thing. The second, kinda tying into this, is the lack of Bibles anywhere – that none of them survived the war. Again, this could be part of the whole Oankali “conspiracy” but I don't quite see the point.

On that note, there is a scene on page 369 of my book (chapter 13 of Phoenix, in Adulthood Rites) that kinda raises a slightly different question: “Bibles – using the memories of every village they could reach, Phoenix researchers had put together the most complete Bible available.” Not so much a question, I suppose, as a problem. Either this means that enough people who survived HAD memorized the Bible – which the Oankali would have done something about, or reacted to – or they just went to Sunday School as kids or something, and the Bible they've managed to make is a piecemeal mess (and very much Christian – something that would just be painful to go into, for someone like me). Given the importance of it – it's conceivably as close to an Oankali memory as humans can come – I find it hard to believe that they would not say something about it.

Then there's the line “We'll be fully Human and free. That's enough.” on page 531 (a page or so before chapter 2 of Imago) that amuses me – I'll explain why in more detail a bit later. Regarding the hybrids (and the humans in the book are already “hybrids” if looked at from the point of view of someone before the war – culturally, in a way?), they'll be “Human” to any other race that happens to drop in for a visit a few generations down the line.

This came up later than I hoped, but oh well. Can't stop time, can't go back in time, can only go forward. I'll put some more stuff up in a while.

WTF

No, no, not the explicative (not anymore, anyway...). Worse Than Failure, a gathering of bad code, bad experiences, and bad user interface. My personal favorite, and the one easiest for someone in my position as a slacker senior to relate to, is this one - yes, it is a newer one, but good school-related stories are rare on that site.

Also. I'm going to this upcoming Sakura-Con, at the Washington State Convention Center - Non-Seattleites, that's the weird building sitting above the freeway when you go southbound on I-5 into downtown - this weekend. It's like a Trekkie convention, only with costumes that look good animated, and not a single bat'leth in sight.

I'm just throwing stuff on the page, because I'm bored at the moment.

Comments are open to everyone

...but I reserve the right to do this to flamers. (Nya nya.)

Also, this is possibly the best "(famous person) Facts" site ever made. Even if you don't fully understand the awesome power that is Bruce Schneier, it's still pretty funny.

MEME!

This is highly relevant to what we just did for class... I'm sure you've all seen it, but... KYUUUUTE!

CLASS: "Blog Post #1 - Appropriate(d) Technologies"

Finally, here is my first blog post assignment. (“Discuss how the idea and/or history of 'turntablism' (and, more broadly, sampling, hip-hop, and DJ culture) relates to, extends, or elaborates some aspect of 'Afrofuturism' set forth in Kodwo Eshun’s theoretical essay, 'Further Considerations on Afrofuturism.'”) I need to say this before anything else, though: I'm still not too clear on how the two work together, and I have some misgivings about the essay as well (maybe I'll explain later). I also need to say that I understand “blog posts” and “essays” to entail two different and exclusive styles of writing, so I don't think I could ever write one in the mindset of the other.

As I understand it, “turntablism” is the art of manipulating LPs for the benefit of an audience, essentially using an analog form of reproducing music in a way not originally thought of as being even remotely entertaining – surely someone noticed that vinyl records produce a sound when suddenly stopped prior to Grand Wizard Theodore (according to the all-knowing digital entity that is Wikipedia)? The basic concept behind Sci-fi (and Spec-fi) is pretty much the same – distortion as entertainment, to paraphrase and butcher Samuel R. Delany – and so it's only from here that I begin to see a relation between turntablism and Afrofuturism.

“Afrofuturism, then, is concerned with the possibilities for intervention within the dimension of the predictive, the projected, the proleptic, the envisioned, the virtual, the anticipatory and the future conditional.” (Eshun 293) This isn't the set-in-stone definition of it, I think, but it comes close enough to describe it in comparable terms to turntablism. Which is predictive (a new use for old technology), projected (usually with a halfway-decent sound system), proleptic (according to Wikipedia, “turntablism” was never meant to be permanently attached to the art like it is now), envisioned, virtual, and anticipatory (it seems to be at least partially improvised off of pre-recorded LPs). I'm not so sure about how closely turntablism adheres to the phrase “the future conditional” though – I can easily imagine even the best DJs practicing and rehearsing for major events, and reserving spontaneity for a club gig or such.

Scratch wasn't bad or anything, but I didn't enjoy it in quite the same way as Hype: pretty much the same movie, only featuring Grunge and taking place almost entirely in Seattle – I think it might be the lack of any sense of locality for me. However, there was one scene in Scratch that really stuck out to me: where a turntabler – DJ Shadow, I believe? – was walking around in the basement of a record store, and it wasn't so much “walking around” as “sliding through the space between prodigious stacks of LPs with deceptive ease.” I guess I see it as representative of the creative process, or maybe just the massive result of it – like a collection of old books, but without the yellowing and deterioration common to acid-bleached paper.

Story: Overwhelming Tragedy

This is a story I wrote for a class last quarter. It came out pretty well, I think. The title is "Overwhelming Tragedy," and it's intended to be full of my somewhat dry humor. I plan to publish it at some point. (It's basically filler, because I'm still trying to connect Afrofuturism and Turntablism in my mind.) Enjoy.

In one day, I've lost my parents, grandparents, three of four brothers, all four sisters, two half-brothers, three half-sisters, six uncles, one aunt, more in-laws than I really care to count (didn't really like most of them anyway), a dozen or so friends, a handful of close friends, my wife and best friend, most of my neighbors and their extended families, three-quarters of the staff at my local post office, a majority of the service and retail personnel at establishments I've patronized since moving to this town, my cat Silky, the mice that live in my apartment (somewhere in the upper 90s), 95% of the ants in the colonies in the front lawn (this obviously includes all the queens), and all the Salmonella enterica within a thirty-block radius. Their lives will be missed, I guess.

And my brother has five different kinds of terminal diseases and/or illnesses. He'll probably die soon, and he's been begging me to kill him. I'm thinking I'll just find him a syringe and some bleach – not really in the mood to off someone myself at this point.

Most of the people I described a second ago committed suicide, the lingering, slow-and-painful type – I'd say around four-fifth of them or so. The vast majority of that consisted of the Salmonella enterica and ants, with maybe fifteen assorted humans mixed in somewhere. I really don't have the space or time or patience to write out all the horrifying deaths of my loved ones and associates (almost forgot – fifty of fifty-two coworkers died in various ways as well), but suffice it to say that confirming them all was a living nightmare. Six hundred twenty-four trillion bacteria (obviously an approximation) aren't easy to count in one sitting, and I'm not going to bother notifying next-of-kin if I'm only going to do it to the tiny minority.

All of this – I'd like to say it affected me somehow, but the events of the day immediately before have made me a bit numb (for example, I didn't even feel pain when I cut my thumb with a butter knife five minutes ago). The events of that day might fill a novel, so I'll just say that it ruined my ability to appreciate borrowing the always-available “great classics of literature” from the library. Now that I think about it, I need to hit the library again – that wait list for the Harry Potter books and DVDs is likely to be very, very short now. I'll be first in line for number seven. Woo hoo.

So. Walking through a town devoid of virtually all non-plant life is an interesting experience, kinda like going into a closed-down boarded-up movie theater. Until you get used to everything, even the littlest sound makes you jump, but it's no longer embarrassing to hum my favorite songs from Phantom of the Opera out loud in public. Also: the lack of people has made it possible for me to receive cell calls anywhere I can get reception – the social situation in which I am not allowed to answer an incoming call no longer exists. Then again, it's also unlikely that I'll get a call in the men's room at any point in the near future, now that everyone is gone. I can finally pee in golden silence. Unless this is like that one Twilight Zone, where the guy survives and wants to read, but breaks his glasses – only tailored for me, so that I lose the ability to use my urethra in any way, or something.

I'm beginning to wonder if, maybe, everyone's playing a colossal practical joke on me, and they're just waiting for me to either be jubilant or morosely depressed. They're going to have to keep waiting, then. I don't think I'm going to lose this epic battle of wits.

Oh, right. Need to pick up some bleach from the store and a (sterile) syringe from the hospital too, as long as I'm out. Wouldn't want to disappoint Ryan. He so loves his temptations.

Regardless of how the dead bodies of humans and various animals can be used as sources of food for various other animals and parasites, corpses are still a hassle to move, especially when they stand (or, y'know, just lie there like heavy rag dolls) between you and non-perishable food. I should probably get some seeds too, in case this isn't all a joke. This town will look so much better with flowerbeds for sidewalks, and there'll be no shortage of fertilizer.

I wonder if I should publish my experiences, being the last man alive? And yes, I checked. I really am the last man with a pulse in this town. Somehow, Ryan managed to summon up his last bit of strength. Probably hurt like hell, but he seemed happy. The joke was probably his idea, too.

Walking around outside, and wading through dead ants and the occasional dead pet to do so, I found myself listening to the wind. It's funny. You don't notice the wind (or the moon, but that's another story) until you're absolutely alone, and confronting death every which way you turn – really, it's just another way to define the “winds of death.” They're supposed to bring death – as in, they're supposed to bring in Bubonic Plague and such – but y'know, I don't think they do. I think it's the other way around. I think death brought the winds. It's some kind of bachelorhood gift, like a pie from the neighbors or a check and sweater from the parents. Only this time, I'm not too busy to sit down and savor it.

My next-door neighbor had a kite. Had, because I've just borrowed it with absolutely no intention of returning it. I've never seen a dead man put up a fuss over a kite like that, though – had to wrench it from his “cold dead hands” (another good thing about being really alone is that, no one's around to call me on really bad clichés). He was a twin, too, named Juan. Guess his brother was named Amal, but I've never seen him. Don't need to: if I've seen Juan, I've seen Amal (same goes for really bad puns, and the dude's name was Lee). But now that I have a kite, I can finally have some fun.

Sitting on a hill, reading Harry Potter number 3 (first edition), munching on some cookies I removed from some Girl Scouts, all while flying a kite, a nice red-and-black kite. It's a good day, and it's a nice kite, but it's a bit depressing to lie on my back and watch it float about all alone.