One Pen To Rule Them All

Cut you with what I got, off the top like a barber/
Black History like Malcolm, you George Washington Carver/
Cause for alarm like I traded arms with DARPA/
Multiple arms: Doc Ock v. Peter Parker/
You knew from the start that you ain't want no parts of/
These mystical arts, lyrical darts to the heart son/
The origin of tough, like Chuck Norris' father/
Big bang, small package; snub-nosed revolver/
Orangutang thunderstorm, Gorilla Monsoon/
Wrote this with a pen I found up in Mount Doom/
Hot as friction with the writtens - 'you'll find that it's quite cool'/
I'm dismissing your admissions to lyrically fly schools/
While my curriculum is killing 'em, homicide haikus/
Your pedagogy is sloppy, you best to copy my cues/
Ram3 - hit by a bus, he might bruise/
A gangstas gangsta - like the girl in a gang that fights dudes/

Avatar and Humanity

One can view the film Avatar by James Cameron as commentary on environmental issues. Such a view only scratches the surface. The environmental issues in real-life are staggering in not only their stupidity, but also in their evolution. The environmental issue is based upon the economic issue which is based upon the fundamentally flawed source of all these symptomatic concerns: the ideal of human progression. It's the empirical history of human society that permeates Avatar, the kind of society that allows Christopher Columbus to 'discover' and destroy the Taino and Arawak nations and be celebrated. The society we live in now is built upon the ideologies of men and women bent on subjugating 'the other'. This is the core of the film for me. In regards to its effect on environmentalism, minimal, since Pandora is nowhere near real. However, it may shine some light on some of the mining situations around the world, but even those have class and race issue at their core.

-- Villainy..

In.Fluence vrs. 3

Flow never the same twice - I alternate live/
Schitzophrenic spitter - I alternate lives/
American Terrorist, when I terrorize/
Sounds like Uptown Saturday Night 1-9-7-9/
That's me, globe traveler grew up latchkey/
Real recognized real, and you looking mechanized/
Like Cycloptic fiber optics in Megatron's eyes/
Gangster Nerd, I cast the die with equivalent sides/
Which means I always win, which means I never die/
Ferris Bueller of rap - I don't slack, I scheme through it/
If getting free was a movie - this was the theme music/
Soundtrack to 'Why not sell Ki's"/
How not to be a Square Enix and roll with LC's/
Watching my Little Brother spit and record an LP/
What's real? What's The Matrix - you tell me/
I just write Psyence Fiction, U-N-K-L-E/

Life on Screen 100-end

This half of the reading was more challenging as Turkle begins to assess the psycho-social aspects of the generational effects of technology on youth (a mouthful).

There are moments in the book where Turkle has interviewed youth around their interactions with technology. It's the interviews that cue us, as the reader, in to what happens next in the blurring between the actual and the virtual: an organic, inborn understanding of the virtual. I think Turkle coined it by noting:

"The idea of talking to technology begins to seem more natural when the computer presents itself less like a traditional machine and more like a demi-person...The reconfiguration of machines as psychological objects and people as living machines..."

It's this deeply psychological inquiry, born in the minds of younger and younger generations, that move our youth toward less of a blurring and more of an symbiotic blending of the actual and the virtual.

Life on Screen 1-100

Sherry Turkle is in many ways writing an expose on the virtual self, from self analysis. I am very in touch with the issue of being seduced by the virtual world. I have a series of user names, and I am a retired hacker (means I got caught). In regards to the writing, Turkle touches upon the crux of the second self, namely, lure.

As an avid video game player, I can speak first hand to using space exploration in Starfox (for super nintendo) as a means of escaping the project buildings I lived in at the time. That was the first time, then it was focusing my frustrations in school on Soul Edge. I hadn't realized how big an issue the second self was for myself until I noticed my little brother had faithfully inherited the lure, his frustrations voiced through the wanton violence of Grand Theft Auto, his inadequacies in school overcompensated for by his desire to enforce nuclear proliferation and anti-terrorism in Metal Gear Solid.

This is the seduction awaiting each more 'wired' generation, Turkle notes how she is compelled to write using a computer, as if the archaic pen(cil) and paper no longer existed, like they never existed. It's Turkle's ties to the analog past that allow her to express her opinions of how the digital world is changing our society, copy and pasting the 'future' onto the past, and becoming the 'always'. What I take from the early half of this reading is that as time progresses, the fact that we weren't always digital in nature will become forgotten, then become myth. Therein lies the true villainy...

My avatar for the week

My avatar is Faith from the video game Mirror's Edge. She is a courier in her virtual world, a freerunner in our world. Her most deadly weapon is her vision, which then fuels her creativity, and ability to create paths while she traverses obstacles. I'd like to think that my most deadly weapon is also my vision, which fuels my desire for change.


Faith in action:

Counting Stars

On knees bent, I'm praying these kids don't walk the road we went/
Not because it was tough, that's the wrong reason/
But the path of the freedom fighter's called treason/
I'm fighting for change so that my son sees it/
And my daughter to understand that if she quits/
The revolution would die in that sequence/
In the meantime I produce like Seacrest/
Writing these poems to get a buzz like bees' nests/
With the people on my mind like Jesus/
Or Cassius Clay in the Congo; free us/
From preconceived notions and hatred/
Lenses, to help see through the fakeness/
Like Morpheus, been up and out of this matrix/
Came back - just to see who I could take with/
Counting stars and making new constellations/
Since zeroes and ones are still new calculations/

iCelebrities Midterm

On any given day, at any given time, what you just saw is likely to happen to any young person of color in New York City. Let's illustrate:



Statistics and video are a form of passive participation. Not to say these don't give a sense of how some folks feel, but there are ways to measure feelings. Rap/MC-ing is one of those things, an art form born of marginalization, criminalization, and strife.



Look What It's Done
Now what am I supposed to do?/
When just seeing cops makes me emotional?/
I'm talking about the anger building/
When the cops post up outside your building/
Like they're waiting for action, something appealing/
One in the chamber, and no feelings/
No connections to the blocks they beat/
Don't ask why we don't respect cops we see/
Never mind the deaths, cover-ups, and dealings
Focus on the entrepreneurs and the beatings/
Cuz we can't chill up in a nice sedan/
When the police just locked up the Icee man/
It's, almost all good in the hood/
Til the cops get shook, and try to get you for good/
Slam you up against the car and push your face up on the hood/
Try to run away - they put two through your hood/
Then, two through your wrists, two through your kicks/
And put the passion of our youth on a crucifix/
Now, how am I supposed to be?
When the victims all look like you and me?/
What happened to serve and protect?/
Somebody's gotta pay, it's not over yet/

Art like this is inspired by acts like these:



and these:



this was last November, involving some of our schoolmates:



in Michigan:



in Seattle:



in the South: from 10sec. in jump to 3:40



more from the South:



in the UK:



Los Angeles:



this is alarmingly normal:

A Record Number of Stops

An August 14, 2009 press release from the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) is titled “Record Number of Innocent New Yorkers Stopped, Interrogated by NYPD During First Half of Year.” Based on figures from the NYPD, the NYCLU reports that in the first six months of 2009 alone, cops in New York City stopped more than 273,000 people who—according to the police themselves—were not violating any laws. This represents the highest number of innocent people stopped and questioned by the NYPD in six months since the department began keeping stop-and-frisk data.

From January to June of this year, the NYPD as a whole (including the various precincts as well as bureaus such as housing, transit, and narcotics) stopped and frisked 311,646 people, the overwhelming majority of them Black and Latino. Of that total, more than 9 in 10—or 273,556 people—were not arrested or given a summons. In other words, by the NYPD’s own admission, in just the first six months of this year they had stopped and searched close to 275,000 people who were not even alleged to have committed any crime. It should be pointed out that the actual number of innocent New Yorkers subjected to these stop and frisks is no doubt even higher, since the figure does not account for people who were wrongfully accused of a crime by the police.

The stop-and-frisk figures are undeniable evidence of racial profiling by the NYPD. Of the total of 311,646 people stopped between January through June 2009, 163,118 (52.3 percent) are Black and 81,210 (32.1 percent) are Latino, while only 29,782 (9 percent) are white. Compare this with the overall New York City population figures according to nationality: 24 percent Black, 28 percent Latino, and 35 percent white (the rest are Native American, Asian American, and others).

Breaking down the data a bit further, of the 163,118 Black New Yorkers who were stopped and frisked, 148,731 (91.2 percent) were neither arrested nor given a summons. Similarly, of the 81,210 Latinos stopped, 68,689 (84.6 percent) were neither arrested nor given a summons.

The figures for the first half of 2009 come on top of the statistics for last year, when the NYPD stopped and frisked a record total of 531,159 times—again, overwhelmingly targeting Black and Latino people.

Michael Moore takes a stab at it:



back to NYC:





While this may seem irregular or out of place to some of you reading this, it is fairly commonplace in urban areas, or any place with a concentration of people of color and a disproportionately white police force. I can speak firsthand to this, and to the extreme urgency this issue demands, but media speaks so much louder.

~Let the villainy ensue..

A little on Kids With Cameras site

Kids with Cameras is what my friends call 'doing the work'. I am astounded by how docile wealthy nations are, and by how brave some members of said nations can be. What KWC is developing isn't small, westernized regions. They are creating the source for progression in regressive societal regions. There is no right or wrong in the places KWC does work, only what is needed to improve the quality of life the world over, this is also the work of every corporeal woman, whether she knows it or not.

The sustainable housing concept they are working on in Calcutta is what is need in many nations, I would hope the UN gets a good look at this work and recognize how easily this can be done to support Haiti and Chile after their quakes, Thailand and China after their tsunami and quake respectively, the US homeless and unemployed population and Native Americans on reservations, or a slew of other places/causes that can utilize this model to improve the quality of life of billions. This site is barebones on the outside, but all heart on the in.

Am I a viral thinker? (week six response)

I have truly gone to extraordinary lengths in life to rarely follow the ideas of others. I can actually say that I don't participate in viral thoughts, at least on a conscious level. However, I have been 'ground zero' for a few things, and started a few viral trends; nothing too contagious, but I've given folks something else to be distracted by while working on the internet. I've made it a habit to 'tag' people in my notes (most of which are poetry) in Facebook. Also I subscribe to HAWP (Hey Ash, Whatcha' Playing?) which is a video game-themed web comedy series by a brother and sister, and I have brought them hundreds of followers by suggesting them to friends and their friends (http://www.heyash.com/). I'd never given it a second though as to whether it was a success, but I noticed that after a year, HAWP was asked to do a live taping at E3 (the biggest video-game convention to date), and was able to press a DVD of their work for distribution. Maybe I'd measure the 'success' by noting the success of others building their work from the ground up.