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The Further Adventures of Herd Mentality

Friday, April 23, 2004

Yeah, I finally joined Orkut. Anyone want to join me? I set up a Xephreniaq forum already.

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En La Esquina

Thursday, April 22, 2004

Wow, I don’t think I’ve done a neighborhood piece since I moved to Washington Heights. It’s about time…

Every evening at the corner of 181st St. and St. Nicholas, around the newsstand, there is shouting. The last couple of nights I have hurried away from the subway station exit at that corner, because the caliber of shouting seemed to be a little louder than usual, and there were a lot more uniformly-dressed young men in doo-rags involved. I don’t know what was up with that. I guess I’m still a clueless agent of gentrification; can’t read the neighborhood.

Tonight confirmed one of my hunches about the usual shouting at the station. Tonight it was back to normal: ardently but not angry shouting from a bunch of middle-aged Latino men in working-class dress, throwing hands in the air and smacking at articles in folded newspapers. Among them, I have often seen a bearded fellow in an odd peaked hat who I could swear read at the poetry nights I used to go to in Harlem.

I paused at the elbow of one of the men. De que estamos hablando en est’esquina? I asked. (I learned the word “esquina” — streetcorner — from an Aterciopelados song.)

Politica, he said. Politica, politica. Todos los noches. He smiled.

I managed to fumble my way through a few more bilingual exchanges. He told me it was mostly Dominicans, and I believe he said they were talking about politics in their home country. I asked why they met on the corner and not at someone’s house or a restaurant. He gently explained it was to eliminate the economic differences between participants. I asked him whether the men present were socialists, or democrats, or something else. All types, he said, smiling again.

Where are you from? he asked. California, I told him. People there don’t like to talk about politics, do they, he asked.

No, no, si! Me gusta mucho! Y es mejor en la esquina, y en la calle! 🙂

I asked after the guy in the peaked hat. Aqui hay un hombre que se llama Popo? I asked. Popa, said the man. Si, si. Apparently Popa hangs out there quite a bit, and is judged to be muy intelligente.

I just looked it up: “popa” means “stern.” He always seemed more sage than stern, and was prone to a definite artistic or even mischievious streak at the poetry readings, but it’s an interesting appellation. I wonder where he got it.

I gave the man my name, and he told me his was Domingo. We shook hands. His were mightily calloused.

I think I should hang out on the corner more often.

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My Sister Rocks!

Wednesday, April 21, 2004

While I was home in Pasadena for Easter, I helped Sylvie shoot photos for a Friendster profile for her alter ego, UnSylvie. (You’ll probably only be able to see these links if you’re in my Friendster circle.) I swear I haven’t had so much creative fun in years (aside from editing video with Robert in January). Sylvie, unlike her elder sister, really understands how to use what actors call her “physical instrument.” I already knew she could tell jokes by dancing; I hadn’t guessed she’d be able to fake a pretentious-girl attitude so well. My sister is a geeeeenius! of pop simulacra! (Also, I see our friend Chris Ward has created Anti Chris: An American Badass For A Better America.)

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Detritus: A little meme spread; definite nostalgia

Sunday, April 18, 2004

… just because I haven’t written anything in so goddamn long:

From Elaine’s site, instructions:

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 23.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

Voila:
“If the aim is to recapture the participants’ experience, then time-shifted ethnography falls short.” –Christine Hine, Virtual Ethnography
Nobody told me this book was going to be such rough sledding. I’m going to have to reread it like five times to get it well-connected in my semantic network.

Can you *imagine* how much there is in my life I could write about? But no. None of it is worthwhile enough to get me a grade if I posted it here.

I popped the Xephreniaq mix we made a few years ago into my random shuffle on my CD player and it’s currently playing Stereolab’s Captain Easychord, which actually has stronger connections for me in other, seamier parts of my life… but which nonetheless are wearing off, and the real power of the song is finally sloughing off the other connotations. I’m really proud of us for the mix. The theme was “Travelling to another dimension,” and there’s an incredible range on it — Chinese and German opera, Korean and Mexican pop songs, Joe Strummer’s Mega Bottle Ride, Nortec Collective, the song I wrote about tadpoles being sent into space, and, um… “Ordinary World” by Duran Duran.

I think it did the theme and us proud. It makes me feel Morning Becomes Eclectic all over. I think our next joint project should be creating a temporary Xephreniaq museum with artifacts and installations. We should do a gallery opening with fancy wine and cheese and invite people who need to know us better. Among other things, if Catherine’s BMW is no longer in the family (I forget if it is) we need to steal it from the current owners and turn it into a giant flower planter or something. It’s *symbolic*.

Robert, I swear to god I’m going to write you soon… I was so happy to get your letter, but the semester suddenly turned to 24 karat suck. That despite the fact that I skipped my rotten NYU class 3 weeks running.

Something else that should happen, sooner than the gallery opening: a burn party. When could everybody make it? Anything before late May is totally out.

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Dear Sylvie,

Sunday, March 28, 2004

this comic is for you. And also for everyone else, but somehow, you. Love, Gillie

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Before You Send Me That Forward

Thursday, March 18, 2004

Recently I received the same email from two people — one on CA-125, which is ostensibly supposed to screen for ovarian cancer. The email is largely in caps, and rather hysterical in tone, but two very smart women I know passed it on anyway. We’re all susceptible to email hoaxes, no matter how smart we are; there’s always some cause or plea or element of actual fact they’re related to which makes us want to believe they’re real. I, for example, forwarded the “They’re going to defund Sesame Street!” email probably two times before I thought to check around to see if it was true.

My own policy is to check and see if there is a date associated with petition spam, in particular. I think any petition worth its snuff should be date-stamped, or it’s likely to circulate on the Internet from now til society completely falls apart (two or three years from now). From here on in my plan is also going to be checking Snopes.com, at least, before I forward something. The site keeps track of urban legends, hysterical spam, and other rumors. Once you find the spam you’re about to resend right next to an ancient rumor about immigrants getting free cars and tax breaks from the government, you feel a little silly, believe you me.

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Who Am I Reading With?: Genres And Audiences: Or, The Sudden Unwanted Appearance Of Colons In My Blog

Thursday, March 4, 2004

Came up with an idea today to go back and refine an issue of Internet literacy I obsessed over earlier but didn’t know how to position in the field. Some work has been done on children’s understanding of genre and intended audience of television shows. It develops in stages, with children first being able to identify cartoons, Sesame Street, the news and a few other genres, then developing more complex genre schemas. In general, though, kids are pretty sophisticated in their understanding of genres. They are also good at identifying target audiences, as in “this is for kids” and “this is for adults.” So as far as their understanding of the intended audience goes, they’re pretty sharp.

But what about their understanding of themselves as a community of watchers? Who else do they think is watching the shows that they do? Do they think, “Everyone watches SpongeBob,” “all kids watch SpongeBob but no adults do,” or “some kids watch SpongeBob and some don’t”? How do they specify to and among themselves the identities and social roles of watchers of various shows? And then, does this television understanding interact with or impact their understanding of the audience of Internet sites?

It’s a weird way to work — I feel like I developed all these questions earlier on and only now am I coming across a vocabulary and a literature I can draw on to make these questions acceptable to the larger academic community. (And heaven knows I have my own weird conceptions of who’s in that community!) The really annoying thing is I’m still feeling so lost in the overwhelming sea of literature I’m being forced to drink that I don’t have a moment to go back and read what I’ve been absorbing into my earlier questions. It was a complete accident that I thought of this at all.

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Today’s serendipity

Wednesday, March 3, 2004

led me to articles on an outcast minority in Japan (Burakumin) and a animated musical piece from SIGGRAPH a few years ago.

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Tapa tai!

Friday, February 27, 2004

The Onion AV Club is running an interview with the creator of Pootie Tang this week. Worth a read if you loved the movie, which I did. Things I hadn’t known: 1) Louis CK is white (which, sadly, flips my liberal white guilt switches in bad ways for enjoying the movie); 2) there was a big struggle with Paramount about the way certain nonsensical scenes were approached, which resulted in pulled punches on a lot of the gags; 3) Mr. CK regrets the parts which were unintentionally bad (the way the film was shot in places, for example), which I at one point celebrated for making Pootie Tang one of those rare and delightful movies which is both intentionally and unintentionally bad. Things I had known: Chris Rock pulled to keep the movie from being killed by the studio because he is a good guy who values smart comedy, and I need to check out more of his stuff.

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Our Princess Is In The Ivory Tower

Thursday, February 26, 2004

Former fellow Mod 63-dweller Roger made the Times today because of his upcoming conference on video games! Yay Roger! (Is there a page for that conference, Rog?) A bunch of us from TC will go down for it — let me know if you want to caravan.

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