Jay's Other Stuff

"Growing up in New Jersey, Bruce Springsteen was so important to me, because listening to him you..."

Mon, 13 May 2013 23:24:51 -0400

““Growing up in New Jersey, Bruce Springsteen was so important to me, because listening to him you didn’t feel like a loser. You felt like a character in an epic poem about losers.””

- Jon Stewart, talking to the crowd before tonight’s taping.

T-Paining Too Much: The Meme-ification of Charles Ramsey So many...

Thu, 09 May 2013 12:32:39 -0400

T-Paining Too Much: The Meme-ification of Charles Ramsey

So many big questions to ask about Cleveland, so much to grapple with. So much that is unthinkable but needs so direly to be thought about. I feel like it’ll be a while before I can say anything intelligent about it. But in the meantime here are some thoughts about the side questions around the Charles Ramsey phenomenon.

Love watching these young finalists from the August Wilson...

Fri, 03 May 2013 11:16:12 -0400

Love watching these young finalists from the August Wilson Monologue Competition. These kids are going in.

I want this LL back.

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 13:10:47 -0400

I want this LL back.

"One American critic was so angry she chased me to the exit to inform me, ‘This film is a call..."

Thu, 04 Apr 2013 17:08:00 -0400

““One American critic was so angry she chased me to the exit to inform me, ‘This film is a call to racial violence!’ I thought not. I thought it was a call to empathy, which of all human qualities is the one this past century seemed most to need.””

- Roger Ebert on Do The Right Thing.

“I don’t think that the answer to all our problems...

Sat, 02 Mar 2013 15:12:00 -0500

“I don’t think that the answer to all our problems is gonna be one book. But I do think the answers to all our problems are gonna be found in the creative.

Because the creative…when we create, we’re basically sending a little map, and sending it forward into the future. 95% of the maps disappear, vanish, get destroyed. But some of them are gonna make it through. Some of them are gonna make it through. And it’s remarkable what they might do.It’s remarkable who they might affect, who they might help.

I mean look, we’re humans, man. We’ve got a long history of screwing everything up, and of victimizing each other. But we also have a long history of continuity, of resistance, and of creative survival. And that’s always been helped tremendously by our art, by our songs, by the cultural stuff that we pass on from the past into the future.

And that’s not a bad thing to be a part of. In a world of many vocations, this seems like…not a bad one.”

-Junot Diaz

NOTE: This will only be of interest to maybe 5 of you, maximum. Apologies in advance.

Thu, 28 Feb 2013 06:19:00 -0500

NOTE: This will only be of interest to maybe 5 of you, maximum. Apologies in advance.:

Freddie DeBoer is a blogger that I’ve read off and on for a long time. He’s a great writer, but his output is erratic. On his better days he does really sharp, thoughtful work, on other days he indulges in semi-coherent ad hominem freakouts.

This week he featured me in one of the latter, with a post that included lots of snickering about my silly hip-hop name, specious appeals to authority (in which his logic, if followed to its conclusion, discredits the majority of his own work), an absurd misrepresentation of my (non)interaction with Radley Balko, and then a bunch of railing against positions that I’ve never held or espoused.

This was doubly frustratng because I’m actually sympathetic to some of his critiques of the practices that he imagines I support. Or at least I think I am, but I’d have to see those faint whispers of cogency fleshed out in a more lucid setting, to know for sure.

So I hope he revisits those threads on one of his better days. And I hope we cross paths again under other circumstances, because as pointed out below our work is actually pretty similar in some ways, and I think he’d find we see eye-to-eye on far more than he’d imagined. Well, a bit more, anyway.

I wish I had time to respond in more detail but this social ladder’s not going to climb itself, so for now here’s a post from Alan Pyke that covers a lot of what I’d have said.

alanpyke:

I’m accustomed to disagreeing with Freddie DeBoer, but I’m unused to seeing him employ lousy logic and self-defeating arguments. So it was surprising to see him do so poorly on the subject of privilege — the subject of some of his best and most personal writing — in a post about the debate over jokes and offense-taking that followed the Oscars:

People of the world, I implore you: what is privilege checking doing for anyone? Is anyone in the world going to materially benefit from someone in some grad seminar checking their privilege? Has all the privilege checking in every cultural studies class in the history of creation ever put clothes on someone’s back or food in their belly? Ever stopped a single cop from beating a black man senseless? Don’t mistake your purification rituals for progress, please.

This is a worthwhile set of questions, in a vacuum. If it never goes beyond a classroom exercise, privilege-checking becomes self-serving. At its most conspicuous and vapid it can be a vehicle for social positioning and alienation rather than, y’know, good things. (Such as making economically-disadvantaged white people realize they are still privileged, and using mass awareness of the bad-hand-at-a-good-table reality of social capital and skin color to shift public attitudes towards the systems of oppression and privilege-protection Freddie so rightly assails.) This is why privilege-checking isn’t and shouldn’t be a constant apologia or a hair-shirted gnash-toothed exercise in look-at-me posturing. White people who run around flashing their awareness of privilege like a credential of their Good Guy status are not helping anything, save themselves. And when they turn their awareness of privilege into a cudgel in interactions with less-aware (or less-overtly-signalling) white folk, they prove Freddie’s point. In a vacuum, this is provocative and potentially enlightening stuff.

However, he didn’t ask those questions in a vacuum. And the context transforms the above-quoted into a foolish wholesale renouncing of the public, interactive, instructive privilege-checking that a lot of people use the internet to pursue. Here’s how Freddie’s piece starts:

When I saw, in this Atlantic Wire piece, that Internet personality “Jay Smooth” was lecturing Radley Balko on his attitude towards people of color, I laughed out loud. It’s like God decided, “I’m going to create the perfect possible example of cultural liberalism’s preference for feelings over material conditions.”Jay Smooth makes videos on the Internet. So he’s got that going for him. Radley Balko, meanwhile, has gotten actual black people out of actual jail. He has worked tirelessly against police abuse and corruption, the drug war, and mass incarceration, and specifically the mass incarceration of young black men.

He goes on to extend his slap at Ill Doctrine’s Smooth into a familiar indictment of social media as a dead end that saps social liberal energy in a meaningless game of who’s-the-coolest — in this case, by encouraging folks to the kind of showy, vapid privilege-checking discussed above.

Right out of the box, you’ve got Freddie declaring that only material accomplishments have value, and that in any given interaction, the person with the fewer material accomplishments has no standing to critique the actions of the person with more of them. We should ignore or discount those whose contribution to a better world is in improving and expanding the running conversation about how to achieve a better world. You could probably take that as a cue to ignore Freddie himself (or me!) and be done with it, but then you’d miss the real cockery:

If you’re a white person who thinks that “Jay Smooth” has the right to lecture Radley Balko about race in America, you care more about your social positioning than about the material conditions of the nonwhite people you claim to be speaking for. Period.

Let’s count ways in which this is convenient, obfuscatory horseshit:

1. “Scare quotes” to show “contempt” for his “subject” who has “a name” he finds “hilarious” and “on-its-face disqualifying,” only he knows that’s “a crock of donkey vomit” and beneath the “seriousness” of his “argument.” Instead of “voicing” the “douchey” notion that Jay Smooth’s online identity is evidence of his irrelevance, he winks at that same idea.

2. A tweet cannot really be a lecture. Balko said something, Xeni Jardin responded, Smooth responded to Jardin an hour later. That (I believe) is where it stopped. Certainly that’s all that Freddie saw in the Atlantic post that set him off. (The Atlantic post also truncated Jardin.)

3. Freddie is claiming his own right to police speech rights here, which is cute. But benefit of the doubt – my rhetorical flourishes destroy my arguments sometimes too—he probably means something like, “If you’re a white person who thinks Jay Smooth has a right to point out that Radley Balko is policing other people’s feelings, in a way that well-meaning people of privilege frequently do, then you’re a preening poseur.”

4. It implicitly agrees with Balko’s point, without bothering to defend it on its merits.

The first three are cosmetic and typical, but the fourth is actually fucked. The dodge of the substance here is the fulcrum of Freddie’s post, and he’s not normally one to dodge substance. A quick peek at the actual stuff of the Balko-Smooth exchange suggests why he’s dodged it:

Balko’s turn as the feelings police — “If you’re really angry about jokes this morning, you should look a little harder for things to be angry about.” — presumed that people can’t walk and chew gum. That you can’t simultaneously be angry about racist/sexist microaggressions in one of the most-watched cultural events we have, and be angry about macro-level structures of racism/sexism. That if you’re mad about our jokes, you’re not also mad about our jails. Why would someone presume such? Occam says: because they aren’t mad about the broadcast microaggressions, and resent the implication that they ought to be. (Aiding Occam here: Freddie and Balko are natural antagonists, as he notes. He’s not defending Balko broadly, he’s asserting Balko’s narrow right to go unchallenged by his lessers on matters of race.)

Freddie’s choice to police the dialogue along an absolutist standard of achievement that would in fact disqualify his own voice from consideration — unless he’s been out righting material wrongs in spandex at night, and the flamethrowing rhetorician and teacher Freddie DeBoer is just a mild-mannered alter-ego — looks undercooked. He and Jay Smooth do the same sort of thing, using different media. Each comments upon both the discourse around and substance of American policy and culture, hoping to improve the discourse, and thus, the policies. And neither likes having his intelligence insulted, which is what Balko’s broad-brush reaction to post-Oscar anger did to Smooth et al.

In this specific case, we know from another post that Freddie found Seth McFarlane’s jokes troubling, but liked The Onion’s. I felt the same way, but found the anger at The Onion informative, and legitimate, even as I felt that it was misplaced. (So as not to be diverted further: what she said.) I reflexively distrust offense-taking with regard to comedy, provided that it’s actually funny and smart. I get frustrated when people I respect are offended by something I liked. But in those collisions, I try to interrogate my disagreement with smart, offended people. Here, Freddie’s standing next to the collision shouting about how right he and Balko are, and how wrong everyone else must therefore be.

Having already ducked the substance of the twitter exchange, Freddie attacks the medium. There is a lot of holier-than-thou to his running critique of how social networks alloy activism, and it’s all present in this piece. But it’s silly to start down psychoanalytical side-roads here, as much as Freddie loves to invite you that direction. If you do so, you’ll likely miss one or more buried nuggets of rightness, hidden like easter eggs in his ragegarden. To wit, Freddie identifies:

a world where social liberals are more interested in demonstrating their superiority over [the masses] than in educating them.

Hey, that’s actually a thing! Smugness and self-righteousness are derailing. Even in the best of circumstances, it’s a lot easier to hook a thumb at someone and shake your head and say “This guy, amirite?” Twitter is far from the best of circumstances for considerate, good-faith engagement. And when poorly used, social media can absolutely become the careerist amen corner Freddie believes it to be. Another easter egg:

But social inequalities are not about feelings. It is the structure of our society that renders black manhood criminal. It is the structure of our society that keeps women underpaid. These problems can’t be solved with feelings. These problems are not in people’s minds. They can only be solved structurally, through actual material change.

Also true! Doesn’t render privilege-checking unhelpful. But it’s vital to figure out how to get from the short-range goal of increasing self-awareness among the privileged both to improve daily life and to broaden the constituency for progressive societal change. Perhaps there’s a subtext here about how privilege-checking evangelists are working in a far more gradual, less radical mode than Freddie would prefer, and he does seem to imply that he’d rather we all ignore the voters who don’t yet share our understanding of structural and abstract oppression, and simply seize the policy levers and tear down this wall. (I’d also argue you have to interact with people’s minds to get them to go to work on structural problems with you. Which, again, is a thing Freddie does himself.) Regardless, this is again a valuable point.

But to leap from there to this notion that all efforts to highlight the privilege gap underlying our discourse are self-serving and without merit is rather much. And a funny thing happened mid-leap:

Balko thinks you should prioritize material oppression structures over cultural reflections of the power gap those structures perpetuate. Freddie agrees and goes further, to the notion that caring at all about cultural reflections of oppression is foolish and self-serving, and never anything more than that. In the process, they’re policing the thinking and feelings of the people who spend their lives mashed in the gears of the structures we’re all trying to dismantle. And in Freddie’s case, he’s attacking somebody who uses his digital megaphone to take privilege-checking and awareness of structural racism and oppression to the very masses at whom social liberals too frequently scoff.

Haters Don’t Die, They Multiply On being creative, and how...

Wed, 13 Feb 2013 09:51:30 -0500

Haters Don’t Die, They Multiply

On being creative, and how those voices get inside your head and stop you from shining.

nativescience: babylonfalling: 17-year-old Rashida Jones...

Fri, 25 Jan 2013 15:14:55 -0500

nativescience:

babylonfalling:

17-year-old Rashida Jones writes a letter to The Source (November 1993) in defense of her dad Quincy after Tupac dissed him for marrying a white woman in an interview with Kim Green that ran in the August issue. G shit.

Posted. No comment

Also check the postscript from Quincy here:

Your daughter Kidada was engaged to Tupac Shakur when he was killed. How does a father react to a potential son-in-law with such a dangerous reputation?

I wasn’t happy at first. He’d attacked me for having all these white wives. And my daughter Rashida, who was at Harvard, wrote a letter to The Source taking him apart. I remember one night I was dropping Rashida at Jerry’s delicatessen, and Tupac was talking to Kidada because he was falling in love with her then. Like an idiot, I went over to him, put two arms on his shoulders and said, “Pac, we gotta sit down and talk, man.” If he had had a gun, I would’ve been done. But we talked. He apologized. We became very close after that. Once, I was having a date at the Hotel Bel-Air, and he came by and told the waiter that he would be back, he was going home to put on a tie.

A tie? You’re destroying his thug legacy.
Ask my daughter! She was there!

artgonegonzo: Last week, I witnessed an art event I thought...

Tue, 15 Jan 2013 19:30:33 -0500

Jay Smooth, Adam Mansbach, José Parlá, GZA, and Alan KET Maridueña. (Pho

KET, Copenhagen, 2009 (via KET ONE’s Flickrstream)

artgonegonzo:

Last week, I witnessed an art event I thought would possibly never occur: the Museum of Modern Art made a serious step forward in recognizing the cultural importance of graffiti writing and hip hop at their fascinating panel discussion, “Writers and Writers: Narrative on the Page and in the Street.”

Read more of my coverage of this groundbreaking panel in my article The Vandals Are No Longer Too Hot To Handle at MoMA on Hyperallergic: http://hyperallergic.com/63498/the-vandals-are-no-longer-too-hot-to-handle-at-moma/

Was honored to take part in this convo at MoMA, hope it’s the first of many! (But the last one that’s all-dude)

"I think Eve would agree with me that if she’d only been allowed to just shoot that snake in..."

Fri, 11 Jan 2013 13:04:00 -0500

““I think Eve would agree with me that if she’d only been allowed to just shoot that snake in the face, we’d still be living in Paradise. But then again, in Paradise there’d be no need for guns, and what a pointless existence that would be! How do we resolve this paradox? I need a bigger gun so I can shoot this philosophical conundrum in the face.””

- Gun Appreciation Day chairman Larry Ward

Here’s my annual message of holiday ambivalence for all!...

Mon, 24 Dec 2012 12:43:24 -0500

Here’s my annual message of holiday ambivalence for all! Hope you either have a happy one, or find your space to abstain peacefully.

“Her name is Kasandra Michelle Perkins. She was 22 years...

Mon, 03 Dec 2012 20:32:00 -0500

“Her name is Kasandra Michelle Perkins. She was 22 years old, a new mother, and an aspiring teacher. Her picture shows off a beautiful smile and her friends describe her as selfless, kind, and generous. She was excited about being a mother to her newborn, Zoey, and was optimistic about her future. But her future was cut short, her life was taken away, and I think you should know her name.”

My last word on this election: NO BUT SERIOUSLY, I’M...

Tue, 06 Nov 2012 14:34:30 -0500

My last word on this election: NO BUT SERIOUSLY, I’M VOTING FOR REVENGE.

My video for the Actually.org project: “An Aurora Borealis...

Wed, 24 Oct 2012 13:58:22 -0400

My video for the Actually.org project: “An Aurora Borealis of Elitist Douchebaggery.”

Why the debate game still makes no sense, even though Obama...

Wed, 17 Oct 2012 17:09:00 -0400

Why the debate game still makes no sense, even though Obama played it right this time.

“Laughing to Keep from Crying” (in which the stress...

Mon, 15 Oct 2012 18:43:38 -0400

“Laughing to Keep from Crying”

(in which the stress of this debate season reduces my voice to one long melodic high-pitched whine.)

Catch this while you can. I’m loving how much Prince is...

Sun, 30 Sep 2012 15:40:58 -0400

Catch this while you can. I’m loving how much Prince is loving being with Jennifer.

“What is the Polite Way to Tell Mitt Romney’s Family...

Fri, 28 Sep 2012 11:50:00 -0400

“What is the Polite Way to Tell Mitt Romney’s Family That We Think He’s a Weirdo?”

"In the serious play of questions and answers, in the work of reciprocal elucidation, the rights of..."

Mon, 24 Sep 2012 13:21:00 -0400

““In the serious play of questions and answers, in the work of reciprocal elucidation, the rights of each person are in some sense immanent in the discussion. They depend only on the dialogue situation. The person asking the questions is merely exercising the right that has been given him: to remain unconvinced, to perceive a contradiction, to require more information, to emphasize different postulates, to point out faulty reasoning, and so on. As for the person answering the questions, he too exercises a right that does not go beyond the discussion itself; by the logic of his own discourse, he is tied to what he has said earlier, and by the acceptance of dialogue he is tied to the questioning of other. Questions and answers depend on a game—a game that is at once pleasant and difficult—in which each of the two partners takes pains to use only the rights given him by the other and by the accepted form of dialogue.
The polemicist , on the other hand, proceeds encased in privileges that he possesses in advance and will never agree to question. On principle, he possesses rights authorizing him to wage war and making that struggle a just undertaking; the person he confronts is not a partner in search for the truth but an adversary, an enemy who is wrong, who is armful, and whose very existence constitutes a threat. For him, then the game consists not of recognizing this person as a subject having the right to speak but of abolishing him as interlocutor, from any possible dialogue; and his final objective will be not to come as close as possible to a difficult truth but to bring about the triumph of the just cause he has been manifestly upholding from the beginning. The polemicist relies on a legitimacy that his adversary is by definition denied.””

- foucault.info/foucault/interview.html