Des Temps

Author: MHB

  • Vampires rock Soweto

    mix heavy
    Vampire Weekend dropped it hot this week and got met with both Kisses and Bronx Cheers. Maybe it’s my preppy roots and culture, but these kids are alright with me. As one sage said: “[This is just] the inevitable graduation of privileged indie kids into their rightful social milleu. Drop the post- art-school ‘ghetto’ chic of most recent Brooklyn arrivistes and you get…this band.” VW keeps it realer than most of us 18-34 liberals in NYC, so let’s put down our snarker rifles and pull on our dancing shoes. To help us all, here’s a little mixtape I cooked up: The Garlic Press & Pestle. (Oh yeah, I’m twee like VW) It’s got that Clipse Cape Cod remix, some Soweto sounds from ’99, Biggie beats over bhangra and Roy Orbison. (you can’t hear it, but the dancehall airhorn is blasting over here)
    —-
    UPDATE: Here is a new metric to study band buzz, can you spot the next Vampire?

  • Soulja Boy's Superman Subversion

    “Crank That” content occupies 5 of the top 100 YouTube videos. Advertising and Academia have written great articles and case studies about the Soulja Boy phenomenon. Even Disney let copyrights slide to join the party. Yup, it’s a new media coup.

    sLGLum5SyKQ

    So…the line “Superman dat (h)o!” means? It aint just some nonsensical wordplay.

    Last fall there was a flurry in the blogosphere about the lyrical ‘translation’, but it didn’t go viral, so the song and the artist have not been outcast by corporate America.

    The song/dance has remixed past the point of authorial intent, so the fact that people age 6-66 are Cranking in the classroom and at halftime is not really a prob, just really funny. It’s another example of hip-hop subverting dominant linguistic paradigms while working within it. Like in 2003 how Dave Chappelle and Lil’ Jon had millions of Americans blindly saying Skeet Skeet. Or in the late 90’s when LL Cool J slipped a FUBU ad into the text of a Gap TV spot – LL says on camera “For Us, By Us, on the low”. It flew under the radar of both the client and the agency, whom I’m guessing just heard it as some cool urban lingo, not an encoded advert for their competition.

  • Steroids, Sopranos & Hilly the Clint

    this just pisses me off.George Mitchell and his legal eagles are bad-ass. I’m glad to see that the ‘purity’ of the National Pastime is nekkid on the table and knickers in a twist. But it ain’t a big secret, I mean being incredulous about juicing in baseball is like Renault in Casablanca being “Shocked, Shocked to find that gambling is going on in here.”
     
    nM_A4Skusro
     
    Let’s be real: Cheating is part of the American Way. The USA was built violently from the ground up and then expanded west Deadwood style. Jay-Z is on the cover of Fortune Magazine – his beginnings as a businessman are rooted in the ‘illegal’ drug trade – and he is now on the legal side of things. So what message does the magazine cover send to corner boys? Keep your head down and work at McDonalds? Don’t think so.

    (more…)

  • The Wire: Social Structure (the game is rigged)

    jdwilliams.jpgSeason 4 of The Wire just dropped on DVD, so this weekend I was glued to the telly and composing armchair academic essays about the structure of this B’more world. Then I read media scholar Jason Mittel’s writing about the show, and decided best just to step aside and give him the mic. I’ve quoted at length cause I know yall might not click through. And this should be read:

    [Series creator David] Simon has suggested that The Wire is a show about the relationship between individuals and institutions, a claim that the program seems to uphold. But I would argue that the point of emphasis is much more clearly on institutions rather than individuals, as within each of the social systems that the show explores—the police, the drug trade, the shipyard, city government, the educational system—the institution is brought into focus through the lens of numerous characters. Certainly McNulty is a central point of access to understand police bureaucracy and functions nominally as the show’s main character, but by season four he is in the margins while characters like Daniels, Colvin, and Bunk provide alternate entry points to explore the police system.
    jimmymcnulty.jpg
    Likewise we experience the drug trade through a range of characters from D’Angelo to Stringer, Omar to Cutty. While all of these characters have depth and complexity, we rarely see much of their existence beyond how they fit into their institutional roles—even romantic relationships seem to foreground inter-institutional links between police, lawyers, and politicians more than interpersonal bonds deepening characters’ inner lives and motivations. The chronic alcoholism and infidelity of The Wire’s police officers offers a portrait less of flawed personalities than of a flawed institution—the police admire the systematic discipline and coordination of Barksdale’s crew, which is distinctly lacking in the Baltimore Police Department.”

    I1VoK2VH_I0
    (more…)

  • Max Ernst, Maya Deren & Craigslist

    max-ernst-antonius-72dpi-gross.jpgAt Desedo HQ form follows function. Rather than cluttering up the space with traditional visual cues of ‘office’ – paper piles/coffee pot/telephones – we aim to keep it sleek, to make every word count. With that in mind, we purchase office furniture only as needed, and often through Mr. Craig Slist. He’s always good for a new adventure. Yesterday we got a credenza from Max Ernst’s granddaughter.

    credenza1.jpg

    Now that the grandpapa of DaDa is in the office, and is next to a lamp bought from this smart chap, it creates a wholly unique narrative. We think of these items as a pair and relate them both to their previous owners. While staring at the credenza my mind drifted to the filmmaker Maya Deren, who wrote about how a dancer can create a new relationship between two unrelated objects by merely moving his foot. Craig Slist – the best dancer evar? 

    jh_srk8jJqQ

  • Occam's Razor & MIT

    kool-aidman.jpg
    MIT’s Futures of Entertainment conference last weekend was a stunna. The crowd was an even split of industry and academia; each camp was curious about the other and left their kool-aid and navel-gazing at the door. The lodestone for this was that the panelists and the audience both asked “WHAT is the Future?” – not stated “This IS the Future!”

    handcuffs.jpe
    And it’s this compass of questioning that helps keep a mind sharp. Even though the event was at MIT, I noticed that a fair amount of people in attendance did not have PDAs (aka Silicon Handcuffs). Curious, I asked why, which lead to convos along these lines: Supposedly PDAs make us more efficient. But efficient at what? Actual creative thinking? Or just the new call and response pattern of email and TPS reports?

    Teasing out that thread – much of our techuse – AIM, PDA, Twitter – does not truly make us smarter. But it’s not the tech itself that’s dangerous, it’s our wonton use and the patterns formed in the name of progress. True progress is most often found by bucking patterns and remixing the norm. Without distance or a curious eye toward our techuse, soon we might have to stage South Korean style tech interventions for our USDA Millenials. Progress? jump-up.jpg

  • Cubicle Quaaludes

    thecubes.jpg
    So I don’t do Facebook. And I quit Friendster. No MySpace for MHB, my LinkedIn is dusty and I aint the only one. They were cubicle quaaludes, never truly bolstered any business, friendships or romance. That said, I read about SNS habits and marketshare like an old man follows the ponies. To date, the thoroughbred of articles is this brilliant and controversial paper by Danah Boyd about the class divisions that are taking hold in Facebook vs. MySpace.

    eszterdata.jpg
    Boyd traces the roots of the division to the fact that:

    Facebook launched in 2004 as a Harvard-only site. It slowly expanded to welcome people with .edu accounts from a variety of different universities. In mid-2005, Facebook opened its doors to high school students, but it wasn’t that easy to get an account because you needed to be invited. As a result, those who were in college tended to invite those high school students that they liked. Facebook was strongly framed as the “cool” thing that college students did. So, if you want to go to college (and particularly a top college), you wanted to get on Facebook badly. Even before high school networks were possible, the moment seniors were accepted to a college, they started hounding the college sysadmins for their .edu account. The message was clear: college was about Facebook.

    Read it, hell print it out. It’s quite something.
    —
    shout out to fellow travelers who are deaccessioning.