Des Temps

Category: Our World

  • 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.
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    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.”

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  • 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.

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    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? 

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  • Black Nerds: a reprise

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    Editors Note: The below text is a follow-up to Raafi’s now-famous post about Black Nerds.
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    Over the past couple months I’ve had to do a lot of soul searching over exactly what the word “nerd” actually means and found myself in a sort of Potter Stewart limbo. After all, blogging about what it means to be a nerd isn’t very cool, but I digress. My fragmentary notion that the black nerd is an emerging presence in our culture that is under-recognized has provoked many sorts of reactions from the vituperative (I see you Tai) to the laudatory. In the process the link has found its way into blogs at USA Today, MIT, and Ebony/Jet. The New York Times called to say wassup and just this week I appeared coast-to-coast on Canadian radio. Did I mention that Clutch Magazine thinks I’m a black man to watch? (I’ll mention here, in passing, that the Beastie Boys once recorded a song entitled “Hey Ladies!”).

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  • Occam's Razor & MIT

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    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!”

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    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

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    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.

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    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.
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    shout out to fellow travelers who are deaccessioning.

  • Dinosaur Fight

    Of the 500+ folks who emailed RSVPs for the Autumn Apotheosis Party, there was only one address that stuck in my memory: Dinosaur.Fight@gmail.com.

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    Who was this person? And why did I automatically assume that s/he was awesome? In a landscape of literal email addresses, Dinosaur.Fight jumped off the screen, a fang bearing smiley face. It was like seeing a stranger enter the room in a stunning outfit – again, who is s/he? So I replied to the RSVP and asked after the etymology of the address. Talena replied “”it’s actually something I’ve thought about since the advent of this internet age, never wanted to be myname@someemailaddress.com.”

    Could having a unique address become a new way to create distinction in our now staid email identity?

    In Web 1.0, email addresses were often combos of initials + numbers, lots of ZZZZs too. This was reflective of the new ‘techo/cyber’ aspect of things, as if we were talking to HAL 9000. (My Hotmail was MHB718)

    In Web 2.0, the online space was no longer an ‘other’ or even ‘cyber’ – it was normal. And with it, we all got serious Gmail prefixes of firstname.lastname@, mirroring how we introduce ourselves in the flesh (Mine is MichaelHB). So click and brick have conflated.

    Avatars, IM handles, Blogger names, etc… are now the sandbox of funny names in the www. But email? Naw, that’s serious. Nobody uses an alternate ID to RSVP for a party, especially in their own industry. Well, Talena flipped our new norms and introduced herself as Dinosaur.Fight. And now I’m writing about and linking to her. It reminds of being a kid and seeing the first pink flamingo in our neighborhood. I had no idea who lived in that house, but was sure that they were pretty damn cool.

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  • Autumn Apotheosis Pixxx

    plaz3.jpgUs Elephants had a stomping good time at last Thursday’s party, thanks to our fine friends & the Drunkness Monster. Anyone have shots of Pop Rocks or Garbage Pail Kids? Do send them our way, we’ll add them to the pixmix.

    The next smashing soiree will celebrate St. Valentine’s Day.
    A Kissing Booth? A visit from Erman Desedo the IV?
    Don’t know yet, but we do know it’s gonna be hothothot!

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