white like obama’s mom

I was at my boyfriend’s roommate’s birthday party in May and ended up talking to this annoying Venezuelan dude for a minute. He insisted on speaking English to me, not out of enjoyment of the language but rather out of his enjoyment of acting condescending. I think from my annoyance sprouted some talk about how I had lived in Panama as a child, and then I said something about Panamanians being different from Mexicans. He asked me oh, and how is that, and I said well, I guess one thing is you can tell a lot of Panamanians have African blood. And he gets all uppity, like, “and can you tell I have African blood?” I could a little, but right then I realized there was something I had been waiting to say my entire life: “I dunno, can you tell I have African blood?”

Not well received, although I did get some sense that I had disarmed him. Still he brushed off my “evidence.” My boyfriend thinks it’s hilarious, but I want to insist that it is probably true. Parts of my family arrived to Virginia in the 1600s , some others to North Carolina in the 1700s, and still others to Georgia during that time. Statistically there had to have been something. Ok well, I don’t really know how likely it is, but something tells me it is not unlikely. I think there was probably at least one black person in my ancestral family in the last 400 years given the racial makeup of the population where my family lived.

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Alright, so there are some things I think about frequently. Miami, dance music, regular music, race, nationality, whether or not I am gen-X, linguistics and etymology, the money trail, infrastructure projects, tacos, juice… since the weekend I have also been thinking about this drunk frat boy who wrote a book, Tucker Max, a lot, who’s book I am reading because my boyfriend’s libertine friend gave it to him and it’s in English. Back to race: I just concluded while walking to work this morning that okay, I accept that Barack Obama is black even though he isn’t descended from slaves, because he chose to identify as black. Not all of us can choose to be black, but he could, and he did, and I respect and possibly envy that, and then he became president and won the Nobel Peace Prize. Okay, that was around 9:30 a.m.

Then I get on twitter this afternoon and see the collective answering me that in fact, yes, genealogists have confirmed that Barack Obama is black in the “descended from slaves” sense, through his (white) mom. So this was nice for me because I had reached my peace on this burning question in my own terms, just hours before, and now the collective/Ancestry.com/god is telling me that my own conclusion had scientifically, really been true, and it wasn’t just true because I chose to believe it was true. It is nice when that happens, you know? And not only that:

SEE I TOLD YOU, BOARDING-SCHOOL EDUCATED AFRO-VENEZUELAN DUDE AND ARROGANT FRESA BOYFRIEND. I believe there is actually maybe a chance that I am also part black, and there is actually maybe a chance that I am also part black.

Obama’s Mom ^^^^^^ and Obama. Both part black.

p.s. This also touches on my gen-X question. I don’t think the millennials obsess over race like this. I get that race is increasingly flattening out into just a social construct, but… Cross Colors

20-minute goldie track

What the hell, I never knew the original of Inner City Life was 20 minutes long. Awesome! I had always just accessed the 7-minute edit from the Urbal Beats compilation I guess.

Just so you know, I am all in favor of super-long electronic (and prog) songs. It is sort of like the big pants argument in high school in the 90s– there is no ultra-wide leg opening too ridiculous, no arguably monotonous track too long. P. Diddy also thinks really long tracks are worthwhile:

also note the plaid shorts

I’ve never really been anti-gun. Actually one particularly rebellious year in college, I joined the NRA kind of to make a statement about bandwagon politics (I was studying a lot of “pomo” and absurdist narrative theory). But… well I found this photo on Facebook today, because someone I know posted it, and it just doesn’t sit right. I think for a number of associations it gives me, aside from the Aurora shooting news coverage:

1) The picture was taken in O’Fallon, Illinois (scary).

2) Not sure what kind of gun this is, but it looks like the Colt .45 I fired a couple years ago, which was ferocious and scary.

3) He is using this weapon to open a Mexican beer.

4) I just read a really in-depth story last night about escalating narcoviolence in Guadalajara due to the Zetas encroaching on the Sinaloa Cartel.

5) The Sinaloa Cartel is speculated to be one of the largest crystal meth producers worldwide.

6) Not saying this dude actually does crystal, nor that I even know for sure who he is, but this furniture, carpet, and the city of O’Fallon, Illinois, all make me think of crystal meth consumption.

In other words, this photo sums up for me, if only tangentially, a business relationship between the United States and Mexico that is estimated to be worth 10s if not 100s of billions of dollars… plus tens of thousands of lives in Mexico alone. Pinches gringos locos, culeros.

more cool photography and the desire to own

Thanks to WFMU‘s twitter account I just found this:

Post-its #2 by Thomas Jackson. Thomas Jackson constructs and photographs these structures. He has ones of disposable plates, cheeseballs, yarn, dixie cups. I like the contrast between crap (deferring to WFMU’s term) and the nature behind it. This morning I woke up dreaming of one of the yarn images, but in a sort of sparkly animated version.

Whenever I find art that I like I immediately want to buy it, sometimes even before I have the chance to sit back and think about why I actually appreciate it. It’s kind of materialistic, but I don’t think it’s a bad thing. I want to possess it, put it in my home, stare at it, show it to my friends, find out what they think about it. It’s kind of like fish tanks. I also felt this way about Sally Mann.

I am not saying I actually do buy the art, just that I want to. If it is a hundred bucks or less I do, but that is unusual.

earnest confessions of the week

I have said two kind of cheesy things this week which were true. Might as well publish them, eh?

1. I really admire and want to be like George Washington. I went to Mt Vernon (George Washington’s house) a few years ago with my parents and sister, and I was really inspired. Aside from the fact that I thought it was badass he had the key to the Bastille (it’s hanging in the foyer), Washington was really a Rennaissance man. He was always learning and trying new things, and he had a diverse career. (Said to my friend Cory on Tuesday night while eating pizza.)

2. I just told my boyfriend of nearly a year I think it’s really great that I feel like I know him better now than I did a month ago.

i’ll fly away

I have a project I am working on with a friend from college. We’re still in planning phases (haha), and I really am not going to say what the project is, but these things are related to it:

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/15263/15263-h/15263-h.htm (The Underground Railroad by William Still © 1878)

just watched the godfather for the first time ever

mexican tattoo artist regulation

I just read this news item on El Economista‘s Twitter: Condicionan trabajo de tatuadores; deberán pedir a menores de 18 años autorización por escrito de padres. Rough translation: New regulation for tattoo studios; minors under 18 will be required to demonstrate written parental authorization. Permission slips!

death of cd’s / rebirth of paying for music (drip.fm)

Part 1: CDs are dead

1999: the year I started college. That summer I ordered from the Apple store my very own computer (my mom paid for it obviously), one of the new all-in-one iMacs. When it arrived to my parents’ house I immediately installed and configured the operating system and hooked it up to my parents’ phone line to begin doing things. Configuring Netscape, I guess. Re-bookmarking my favorite sites. Probably some stuff with my AOL account. I think I downloaded some cool “computer graphics” artwork to set as my desktop picture. A The Matrix screensaver. During the installation process, Apple had walked me through the steps to configure it for a WLAN network, but I wouldn’t understand what that was until a few weeks later, when I moved into dorm and followed the IT helpdesk’s guide to getting connected. After successfully setting my (pink) computer up to run on the FASTEST INTERNET I HAD EVER EXPERIENCED, I quickly began to realize from friends, via AOL instant messenger and ICQ, that one of my life’s passions, music, was about to blow up in my face.

A new friend, an upperclassmen I had introduced myself to online in one of the Washington, D.C. rave forums over the summer, sent me a drum and bass song via chat. I started finding songs online to trade back to him, and to keep. Napster did not yet exist for Mac, not until the summer of 2000 I believe, but there existed actual webpages offering downloads, spyware- and ad-free. The MP3 Crackhouse was one that I went to a lot. My collection grew; especially after I figured out how to get the iMac onto the college’s Windows network, to access all the music which my PC-using colleagues were downloading and sharing.  I signed up for a show on the campus radio station, knowing that I would be able to offer amazing new music every single show, fresh off the internet. That Christmas I asked for a CD burner (decent hardware MP3 players weren’t yet available). At first I was converting all my MP3s to audio format to listen to on normal CD players, but by the end of my sophomore year, I was just using the discs to store the MP3s as data, having realized that I would never buy another CD player ever again.

My purchase of CD albums didn’t altogether stop, though, not right away. In 1999 a lot of MP3s were still kind of rough in quality, and even with Napster the infrastructure to find non-pop music wasn’t fully developed. That came with P2P networks like Oink, where you had to upload something good in order to be granted downloading privileges. So I kept buying CDs for a while. Music stores were still often good “curators;” Willie’s Records and Tapes (no website, sorry) in Richmond, Virginia still had tons of hiphop I wouldn’t have known about or been able to get if I relied solely on the internet. Plan 9 music, also in Richmond, and Other Music, in New York, had a lot of good compilations. I remember I went to London in 2002 and dropped about 200 GBP on electronic music compilations, all on CD. By 2003, however, I was only really buying second-hand CD’s. It was really starting to sink in that digital was more useful to me as software, and in 2006 I effected a vinyl-only policy for hardcopy music.

Part 2: it is an honor to pay for things that I value

In all this time I had, meanwhile, never purchased any digital music. MP3 Crackhouse gave way to Napster for Mac (Macster?) gave way to Soul Seek gave way to bitorrents. In 2007, blogs, supplemented by Soul Seek or bitorrents for special needs, had become my main music source, or DJ mixes. I was no longer stealing most of my music; I was being given it for free. RCRD LBL is a great service if you like their editorial taste, which posts free mp3s, paying artists with ad revenue. I was on their daily mailing list. I even contributed to a music blog for a while myself (emptyskeleton.blogspot.mx— it migrated to a Mexican domain after I left… they’re following me!), uploading music I was ripping from CD promos received via my community radio station, where I had a show. (I also started doing a weekly show showcasing music blogs!)

I did make one purchase, finally, in 2009. My friend’s band, Zombie Zombie, had released an EP that I had been unable to find for free download. And since I actually know them, and actually wanted to own the music, I bought it on Beatport for 5 bucks. It was worth it, of course, but that is really the only time I had been confronted with music that I wanted that I couldn’t easily get, without paying. (I have never used iTunes, by the way, for content. I consider it a pain in the ass.)

Until! Until… last month I signed up for drip.fm, the online music sales service started by the record label Ghostly International in May 2011. They, a favorite label of mine, have recruited other really good labels, such as Stones Throw, Domino, Morr Music, Dirty Bird to be part of the service. Customers like myself choose a label and pay a monthly subscription fee, set by the label, to receive whatever content the label wants to send them. I signed up for Morr Music, a label out of Germany featuring cerebral, non-dancy electronic music. They give me an album a week for $10 a month. It’s working out great. I have new music served to me, and what’s more I am thrilled to be buying music again! Really. Possibly because I know that 70% is going straight to the label, a good label that I like and who probably shares as much revenue as possible with their artists; Drip gets 30% for disribution. What I am not paying for is plastic, marketing and distro to Clear Channel Communications, or record store overhead.

Ghostly, the way they talk, seem to be taking Drip.fm as an experiment. I guess they don’t want to go too bold, considering all the flux around digital. But what I would like to see is them offering packages if I buy more than one label, for example. I could also see a music promotion service, the companies which send promos to radio stations and probably bloggers in exchange for airplay/publicity, doing something like Drip for regular listeners. There were several that served my radio stations that I would pay for: Spectre was one of my favorites, though now defunct, and Terrorbird… I would consider paying for their stuff. Forced Exposure is awesome– at the college station, I convinced them to start sending us promos, but I had to really differentiate us, our station, in their eyes in order to get them to. As a grown up, I would probably pay them $30 a month, for the quality and variety of stuff they carry.

My Morr Music/Drip.fm dashboard:

example of my bipatriotism

My friend Lesley Téllez was over at my Fourth of July U.S. expat corndogs-and-pie get-together last night (she is a foodie, which makes me proud that she came). She mentioned that she noticed I had been blogging a lot recently, about Mexican politics. Our brief conversation led me to conclude that I hadn’t so much felt inspired by the Mexican elections; rather, I was inspired by the U.S. news media’s lack of interest in the Mexican elections.

That’s basically it; just wanted to clarify that point. Also, I think this subject makes for an appropriate pretext to post this awesome design, which will possibly be my next tattoo (after the Virginia state seal). This would be the logo for the U.S.-Mexico Chamber of Commerce… holler

Also, the Washington Post finally published an interesting article about the Mexican elections. I might start following Texas House Representative Henry Cuellar on twitter because of it; he is apparently friends with Peña Nieto.