Every Sunday Morning, a place where various things get thrown out, shot at, cut open, and dissected. Topics of interest: psychological, and medical anthropology, privatization, globalization, excess, language, humor, hip-hop culture, jazz, brain and mind, memory, urban space development, Los Angeles, the Chicago Bulls, UCLA Bruins, FC Barcelona, and mankind.
So, stop with the nonsense, like he conscious I'm just awake dawg, I'm doin' great dawg
He was talking about "conscious", meaning a state of knowing what's going on. He says being conscious is not really a state worthy of praise or congratulated for; it's just him simply being awake. By implication, this means he's noticing things.
Consciousness, specifically human consciousness was the main topic in the book the User Illusion by Tor Norretander.
The main thing I got from the book was that 80% of what we do is done unconsciously. Breathing, heart rate, thoughts, especially during sleep. Unconscious. We can sense a billion things a minute, but only a few bits actually enter our stream of thought and movement called our "consciousness."
I'm inclined to say that consciousness is about maintaining and exacting control. Consciousness acts so you don't go crazy processing every bit of information. It acts as yet another filter of information for the world around you.
It simplifies your life, your thought, emotion, movement process, the way that the User Interface on your computer simplifies your life as a computer user. You don't have to enter code just to do anything. You can click on your My Computer icon, the start button, which is nice, but there's so much work involved in making it look that easy. The binary coding, the programming language, the time it took to develop all that. That's all hidden.
Consciousness like that user interface that hides a lot of those details like the binary code and the programming language.
One thing I notice is that what you do become conscious of, you're probably insecure about. Which brings me to self-consciousness.
I'm conscious right now about my math abilities.
Kanye West says he's so self-conscious, but he's the only one to admit it.
It's a bad thing in this socio-cultural milieu to be "self-conscious" because it means you're too worried about what people think. You don't act the way you want to because you're trying to control what people think about you. Or at least limit the bad thoughts. When you become conscious, it seems like you don't really do anything, but you observe. The "I" part of you becomes active, but you cannot envision that "I" part of you committing to an action.
Basketball players, soccer players are said to be unconscious when they're making quick decisions with their respective balls. In those contexts, where timing is of the essence, you're not supposed to think, you're supposed to act. There is no room for pondering. There is no room for the "I" to perceive, and then decide to act because the moment is already over. Hesitation usually doesn't mean anything good in sports. The solution is to act before you think. Acting unconsciously.
Essentially, the book by Norretander is about how happiness tends to happen more when we are unconsciously acting. Unconsciousness means we act rather than let the consciousness creep in and instill doubt.
Then I thought back to what Mos Def said about consciousness.
So, stop with the nonsense, like he conscious I'm just awake dawg, I'm doin' great dawg
Even outside of Mos Def's context, we use "consciousness" a lot in youth hip-hop culture here in the US of A to indicate someone who seems to be thoughtful and knows about harsh realities. As opposed to someone who isn't conscious. By implication, a person who isn't conscious isn't thoughtful and skips over harsh realities.
There is even a demarcation of "conscious" hip-hop and non-conscious hip-hop. "Conscious hip-hop" is hip-hop that invokes thoughtfulness and harsh realities.
There seems to be a parallel between consciousness and harsh realities. Consciousness seems to recognize "harsh realities" all the time. With its recognition of harsh realities, it notices limitations as well. Consciousness by proxy notices limitations.
Consciousness. Realities. Limitations. Consciousness knows realities and knows limitations.
Acting unconsciously. Happiness. When you act unconsciously, you're generally happier.
Notice that we don't really care whether or not Britney Spears, Lindsey Lohan, or Paris Hilton are "conscious." I rarely hear that word used in any Hollywood Infotainment show. "Conscious."
It's probably because there's a kind of happy and upbeat discourse always surrounding them, regardless of what they actually are feeling. They live in an unconscious world where each of their missteps are exposed and judged harshly, yet anything positive they do, including losing 0.5 lbs of weight, is celebrated as an achievement. With the worlds they live in, they can fuck up royally,
When explaining why people are addicted to gossip about Hollywood celebrities, Danielle Fishel, formerly of Boy Meets World and apparently now a gossip host, said something to the effect of: "it's fun to follow their stories because their worlds are limitless." Limitless. Boundless. Unconscious. By implication, they have choices and can act on any whim, which makes their story more intriguing.
They get to act as unconsciously as they want.
Now that's something I wish I could do as a middle-class Filipino kid in America. I'm happy, but it feels like I have to walk on eggshells still. I have to carefully be something. I mean I wish I could just act ridiculous and stupid and then somehow bullshit my way into popularity. Or even something like the US presidency.
Only it feels like I can't. It feels like I can't just walk into a job interview and chum it up with old whitey. No matter the qualifications or knowledge I have, I have to match an employer's "comfortability, fit" factor (or maybe that was just me). The employer is usually somebody white. It feels like I can't just be an Eric Kandel from Vienna who studies literature and history as an undergrad, becomes a psychiatrist in training, and becomes a Noble Prize winning neuroscientists. My point is that it seems like everyone's doing something unconsciously, except me.
I'm just sitting here consciously, and observing.
Now this brings me to a question of whether or not I could act unconsciously on my way into something like the US Presidency?
Would I as a Filipino middle-class kid be able to George W. Bush/Sarah Palin my way through anything en route to the presidency?
It feels like I have to do everything by the book while other people, namely the white folks and asskissers of color get by on a steady diet of bullshit. I feel like I've had to do things at a higher and tighter level, so good just to get something that white people could get with just a minimum of effort.
The same I could say about Barack Obama.
Community organizer from the creme-de-la-creme, professor, organizer, awesome communicator matching up against an old guy who is respectable but is probably going to continue the Bush push, and some lady who came out of nowhere and prides herself on being a hockey mom.
It feels like this presidential "race" shouldn't even be a competition anymore. However, the polls are closee. He still seems to be walking on eggshells and is perpetually in doubt over the Bubba votes and the Bradley effect.
He's still defending against so many things: Reverend Wright, the unfettered linking of his middle name to Saddam's last name, the claims against his links to Islam.
All of these things shouldn't be issues, but have been made so, and he's had to straddle the line delicately to appease voters.
I think it took a lot of consciousness to play his positions the way he has. I do believe in his commitment to ALL working class folks. I really doubt he actually likes to support Israel, that he's actually steadfastly Christian, or that he's all for some kind of border security. Those seems like things in his form, his identity, that he consciously changed to make him palatable to broader demographics.
Not saying that's wrong, but that's how you win in politics --- more form than function. The right form to carry out the function. With the right form, the collective feels that it can unconsciously carry on with their functions.
Author's Rendition of statement: "Bill Wennington got wurped"
Actual statement: "Bill Wennington got worked."
The etymology of the word stems from a shellacking the 1996-1997 Chicago Bulls took from the hometown Los Angeles Lakers team in the game of Professional Basketball. "Wurped" is merely a mispronunciation of the word "worked", however by mere fact of the aforementioned shellacking, combined with the author's inability to say anything in defense of the Chicago Bulls, "wurped" functions to intensify the sense of defeat, or loss (i.e. salt on the wound).
Four years ago there was a graffiti park called Belmont Art Park near downtown Los Angeles on 2nd Street and Glendale.
I first came across it during a Huell Howser special. The context was right in front of the downtown vista of buildings. It used to be the site of the transit station. I can't believe I'd never seen this place. Huell spent the program interviewing some Latinos in the park playing some kind of ball game from Mexico or whatever, overviewing the art, speaking to some kind of tour group, and interviewing the artists.
I checked it out one day, then another day, and then another day (which is not documented). First day was when there were people playing that ball game I saw in Huell Howzer. Second day there were gates, but we pushed through anyway. Third day, there was no way of getting past the gates and we could only see the park from behind the gates. A few conferences, article readings later, I came to learn gradually that there was some deep history and precedence to it if Huell didn't already impart that into mind.
Many of the lot’s constantly replenished murals have been featured in magazines, photography books, art history textbooks and documentaries. Taggers come from all over – San Francisco, Chicago, New York, London – to paint there and document the murals. Art students from Japan make the pilgrimage to the lot where 2nd Street and Glendale Boulevard meet in the shadow of downtown to soak up the atmosphere.
From the 1980s, up until last November, the site was a popular neighborhood gathering place, outdoor art gallery, ancient Mexican Indian ballgame court, and a profitable film shoot location. In early 2003, planning began for building a 276 unit apartment complex on this site, but the community was not alerted of these plans until August of 2004.
Part of the site used to be a Shell gas station in the 1940s. Underground Storage Tanks have been buried for all these years, but only recently leaked gasoline into the soil and groundwater, when they were removed, illegally, by the developers.
Interestingly enough, Belmont Art Park is the site where Edward Doheny discovered oil. The Doheny of the Doheny Foundation and Doheny St. in West Hollywood. I guess it's only a fitting history to a fitting end...
The historic and cultural importance of the graffiti was not recognized by the city. Only the tunnel, the yard, and substation were declared historic and cultural, not the layers upon layers upon layers of sweat and paint. They decided to monumentalize a substation, a place which handles the utilities of the transit system. Utilities which have long ceased to be functional. It's like worshipping your nearest non-working fire hydrant. They will celebrate the yard's cultural history and heritage by making it a new pee reservoir/dog park.
Belmont Art Park was closing down was to develop 276 housing units, 20% of which would be allocated for affordable housing. Initially, before the LA Times was writing about this, somehow I was led to believe that the condos would be developed for low-income housing. Young, dumb, beating the drum. I knew at the time that we needed affordable housing, but I'm not sure why affordable housing advocates were fighting for this as if it was some kind of solution to homelessness.
The lot has been used for tarasca, an ancient Mexican ballgame, and as a canvas for elaborate graffiti murals that have gained international notoriety and been the backdrop to films and commercials.
But other community activists argued the development would help solve a long-standing need for affordable housing in the dense neighborhoods that surround downtown.”I am tired of seeing people on the street,” said Alvivon Hurd, a downtown resident and member of ACORN, a housing advocacy group.
“As much as I like the park, I can’t take that position.”
The planned complex calls for 55 affordable housing units, an after-school tutorial program and surplus parking.
Alas, the Los Angeles Downtown News now reporting on the new development called Belmont Station at Glendale and 2nd St.:
Almost one-third of the residents who pre-leased market-rate units at Belmont Station are USC students, but Essex expects the property to be popular among young professionals and families who work Downtown, Prayonsirisak said.
"I thought an obstacle was, we were out of Downtown, but a lot of people were okay with that because Downtown, it's busy, it's crazy, there's so much stuff going on," she said. "Whereas here, when you leave from work even though we're just blocks away, it's kind of like the suburbs of Downtown."
Somehow, I don't think those affordable housing advocates from 2004 envisioned USC students, who usually can afford a $30,000 education and live kinda far from their campus, young professionals to be the big beneficiaries of the "suburban" developments.
In fact, there's class snobbery inherent in the discourse of the blogger trying to sell us on the new development.
Aside from its historic connections to the old Belmont Tunnel, the development is notable for its generous allotment of affordable housing - 55 of the 275 new residences have been set aside for low-income families.
I'm not quite seeing how "generous" things are when a family needs to make almost $60,000 a year just to live in the "affordable" studio with the lowest rents at $1600+. And only 20% of the units are priced at that "affordable" rate. Not quite seeing how the $4000 a month condos will do anything either to mitigate the nation's largest homeless population.
Equally intriguing is the way various people seem to perceive of the history that was there before them:
However, the structure may be sandblasted to remove decades of graffiti or painted to match its original color. Crews testing exterior paint chips found some with 150 to 200 layers of spray paint, a telling sign that the derelict station (and the site in general) was once a playground for graffiti artists and the homeless.
"We welcomed that with open arms, the history," Kinney said. "Obviously, it was a challenge because when we first saw it, it was all graffitied. But watching it progress, we decided we were going to take this theme and run with it."
The way they handled the issue of graffiti is as wasted fragments of past years, home to vandals and transients. It's treated as an obstruction. It's a history that doesn't need to be known or need to exist, essentially, cause were creating a new whitewashed one covered in green.
In the eyes of some potential buyers and people who follow real estate development, it is a place that "didn't exist" for 45 years.
I’m glad that this once forsaken neighborhood is coming back to life at such a rapid pace after more than a 45-year hiatus! The apartments look great!
Apparently, the neighborhood's been "dead", and is only "re-birthed" when his white flight-ass comes back to town.
In the end it's not about the muralists, the taggers, the spray cans, the tarrasca. It's not about Meta-Housing, the commentors, the new buyers. It's about the memory of a space of nowhere that was co-opted into a place of somewhere, which got exposure everywhere --- the essence of the roots of hip-hop. It's a place you won't find on a tourist map, but has just as much resonance. It's about the meanings created, manipulated, the interconnectedness of the pieces and the people, the folk who breathed into life from an ambiguous dirt pond in the teeth of downtown Los Angeles.
by B.J. on 6/23/2008 11:16:00 PM
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The Manhattan Institute's John McWhorter says that hip-hop is not a vehicle for positive change, but rather a destructive force for black Americans.
Another one of those "reformed" black guys who act as a vehicle to legitimate conservative, and moderate white America's history of racism and paternalistic, third-person omniscient solutions.
I generally can't get myself to like anyone who can easily dismiss something that is important to a chunk of the population. He seems to goes out of his/her way to hate on something he doesn't really understand, kind of like a spy...or...a stalker. He reminds me of Steve Bowman's piece "You know what's stupid? Everything I don't understand!"
However, upon reading more of McWhorter's material here and listening to an NPR interview, I can't help but feel sorry for the man. I truly do.
Why? Two things: He's a stalker and he's passive-aggressive.
1) Keeping true to that identity as a stalker, he doesn't actually speak to anyone to uncover any truth.
In his main article against hip-hop, he leads with an observation about some kids at a KFC. The kids are loud and annoying in a public or quasi-public space, behavior virtually unheard of from any group or subgroup of teenagers in America. So, what's to blame?
You guessed it! The ASSUMED soundtrack of their lives. These Black kids at KFC...must be that damn Hip-hop! A-HA!
In his radio interview, he mentioned that when he speaks, everyone has been supportive and no one has bothered him. No one, except maybe "one hothead" gets riled up at his talks, probably because he bores his supporters or would-be supporters and he passively aggressively hides from those who want to call him out.
2) When explaining his avoidance of opponents and potential detractors, he calls himself a "homebody", code word for divorced-from-reality, scared, linguist.
I feel bad for him mostly because behind the flowery high-falutin' language and the degrees from Stanford and Berkeley is just a scared, passive-aggressive stalker.
Even though the writer of these books and articles is kind of pathetic in his attempts to disparage hip-hop, what he says is essentially still the same stuff that critics of hip-hop from casual to extreme haters use, so its still worth a response.
I can agree with a few things he says:
-Some of the most promoted and commercialized are those without real positive messages. But I can see where it comes from and I don't think it goes anywhere. -I agree that we could do without the sexism and violence but they'll keep saying what they want to say -People do need to adapt to their life circumstances
Where he and I differ is that he seems bent on extracting the worst elements of hip-hop and subsequently, rooting it out based on that.
It's kind of like trying to ban Christianity because you don't like the KKK or Terry McVeigh. In each case, you're trying to look for the worst elements of something you don't like without fairly weighing its good elements.
From this vantage point, this attempt to extract the worst of the genre, his argument boils down to two things:
1) According to him, Hip-hop is responsible for the destruction of the black American.
You'd think that the arrival of hip-hop caused the destruction of the 'hood.
"The rise of nihilistic rap has mirrored the breakdown of community norms among inner-city youth over the last couple of decades. It was just as gangsta rap hit its stride that neighborhood elders began really to notice that they’d lost control of young black men, who were frequently drifting into lives of gang violence and drug dealing. Well into the seventies, the ghetto was a shabby part of town, where, despite unemployment and rising illegitimacy, a healthy number of people were doing their best to “keep their heads above water,” as the theme song of the old black sitcom Good Times put it."
He seems to operate on this romanticized and historicized viewpoint that the 'hood was a rough place but still a place where this "healthy number" of people were doing their best.
Healthy numbers?
I remember a talk with the LA Times Homicide Blogger, Jill Leovy where she said that the black man murder rate has always been staggeringly high from Jim Crow until now. Her point was that there's deep a history of homicide within the black community.
In 1976, before talks of handguns, gangs, crack stuff, the black male homicide rate according to the US Justice Department was still 7x higher than those of whites. In, 1960, according to the Centers for Disease Control, death rates for black man were 14x higher, and in 1950 black male death rates were 17x higher than those of whites.
So bad things were still happening before hip-hop. I think the only difference with hip-hop in the picture is that it gives people like him to pick at and justify structural injustices and hegemonies.
2) His conclusion: hip-hop is antithetical to "helping people help themselves..."
He takes aim at those who try to spread the positive messages. Cites the Dead Prez as an example of conscious hip-hop. He mentions that they're pretty good at noting the insufficient employment opportunities. But he criticizes them for advocating civil and social rights, i.e. standing on top of Capital Hill.
The classic pull-by-the-bootstrapping man, he advocates a personal anecdote to a social and structural problems. He says that plenty of UPS jobs and delivery boys do not require college degrees and they can live perfectly legit middle-class existences. Guess he missed the talks about the disappearing middle-class, here, here, and here.
McWhorts then goes on to criticize those who do try to make their money in the underground economy. I would've thought that he'd think the underground is the adaptive way of making money, and would've applauded them.
Ultimately, Dr. McWhorter's prescription for his fellow black man is a whole dose of mediocrity. He offers a hellvua lot less that than the rappers from the neigbhorhood with the money and the women. He's essentially telling them to become drones of everyone else while other people get their action.
In the end, rap and hip-hop is only a medium of expression. It's a piece of marketing, but it doesn't drive any widespread violence that wasn't already endemic. If people want to destroy, that's usually a highly personal decision. I doubt that people make negative life or death decisions based on what they hear from an artist.
Hip-hop is mostly a tool for empowerment because it breeds expression. It has the potential to inspire. A tool for empowerment because this is where people can find their strength.
But ultimately, it's only a tool, it's not going to be the only thing that will make or break a segment of the population.
Add me to your reading list.
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