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.
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.
Just when you think you have a unique idea, somebody else has probably done it before. We have about 500,000 years as a speices, 6000 years of documented or written history, across 25,000 miles of earth, with over 6.7 billion people on this planet currently. Assuming most of them have similar capabilities, there is an infinite potential for communication and expression which will also carry on its variations, somebody's bound to have thought what you have.
New technology tends to encourage new nodes of connections, which spawn new ways to interpret our culture and new complications.
While the internet has been up and running en masse for about 15-20 years now, at its root is a materialist and consumerist ideology: the idea that the internet user is there to passively seek information, conveniently do business, communicate with people on limited scales, and perhaps share a few tidbits and old things.
As I recall during the early days of America Online, chat rooms, and the enticement of online shopping, the internet did not exist to produce new information but really just to offer a new way to manipulate information. As with any technology, the internet was not there to produce anything new but to conveniently commence old habits from the paper and pen world --- just in a new way.
Now that the en masse internet is about ready to get its license and start driving, the en masse internet itself is developing its own habits.
We've had years of online messaging, almost a substitute for the phone, except for the fact that you do not hear a human voice. We've had years of message boarding where inside information can be exchanged between professionals and/or hobbyists on any particular subject from politics to sports. We've had a few years of social networking, where people connect and re-connect.
We've had years of peer-to-peer networking where music, video, and photo files would be traded and shared amongst people...to the chagrin of the Recording Industry of America.
We've had years of blogging where people share their ideas and have the opportuity to act as journalists.
We've had a few years of video sites, but those were restricted to people who could afford the webspace.
Enter Youtube. A medium that provides the webspace for people en masse to post their own videos.
Videos, which they could actually watch on site, on command, unlike traditional peer-to-peer networking where you had to know a subject before you consummated a download. They could just happen upon many more videos and variations based on the "related videos" tab. What's more is that they could post their own variation or interpretation of a video, creating further connection and investment in the site.
In addition to being able to watch video on site, they could make comments as if they were on a message board or on a social networking site. However, with some anonymity also the ability to make strong affirmations, rejectons, and even comment on other commentors themselves.
For philosophers, human condition thinkers, youtube makes new food-for-thought fodder as it did for this guy:
He talks about how new connections are to be made over youtube.
I was most intrigued by his notion of cultural inversion (30:34). In the videos uploaded, generally we want to express our individualism, independence, and popularity while at the same time we want community, relationships, and authenticity. We want to express how unique and popular we are, but we also want to belong to something and we don't want things that are full of crap --- the assumption that underlies popular things.
Youtube is a way of negotiating these different extremes. It is prime representative of the new internet with its own new habits. The Web 2.0. The Web 2.0 is a medium we use to produce things as opposed to simply communicating things from the "real world". It is the real world. It's the way we communicate.
With youtube, and other web 2.0 applications we have a new medium to explore and play, learn what connections can be made, and what connections can't be made in general social norms....
Which is kind of funny...
The connections that we can and that some video uploaders do make seem to be quite limited by Copyright law. Remixes unless by the original artist are illegal. Ripping DVDs are illegal.
Essentially, what youtube makes us is a society of thieves rummaging for answers.
The man in this video talks about how technology introduces new complications and ultimately changes law.
Patent law in the United States has always seemed kind of regressive in that they've let corporations dominate it, to the point where it seems to the average person that they're the ones responsible for progressive technology. They're the ones who've come up with every great innovation and invention --- stripping away the context and the authenticity, the knowledge of the common person.
Youtube encourages that knowledge of the common person.
For him, Youtube provides the ability to re-mix and re-make. The re-mix, the re-make acts as a form of literacy, a form of communication. This form of communication acts as a new way to conceptualize and re-organize the world...and perhaps spawn a whole new set of ideas. It's a collection of syntheses that can exponentially spawn new modes of thought. It's sort of like the effect of the shot of earth from a satellite photo from space...inspires a growing, ecological, interconnectedness consciousness.
The insensibility of copyright law is that everything restricts creativity.
It's ironic that a society that likes to call itself "free" in comparison to the "not free", and fight for "free" has such laws that
His end point: Lawmakers are not going to stop this tide of people taking things and re-appropriating them, the best they can do is label them as doing things "wrong." Like the lawmakers adapted to other modes of technology, they must reasonably adapt to new Web 2.0, user-produced content.
That said, here are my top 9 favorite remixes of various things from popular culture, mostly my childhood.
9) Doug Theme Song
Done in 3 speeds. A waste of time, but funny! The slow version strikes me as pretty funny to watch when high.
8) Renaldo Lapuz - You Are My Brother
I love this motherfucker. He is exactly the phenom that the anthropologist in the first video was talking about.
7) Super Mario Bros. Theme Song
A mellowed out version of the plumbers who eat shrooms and their theme song.
6) Inspector Gadget Theme Song
Kinda weird looking, but can't say it's a lack of skills. Flute and beatboxing.
5) Rihanna - Umbrella
I need to know her.
4) Curtis Mayfield - Move on Up
Simply awesome
3) Capcom's Street Fighter - Guile's Stage
2 and 1) Mortal Kombat v. Street Fighter
This was all video-game based. Obviously, the video games have never actually been merged, but some graphic artist took his time to show us what could be...in two parts! Storyline's funny, but I love seeing the action.
Before making our way to the strip mall city that is called Burbank, we were watching T2. I don't ever remember finishing the film, but the first hour to hour and half where that white cop is chasing Johnny, where the Terminator incites random violence on people, where Johnny's mom plots her escape are classic moments, is forever burnt in my memory, with new proteins synthesized in my brain specifically for those moments and everything.
So with my memory fully emblazoned with classic action film imagery and flow, I was initially really feeling this movie.
The cast of characters seemed to have a deeper story to tell. I thought Angelina would be like this T2-like protector of the overanxious protagonist. I thought Morgan Freeman would be some old wise guy with great stories and lessons to teach.
I thought there was going to be a revelation about how all these assassins came to be associated with each other, which spoke to the working classes or something. Assassins killed who they killed because it was "fate." Fate was a textile machine that determined who these assassings would target. They were assigned the kills and did them without any questioning. One interesting thing Angelina said in justification was "kill one, save one thousand." I definitely don't agree, but I kept thinking that they were going to have a better point that would explain that quote.
One theme I liked was considering their handling of the protagonist's "sickness." Here's an overanious guy in a cubicle who can't speak up at all and is prone to panic attacks. He absolutely needs his pills to stop what is defined in our society as a "panic attack." However, not so anymore, he absolutely needs these "panic attacks" to shoot the wings off a fly, curve a bullet, or grab a pendulum. The protagnoist's "sickness" was effectively harnessed into a "strength." From a blood-pumping bedwetter to an intensely focused, assassin.
The effects department of the movie did quite a job of bringing the viewer into the experience of an anxiety attack...the mounting and increasingly suffocating pressure, the lack of memory. The extra blood pressure ended up being the energy needed to refine his super-human abilities.
Aside from this theme, turns out there wasn't much of a story to tell.
The story broke down when it turns out that this assassin fraternity turns out to be a faux, or at least run by a superficial faux. Its as if we shouldn't have bothered following anything till the end of the film. I just don't like that it appears there's no nuance or any character development.
The culmination of the movie happens when this assassin fraternity ultimately kills itself because of fate. They seem to accept this 'fate' from Morgan Freeman's character with no questions asked. They do not think to question a guy who has been lying all along...and they end up killing themselves...in honor of the fraternity code.
The message this movie ultimately ended up saying is something I take issue with.
With a great cast of celebrities whom I consider somewhat respectable people, I thought there was going to be deeper themes than the ones of revenge and "taking control."
The big take-home message was about taking control of your life. However, the huge irony the size of the elephant in the back of the room, is that Morgan Freeman's character is similar to the protagonist's in that he too is tring to take control of his fate. The only difference is that he gets killed because he's defined as "bad", or "not the protagonist" a very slippery slope.
Seemed like the movie that the mid-20s, recent college grad, office cubicle bro-ski demographic would enjoy. Plenty of unwarranted violence with a hip Office-Dr. Phil/psuedo-scientologist type of fatalistic view on life. New clothes, same bullshit.
"Now Emory Douglas, former minister of culture for the Black Panther Party, joins us in asking you to make a financial contribution so we can continue to provide meaningful access to the lessons of those who have come before us.
In January of this year, Emory Douglas came to the Library for the first time to facilitate an all-day graphic arts workshop for social justice organizations from around Los Angeles."
Much much later in the letter:
"At the Southern California Library, Emory Douglas is not an icon. He is our brother. His life and work are an important part of our collective struggle for justice. We are proud to call him a friend."
You know, I like the way this lettter is written. They do not objectify their person. He is subject amongst them.
An accomplished person not being held up as some holy, untouchable object, but as a living, breathing subject.
Something quite different than a culture of the objectification of relatively non-accomplished celebrities.
There was an article on Alternet a few weeks ago justifying the media's extensive coverage of celebrity lifestyle and gossip.
Essentially, the article says that celebrity gossip is a guilty pleasure from which insights of life can be drawn out. The argument was that there is value to celebrity gossip because it is where the people's interests are and it's really a medium where people discuss their values. It's not dumb; it's democratic because anyone can offer their judgment, their stories on a subject without being reemed for lack of knowledge. Talking about these celebrity stories are like a real-life modern-day greek tragedy full of interesting story lines, twists, and turns. Kim Kardashian, a living, pulsating Venus de Milo.
Celebrity gossip is where the people are and what they're interested in, but I can't get over the fact of how that this is all been such a construct. I am NOT trying to be an intellectual snob or some super-moral puritan who avoids all vices, but I feel like the media has so much power, it could bring light to so many other worthy things.
A commentor named Tom Degan on the website wrote:
"During the era of the Cronkites, the Murrows and the Severeids, our parents and grandparents had a pretty good idea what was going on with respect to affairs of state. That is no longer the case. The deregulation of the FCC a generation ago has had a dreadful effect on the American electorate. Think about it for a minute. A quarter of a century ago, CBS was owned by the Paley family. Today it is owned by Westinghouse - an arms manufacturer.
Why aren't the American people outraged by this turn of events? Because they've been so dumned-down since the dawn of the Reagan Revolution, they don't know any better. It's sickening.
Thank God for sites like AlterNet."
I do see value in celebrity gossip being a connective tissue for people, but I wish we would draw storylines on stuff that actually affects us. Stuff like the life of graff artists, or the fights to save rent control, or the drama behind the privatization of water. Why couldnt struggles for justice be the connective tissues, the addictive things?
What strikes me is that the news used to be a public service, but now its only objective is market driven and now practically all entertainment-related. I gleaned this from a Dan Rather interview on PBS.
He had this to say about news journalism back then:
"...the central thing that impressed me was their spirit of mission. They saw their work -- their life's work -- as something bigger than themselves. ... To do quality news of integrity in the public service. ... And that permeated the halls of CBS News. You could smell it, see it, hear it, feel it. The strongest early reaction was, what a powerful sense of mission these people have."
Its like the media is our moms and dads who threw out the vegetables, fish, rice, grains fruit from the diet so we could just have chocolate cake and ice cream all the time. Celeb gossip is a piece of that chocolate cake and ice cream. As the kids of these proverbial parents, we don't really know any better except that it tastes good, so we just consume it till it makes us sick.
Were happy to keep following these icons and use them in storylines to discuss with people. Were happy to hold these objects of discussion, these icons up as things to criticize, emulate, criticize, but ultimately as mediums to secretly admire and follow. It's as if these objects aren't people who eat, breathe, shit, and fuck like other people do, but walking statues to be watched. Obviously it's gotten to the point where magazines, TV shows, and uh...careers are being built on feeding this objectification.
This objectification is very appropo. We have objectives to meet. We have objects of desire. Object, object, object. We like to criticize and follow these other things, live vicariously these icons, these objects, things we abuse or worship. Celebs lives are those very objects, which the media has warped us into wanting and craving...objects.
Why don't we care much about...subjects? What do we do to live on our own subjectivities, subject to criticism both self and outside? What do we do to honor and care for the subjects of our lives, the people actually doing things you see everyday? What do you do for your moms, your dads, your brothers, your sisters, your friends?
"Kelly Tilghman, the Golf Channel anchor who during Friday's broadcast from the Mercedes-Benz Championship said while discussing Tiger Woods' dominance that young players on the PGA Tour should "lynch him in a back alley," was suspended two weeks Wednesday for the remark."
Al Sharpton responded in a completely rational way (which of course wouldn't stop a lot of people from hating what he does anyway):
"If I got on this show and said I wanted to put some Jewish-American in a gas chamber, I don't care what context I said it in, the entire Jewish community would have the right to say I should be put off this show or my radio show if I said it there. Or if I said I wanted to see a woman raped. This is an insult to all blacks. Lynching is not murder in general; it is not assault in general. It is a specific racial term."
There was one response on the message boards that immediately caught my attention and I think it explains the experience and history behind the usage of such language in especially on a national public platform:
"I've read almost 2000 posts on this subject. I'm African-American and 38 years old...my mom told me stories about how growing up she wondered if the water from the white water fountain tasted different from the water in the black water fountain. She rode the back of the bus. My grandfather worked in a hotel that he was not allowed to stay in as a customer. He worked in the laundry room and never saw the rest of the hotel. I grew up hearing stories about how if a black male even made eye contact with a white woman in the south that his life was in danger. There was a very real risk that a group of men would come to his house and lynch him by hanging him from a tree.
When you grow up hearing true stories like this from your family, the association that you have with certain words is very real and very scary. So when you hear someone make a very specific comment, about someone that is african-american it can conjure up very strong emotions.
For the people that have posted that its "just a joke" and that "people should get over it" I can only say...you should be very fortunate that due to how you were born a simple word like this doesn't invoke the same emotions that it does for others. Seek to understand before you dismiss other's feelings as unimportant."
by B.J. on 12/24/2007 01:26:00 PM
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Listening to KOST Christmas songs, emphasis on Christmas, (which they never fail to subtly inject into your consciousness) it's become custom since 2003 to listen to Soldiers' tributes to and fro.
However, those aren't the only people in situations abroad.
There's also those in the Peace Corps. People who are in a place for 2 years.
I wonder why they don't get to give their greetings abroad to people at home.
by B.J. on 11/11/2004 08:52:00 PM
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This is what the typical BMW speedster businessman asshole would see on his way to work, and this is definitely how he would comment.
Pretty attractive girl.
Pretty attractive girl, too, despite the fact that you can shoot a football into her hole in one.
And yet another white girl I can bang.
But wait, hold the phone, here's our Asian sensation ! That's a nice looking girl inviting me to go somewhere "exotic" ! Boy am I getting excited. And so is the boy in my 400 dollar silk boxers.
I just had a thought ! I can go to Bangkok ! They must not wear any clothes at all. :sleazy boner:
Or hell, I can just speed away to Compton and scoop me up some chocolate ice cream ! Coloured girls are always so totally naked !
Add me to your reading list.
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