The Corner of 12th and Chicon

Transitional you may call it these days, the corner of 12th and Chicon
A far cry from its salad days as an out-and-out combat zone
When hardened hookers used to walk the streets barely causing a shrug
And the weary cops turned a blind eye to the open air markets of drugs

Change has been long coming but it creeps up on you all of a sudden
Places betray only faint traces of their previous reputation
Located just a mile from downtown, no wonder there's been gentrification
The inescapable reality of commerce and real estate transactions

Suffice to say in this case, that there has been a whitening
A rebrand now that the corner is no longer so frightening
And as a fitting testament to the changing face of East Austin
On the mural, they painted the face of Bad-era Michael Jackson

Still, the other heroes are there, defiant:
   Bob Marley, Nina Simone and Prince
Thurgood Marshall, James Brown, Sade,
   Sly Stone (or is it Jimi Hendrix?)
The conscience of a certain tribe: Dick Gregory, Muhammad Ali
And, keeping it real, conflicted martyrs like Tupac and Biggie

Throughout, the nearby Eastside Community Church aimed to provide shelter
Modified latterly to host, on its premises, a Pregnancy Resource Center
You never know in Texas, this was ground zero for maternal mortality
Where Barbara Jordan fought for civil rights, they try to preserve her legacy

The last holdouts remain but now no longer hold sway
Just a few transients holding on to faded glory days
Rough trade, ambling in the early morning to the liquor store
Passing, as they do, the fresh-faced women out walking their dogs

Lululemon leggings, some carrying their yoga mats, nubile young things
Or the others now heading to work out on the shiny exercise machines
Complicated tributes to physical perfection, elliptical witnesses
On their treadmills to modernity, edifices of health and fitness

The parking lots where the Guinean immigrants would sell African clothes
Trinkets, carvings, dashikis, herbal oils, and the like are now mostly closed
Once their steady remedial work was done, the developers moved in
It's a safe neighborhood now, and on a few plots they've started construction

A couple of desultory food trucks, beasts of burden, now stand alone
On the way to middle school with the 11 year old past 12th and Chicon
No crossing guard here, those who walk these streets are on their own
Eyes wide open, we take it all in. Then a quick hug before I turn and walk home

The Corner, a playlist

A soundtrack for this note (spotify version)

• The Corner by Common ft The Last Poets
• Ital Corner by Prince Jazzbo
  One step forward, two steps backwards on the corner. "Now you are commercial" in Babylon go the lyrics of this upsetter dub joint.
• Street Corner Symphony by Kook & the Gang
• Look Around the Corner by Quantic & Alice Russell
• For Corners by Digable Planets
• Hell is Round the Corner by Tricky
• Blues on the Corner by McCoy Tyner
• On the Corner by Miles Davis

Bonus beats: Street Corner Hustler Blues by Lou Rawls

See previously Inman Square Still Life and Coyote Point

This note is part of a series: In a covidious time

File under: culture, observation, perception, Austin, Texas, race, black, urban, city, gentrification, history, poverty, economics, USA, poetry, covidious, toli

Writing log: August 31, 2022

The Last Holdouts

The last holdouts, it's come to this
The Walker brothers would be leaving this place
Yes, they'd delayed the purchase for months and strung things out
But now time was up, they had to move out of the house

At least the two of them had made a stand
Scrap dealers, their hustle was hard
The mountain of bikes scavenged for parts
Machinery under the tarp

Old man Jackson would be the very last holdout
His house on the other side of the tracks
Specialist in all styles, you had to respect him
The end of an era, and now it's come to this

...

Down by the train tracks, the very last patch
On the east side, past the highway
Bad soil, badlands
Bordered by the railway and the creek
Cul-de-sac
Halfway houses
Depression era bungalows
Functional and plain homes for our kind of folk
Featuring Terry's stealth restaurant in one of the backyards
One of his jook joint ideas that didn't go nowhere
Left with barbecues, conversation and soul food
Frankie Beverly and Maze blaring,
Cheap malt, it was all good
And now the blues grinder is over, it's come to this

...

Bars, heavy iron burglar bars over the windows
During the crack years it wasn't far from a combat zone
Drugs, man, I tell you, a hell of a thing
Charnel houses, dens of iniquity, they saw it all
And if it wasn't dope, well all vices could be bought
Mind you, there were fifteen churches within the six blocks
Sin and redemption were the nosy neighbors
It was hard to tell which you would end up crashing with
The churches too are moving out, it's come to this

...

Now that the trail has been done up, it's come to this
The developers have their eye on things
It's the American way, we understand cold cash
Someone expert with the building code, real estate
A couple of miles from downtown, it's a no-brainer
Multiple units or townhouses with the right contractor
An offer you can't refuse, a fateful decision
Suburbia here we come, some call it gentrification

The Last Holdouts, a playlist

A soundtrack for this note (spotify version)

• Changing Times by Maze ft. Frankie Beverly
• Comin' From Where I'm From by Anthony Hamilton
• Holdin' On by Soul II Soul
• Joy and Pain by Maze ft. Frankie Beverly

See previously: The Old Man who Lives in the Park

This note is part of a series: In a covidious time

File under: culture, Austin, Texas, race, black, gentrification, observation, perception, history, poverty, economics, USA, covidious, poetry, toli

Writing log: April 11, 2022

Ebony 1978

Serendipity. I'd been listening to José James's new album, 1978, on repeat all week and came across all the issues of Ebony magazine from that year at the library. Let's take a look at the year through that lens

Ebony 1978, an album

Starting at the middle of the year, June 1978 was the music issue.

On the cover, The Hottest of the Hot Groups in all their glory:

• Rufus & Chaka Khan
• Maurice White, Earth Wind & Fire
• Bootsy Collins, Bootsy's Rubber Band

The lead article actually focuses on five of the top groups then making waves

Would have thought The Commodores would be sure to feature, what with Lionel Richie and their origin story (meeting as freshmen at Tuskegee University). Ebony bait if there ever was such a thing. (they do get an inside photo)

Bootsy Collins was stretching out the funk with his Rubber Band. They had a great live reputation

Note the assertion in the ad: "Jamaica is more than a beach. It's a country". When you market yourself to black Americans, there's less of an emphasis on Jamaica as bacchanalia.

I note the interesting editorial decision that the body of the text discusses Parliament/Funkadelic and quotes George Clinton extensively, but they doesn't print any photos of them. Methinks P-Funk were too edgy for the straightlaced Johnson publishers.

Maurice White and Earth Wind & Fire were more wholesome and perhaps at their artistic peak. They released The Best Of Earth, Wind & Fire during the year. Mics were dropped.

This is Ebony so they only cover mainstream groups - no mention of say Cameo, Ohio Players, Brass Construction, Con Funk Shun, Bar-Kays, War, Mandrill or even Kool & The Gang even though all of them were in the mix in 1978.

The specter of disco is not mentioned here, the focus is on the bands with a reputation for their live shows and instrumentation. Albeit, Donna Summer had her Ebony cover the previous year. In 1978, she was working on Bad Girls. Hot Stuff and all that.

Earlier in 1978, the January cover was Richard Pryor. Sidenote: the more interesting feature is about "Black women - white men, the 'other' mixed marriage". Loving v. Virginia was only a decade in the past.

Hey! Cars of 1978 (disclaimer I now work at a car company so I've started to pay more attention to such things)

One of the pleasures of reading Ebony in those years was just how big the magazine was. The full tactile sensation turning those pages was unmatched. Typical issues were 160 pages, packed with advertisements, the style, the hair products etc. Call it the bourgeois id of black America.

Hey a Chevy, now that's more like it

March 1978 asked: Who is the greatest heavyweight champion of all time? Muhammad Ali or Jack Johnson? Ali was an evergreen topic for all media outlets throughout his life; any mentions boosted circulation.

The US Army was a big advertiser (after the final draft in 1972 as the Vietnam war wound down), the black community was heavily recruited by the military. All branches of the military placed enticing ads. (opposite The Pips)

March 1978 - readers respond to the Ebony class and style poll

The usual suspects win: Lena Horne, Sidney Poitier, Count Basie, Bill Cosby and Harry Belafonte. Black royalty.

Winners of the style poll: Stevie Wonder, Ray Charles, Richard Pryor, O.J. Simpson, Redd Foxx, Aretha Franklin, Billy Dee Williams, Rev. Jesse Jackson, Eartha Kitt and Ben Vereen (of Jesus Christ Superstar fame).

Ebony April 1978 black colleges choose campus queens. Ebony was a society magazine.

Note: the special report on "Detroit - Motor City makes a comeback" seemed a bit premature. How many comebacks has Detroit made?

Andrew Young had been made UN Ambassador under Jimmy Carter's administration. Great in prestige but still a servant to power. I wonder how say Linda Thomas-Greenfield's reputation will fare after the display of the past year shielding Israeli warmongering.

Natalie Cole was luminous as ever (May 1978 cover). Not quite sure that the feature about Older women - young men applied to her. Interesting juxtaposition though.

June 1978 focues on What's Happening!! the teenage comedy that was a big tv success, drawing on Cooley High

The fashion fair issue includes a spread: dress up for summer evenings. I can see my mother's flowing robes

Ebony July 1978 considers the new generation. I do wonder, did they leave a mark?

Ebony July 1978 sports a feature on Soul Train, The Outrageous Waack Dancers, Kirt Washington, Tyrone Procter, Cleveland Moses Jr, Jeffrey Daniel, Jody Watley, and others. The latter two spawned Shalamar

Ebony September 1978 again wondered Can old man Ali accomplish the impossible?

Muhammad Ali prepares for the rematch with Leon Spinks to regain his heavyweight title at the Superdome in New Orleans.

Note: Lou Rawls' Budweiser ad was doing numbers

Sidenote the second: the ads for mentol cigarettes and liquor are some of the more inventive

Ebony October 1978. Hollywood - how to survive between gigs. The feast and famine of creative types endures. It's the same old story

Ebony November 1978 Diana Ross debuts The Wiz (no mention of Michael Jackson who would steal the show). All I remember of her album of that year was the cigarette cover and, I guess, Reach out I'll be there. Nothing else stuck

Finally, Ebony December 1978 asked: is it true what they say about twins? Inquiring minds want to know

Going back to the first image, Ebony did hit on some touchstones in 1978:

• Earth, Wind & Fire released their greatest hits album and unleashed September. There were showing off by this stage
• Chaka Khan released her debut album although she wasn't done with Rufus by any means. She said it all with her anthem: I'm every Woman
• Bootsy Collins continued to made hay, touring on the strength of Ahh...The Name Is Bootsy, Baby!
• The Commodores came out with Natural High, Lionel Richie gifted us Three Times a Lady
• Parliament released Motor-Booty Affair and their live shows were the stuff of legend

I did mention the specter of disco that would decimate the funk bands in short order. Some adapted, but many didn't. e.g. Boogie Wonderland was a success, but James Brown didn't handle the transition. Indeed 1978 was the first time that JB didn't have a response to the music that was in the mix.

Not to be too reflective, but I should note that 1978 would mark a high-water mark for blacks and much of the working class in the US for a generation. They might have been grooving to Good Times by Chic or Y.M.C.A. by The Village People but the Reagan retrenchment was just around the corner. Eyes wide open.

The relative leveling of society and the real economic and civil rights gains would take a back seat. The gains that accrued over the next 40 years were unevenly distributed to say the least. It was Baby Huey's Hard Times or Gil Scott-Heron's Winter in America that ensued. But I digress.

On the brighter side, I had no agenda here other than to soak in those images and read up about those times. You had to be there I guess. Kudos to José James for the revival of music that mattered.

And for good measure, here's a massive playlist - the music of 1978. My own albums of the year were Golden Time of Day by Maze, Cool Ruler by Gregory Isaacs and Social Living by Burning Spear. Your mileage may vary...

File under: music, culture, Ebony, black, observation, perception, magazine, history, appreciation, USA, toli

Writing log: April 26, 2024

Milestone

It had been creeping up on me quite gradually
But the irrefutable sign that made it official was the diary entry
(To be precise, the Google calendar reminder, more formally)
That read, in black and white, on the little screen:
"Schedule colonoscopy"

I guess this was a watershed, call it a milestone
There was no mistaking what I read on my phone
The doctor's recommendation that one inspect my nether zone
Lest, like the dearly departed actor, you know
The one who starred as Black Panther,
I succumb to preventable misfortune

I suppose the statistics for those of my race in America
Must have been suitably ominous when it came to colon cancer
For the public health officials to have advanced by a number of years
Their recommendation for check ups to avoid a trail of tears

Demography and mortality statistics being what they are
For those, quoth the soul singer, darker than blue in America
I celebrate daily the small things, and that I have made it thus far
With loving family, relative wealth, and unscathed in police encounters

I still wear my mask of civility and bottle up my outrage
Except on the occasional lyric verse that I apply on these blank pages
But here, I count my blessings even as I must acknowledge
The bleedingly obvious: that I have become middle aged

Milestones, a playlist

A soundtrack for this coming of age (spotify version)

• Milestones by Miles Davis
• Milestones by Bill Evans
• Milestones by Dexter Gordon
• Sign O' The Times by Prince
• Afraid by Amel Larrieux
• Check Yo Self by Ice Cube & Das EFX)
• It's Going Down by Ralph Tresvant
• Milestones by Miles Davis

...

Timing is everything
Observers are worried

File under: humour, life, aging, culture, race, health, observation, perception, black, USA, public health, Small Things, Observers are worried, toli

Writing log: May 3, 2021

The Stereotype

You know too the stereotype about black men,
   that we care too deeply
Unlike the rest of the world,
  all those shifty flaneurs living carefree

The black man's burden
  is of a lifetime duty of care and responsibility
The lack of physicality is appalling
  which, I daresay, is why we hide our bodies

What a life, always the first pick
  for the keynote at the philosophy colloquium
And hopelessly out of our league
  in athletic sports except in technical events, say equestrian

Always to be found, long past the midnight hour,
  in the lab at the science center
And hard at work in the afternoon,
  when most others are taking their siesta

Can't get them to crack a smile,
  so humorless, always so serious
Two left feet on the dance floor,
  no rhythm to speak of, can't carry a chorus

Unlike those undisciplined others
  who are so quick to lose their temper
Equanimity in repose is the natural mode of the African,
  the cerebral thinker

Forever with masks of civility, a confession of faith
A model minority dedicated to inspiring higher forms of debate

A change in perspective,
  badged with the confident sovereign's regard for tradition
Elevating the discourse,
  our contribution to humanity's curriculum is conversation

...

You know too the stereotype about black men,
  that we write long poems
One stanza is never enough,
  effusive outpourings are the order of the day

This afternoon, The Wife ran up the stairs away from me shouting
"Don't give me another poem to read". The prospect is of marital counseling

While my poet friends have always casually stressed
  its pickup potential and aphrodisiac powers
They never mentioned
  that poetry has been cited as grounds for divorce in New York courts

I'm genuinely curious what the tipping point was
  that forced her drastic measures
I'd like to think it was the quantity,
  rather than the quality of my poetic gestures

Did she see me approach with a sheet of paper?
  Was that the tip off?
Perhaps I should instead be declaiming
  my fragments of lyric verse

I too have watched Love Jones
  and realize that the spoken word cats
Get a lot of love and action.
   I've got to change up my game quick fast

Was it the accumulation of metaphor
  that broke the camel's back?
Or the searching scrutiny every encounter is now provoking?
  Imagine that

Quoth Chateaubriand,
  poets are like birds, the least thing makes them sing
Witness this poetic impulse
  now causing marital discord and misgiving

Needless to say, the warning shot was fired,
  I'm going to have to stay in my lane
I'll have to make do with you, Dear Reader,
  if only for the sake of my children

...

You know too the stereotype about black men,
  that we have large vocabularies
And frequent affairs of the heart,
  owing to a frisson de folksonomie

Liminal undertakings,
  we pursue the psychogeography of far regions of the mind
Forever mindful that some only fancy
  the hyperlinked territory we outline

The hatchet job tag gets a lot of mileage,
   that and the proverbial zingers
Fallen angels abound, those rogues,
  the strange bedfellows and the grifters

Aficionado of shell games,
  I'll concede an obsession with gremlins and parasites
These last may get plaudits, but take heed of their insatiable appetites

The human factors, the economics of whimsy,
   and the laws of grief
It's all about manufactured serendipity
  and finding comfort suites

Where comprehension is poor, turn to glue layer people,
   their networks and infrastructure
We seek to capture social interplay through observation,
   the changing perceptions of culture

If there are dark matters,
  there is the determination to bear witness
Biting satire as a weapon
  when confronting the heart of darkness

The necessity of permanent outrage informs the exiled soul's identity
An immigrant's stance contra dislocation and this fraught modernity

The joy of small things is a mainstay
   as is compulsive storytelling
Humour is everywhere in communities
   and ultimately social living

Of late, public health has been a focus
  what with this covidious pandemic
Needless to say, the specter of the superspreader looms,
  observers are worried

The one important contribution that the African can make to the world is to keep reminding everyone that it is out of sympathy and the love for one another that we can build eventually what is valuable and peaceful.

- Kofi Abrefa Busia, The Prospects For Democracy In Africa

Stereotype, a playlist

A soundtrack for this note. Looks aren't everything. (spotify version)

• You Can't Judge A Book By Its Cover by Stevie Wonder
• Poetry by Roy Hargrove Erykah Badu & Q-Tip
• Seein' is Believin' by Cheryl Pepsii Riley
• I'm Too Much by Chubb Rock
• Seein' is Believin' by Adriana Evans
• Dancin' with Myself by Johnny Kemp
• You Can't Judge A Book By Its Cover by Bo Diddley
• Looks aren't Everything by Cherrelle

...

Timing is everything
Observers are worried

File under: stereotypes, whimsy, culture, humour, observation, perception, language, obsession, race, black, Africa, identity, Observers are worried, poetry, toli

Writing log. Concept: April 1, 2006; April 26, 2021

The Closing Ceremony

A covidious closing ceremony
For the mortgage game of thrones.
We needed her stamp of approval
To buy a loan for our current home.

In front of our house, we staged the chairs
And tables, and offered some face masks.
She said, "Come near, it's too hot,
I don't have the time to go back and forth"

Perplexed by the stance of this notary public:
Forgoing social distancing during a pandemic?
"I beg your pardon, Ma'am, I didn't catch that. What did you say?"
"I don't know about y'all but I have my temperature checked every day."

Suffice to say, there was visible unease
"It's not that we're anti-social, Ma'am, we're just anti-disease"

Also immuno-compromised, you see
Your daily temperature checks don't mean a thing
When asymptomatic transmission is key
And the source of much superspreading

"I teach the history of disease", said the Wife, "it's our duty of care"
"Well I had some nurses sign for me last week, and they didn't care"
"Well, we'll stay over here at a distance, we're happy to go back and forth
Right there on the table are our drivers licenses, the check, and the passports"

What's this? You're really threatening to leave in a huff?
About to dial the title company to call the whole thing off?
Packing the precious documents and unlocking your car
A performance worthy of a b-movie star

Enough already, that wouldn't solve a thing
And, really, you're uncomfortable with our social distancing?
Think, lady, you'd go home and lose your commission
And we'd merely rage at the micro aggression.

We're protecting not just each other
But also our loved ones, do consider:
Those two terrified kids up there looking down
From behind the bedroom window glass
I'm trying my darndest here to remain calm and to not frown
Thinking of a broken health system and The Grand Reopening of Texas.

At length, she relented and deigned to stay.
I think my level headed posture saved the day
Somehow the sparkle in my eyes was up to the task
Seeing as my usual smile was hidden by my face mask

But, still, as the signing proceeded there was no small amount of tension
With The Wife, strained and visibly upset, throughout the interaction
I took the pen she offered. The Wife brought out her own.
Ah to be a middleman in this business, I just needed a loan
Refinanced promptly, a house is not a home.

Poised between capital's representative and my lover
It was just a few weeks earlier, if you remember,
That we read about the incident with that bird watcher
Threatened on the nature trail: a tale of two Coopers
But the front of my home is not a park, it's quite a flight of fancy
To have to sit here and appease the whims of Notary Nancy

It was hard to break the ice, I hasten to mention
Quite a struggle to complete this real estate transaction
At times, I must confess, it was touch and go
Gruffly she barked, "Sign with full name and initial any typos"

But where The Wife was getting increasingly alarmed
I was rather focused on turning on the charm

I read the fine print and saw that I could walk away for any reason
"Ma'am, does anyone really go through with this... recission?"
"You'd be surprised, it's your right, that's what you sign on the line"
No wonder the mortgage company has you on speed dial.

The closing ceremony involves notarization and liens
The whole process can make you feel like an illegal alien
15 years a debtor, you harken back to the plight of some ancestors
But it's worth going through this business, they say it builds character
You sign your life away for want of a stamp, it's quite the show
I've packed my bags already, Ma'am, they call them Ghana must go

You had confused me at the outset with that other Ghanaian
You dealt with earlier in the week named Ofosu
What are the odds of this out here in central Texas?
The name's not too common back home, but there are quite a few
Well, I hope that his experience notarizing with you
Was better than mine for, straight out of the gate,
What we've had here was a failure to communicate.

There's a nagging thought at the back of the mind
That perhaps our interaction might have gone much smoother
If only our names had been Chuck and Julia
And looked a lighter shade of brown
But no matter, the deal is done
I'm sure you're happy to leave this open air station
Let's double or triple check to see if any papers were missed.
I had to call The Wife back to clear up a form before we were dismissed

Our rituals are in upheaval
What paradise have we lost?
I wonder if the two percent interest rate
Savings we got were quite worth this cost.

The Wife was done, she couldn't end this business fast enough
Couldn't feign your African nonchalance, she wasn't that tough
She wears her emotions on her sleeve, I feared she'd go beserk
For even with my patience, I'll say you were a piece of work

A historian, though, she was thinking about preserving the moment
And to protect herself in case you later escalated the argument
Thus she took a surreptitious photo to document
And even transcribed my parting comment:

"You know, Ma'am, I find your job quite interesting
I'm curious about how those in your profession do your magic.
I should also add, for the record, something that I bring
To the table: I have a patent disclosure on the digital notary public".

Soundtrack for this note

A closing ceremony playlist, notarized to make it official. (spotify version)

• Let's Call The Whole Thing Off by Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong
• Stay by Rufus and Chaka Khan
• Sign Your Name by Terence Trent D'Arby
• A House is Not a Home by Luther Vandross
  The Radio City Music Hall version is essential but any version works. As he says at the outset, "I'm going to take my time with this"

Previously: America's social studies syllabus teaches some of us mandatory lessons in civility.

This note is part of a series: In a covidious time.

File under: race, culture, USA, black, observation, perception, humour, life, poetry, Observers are worrried, covidious, toli

Bloodbath, South Carolina

It was only in the twilight,
When he felt that you had passed the test,
The now-empty bottles of choice liquor,
And the four and a half hours of roots reggae,
That he would admit that he was a prodigal son
Of Bloodbath, South Carolina.

"Raised on the ironic side of the tracks",
He would then clarify for you,
"And steeped in the muddy blues"
That last one delivered matter of fact.

He would keenly watch for the contours of your reaction,
The bloodlit eyes squinting as he nursed his drink.
I must have passed, as I didn't even blink,
And merely asked if he went back home often.

I guess I didn't realize that some people
Ran away from where they came from,
Never mind the curse of the hometown magic
My own roots are now located somewhere in the Atlantic
Not too far from the shores of the Gulf of Guinea
An exiled soul, rather, chased from the land of Aburi

Instead we turned the conversation back to music
Enjoying the bass response on the Tannoy loudspeakers
His favourites came either from the chitlin circuit
On the one hand, or some Caribbean island on the other
Roy C, first and foremost, was a touchstone singer
With his tales about life in Infidelity, Georgia
Burning Spear's Man in the Hills album
Would be on constant repeat, and perhaps the obvious dub plates:
Old Slavery Days or that old faithful refrain
Repeated twice to punctuate the sad claim

No one remember old Marcus Garvey
No one remember old Marcus Garvey

Maroons and borderlands were the order of the day
Any fences erected were for mere display
A reflexive disdain of The System's authority
Our conversations returned inevitably to matters of identity

Like his best friend, Bill, whose second home
Was just a stone's throw away
On the outskirts of Slaughter, Texas
He was, quiet as it's kept,
Full of wariness towards outsiders.

Bill, tall, broad-shouldered with his long red mane,
Would only share his last name, Sherman,
When he was comfortable with you, and
"Never in North Carolina, you know,
The old man was rough on them in that campaign"

And the memory hadn't faded one hundred and fifty years on.
Such careless whispers could get you burnt by the sun
That was a thing they shared, a kind of identity crisis
As if the sins of the great-great-grandfathers were visited on the sons
What more someone who had flirted at one stage
On the internet, with a recruiter from ISIS
They'd drop these harrowing pearls
In the middle of the nighttime conversations
Again observing your pupils for involuntary reactions.

The stain of Bloodbath, of course, lay much much deeper
Than even Bill's ancestor's civil war march of the grim reaper.
The river turned crimson and overflowed its banks
Its living memory would never get Hollywood's chance
Like Antebellum, Mudbound and Rosewood,
He weaved a tale of unglamourous and relentless lynching
There was no saving grace, and no stich up by avenging
Watchmen, rescuing set upon folks from Tulsa's Wall Street
They were quick to call Bloodbath, South Carolina ancient history,
And there was no small amount of irony,
For those blood vessels that came to rest on Sordid Creek
Belied the remains of a mass gathering of lost souls,
And presaged a strike for appropriated black gold.

...

Come Smoke My Herb from Meshell came up next,
Conversation turned to our comfort women
And long ago moments of bliss.
"I swear man, that woman could kiss,
I didn't care about anything else,
I would still die for those lips".

Man, trust him to raise the tenor of the conversation
Just after I had quoted him that Twi proverb
"Ababaawa animuonyam ne ne to"
A young woman's reputation lies in her buttocks.
He continued with a sharper retort,
Steady sipping quinine tonic on the rocks
"You guys keep going on about matters of ass.
I'm telling you, back in my town, we have slightly more class.
You wannabe hustlers talking about big pimping
While the reality of a flesh and blood woman
Would make you flee from her garden of Eden".
Touché, I was bloodied in this game of the dozens
Still, nothing I had said came close to barbershop heresy
I wore my mask of fundamental unseriousness for my own reasons.

At length, he got back on track talking about his town's legacy
And how you couldn't be wedded to a generation's insanity
Those scrolls he laid out had words written in blood and sin
He deciphered them for us, disdaining the town's eponymous gloom
I began to understand the complexities, that he was no cartoon
A burdened man like him only moved to his own tune
With wist and fortitude, drawing outside the prescribed lines
He lived with an outlaw's sensibility and attitude
A soul forlorn in his fortress of solitude
He preferred prickly cactus to a well-manicured lawn
And so I kept on listening until the crack of dawn
Shooting the breeze with these two children of men.

The soundtrack turned, and we moved away from the Jordan River
To cross the desert of Black Soul, we paused and shivered,
Then, my goodness, shuffle serendipity once again took hold
Her ethereal voice came back on over the futuristic dub undertones
Forgiveness and Love fittingly played for Messers Ebony and Ivory
An odd couple burdened by their parallel, intimate legacies

"Caution, take heed of our insatiable appetites
For even the lion can be brought down by a mosquito's bite
The victors may well write the initial tale with their spoils and glory
But look at you, only a century later, debating these fraught histories.
Narrative closure is an all too human necessity
Storytelling is a given in the affairs of men."
These were my parting comments as I left the two of them
"The tales that we weave will outlast our own timelines.
Bloodbath, South Carolina is a region of the mind."

Bloodbath, South Carolina, a playlist

As usual a soundtrack for this note, a musical conversation, perhaps, on the legacies of men. (spotify version)

• Saved by the Bell by Roy C

  If you're ever down south in this little town called Infidelity, Georgia...

• Man in the Hills by Burning Spear
• Slavery Days by Burning Spear
• Old Marcus Garvey by Burning Spear
• Come Smoke My Herb by Meshell Ndegeocello
• Forgiveness and Love by Meshell Ndegeocello
  It's fascinating that this initial ferocious antiwar jam was transformed into Fellowship for the release of the Comfort Woman album. I remember being astounded that she would hold it back and only hint at it in snippets during the live performances of the tour. I seem to have uploaded the only version on the web, hopefully the copyright police will allow you a listen.
  
  After the excoriating the brothers who "wear the uniforms of brutality", comes the refrain:

  God bless America
  Who God you talk about?
  Forgiveness and Love

• Black Soul by Burning Spear
  

  Caution, my brother, caution, take heed
  Black soul, you're black as they

• The Lion by Burning Spear

See previously: Touch

File under: race, culture, memory, history, sin, legacy, USA, black, identity, blood, secrets, lies, storytelling, poetry, observation, perception, conversation, Observers are worried, toli

Types and Faces

My friend Nate pointed out André Gide's Travels in the Congo to me a few months ago. We've been carrying on this occasional conversation about travel writing, perceptions, Africa, Conrad and the like.

In passing he mentioned that the book's typeface reminded him of Rob Giampietro's fascinating article on the Neuland question which discusses

"Neuland, a "display" typeface hand-carved in 1923 by Rudolf Koch but also Lithos, another "display" typeface digitally created in 1989 by Carol Twombly"...

How did these two typefaces come to signify Africans and African-Americans, regardless of how a designer uses them, and regardless of the purpose for which their creators originally intended them?

Let's have Nadine Gordimer as the token African.

Richard Wright can serve as the token African-American.

There's a discussion about the history of those typefaces and how they came to embody an authentic sense of, well, ethnicity shall we say. "Stereotypography" was how Nate put it. "Blackface" might be another appropriate pun. There's lots to say about such signifiers. I can certainly imagine further papers on "Issues of authenticity and its visual vocabulary: field lessons from Gutenberg's press".

All of which reminded me of the box of Ubuntu Rooibos tea from South Africa that The Wife had picked up on her travels. It's one of those "sustainable agribusiness", fair trade, touchy-feely things marketed by an offshoot of USAID. The brand names, Ubuntu and Mpuntu, let you know what you're getting into. In case you're not convinced, the obligatory typeface is a great signifier and adds the requisite marketing frisson of authenticity: Africa. Motherland. Earth etc.

My own copy of the Travels in the Congo arrived in the mail today, and before I could turn the page and note Gide's dedication to Joseph Conrad (all travel writing owes a debt to Conrad so this was unsurprising), I was confronted by the striking cover. I realized that I'd ordered a different edition.

Hmmm. That's more like it. Congo: breasts, nudity, enlarged ornamental lips, pygmies, natives. You don't tend to see these kinds of images on book covers any longer. They'll appear on National Geographic magazines to be sure, or coffee table books, but not on the paperback that you pull out on the bus. It appears that some cultural threshold has been crossed in the recent past, my guess is that this took place around the mid-seventies and there has been a consequent marketing realignment or adjustment.

A more subtle indicator is required and the typeface is one of the few tools product designers have, along with the product names to indicate the essence of the product they are trying to move. You need to know what you're getting but these days we don't discuss race - or at least it's always a very polite discussion. As we say in Ghana: how for do?

A theory formed in my mind that when it came time to revise Gide's work in the later 1994 edition, it was no longer culturally appropriate in the US to display nubile, big-lipped natives, even if they were all the rage back when my 1962 edition was published (that liberal Berkeley Press!). There are probably throngs of academics working on such material.

I amended the topic of the paper to "Changing mores, changing types, changing faces in representations of Africa: field lessons from Gutenberg's press". I like how academic papers seem to go with lots of sub-clauses in their paper titles.

I then remembered that Fred had discussed Then I Saw the Congo, a 1920's travel memoir by Grace Flandrau. I put in my order for that book; we all need more writing about Congo. Its cover is less exotic than Gide's. Its subtle imagery, the silhouetted rowboat of natives on the Congo river dates back to Stanley's expeditions. The mighty river Congo has great visual appeal and looms large in African iconography.

I turned around, glanced at my bookshelf and immediately noticed a couple of books that fit the visual mold. The first was In Griot Time, An American guitarist in Mali by Banning Eyre. The ubiquitous font is overlaid on his photo of Djelimady Tounkara who Teju Cole reckons as the best guitarist in the world - I won't quibble, but what about Prince?

Checking Amazon, I noticed that a later edition (2002 - only 2 years on) dispenses with our typeface-du-jour and sadly also that the musician, whose face I can no longer make out, is now squashed behind the prison bar-like guitar strings tucked in the cavernous confines of a grey guitar.

What should one make of the demotion of both the black-faced guitarist and our typeface? What was the designer attempting in the reworked cover? In mitigation, one notes that there is the green, yellow and red in the background to indicate the colours of the Malian flag, although one must add, the colours are washed out, perhaps to indicate the ancient status of the music, and of Mali. Authenticity is preserved, I suppose, although the ethnic signifiers have been toned down. I guess it's fair, there was no need to beat the shopper over the head as the original cover did. We could have figured things out from the subtitle.

Robert Klitgaard's Tropical Gangsters also jumped out to me.

It has the great subtitle: "One man's experience with development and decadence in deepest Africa". You don't quite need to write "darkness", "deepest Africa" gets the point across. Now of course Condi Rice and co. have no qualms dealing with the Equatorial Gangsters that Klitgaard deconstructs in his book, so I guess decadence is appropriate in the title. Kurtz's moral decay is quite apt when one reads things like the following hatchet job (Thatcher alert):

Equatorial Guinea had the bad luck to come to independence under Macias Nguema, whose rule was so terrible that a third of the population was either killed or fled. Though he had people garrotted, buried alive and beheaded (and their heads stuck on poles), the detail that sticks in my mind is his having 150 people executed to the tune of 'Those Were the Days, My Friend' played over stadium loudspeakers.

Tropical horrors continue to be our mainstay on the continent it is sad to say. Everyone owes a debt of gratitude to Conrad it seems.

Which reminds me... The best history book on Africa since independence is Paul Nugent's appropriately titled Africa Since Independence.

If you take a look at the cover, it's as if you are out on a safari, the zebra is quietly crossing the scene in the foreground, the wide trees spread out in vistas of the savanna, you almost expect to spot a lion lazily stepping into to the picture - or an antelope perhaps. Simba. Kimba. Bambi etc. That image has almost nothing to do with the content of this brilliantly-constructed book other than to be a prime stereotype of Africa. Indeed I can't think of an image that could do more violence to the words of this sophisticated book, focused as it is on Africa's post-colonial history and the vagaries of modernity. Is that really the image of Africa since independence?

I'm fairly sure that Nugent had almost no input on his book's cover. Like almost all authors - and certainly all the ones I've pointed out in this note, let alone those South African rooibos farmers - he would have had nothing to do with the packaging of his works. Very few authors have the clout to insist on cover art, they are spent by the time the discussion over the book title is done. Still I almost disregarded his book, judging it as I did by its cover. Perhaps those purchasing history textbooks respond to different things. It goes to show that those cues can have can great influence, whether it is overt imagery or even typefaces.

I amended the paper's title: "Types and Faces: Visual Identites and cross-cultural (mis)understandings - (re)visting the Congo through fonts".

I would normally close with a playlist - and I've had requests for a Heart of Darkness playlist, but that can wait. Instead, apropos the business of not judging a book by its cover, I'll end with a Congolese proverb:

A white tooth has a bloody root.

File under: typeface, design, culture, aesthetic, stereotypes, Africa, black, typography, graphic, history, publishing, USA, African-American, Congo, literature, race, identity, observation, perception, Gide, toli

A Nine Dollar Vibe

I was a charter subscriber of Vibe magazine; Quincy Jones was quite the salesman and saw a budding market for a publication on a music and culture that was becoming ubiquitous. Up until 2000 or so, the writing was fairly sharp although it appeared that the magazine was becoming a forum for a so-called "hip-hop lifestyle". The commercial imperative is keenly felt in the USA. Still at $9 or so to renew, I persevered with the magazine even as I would get increasingly irked (and last year they started an offshoot Vibe Vixens which, other than fulfilling an eye candy and titillation quotient, was similarly vacuous). Quincy incidentally cashed out some time ago (like Berry Gordy, he knew exactly when the gig was up). When we moved to a new apartment last year I allowed the subscription to lapse. For the past few months I've been picking up a copy in bookstores and flipping through in the hope of finding a reason to get back on the bandwagon, $9 is a such a low threshold. Sadly enough this email from my archives is still relevant.

To: mail@vibe.com
Subject: September 1999 6th Anniversary issue

Don't start a piece titled "We're on a mission" with a clear error in the second sentence: as we all know "Feels Good" was on Tony Toni Toné's second album (The Revival), not on their first (the aptly named Who?). Or were you over-excited by your sixth "Anniversary" (a song on their third album, Sons of Soul)...

Not to be pedantic though, the appeal of Vibe in its first couple of years was its incisive and informed writing about a fairly wide range of music. I can't help but comment that that aspect of the magazine has been overshadowed of late. A couple of recent issues were clearly devoid of content; I kept turning the page looking for something, anything, and ended at the end of the magazine.

On the other hand, it's obvious that you are a success given the amount of your pages devoted to advertisements, fashion and celebrity eye candy so maybe I should shut up. Or maybe I won't: consider this a plea for you to get back to some sharp writing and keep on your toes; there's still some good music out there. No more puff pieces.

I'll give you the benefit of the doubt, For now.

A concerned subscriber

I was ignored the first time and have no illusions that anyone will even care that they've lost my annual $9 contibution especially when others seem to tolerate 3 pages of marginal music commentary amongst 180 pages of advertisements and "lifestyle" bluster. Still I'm a little saddened.

These are the remnants of my Vibe magazine collection. Curiously enough, this is all that survived my last apartment move (at least these are what are in the boxes that I've opened). As you can see these remnants are all eye candy. You have my word that the music reporting was as interesting as the covers. The Maxwell, D'Angelo and Erykah Badu issues were fabulous as was the Chris Rock piece. As regards eye candy the two Toni Braxton issues are collectors items, Toni, Toni Toni! was the title of the middle one. The Foxy Brown, Eve, J. Lo and the two Mary J. Blige pieces were a mixed bag, the music was not as incisive but there was a focus on the culture. The Beyoncé and TLC issues were elegaic while the R. Kelly and Lil Kim bits were pure scandal showcasing the eternal struggle between the sacred and the profane in the music that I love. But that was then, this is now; now there is only eye candy. Thus my hommage to the end of an era and my boycott of the nine dollar Vibe.

It is apparent that best writing on music is now to be found in blogs or various discussion forums. I am old-fashioned enough to like settling down with a good magazine and the occasional meaty book on music or the arts. There are still interesting magazines on literature and the like, why not music? I guess I'm going to have to write my own books since no one wants to cater to my admittedly intense predilection for music.

In all seriousness, what are people reading these days? And if it's not on paper, who should I be adding to my Bloglines' subscriptions?

This is the first part of the Boycott Day Trinity: The Father.

File under: vibe, music, culture, magazine, commercialization, hustle, decline, fall, writing, rant, black, america, hip-hop, soul, lifestyle, Dark Matter, Small Things, boycott, media, Things Fall Apart, toli

On Bleach, Entertainments, Forms, Atom, Kiss and Sexy MFs

Some ruminations on pragmatism, Bleached Unobtrusive Dom Scripting (BUDS), Forms, Atom, XForms, Glue, Infopath, "Entertainments", Kisses and the Sexy Mom Factor in Software...

• On Bleach
• On Entertainments
• On Forms and Rich Web Apps
• Down the Infopath
• On Forms and Atom Glue
• Kiss and Sexy MFs

On Bleach

So Adam Bosworth was reconsidering a programming style that some people would have us think must be called by a snappy acronym reminiscent of bleach or legendary Dutch Football clubs. Now I won't complain about said name because I realize the value of a coinage and have been evangelizing said style for quite some time. Still I haven't used that tag because I've been mindful of Fela's injunction against Yellow Fever, the practice in many African countries for people to bleach their skin to a lighter, more palatable, shade with gruesome chemicals (most banned in the West) and the consequent horrific effects on health (read what the bleach does to the resiliency of skin to minor cuts or otherwise routine surgery). The Nigerians and Congolese are prime exponents of this practice but even Ghanaian musical icons like Daddy Lumba have fallen into this Michael Jackson-turned-Diana Ross self-hating mindset which goes to show that the distortions of race are deeply rooted and occur in every society. Looking at the evolution of Daddy Lumba and the Congolese Koffi Olomide's faces over time is much like watching Jackson 5 videos and pondering the emaciated wreck the tabloids demonize today. Like Michael, Olomide has now taken to wearing face masks. As Fela sings

You deh bleach oh You deh bleach.

But maybe we all need to suffer for our art and perhaps the musical excitement has been consequently heightened.

On Entertainments

In any case Bosworth's notes are as-ever insightful and to the point and with his now official Googlejuice there is even more scrutiny in the subsequent blogospheric discussions. Equally enlightening is his response to the feedback his note provoked.

Technology Toli readers would know that this is a pet topic of mine and I've been writing a State of the DOM address every year ever since DOM scripting became Good Enough ® (circa 1997-1998) some of which are available on the wild web and have even found an audience (e.g. Applications vs. W3C DOM, On Rich Web applications, AlphaBlox and Oddpost and On Gmail and DHTML architecture again). I've been working on this year's version but keep getting distracted by the lure of technology folktales and B-movie scripts in the town of Deadwood.

A problem with my cacophonous take on blogging is that it's sometimes easier to go with "entertainments" than to write the technical monograph for Dr Dobbs and you run the risk of being characterized as mere fodder for the titillation quotient. In mitigation, I'm of the opinion that the conversational style helps you examine various aspects of an issue and get your ideas together en route to the book (and I suspect I've got a few books in me).

You can't seperate Graham Greene's entertainments and travel journalism from his serious and high-minded literature and indeed his later works wove all these strands into a cohesive whole. In my view Monsignor Quixote is more essential to the Greene canon than A Burnt Out Case or (and here I am not seeking to be controversial, I firmly believe this) The Power and The Glory. Also the occasional parable can elucidate essential truths very effectively, plus they're more fun. And since many people are visual, a good image, as our man Edward Tufte would admit can occasionally convey your point with greater force (read camels and eyes of needles or angels and pinheads etc).

On Forms and Rich Web Apps

The leitmotif in all of those DOM scripting pieces is that the browser can be construed as a programmatic surface that can be dynamically constructed and incrementally updated. The tradeoffs in that architectural style are all about client reach and efficiency, sometimes it is more expedient to deal with Plain Old Javascript Objects (to remix the POJO acronym) as the wire format and hidden iframes as the transport of choice. XML as the data format and XMLHTTPRequest as transport are nice-to-haves but not essential as various implementations have shown.

On the supposed failure of XForms or say Infopath, that one Bosworth's commentators notes, all I would say is that technology adoption takes time. The Big Bang of the web was rapid adoption of the web primitives (HTTP, URIs, HTML, XML, the HUHXtable sweater quartet), for content authoring and service deployment. We are now seeing a second Big Bang with the irrepressible blog phenomenon, Atom/RSS, and some might add wikis although to my mind the simplified wiki syntax leaks mightily in html authoring - those quote delimeter characters. Big Bangs are said by physicists to be rare events. Three Big Bangs in a decade is a little much.

Programmatic dynamic form-like applications, which after all are the design patterns that unobtrusive DOM scripting addresses were an afterthought in the development of web browsers. There were the empire-building distractions of more flashy, if leaky, mobile code (Java, ActiveX and Flash now recasted as Flex) which are also great but which raise not only issues of plugin installation, cross-platform support and hence ubiquity, but also accessibility, matters of focus and, more importantly, those user interface standards that the browsers codified: the back button for undo, the refresh button, the ability to bookmark etc.

Down the InfoPath

The problem space of forms in browsers is slightly different than the vanilla HTML authoring issue. The dominant OS vendor doesn't really want you to write applications first for the web but rather for its latest framework-du-jour thus the incentives are perverse in the Castle of Avalon. As a case in point, I explored Microsoft InfoPath a couple of years ago, based on public articles on MSDN and a couple of Jon Udell columns and had the following comments:

Let's start with Infopath's pervasive use of XSLT. XSLT is very difficult to hand author. I've written the hairiest of code before but XSLT strikes the fear of God into me.

Microsoft tied their form rendering engine to the Internet Explorer engine. Their runtime builds what is known as a Custom DOM to augment what in in IE. A web browser implements the standard DOM, an api that all web programmers write against. In InfoPath there are 2 new non-standard object hierarchies that are implemented.

They used non-standard extensions to HTML for their rendering, (behaviors and custom html attributes) and how they do validation (through what is called expando attributes).

We can infer what is supposed to happen, and when, by looking at their file format but the semantics are not easily understood nor indeed are they documented anywhere. Indeed they can and will change at a moment's notice...

The basic thing to understand is that while in InfoPath, Microsoft has followed the same separation of Model from Controls and Instance Data and Schema as XForms or say Adobe's XFT, almost all the technology choices they made make it very difficult to interoperate with them. I'm not sure that it was intentional, their programmers might just have been more familiar with those technologies, but the net effect is to tie their forms offering very tightly to their product line. They could have added their form processing extensions for a wider audience in Internet Explorer much as the Mozilla XFoms work is doing, but as a company they had no incentive, or desire, to add such functionality to a browser that they give away for free. With Infopath they could get you to pay to get this functionality...

It is costly to implement their notion of data binding (a combination of expando attributes on elements and html behaviors), their scripting runtime has its quirks (JScript, mshtml). Their custom dom is by far the most expensive to implement, and I don't believe that the XDocument.DOM and XDocument.Solution.DOM object hierarchies, nor their semantics and lifecycle are defined anywhere.

Reverse engineering the semantics of these objects that the InfoPath runtime adds to Internet Explorer is an expensive proposition. We don't have tools to author stylesheets and are hobbled too in their use of Internet Explorer Trident rendering engine. The type of html that is generated is full of the quirks that MSIE is known for.

It is costly to implement their controls since even the simplest controls are using behaviors. As an extreme example: text input boxes are not implemented using standard html input controls rather they are implemented as spans with custom behaviors and the contenteditable style.

Infopath has been 4+ years in the making, I'd hazard a 2 year effort at the very least not to mention dealing with all the various quirks in this still evolving runtime.

On Forms and Atom Glue

2 years later I'm glad that IBM's efforts weren't dissipated into chasing rainbows or these chimeric Redmond information paths, but still it is an ongoing struggle to convince people to ignore Microsoft. The good news is that the fun will begin not with Longhorn but rather when Mozilla includes either their XForms xpi or their parallel Web Forms 2.0 work in the default install of Firefox. It also helps that the subset of XForms 1.0 Mozilla has implemented is small enough that the Mozilla XForms runtime can fit in Minomo, the slimmed down version of Mozilla targeted for smaller devices. This is sure to get some operatic attention.

In this same vein, the indication that web rendering is where the action will be is that apparently some crazy glue layer wonks (who must not have slept for the past 2 years) can now transform Infopath forms into ASP.Net.

The other outlier will be if that apparently budding Bleached Unobtrusive DOM Scripting (BUDS) community manage to build and document frameworks that are easy to use and Good Enough ®. Again a shoutout to Alex Russell, think of lay programmers when building the Dojo toolkit, the latest recasting of the NetWindows dream. Jane Programmer is looking for a VB cookbook approach to this area.

T.V. Raman, Micah Dubinko and Steven Pemberton would argue that in XForms, they have Been trying to distill the essence of those heavy scripting applications and codify the design patterns therein. This emphasis on lowering the bar for authoring is alluding to something that goes under many names:

• The obligatory Long Tail of Application Authoring
• the View Source impulse
• The Mass Amateurization imperative etc.

And yes XPath has comprehension issues but those are leaks that can be plugged with enough work as Adam points out. Also the declarative versus procedural issue is an unresolved question and I see the value in both. As with all framework approaches to technology, what one is trying to achieve is to get things Good Enough © like Visual Basic or MFC on Windows so that leverage is inevitable.

Mark Birbeck is attempting to codify design patterns and to show that XForms as opposed to heavy and supposedly unobtrusive DOM scripting is the way forward. His latest patterns being Google Desktop Search and how to handle dynamic urls and Terraserver maps. This after Google Maps and Google Suggest. Slow down Mark, leave some work for others. People will think I'm a shill linking to you every week. And presumably if you continue to dance so attractively one of the big boys will swoop in and swallow your company up into some faceless Borg entity. That may be the point of course but I'm loving the creative exploration I'm seeing and working on the competition in the hope that the best of these breeds will distill this potent xforms confection.

On matters of glue and data, PubSub appears to be on the right track with their focus on Atom. Similarly when you see Matchmaker Fielding not merely lurking, but knocking heads on atom-syntax, or Adam's theorizing that Atom, as a mere wire format and publishing protocol, "could do for Information what HTML over HTTP did for user interface", you know that Atom is worthy of attention. My long lurking on that list is perhaps not time wasted.

Kiss and Sexy MFs

Finally to pick up on Adam's harkening to pragmatism at the end of his latest comment, I've recently been having some fun with neologisms, trying to name the kind of aesthetic I detect. I had completely forgotten about the Bosworth Axis of Empathy and now have to remedy that situation.

I had always figured Adam out for a KISS after reading Keep It Simple and Sloppy which reminded me not of those obvious rock stars who killed chickens on stage but rather of Prince who was also enamoured of the sloppy and sang

U Don't Have 2 Be Beautiful
2 Turn Me On ...

U Don't Have 2 Be Cool
2 Rule My World
Ain't No Particular Sign I'm More Compatible With
I Just Want Your Extra Time And Your

Kiss

And with those Rock Star initials, I had painted him in a corner with fellow glue traveler Sam Ruby as a Radical Simplifier, Good Enougher or Technology Buzzword Demystifier (TBD). The other possible folksonomic tag was related to Godfather Bray as a Plain Old Loyal Oppositionist (Polo).

But loosely coupled with Adam's repeated emphasis on Simple, Sloppy, Standards that Scale in a web of data and the Mom Factor in technology, perhaps we should again turn to Prince who would say that were just in the business of Sexy MFs (Sexy Mom Factor Software).
But Adam, it turns out that you're a PITT (Pragmatic Inside-Out Technology Type). Glad to have you on the team, coach.

I had written about having both William Pitts as our mascots but it was pointed out to me that having Brad Pitt would be a better bet as a cheerleader not to mention that, in keeping with Kiss and Sexy MFs, he wears a mean skirt.

(ducks)

File under: technology, whimsy, bleach, entertainment, forms, Atom, glue, language, kiss, bleach, dom, scripting, javascript, xforms, infopath, writing, music, Fela, Prince, black, mom, pragmatism, sex, Adam Bosworth, Nigeria, Ghana, Congo, Koffi Olomide, literature, Graham Greene, toli