The Secret Life of Presentation Pete

I had a golden encounter this covidious afternoon. To wit, I was out in the front yard mowing the lawn with my hand reel mower - I roll that way. I was wearing the face mask The Wife had sewn for me out of my old Hanes undershirts. Mowing was going fine...

Sidenote: I was wearing my Presentation Pete t-shirt from my old Lotus Freelance days that I had found in the box in the garage that we were going to donate to Goodwill, but that, in our covidious era, I decided actually sparked joy. I wore the shirt proudly.

Here's Presentation Pete in his glory

Here's the t-shirt. Some of my old Lotus folks will remember. This was the kickoff to the Coltrane Release where Lotus went all out to embrace the "World Wide Web". We would implement "Publish to Web" well before Powerpoint got around to it.

Digression upon a digression: I have a draft of a short story somewhere titled The Secret Life of Presentation Pete. The idea has been percolating for nigh 13 years now - a high concept joint about the inner life of stock photograph characters or something.

Arrgh, it deserved neglect, let's tweet instead.

I wasn't there at his conception - I believe Joanne Meirovitz might have been the mother, however, Presentation Pete had a very inauspicious debut. The scandalous toli would be chronicled by Cringely in an aside in InfoWorld (June 1 1992). Our Bob titled it "Lotus Unenlightened". Call it a youthful indiscretion.

As the story goes,

"Lotus CEO Jim Manzi et al will soon make a public apology for racist images printed on a Freelance demo disk called The Adventures of Presentation Pete. The animated demo was built on an African Safari theme complete with images of white hunters and black tribesmen."

Something along these lines perhaps?

Here's the detail that gets me:

"An African American employee in the Freelance group was offended by the racist image but waited to complain until the disks were already shipping. Lotus will eat 750,000 leftover copies"

I believe I know who that African American employee was, although I can't remember the name - even as he gave me much shrewd career advice - there weren't many of us darker than blue at Lotus back then (or even now in software). I loved that he waited before pouncing. I still admire the nerve.

I can only imagine the contents of the safari themed disk of The Adventures of Presentation Pete that had to be pulped. I would pay good money for a bootleg of that disk. Surely one of those 750,000 leftover copies still exists? I demand especially to see those African tribesmen.

Scratch that. Here's my artist's rendition of the African safari themed disk of The Adventures of Presentation Pete that had to be pulped. A quarter century later, I still have a copy of Freelance on my laptop.

Digression: was it a floppy disk or a cd-rom? Freelance's PRZ file format was quite famous for being more efficient than Powerpoint's PPT format and could fit on floppies.

I now understand why there was so much trepidation 6 years later when I brought up the issues I observed when integrating clip art in the Coltrane release. Lotus had been primed for Cultural Sensitivity in Technology

I first met Presentation Pete in his prime when I joined Lotus in 1995. As noted, he had already led a storied life by that young age. He was a natty dresser

Presentation Pete was passionate about office life. The title in the Freelance clip art chooser read "Hardworking Pete"

Still, office life could sometimes be overwhelming for Presentation Pete. Cue the clip art title "Scared Pete":

Presentation Pete was a renaissance man.

In his Christmas and Santa personas, Presentation Pete was full of zest. He was a fair referee also

In short, Presentation Pete was a man for all seasons

Pete's co-workers loved him. I think one of them, his office wife perhaps, was modeled on Ruth Seltzer who hired me at Lotus. Or perhaps it was her sister. Whatcha think @iustinianus ?

Presentation Pete was all about collaboration and groupware, what we now call social software.

Pete was a pioneer of remote screen show. You say Zoom, I say Presentation Pete

I learned heady lessons about work-life balance under Presentation Pete's tutelage

The four years we spent together collaborating were the best years of my professional life.

Pete's job was offshored to India once IBM ceded the office suite market to Microsoft circa 1999. Lotus would stagger on as a brand for another decade but the thrill was gone. The remnants of a still-profitable Lotus were finally sold off by IBM in December 2018.

I helped train Presentation Pete's replacements in India before switching to work on software for the ill-fated Network Computer. Lotus eSuite, remember that? For you young ones, a precursor to Google Suite.

Surfer Pete was one cool cat. Presentation Pete had more than 9 lives.

Presentation Pete was a man in full, his legend proved to be iconic in software history. Presentation Pete Lives.

Adapted from some covidious toli

Next in Part II: A Golden Encounter

Previously: The Mosquito Principle

File under: history, software, folklore, humour, biography, satire, life, work, race, sensitivity, technology, Lotus, IBM, culture, decline, Observers are worried, toli

Mindless Speculation

I. Geopolitics

The fellow with the fufu usually moves over to the man with the soup, never the other way around.

— Elechi Amadi, The Great Ponds

This delightful Nigerian saying distills a lot of economic insight - and it translates quite well even if you've never had the pleasure of eating fufu and light soup. It's a folk lesson that is learned very early in human life and certainly ingrained by the time you master the hard knocks of school playgrounds - or streets as the case may be. Gil Scot-Heron once phrased the sentiment as "all consumers know that when the producer names the tune the consumer has got to dance".

In times of crisis, economists talk about the "flight to quality" or deleveraging; political scientists, in turn, form models about the calculus of power relations. It's not quite a matter of rats and sinking ships but it surely comes down to the perception that the pepper soup would greatly enhance a depleted stock of pounded yams, cassava or plantain fufu.

Anecdotally, we then start reading articles about Americans (belatedly) trying to find jobs in the Middle East

Europeans in investment banking and other financial fields already have been flocking to the oil-flush Persian Gulf for months, propelled by the hope that emerging economies of the East will ride out any global recession better than New York or London. In a phrase often cited by British brokers and bankers, "it's Shanghai, Mumbai, Dubai, or goodbye."

This is at the level of the individual response but presumably this phenomenon extends to the societal scale. Tribes, companies, and countries the world over are now searching for soup.

These days, the men with the soup - or capital, or cash, or credit, or liquidity, or savings, or solvency if you prefer, ostensibly live in places where phrases like "sovereign wealth", "nation of savers", "oligarchy" or "oil producers" are bandied around. If they are called to finance bailouts, they might well extract their pounds of flesh - to continue on the metaphorical route. And yet that is the crux of the matter: who is going to finance bailouts and on what terms?

Warren Buffet is a happy shopper and is very exacting with the terms he demands before deploying his checkbook. Japan's Mitsubishi banking group almost caused Henry Paulson to go into cardiac arrest when it started renegotiating the terms of its proposed bailout of Morgan Stanley. Iceland, to take the other obvious example, was even negotiating with Russia for its bailout before others finally stepped in - the price of Russian army bases on the soil of a NATO member is too high apparently.

Negotiations are always tricky things of course, but when you have the soup you have the benefit of knowing that others will come to you. In this respect the most poignant geopolitical maneuvering has been pointed out by Bernhard of Moon of Alabama and it concerns China and Taiwan.

Item: Selling Out Taiwan To Finance The Bailout

"The Chinese president also praised the good momentum of the development of the Sino-U.S. ties in recent years in various areas.

He said China is ready to work with the U.S. side to intensify dialogue, exchanges and cooperation, and properly handle issues concerning mutual interests and of major concern, particularly the Taiwan question, in a bid to push forward the sustained and steady development of the Sino-U.S. constructive and cooperative ties."

Translated from diplo-speech: "Give us Taiwan and you'll get the loan."

Dig: the reaction was swift

Regulators in Taiwan ordered insurers to limit their holdings of Freddie, Fannie, and Ginnie Mae paper...

The Taiwanese also have some soup they can withhold it appears. These are fascinating times for geopolitics, everything is being laid bare.

When confronted with empty bowls and covered pots, you really start to wonder if indeed there is any soup available. More to the point: who's got the soup?

II. Estate Planning

Apropos the notion of death and taxes I was thinking recently about the sad and tragic death of Kenneth Lay, former CEO and erstwhile looter of Enron. I was reminded of the mindless speculation about its timing, for indeed, from some points of view, it was a very convenient death for his estate, coming as it did after his fraud conviction but, and this is crucial, before his sentencing, which meant that said conviction was abated - and the prospect of punitive damages and restitution to those who suffered at his hands disappeared in a coronary heartbeat - or lack thereof. Of course one shouldn't begrudge his family in their time of loss for the consequent beneficial preservation of capital. Still it would have been good to be able to hear his expert opinion on the current "global financial crisis" (as the BBC have branded the current mood - sidenote: the Motley Fool term it Panic 2008) and speculate as to its causes...

The mind is a funny thing and I then remembered the part of The Godfather II where Robert Duvall's Tom Hagen pays a visit to Michael Gazzo's weary Frank Pentangel on a military base and reminisces about the old school Roman solution for unsuccessful conspirators. The good soldier subsequently took those musings to heart. That scenario is the kind of thing that only happens in fictional movies - even if these days people worryingly encourage it in their anger. Moving right along...

Along the same lines, the always astute Floyd Norris was indulging in some mindless speculation himself recently

If Congress takes no action in 2009, the estate tax will fall to zero in 2010, and then bounce back to 2001 levels in 2011. That would create what the Tax Policy Center report, written by Leonard E. Burman, Katherine Lim and Jeffrey Rohaly, delicately calls "grotesque tax planning initiatives." What they mean is that there would be a great temptation to do in dear old (very rich) dad before midnight on Dec. 31, 2010.

There hasn't been much remorse among those who have made out like bandits in the bubble years, it seems however that the gig is up - or at least, pace the observation about who now has the soup, that the shell game will have different winners in the near term.

One starts to wonder what will get in the head of the dissolute offspring of modern day aristocrats when they contemplate the prospect of ill-gotten gains disappearing by fiat as the mandated clawback (albeit a quite lenient clawback) begins. It is quite fitting that those who thrived on moral hazard might find themselves targets of the ineluctable financial logic of perverse incentives. Time will tell, I suppose, if this idle speculation has any grounding.

On a slightly related note I was reminded of the following poem

Lord Finchley

Lord Finchley tried to mend the Electric light
Himself.
It struck him dead: and serve him
right!
It is the business of the wealthy man
To give employment to the artisan.

— Hilaire Belloc's Cautionary Verses

Periodically the social compact that Belloc identified a century ago is forgotten - that is the realm of trickle down economics. When The Masters receive their comeuppance, the reaction is not necessarily one of class warfare - everybody knows their place in society, but rather it is a distinct lack of sympathy for those who fall from grace. A debacle prompted by overblown real estate leads, as it were, to some furious estate planning.

III. A Pepper Soup Soundtrack

A fufu and soup playlist

• DJ Palm Butta - Fufu N Soup
  The message delivered in this cheeky Liberian hiplife reworking of the Chicken Noodle Soup fad is clear: "with some okro on the side... that fufu and soup is sweet". True enough, we live in an era of microwave fufu, but even with such modern conveniences, we also need some soup. It goes without saying that Palm Butta also has the follow up track Cook My Pepper Soup which dives into the heart of the matter.
• Eastern Ministers Guitar Band - Uwa Tuto Uwa Fufu
  As discussed at the indispensible Likembe, the literal translation of the title is "The World is Sweet and Painful", the fufu of the title is perhaps the pain, the soup is the sweet.
• Digable Planets - The Art of Easing
  You had to be there perhaps, but if you flowed with the vibe that was the Blowout Comb album, you'd know all about the art of easing, of laying back in the cut.
• James Brown - Escape-ism
  Some hot sauce to go with some hot pants, JB delivered wisdom in spades

  You know when you forget that grits is... when you forget that grits is groceries and that eggs is poultry, you lose your thing. Now, you can lose your thing out there wandering around.

  Fred Wesley's horns and the various incarnations of the JBs band were the soup to James Brown's fufu.
• Donald Byrd - Fufu
  Donald Byrd's 1973 album Kofi is one of my favourite in the jazz funk canon. Perhaps the excursions trips to Elmina and the consequent African-inflected rhythms place this music on the funky jazz side of the spectrum. Whether it is the driving soul jazz of The Loud Minority or the intricate interplay of title track or the blowing session that is Fufu, this is simply inspired.
  
  
  
  
  
  I could listen to this for hours on end and indeed, to harken to another song on the album, I do have Perpetual Love for Byrd's music.

The received wisdom is that it was mindless speculation that got much of the world into our present belt-tightening. As things take on serious notes, one hopes that we can at least comfort ourselves with some mindless speculation. I've made my opening contribution, I await yours.

Let's place this note as part of an occasional series, observers are worried.

File under: observation, economics, culture, decline, fall, USA, bubble, power, politics, Observers are worried, toli

Mood Markers

These three songs and a stanza captured much of my mood over the past week. I wonder, what was your soul therapy?

• Winter in America by Gil Scot-Heron and Brian Jackson
  The full lyrics paint a picture of decline and fall. A harsh season has arrived early and, from all appearances, doesn't want to leave anytime soon.

  People know there's something wrong
  Feels just like winter
  It's winter in America
  Truth is there ain't nobody fighting
  Cause nobody knows what to save

  I used to mishear that last line as "cause nobody knows what to say" and was glad for the ambiguity: say versus save. Are these pieces of the same thing? Which is preferable: being tongue-tied or overwhelmed? Is it the sound of sirens or the sound of silence that is more disquieting in these time?
• Anger in the Nation by Pete Rock and C.L. Smooth
  Well the title says it all doesn't it? I'm not normally a believer in ritual humiliation nor indeed the incantation of politics as theater, but I did find solace watching a few investment bank executives squirm under the questionning of US congressmen (notwithstanding the fact that said congressmen have been poor regulators). Thinking about the collateral damage that friends and family have already experienced made me appreciate the spectacle of these small discomforts and the promise of more to come. Of these small things are made comfort suites.
• All Your Goodies Are Gone by Parliament
  The languid rhythm of the track belies the message namely "Let hurt put you in the loser's seat". A essential soundtrack for anyone who deals with the stock market in the year 2008.
• Ezra Pound's Hugh Selwyn Mauberly is often cited as the great anti-war lament, I rather harken to his characterization of moneyed charlatans and the damage they do

  walked eye-deep in hell
  believing in old men's lies, then unbelieving
  came home, home to a lie,
  home to many deceits,
  home to old lies and new infamy;
  
  usury age-old and age-thick
  and liars in public places.

  Perhaps the silver lining of the current moment will be some good art. I certainly look forward to it.

Mood Markers, a playlist

Next: Heart of Darkness, a playlist


File under: music, quotes, culture, observation, decline, fall, anger, economics, USA, toli

World Cup Radio Toli

I tried to keep away, believe me... Last night, right after the movers departed with our possessions, I donned my Stephen Appiah shirt and headed to the WGBH studios to make an appearance on Radio Open Source to dispense some toli on the World Cup and sports as a leading indicator. You can download the podcast to listen if you care. It was my last Bostonian hurrah with Christopher Lydon, Chelsea Merz and crew, a show packed with both erudition and down home punditry. On the phone were Robert Lipsyte, Stacy-Marie Ishmael, Patrick Belton and John Ralston Saul - cosmpolitans and sports lovers all.

Chris's pitch for the show was simple

What is this comprehensive "globalization" of sports stars, money, victory all about?

What is the story unfolding in this World Cup summer of empires falling and rising — empires of money and fashion as well as of national pride and prestige?

These were some notes I sent him over the weekend, my talking points, if you like, about possible directions for the topic: sports as leading indicator and sports as globalization off the top of my head.

On Sports as a Leading Indicator

You'd have to talk about the French team and its composition.

Zidane as the street gladiator. 17 of the 23 players are minorities. Cosmopolitans?

You'd also have to talk about how they are looked at by their countrymen... With love by most, but ambivalence or outright hostility by some (e.g. Jean Marie Le Pen).

You'd have to talk about the changing nature of the game and how everyone plays in Europe. The Brazilians have made almost one billion dollars selling their players to European teams. The Africans too, and these days many of the African teams were playing a very European game with only flashes of their previous freer flowing style.

What about identity and allegiances? I've pondered it recently.

Brazil, Argentina and Old Europe as the Great Powers; South Korea's showing in the last World Cup. Australia doing better than the US this time.

Rupert Murdoch built his empire on sports: Sky satellites... Fox Sports World and elsewhere as the expression of his parochial interests. The problem with the coverage: all highlights, all sensational, all superficial, all triumph over adversity, missing the subtext. Compare to Fox News.

Connect to the entirely ridiculous coverage by ESPN/ABC. Less said on that. I watched it all on Univision. This bit by Jeff Klein of the New York Times covers it all: The Sins of American Sportscasting.

Dana Blankenhorn too wrote about The Greatest Game Ever Played

Americans still have no clue about the World Cup, or of soccer in general.

The U.S. announcers are horrible. They talk about everything but the game in front of them. They repeat the back-story endlessly. They assume the ending and look two games ahead. They talk about other shows to be on the next day or the next week.

Tony Karon, whose coverage was excellent, had piped in earlier with How to Watch the World Cup.

I have a pretty good idea where Osama bin Laden will be on June 14 -- and June 19, and again on June 23. Not his exact location, but it's a safe bet he'll be in front of a TV tuned in to Saudi Arabia's World Cup soccer matches with, respectively, Tunisia, Ukraine, and Spain.

Sporting Blues

You'd have to talk about America's place in sports. Great Power? Things Fall Apart? Decline and Fall? I don't know but small things add up. You need some joie de vivre and the sports headlines should be providing comfort.

It was not a good 4th of July... No McEnroe, no Connors, no Agassi, no Sampras or Roddick, no Venus, no Serena, no Lindsay Davenport winning at Wimbledon. Instead a Swiss guy and a Spaniard are providing the excitement. And what about that tall Chinese woman who made the quarter finals and gave Clujsters the fits, Li Na? What about feet binding? The Chinese are coming...

Nathan's hot dog eating competition was won by Kobayashi again, a small Japanese guy out-ate red-blooded Americans. Hot dogs for God's sake.

If you watched the world cup on Independence Day you would have seen Italy against Germany (weren't they part of the original Axis of Evil back in the World War?).

The US team had been knocked out by Ghana, and it was the "Nigerian" player who bumped the guy and gave away the crucial penalty. Where is Ghana on the map again? And Ghana beat the Czechs, the number 2 team?

If you read the news, the front page of the New York Times showed a baby faced soldier in chains accused of rape and murder of a 15 year old girl and her family in Iraq, echoes of Abu Ghraib, erustication. He was wearing a black Johnny Cash shirt and looked vaguely gothic and troubled.

If you went to the movies you would have to make sure you didn't see An Inconvenient Truth, The Road to Guantanamo Bay or Army of Shadows as you got your Superman Returns tickets.

Things like that put a damper on the fireworks...

On the other hand, it is silly season, just a few bad apples. In other news, the Israelis are using American tanks to blow up Palestinian bridges and power stations...

Realpolitik

You'd have to talk about Italy winning with deadly efficiency. You'd also have to mention the corruption back home in their football league.

Sports is big business, the global brand.

You'd have to talk about Fifa and the International Olympic Commision, bureaucracies created by English and Frenchmen but now totally their own thing. Who was that Spaniard at the IOC with his corrupt ways?

You could talk about how tribal identities are forged when you watch sports.

Sports bind the US more even than religion since there is that Church/State separation business.

The Germans started buying flags once again since their team did so well this time.

Gamesmanship: Portugal's diving cynicism and the head butts in the Netherlands match.

Togo and Cote d'Ivoire have been on the brink of a civil war but were quiescent for the past few months since their teams made it to the cup. What will the future bring?

In Ghana there is considerable nationalism now based on the way the team played. We came to win and did well. The nation fully expected that the cup would come back with the boys. Ghana flags are flying everywhere these days. Will this feeling be capitalized on in the economic sphere?

Afterthoughts

Yannick Noah, the great French tennis player, was French when he won but was characteristically "of Cameroonian descent" when he lost. Similarly, the coverage of Zidane, and the urge to "understand" his actions, focuses on his Algerian immigrant upbringing. Wayne Rooney, who similarly lost his cool and shoved Ronaldo to be sent off must comes from the same immigrant school of hard knocks I suppose, as does Luis Figo whose head butt was unprovoked. Right?

Silvio Berlusconi's political career was supercharged by his ownership of a football club. How he would have loved to bask in the triumph of the Azzurris, the colour and slogan of his political party if he were still Prime Minister. Instead he was indicted for fraud days before the final.

I don't quite buy the argument that Americans only care about "their" sports (NFL, baseball, Nascar etc.) and will always remain indifferent to football and the World Cup. If there is one thing that America understands, it is attention and the impact of large numbers. Branding is the signal contribution America has made to the world. That is why there is a "World Series" in baseball even though much of the world doesn't play that game. Hence the excitement of a truly global game like football, one that literally is the lingua franca of the entire world, will permeate consciousness and attract participation. Soccer children will become the next generation's soccer moms and dads and will want to see their heroes make it on the global stage. Join the queue.

Wolves and Emperors

During the show, I tried to handwave a little about this notion of sports as a leading indicator, mixing my metaphors as is my custom, and I should explain what I was getting at. Poetically I started with the focus on small things like the current poor performance of the US in sports. Someone had brought up the Duke of Wellington in the conversation, but I rather harkened to The Boy Who Cried Wolf in that folktale as a leading indicator of perils that faced his community... To relate that to another folktale, the message in these leading indicators is often that The Emperor has no clothes. And I'd hazard that we are currently living in an imperial moment. The difference between the reception of the boy who cried wolf and the devastating impact of the boy who pointed out the emperor's hubris was that the words were said at a parade. Thus it is at social events or gatherings that we reflect on the zeitgeist and see things in their true light. Sporting events like our ceremonies and our public holidays are the grand events when communities come together. Politicians can't control the zeitgeist, nor can big businesses really control the human drama of sporting events. Still they can try, and I can recall Mr Bush delivering turkeys to the troops one recent Thanksgiving. I'm not so sure that there has been much comfort in this silly season of our discontent however. But perhaps one shouldn't make too much of these things.

In any case, head nods are due to my fellow panelists and to the Open Source crew who conjure up news feverishly every day, Chelsea, David, Brendan, Robin and the rest. The conversation continues apace.

File under: sports, football, world cup, soccer, Ghana, USA, media, radio, Open Source, globalization, commerce, tribes, empire, decline, Small Things, punditry, 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