Below is the Google Voice transcript of my mother's NYE message. Exactly 3 words are right, can you guess which?

"Yeah, I just wanted to see and then it's vending so much in Bosnia one slight 19th it but that I know it's not getting this evite but not you were supposed to go out of this, he did. I don't know which day. Peace, deductible. Can you email and I've got everything is. Thank you."

Happy belated NYE, all. May all your peace be deductible!

VAZQUEZ JOHN MANUEL "JACK" (March 7, 1932 - December 10, 2009.) Son of Manuel Vazquez and Helen Flannery Vazquez, was good times and fun to all he met. He attended Annunciation on Detroit's east side, graduating high school in 1950, while also taking art classes at Cass Tech. He studied architectural engineering at the University of Detroit, where he first met the woman who would later become his wife, Lois Cahill, and the priest who remained a lifelong friend, Arthur Lovely. He entered the Society of Jesus in 1955 and spent the next twelve years studying and teaching Latin in Milford, OH, West Baden, IN, Cleveland, OH, and Toronto. In 1968 he left the Jesuits to marry Lois, and in 1969 they had their only child, a son named Michael. He continued to teach, first Latin and then English, at Nolan Middle School near Seven Mile Road in Detroit, while advising various student groups and serving as librarian. He retired in the early 1990s. He was often to be found in a cafe—always wearing his dragonfly pin—writing in his journal, tutoring young people, and reading poetry aloud with friends. An ardent patron of the Grosse Pointe Public Library, he was a champion of librarians everywhere. He is survived by three sisters, Mary Gottlieb of Portland, Theodora Vazquez of San Francisco, and Carmen Forkin of Detroit, and by his son Michael, an editor and writer in New York. A funeral Mass will be held at St. Paul Catholic Church in Grosse Pointe Farms 12pm on Wed. December 16, 2009

adios, Mr. V. Good luck on the next leg of the trip, and many thanks for the emails over the years. You might not have realized it, but the stream of missives were a great comfort to me after my father died, in so much as they managed to be completely familiar and alien at the same time. No worries: promise keep an eye on Mike.

Well, at least you are saved the hassle of the DMV this year.

From Anthony Lane's New Yorker review of Bruno:

You can’t honestly defend your principled lampooning of homophobia when nine out of every ten images that you project onscreen comply with the most threadbare cartoons of gay behavior. [full review]

Sasha Baron Cohen obviously did not consult my blackface use guidelines, which counsel near the end that any use of blackface that reruns an image or scene or trope from the existing repertoire of racism should be sent back to the drawing board for retuning.

...is way more fun than blogging, which is more fun than writing articles, which is way more fun than finishing short stories. It really is like one of those evolution cartoons that runs in reverse! Sad, actually.

Found these videos for Lil Louis' French Kiss on Youtube last night, and went to bed thinking that I should put them up on ye olde blog, along with a note to the effect of: "I never knew these videos existed!"

But when I woke up this morning I dimly remembered seeing these images 20 years ago. It was the wind-up Africans that brought all it back to me. I remember sitting in a dorm room and having an extended conversation about irony, racism, kitsch, cross-cultural confusion, et cetera, et cetera, all of it prompted by that video.

Video director/Youtube submitter "zynsk" (any intel on him or her? Likely him.) writes of the first video embedded above:

This is actually the second version of the video I made for French Kiss. The first one was "pulled" by the record company and they'd only pay for 2 minutes worth of video so here it is.

Said first video is embedded below.

The word punctum is another 20 year old memory, this from college readings of Roland Barthes' Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Wikipedia, as usual, puts it better than I can on short notice, defining as punctum as "the wounding, personally touching detail which establishes a direct relationship with the object or person within [a photograph]."

The kitsch racist wind-up toys in a video for a song I loved are exactly the sort of "wounding, personally touching detail" that could linger for 20 years, as is (now that I think about it) the bogish-seeming tyke in sunglasses. (As one of the wags in the Youtube comments puts it "French Kiss makes babies!") Still, because the video was an kind of addendum to French Kiss, I don't remember those racial angles being prominent in my thinking about the song 20 years ago, having focused instead on the song's completely bananas and largely mathematical structural elements. I wrote a piece in Bidoun last year about, like, glory, phlogiston, the Black Plague and a few other things, and, looking back, the parts about house music now seem to be less about "house music" in general and more about French Kiss in particular.

Still, the house mix was too compelling to turn away from. I was fascinated by math as a kid, and I would often try to graph the mixes on quadrille paper, assigning admittedly arbitrary values and lines and algebraic expressions to beats, vocal lines, crescendos, and fades. This work was easier with the already schematic dance music, and I would often fantasize about working backwards from a graph and creating a song from it. The pictures always struck me as beautiful, futuristic, graffiti-like, and I wondered what the graph of the Greatest Record Ever might look like. I understood from my readings in physics (another interest) that scientists were on a quest to find a grand unified theory that could explain and encompass everything, and I imagined that such a thing must exist for music, too, a graph of the perfect, hidden beat. This notion seemed to solve the problem of the Greatest Song Ever, as whatever song I loved at any moment could be understood to be an aspect or piece of the Perfect Song, with some lines and equations omitted or mathematically transformed. The next Greatest Song Ever didn't erase or eclipse the previous one; they were all the same. The upshot, of course, was that I might have to keep listening, cataloguing, and graphing forever. Saturdays and Sundays I would lay in bed well past noon, more haggard than any child of relative quiet and privilege should have been. [full yackity smack]

Those toys are tantalizing, though: relentless, mechanized, racially charged, fuck-machine-ish. I wrote Zynsk on Youtube to ask him for for the full story on what he was thinking - and what the label objected to! - and will post any response I get.

Off to brunch, but just a closing archaeological detail: What got me thinking about French Kiss was this song:

There is another (live?) version where the schematic, gloriously insane-making part hangs way longer:

I have become a regular invitee to a series of house parties attended largely by a clique of deeply butch, 5-foot and under Guatemalan lesbians (a story for another day), and not a BBQ goes by when they don't play that Hechizeros Band song, the gravel driveway turning into a makeshift dancefloor on a completely random central LA street. When that beeping starts and hangs, getting louder and threatening to go on forever, they go completely crazy. Not to brag or boast, but I have gotten laid more than once directly because of French Kiss, the song a kind of virtual, processing black box where amorphous late night dance floor attraction goes in and comes out the other side focused and rationalized in the, como de dice?, "lets grab a cab" sense of "focused and rationalized." I have completely platonic and deeply loved female (and a few male) friends with whom dancing to French Kiss at 5 in the morning is a fondly remembered peak experience where the ritual, cliff's-edge implication of nookie, the look into parallel universes, is the foundational moment of our bond. Dancing to Hechizeros Band with those grinding Guatemalan girls, with their slicked back, quasi-pompadours, is exactly like that except the gender roles are reversed. When the song changes and the dancefloor clears they wink at me as we crowd off to the bar. And me? All I can do is blush.

A good deal of my Postopolis talk was concerned with Fort Greene nostalgia. Author Nelson George takes us on a walking tour:

Here some tweets I found of my postopolis talk. I think it went okay!

@nicolatwilley "Surviving genocidal pressures only to be undone by the real estate market." That, and the 1995 census of vampires. Gary Dauphin @postoplis!

@jordanclaire Thinking of Seinfeld scene, on Staten Island ferry: "What's that, daddy?" "That's Brooklyn, son. That's where Spike Lee lives!" #postopolis

@jordanclaire 'monocultural multiculturalism' in Fort Greene Bklyn gentrification #postopolis

@postopolis: RT @nicolatwilley: Gary compares gentrification to the neutron bomb: change the demographics but keep the buildings. Value of new metaphors

@postopolis: Gary points out that there are very few "vampire architects" in contemporary vampire writing (where "vampire" is a political metaphor)

@postopolis: The talk now shifts to the political implications of vampires in pop culture today - full-bloodedness vs. mixed-race vampires

@postopolis: Throughout Gary's presentation, lots of images of white vampires appear on the screen... followed by Blackula. Blade. White hipsters

@postopolis: The increasingly non-African American character of Fort Greene, Brooklyn, has led to something Gary calls Fort Greene Nostalgia

@postopolis: Gary asks: Do Ebony and Jet, in a collapsing magazine market, need to be saved as examples of black history? Media preservation

@postopolis: Gary is showing a randomly changing loop of images, and the effect is so great, actually. Wesley Snipes as Blade suddenly appears

@postopolis: The city as a geography of "ethnic pride" and "ethnic nostalgia." He mentions Ebony and Jet as a media of ethnic urban communication

@postopolis: Gary refers to himself as "a working journalist," not a theorist, not an architect, not an artist. Used to work for Black Planet.

@postopolis: And now Gary Dauphin begins. Laughing, he says that he will start his talk about LA... with a map of Brooklyn. And indeed he does.

@jordanclaire: Gary Dauphin – mapping fuzzier defns of identity-based communities, was just having convo about my interest in same w/ @subtopes #postopolis

@postopolis The increasingly non-African American character of Fort Greene, Brooklyn, has led to something Gary calls Fort Greene Nostalgia.

My piece in this issue is called "The Aloha President." It's not on the site, but here is a teaser:

Consider the wry, half-inward-facing, half-defiant smile that ghosts the President’s lips whenever he refers to himself as a “mutt.” Or recall the passage, early in his 1995 autobiography Dreams From My Father, where Obama notes the amusement his maternal grandfather took in toying with young Barry’s racial ambiguities. “Sometimes when Gramps saw tourists watching me play in the sand, he would come up beside them and whisper, with appropriate reverence, that I was great-grandson of King Kamehameha, Hawaii’s first monarch. ‘I’m sure your picture’s in a thousand scrapbooks, Bar,’ he liked to tell me with a grin, ‘from Idaho to Maine.’”

Stanley Dunham died in 1992, five years before the boy he and his wife Madelyn helped raise won his first seat in the Illinois state senate. But his words were prophetic. Not counting the issue of Bidoun now in your hands, it has been estimated that since November 4, 2008, close to 300 million scrapbook-ready magazines and newspapers have been sold with Barack Obama on the cover, enough pages to stretch from Idaho to Maine many times over. Even Dunham’s reference to Kamehameha seems slightly uncanny. Hawaii’s great unifier brought the archipelago under one-man rule in large part by outspending his enemies, the islands’ other rulers playing overmatched Clintons and McCains to his Obama. Kamehameha’s last opponent, Kaumuali’I, gave up without a fight after watching him amass the biggest armada the islands had ever seen, right down to newfangled foreign-built schooners and cannon. The triumphant warrior king showed a great interest in the problems of war and the treatment of non-combatants, promulgating the doctrine of Mamalahoe, or the “Law of the Splintered Oar,” which asserted the right of “every elderly person, woman and child” to “lie by the roadside in safety” during battle. Looking forward, Kamehameha’s grandson, Kamehameha III would propose an early Declaration of Rights of Man, his assertion that “God hath made of one blood all nations of men to dwell on the earth in unity and blessedness” preceding Obama’s career-making and echoing assertion at the 2004 Democratic National convention that “there's not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there's the United States of America” by 165 years.

Indeed if there is a racial fantasy worthy of object, it is not the oft-bruited notion that Barack Hussein Obama is a Muslim or a Marxist or an Indonesian, but Stanley Dunham’s sly assertion that his grandson was the scion of Hawaiian royalty. White recoil from Obama has often latched onto the supposed injustice of his rejection of his mother’s whiteness in favor of an identification with his absent African father, but it is far easier to project the face of Queen Liliuokalani, last reigning Hawaiian monarch, onto the President’s features than his own mother’s. The regal posture, the multi-layered, sun-kissed skin tone with its ghostly archipelago of freckles suggest a genetic transit that skips the American heartland altogether, jumping from Kenya to the middle of the Pacific in one hop. His grandfather, who had been primed for such insights after being instructively mis-identified as “some kind of wop” by his wife’s family, could not only see this connection but made it possible by picking his family up and planting it on Hawaii’s fertile volcanic soil during the 1950s. Obama’s autobiography describes at great length how his grandparents were unsuited for life in the moist, conflicted American south and drifted steadily west like pollen caught on steady wind. They needed a different greenhouse for growing the future.

Go buy a copy, or, better yet, a subscription!

Also: Bidoun is a finalist in this year's National Magazine Awards, in the General Excellence under 100K circ category! Congrats to the whole crew over there, but special xoxo to my droog and editor there Michael Vazquez, as well as Senior Editor Negar Azimi, Creative Director Babak Radboy and Bidoun's Founderix/Editorix in Chief Lisa Farjam. Fingers crossed!

Postopolis

Jace Clayton was kind enough to ask me to talk a bit during this week's Postopolis LA blog/talkathon. Thanks, Jace!

And what is Postopolis, you ask?

Postopolis is a 5-day blogathon with discussions, interviews, panels, slideshows, films and parties designed to push the architecture, urbanism and landscape conversation from virtual to reality. It’s hosted by bloggers which means that the event will also be an opportunity to reflect on how blogs participate, and sometimes even redefine and lead the architectural discourse.

My talk is Thursday, April 2 at 840pm for about 20-25. (The full schedule and deets are here.) I think I am going to chat a bit about my usual set of preoccupations: colored vampires, hybrid aliens, movies/tv, Los Angeles, the tragically beige undead, et cetera.

After the break are some images from my slideshow, in no particular order. Come on through if you're in LA on Thursday!

**

Comparing conservatives to black people is the new black, apparently:

Rush = Oprah

A week ago a reporter from a major American newspaper called me to talk about Rush. I agreed to do the interview provided it was recorded and that I could air it after the story the reporter was working on ran. The reporter asked me if Rush was a "leader," and I said no. He is, I continued, a communicator, a pundit and an entertainer, one of the two best in the country --along with Oprah. And a man of extraordinary influence. I think the Rush-Oprah comparison startled the reporter, but it is exactly correct. They have the same reach, and though they have almost completely different approaches to life, both are deeply sincere about their views and thus far beyond merely "effective." Both communicators change lives. [full story - h/t Ross Douthat, who concurs]

Rush = Jesse

Rush is to the Republicanism of the 2000s what Jesse Jackson was to the Democratic party in the 1980s. He plays an important role in our coalition, and of course he and his supporters have to be treated with respect. But he cannot be allowed to be the public face of the enterprise – and we have to find ways of assuring the public that he is just one Republican voice among many, and very far from the most important. [full story]

Talking Android Bobby = Barack

He is the Republican party's wunderkind. His family's triumph-over-adversity narrative is nearly as powerful as that of U.S. President Barack Obama's. And now, Bobby Jindal, the 37-year-old Governor of Louisiana, is closer to becoming a household name — launching onto the national platform on prime-time television by delivering the Republican party's rebuttal to the President's address to Congress.

It's a moment in history that's being compared to the keynote address a then-unknown Mr. Obama delivered in 2004 at the Democratic National Convention in Boston. [full story]

Talking Android Michael = Barack

What few people know is that when Obama first took to the national stage in 2004 at the Democratic National Convention in Boston, there was another African-American man who was already climbing the political ladder of success within the Republican Party. In fact, former Maryland Lieutenant Governor Michael S. Steele gave the counterpoint to Obama's speech that year. Now, he's vying for chairmanship of the Republican National Committee, which would make him the most recognized Black conservative in the nation. ESSENCE.com talked to Steele about taking on this monumental task, convincing Black folks to better understand the party, and the possibility of one day stepping into Obama's shoes as president. [full story]

Talking Android Michael ≠ Barack, because he's his evil twin (Or is that Talking Android Michael ƒ-1 Barack? ≅?)

Evil twin, nemesis, archenemy—whatever the term, every great protagonist has one. Superman had Bizarro, his alternate-universe self. Spock from Star Trek had the shady, goateed "mirror" Spock. Super Mario has the cackling Wario.

And Barack Obama has Michael Steele. [full story]

Talking Android Bobby + Talking Android Michael = Barack

Not long after Barack Obama delivers his pseudo–State of the Union on February 24, the official televised Republican riposte will be uncorked by a guy who violates almost every prevailing liberal stereotype of the contemporary GOP: the governor of Louisiana, Piyush “Bobby” Jindal. At 37, Jindal is the nation’s youngest governor and the first Indian-American to win statewide office in U.S. history. The son of Punjabi immigrants, he’s an Ivy League–educated Rhodes scholar and an unrepentant policy wonk, with heterodox views on his specialty, which is health care, and a reputation for competence as much as ideology. For all these reasons and others, Jindal strikes many savvy conservatives as the answer to their party’s prayers: a brainy, precocious, multiculti change agent—a Republican Obama.

Precious few have ever described Michael Steele quite that way, though his recent rise to national prominence is hard to imagine outside the context of our new president. The victory of Steele, a former Maryland lieutenant governor and failed Senate candidate, in the contest to become chairman of the Republican National Committee came as a surprise; he’d often been criticized as insufficiently far right to win. But against a field that included an incumbent Bush holdover, a southern party operative who until recently belonged to an all-white country club, and the genius who sent out that infamous Christmas CD with the song “Barack the Magic Negro,” Steele emerged as the first African-American head of the RNC—having argued that he offered a solution to what he called the party’s “image problem.” [full story]

(Oh, on a related topic: Slumdog Millionaire = Crash.)

------------

** For those of you wondering about the quote in the image up top: It seems talking androids are fueled by shit, because Michael Steele recently sat down to feast on the pungent fruit of Rush Limbaugh's meaty ass:

In the new game of chicken between Michael Steele and Rush Limbaugh, the loser is...Michael Steele, who now says he never meant to diminish the voice and leadership of Limbaugh.

In an interview with the Politico, Steele said: "My intent was not to go after Rush - I have enormous respect for Rush Limbaugh. I was maybe a little bit inarticulate...There was no attempt on my part to diminish his voice or his leadership." [full story]

Talking Android Bobby Jindal asked for a plate of what Steele was having and chowed down as well.

Michael Steel / Talking Android MC

From Talking Points Memo

Michael Steele is promising a drastic makeover of the Republican Party's image -- and he really means it!

"We want to convey that the modern-day GOP looks like the conservative party that stands on principles," Steele told the Washington Times. "But we want to apply them to urban-suburban hip-hop settings."

"It will be avant garde, technically," he said of the new public relations team he's signing on. "It will come to the table with things that will surprise everyone - off the hook." He also added: "I don't do 'cutting-edge.' That's what Democrats are doing. We're going beyond cutting-edge." [a href="http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/02/steele-promises-new-image-for-republicans-in-hip-hop-settings.php" target="new">full story]

If you're on Facebook, you can send one of those talking android trading cards to your friends using this handy tool.

Roland Burris, Talking Android

From the NYT:

Senator Roland W. Burris acknowledged in documents made public on Saturday that the brother of former Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich sought campaign fund-raising help from him in the weeks and months before his appointment to succeed Barack Obama as Illinois’s junior senator.

Mr. Burris said he provided no money to Governor Blagojevich’s campaign in response to the brother’s request.

The disclosure was inconsistent with Mr. Burris’s earlier descriptions, including one under oath, of his conversations with those closest to the former governor. It raised new questions about events that preceded Mr. Burris’s unusual appointment in late December, and prompted some Republican lawmakers in Illinois to immediately demand an inquiry into whether Mr. Burris committed perjury. [full story]

If you are on FB, you can send your own talking android to your friends.

... or at least Twitterton.

My current work schedule means real, actual blog posting will continue to be infrequent into at least June, but if you tweet I would love it if you followed me. (You can find my tweets here.) I have to confess to initially being a twitter-resistor, but the 140-word format starts to make a bit more sense when you're on the clock and stealing time from THE MAN. (As opposed to yourself.) I was also won over by having re-connected with some random people I know on there, as well as by connecting with a few souls I have known at byline or nod-across-party level but never really talked to.

Anyway, don't go and unsubscribe to this feed or anything. The kids at Ebogjonson Labs are trying to figure out how to bring you the more.

I think the 4:30 Movie week long series - Japanese monster movies, WWII week, etc - is where I learned there was such a thing as curating.

I mostly remember this as where I learned to appreciate black & white Hollywood movies from the 30s and 40s, largely for their endless stock of tough-talking, sharp-witted dames.

My pals and I would stay up late (on either Friday or Saturday?) for the Channel 5 movie, which came a built-in aura of "quality" and served as a kind of gateway art-house drug. I distinctly recall two life (or at least 10-year-old mind) altering nights with the Channel 5 Late Movie, one spent with 2001, the other with a moderately edited cut of Straw Dogs. No wonder my cohort of boys grew up a little bent!