Below you can find my recent tweets, as well as those labeled with some of my favorite hastags.

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!

Over the next 2 months I'll be doing some consulting work for NPR's Day to Day. My gig involves helping the Day to Day team think through a new blog called Daydreaming, which, as the show describes it, will look at the state of the California Dream:

Daydreaming is Day to Day's official blog. Over the summer we'll be showcasing the people, stories and issues featured in our new series, "California Dreamin'." The Golden State has brought the world new trends, new ideas, and new ways of life, but what happens to the California Dream when the economy's sluggish?

My own goals are pretty straight-forward: build a blog for the show (check); develop policies and procedures for said blog; develop a content and community strategy; work within the framework of NPR's existing tools and digital policies, as well within the more abstract framework of "NPR-ness." Come visit every now and then, and leave me a comment. Or, better yet, subscribe to the feed.

hey team,

As many of you know, I attended the Clarion West Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Workshop last year. It was an amazing experience, and I walked away with great affection for the workshop and (strangely enough) Seattle, where the Clarion has been held for the 25 years.

Clarion is a non-profit, and the tuition students pay doesn't begin to cover the costs of putting up and feeding attendees (student and teacher) for almost 7 weeks in rather nice digs on the UW-Seattle campus. In order to offset costs, Clarion engages in the usual fundraising gambits, one of which involves getting alumni to shadow the workshop in what has been dubbed The Clarion West Write-a-thon. Over the next six weeks, a number of alums (including your droog and humble narrator) will be writing away in parallel with this year's workshop.

If you'd like to support/sponsor me over the next 6 weeks, you can do so here. My Write-a-thon goals are pretty modest - I need to revise 6 old stories and complete first drafts on 3 more - as are my fundraising goals. If 20 of you were to donate a buck a story - 9 in total - I'd be golden. (Those of you looking for more bang for your donated buck should consider supporting Michael Swanwick, who is on some kind of crazy streak that involves 80k+ words a Write-a-thon.) In addition to helping out an organization that has come to mean a great deal to me, you'd also be helping me out personally, as I would be more likely to stop procrastinating on these stories if I knew people I knew and liked had paid 9 dollars for them. As an added inducement, I'll be sending out the finished/revised stories to sponsors on a weekly basis.

Thanks in advance for your help, and for forgiving this intrusion into your blog-reading day. And (again) the donations page is here.

best,

gary/ebog

Apparently a piece I worked on while consulting at NPR's News & Notes last year won an LA Press Club award for Best Multimedia Package. Who knew?

The package is here. Congrats to my co-winners: Tony Cox, who hosted the radio segment, and Anthea Raymond who produced it.

buy this book

So I have a story/essay/memoir in the recently released anthology The Time of My Life: Writers on the Heartbreak, Hormones, and Debauchery of The Prom.

May 8, 2008--At about the same time my little sister was getting married three weeks ago – it was a lovely beach ceremony in the Florida Keys; she was beautiful, and I was teary, having the bittersweet privilege of subbing for our dead father on the walk up the aisle – food riots were breaking out across the picture-perfect waters at her back, on the island nation of Haiti. Putting the two together – a wedding and a riot – is more than an article-opening flourish: My sister and I were both born in Queens, N.Y., but our family is Haitian, and some of the relatives in attendance barely made it off the island in time for the nuptials.

Our cousin Leslie, a priest in a small, rural town north of Port-au-Prince, was not so lucky. He got all the way to the airport before being called home. His rectory had been broken into and looted by parishioners looking for stores of rice used by a church-administered meals program. ("A church!" some of the older ladies tut-tutted at the rehearsal dinner, as if the building's powers of sanctuary should have included the ability to bar hunger and desperation at the door.)

more over at The Root.

These pieces of mine appeared on The Root and in Bidoun Magazine recently.

hey folks,

I am swinging east for my sister's wedding, and will be making a stop in NYC on April 8th to participate in a reading for Bidoun Magazine. If you're free that night, it would be great to see you!

best,

e/g

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

Tuesday, April 8, 7pm
Bidoun Night @ The Kitchen, 512 West 19th St between 10th and 11th Avenues

_Bidoun: Arts and Culture from the Middle East_ presents an evening celebrating a triplet of telling objects, culled from the pages of its spring-and-summer issue.

Writer, film critic, and web theorist Gary Dauphin on the Cleaver Sleeve -- a revolutionary trouser design (circa 1975) by the soon-to-be-ex–Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver.

Bidoun Editor in Chief Lisa Farjam on the secret of her beating heart.

Writer Anand Balakrishnan on castrated pop singers, American imperialism, Arab mustaches, and the mystery of Naguib Mahfouz's white linen suit.

All this, plus --
Magic tricks!
Slide shows!
A harrowing journey to the Cairo Agricultural Museum!
A video by Ziad Antar!
And music by DJ/rupture!

This time, we discuss Tyler Perry, Rev. Wright and the (potential?) end of the chitlin circuit.

I also slip in a direct Alexyss K. Tylor name-check, as well as an encoded/oblique 2Girls1Cup reference. Not a bad day's work.

As explained by me, here.

Click over and give my numbers some love.

Don't lie, you google yourself, too. During a recent extended session with my results I discovered that some completely random Russian archive has the bulk of my Village Voice writing career stored on their database. (Anyone speak Rooskie who can tell what it is?) Anyway, it includes articles that don't show up on the Village Voice site and which aren't in Nexis, and in the interest of owning my digital footprint I'll be uploading to ebog.com periodically. Don't pay them any mind.

I've got new pieces in Bidoun and New Angeles Monthly this week. Go check 'em out.