Post from: Derek Powazek

How We Roll

Both presidential candidates selected people to be their running mates that are the things they are not. The young mixed-race guy picked an old white guy. The old white guy picked a young woman. Make no mistake, both choices are cold, calculated, strategic decisions. Both are identity politics run amok.

The difference is that Joe Biden, the democratic VP choice, has been in politics for 35 years. That’s as long as I’ve been alive. Sarah Palin, the republican VP choice, has been a governor for 18 months. John McCain, who she’d be veeping for, would be the oldest president ever, and has had cancer multiple times. If the primary task of a vice-president is to be a heartbeat away from the presidency, then the quality of the heartbeat in charge, and the resume of the person next in line, become kinda important.

I wonder if Adams would still think the vice-presidency was insignificant with the prospect of a far-right, anti-choice, book-banning, self-described “hockey mom” looming over the nation he helped found.

Post from: Derek Powazek

About The Veeps

Time’s Swampland Blog: What a Community Organizer Does
When Palin mocked Obama for being a “community organizer,” she got a cheap laugh. But she was mocking a man who was serving the poor instead of lining his pockets. Shameful.

Post from: Derek Powazek

Links for 2008-09-04: Politics

It’s an honor and a privilege to be selected as All Thing Girl’s Man of the Moment. I’ve always wanted to be called Mister September.

Post from: Derek Powazek

Mister September

Over a year ago, we were walking down Venice Beach in LA. Both sides of the street were lined with artists and importers. All the same crap you can buy at the border was there, along with the local painters and weirdos.

Heather stopped short. “Check that out,” she said. At our feet was an amazing series of paintings of Barack Obama. It was the first time I’d seen any Obama-related art.

This is April of 2007, just a couple months after Obama announced his campaign for the presidency, when it looked a quixotic long shot. “If only,” I said.

We bought the painting from artist Tony B. Conscious. As he took our cash, he shouted out to the surrounding crowd: “We got a coupla white folks for Obama over here!” Heather and I blushed.

We put the painting in the window of our living room. Our own little political/artistic statement.

Fast-forward sixteen months and here we are. Today Obama became the official nominee of his party at the DNC in Denver. I truly believe that in a few months we’ll be calling him Mister President.

How he went from long shot to nominee in a year and a half is a subject I’ll leave to people smarter than I. But I can say this: There seem to be a whole lot of white folks for Obama. And that, more than anything else, gives me hope for my stupid country.

Post from: Derek Powazek

White Folks for Obama

Post from: Derek Powazek

Operators are standing by

I love growing orchids, and I’ve had some luck with it. But orchids are the toy poodles of indoor growing - fussy and high maintenance. Sometimes you just want a big slobbery mutt.

So a few months ago I asked my dad what plant he thought had the most beautiful leaves. Dad’s an amazing green-thumb and knows more about indoor plants than anyone. He thought about it for a while and suggested Caladiums, pointing me to the aptly-named CaladiumWorld.com.

I ordered the smallest mixed box they had, bought some soil and pots at a local gardening store, and planted ten small pots. Two months later, our living room is an explosion of red, green, and white. Endless variations of intricate heart-shaped leaves springing from bulbs following chemical programs. It’s real life generative art.

My dad jokes that after years of working as a psychologist in hospitals, he likes growing plants because “they don’t complain and die quietly.” I don’t watch kids die of cancer for a living - I just play with computers. But I am frequently confused by how complicated people are, how alienating life behind the screen can feel, and how some justify cruelty as business.

No wonder I grow plants, too.

Post from: Derek Powazek

The Caladium Project

Post from: Derek Powazek

links for 2008-08-21: Raising ’Cain

Post from: Derek Powazek

links for 2008-08-19: Links and Editors

• NY Times: Malwebolence - The World of Web Trolling
  A growing subculture has a fluid morality and a disdain for pretty much everyone else online. By Mattathias Schwartz.
• The New Yorker: Annals of Crime: The Chameleon
  The many lives of Frédéric Bourdin. By David Grann.
• The Inquisitr: All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing
  Well known photographer Thomas Hawk was thrown out of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art this week for the crime of taking photos. By Duncan Riley.

In the first story, Mattathias Schwartz goes deep into the troll subculture. These are people who go out into the web to fuck with others. It’s an amazing story that goes far beyond the media’s usual “wild west” web story. The one place where it falls short is in its brief treatment of any solutions to the problem. It’d be interesting to see a followup on the various methods pioneered at places like Slashdot to combat trolling. Still, amazing read.

In the second, David Grann profiles Frédéric Bourdin, who may be the most successful impostor ever. He actually convinced a small Texas family that he was their missing son, even though his hair and eyes were the wrong color and he had a French accent. Bourdin is a troll in that he pretended to be something he wasn’t, in order to feed off the reactions to his lies.

Finally, in the third, Duncan Riley reports on the latest incident of Thomas Hawk getting thrown out of somewhere for taking photos. This time it’s the SF MOMA that catches his ire, but it was previously 45 Fremont Street and 1 Bush Street. I’m a staunch believer in the rights of photographers (indeed, when I was running JPG Magazine, I put together a whole issue on the topic to which Thomas Hawk was a contributor), but I’m also a strong believer in the Don’t Be A Dick school of photography, which reminds us that when you’re on private property, owners can ask you to stop taking photos at any time. Fighting with them only makes it worse for the rest of us with cameras.

To be clear, I’m not saying Hawk was wrong in any of these cases. I’m just saying that when you keep being the victim in stories like this, one has to wonder if you may be trolling for a conflict.

In all three cases, consider how the outcome would have been different had the people involved followed the old net axiom: Don’t feed the trolls. Online or off, the best solution is often to ignore the guy who’s out to fuck with you.

Post from: Derek Powazek

Three Tales of Trolls