New Look

I’ve changed themes for the blog, as well as the header image. Not sure how I feel about it just yet. So if the header image changes back to the eBOY image, don’t be surprised. I changed it back. LOL.

Shameless Plug: Hans Beck Remix

My good friend and former band mate Chip Beck and I have been getting back into music production recently as “Hans Beck.” We’ve scored our friend Steve Pristin’s short documentary “Lions of New York” which recently premiered at NewFest. You can find the tracks used in the film over at Amie Street.

But more pressingly, though just as important, we have entered a remix contest over at RCRD LBL for Daniel Merriweather’s song “Change” (ft. Wale). I’m asking you to go here and click “download” as it counts as a vote. The top 5 remixes go to Merriweather and Mark Ronson for final selection as the official remix. Thanks in advance!

D.O.A.

Elder statesman of hip hop Jay-Z recently put out a song called “D.O.A(Death of Autotune).” But more broadly, outside of the tiny section of the blogopshere that consists of rap blogs, we have experienced another DOA–Death of Analog.

We have officially gone digital across the board for television. All stations were required to shutdown analog transmitters at midnight of 12 June.

How prepared were we? Not too bad according to Nielsen, which reported that only 2.8 million homes were completely unprepared. This doesn’t say much since one can just go out and get the $40 signal converter at an electronics store pretty easily, though this is less so the case with elderly viewers, who make up a big chunk of that 2.8 million, I’m guessing.

But all in all, it wasn’t a big deal… since most people have cable. Perhaps the biggest much-to-do-about-nothing deadline since Y2K.

NY Times Media Decoder

Take It Personal 05

From the danyelliott blog:

Usually we record on Saturday, but this time we did it on Friday, at the end of a long work week. So: Elliott is manic, Danyel is kinda tired and no we’re not OT at this year’s Super Bowl—which was the reason we taped on Friday night in the first place. Topics? Grammy nominations. The bloody battle for Internet Domination. The boss Rick Ross’ homage to Special Ed’s magnificence. Oh and Elliott’s ability to treat strippers and go-go dancers like the dainty debutantes they really are. See ya at Grammy’s. We promise!

http://www.mediafire.com/?nngfzwwtvmd

http://sharebee.com/18af76cb

Please check it out!

Take It Personal 04

The latest installment of the danyelliott podcast:

Could it be a bitter cranky Saturday at the danyelliott Castle? Ha! Elliott goes ape shit over Twitter flirts, and his Facebook fiasco. Danyel’s not feelin’ Obama’s swearing-in snafu and people mistakin’ kindness for weakness. Throw in Special Ed. Wale. Hiero. Shirea L. Carroll. Twitter’s djbigdaddy, and Solange Knowles. And it’s all just another week in the life of danyelliott. Thanks, as always, to Sam Han for riding shotgun.

http://www.zshare.net/audio/546250435bc414b5/

http://sharebee.com/da944172

Our consistency is kind of unparalleled right now.

danyelliott podcast episode 3

Take It Personal Episode 3

Sorry for the lack of posting

Hi all. My bad for being real slack on the posting but I’ve been in the middle of finals craziness. Will post something very soon.

Apologies!

Happy Holidays!

-SH

Q-Tip and I are friends

Last night, Q-Tip from A Tribe Called Quest, replied to my tweet on Twitter.

And this is what I tweeted immediately after:

I love the Internet.

X-posted at Human Potential.

apliiq East Coast LAUNCH

My boy Steve from I Smell Like Money (see blog roll on right) is helping to put together the East Coast launch for up-and-coming clothing line apliiq. Key things to keep in mind. It’s free and there are giveaways, so WTFN (why the F not)?

Details:

• When: Jan 2. 10pm-4am
• Where: Public Assembly, 70 North 6th Street, Brooknam.
• Who: Francis and the Lights, Theophilus London, Friends with Benefits and Superdunny.

Also, keep in mind, the clothes are dope so check them out.

And lastly, I’ll be in the building.

X-posted at Human Potential.

NY Times: Overfeeding on Information?

The Times asks if Americans are becoming news-obsessed as we are in the middle of a very exciting election season as well as stuck in a hot economic mess. They begin with a story of a film production accountant with the last name “Lehman” (coincidence? please….) whose MSNBC-watching habits have gone so far as to elicit a pretty hilarious behavioral tick from her  5 year-old son Beckett.

YANA COLLINS LEHMAN, a film production accountant who lives in Brooklyn, knew something was amiss when her 5-year-old son, Beckett, started to announce to no one in particular, “I’m John McCain, and I approved this statement.”

Ms. Collins Lehman, 36, thought: “Oh my God, I’m watching too much news.”

But it is hard not to, she said, with the financial markets in meltdown, and that crisis increasingly intertwined with a frenzied presidential campaign entering the homestretch. This is why her own news diet has spiked to where it feels as if it’s taking over her life. And maybe her son’s, too.

“It’s such a drain on productivity,” Ms. Collins Lehman said. “It’s a compulsion.”

And of course the NY Times looks to a sociologist to ask about news-compulsion.

ERIC KLINENBERG, a sociology professor at New York University, said people are unusually transfixed by news of the day because the economic crisis in particular seems to reach into every corner of their lives. Usually, he added, people can compartmentalize their lives into different spheres of activity, such as work, family and leisure. But now, “those spheres are collapsing into each other.”

I do not buy Klinenberg’s veiled economism but I do see where his view stems from. More philosophically, we would consider his statement about the ability to rationalize and compartmentalize social phenomena parallel to what existential philosophers call “ontological security.” In other words, everything is in its right place. Or as the phrase goes, “everything is everything.” But as of late, during periods of crisis or social transformation, as the classical sociologist Durkheim believed, we experience a spike in “anomie” or normelessness. Or, as the great George Constanza put it: “Worlds are COLLIDING!!!!!“(Warning: The link is actually in Spanish overdub, which I find to be extra-hilarious.)

But beyond the existential argument, I find another area that the Times reports on to be far more interesting, that of what Pierre Bourdieu called “cultural capital.”

For others, information serves as social currency. Crises, like soap operas or sports teams, can provide a serial drama for people to talk about and bond over, said Kenneth J. Gergen, a senior research psychologist at Swarthmore College who studies technology and culture. “It gives us the stuff that keeps the community together,” he said. And for those whose social circles think of knowledge as power, having the latest information can also enhance status, Dr. Gergen said. “If you can just say what somebody said yesterday, that doesn’t do the trick,” he said.

This is something you and I have all experienced, which is the necessity of “one-up-manship” that occurs at all social gatherings especially in situation in which the person who does not know how to explain a derivative and its importance in the current global financial meltdown is looked upon as lacing social currency, in other words, culturally poor. It is most likely the case that we modulate between the one who is disdained and the one who disdains.

However, I find the tragic human alienation narrative that the Times story paints is not only a bit “precious” but also empirically iffy in one sense. Information can become a compulsion but it can also, and is in many places in the world, a hard-to-find commodity. And in many ways, I think information-in-use, that is not the concept of information but information as it is used socially and other wise, exists as something that is ready-at-hand, not something is overloading humans’ ability to use it. What I mean to say is that the Times report lacks an understanding of information distribution. It assumes that because all of this information exists in our technomediated worlds, that it is used by everyone at once. It is quite clear that people do not use one media at a time; I, along with most of you all, watch TV regularly with laptop close by. Nevertheless, information, especially news, must be accessed through iPhone, TV sets, and computers. It does not land on the doorstop of your consciousness with the help of a news stork. All of this to say, the Times paints the portrait of the overfed individual who obsessively watches the news and goes to Huffington Post by him or herself. This is a very old story from the 1950s in which the individual loses his or her individuality through the colonization of his or her mind by technology (See various books by Riesman, Lasch, Adorno and Horkheimer, Jacques Ellul, and more recently Neil Postman). But this is not exactly an accurate picture of the conditions under which information is distributed–sent out and received.

How many times have you sat around the TV with roommates, friends, significant others and had a burning question which was quite easily answered by someone grabbing the computer or whipping out (pause..haha, had to do it.) their iPhone?

X-posted at Human Potential.