Category: Me Myself&I

I went to Baldwin Hills two weeks ago.

Wikipedia says it all:

Baldwin Hills Estates (east of La Brea, southwest of Santo Tomas Drive, south of the Jim Gilliam Recreation Center and north of Stocker Street), one of the wealthiest majority-African American areas in the United States, and is sometimes called "the Black Beverly Hills".

I so wanted to see it, you don’t even know. Just neighborhoods with black people, looking good and over Los Angeles. I read about that place. I dreamed of this place. I imagined myself biking that hard hill, needing some water and some nice black people would ask me if I wanted some.

It happened exactly like that. I had to give up and walk and this black woman is there on the other side of the street. She doesn’t even yell, it is so quiet up there. She simply asks me if I need any water and I gently declined, short of breath and walking with my bike on the side.

It took me at least 20 minutes to think that I could have engaged a conversation with someone living there and that I didn’t, totally just high on the beauty, those families living peacefully, that dude asking me wassup walking down his driveway with his 10 year old son, both looking like hip hop stars. Pianos standing in the middle of living rooms.

It’s a weird thing to feel so comfortable somewhere and at the same time, being such a stranger.

So thankful I’ve been in those hills though. I shall return.

“That empty, forever empty”  Oh I know that thing, Louis. It started early when I learned that I didn’t have parents or brothers and sisters and understood that “forever alone” feeling very well. Orphans are some kind of cold ice motherfuckers with the biggest empathy you’ll see but anyway.

I got used to the idea of being alone. Like maybe a little too much. It makes me feel so powerful! I can stay days alone doing music, fighting my own little creative demons, feeling and filling the void, feeling like shit or feeling like the best warrior on earth.

And then I go out and enjoy so many things, kids smiling, the design of an aisle at a supermarket, the weird interaction of a mom and her kid, everything becomes fucking interesting and awesome. Then at some point I realize how much all of that is theater, people playing their roles. It’s all kind of fake and I go back to that sappy (sad and happy) loneliness that brings me to inspiration and analysis of things and overall making me feel good.

It’s a game, you have to be able to perform in both “forever empty” and “social” mode. The problem is –like Louis demonstrates- that we’re way too much into the social part, which is pure construction. It doesn’t really exist, you know? We’re willing to kill other people driving and texting so that we can feel NOT alone. Attention whorism reached its peak.

Disconnect. Take your time. Learn to play an instrument, learn to listen, read stuff. Be alone and deal with it. It’s pretty good. Also, you’ll die alone like everyone so get used to it.

Like Paul Mooney says “oh, death is coming. Just wait.”

Dave Chappelle. I had barely heard about the Rick James skit, which with the Prince one are the first videos of Dave I saw in the early 2000s. I started watching the Chappelle Show in ‘09 when it had been over for a while but boy, did I cry my ass off. Just so good, terribly immature sometimes but so hilariously honest and funny. Dave introduced me to Paul Mooney.

I got all the videos, audios, books I could about Paul. Paul’s the shit. I did the same with Dave.

Watching his Inside the Actor’s Studio thing, I realized how much pressure Dave had gone through. I realized how bad he felt with the Rick James thing where he kind of, not intentionally at least just for fun, used him. Now Rick’s dead and hecklers can’t shut the fuck up. With the weight of a segregated country that has such a twisted approach to black entertainers, there’s enough to get sick as a dog. Reading Paul’s journey with Richard Pryor also showed me that it was nothing new.

I remember his ‘04 For What It’s Worth stand up where he jokes about how “they’re locking our (black) stars up!” but the more I think about it the more I feel that it’s actually happening, in some way. Negative stuff happening are branded on black people. We can’t get away with anything. Dave Chappelle walks off stage? IT’S A FUCKING MELTDOWN. Bill Burr (that I love too) shreds the crowd for 12 minutes hoping that they all fucking die and the video is called PHILADELPHIA INCIDENT? Dave will have to live the rest of the year reading about his supposed meltdown while no one gives a shit about what Bill did.

Fuck that, people.

I just miss Dave, man. I miss his delivery, his different voices and tones, I miss his wit, I miss how many hilarious comments or skits he could have done for the almost past ten years since his last big special. When I see Black Bush and the Mars part popping out on Tumblr or Reddit, I miss him even harder. I know he’s one of the sharpest ever and I wish I could have seen his talent evolve, I wish he had had some specials on the internet like Louis CK did.

Instead I just get gossips and badmouthing here and there with people dropping the “he’s crazy anyway”. Suck a dick, you guys.

And Dave if you read this, walk off stage as many times as you need to until the crowd gets its shit together and please, release some specials on the intertubes. It’s where’s it’s at son come on now.

After writing about Amazon Fresh I can’t stop but think about my French services, how I can’t even compare to what I see in California. I try to see the hidden costs though because these amazing services have one.

People work really hard and barely make it. French took another way where we don’t work so hard but we’re not so happy in an ocean of mediocrity. It wears your happiness out, croissants or not.

Add the fact that anywhere, you can lose your income for any reason at anytime (we don’t need you anymore, you have to work half the time, for a smaller pay, this company bought your company and shuts down everything because profit is barely up 0.5%) and I really don’t see how we can be against a basic income. It’s just fair. Things go fast. Amazon –97,000 employees- is going to hit WalMart –employing 2.2 million people-  hard. I know a developer who was making nice money with web stuff mid 2000s. Today all that stuff is automated, he lost his job somehow. What my mom, accountant has been doing since the 80s is totally automatable. It eventually will. How many musicians lost their gigs to samplers? There’s no end to it.

Basic income solves a nice equation: you don’t have to work so hard and when you do, you do your job nicely because you’re not doing it to get by, you do it because you like it. Best of both US and French culture.

We would just need to stop being greedy, introduce a whole lot of transparency and we would be fine.

TL;DR: it’s so good it freaks me out a bit.

So Amazon started this summer to deliver food too. All the food. They also partner with local stores.

Orders have to be above $35 and the fee a year is $220 (or $299 for non prime users). It stings, but for now free trial…

You can order for the next day and get delivery from before 7am to 9pm. I do before 7am because you wake up and you have your food waiting for you in green bags at the front door. Super neat. You only have to be present when you buy alcohol. They collect your old bags and that’s it. Of course you can order stuff from traditional Amazon too so basically for the first time since the web exists, I have a one stop for everything at my fingertips, with delivery from next day to a couple of days later for non-fresh items.

I mean, it’s sexy as hell. And we’re only two using this service, I can’t even imagine for a family of four how it would change your life. Did I mention that they keep your fresh items with frozen bottles of water that are given for free? Free water! I was sending them back at first. In 2050 people will be like “remember when we were getting free water ordering from Amazon? Those were the days.” Prices are competitive with stores and they have deals and also deliver bulks (10 boxes of granola bars, BAM). Oh, and also once the delivery was 20 minutes late. Full refund. *that’s what I’m talking ‘bout*

Absolutely no one likes going for grocery shopping, it doesn’t matter if it’s close or far, with a car or on a bike. Amazon Fresh is a massive update in quality of life, no doubt about it (and that’s why even if they don’t make a lot of money today because of investments in trucks and fridges, they will). Of course, you can still hang around your favorite stores but it’s no more a chore.

But what about the future? I adore efficiency but I feel conflicted about how it destroys simple lives. I don’t work in retail, automation doesn’t dictate my life I’m safe for a while but what about like, millions of people? How Amazon will deal with new local stores who want to enter the Biggest Store In The World? Will they be ignored, unable to sustain a local business and die because Amazon decided to pass on their services? What about delivery segregation creating more inequality?

We’ll see but you know what usually happens when a company finally has all the power. For now though let’s not get paranoid, Amazon Fresh is really good. I’d pay that annual fee I think. Shopping anytime, anything, anywhere, with next day delivery? If I had a household with a kid, I would have already paid.

So this is happening. Basically, Google does the same bullshit Microsoft did with IE6. But I thought the web was all about platform agnosticism! It’s not. It’s awful. HTML5? It’s worse than anything else. Have a look.

Anyway it’s business. Same cause (success) produces the same effect (nasty behavior). Don’t you ever come to me telling than one company is better than another when it comes to commercial and tactical practices. When they compete at the same level, they use the same arsenal. Common sense but I guess it isn’t that common these days…

In the end one comment says it all:

What does this mean for the users of Microsoft products? A lot of people still use Internet Explorer. Whatever Microsoft’s sins may be, how is it just to punish their users, who had nothing of substance to do with this? Do you turn potential customers away because you don’t like the car they drive, or the style of suit they wear?

What it did, coupled with the fact that MS services like Outlook.com and Skydrive are neat and support all platforms is that I stopped using almost all Google services. It drove me away. Google helped. That’s how stupid that practice is.

So listen up, service providers: the platform I want to use your services on is none of your business, you have to provide good experiences, regardless. And if you do nasty things or purposely don’t listen, it doesn’t make me want to use your stuff, stuff that alternatives can provide as well.

In other news Microsoft and Google are suing the government over transparency. They agree on something. Hurrah…

TNC article, brilliant as usual. This is what Obama said during the 50th anniversary of the “I have a dream” speech:

And then, if we’re honest with ourselves, we’ll admit that during the course of 50 years, there were times when some of us claiming to push for change lost our way. The anguish of assassinations set off self-defeating riots. Legitimate grievances against police brutality tipped into excuse-making for criminal behavior.

I was like livid. How the fuck can you say that Mr. President, on this occasion, when you know this:

There is the rub: In the 1960s, black men and women who carried the pain of living in a white terrorist state, who carried the pain of redlining, of job discrimination, of being cheated out of land, cut on the television and saw black women and children getting the shit kicked out of them. No one was being punished. Sometimes the police were doing the kicking. They saw this, and they stewed. They’d seen it before. And as they had in the face of racial pogroms, and in the face of slavery itself, they closed their mouths, swallowed the daggers, and got dressed for  work.

And they’re still doing so through stop and frisks, tragedies like Katrina or Trayvon to terrible awards. I think African Americans are so used to swallow daggers for breakfast that they’ll eventually become immortal.

Joke aside, I’m deeply disgusted.

Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it.

On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs.

We don’t talk about it because we drink. Seriously. Alcohol is probably the best drug (yes, I put alcohol in the drug folder) to forget things like unhappiness and heart pain and it’s super legal. We all did it. Some do every weekend. Some countries are known for this tradition of Friday alcohol abuse, passing out at 9:30pm (hi mate).

We know that we can sustain humanity with much less work than what the norm is. We know that effectively, more than 40 hours a week is absolutely unproductive and destructive. Working hours are decreasing all around the world but in the US. We know that we spend an insane amount of time commuting and that most companies inertia makes it impossible to scale up efficiency anyway. We swim an ocean of oil. Then we get our salaries and try to forget about all that shit with a couple of bottles. Some people have plans, they work those BS jobs to invest, create something but a lot just don’t have anything but that job and a rent. Next thing you know, they start swinging at home. This is how it happens. Stress.

I am all for a Basic Income. Numbers and facts are all leading to this. Except that it breaks so many people’s mind because Sweet Jesus of Murica, that is close to communism. Most people still believe in a system that is pretty much, a mirage. They got lucky or they think they will. Meanwhile they fight to not punch that stupid coworker in the face. The answer is: Think Different *wink*

I think basic income is just fair. There are so much money –trillions- out there wasted are you shitting me? I’d rather know that taxes I pay are directly going to someone’s pocket, money she/he will spend around, maybe buying my stuff. It just feels like the right thing to do to engage people in doing things they like instead of struggling, making the worst decisions just to get by. It is unfair and we have the resources to deal nicely with it, making people accountable with maximum transparency.

We just need to change and when I see how people can’t with stupid things like a damn menu not being present in an OS, I doubt we can change our global vision of how to life on this planet, instantly killing so many people’s efforts and dreams of rising above “the rest”.

But then, we’d be good. I, for one, have a dream.

For those not on twitter 24/7 a girl at Slane Festival didn’t just enjoy Eminem but gave at least two men blow jobs, and was photographed doing it. As is the way with such things the photographs have gone viral.

So this happened and I totally support this opinion about it. I still don’t understand men’s incapacity to see how in the long term having women enjoying an open sexuality is benefiting us you morons, but anyway.

Let’s talk about oral sex.

The author notes how a woman gives a head, how it’s an active thing to do. What I find fascinating with oral sex is more the duality of being in control as much as being vulnerable, both ways: you are “down there” but you have the most fragile and sensitive external organ of the human body between your teeth. You are “above” your partner but you are “on your knees” in your mind. Oral sex is an exercise on trust and a beautiful dance between power and powerlessness. I think it’s great and so simply pure but anyway I’m totally subjective.

It’s really sad how we don’t make sense for teenagers, being all positive about them being who they are, experiencing things and then we just condemn them when they are doing just that , when they are women. I wish we were showing more consistency.

Great article on science, science is not your enemy. It made me think about how I see languages in a very pragmatic way.

To me languages are tools to communicate. We reached a point where if you use English, a majority of human beings can understand you. I mean to me it’s almost all there is. It’s huge. Imagine if human beings had been able to at least understand each other for most of our story. Things would be different, in a good way I think.

English won because of wars of course, but also because of its efficiency: I’m often amazed at how things are simpler explained in Shakespeare’s updated language compared to French, which is a very precise language. So precise that it tends to get superfluous. You have to read extreme academic things in English to reach a pompousness level like French does commonly in magazines. 

What about culture? Culture acts like a reward to me which is why French don’t know much about German, the reward didn’t look so great compared to the massive Anglo-American cultural wave. Mostly people learn languages best when they have to: the computing era from the 80s to today demanded the French to understand English whatever local dialect we were using: I had to get the dictionary to understand words used to navigate game menus and computers (My 1992 born sister though doesn’t need English because everything in the digital world is translated in French today even though everything is English-based) as Swedish kids growing up with subtitled movies.

The start of home computing converted more people to English than the British Empire ever could, without being messy and slaughter-ish. No one in the world in the 80s/90s except people moving to France, needed French.

So I don’t really get why people learn a language just for the cultural aspect of it. You can’t practice everyday, you don’t have any need for it and the environment is not in this language. So it’s like an intellectual workout? I mean it’s pretty hard so why the pain? Africans speaking like five or six different dialects, they don’t do that for fun.

People connect language and culture like they’re inseparable but you don’t need Italian to read about Italian culture. I’d go faster by reading a lot about Italy in English or French or have a trip to Italy where I can ask smart questions about Italy to Italians in English, still following?

I don’t know. Sometimes it bothers me when people are doing things with no real purpose. Also I smile when I see all the “West” sharing stories on Reddit, spreading knowledge faster than people can absorb. Americans learn tons of shit they didn’t know and they didn’t know stuff for way too long and seriously question things like guns or health care. That is progress. That’s what effective communication does. Thanks, common language.

I love seeing that. Between flying across half the globe and reading people from all over the world sharing their views and ideas on a website, I feel like living on a planet with my human people. Thanks, English.