Category: Me Myself&I

What a crazy year.

It feels even more crazy by standing here, between Christmas and New Year’s Eve in underwear in sunny Los Angeles when I always been calling names the lack of sky in Paris and the fucking cold weather.

I’ve been busy transferring at last this blog to a WordPress engine on a new server. Nothing should change for you but I’ll let you know if it does.

–insert paragraph about how it’s pretty complicated to move 1,000 posts from Windows Server to Apache and how I did it all by myself with the help of the interweb-

Also these Steam sales are insanely satisfying. I hope Valve will release the numbers because they must be the best ever.

But back to these crazy twelve months. I think I got enough emotions and ideas to create and build stuff for the next decade.

Peace out, reader. And have an outstanding next year.

There’s so much going on about Wikileaks. It was going great, bringing transparence through a thick coat of BS, revealing what we could guess or what we were totally suspecting. It was nice in terms of public image for the White Knight.

Obviously with Julian Assange’s sexual assault charge it’s less the case. We don’t know everything yet but it appears that the Whitemare like Jon Stewart called him really did some bad things. The all “sex by surprise” thing.

I don’t know what is going to happen with his arrest but the fact that a lot of people find normal that once you say yes to have sex automatically means that whatever happens after saying no is invalid ,really confuses me. The dude has to finish is that it? Seriously, WTF.

The thing is if Julian had been a bit more of a gentleman or let’s say if he hadn’t been a complete douche on a booty call, Wikileaks and him would be in a very different –and I guess better- situation right now.

Bummer.

People are not stupid.

First, we always say “never underestimate your enemy/opponent” but we’re still so eager to consider that a vast majority of people are dumb? It doesn’t make sense and I always had a hard time to deal with this stereotype. And something is always going to remind me that now.

It was two years ago or so, I was visiting my foster parents in the countryside. One of my foster dad’s friend was coming over. He’s a farmer, he looks like a farmer, smells like a farmer and never drinks water if you know what I mean. I swear you would think he’s straight out of the Middle Age with his tanned face and bad teeth (for the ones still here).

Anyway, he’s having his glass of Pastis 51 (sans water) and we’re chatting briefly, I’m saying that I’m about to go for the first time in the US. He’s looking at me, his iced-blue eyes wide open.

And there, I’m an asshole. I think that I made him dream, I think that he obviously never left the region in more than sixty years, maybe went to Paris.

He’s telling me that he’s been to Chicago once. I’m like, maybe a trip to see a John Deere’s convention. But he’s explaining to me that he went there to bail out a cousin, who had been in jail after some serious problems with these people. So he had to bail him out, drive him back in Chicago, deal with the lawyer…

I know. I was amazed in every way. That he could do that, amazed at how I felt superior and so shitty so rapidly there after.

I was happy. Not just for the slap in my ego’s shitface, but simply because it gives hope and trust that people are capable. People are capable and not dumb. They learn.

After they know, it’s all about persistence.

It’s a strange feeling to see someone so important in your life getting so close to death. I feel stupid because there’s no surprise, cancer is a bitch. Two years it’s been going down, slowly. No surprise.

But I’m all like fffffffuuuuuuuuu.

I just wish I could be there helping him dealing with the pain, helping her with him. Maybe a last joke or two. Or three.

I read a couple of threads out there about the US and the lack of culture VS Europe and its abundance of culture. I feel I have something to say about it.

First, it should be separated between output of culture (creation, content gets out) and input of culture (consumption, content gets in).

There’s no debate about what the US brought in our human culture. I’m just thinking about music and it’s overwhelmingly a US thing since 100 years. The output volume is gigantic.

In terms of input though, the US are pretty bad and it makes sense because they’re a lot busy creating and thinking $$$. Europe is the consumption place.

I was thinking the other day that my friend and I had access to US music that was not even commercially successful in their own country at this time –94, Korn-. Thanks to a lot of passionate people in the chain, we had access almost in real time to what’s hot in California and across the world, with just one store in the suburbs of Paris.

I’m sure people didn’t have access to what’s hot in Marseille or Osaka in a store in Portland at this time.

It’s an old thing: English people were consuming US black music like crazy (that’s how the Beatles and so many others are born, playing RnB stuff they bought  on 45s, excited) when all these musicians were poor if not homeless or about to die anonymously in the United States, their country. Hendrix was already a star in Europe and despite having played more than 10 years in his country, the US needed Paul McCartney’s recommendation of Jimi Hendrix band for Monterey to actually approve the talent of the most famous lefty in the world since then. Kind of pathetic.

This tells so much about what culture is about in the US: making bucks first (Zynga market valuation, so not right).

I remember reading Miles Davis biography being mad because he was unknown in his own country while he was a god in France. Same with Booker T and the MGs. Same with Quincy Jones etc. Once I had a private message on YouTube asking me: “how did you see this band ?? They’re from L.A. I’m in NYC and I’ve never seen them here ever!!”. Saw them twice in Paris, for cheap.

Europe culturally just likes anything new to consume. We had mangas almost fifteen years before they hit the US. In France the connection with what was going on culturally in Japan was as short as a few years. Without internet.

But it’s not just with culture outside of the country. When I see that the Sequoia National Park, a few hours away from L.A. is almost unknown to people in the city, my European brain doesn’t understand: these trees only grow naturally here, these are 2000 years old living organisms, there are two of the biggest trees in the world… I mean If California was in France, everybody living in L.A. would have done a trip in this forest and be bored about it. Yeah, yeah giant trees whatever…

Stax Records. Look at this fucking list of artists. The legendary studio A recorded some of the most immortal US music ever. Of course it has been destroyed:

The Stax studio was sold by the Union Planters Bank to Southside Church of God in Christ, located nearby on McLemore Avenue. Except for a brief time when it was used as a soup kitchen, it was allowed to deteriorate so it was torn down in 1989.

It’s like the UK destroyed Abbey Road Studios which started in 1931. Well, they didn’t:

At the end of 2009, the studios came under threat of sale to property developers, but the studio received historic site status from the British government in 2010 to protect it.

The US have a real problem with long term, sustain and respect keywords. They are too busy creating and successfully exporting entertainment –a big part of culture- while ignoring a bit too much everything else including local things that don’t make a shitload of money. During that time in Europe the creative success is usually weak, unsupported and doesn’t go much further than its own national borders while if you haven’t seen this super weird and obscure movie from New Zealand that just got out you totally suck. And if you don’t know some US trash TV or don’t listen to that 3 month old Canadian indie electro rock band you suck even more. This cultural elitism is so poisoning sometimes.

To conclude, both world are unbalanced.

Read this NY Times article yesterday (if the article doesn’t show up, copy/paste the title in Google and then click the link). Can’t really get my mind off it. Cold hard facts:

• "Only 12 percent of black fourth-grade boys are proficient in reading, compared with 38 percent of white boys, and only 12 percent of black eighth-grade boys are proficient in math, compared with 44 percent of white boys."
• Also, young white male students who are in poverty do as well as young black male students who are not in poverty.
• "In high school, African-American boys drop out at nearly twice the rate of white boys, and their SAT scores are on average 104 points lower."
• Only 5% of college students in 2008 were black men. At the same time, black men were incarcerated more than any other demographic group—at 6.5 times the rate of white males.

Between that and thinking about what I see here in L.A. or what’s happening in the South after Katrina, all these families broken etc

For the first time in my life about this racial issue, I feel hopeless. Desperately hopeless. How to break the loop, I don’t fucking know.

In France well it’s not as dramatic but it’s awful enough. It’s like black people there saw how much the US way wasn’t working during the past thirty years and how hard it was for a handful of them to succeed. And France has a colonial past, meaning a past of slavery with its minorities that makes some people able to hire illegal immigrants from Africa, get their passports and make them work for 20 years without doing nothing to legalize their situations. It doesn’t feel like an open environment to succeed for their children. It’s survival, by any means necessary, anger, violence etc Add the fact that the culture of praising self made people is inexistent and you have a recipe for disaster.

Meanwhile an old white man is dying in its old white small village, a man that a lot would consider racist though he took care of me for six years, made me jump on his lap and has a giant picture of me above his bed. I don’t know what connection we have, it’s hard to define. But we have it, no matter what. By reading all that stuff on black people vs the world it seems inconceivable but this shit is real to me. Real. Defying the norm and reducing it into powder.

Extremely lucky. Extremely isolated too.

I can’t get over this Lonnie Johnson story. It’s actually old news from a few years ago.

I’m speechless reading his amazing journey. I’m excited with his invention, backed up by the scientific community as something that has enough potential to dramatically change the world (yeah, I’m into this shit these days).

And yet Lonnie struggles to finance his research. I can’t get over this either.

When I read about his perfect career at the Air Force and NASA (received multiple achievement awards), his perfect life (helps children in Georgia and created jobs around his hometown), I don’t understand. There’s something deeply wrong in this country well known as Entrepreneur Land when a man like Lonnie is in difficulty to do research on his JTEC engine prototype and maybe start a worldwide revolution.

I mean the effing PARC said  about the invention “ it’s a very clever way to extract energy from a heat engine … It’s incredibly elegant.” But the defense about why Lonnie’s concept and prototype are not heavily funded is basically this (comment from ycombinator):

Investing in this is a huge risk since even though the concept might actually work it may turn out that there’s no economical sane way to enter mass production. In addition there’s still the doubt of "too good to be true" because it usually is.

A huge risk to invest a couple million dollars in order to change the entire energy economy, opening new markets? We have games, websites, failing with hundreds of million $ of funding, how come investing even half of that in the potential of the JTEC is crazy?? And if there’s still a doubt how the fuck are you going to make it disappear if you don’t help? It’s the kind of argument you could use for any invention Humanity discovered. It’s almost nonsense to stop at “it’s a risk” in R&D. R&D is about taking risks and minimizing or at least manage them.

Like another comment said, “if an electric sports car for the rich can get funded, so can this guy.”

Well apparently not.

Yeah, he’s a minority. In his skin. In his way and fields he’s doing research –from working on spacecrafts for the government to create squirt guns on its own to building an engine with both private and public interest-, he’s different, not academic, too cool. Probably a bad seller too.

But the man’s definitely got something, how come he be pretty much left alone in his little town in Georgia with no or very little funding available? Lonnie wants to stay independent and that doesn’t make it easy to get funding I guess. Still, how come?? MIT? Jay Z? Bill Gates? Fucking somebody??  

He gave a keynote almost two years ago and the goal was to develop a 25 Kilowatts engine in less than three years with the help of PARC.

Nothing in the news.

During that time, here’s a scale of R&D investments in different types of energy compared to the cost of the war in Iraq. Scroll down and cry.

So my question is: should I start a Kickstarter project and help a brother out?