I couldn’t find documentation on this elsewhere on the net so I decided to add a note here. I have to use a Windows XP workstation at my job and I’ve been annoyed that the Windows Live Messenger program seems to start up every time the system restarts. Disabling this was non-obvious:
Geography, Safety, and White Flight
It’s after bedtime and things I’ve been thinking about all day seem to be converging. One of the biggest changes in moving to Chicago is hearing about shootings on a daily basis. I found this map today and I don’t know how to interpret it, but it’s staggering, horrible, and also engrossing. I can’t help but overlay the map with my hasty impressions about the different racial and class makeups of neighborhoods across the city.
View Chicago homicides map in a larger map
The transit ride is about an hour to and from work but it doesn’t feel oppressive. It helps me block off time for reading and I can finally get down to finishing the book Sundown Towns. The added dimension of reading it now is that I get to also see the flip side of white flight: the concentration of Black residents in cities rather than their absence in certain suburbs or rural areas. Thinking about race and technology, I came across this quote from interviews with youth conducted by Danah Boyd:
Tara (16, Michigan): [Facebook] kind of seemed safer, but I don’t know like what would make it safer, like what main thing. But like, I don’t know, it just seems like everything that people say, it seems safer.
This sentiment refers to a digital geography, but it is so familiar to the way that people talk about safety in towns and cities. It is easy to ridicule those with these attitudes as paranoid or even prejudiced. The problem is not that concern for safety is unwarranted, but that segregation has ensured that everyone loses the ability to realistically assess safety and move towards a safer world/
Neighborhood Names
There was a pretty good article in the Redeye this morning about the confusion surrounding the names of neighborhoods in Chicago. Living at the cusp, or at least what some bar owners want to convince people is the cusp of Lakeview and Wrigleyville (or is Wrigleyville part of Lakeview?), I feel this for sure. Just as real-estate developers and realtors can create new names and changing populations can provide the momentum to change the name of a neighborhood, I think its also possible for names to be totally out of whack with the reality of the neighborhood. 2 weeks ago, I went to the Little Italy neighborhood with Chiara, and she was disappointed by the few remnants of Italian or Italian American culture that remained in the neighborhood. Googling after we got home, she found out that the Italian American community there was largely displaced by gentrification cased by the expansion of the UIC campus. I had remembered reading Florence Scala’s obituary in the paper, and though it was sad to see the changes that had affected her community, it was awesome to see the concrete reality of the place where she passionately worked to hold together a community. I found out about Scala from a Wikipedia entry which quoted interviews that she did with Studs Terkel. It seemed like such a great combination of old and new media. I don’t know if I would have come across Scala’s story without Wikipedia, but Terkel’s interview added such richness to the telling of her story.
Reconsidering MySpace
Update July, 21 2010: danah boyd added this framing to her inquiry into race and social networking. Regardless of the current demographics of social networks, people (teens in the case of the focus of boyd’s work) still speak about them with racialized/racist language that follows how people talk about physical spaces.
Since the subculture-centered Make Out Club, to Friendster, and through MySpace, and Facebook, I’ve always had social networking website accounts. However, I always shyed away from them for the bands that I was on. Putting music on sites like MySpace used to mean granting them broad license for your content and I didn’t like the idea of arbitrary advertising being pumped alongside somehting that was deeply important and thought over by me and my bandmates. This past weekend, however, someone mentioned to me the stark demographic differences in terms of race and age between MySpace and Facebook, claiming that Facebook users tend to be older and whiter than their MySpace counterparts. Does a prohibition from MySpace mean that we’re cutting ourselves off from a more diverse audience and precisely the one that the socio-economic factors supporting DIY punk has already marginalized? This sounds a little like marketing, but I feel like music can be one of those rare sites where people can connect across vastly different experiences. I don’t want to squander the opportunity that I have as a public music maker to break through the geographic and socio-economic segregation that has mediated my life for a long time.
AMC Reflection
I got back from the Allied Media Conference yesterday. It has been helpful to have gone out of town on the weekends, even though it has also been an impediment to feeling like I’m getting more familiar with the city outside of the default of my routine. Going away and coming back has reoriented my sense of home from Bloomington to Chicago in a way that probably would have taken much longer otherwise. As Chiara mentioned as we were coming into the city, the ideas and projects that represent at the AMC seem much more present and possible in Chicago.
This year, as was the case with the conference last year, I came back ambivalent, which is, perhaps the way it should be – that narrow space that is simulatenously “this is amazing and awesome” and ” this is a huge problem that we’re completely ignoring”. I spent most of my weekend in the Media Lab working on the Supercomputer Build. The best thing about this was meeting many different people who had visions and ideas for the technology or who identified as “geeks” but didn’t fit into every part of that stereotype. The only full session that I went to discussed how broadband stimulus funds could be and leveraged in a way that was useful and accountable to communities. Building computers from parts and installing free/libre/open source software on them felt like the micro version of broader efforts to increase access to technological infrastructure. The people with the vision were the ones building the machines, and hopefully, with cases off and free software, the platform seemed malleable and responsive to that vision.
My friend Josh said that he felt like more space was made for print media at this year’s conference, but being surrounded by technology it was hard for me to assess that. There was ample evidence that we were all struggling to make the technology responsive to our activities and human networks rather than the other way around. The Voces Moviles project is very awesome, giving immigrant workers in LA, many with limited internet acess, access for their stories on a blogging platform via their mobile phones. However, I was disappointed that, given the limited time in the keynote, they chose to exhbit the platform rather than the stories. This culminated in a projected IRC channel with tweets, vozmob texts, and IRC chats that ended up seeming very distracting to me. Also, juxtaposing the vozmob technology with something like twitter is useful for explaining it, but reinforces the idea that FLOSS and community technology hackers are simply trying to recreate commercial technologies instead of trying the address their missing functionality for communities. Ultimately, the stream of txts and tweets just didn’t seem very articulate. Detroit MCs Invincible and Sterling had planned to drop freestyle verses being prompted by people’s projected messages in response to the question “what are you ready for?” Unfortunately, most of the messages were things like “The AMC is so awesome”. It is hard to condense complicated feelings and ideas into 140 characters on the spot and the nature of the messages just showed that there’s a great need to assert collective experience and excitement, even when sitting in the same auditorium. I sat next to some older ladies who proved that snark needn’t be exclusive to my generation. They were particularly incensed by the projected messages. Maybe the technology seemed cryptic to them, or maybe it didn’t meet their needs at that moment. The nice thing about the AMC is that this kind of counterpoint remains present at the conference.
A more successful public use of technology at the keynote was a Skype video chat with an artist/organizer in South Africa. The connection was shaky at times and it was difficult for the moderator to speak into the PA mic, so the audience could hear it, and also into the computer mic without everything feeding back like crazy. Still, I think it demonstrated how you can make technology do things it wasn’t exactly designed to do, that doing this doesn’t always go smoothly, but ultimately people can come together to use tools to do cool, useful things.
I’m so glad that I got to be a part of this year’s conference. Ultimately, the greatest value to me comes not from the session content but from all the people you meet and the threads of conversastion that bring together and blanket the session topics. Even holed away in the Media Lab I got such a strong sense of that.
Masculinity and Sexual Assault Awareness Month
This is a first draft of an op-ed for a group called ManUp! that I’m working with in Bloomington. I’d appreciate any comments or feedback:
April, sexual assault awareness month makes me tired. I am tired of seeing women that I respect and care about exhausted as they do the challenging, important, but also extremely difficult work of supporting survivors of rape, sexual assault, and domestic violence and working to raise consciousness which might prevent future violence. Many of these remarkable friends have experienced violence in their lives and started doing the work that they do because of the lack of support that they experienced. Their efforts are remarkable and brave yet ultimately they shoulder the weight of their pasts as well as the weight of the survivors that they support and the confused, indifferent, or even hostile voices they encounter doing prevention work.
I am tired of feeling trapped in the same tired discussion in the rare cases that men’s violence and men’s violence against women comes to the surface, whether it is in the lives of celebrities such as Chris Brown or the lives of men in my social circles. I can try to excuse the violence, weakly dismissing it as stress or substance abuse or as an isolated incident. Or, I can pat myself on the back, satisfied that at least I am not one of “those men†who chooses to be violent, to harass and intimidate those passing by on the street, who touches someone’s body without their permission, who pressures someone to consume too much alcohol or drugs in the hope of getting lucky, or who seeks to belittle and control intimate partners. In either case, I can’t find the imagination to think of a world where perpetrating and experiencing violence is not a part of manhood – mine, my friends, or Chris Brown’s.
I am tired of a man’s strength being defined by his ability to suppress painful experiences and to downplay the experiences of others rather than crying out and reaching out and working in the hopes that others might be spared those painful experiences.  I am tired of the gentleman’s agreement that we will not speak of our fear of violence from other men or the fear of the violence we have committed or might commit.
Finally, I am tired of the myth that violence against women doesn’t matter to men and that it is not men’s work to end this violence. It is a myth that I have found comfort in because it excuses my own inaction. If this myth rings true to me or other men, I fear it is only because we have spent so much energy convincing ourselves that it is true.  When I think of all the effort spent changing the subject to avoid seeming vulnerable, laughing along or remaining silent when a friend tells a cruel, demeaning joke, or convincing myself that it’s not my place to say or do something when I witness or hear about violence it seems like such a waste. All that energy could have gone into dealing with the violence that men have witnessed or experienced in our lives to make sure that we don’t repeat it. It could go to defining manhood by our best, most noble qualities instead of the worst of our choices. It could go towards working earnestly as allies with women to prevent violence that hurts us all. Sexual assault awareness month is not just a chance to be aware that violence is terrible, that it happens too frequently, or even that it hurts both women and men. It is also an opportunity to be aware that we can make a different, less violent world.
Graffiti Panic
This is a letter to the editor that I just submitted in response to an editorial in today’s H-T, Graffiti not art; it is vandalism:
I was disappointed by today’s editorial condemning graffiti. Rather than fostering a nuanced and frank dialog about complicated issues like the state of public and private spaces in Bloomington, the editorial’s intention seemed only to attempt to induce panic. Why even mention the specter of gang violence when the police department confirms that graffiti in Bloomington has no relation to such violence? Furthermore, I am disappointed by the brief mention of the “broken windows theory” and other studies outside of the context of a broader body of research. This theory, like many sociological theories, is still being widely debated. For instance, one study by researchers Robert J. Sampson of Harvard University and Stephen W. Raudenbush of the University of Michigan suggests that rather than being inherently problematic to the well-being of a neighborhood, graffiti (among other things) invokes deep-rooted anxieties and prejudices that people have about changing class and race dynamics of a community. Ultimately, I am far more concerned about the high costs of renting spaces, barriers to starting businesses, and difficulty finding employment in Bloomington. If we do not address these factors, graffiti may be the only way that many can participate in Bloomington’s downtown.
Django: Querying data from the Python shell
I needed to get some stats for some research that we’re doing and was happy to see that you can use Django and the python shell to query testament data in a way that’s database independent. It’s a little unintuitive if you’re thinking in SQL mode, but it is usable and super-helpful. I wanted to share it with ya’ll in case you needed to quickly pull stats or examine info.
Helpful reference Django docs:
- http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/db/queries/#making-queries
- http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/models/querysets/#queryset-api-reference
Print the prison name, city, and state of all prisons that received a package sent by the Midwest Pages to Prisones Project from 2009-01-01 to 2009-03-22
geoff@btp:/var/www/testament/testament_trunk/btp$ python manage.py shell >>> import datetime >>> from core.models import Prison, Package >>> start_date = datetime.date(2009, 1, 1) >>> end_date = datetime.date(2009, 3, 22) >>> prisons = Prison.objects.filter(package__sent_on__range=(start_date, end_date), package__group__username__exact='mwpp').distinct() >>> for prison in prisons: >>> print "%s %s, %s" % (prison.name, prison.city, prison.state)
Defiance, Ohio Northwest Tour Day 1
I’m going to try to write about tour this time. It comes and goes so fast that sometimes all I feel is left are these “remember when …” snippets that come up between people I’ve been on tour with that are nice to remember but alienating to everyone else in the conversation.
I told Florence and Oona that I had to wake up yesterday at 4AM in order to get a flight that would put us in SC in time to play the show that night. Florence just rolled her eyes and said “That’s crazy”, which is funny because she’s had enough long, early-morning flying in her life that it’s not unfamiliar. I think for her, and maybe other people, the idea of going on tour remains abstract enough that it adds this additional element of “craziness”. The flights all went okay in the end, even though Theo flew separately and had 2 layovers and had his accordion stuck in SLC for a while. Bz, Ryan, and I got to play pinball on our layover and managed to sneak our instruments on as carry-on.
We rented this crazy, new-car-smelling, Hybrid car. It’s pretty surreal, but fun. It’s a small thing, but hopefully it saves us some money and makes the ecological footprint of touring a little less. I don’t know how to calculate that. A bunch of folks drove up from S. California for the show last night because we’re not making it south of Santa Cruz. It’s awesome that people are willing to do that, and I have fond, fond memories of the concert road trip. At the same time it just seems so costly. I guess I take it for granted that I get to see a lot of good bands without having to travel far.
My totally uninformed, knee-jerk reaction to Santa Cruz is that it is a mash-up of Beverly Hills and Eureka. As we rolled into town, stopped at a spotlight, I saw two guys yelling at each other and waving blunt objects. One guy had a hammer and another had this cane. The windows were rolled up so it was really surreal to see this scenario play out on mute. I had this sick feeling of being trapped, just waiting for someone to get really hurt. It would be easy to dismiss the two dudes as just being fucking crazy, but I think that lifts a lot of the accountability from their shoulders. One of the guys kept starting to walk away, then the other guy would walk away, then the first guy would turn arond and say something and the other guy would start following him again waving his hammer. It was so obvious that either of them could have chosen to just end it and walked away and saved themselves from getting really hurt and a lot of motorists from witnessing two guys bludgeon each other. But, they felt like that had to keep provoking each other to keep their dignity intact. It’s definitely a very gendered interaction, and I’ve felt it, though not involving such an immediate threat of violence. I hate feeling like there is this trade-off between feeling like the choice is between avoiding violence and just escolating a stupid situatin and having your dignity and not feeling like you’re getting trampled on and letting a person who isn’t very nice or respectful “win”. Not saying anything feels like you’re resigning yourself to a world dictated by violence and intimidation, but escalating conflict seems like it just hastens the worst realization of that world.
Playing the show was hard because we didn’t get to practice with Will, but I think it went okay. People seemed stoked, even though we got completely squished. When I tried to adjust to make more space for Bz or Theo, I feel like I ended up just bumping the other one more. Punk is such a participatory medium, it’s hard to imagine people not wanting to be so close and get jostled, but there are times when I just can’t sing or play from getting jostled too much and it feels like the musical aspect is just lost. I guess it’s reductve to separate people dancing and feeling part of this collective mass from the music, but it’s still frustrating. It’s uncomfortable to feel like we’re scolding people when we ask for more space.
I enjoyed watching the bands that we played with more than I have in a long time. Black Rainbow was great and dealt well with playing first in a sort of akwards space. I liked Fischer a lot and how their music just sounds good without being overworked, labored, or trendy. I had seen a bunch of the folks from St. Augustine’s bands before, but I think I might like Tubers the best. They just looked like they were feeling what they were doing completely. Dichotomy was totally good and also seemed really immersed in playing which somehow seems to make such a difference. I’m excited to be playing shows with them this week, though the social coordination of 10 people is probably going to be really challenging.
CRL Administration Menu
This is a module that I wrote while working on the new Drupal-based site for the Center for Research Libraries. It is a good example of how you can manipulate the menu created by the Administration Menu module.
You can check out the code at https://github.com/ghing/crl_admin_menu/tree