Easter 2011

Music represents the aspirations of a people. Bach, Handel, Telemann, Corelli, Vivaldi, Mozart: proof that the human race was worth saving. Their music was to reflect the glory of God. But now? Easter 2011? Jadakiss? Hip hop, rap, kwaito? Goth? Music that reflects the condition of fallen man. Romans 1, my friends, Romans 1.

posted from Bloggeroid

Worth saving?

Bach, Handel, Telemann, Corelli, Vivaldi, Mozart: proof that the human race was worth saving. But now? Hip hop, rap, kwaito? Goth?

posted from Bloggeroid

Naked

My lips are naked
without yours to cover them;
my bones like ice
without your fire to warm them,
my soul shabby and shapeless
in the wardrobe of these days.

But in the places where your tongue
danced and played,
memories still remain;
my heart dresses itself in those memories
again and again and again.

posted from Bloggeroid

Cool Reading

cool reading
I never thought I'd say it, but I'm starting to prefer epubs to books. Why? Because epubs are extremely portable, so small that I can carry hundreds of them in my pocket, and now intensely readable even on a cellphone. Pdfs are horrible on a phone (too big in too many ways) but epubs seem to me to be the future of publishing (in exciting avenues of ways). As an author and reader I'm ready to roll with the new wave.

Firefox 4 ppa

Firefox 4 ppa



I've been using the Firefox 4 beta for a while now and like it a lot--it's fast and a great improvement on Fox 3xxx although I won't say it's better than Chromium. It's now out of beta, so if you want to add the ppa to your system, fire up a terminal and type in the following:
   sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mozillateam/firefox-stable
   sudo apt-get update
   sudo apt-get install firefox ubufox

and you'll be in business.
  
  

Does contemporary r&b promote racist stereotypes?

Does contemporary r&b promote racist stereotypes?

Quote:

'… a single, menacing question surrounds public articulations of Black sexual desire: How, given the ways that racism and racist oppression manifest in sexual violation, can Black people speak of the erotic? What many [ ] authors and editors repeatedly foreground is the undeniable relationship between the erotic and racist oppression. This connection does not mean that one must take pleasure from acts of racist and sexual abuse, but that Black erotica is concerned with and shaped by Black peoples’ memories, experiences, and narratives of racism. Because sexual violence historically has been a key mode through which bodies are racially marked and subjugated, then the realms of sexual intimacy, bodily pleasure, and love are important places where the struggles over recognition and affirmation

emerge .' Felice Blake , University of California, Santa Barbara , in From Margin to Centerfold: The (Mis)Recognition of Pleasure and Danger in Contemporary Black Erotic Fiction , page 3

Reflection:

Does the portrayed connection between sex and violence prevalent throughout contemporary hip-hop, rap, and even much r'n'b derive from a history of racism, and is this connection actually encoded into the core myth of the Middle Passage? Or, to express it differently, is historical racism so much a part of African-American models of identity that it has shaped what is seen as 'normal' black sexuality?

Reading books on a cellphone

Have you ever tried reading a pdf book on a cellphone? It's truly an off-putting and frustrating experience: you are always trying to adjust the size of the text, scrolling from side-to-side and so on. Yet I have persisted; one of the things I want to do is read books on a cellphone-- there are often situations when I am waiting for someone or something or even when I'm so into a book that I 'can't put it down'.

Well, one of my cellphones is an android phone and, although pdf's are still a pain, I have discovered epub files and some really cool readers for them (one is even called Cool Reader). The problem is that most books are in pdf format. Enter Calibre, a linux program that does a good job of converting from pdf to epub format! I downloaded and installed Calibre via synaptic and have been converting my pdf books and reading them comfortably on my phone since then. Pretty cool.

Peppermint-One Jan 2011 respin is the biz!

Yes, this post is slightly late... well, I was actually looking for a torrent of the latest Peppermint Ice respin (March 2011) but couldn't find one, so I tried the latest Peppermint-One edition instead. I was happily surprised.

My preference for Ice over One was simply related to the underlying browser-base of each of the distros; the Mozilla-Prism combo of One was often slow and unwieldy because Firefox had itself become bloated. So I preferred Peppermint Ice since it was built on a Chromium-Ice combination. Now, ironically, I find that Chromium has begun to show signs of bloat, and that the new Peppermint-One uses the sleeker and much faster Firefox 4.0 (Beta 9).

In other words, get your copy of Peppermint-One's 01042011 iso, burn it to disc, and install it today! You won't be disappointed. It's fast, efficient, and a real pleasure to use, even with limited RAM. Well done to the Peppermint team.

Valentine R.I.P.

Valentine R.I.P.

I don't know if you've yet seen the new Rihanna video, S&M, but it's already done its promo job by stirring debate and controversy across the blogosphere. Coming hard on the heels of 2010's massive singles Eminem's Love the Way You Lie and Lady Gaga's Bad Romance, its bondage/men as dogs/scenes with bananas and dolls etc effectively means that kids growing up today will come to accept obsessive behaviour and domestic violence as the norm for what were once seen as romantic relationships. Cupid is still a fat boy, but his arrows are now valued for their pain rather than for warm fuzzy feelings of love.
   Love the Way You Lie was of course classic s&m: the ending especially, when the rapper warns, 'If you try to leave me, I'll tie you to the bed and set the house on fire.' Rihanna explains: "You'll stand there and watch me burn. That's all right cos' I like the way it hurts. You'll just stand there and watch me cry. That's all right cos I love the way you lie." Eminem as the sadist; Rihanna as the masochist.
   On Rihanna's latest, the chorus is
"'Cause I may be bad, but I'm perfectly good at it/Sex in the air, I don't care, I love the smell of it/Sticks and stones may break my bones,/But chains and whips excite me."
   Yes, it's clear from the video that she's responding to her critics, putting a finger in the air to especially the media, but still the other elements disturb. Even if the video is banned worldwide (it already has been banned in some places) it is obviously going to influence teens and others. In time, nothing in this video will be considered shocking or even abnormal. Don't get me wrong: I actually appreciate Rihanna's style and talent; but February 2011 surely marks the death of romance and a quick farewell to that old gentleman once known as Mr Valentine. 

aDeskbar!

my desktop with aDeskbar on the right

I should have posted this earlier, but... well, anyway. aDeskbar is a perfect solution for those of us who are really Mac users but have migrated to linux for whatever reason (I use linux at work mostly). As you can see from the screenshot it can sit anywhere you want it to, it can autohide, and it works seamlessly and trouble-free with the lightweight distros out there (in this case, Peppermint-ice). If you are interested, read the original post on OMGubuntu and download the deb file by following the links. I'm finding aDeskbar a valuable utility at the moment. Enjoy. The link:

http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2010/11/adeskbar-dock-panel-replacement-for-ubuntu/

watching them lower his box

watching them lower his box

Watching them lower his box into the earth
I remember all too well his passions:
the wine, the women, the song;
and silently I whisper,
“Don’t worry my friend. I’ll be joining you
before not too long.”

There was Sophie, a sophomore
when he met her;
they stayed together,
on-and-off, for over twenty years.
Never married. Often fought.
When she finally walked out,
he couldn’t forget her
even though she had ruined his life.

His favourite wine was Chablis, always cold.
The song was Beethoven’s--the Eroica.
Always too short for him,
it was ever too long for me.

Ah, but I loved him.

He had three jackets, I remember:
his blue leather ‘James Dean’ one;
an expensive tweed;
and one his father had given him,
a black one, that he only wore to funerals.
That was the one he hated.
No trousers ever matched that jacket.
He was never suited for death.

A thin rain pours thinly from a grey mournful sky.
I look again at the ground.
His box is gone now. Fat earth covers it.
The soil is damp and only waits for worms.