The Counterpublic Papers vol. 5 no. 2

September 15, 2019

I write the first draft of this in my parents home a few hours before we hit the road to drive back from Detroit last Sunday. My former father-in-law passed away three Sundays ago and we sent him home. When I’ve spoken about him I’ve primarily spoken of him as a postal worker (he was a postal technician)…but he was also a Korean War medic (twice decorated), and wired the Jupiter C for NASA. He spent his formative years in Jim Crow—as time passes we’re losing this generation to death. My oldest son interviewed him for a high school project, and I still have the video. I wish we’d have talked to him a bit more.

….

I cut facebook about a month or so ago. I haven’t deactivated my account—too many of my people are there, people from every stage of my life at this point. And I think there are a few automated processes that post. Finally, I still use instagram, which facebook purchased. But I’m trying to ween myself off of most forms of social media, or at least get to the point where I own more of my attention than some other entity does.

Part of this is related to work—I neglected to mention in the last newsletter that I’ve the year off. No teaching responsibilities, no committee responsibilities. The plan is to finally get book #3 (currently untitled because of Amazon—Live and Let Die would in an Amazon search either get you to Wings or to James Bond) out the door, but also to spend a bit of time tending to family related issues and resting. When I noted in the last issue that I was back from my “usual hiatus” I wasn’t really telling the truth—I stopped writing sometime in April largely because the macro, the meso, and the micro all became a bit too much. And although some of this couldn’t be helped—it’s not like Trump isn’t still an issue—some of this was self-imposed.

A quick example—last week I was in DC for the annual American Political Science Association conference. About two months ago someone asked me to serve as a discussant on an 8am Thursday morning panel because one of the papers examined freedom through DJing. The only problem was that I was already chairing and discussing a panel at that time. Now the normal person would’ve simply said “no. can’t do it. double booked.”

I’m not normal.

I suggested that if he got the papers to me in time, I could create a YouTube clip discussing the papers that he could use during the panel.

Now I’d already blown the APSA participation limit sky-high. It’s clearly stated that participants can only participate in three panels. But when the actual conference rolls around there are all these gaps that need to be filled—panels that now need discussants, current event special panels that need filling, mini-conferences that need participants. Before I was asked to double-book I had seven conference responsibilities.

So yes, some of this is self-imposed.

Anyway, turning off facebook and other related forms of social media represents a way for me to get my attention back and to reclaim my time, so to speak.

I know I’m not alone in this—a lot of my people have done the same. I’m thinking it’s part of a trend.

….

There’s one exception to the sabbatical thing. I’ve got talks scheduled.

This week I’m going to be in dialogue with McKenzie Wark (author of The Hacker Manifesto and the forthcoming Capital is Dead and part of the radical Dis.Art collective) as part of the BMA’s series based on Dis.Art’s “crisis” installation. Here’s a taste (and Wark):

I don’t think these teasers really does the project justice. Dis.Art has basically tried to…I want to say hi-jack YouTube and Vimeo by creating a new type of channel, but I don’t think that’s right in as much as YouTube was originally a much more radical project than it’s become. During the talk Wark and I are going to talk about crisis, liberal democracy, and neoliberalism, at a few different scales—with me focusing on Baltimore, and Wark providing the national/international context. It’s only going to be an hour—which is a total shame as I know an hour won’t be enough. But my plan is to use this as a way to talk about the growing Baltimore School that a number of us have been developing over the past few years, in fact if I think about it, going all the way back to the Baltimore Mixtape Project if not earlier. We’ve created a small syllabus of suggested readings. On my end I’ve got works like Robin Kelley’s Freedom Dreams and the recently released Baltimore Revisited among others. On Wark’s end she included C. Riley Snorton’s Black on Both Sides.

(Oh. Other talks this year include a DJ’d keynote on the humanities in November, a talk at Bard College about Black Studies at 50, potentially a talk in NYC about the Museum of Capitalism project I was involved in a few years ago, and perhaps a talk at Michigan about black populism. And my personal goal is to take the write-ups for each of these projects and then create something out of them.)

Anyway, there should still be some tickets left. Come.

….

I’ve got a friend. Every time my friend reaches out, she writes: “Tell me something good.”

Every time I see that, I think of Chaka Khan. Every time.

I just found out Prince’s estate is releasing a new remastered version of 1999, with a few dozen unreleased tracks including snippets and demos.

I don’t think this is on there….but it should be (in case you don't see it, it's a live performance of Sweet Thing by Chaka Khan and Prince): 

Tell me something good (i know i know, different song, still). Make this week one for the books. I plan to.