Frank Dowsing

I was recently reading a book I had relegated to the bottom of the enormous “to read” stack. It turned out to be quite good and one of those books where I was like, “Why didn’t I read that earlier?”

The book was Mississippi Sissy by Kevin Sessums. The book isn’t the best piece of southern writing ever, but would be my first suggestion to someone wanting a look at gay life for a guy my age coming into his own in the rural deep south. Sessums taps into a certain atmosphere of what life was like in both rural Mississippi and in the Jackson circles surrounding Eudora Welty and the other titans of the literary and arts scene there.

So it was while reading this book that I came across mention of a man named Frank Dowsing.

It turns out that Frank Dowsing was an amazing athlete from Mississippi. Now, it was a little surprising that I hadn’t heard of an All-SEC, All-American player from the state next door. It was a little more surprising when I learned that he was the all time school leader for punt return average at Mississippi State and had ripped off an 88 yard punt return against the 1971 Alabama team that ended the season #2 in the nation. And he blazed a 9.5 second 100 yard dash for the Bulldogs in 1971.

But that’s all still within the world of reason. Mississippi was home to a lot of great football players: Jerry Rice, Walter Payton, Brett Farve, etc. So for me not to have heard of one from well before my time isn’t a shocker. But then there’s this: Frank Dowsing is described as the Jackie Robinson of Mississippi.

Turns out, much like people don’t really know Wilbur Jackson on that 1971 Alabama team, people don’t remember the names of those who break the color barrier. And maybe there’s some overshadowing because of what happened at Ole Miss in Oxford (trivia fact: Everybody knows James Meredith in 1962, but nobody remembers Ben Williams integrating the Rebel football team a full decade later). But Mississippi State’s Dowsing was also amazing for things he did away from his college campus (where he was on the SEC’s all-academic team three consecutive seasons).

First there were his pre-college successes. At a high school track meet, Dowsing, who went to school integrated the public schools in Tupelo, endured people pounding on his hotel room door shouting threats and racial slurs. He got enough rest to go out and crush the field the next day, winning the 100 (going on to set the state record) and the 220.

And after college? Well, according to Sessums, Dowsing was drafted by the Philadelphia Eagles to play in the NFL but wasn’t happy with his draft position and decided to go to med school. Oh, and Sessums claims that on the way to the Hula Bowl, a now-defunct college post-season All-Star game, Dowsing came out of the closet.

Sessums claims to have dated Dowsing, who was something of a fixture on the New York City gay scene in the 1970s, never going on to play in the NFL. None of this is mentioned in any of the “official” writeups of Dowsing’s life I could find on the web. They just say he went on to work for AT&T.

Dowsing died in 1994, but was nominated last year for induction into the Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame. The ceremonies will be held July 30 in Jackson. And I was so inspired by what I learned about the ground-breaking Frank Dowsing, that I’m planning to go.

Bad Stand Up Comedy Routine

Hey everybody! Thanks for coming out tonight, everybody. Great to be here. (cough)

You know, this is my first time on stage here at the Ha Ha Hut. Thanks for coming out.

So, I was chilling out watching some cartoons before I got here tonight. Do ya’ll watch cartoons?

One of my favorites back in the day was Shirt Tales. Do ya’ll remember that one? It was about creatures that wore shirts that had messages on them. Remember that? They used to like, go on missions and stuff. No? You don’t remember?

Oh.

Guess I’m old and stuff. It was awesome. Shirt Tales!

Well, I mean, um, cartoons. What was the deal with The Smurfs, anyway? Why was that old wizard trying to catch them? Did he try to eat them? Or turn them into gold, or what? Huh? What was that guy’s deal?

Did you ever wonder if The Smurfs were, like, high and stuff? Or, um, what if, Robocop started stomping through their mushroom village? That’d be awesome. And that robo-ninja from Robocop 3 could be there too. The Smurfs would be all like, “Noooooo!” and then they’d get smushed. And Robocop would be like, “I’ll be back!”

Robocop was awesome when I was a kid. I was really into technology when I was a kid. And cops. So like, a robot cop was pretty cool. I’d just sit around playing cops and robbers and drinking tea.

Hey, tea! Haiti! Get it? What’s the deal with that place? Did you read what Paul Shirley wrote about the earthquake?

It’s like, yeah, I’ve studied my Haitian history and all and can discuss the implications of American aid policies, but why can’t I look away from the pictures of horror? Why are my eyes locked to the raw and unedited feeds of screaming human misery?

What? Where’s everybody going? Come back! I have much more material about the Western addiction to disaster pornography! I have a whole set of material about the despair of having everything!

You could say serious natural disasters are a form of terrorism since, although they are technically classified as accidents (such as Chernobyl), they may resemble terrorism. In India, the Bhopal poison gas tragedy (technically an accident) could have been terrorism. Any terrorist group could claim responsibility for an aviation accident. Irrational events can be attributed to anyone or anything, so that, at the limit, we could see anything as criminal, even cold weather or an earthquake. There is nothing new about this: in the aftermath of the 1923 Tokyo earthquake, thousands of Koreans were blamed and killed. In a system as integrated as our own, everything destabilises; everything seeks to undermine a system that lays claim to infallibility. Given what we are already undergoing because of the system’s rational grip, we may wonder if the worst catastrophe is the infallibility of the system.

Having everything! It’s awesome. How’s the ice in your drinks?

Try the veal. Tip your waitresses. CDs are available. Check out my Myspace page.

Mallsai

About seven months ago we received a bonsai tree as a gift. We had asked for a bonsai tree and some generous friends helped us to get one through the wonders of Amazon. We dutifully read the instructions for taking care of our wee juniper and tried our best to prevent the cat from consuming it. Despite our best care, it died within a month. And we wanted to know why.

A sad case

Turns out we’d unwittingly consumed a “Mallsai.” The BonsaiWIKI explains that a mallsai is a rooted cutting normally found in discount stores and malls – thus the name “Mallsai.” Like many malls, mallsais die. In fact, it seems like they are usually done for long before you ever take them home to play with. The Internets are filled with sad juniper bonsai owners wanting to know why their new trees are turning brown, dropping needles, and otherwise acting sad. Every major gardening forum online seems to have a thread devoted to these lamentations. And everyone basically says the same thing – probably you overwatered it. Or you underwatered it. Or the roots are rotten. In any case, it’s dead now.

This seems to be, in part, because the rocks in the average mallsai pot are glued on so water bounces off the soil and the tree’s roots don’t get air. Also there’s the humidity problem – most of the trees sold as mallsais need a lot of humidity, and they’ve likely been without that for some time because of extended shipping and storage times. Finally, there’s the problem of tree type. It turns out that junipers (like our own poor dead mallsai) are not good candidates for indoor bonsai growing even though they will remain green long after the roots are dead and the tiny tree doesn’t have a prayer of absorbing any more water. Looks like if I ever get another one of these, the first order of business is repotting, as Bonsai of Brooklyn explains.

The folks over at the Bonsai Wiki are a little more generous about the potential benefits of mallsai than some other bonsai enthusiasts on the Internets. The Bonsai Wiki people agree that mallsai do have the advantage of interesting people in the ancient art of bonsai, even if their trees are likely to die. Over at the Art of Bonsai Project, there’s a little less interest in soft-peddling the evils of mallsai.  Then again, their interest is more in cultivating art and less in engineering mass appeal, as this article shows.

Are people going to be more likely to try again if their trees die? Or will this turn them off forever? As someone who’s killed a lot of plants in her day (and has several dying in the house right as I write this), I’m unlikely to be deterred, but I can imagine lots of people feeling discouraged and at fault for the death of their mallsais. Maybe that’s why there are so many online pictures of dead bonsai. And now I’ve added ours to the pile. RIP, little mallsai.

Space: No Moon, Yes Taxis

Noted articulate visionary George W. Bush wanted America to return to the moon. And to be the home of the first humans to ever set foot on Mars.

Now, due to stupid term limits, the other nations in the global village will beat us in the space race! Or at least in the Laff-A-Lympics.

We do all remember those heady times last decade when President George W. Bush Dave Chappelle told us:

“I feel like you guys keep trying to distract people with Iraq when I’m focusing on other things. Mainly the moon. Yes, I said it — the moon. Can’t be distracted – what’s going on with the war, what’s wrong with the economy … stop worrying about that! I got that shit under control! Let’s focus on space nigga’, the United States of Space, cuz I ain’t stoppin’ at the moon, write this down…M-A-R-S, Mars bitches! That’s where we going, Mars! Red Rocks! (actual video clip unavailable because of stupid IP laws)

And what now? What of the final frontier, inter-dimensional alien love, and (most importantly) getting off the rock?

Well, Obama isn’t into it anymore. The Back to the Moon Project is being scrapped. Sure, it may have been an inadequately funded fantasy to begin with — a crass attempt to distract from two failing wars and a cratering economy. But Obama’s new plans for NASA represent a great chance to fork over a couple of billion bucks to a commercial space flight industry that doesn’t even exist yet. Space commuters!

We’re giving people money to go to and from the ISS? Why not give people money to go to and from Cleveland or Birmingham? Maybe it’s because Bruce Willis drove a space taxi in Fifth Element and that was cool and all, so let’s build our space program around that idea.

Obama’s request would add $6 billion over five years. Um, what happened to that spending freeze from the state of the union?

Some would say that the collapse of the economy, whether as a result of the multi-decade gutting of the American manufacturing base or as a result of more esoteric factors (like currency buy-ups and credit default swaps), will prevent us from doing the serious R&D needed to do real space exploring. The counter to that, of course, is both that cutting edge space tech can help our economy by conquering those particular technological sectors and also that now, of all times, is the most important time to be focused on getting off the rock. The old ways of polluting the planet as we make a last ditch effort at digging up rare earth metals just aren’t going to cut it any more. Now is the time when we need to be looking at radical solutions.

Disturbing fact: Most US citizens believe NASA receives 24% of the annual $3 trillion federal budget. In actuality, NASA receives less than 1% ($18 billion). According to the former head of NASA, “That’s less than the annual market for pizza,” which is $27 billion a year. Ouch.

The “explore space” part of NASA has some pretty cool ideas. Too bad they won’t be realized due to a development that somewhat mirrors the 2001 Congressional testimony of a science fiction writer named Allen Steele, who talked a lot about the conflicts between government-run NASA and the commercialization of space.

As always, the indispensable World of Weird things has a good take here. But my take is this:

We’ve got to keep poking around. And I mean well-funded poking around too. We don’t know what’s out there. And it is of vital importance to the continuation of our species as we continue to render our plant uninhabitable.

Ego, if you’re reading this, I always believed in you.

Executive power

Over morning coffee, two things caught our eye(s) as studies in executive power and its limits. Ah, morning S.O.P. with a Euro flavor!

On the one hand, perpetual paperweight Foreign Policy has this article about how U.S. policy is perceived internationally. Which is, basically, as a bunch of noise without substance. It must be perplexing for people outside the US to see a President branded as “change” win by a huge majority and then proceed to do basically nothing. It’s funny to think about Europeans being confused as to why we have been talking about health care since Truman.

The uniquely American (and relatively recent) requirement for a supermajority in the Senate to accomplish anything must seem so bizarre. Heck, it seems bizarre to me, and I’m actually in favor of giving massive privileges to the minority in most situations.

So even if you’re feeling like Obama’s not all he was cracked up to be, you at least have to feel a little sorry for him. Executive power may have been expanded to new and scary frontiers under Bush (signing statements, pre-emptive war, detention without trial, etc, etc.), but none of those expansions included the ability to implement legislation of the kind he’s said he wants. That’s why Bush offered us the worst kind of big government – the kind with guns and nuclear weapons that wants to read your mail. Of course, it might be worse to have a big government that still does all those things while posing under the banner of change….

Meanwhile, in similar Euro-news, Tony Blair is still fighting the good mostly resolved fight about whether the invasion of Iraq was justified. The Los Angeles Times reports on his testimony at the third official inquiry. For six hours. It makes you so sad. Not for Lapdog Tony, who deserves all of this and so much more. But for America. It’s unfathomable to imagine Bush ever answering to anyone about Iraq, much less testifying before anyone official, much less in public, never mind for six hours. We are getting robbed here, people.

Obama’s First State of the Union

Writing this introduction after the speeches are finished (boozy blueberry haze), it actually all seems perfect. We sat down to live blog the 2010 State of the Union with high expectations. Hope! And it ended up somewhat disappointing. Meh. So, it’s perfect for the Obama presidency! Outstanding! We did a bunch of the presidential debates (here and here) and the VP debate and the last ever Bush SOTU. And we did the Super Bowl but didn’t publish it because it wasn’t funny. So we sat down and did the same deal with Obama’s first one. Live chat. Real transcripts. Here’s what we had to say:

Kate: Okay, so we’re here about to “live blog” the State of the Union
Stephen: incense is lit, rum drinks are strong and ample
Kate: We debated about what to drink for this SOTU and decided something Hawaiian. Couldn’t find the stuff for a Mai Tai but approximated it and served it in giant jars.
Stephen: We haven’t done this in a while. We did 3 pres debates, a VP debate, and the last SOTU that Bush did
Kate: The last time we live blogged a SOTU, I was living in California. I can’t believe we did four debates. We must have been drunk
Stephen: we were

Kate: Oh right. I say eff those SOTU drinking games. It’s better just to drink throughout.

Wood v. Allen, redux

I wrote nearly a year ago about a case that was from my home town and was, at the time, coming up for review before the United States Supreme Court. For a simple boy from a small Alabama town, this was exciting. The fact that the subject matter of the case overlapped with something I studied a ton in law school, well, that was super jackpot.

The case (for those of you too lazy to click and read the above hyperlink) was called Wood v. Allen, and involved a murder (as nearly all death penalty cases do). A mentally retarded man named Holly Wood was convicted of killing his ex-girlfriend.

Now, as many of you are aware, it is unconstitutional in the United States to execute someone who is mentally retarded. However, the Supremes were not considering in this case the validity of Wood’s Atkins claim.The claim that Woods is retarded failed at the district court level and that decision was affirmed by the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals in 2004. The Alabama Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal on the retardation piece and the Eleventh Circuit (the feds) also chimed in to say that Mr. Wood couldn’t be retarded because he:

(1) was able to obtain and maintain employment and had worked at several jobs for a lengthy amount of time, such as driving a forklift, driving motor vehicles, working in a factory, and operating heavy machinery and equipment in a dangerous work environment; (2) was able to function well independently and did not need the assistance of others to complete daily tasks; (3) managed his own money and always had money; (4) did not have problems communicating or getting his needs met verbally or through written language; (5) was able to plan and cook meals for himself and others; (6) could identify and resolve typical problems that might arise in everyday life (such as checking the fuse box if the lights went out in his house); (7) was always neat and clean in his appearance; (8) often drove himself out-of-state to visit relatives and for other reasons, and in fact was an automobile enthusiast who subscribed to Hot Rod magazine; (9) could form and maintain interpersonal relationships with others and had a girlfriend, Barbara Siler, for three years; and (10) devised and implemented a scheme to lure Siler out of her house to shoot her after she ended their relationship.

Because the best way to show the world that you’re not legally retarded and able to fully comprehend the consequences of your actions is to subscribe to Hot Rod magazine and look at all the pretty pictures of the vroom vrooms. In America, you can be killed even if the court agrees that you “probably do exhibit significantly subaverage general intellectual functioning,” but you fail to show “significant or substantial deficits in [your] adaptive functioning.” Translation: You’re retarded, but not some kind of social misfit. You can die because you made the mistake of being somewhat able to get around in the world.

So, no, the Roberts Court wasn’t looking at whether Wood could be spared from the executioner’s needle due to retardation. Rather, they were looking at a commonly litigated bit of death penalty jurisprudence — whether Wood’s attorneys (appointed to him by the court in this case because he couldn’t hire his own) managed to fulfill the basic standards of competence required by the Constitution. Remember, you not only have the right to an attorney, but you have a right to one who will give it the ol’ college try at preventing the guv’mint from killing you. What constitutes said effort has been the subject of considerable legal fighting over the years.

The crux of the Supremes’ decision (7-2), was a nugget from radical leftist Sotomayor (who once signed a memo in 1981 saying that the death penalty was “associated with evident racism in our country.”) Quoth the Wise Latina:

[W]e agree with the State that even if it is debatable, it is not unreasonable to conclude that … counsel made a strategic decision not to inquire further into the information contained in the report about Wood’s mental deficiencies and not to present to the jury such information as counsel already possessed about these deficiencies.

The key here is the phrase I put in italics: “strategic decision.” The courts don’t want to second guess lawyers. And there are some good reasons here. While you have a right to an effective lawyer, one who is competent and diligent, you can’t have every appeals court hearing every conviction and going back and armchair quarterbacking every tactical decision made by the lawyers that lost. You thought your lawyer should have called your friends as witnesses? Too bad. The lawyer thought they’d come off poorly. The appeals courts have more important stuff to do besides second guess tactics. And that’s the key to these “ineffective assistance of counsel” claims.

And that’s why Wood’s best shot would have been to have been ruled retarded and qualify for Atkins protection.

However, I’m with Justice Stevens on this one. The lawyer given to Mr. Wood was wholly unprepared for a case in which life and death were literally on the line. And I don’t mean that as an insult. I say that as a lawyer who was trained at one of the top law schools in the country with a focus on death penalty law. I wouldn’t have been ready and neither was this guy. He was just too green. And Stevens makes that point with brutal honesty in rebutting Sotomayor’s attempt to protect the strategic decision making of the rookie:

“A decision cannot be fairly characterized as ‘strategic’ unless it is a conscious choice between two legitimate and rational alternatives,” Justice Stevens wrote. “It must be borne of deliberation and not happenstance, inattention or neglect.” Sotomayor attempts to respond to this point in the third footnote if you’re reading along at home.

And that’s the real tragedy about all of this (or one of the many). The system we have not only authorizes government killing, but it does so after you’ve been represented by someone so wildly inexperienced that they don’t even have enough savvy to make a call between courses of action. Alabama has no public defender system, staffed with professional and seasoned criminal defense attorneys. Wood was represented at the most important event of his life by a total rookie (who had some oversight from some veterans). And that rookie made a call not to introduce some key evidence and not to get any additional tests done. And now, sometime pretty soon, Holly Wood is going to be injected with some chemicals and die at the hands of a State of Alabama official.

Move over Mellencamp. Small town life has no room for compassion and the Roberts Court, along with the Eleventh Circuit, is just fine with that.

You may also like…

Recently I purchased some vegetarian jerky on Amazon. I was tired of paying twice as much at the local health-mart, and as I was planning an overseas trip I wanted to make sure I would have middle-of-the-night munchies with protein in them so I didn’t end up spending a fortune on jet lagged room service orders. About a month after I received my box of Stonewall’s I got an email from Amazon that started with the following sentence: “As someone who has shown an interest in meat snacks, you might like to know about the following offer…”

A few months later I ordered several pounds of essential wheat gluten from Amazon. I needed it to make seitan, but that’s not the important part of this story. The only thing you need to know to appreciate the follow-up email from Amazon that started “As someone who’s shown an interest in gluten free groceries, you might like to know about the following offer…” is that essential wheat gluten is not in fact gluten free.

These two examples really just show the laziness of Amazon’s recommendation algorithms. They saw that I bought jerky (well, “Jerquee”) and assumed it was made of animal, like probably more than 99.99 percent of the stuff they sell called jerky. Likewise the wheat gluten. There may be more people with celiac disease trying to buy stuff on amazon than people looking for wheat gluten (even though wheat gluten isn’t just for making seitan – it’s more commonly used to add body to breads and baked goods). So Amazon’s just got a keyword trigger (“gluten”) which probably matches the previous purchases a whole lot more than mine.

We’ve always gotten recommendations for additional consumption, whether from friends or shopkeepers or magazines. Grocery stores try to engineer extra purchases by shelving companion items together – that’s why you’ll see a display with Rice Krispies and marshmallow cream at the end of one isle, maybe next to another display with Velveeta and Rotel. Over the last few decades, this process has tried to make the jump from art to science by exploring a variety of sources for data mining – the idea being that if someone could know the kinds of things someone like you bought, when you bought those things, and which groupings of things you purchased together, they’d be in a much better position to pick the kinds of things you might be willing to also purchase. Especially if they had data from several million people like you. Or more.

The science behind recommendation algorithms is actually very complicated. I got interested in it in 2008 when I read this article about the so-called “Napoleon Dynamite” problem. Netflix has struggled for a while to improve the algorithms that predict movies you might like. They finally decided to sponsor a million dollar prize (looks like there will be another one at some point) to anyone who could improve those algorithms by 10 percent (unfortunately it seems that they may have violated a lot of people’s privacy in the process…stay tuned on that one). It turns out that it’s very hard to predict how much people will like Napoleon Dynamite and a group of other movies including “Sideways” and “I Heart Huckabees” (all movies that get a big thumbs up in our house).

Because the difficulty of predicting the direction your quirk might take next is big money, there are always going to be folks interested in investing to mine your data. This is one of the big arguments against participating in Facebook – it’s not making money at an especially impressive rate right now, but it is a gold mine for cutting edge research on social networks, interaction, and how buzz is generated and spread. Even if buzz doesn’t translate into buy, it’s still worth a lot of money to the right people. How else might they be able to tell you what you might be interested in?

White Gold Car

A few days ago I wrote a post about facts.

It was prompted, in part, by an email forward that I got about a shiny car.

Now, pictures of the mysterious car can be seen here and here. The gist of the email I got included the photos and claimed that the car was “made out of white gold.” Now, putting aside for the moment the fact that the car could have been plated with white gold (versus, say, entirely comprised of), the email went on to say something about how the car was owned by some “oil sheik,” and ended with something along the lines of, “Can you believe we give them all our money so they can buy things like this?!?”

Oh, and the email said the car featured “the newly developed V10 quad turbo with 1,600 horsepower and 2800nm of torque; 0-60mph in less than 2secs, 1/4 mile in 6.89secs and runs on biofuel.”

Whaat? I was interested. I started poking around to see if there was really a car plated with white gold. Turns out there are a lot of people on the Internets debating these photos. “Oh, it’s not white gold. It’s chrome.” “If it were white gold, it would triple the weight of the car.” “I know someone who has ridden in this car and it is real.” “Deeze Arabs are going crazy on our oil monee! We gots to bomb dem!”

Turns out, whenever oil prices get high, people start forwarding things about the luxury of the oil rich petro-dictatorships. See, for example, this thing about a diamond-plated Mercedes. It’s classic lower-middle class America expressing xenophobic rage about the wealth of foreigners — the same sort that seems to sputter out when populists attempt to cultivate rage against domestic policies that enrich American bankers and parasitic investment types at the expense of working class families.

I thought that the bit about how the golden car runs on biofuel was particularly interesting, as if a gold car could not only achieve eye-popping (and impossible) performance numbers, but also somehow the UAE countries had figured out the mysteries of renewable energy while keeping us hooked on their petro products. In that way, the email might actually operate in a somewhat progressive way (if you can detach it from the xenophobia). The more that alternatives to fossil fuels are promoted as objects of envy, the better, right?

At least, that’s my hope, as my policy on these things is always to “reply to all” and drop some information on all of the recipients of these various electronic nuggets of mental poisoning. I always make sure to include everyone too, when I put in some factual refutation of whatever it was that came my way. But what’s most interesting about replying to these misinformation bombs is trying to put a spin on them that will resonate with the intended recipients. Thus, the usual lies about Obama or health care or Congress (or whatever) offer an opportunity to capitalize on the average contempt that a person might have for politicians in general, and at the minimum, get specific about things.

And trust me, I get a lot of these since there seems to be an entire generation of people (the Greatest Generation) that think of me as “that guy we know who follows politics.” And since the Internet is all the rage amonst the kids these days, I get the forwards. My Mom’s Zionist stock broker who sends along all sorts of racist crap about Arabs? Yup. My friend who flamed out of the Marines and thinks things like this are hilarious? They all get replies from me too.

I know hitting delete is the most common option for folks. Others might say “take me off of this list,” although that can be tougher to say in a polite way, especially if someone just thinks they are sending you a joke or a prayer chain or something. But I’m interested in replying to everyone and counter-programming to the same networks. The best of all would be to put together your own crazy thing and try to get it forwarded around. I know some folks who have tried the “viral video” with varying levels of success, but I’d love to see something political and progressive take on a life of its own — at least to the point that my Mom gets it and has to ask me, “Is this true?!?”

Spooky Alabama Nights, Part 3: Bottletree

We discovered that DJ Spooky was going to play a Friday night set at Birmingham’s best music venue, The Bottletree (try the veggie chili, but the entire menu is vegan-friendly, delicious and affordable.). It was the perfect cap to a week in which we had seen him screen a movie at the Civil Rights Institute and then, two days later, play with the Alabama Symphony Orchestra. The Bottletree show promised to be a nice counterweight to the formal academic-style presentations of upper crust types and art gallery hipster stuff. Spooky promised that the Bottletree set would be “a dance party,” and we were looking forward to it.

Still, our expectations weren’t all booty-shaking and grinding. In fact, the event was promoted as a screening of the newest DJ Spooky project, The Secret Song. Here’s how it was described in the Bottletree advertising for the evening:

DJ Spooky’s new project “The Secret Song” isn’t really an album: it’s a manifesto about the place of history in our modern collaged, scrambled, sampla-delic to the core, mega info overloaded digital culture. With references stretching from Thorstein Veblen’s “Theory of the Leisure Class” and John Maynard Keynes classic in the field of economics, “The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money” over to hip hop’s relationship to psychoanalysis and a la Edward Bernays’ concept of the manufacture of consent– this new album is a groundbreaking meditation on hip hop and electronic musics relationship to philosophy, economics, and the science of sound in a world where the steady drumbeat of the financial meltdown has made music the last refuge of young people with less time and money. As DJ Spooky likes to say, “People – it’s ALL about economics.” Dig?

Interested? Us too! What’s more, according to Spooky’s site:

His new album ironically refers to a couple of things:
1) The “Secret Song” is made by failed ATM transactions, credit card fraud, and jazz motifs made into stock exchanges, and the futures market.
2) It is an album that says 2012 isnʼt the end of time, like the Mayan Calendar says – its just the end of the last Walmart.
3) The economics of music as the music industry as we know it goes through massive transformation – itʼs the new Stop and Shop of the Mind.
4) The Secret Song has tracks hidden in barcode throughout most of downtown Manhattan. Donʼt believe us? Swipe your Iphone anywhere you see the barcode…

AND

The title track is a story told in Mandarin by Jing Zhou, a young Chinese novelist and economist from Shanghai. DJ Spooky wrote the lyrics as a “free-style” based on remixing Adam Smith’s infamous concept of “the invisible hand” and asked Jing Zhou to translate the material into Mandarin.

AND there’s a DVD that goes along with the album:

As you might expect from an artist whose music was the orchestration was voted the “Best Political Video of 2007” on Youtube, thereʼs an extra twist in the situation. Following in the steps of The Cinematic Orchestraʼs rescore of Dziga Vertovʼs cinema classic “Man with A Camera” – DJ Spooky remixed and created new music for Vertovʼs rare first collage film “Kino-Glaz,” the “Cinema-Eye,” from 1921.

OK. So this wasn’t going to be your average club DJ set. We were thinking music, dancing, 1920s Russian cinema, global economics, Dirty South music, illbient, all of it.

It would be generous to say we got parts of that. Spooky took the stage after someone called DJ Coco tried (and failed) to get the crowd moving a bit. So Spooky came out and played some video segments on the screen behind him, only some of which seemed to have any relationship to the music at all. He played a video of Iranian street protests, weirdly, while some serious booty music was playing. You can forgive people for not exactly wanting to shake it to Ludacris while Iranian police bloody the heads of green-shirted teenagers. Sure, this created some dissonance. That might have been fine except that it didn’t seem like it was the desired effect.

In fact, it didn’t seem like the video material had been chosen intentionally at all. And lots of it was incomplete. One piece he showed that we loved was a John Sutherland 1957 cartoon made for the New York Stock Exchange. We’d embed it, but WordPress still has problems embedding Archive.org videos. Looking up this video led us to an earlier Sutherland toon. Twenty-three skiddoo! (and while we’re on the subject, here’s an amazing one I found when the above stuff got me looking around at the animation produced by the right wing Arkansas school, Harding College. Love that public domain!)

But if video of police beatdowns and black and white cartoons about the stock market aren’t going to get random Birmingham hipsters dancing, what will? How about turning off the rest of the crowd at the start of the set by saying in your introductory remarks that we are about to experience “New York City versus Alabama.” Um, OK. I guess we’re like, against you or something. Or how about playing some T-Pain that we could all hear at any of the downtown crappy dance clubs? At least DJ Coco played some Blackalicious. Or how about saying, “How many of ya’ll have been to India?” and then staring out into the sea of unraised hands. Nice. Way to make us feel cultured. Maybe we can’t all afford to go to India, so how about you fill us in and do more than just play a single (admittedly awesome) Bhangra trance song?

Once Spooky had run through all his video shorts, he started talking to us about his iphone app. We don’t have iphones, can’t afford them, and in any case are pretty skeptical about the reduction of DJ artwork to the iphone. On the other hand, we respect Spooky like crazy. So we were willing to listen to him DJ from his phone. We couldn’t tell what he was doing at all – just kind of poking at a screen, but it sounded okay until he decided to “scratch” on it during a Coup song that we love. (Sidebar: He incorrectly identified the song as something new from Street Sweeper Social Club, but it was in fact “5 Million Ways to Kill a CEO” from 2001’s Party Music). He called this a “drum battle remix” or something like that, but really it sounded preposterous, and even amateurish, to be making wiki-wiki noises from his phone over the song.

Part of the problem was that the crowd was so weird. At the beginning of Spooky’s set it seemed like the place was pretty packed (although it never seemed to reach that full intensity that clubs can get when there’s great music animating everyone). By the time he was done (at only 1 in the morning), there were maybe 30 people there. The folks that were up front with us were a very strange lot. Some had no good sense of how to navigate appropriate personal space boundaries. There was a lady who seemed to have imported her dance moves from a Grateful Dead show. There were some dudes who were serious hip-hop heads bouncing up and down every time some track was played that they might have been in the know about. There was an intolerably loud and drunk woman who kept claiming that her boyfriend owned the club so she could do whatever she wanted. Overall the crowd was low energy, or possessing the same kind of studied, chin-stroking low energy that you might expect to see at a Modest Mouse show.

Look, DJ Spooky is awesome. He played some great tracks. A handful were hip-hop. A few more were electronic music of some sort. But there was no vibe and the whole thing felt somewhat half-assed, with the hallmark of it all some dicking around on the turntables. And while we must concede that the crowd was lame left something to be desired, it ultimately is the job of the DJ to move the crowd. Do I wish that more people came? Sure. Was this probably a one-off way to fill an evening between performances with the symphony? Sure. But I can’t imagine that a lot of people left that set saying that it’s worth it to drive to Atlanta or Nashville for the next Spooky gig, and, art school fetish object or not, I can’t say that he gave the kind of performance that I have seen countless others give — where you put your heart and soul into it no matter how many people paid to see you and no matter how small of a town or venue.

We were glad that we went. It was fun, but nothing to write a letter to Hakim Bey about. And after three nights with Spooky, we didn’t feel especially sad about missing Sunday’s MLK event. We will continue to love him and buy his records, but we’re left wondering what it might be like to see him play live in a context that he really cares about with a crowd that’s really into it.