intercourse with biscuits a modern miscellany

I’ve just been reading and getting slowly riled up by Simon Reynolds’ meditations on hip hop on The Guardian site. The contention of his piece is that, as Nas sang back in 2006, “hip hop is dead.”

I don’t get this desire amongst hip hop writers and artists to declare the genre dead. It comes around frequently – either in braggadocio rhymes by rappers on the cusp of retirement claiming the game will be dead without them or in treatises like Reynolds’ that propose that the artform has grown stale and morbid, teetering around on its last legs, dragged down by bling and bullshit.

Why not express a more complex view that all genres and forms of music wax and wane? Declare that “rock music is dead”, as balding buffoon Billy Corgan once did, and you’ll get short shrift. But somehow, even huge hip hop obsessives seem OK with denigrating the genre, suggesting somehow that it is incapable of regenerating itself, making out that it’s like Dr Who on his last incarnation.

That quickness of critics and even artists to organise hip hop’s funeral shows what little faith they have in the inherent poetry of rhyming and the way in which hip hop has always developed over time. These blankets statements are cheap journalistic tricks but still, they get me every time.

Wikileaks has been releasing hundreds of pages of text pager intercepts from September 11 2001 and they make strange reading. In amongst thousands of automated messages from computer systems (including some at the World Trade Centre reporting “major failures”), there’s hundreds of fragments from conversations by the security and emergency services and ordinary US citizens:

2001-09-11 13:41:57 Skytel [007611375] D  ALPHA  traci.buttler@foxnews.com||my mom got a call from a woman in NY that said my brother is with her husband and a gr

2001-09-11 13:41:59 Arch [0716559] D  ALPHA  -PLS CALL JANICE AT SECRET SERVICE AT 202-406-5374.

2001-09-11 13:41:52 Skytel [007465016] C  ALPHA  DalyHK@NAVSEA.NAVY.MIL|UPDATE|Have heard that 2 AC have been moved from Tidewater up to area around DC and NYC to cover air space.  Pentagon fire still burning out of control.  It was in the Army section - and some of the spaces were un

2001-09-11 13:42:03 Arch [0970192] A  ALPHA  Arnie, please track me down after your meeting. Delaney and I would like to discuss possible media inquiries etc. … about today’s terro

2001-09-11 13:42:09 Metrocall [0474834] A  ALPHA  hey my fat little buddy, cindy is going to com pod at pentagon // PSCC // UFO

2001-09-11 13:42:16 Arch [1602935] B  ALPHA  to JimBob. Your mother called also so call her. Watch out for airplanes.

2001-09-11 13:42:16 Arch [1044902] B  ALPHA  jdimacch|Your employee badge is at the desk in Lobby 19 @ 10:43am on 9/11. Thank you-Jeanne ext. 70959.

2001-09-11 13:42:31 Skytel [007518722] A  ALPHA  y-news@yahoo-inc.com||$499 deals on iPAQ Pocket PC Man Arrested for 1971 Air Canada Hijacking Reuter

2001-09-11 13:42:35 Arch [0928018] A  ALPHA  26-PLEASE CALL SPANKY W/ SAFETY DEPT. 914-271-1608.

Reading the transcripts gives you this odd vision of both how confusion spreads and echoes, how similar people are in their concerns and also how unwilling some people are to give up the trivialities of every day life.

Amongst rumours of future hijackings, a largely ignored molten sulphur spill elsewhere in the country, messages about emails from the previous day and badges for now cancelled conferences are still being sent far into the day, many of them with no reference to the day’s events at all. Shock or disconnection?

There seems to be a campaign every other month to stop bullying in some place – stop bullying in schools, stop bullying in work places – but to me that’s not enough.

Let’s kick bullying out of…life Let’s tie a ribbon, create a Twitter avatar, build a website with the sole purpose of fighting bullying full stop. Because it’s too easy to be abusive in this world, too easy to pick on the vulnerable to make yourself feel better.

I know this sounds like some hippy dreaming. I know life is tough. But I want to see more of the tough, worldly wise people I know speaking out against the thread of bullying that runs through modern life.

The people who use email and website comments to make aggressive attacks in place of criticism. The people who push and shove on the train. The people who mock those who don’t know how to defend themselves.

Almost every week, I go to a poetry night. There’s an older lady who comes and rages about the European constitution and her fear of the Euro coming to the UK. She’s unbalanced and I disagree wholeheartedly about her views. I’ve watched her perform out of tune songs and terrible poetry and found myself stifling a laugh.

Last night, I looked hard at myself and my behaviour sometimes. I watch a talented, intelligent poet tell the lady that he “loved” her poems, that she was “brilliant”. He was mugging to the crowd, mocking her while she thanked him for his kind words.

I don’t want to do these things anymore. It’s too easy. I’ve got enjoyment out of being snarky. I’ve mocked people from a distance, I’ve used words to attack and hurt people. I don’t want to do it anymore. If you attack me, I’ll come back at you.

I’ll defend myself but I don’t want to make myself feel good by making someone else feel small. This culture of hurt is everywhere. It’s on TV talent shows, it’s on the streets, in our magazines. But we don’t need it.

My computer was stolen the other day. But all I really lost was one piece of hardware and a small scattering of documents. I realised that this is down to four applications:

a) MP3tunes, yearly subscription
I have to pay a yearly fee for this site but every time I add a song or podcast to my local library, it’s thrown up into my online store at MP3tunes.com. That means I can access my music on any computer through it’s web portal and that my iTunes library could easily be dragged back down onto my new Macbook. If it handled video too, it would be perfect. To bring back my TV shows and movies, I use iRip to grab them from my iPod Touch.

b) Evernote, £free
I use Evernote every day both on my Mac and my iPhone. I sling notes on forthcoming projects into the virtual notebook as well as voice recordings, pictures and maps to places I’ve been or am going. It’s like a virtual extension of my brain and keeping stuff there as well as on the local drive meant that I’ve not lost hours of work on future projects.

c) Delicious, £free
I bookmark new websites constantly, it’s part of what gives me ideas and material for this blog. But if I’d just kept them on my local machine, I would have lost a vast catalogue of sites that I read every day. Along with Google Reader, Delicious keeps track of the sites I love. It’s also brilliant in the same way MP3tunes is because it allows me to access my bookmarks on any machine.

d) Google Docs, £free
I’ve ditched Microsoft Office and even Open Office now in favour of using Textedit for writing plain text documents on my Mac and Google Docs for writing and sending invoices and pieces of work. I keep local copies but the ability to share documents and access them anywhere makes Google Docs perfect.