stevengharms.com

I think Ryan and I must be on a similar wavelength lately as I too was thinking the exact same thing as him: I am thankful to not have come of age in an era where the internet’s depthless hard drives could store my equally depthless teenage narcissism or youthful folly for-ever. You can read Ryan’s take here.

As an early (may I say that?) adopter in the general populace (1994, dial up Unix shell on a SCO-V UNIX) of the Internet, I didn’t get off scot-free. Thanks to BBS’ and Usenet, I managed to write some pretty inane things (e.g. “Are you excited about Mike Modano and the Dallas Stars?”) and various comments of the form “Gillian Anderson is the most beautiful woman in the world!”). Thankfully these comments were widely spread, private (in the case of BBS’), and untraceable (in the case of Usenet).

Unlike what faces modern youth, my revelations of crushes, breakups, or photographs of humiliating pass-outs are not recorded, displayed, and / or, as in the case of particularly recirculation-worthy errors, spread globally with witty, degrading commentary added in sans-serif fonts. It seems that the internet has forgotten the essential truth of being young: as youths we fuck up. For a taste (possibly not-safe for work), consider Late Night Mistakes.

To say “fuck up” may seem a discordant note in an otherwise slightly-more-highly-minded essay, but I think “fucking up” is exactly what youths do. It’s not that the young “err,” implying a sense of understanding cause and the full length of effect and they do the wrong thing. No, rather they fuck up. They leave mowers in the rain, crash cars, text and drive¹, and run out of gas.

When you ask them why they did (or did not do) what ought have been done, they often have no answer because, research shows, their brain is not fully wired up yet; in case you missed that, they literally do not know. It’s all the free will of an adult without the experience to see final consequences all while being divorced from the motivation. It’s asking for chess, a game of evaluating predicted long-term outcomes, from a Candy Land player (“I go to the green square now!”).² This implies to me not that they chose to do the wrong thing, but that they simply fucked up. Incidentally, to me this seems the game of parenting: molding kids by providing rote maxims while hoping your kids don’t fuck up unto death before they can start making sense of the world as an adult.

When young the brain is not fully developed, the risk-evaluation cortices are immature and fucking-up occurs. Surely at the age of 25 everyone wishes the option to have a wipe-out, a quashing on mention of the fuck-ups in the previous 25 years. To remember the moments of burning humiliation, despair, isolation, and cruelty are the moments that forge our characters, but it’s nice to know they live back there away from quotidian existence. To feel that bitter flush in our temples and ears when the memories come back too clearly is our private boon, a spur to the right, or a sword-wielding, flaming angel warning off from the wrong path. Is it fair that my private character-forming experiences may be commandeered for sport, or that my lessons sans context are found later? In my generation that was not possible, for today’s it may be impossible to avoid. You know your errors will be documented by a dozen cell-phones, be spread like spilled quicksilver, and will live forever.

For me there is another concern. Not only does the burn of shame endure from moment of fuck-up unto the end of the electronic society, but knowing of the deathlessness of modern error, there will be a chilling effect on the healthy experimentation befitting to this time of life. To be clear, there are fuck-ups, but there are also experiments. Admittedly, sometimes that line is fuzzy, I grant. But if one is afraid to attempt an experiment for fear of it it being wrong and then having it recorded and disseminated as a fuck-up, then some wonderful people will not realize their full, true identity. It’s a pre-emptive shove to keep your exploration about your identity in the closet against the master paradigm. And note, I’m not strictly talking sexual identity, I’m talking about loving cello, being devout Muslim, being an atheist, struggling to be a poet. There’s a chilling effect as we see how deathless media can haunt you forever.

Imagine:

…High on hormones and ill-gained vodka, in a music-thrumming bedroom where the room spins red as her lips careen into her best friend’s… hours later her friend crushes her heart and her weeks of angst by publicly blabbing about the “lez shit” that her friend pulled….³
…The humiliating break-up from something you might work…hours later you have to endure a grilling via dozens of text messages…
…That Goth phase….

To remember and laugh, to move on, to accept is a blessing of aging, but to have it indelibly etched in so many 1’s and 0’s for eternal sport and to know that this is the case could make anyone run from seeing something as a folly of youth or an experiment and turn it into something, quite possibly, not worth living through and past.

The time is, sadly, inevitably coming (has already come?) where the Internet’s perfect, inhuman, and inhumane memory will drive a beautiful life to end itself. Perhaps I can take a page from Dan Savage in preëmption: “For those who have embarrassed themselves on the Internet, it gets better. No matter how bad it gets, we’re born naked, we die with little control over our bodies, you will do well sometimes and poorly others, you will rue and relish alike, and everyone is a fool in love. Try to be honest, nice, and respectful to others, especially those you share your secrets and bodies with. And lastly cut yourself and everyone else a little slack. Be that voice of conscience that doesn’t relish the safe, mean blanket of schadenfreude over the beautiful quilt of friendship.”

Whatever evidence is left, you are more than the sum of your experiences and their record.

Notes:

1. I’d almost rather give a teen a beer than a phone before putting him/her on the road
2. Obviously this varies by individual, so yes, there will be some teens who know more about electrical engineering by 16 than I ever will.
3. Times being what they are, this situation may now be a bragging point.

I’ve always had a soft spot for noir.

Men are men, dames are dames, bartenders sling murky off-brand whiskey when they deign to look up from the LA Times crossword where they’ve been stuck on 46 across all day, the corrupt win, and with any luck the good scrape by to see another day, sometimes.

This genre’s icons bear hard names like Chandler, Hammett, Leonard. The form dictates roughing-ups, sticking your nose where it doesn’t belong, lonely codas of reflection and loss, and sticking it to Mr. Big, when you can, and the general chill that comes from the inescapable realization that it’s still all law of the jungle out there and that sometimes when you win, you lose. In short, one line from one of the greatest noirs ever covers it all:

“Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.”

If Jake Gittes could feel like he was in Chinatown even as he was in LA, what happens if you take a Jewish kid from the midwest with a crusading heart, plunk him down in Tokyo’s seediest, yakuza-hosting districts as the Yomiuri’s newspaper’s vice beat reporter? The book Tokyo Vice tells that tale. Here’s the kicker, it’s all true¹.

The story is tri-partite. First our narrator Jake comes to Japan and against all odds winds up getting accepted to write for the Yomiuri Shinbun, something like the New York Times. It narrates a cub reporter’s early and naive steps. Jake gives us a picture of the politics of the newspaper and the politics of the police department. If the structure that is overt and explained is complicated and designed to protect the honor of all involved, the secret structures that form how the work really gets done is even more interesting.

In the second act Jake describes his continued growth of a network of whores, pimps, yakuza, and cops. The stories generally fall into the form of where a cultural precept is discussed and stories from the beat clarify the issue or the story about the pursuit of a meaty topic is given. In the first class we have the explanation of a woman’s place at the paper (“Evening Flowers”) or a case about a serial killer (“Whatever Happened to Lucie Blackman”). These two parts set up the conflict that opens and closes the book: Jake getting on Yamaguchi-gumi gang leader Tadasama Goto’s hit list and calling in all the favors and players we’ve come to know through the first two acts.

Amazingly enough, the thing that ties all those pieces together is honor. The cops’ honor to the favors paid, the yakuza soldiers loyalty to each other, and the businesslike honor of the criminal empire known as yakuza (“Goldman Sachs with guns,” Jake quips). The stories are independent vignettes that, in sum paint a confusing picture of the turmoil around doing what’s right. Doing right by some sacrifices other good people, to win you have to be willing to lose it all, left and right.

If “Chinatown” could make that world complex with only one financial scheme and relatively few power gangsters, Tokyo, with its density and wealth, escalates that by a whole order of magnitude.

Jake gets his larynx squeezed by silent, nine-fingered enforcers. Jake plies secrets out of cops and criminals in hostess bars in Roppongi with sake and blackmail. He takes lonely walks into the suburbs to visit a cop mentor and he gets very, very little sleep.

I really enjoyed the story, for all its grit. You can easily imagine the wrinkled, dirty suit at the end of the day. You can imagine the reek of cigarettes and perfume and you can understand the paranoia of knowing that one of the most powerful gangland leaders has dozens of punks who know they can make a big splash by doing the boss a favor and getting rid of you.

I really enjoyed the descriptions of the inter-factional yakuza system of obligations. It’s amazing to consider that there’s a board of directors and that rival sub-factions have no compunction about getting into the board’s good graces by shutting down non-performing franchisees. It’s a very, very different way of looking at organized crime.

For me the payoff for the two gritty opening parts is the mournful, elegaic third act. Good friends die, evil prospers, a true innocent is destroyed with Jake as the one who brings it about, and Jake scores a last, final, desperate victory. He manages to put a scratch in the paint of the organized crime juggernaut that is the yakuza’s enterprise. This sadness is so critical to noir, where the hero re-connects to human emotion in the quiet spaces. For this reason I think the part’s title “Dusk” is perfect.

I think that this sadness aspect was caught in this great hard-boiled text from “Evening Flowers:”

Setsunai is usually translated as ‘sad,’ but it is better described as a feeling of sadness and loneliness so powerful that it feels as if your chest is constricted, as if you can’t breathe; a sadness that is physical and tangible. There is another word, too — yarusenai, which is grief or loneliness so strong that you can’t get rid of it, you can’t clear it away.
There are some things like that. You get older and you forget about them, but every time you rememeber, you feel that yanusenai. It never goes away; it just gets tucked away and forgotten for a while.
…
What’s yarusenai?
It’s that one email you never replied to and will never open. It’s the bad advice you gave and the phone call you should have made and everything that came out of it. It’s thinking about the friends you suspect you might have been able to save.

The language is terse and crisp, like McCarthy or Hemingway, the economy and unadorned nature of the language prompts a clarity and a nakedness that helps advance the story.

It’s a good read, and a lot of fun.

Updated: April 2 evening for typographical errors.

1. We don’t actually know how much is “true.” Jake may well have bent the story to protect the innocent, to hide secrets, etc. This text assumes the truth is told.

I really enjoy David Byrne as a commentator, artist, pretty much anything, except as a singer and except as the icon of the Talking Heads. I just am not really into their music besides the obligatory “Psycho Killer.” That said, the Heads were an influential musical act and I can hear their reach far and wide into today (No Talking Heads, no Lady Gaga).

But I have always liked Byrne’s commentary and interviews, he seems like a really interesting cat and is a standard bearer for what my friend Alfredo calls “The White Guys who Make World Music (Sting, Peter Gabriel, Paul Simon, et al.).” Here are some of the quotes wrote down while reading this.

In these quotes Byrne muses on censorship, the South Bay, the psychology of coffee shops, and beyond.

A cognitive scientist need only look at what we have made — the hives we have created — to know what we think and what we believe to be important, , as well as how we structure those thoughts and beliefs. It’s all there, in plain view, right out in the open…They say, in their unique visual language, “This is what we think matters, this is how we live and how we play.” 2

There once existed natural geographic reasons for most towns to come into being:…Eventually what was originally a geographical justification for choosing one place over another to settle got cemented down as rail lines reached across the open spaces…In many cases the rivers or lakes eventually became irrelevant, and shipping mode…As a result the rivers and waterfronts soon became derelict… 10

The faint cacophony of many distant cell phone rings. In the train car — snippets of Mozart and hip-hop, old-school ring tones, and pop-song fragments…These ring tones are “signs” for “real” music. This is music not meant to be actually listened to as music, but to remind you of and refer to other, real music. These are audio road signs that proclaim “I am a Mozart person”…symphony of music that is not music but asks that you remember music. 22

Europe is manicured, a millennial custodial project.

The best surveillance is the one where everyone suspects they’re being watched all the time.

What’s the time limit on reparations? How long can you legitimately claim that it should be handed back to you? Can Jews in Leipzig demand their old houses back?

The two biggest self deceptions of all are that life has a meaning and that each of us is unique

She mentions Israel’s dominance over the Palestinians, and the aggressive behavior of the Israelis, as if this were a well-known fact….I am surprised to hear it voiced so openly. In America, and especially in New York, there is a hidden level of not-so-subtle censorship of such statements. They are just never heard, or if they are the speaker is often given a nasty look or accused of anti-Semitism…At that point, it seems to you that there is no censorship at all; it appears to you that your thoughts are actually unfettered and free. (188-9)

When the TV-saturated public begins to act as if the TV reality is real [Fox News, America’s dumbest criminals] and behaves accordingly — reacting fearfully and suspiciously to a world perceived as being primarily populated with drug dealers and con men, according to Gerbner’s scenarios— then eventually the real world begins to adjust itself to match the fiction. …. Existence can be confirmed, just not in the proportion seen in TV land. ….any marketing …person will tell you, perception is all. (Referring to George Gerbner, professor of communication)

Re: Rodochenko. Here is a layout featuring “illuminations” added to a tractor factory for the enjoyment and excitement of the workers —- sort of workplace as pleasure palace / theme park. Google, the current hip place to work, where the workplace is hyped as a cool campus, has some catching up to do.

Abercrombie and Fitch…has remade itself as a kind of homoerotic Fascist-chic outpost. Talk about a makeover! Do the straight kids who shop there, many of whom would never knowingly be associated with anything gay, think Oh, they’re just cute guys?

In Venezuela there are chains of coffee shops where the clientele, almost exclusively male, is waited on by attractive women in tight outfits. ….The twist…is that the interior architecture allows the female wait-staff to tower over the men. They women are positioned behind the counter on a slightly elevated platform. This means the typical Latin macho man is either being put in his place and enjoying it our that he is being transported back to childhood, where his primary view is of this mother’s breasts looming conveniently above him.

From what I can tell, there’s really not much to do around this part of the bay (Cupertino). I ride my bike fairly aimlessly down clean, spotless arteries and see on one around — not walking or biking anyway. All roads lead to places that are versions of what I just left. I ask if folks her go up to San Francisco to catch shows, exhibits, or to sample the wildly innovative cuisine in the SF restaurants. Nope, these folks just love their work, so they stay put her in the beautiful suburbs, working late, or they take their work home.

Once upon a time there was a genius software developer named Hans Reiser. He used to join Linux forums and lambaste other hackers as being foolish, prodigal, indolent, and was generally a bit of an egomaniacal ass.

In other words, par for the course in the world of software development.

But then he was indicted, and convicted, for the murder of his wife amid a tale of S&M, Linux development ( intimately linked ), Russian internet-ordered brides, and infidelity.

A crucial feature of the trial was, well, that the cops couldn’t find the body. Upon being found guilty, Reiser seems to have copped a plea with the judge such that he could get a lesser sentence in exchange for the victim’s family and, nota bene, his own children being able to lay the body of their daughter / mother to rest.

Here was Gawker media’s “Valleywag” summation picture:

First of all, and not to be juvenile, but a copy-editor would have caught the phrase “fingers corpse”—oh right this is blogging, ahem, never-mind.

Secondly, the incapacitated girl in the ad in the party dress appears dead if not really whacked out on laudanum. One could foreseeably think that that was the corpse under discussion.

The whole post is pretty distasteful, I’d say.

I’m reminded of pro-feminist blogs decrying things like “new bikini’s are scandalous” or left-leaning blogs that decry “It’s insane that McCain can run for president in the 21^st century given that he can’t even use a computer” only to be served up, guess what, an ad featuring said bikini’s or a clip of the blogger-hating senator as an ad.

So The League informed the world of the availability of the Iron Man trailer. I must say Downey looks like he’s caught the disaffected playboy / Bush-era military-industrial-complex profiteer turns warrior for good ( but with a hint of misanthrope ) lightning in a jar in a way which is not “just the character formula of Batman” yet again.

He can do that because he’s an excellent real actor. See counter-example:

But the thing I’d like to lens in on is the use of Black Sabbath’s Ur-Metal song, uh, “Iron Man”. “Iron Man” is the Epic of Gilgamesh of Heavy Metal. Like the waters of Enki, it’s the source from which all that is meht-haaaaal comes.

[ Death says: “Mehtal rules!” ]

In any case, assuming you have some level of pop culture knowledge and a “The Arrow” formatted radio station somewhere in your experience, when you hear Tony Iommi’s pick-up bending, bridge-buckling, whammy-bar distorted opening air-raid dive-bomb opening of “Iron Man” you get the “Aw shits”.

“Aw shit, it’s “Iron Man” by ür-metal band Black Sabbath in the trailer for “Iron Man” - bet the studio paid through the nose to use that one! But it’s so cool!”

Great moments are achieved by subtlety not by the TOTAL RUINATION OF THE AD BY INCLUDING THE OPENING DISTORTED VOICE EFFECT “I AM IRON MAN” FROM BLACK SABBATH’S “IRON MAN” SONG AS THE MOVIE TITLE IRON MAN IS PRINTED IN A BLADE OF IRON

Wait did you miss it? He’s IRON MAN.

Stupid hacks always butcher good things.

Read more to find out how I would have cut the trailer.

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I have a philosophy degree and, as such, I am uppity and snippy about a great many philosophical ideas that the non-philosophy-degree-holding public ( that is to say, those not asking “want fries with that” as the heart of their occupation ( I kid, I kid, my decadently over-educated bretheren )) believe they already know plenty about.

Much like an engineering magazine left in marketing, which leads to promises of Flux Capacitors in the next release, the non-Philosophy students occasionally get exposed to strange ideas which enamor them and which they begin to speak of regularly and, more dangerously, knowingly.

Exhibit A: “begging the question”.

“Begging the question” is a phrase that denotes a common type of logical fallacy. It’s where you assert what you’re trying to prove, as though it’s an established fact. Logically speaking it looks like

Premiss1 Premiss2 Conclusion

——

Conclusion

Versus

Premiss1 Premiss2 Premissn

——

Conclusion

Every time someone uses this phrase in the context of: “The car is broken, which begs the question of how we will get to school” my teeth grit. Why not say:

• “Which leads to…”
• “Which forces us to consider…”
• “Which immediately draws us to…”
• “Which, as a consequence, asks…”

Given that lack of options isn’t the reason for this misuse, it’s clear that there’s some sort of fascination with “beg the question”. Somehow people hear it once and, under its power, become like victims of Ampulex compressa. It’s compelling as an inter-sentence segue, it works a dark magic on the mind. As the pod-people continue to express the idea those of us with familiarity with the technical term chafe.

In this excellent article on how autistic children have a hard time understanding lying ( because they don’t have the ability to imagine minds with beliefs independent of fact ) the learned author writes:

If what other animals are doing when they appear to be dishonest is not real deception, this begs the question of what counts as real deception[1].

Now wait just a minute. Someone is writing scholarly work about autism research and misuses “beg the question”? Could it be? Have the scientists have been invaded by ampulex beggainterrogativa?

I think this phrase, quite like no other, is a shibboleth of “I went to a university and got a degree of consequence” . Ironically, it is usually the people who adopted the shibboleth for exactly that reason who most misuse it, leaving your fry cook’s teeth it ill-repair owing to the induced gnashing.

Footnotes:

1. Might I add, that for those who do know the meaning of “beg the question” it’s confusing as the author might actually mean the true technical usage…or may not. It took me several re-reads to decide if he was being logical about it or using this bastard usage.

I’ve recorded how I was recently in Boston at the beautiful Westin Boston Waterfront hotel. The foyer is beautiful, the bar dark and sleek, the staff courteous. In every way a high-calibre hotel should be enjoyable, it is.

Ancillary to this æsthetic, when turning on the beautiful plasma LG screen, you are given, instead of some graphic menu of “here are the movies we hope to bilk you an extra x bucks for”, a rotating series of interactive vignettes with this lovely, non-offensive, pretty, but not threateningly hot-pretty, conservatively-dressed, non-Caucasian ( because we’re down wit’ diversitay ) lady as your virtual interlocutor.

I named her Christina.

Christina reminds you that Westin wants to elevate all your senses, and advises you to buy White Tea scented candles - against a pseduo-shoji wall, perhaps taking the Asian thing a bit too far, we get it, yo.

Now, I was surprised when pretty, prim, Christina had the ignominious task of informing me of the movie selection options: “Hollywood Blockbusters, Children’s programing, and mature adult content”.

Say it with her “mature adult content”

She didn’t that, did she? Why Christina, you little minx, underneath your buttoned-up tweed there’s a scarlet A, eh? But then I thought about it a bit more…

• Adult content = naughty movies
• Mature content = naughty movies
• Mature adult content = naughty movies targeted at the elderly (cue Pulp’s “Help the Aged”)

I realize that they’re trying to give as many flags to parents in the facility that this is exactly what you don’t want your kids to be watching ( same reason, reversed, for road warrior salesfolk ), but in so doing they created a bit of a semantic conundrum.

As for you mature adults tuning in…well, boffo.

…Realizing that her show is a zero-value add to the news discourse …Having guests show the miracles of lip injections …Realizing that her crew thinks she’s a hack

Meditate, young grasshoppers.

Update much question around is this real or not. Apparently the actual air was them running the Paris Hilton car wash commercial. Nevertheless, Grace did take her producer to task on-air.

Millions of dollars each year are spent figuring out how best to position a product within the aisles of a grocery store. For the pleasure of having a rickety cardboard kiosk set up on the corner a company will pay a premium to the store owner, or, in to the drug store chain that Lauren and I were patronizing this afternoon.

Now, as I walked past this kiosk I thought to myself: “This name is horrible, how can I improve this?”.

And then the answer became clear….

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I didn’t get to experience very much of Atlanta, being that I was whisked from the airport to the site, but I did have a few moments of interaction with the locals and I was struck by how different black / white relations are in this city.

Atlanta may be the most racially integrated place I’ve ever been ( I’m talking to you, California ). This was a complete surprise.

In California and liberally-minded campuses, we hear a lot about Diversity: this post-PC concept that all rational, enlightened people are supposed to accept and adapt to as they mature and move through life. Incidentally, the delivery of this message is so sanctimonious and treacly it undermines the message many times. We are taught that this is a Good Thing and that places that refuse this precept are backward and, ultimately, ordering the waves to stop lopping the shore.

But let’s name names, shall we? New York City and Westcoastia are clearly singled out as the progressive environs where such ideal behavior is practiced. States in the Old South are singled out as “not having gotten the message”.

My personal experiences in Northern Californistan turned out to be a bit less than the utopian vision that was alluded to at UT and that is ever-so-freely spoken of when non-CA’ers ask CA’ers what they love about their state, but I came away having drunk the Kool-Aid and thinking “Westcoastia is really integrated.”

But in Atlanta something happened to me that made me question the sincerity of the CA-we-all-love-each-other story. I’m now wondering if it’s a uniting myth, PR, and not necessarily reality.

The Little Things

While I was waiting for my ride I was typing some stuff on this very computer and minding my own business. An black man in a Carhartt jacket sat next to me. I thought he was waiting for luggage or something and I continued typing away.

Day-um, girls be sproutin’ like earlier every day

I didn’t think I was being addressed.

Ay, Ay, Ay, stop staring at that theres and take a look

I was being addressed and pointed to, uh, well, a young lady, who, in my neighbor’s eye was worthy of being friendly with.

I was so, surprised, I couldn’t believe it. In Texas and California it’s just so, rare: first to be spontaneously addressed by a member of another race outside of a Diversity Embracing Environment ( work, school, etc. ) and secondly to not have him modulate to my dialect.

So, as he enjoyed his lunch we chatted and he introduced himself. He was a worker for one of the airlines and his name was Hakeem. He told me his advice on getting rich ( a variant of the pay-yourself-first theme ) and how he was planning on looking sharp and finding a girl he could trust with his money. He talked a bit about some of his babymomma drama and how he was planning on getting another job and just banking all that money.

In total, we conversed for about a half hour. He spoke in his native Atlantan dialect and didn’t seem the least surprised that I remained speaking in my own. So we talked for about a half hour with our dialog interrupted only occasionally as he addressed passers by:

To A Lady:

“Hey friend, why don’t you come have a seat?”

To the rejections or eye rolls he opined:

“She’s just tired, that’s all. Tired.”

To a Nation of Islam Member:

As-salaam alaykum, brother, sharp suit. Back: Wa alaykum as-salaam, thanks, brother.

To my great surprise, this approach, when applied to the ladies, netted one giggle and his arranging a rendezvous at that spot when he got off at 9.

He then said he had to go back to work. He sat up, eyed the next acceptable female going his direction and proceeded to follow her so that, I gather, he could have acceptable eye-candy on his walk back.

After my discussion I started listening and observing, to see if I had just met an exceedingly loquacious and gregarious fellow. I had not, I started to see more and more black / white friends walking about through the walkway. I saw tiny social interactions go on between the races effortlessly.

The posh black lady talked to the Fonzworth Bentley Southern Dandy Style type, and the Bently Farnsworth guy was waiting for the white girl who was the girlfriend of his friend the black football player type (280 and BIG!). There was no hint of the hand-wringing (these black guys look like they know what I need to know, can I talk to them?) - just people being people, getting along.

I noticed that the Nation of Islam guys didn’t seem to be too surprised by the white guy with razor notched eyebrows and skullcap with Braves baggy training suit clearly pulled out of the fashion pages of The Source or similar.

In fact, no one seemed surprised to see white people acting “black” or white people acting “white” or black people doing smooth and preppy better than the Harvard yacht club. Similarly when two young black gentlemen sat down next to each other they continued talking ‘white’ despite the one was dressed in a puffy Falcons coat with skullcap out of rap video central wardrobe and the other was in a smooth argyle sweater.

It was enough to send ones stereotype reference guide to the blender.

It was an entirely racially neutral environment - for real! People here simply didn’t seem to care too much what behavior mapped to what cultural association and didn’t seem to be all that concerned about which one people in their environment had chosen (OK, the Nation of Islam guys did give a bit of a tut-tut when the football player type walked into the arms of the white girl ).

Time after time I saw my assumptions challenged.

On one occasion I heard voices outside my hotel room. Obviously a black female and a black male. I walked out a bit later. Wrong. Black female, white male. And it wasn’t like the white male was just doing the “Act Black and try too hard doing it” thing. It was just who he was, how he communicated and, for her part, the black female, a worker at the establishment, seems not to have registered that their discourse was remarkable.

On another night, in the bar, some black gentlemen taught me a game called, I think, “booshit” which is sort of like a profanity-laced version of hot potato that’s a drinking game at the same time. My pronounciation was corrected to be “booshit” because I was a bit hesitant to use black dialect. It was all very surprising, and liberating.

It was the ability to not be a nerdy white guy or to have to wring-hands about is this assmuption PC or not PC, can I say black, or African American, etc. All that stupid burden idiocy that gets in the way of people actually relating was relieved. It was excellent.

This freedom from baggage must be a reason the black educated elite are flocking to Atlanta away from Nashville, Dallas, and Houston. Affordable housing, good quality of life, and for once, everyone seems to really be into what everyone else is cooking, not on paper, or in theory, but in true day-to-day reality.

And, for my part, it’s this freedom from baggage that makes me think Atlanta might be a fine place to reside as well.

I’d be interested in knowing if any CaliGeorgians have any further insight into this. Am I reading too much in? Was this just a bunch of outliers? Do you think you have Westcoastia or Californistan beat in terms of true racial integration?