Good morning. After a week-long vacation at a rented cottage where I did not bring a laptop, I am back home writing from my study. Despite all the sunscreen that I lathered on me, I've got a bit of a tan on account of all the time I spent in or near water. I've swum from the beaches of Lake Huron and have done laps at the recently re-opened outdoor community pool. I've been kayaking on the lake and paddle-boarding on the River Canard. Not all cures require salt-water.
I did achieve one major accomplishment during my two hiatus: I finally solved a Rubik's Cube. I did so with the help of these three YouTube videos: It took me an absurd number of hours for me to do my first solve. But spending all that time on something so gloriously useless was very good for me. And with that, I want to let you know that for the indefinite near future, I'm going to continue publishing this newsletter every other Saturday. I might move back into a weekly publishing schedule in September, but maybe I won't. I'm making this change not because I don't enjoy writing this newsletter (because I very much do), but because I'm finally beginning to understand that in order to do more, it is sometimes better to do less.
The Compassion of DevOps I managed to finish a delightful book during my holidays and I did keep up with my newsletter reading. I wasn't able to make much headway through my list of unread bookmarks, but I did spend enough time to find and enjoy Bess Sadler's short code4lib presentation called, The Compassion of DevOps.
If you work with computer systems, I think you will appreciate this 20 minute video about computers, care, and worker safety. And if you manage people who work with computers systems, I think it is essential that you to spend some time with this talk. The Antiquity to Alt-Right Pipeline I remember when I first heard the results of the Brexit referendum. I was in bed, while on vacation in Denmark and beside me was Sarah Bakewell's At The Existentialist Cafe: Freedom, Being, & Apricot Cocktails. During the COVID-19 lockdown, I read Bakewell's How To Live: A Life Of Montaigne, about the works of French statesman, mayor, and essayist who also sheltered in place in his time. For this particular moment, I'm now reading her latest: Humanly Possible: 700 years of humanist freethinking, inquiry, and hope.
I'm only in the opening chapters and I haven't gotten to a point that I would wholeheartedly recommend the work for others to read, but I have already found this survey of humanist thinkers as personally useful. When I read the interview between Alison Gopnik and Ted Chiang ("Developing AI Like Raising Kids"), I took a certain amount of pride of knowing who Meng-tzu was: One of the things that we’ve talked about in the center is this Asian tradition with philosophers like Meng-tzu [Mencius]. In that tradition the idea is supposed to be that politics should really start with those close personal relationships. The task for ethics and politics is how to scale up those close personal relationships of care to the level of a state or the level of a country. You can make an argument that one of the things that the Enlightenment did, for example, was to take the contractual relationships, the “I’m an autonomous person, you aren’t, we’re reciprocally negotiating,” and find a kind of software in markets and democracies for scaling those contracts up to the scale of a country or even the scale of the planet. That’s been a very successful enterprise, but it left the care relationships in the realm of the private and personal and not part of the broader ethical and political world. One of the reasons why I'm persisting in reading in Bakewell's sometimes-tedious history of Humanist thinkers, is that in this moment, the alt-right (and increasingly, The Right) are investing heavily into getting more men thinking daily about the Roman Empire. From Tallulah Trezevant's The Antiquity to Alt-Right Pipeline [ht]: The association between the ancient world and contemporary extremist political ideologies is well known among career classicists and amateur historians alike. For example, the etymology of ‘fascism’ is derived from fasces - bundled rods with protruding axe blades carried by lictors during the Roman Republic, signifying imperium, the power of the state.
Not only is the association widely-known, it has a long history: in 1922, Benito Mussolini’s government – considered by some to be the first government to be known as fascist – envisioned itself as an extension of the Roman Empire, while in 2015, outspoken white supremacist Richard Spencer encouraged white people to embrace their “forgotten” Roman identities. My aim is not to explain that there is a connection between Classical Antiquity and the Alt-Right, rather, I aim to understand how algorithms on social media sites such as Twitter[1] lead users who engage with content related to ancient history– particularly ancient Greco-Roman history– down an alt-right pipeline.
Who Is Tommy the Clown? I am no longer heavily invested in knowing who the players are in the modern music scene. But I used to care. And this is why I was able to ask my son, on the occasion of a conversation we had on the matter of Kendrick Lemar's latest video, hey do you know who that clown is?
If you’ve been paying attention to hip-hop —and particularly Kendrick Lamar’s moves the past few weeks — you may have noticed a colorful afro’d character named Tommy the Clown. He was on stage dancing at Kendrick’s “The Pop Out” concert on Juneteenth during DJ Hed’s set and is also one of the stars of Lamar’s “Not Like Us” music video.
Many of you may be wondering, “Who is this clown?” But for those in the know, he’s a legend that may be just as important to Los Angeles as Lamar himself... I first learned of Tommy the Clown, some 18 years ago. If I am not mistaken, I watched Rize as a rented DVD from Netflix while I was on maternity leave with my infant son. I had heard about krumping (probably from Madonna) but I had no idea about clowning. Rize is a documentary following an interview schedule of two related dancing subcultures of Los Angeles called clowning and krumping.[3] The first series of interviews introduces, describes and develops the dance style known as clowning.[3] A descendant of 1980s breakdancing, clowning is a contemporary street art all its own, characterized by speedy, flowing limbs, feverish shakes, hipness, and confounding athletic tricks.[4] Tommy Johnson, better known by his alias, Tommy the Clown, is a former drug dealer and a man with a mission. For Tommy, clowning is more than an aesthetic pastime: in an area besieged by drive-by shootings, drug deals and unemployment; clowning is his way of offering an optimistic alternative for youngsters, a means of self-expression and a chance to channel positive energy.
The second series of interviews and footage explains how the dance style known as krumping evolved from clowning and matured into its own identity. Like clowning, krumping is characterized by free, expressive exaggerated, and highly energetic movement. The youths who started krumping, known as Lil C' and Miss Prissy, saw the dance as a way for them to escape gang life and "to release anger, aggression and frustration positively, in a non-violent way."
The third section of the film depicts a dance battle called The Battle Zone which takes place between clowns and krumpers at the Great Western Forum in 2004. And I also had no idea that clowning would survive for another 25 years.
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