<nettime> clarity...

["Paul D. Miller" <anansi1 {AT} mail.earthlink.net>]

Joel - the message was a quick announcement, and there'll be more 
details in a little while. Dhalgren was an incredibly important novel 
about how American culture's conflicts during the 1960's. It is now 
the 21st century and we still have race riots (check out Cincinnati's 
riots in the news today ad yesterday.... c'mon this seems really 
really really really really really really obvious....), and intense 
structural racism. By my standards, the "Old Left" ideas that Mark 
represents are actually re-enforcements of all the kinds of 
boundaries that make those kinds of situations happen. The intensity 
of this kind stuff is not likely to go away anytime in the near 
future. I don't "hate" Mark Dery, I have total and utter contempt for 
the man, and I feel critics like him have held been totally 
detrimental to the notion of arts and letters as a place for growth 
and intellectual stimulation.  We were editors at Artbyte (in fact I 
helped vote to bring him in, but that was before I had really "met" 
the man), and he treated people abysmally, and started an absolutely 
poisonous atmosphere, in which, for example, my writing was called 
nifty stuff like "ebonic plague" because I focused on on some the 
ways dj culture is altering language etc etc As an African American 
involved with digital culture, I found that Mark was a farce, and if 
you look at most of the discourse around digital culture these days, 
people of color are consistently crushed out of the narrative for 
precisely those reasons. The recent forum in Artforum magazine, for 
example, was a perfect example of the kind of vapor ideas Mark 
espouses, with absolutely nothing to back him up, but he is a white 
American, and he will be published until the sky falls..... If you'd 
like more info, I'd be more than happy to point out specifics, but 
the basic idea is that I really think that the discourse in the 
conventional critics circles is so utterly lame and one sided that it 
is completely out of touch with the "real" world. Basically the 
subject heading game was just a ruse, no more no less. But that's a 
minor topic. The message didn't mention Mark because he's not that 
important a voice in what I was talking about. Yes, I enjoy paradox, 
and yes you can't have the bad without the good. This seems pretty 
self evident. I definitely think that you didn't understand what I 
was writing about. No I'm not into the whole "new agey" "positive" 
happy feel good -ism promoted by various folks, and I don't think 
that my e-mail said that I was into only the "good." The future, like 
the present, is what we make of it. In any case, thanks for the note.
okay,
Paul

ps, I definitely don't play "happy" pleasant sounding tunes... if 
you'd like, go to a place like Freenet.org and download my live sets 
with Thurston Moore and Yoko Ono.... ummmm or actually listen to the 
music before you write that kind of stuff. But anyway, hopefully this 
clears up what you've discussed.

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