the rasx() context

You don’t know John Outterbridge? You probably are younger than me and I’m going to do a little something about you getting to know him. You might be with strong African features and you might have exclaimed something like, “Why can’t we just get together and do something constructive?” When ‘we’ say things like that, it is often based on the assumption that Black people have been permanently and eternally dysfunctional instead of being collectively on crack for the last 35 years.

A man like John Outterbridge and his creative constructiveness may be unexpected for you.

Anyway… the people who went to King/Drew Medical Magnet High School, since the day it first opened in the 1980s, should know John Outterbridge. This is because John Outterbridge was the director of Watts Towers Arts Center. I remember going to Jazz festivals and other events long before these events (like The African Market Place hit the West Side).

And, speaking of the West Side, it was my error to confuse John Outterbridge with a guy like Ben Caldwell. This essentially means that I would have to go through way too many explanations as to why I would want to conduct an interview—especially when someone ‘else’ (who probably lives in Santa Monica) is expected to do it.

So here are a few sketches of questions for Mr. Outterbridge while I work up the powers to phone his sprawling studio off Slauson:

• I have read his 1973 Smithsonian interview where he repeatedly and deliberately questions the definition of “art” itself. It should be interesting to ask him about the fact that there are no words for “art” in many, many pre-colonial/pre-Islamic African languages—yet the peoples who speak these languages seem to have produced copious amounts of what “we” call “art.”
• I would like to show him some stills from The Wiz (1978)—especially the scenes with Nipsey Russell and see whether he sees some of his work in there. Other movies should be included here as well.
• Back that 1973 Smithsonian interview, Outterbridge proposed a community project that would be outlandish and considered impossible by the “standards” of my generation of artists. It may be informative to find out whether Mr. Outterbridge notices a marked difference in community activity and self-starting in my age group and younger (the crack and post-crack generations).

Terry White: “The new MacBook Pro’s trackpad is completely redesigned. The separate “click” button is GONE! The whole trackpad (actually most of the lower section) is a button. This has it’s pluses and minuses too. Unfortunately it has more minuses than pluses. It’s just sometimes awkward to click and drag objects. Speaking of clicking, this trackpad is the loudest I’ve ever heard. When you click it, everyone around you will know! This includes your sleeping mate that is lying next to you while you work late. I could deal with this if the darn thing just worked consistently. It seems that depending upon where you click (for example the center vs. the sides, you may get a click you may not.”

“Most users don’t office in the cloud: 1% use Google Docs”

Jacqui Cheng: “…68 percent of the Google Docs group still reported having used Word at least once during the six-month period. Comparatively, only 26 percent of OpenOffice.org users made use of Microsoft’s apps. This tidbit of data is particularly telling, as it shows that most users still don’t see Google’s offerings as a standalone option even if they prefer it.” After years of observing how this word-processing issue had played in the press, I am actually surprised about the low numbers for Google Docs. For any person with some kind of Bill-Hill appreciation of typography, literacy and human glyphics, Microsoft Word is still the preferred environment. I just cut and paste my CleanXHTML into the hip new Web 2.0 word-processing crap and the bulk of the writing takes place in Word.

“What is Grasshopper?”

“With Grasshopper, you can use your favorite development environment from Microsoft to deploy applications on Java-enabled platforms such as Linux. … Grasshopper 2.5 is a plug-in for the Visual Studio 2008 development environment and provides full support for ASP.NET AJAX, including Microsoft’s ASP.NET 2.0, the AJAX Extensions, and the AJAX Control Toolkit. In addition, version 2.5 supports new language features for C# 3.0 and Visual Basic 9, such as Local Type Inference, Object and Collection Initializers, Anonymous Types, and Auto-Implemented Properties.”

Overton Lloyd of p-funk-art fame released a wall of charming and insightful caricatures of his “posse of possibility”—and I just could not help but notice Robin Strayhorn in the mix:

Last I heard, Robin was in India—my guess is that she went there in Alice-Coltrane style! You go girl!

By the way: A few years ago Ms. Strayhorn borrowed my compact bicycle pump for Schrader valves. I look forward to her returning it…

Yes, in spite of the fact that according to a “Dogon to Digital” press release, “…out of approximately 10,000 industrial designers in America, less than 250 are African-American. There are 31 million African-Americans in the United States,” there is The Organization of Black Designers. They have a web site. I’m pleased and impressed.

“New Venture to Offer Small Publishers Digital Technology”

Julie Bosman: “David Steinberger, the president and chief executive of Perseus, said that by using Constellation independent publishers could make their books quickly available in several digital formats, allowing them to compete on the same technological level and with the same speed and flexibility as larger companies. Many publishing analysts see digital technology as one of the few major growth areas in the book industry.”

A Wikipedia.org Moment: Lake Tana

“Lake Tana …is the source of the Blue Nile and is the largest lake in Ethiopia.” This lake is vitally important because the Blue Nile is vitally important to the whole of Nile Valley civilization. “The flow of the Blue Nile reaches maximum volume in the rainy season (from June to September), when it supplies about two thirds of the water of the Nile proper. The Blue Nile, along with that of the Atbara River to the north, which also flows out of the Ethiopian highlands, were responsible for the annual Nile floods that contributed to the fertility of the Nile Valley and the consequent rise of ancient Egyptian civilization…”

I knew about Jacques Derrida before I knew about Jacques Derrida. When Dr. Margo Natalie Crawford and I thought we were young, intellectual friends, she would tell me jokes about how the superficial, fad-like version of deconstructionism swept through her Yale peers like wildfire. It seemed like every campus conversation required the punctuation, “Let’s deconstruct that.”

My other homie, Dr. Darryl Dickson-Carr, sets the scene adroitly:

Deconstruction was a trend, but it actually hit its peak in terms of influence and popularity almost thirty years ago. Of course, one can argue that it receives periodic revivals whenever a new class of graduate students takes an initial theory proseminar, but that’s not quite the same.

As for me, I recall first being introduced to deconstruction the winter or spring of my senior year at UCSB, when I took an “Introduction to Literary Theory and Criticism” course. I admit to being taken in completely by Jacques Derrida’s “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” due primarily to Derrida’s assertion that “the center is not the center” with regard to Western epistemology. It helped dislodge me from the Eurocentrism at the heart of my education, as had reading Malcolm X’s Autobiography some nine months earlier. I started questioning the ability of most of the books I read from that point to make meaning. I saw play and punning in their language. I was impossible (or is that “‘I’ was impos[s][i/a]ble”?).

I continued to find resonances in deconstructive theory for a couple of years, at least, until I realized what Ishmael Reed and others had said: people of the African Diaspora have been showing for centuries how the West deconstructs itself. The bloom was off the rose; the (nonexistent) center had no center.

I write none of this to indicate that deconstruction is useless, or that one cannot find value in it. You cannot expect to make it through any advanced degree program in the humanities without working knowledge of deconstruction and post-structuralist theory, especially if you refute or reject it, as some do. I simply found it more productive to engage in a historicist approach.

When you struggle with my shabby word play in this journal babbling about exploring African intellect, it would have never occurred to me without the help of the relatively superficial film, Derrida, that some Jewish dude from Algeria (which is in Africa) was a living, breathing, influential, poetic example of what I call an ‘African revolt’ against European intellectual and technical assumptions about what is universal and what is natural. Derrida himself and 10,000 of his followers would never use my words to describe his journey through “philosophy” so it helps to write them down here for future reference. (In fact, Derrida is easily and deservedly grouped in with a French ‘wave’ of thinkers as dramatized and documented in French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States.)

Well… actually, I could be wrong about this. Maybe Derrida knew that some of his dance moves are of African origin because of the choice of imagery for this book cover:

Maybe not…

Through a serious study of Derrida, students have the opportunity to discover that their intellect has an ethnicity—and, regardless of your lovely complexion, that ethnicity is likely European. These students who may feel “uncomfortable” with my pro-Africa “rhetoric” can still get somewhere near I am coming from when, “Derrida takes issue with the way in which much of metaphysical thought is founded on dynamic oppositions of good and evil, interior and exterior…”

My poetic vision about these Western “dynamic oppositions” borrows heavily from the book of Genesis and the “Knowledge of Good and Evil”—this can sound literally crazy to many properly assimilated chocolate church folk. So when you think my super-Black bag is full of shit (not collected by sacred beetles), I can now refer your hyper-modernized monkey ass to Derrida. Since I dislike intensely being called crazy—especially by women like, say, Dr. Margo Natalie Crawford, I am quite pleased and relieved that a relatively “acceptable” character is available to self-described “normal” people.

A note for serious students of deconstruction: My use the phrase “Blackness of Deconstruction” in the title of this entry can be problematic because “Blackness” is a unit of dual opposition. Blackness requires whiteness—and deconstruction requires the dismantling of oppositional structures like “Black” and “white.” There is opposure and composure… my preference is for eternal African composure instead of temporal Black opposition so please regard my usage here as transitional, communicative and I daresay instructional.