Just a quick note to point anyone who’s interested to a piece I wrote for Culture+Travel, a magazine that covers some cool, off-the-radar stories from travel destinations around the globe. This one’s about haenyeo, Jeju’s famous women divers, who free-dive — that means no air tanks — for seafood off Jeju’s coasts. A guy named Ian Baguskas, which is an awesome last name if ever I’ve heard one, took the photos.

Brief history of the internets: October 29, 1969: White American guy Leonard Kleinrock sent the first data online over

Brief history of the internets:

October 29, 1969: White American guy Leonard Kleinrock sent the first data online over arpanet. The white people needed more sneaky military tricks and this was cutting edge stuff.

Web 1.0: More and more American white guys get their rocks off developing esoteric languages to exchange porn and escape into fantasy worlds where they weren’t only white but powerful and rich.

Web 2.0: These same white guys don’t have to play games any more (but they do!), their fantasies having become reality. You see, a bunch of rich white guys begin to agree that their esoteric work is going to change the world. All the white guys in the world start piling on! Some white girls do too, as well as a few privileged others.

Web 3.0: A black guy gets elected president. Then a black woman (Oprah, naturally). Black people take over the internets despite the seeming insurmountability of centuries of economic and cultural violence against them. They are able to do this because they make sick music videos.

If you want to get more detail on all the activities of these white guys, the latest issue of white magazine Vanity Fair gets into more white facts as told by various important white guys. But my version gets to the meat of the matter.

Web 3.0 is indeed the semantic web—but not the way us white people thought. It’s about word meaning alright. But not about another round of esoteric languages that cull the connotative and contextualized meaning of words. Nope. It is about changing the meaning of whiteness from normal to political. From average to privileged.

The semantic web was crowned recently on Perez Hilton after he posted the new Nas video: Be A N-word Too. It garnered this comment:

You usually post alot of BS we indulge on on a daily basis about who’s wearing what and how many pounds and what a mess, d list… BLAH BLAH BLAH… BUT WHEN YOU POST REAL MUSIC, REAL PEOPLE, REAL NEWS, I REALIZE YOU’RE NOT JUST A GOSSIP BLOGGER… YOU’RE INNOVATIVE!!! Who else would post this video??? how else would I have seen it? NO television network would have posted it and nowhere would we have found it without being censored… SO YOU KNOW WHAT PEREZ… F*CK YOUR HATERS, SPOILED “STARS”, UNTALENTED BITCHES (avril jijiji), AND KEEP ON SPILING THEIR MESS OF LIVES SO YOU CAN ENTERTAIN US ****AND**** THANK YOU FOR ENLIGHTNING ME WITH THIS MUSIC… I WAS NEVER A FAN UNTIL TODAY! XOXO

This music video is what the internets will be for. It is probably beyond our imaginations right now. Revelatory cultural productions that come contained in previously unbroadcasted forms. Boundaries are exceeded. Failure of imagination will cause many to belittle and condemn the work. Just like no one in 1849 could imagine a human would fly from New York to Los Angeles. There were cartoons about how silly it would be for a human to fly across the continent.

Nas is being overtly political—but he has to be. Take your Scoble, your Arrington and even the little Kevin Rose. They are the normal. Our culture’s natural. So they can pass as apolitical. Why would they need to bring politics up when the system’s milk nurtures and sustains their delectable plumpness? White capitalist patriarchy is only a political issue to those who aren’t the norm. Like Nas and his N-word.

There are no apolitical spaces, only tacit functional denial. There are no dirty words, only dirty contexts. Across the board social regulation of all kinds services the interests of the white people who invented the N-word word to rationalize past violence and, in that grand old tradition, reinvent new violence by cross-contextual bans on its use in public broadcasts.

Nas is danceable enlightenment. His is the new semantic language. He is the vanguard of Web 3.0.

P.S. I will be in attendance at Luminato’s “The Dark City”, tonight at the Lorraine Kimsa Theatre in Toronto. If you see me at the show then say hi. I’m told tickets are still available at the door—walrusmagazine.com/events

Naomi Duguid and Jeffrey Alford’s new book, Beyond the Great Wall: Recipes and Travels in the Other China, is one of the best cookbooks I’ve ever read. Duguid and Alford have compiled twenty-five years of personal history, observation, photographs, travel narratives, and recipes into a collection that illustrates just how rich and varied non-Han Chinese culture is today, and just how endangered. In a year when China is in the news more than ever, the book serves as a reminder that the country is more than its capital city. I spoke with Jeffrey and Naomi a few weeks ago at the Random House Canada offices.

****

Your own personal history is woven throughout this book and one gets the sense that these areas have been important to you for a long time. So why this book now? Why wasn’t it, say, your second book? What has changed politically, or in your own experiences, that made you want to write this book now?

Naomi: Well the ones out earlier, we put bits of those things in them—in our first book, Flatbreads and Flavors, we managed to squeeze Tibet in there, there was a lot of Xinjiang in there, and we started the book with flatbreads from Kashgar. But even now on our sixth book, we think this is lucky to be able to write about somewhere that is relatively so far out. So to have a contract even after a track record of six…that’s got to be our answer, partly. This has always been an interest of ours.

Jeffrey: in fact, a long time ago, Naomi wanted to do a book on Tibet. And I kept saying no way in the world…

N:…will anybody ever publish it. Stones and Silk, I thought. That would be a title.

J: Our editor was working on our second book with us, the one on rice, and she said, “you know, I’m okay to have my feet in the mud…”

N: “…in the rice paddies…”

J: “But please not over my knees.” (more…)

BRENTWOOD, CALIFORNIA—This morning I walked my dog Jesus to a beautiful lush lawn to pee. Her delicate quarter-sized paws prefer dry soft ground and her nose craves living grass after an enduring Toronto winter.

But instead of sniffing around eagerly for the right spot to relieve herself, she broke her pattern and did a very strange thing. She rolled down and onto her back, like she does on the carpet at home. I urged her on to no avail. Kneeling down to pick her up my fingers brushed the grass and I realized what was wrong.

The huge lovely “lawn” was in fact, extremely realistic AstroTurf. (more…)