Hey City Zen!

What some now call cultural appropriation used to be called cosmopolitanism. Thank you Stephen Fry for pointing out the menace of the parochialism of "illiberal liberals." I hope you are wrong about the end of classical liberalism. Everything I do is appropriation. Complex Systems is the science of scientific cultural appropriation: finding commonalities, importing, updating and exporting methods across disciplines. Djing is the art of cultural appropriation and reinvention. So is Hip Hop. "On a quest to make love De La Soul, no pretense," life itself is appropriation: genes that jump, genes that crossover. Sex is appropriation. We are biological appropriation, and all culture is cannibalism, as Dali so well observed. When appropriation becomes a thoughtcrime, culture and life itself becomes a crime. Stop the reductive, illiberal parochialism of political correctness. "Let the whole world become a paper tape we can write on", said Von Neumann, grasping the similarity between Turing machines and living cells. Save us gods and goddesses of appropriation: Laurie Anderson, De La Soul, Beastie Boys, Prince, Bowie, Miles. "Só a Antropofagia nos une. Socialmente. Economicamente. Filosoficamente. Única lei do mundo. Expressão mascarada de todos os individualismos, de todos os coletivismos" ("Only Cannibalism unites us. Socially. Economically. Philosophically. The unique law of the world. The masked expression of all individualism and collective movement",) said Oswald de Andrade. Here is Lesson #3, Masters Double Dee and Steinski shows us how. And let's write all over the Berlin Walls of the newspeak police.

Labels: #Appropriation, #ComplexSystems, #Culture, #DJCulture