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

The most rewarding aspect of DJing on a friday night after spending the whole day in a long faculty meeting is to see how students, young people of all ages, and clubland at large have move beyond the 1970's wars that still dominate social interaction in academia. While not entirely there yet, clubkids are now essentially post-national, post-race, post-gender, post-sexual-identity, post-feminist; they are entirely humanist. All the summers of love have indeed brought an exciting millenial generation of aquarians, as we did not think possible. Of course academic education, like all encoded memory systems, will ensure the vertical inheritance of the cognitive categories (memes for you milennials) of 70's wars---after all, there is an entire cottage farm of such concepts sustaining PC academia. But mutation, and most of all the inexorable recombination from the evolutionary forces that drive culture---of which DJ Culture is the best metaphor---will reveal how archaic identity politics codes really are now. While academia continues to create every self-serving "identity" possible to encode unfair and unsustainable distinctions, Lana Del Rey sings and we dance the human continuum. Let them eat cake, they're jaded.

Labels: #Academia, #DJCulture, #IDenetityPolitics, #Music