allaboutgeorge

Suburbs, particularly in newer, more affordable areas farther out from urban centers, are booming in places like Washington, Houston and Denver. Yet analyses of the 2000 census data by researchers at the State University of New York at Albany suggest there has been little change in the tendency of whites, blacks, Latinos and Asians to live apart from one another.

The otaku, the passionate obsessive, the information age's embodiment of the connoisseur, more concerned with the accumulation of data than of objects, seems a natural crossover figure in today's interface of British and Japanese cultures. I see it in the eyes of the Portobello dealers, and in the eyes of the Japanese collectors: a perfectly calm train-spotter frenzy, murderous and sublime. Understanding otaku -hood, I think, is one of the keys to understanding the culture of the web. There is something profoundly post-national about it, extra-geographic. We are all curators, in the post-modern world, whether we want to be or not.

"We're going to open sometime this summer, maybe in June, maybe in May, maybe not until in July," he says. "I have a partner down there, and we've just built a restaurant that is really exciting and good. And because Clarksdale is what it is -- we call it 'ground zero for the blues,' this is where the blues supposedly originated -- we have people coming there from all over the world [saying], 'Where can we hear the blues?' There already are a couple of places there, but they're not set -- you may or may not get music on a particular night. So we're going to open a juke joint, and it's called Ground Zero."

"If you have something interesting to put out there, then the Internet drops the physical barriers," he says. "Anyone can publish a Web site, so what's our excuse?"

"If you're out in the street for a shot it's pretty scary, man," Maher says. "You could pretty easily get hit by a car or a bus. Buses are the worst. It's always scary with traffic. You never know what people are going to do."

-----

Finally, connecting the new OS X machine to another Mac was a frustrating nightmare that cast a black shadow across an otherwise sunny day, although the solution to the problem turned out to be quite simple.

I turned on file sharing and AppleTalk networking on the new OS X machine and was able to see it on the network from the other Mac, but the OS X machine couldn't see the Mac.

Getting this far was hard enough --- it took me ages to figure out where the different settings could be found. Figuring out the problem had me stumped. Finally, a friend told me that I had to check an "Enable File Sharing clients to connect over TCP/IP" checkbox on the Mac. And I'd been concentrating on the OS X machine. Silly me!

According to data from entertainment research firm Webnoize, the number of Napster users on the system at any given time has dropped from 1.5 million in mid-March to 1.1 million as of Friday -- a one-week decline of more than 25%.

At the same time, however, Webnoize found that the average number of files shared by any one user, which had tumbled by 60% after Napster implemented its blocking technology, has rebounded from 71 to roughly 110 -- implying that the users with the least files to share are the ones dropping off the system and that those who remain are renaming their files to avoid the blocking.

Anyhow, more to come as I get the hang of things and she enlightens me when I get bollixed up.

A single word comes to mind: promote.

Apple must promote the heck out of this operating system. It must be the face of consumers and businesses. It must tout this operating system as the best thing since sliced bread. It roasts, it toasts, and it burns. It slices, it dices, and it grills. Sounds like a bad infomercial?

Ever seen how much money people make off of infomercials?

So, Shannon's leaving ("leaving!") to hit the road again. In an e-mail she sent around today, she says:

Last year, I rode 570 miles on California AIDS Ride 7 to raise money for the SF AIDS Foundation. This year, I'm riding for the L.A. Gay and Lesbian Center, which features the Jeffrey Goodman Special Care Clinic, the Audre Lorde Lesbian Health Clinic and the Pedro Zamora Youth HIV Clinic. The L.A. Gay and Lesbian Center is an amazing organization, serving 18,000 people each month and anonymously testing 25,000 people each year as well as providing HIV/AIDS educational materials to 14,000 other service providers.

In the last 8 years, AIDS Rides have raised over $84 million for education, testing and services all over the country. I'm not going to overwhelm you with scary statistics about HIV and AIDS because I think you all know how devasating this disease has been, and how vital it is to fund AIDS organizations. I am going to ask you to open your hearts and your wallets for this great cause. E-mail me if you need a pledge form, or pledge electronically using the link below.

The organizers of the AIDS Rides make it easy to give by allowing small donations over time, so you can give $250 at $25 a month for 10 months. Enough of the infomercial. If you need further inspiration, revisit my ride journals and slide show from last year at http://content.gay.com/channels/HIVlife/aidsride/index.html, or come talk to me on the 16th floor, I'm the one with the overgrown quads near the back stairwell.

To donate on the Web, go to: https://www.ecenroll.com/ECPTW2/SilverStream/Pages/pgTanquerayRidesDonateOnline.html

first name: Shannon
last name: Wentworth
Event: Los Angeles AIDSRide 2001
My rider number: 7482

Thank you for your time and support.

Cheers, Shannon

"When the conversation goes too deeply into Chicago," Ms. Suman said, "you just ask politely, 'Can we get back to business?' "

LONDON (Reuters) - Pop diva Whitney Houston is being lined up to star in the next James Bond film, Britain's top-selling Sun tabloid reported Wednesday.

Houston has agreed in principle to appear alongside Pierce Brosnan, the latest incarnation of British secret agent 007, and is waiting for confirmation from movie bosses, the paper said.

The singer, who appeared in the box office hit ``The Bodyguard'' with Kevin Costner, is set to follow in the footsteps of actresses such as Ursula Andress, Grace Jones and Denise Richards as a ``Bond girl.''

"The movie bosses think Whitney would make a fantastic Bond girl and are desperately working out a deal which will be acceptable,'' the Sun quoted an unidentified source as saying.

Smog, "Cold Blooded Old Times" (linked in my head with Cornershop's "Brimful of Asha," if you must know)

Wookie, "The Battle"

R.L. Burnside, "You Gotta Move," "The Criminal Inside Me," "A Ass Pocket Of Whiskey," "It's Bad You Know" and "Woke Up This Morning" (because James wouldn't quit plugging him in our AIM convos -- I hope you're happy now, bro!)

Call and Response, "Colors," "(Learn To) Rollerskate," "Bustout" and "California Floating In Space" -- SXSW darlings, it seems

Jonatha Brooke, "New Dress" (feat. Neil Finn) -- if she's good enough for Anil, she's good enough for me (and besides, "Secrets and Lies" is the joint)

Cassandra Wilson, "The Good Life" and "Fly Me To The Moon"

St. Etienne, "Goodnight Jack," "Lose That Girl" and "Erica America"

The Sea And Cake, "Seemingly"

Tortoise, "Seneca" from 1:56 to the end

"There is no individual, but he does actually represent a couple of real people I know who are sort of outer fringe in terms of use of digital things.''

Rothnie thought up Tommy to illustrate just how fast the world, and especially the United States, is creating data, because it is tough to believe, just as it is tough to understand where the data goes, who owns it and who manages it. "We are all drowning in a sea of information. The challenge is to learn to swim in that sea, rather than drown in it,'' opined Peter Lyman and Hal Varian, two University of California, Berkeley professors whose 2000 study, How Much Information, was funded by EMC.

Most people are not nearly as prolific as Tommy, but they are learning.

If everything every human being has ever said were transcribed and digitized, it would be about 5 exabytes of data, an exabyte being a million terabytes. The world is creating about 1-2 exabytes of new data each year, the Berkeley study showed.

Moreover, all those figures are for original content, which, thanks to rampant copying, is only about a fifth of what is out there. Store that on your disk and spin it.

WASHINGTON, March 16 -- At 10:26 p.m. on Jan. 17, less than three days before he was sworn in as president, George W. Bush sent a group e-mail message to 42 "dear friends" and family members, telling them his new job would preclude continuing to correspond in cyberspace.

"My lawyers tell me that all correspondence by e-mail is subject to open record requests," Mr. Bush wrote to the group, which included top aides and business people. "Since I do not want my private conversations looked at by those out to embarrass, the only course of action is not to correspond in cyberspace. This saddens me. I have enjoyed conversing with each of you."

Until that moment, when Mr. Bush wrote that "sadly I sign off," he kept in contact with these people through often daily e-mail messages, which he would usually dash off early in the morning before embarking on the campaign trail. (The missives were generally to the point ? a sentence or so. Mr. Bush preferred all lower-case letters and little punctuation except dashes between thoughts, and would usually sign off, simply, "gwb.")

And you can wrap up your ego all you like in the vagaries of technology and gizmo garbage but what it really comes down to is how well you can stir-fry some leftover bok-choy for dinner and dance the tango naked and suck the toes of your lover; and I don't care how many damnable gizmos and sleek portables and wireless stroketoys you've got dangling from your hip, if you can't give a decent massage or quote from an exquisite poem or appreciate a cheap bottle of scruffy chianti while admiring your S.O. as she does the dishes in her inside-out DKNY thong you don't really have anything.

Q: Getting back to the issue of financing, Kasi, tell me how you got "Caveman's Valentine" going.

Lemmons: Well, Samuel L. Jackson and Jersey Films were already attached to the project when I came on. Jersey has a track record of putting together packages of material that's difficult to sell. And because Sam and I worked together on "Eve's Bayou" -- and in fact he made it possible for me to make that movie in the first place--it became easier to package it.

Q: But what about selling it to financiers? I mean, we're talking about a movie whose hero is a psychotic African-American derelict who rails against unseen forces and has a sexual encounter with a white woman. Not the sort of story that attracts instant financing.

Lemmons: Well, my feeling is you never know why somebody is passing on the material, OK? At one point, we were in business with a company that we really seriously thought was going to make the movie, and then there was a changeover of personnel and they balked at the material. Which is particularly distressing.

But for the most part, people either love it or hate it, and they tell you without telling you why. Even though there are a million things they can hide behind. Like, say, African-American actors don't "sell foreign" or that this is a hero who'll rub people the wrong way or, like, who wants to see a movie about a schizophrenic homeless black man, you know? I never heard that the interracial sex rubbed people the wrong way, though I'm sure it did. It's OK, though. We did find someone to work with for whom none of these issues seemed to matter at all.

Melvin Van Peebles: I didn't have to worry about anyone else because I did it all myself. I tried the studio thing. Had a three-picture deal with Columbia. But when it came to something like ["Sweetback"], they said, "How could I be doin' somethin' like this and dahdahdah...." Now, people are oohing and aahing about what I did. But back then, I was on my own. Did my own distribution, publicity ... And it wasn't just dangerous on the black level. Forget the political message. What was dangerous was, here is a guy who comes along with two pieces of Scotch tape, makes himself a huge killing. I mean yes, I'm the godfather of modern black cinema. But I'm also the godfather of "Blair Witch Project" and all that implies, hmm?

Spikes: I remember something [president of Time Warner] Dick Parsons said once: A company that does not look like its target audience will ultimately miss its mark. I liked that. He was saying that if you want black business and you don't hire black people in your company, what chances are you going to have? How do you feed that audience if you don't feel that audience's needs in your own arteries?

Ridley: Not to sound like an old man, but young people...yeah, they're affected by the cross-cultural influence in music and hip-hop and things like that. The problem is that movies are still dominated by twenty-five middle-aged white multimillionaires who are out of touch. And not just with black people, but with everything.

Look at what happened with "Pay It Forward." It was adapted from a novel in which the lead male character was African-American, and yet they cast a white actor [Kevin Spacey] to play the role. You're telling me there wasn't a black actor around who could play that part? It certainly wouldn't have made less money with a black actor. So, you can say, it will get better, it will get better. But how much more bankable do you have to be as a black actor or actress? How many more positive responses do you have to have from moviegoers in general, white and black, before it really changes? I don't know.

This post is my first one using Blogger Pro. More about that as time and tinkering permit ... (thanks, Ev!)

Out of these insights, Kelly developed his theory and philosophy. The theory we'll get to in a while. The philosophy he called constructive alternativism. Constructive alternativism is the idea that, while there is only one true reality, reality is always experienced from one or another perspective, or alternative construction. I have a construction, you have one, a person on the other side of the planet has one, someone living long ago had one, a primitive person has one, a modern scientist has one, every child has one, even someone who is seriously mentally ill has one.

Some constructions are better than others. Mine, I hope, is better than that of someone who is seriously mentally ill. My physician's construction of my ills is better, I trust, than the construction of the local faith healer. Yet no-one's construction is ever complete -- the world is just too complicated, too big, for anyone to have the perfect perspective. And no-one's perspective is ever to be completely ignored. Each perspective is, in fact, a perspective on the ultimate reality, and has some value to that person in that time and place.

In fact, Kelly says, there are an infinite number of alternative constructions one may take towards the world, and if ours is not doing a very good job, we can take another!

Abraham acknowledged that the West's energy crunch, which has resulted in sporadic power interruptions in California and soaring electricity prices across the region, will not ease anytime soon.

"The problem will get worse, and blackouts this summer appear inevitable,'' said Abraham. He projected that peak demand for electricity this summer will outpace supply in the state by 5,000 megawatts.

... sympathy with the cause it carries, annoyance at the stereotypes though which it communicates its message, curiosity about where i can get that shirt. ...

Annoyance? I felt a sense of recognition, not just because of the skin color of the three kinds of folks who are shown (gay/bi men who sleep with men; the straight-acting men who sleep with the aforementioned men -- or actual, real live Kinsey-zero specimens -- and the women who sleep with the straight-actors/K.Z.'s.) but because it's a pretty tight snapshot of HIV's spread within the African-American community.

A recent survey of young adults in six U.S. cities found that while an astonishing 30 percent of gay black men aged 23 to 29 were HIV-positive, less than one third of them knew it.

"We believe that 60 percent of new HIV infections are occurring in black communities," A. Cornelius Baker said last month when the Atlanta, Georgia-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study was released.

While reasons vary, societal and cultural norms within the black community play a part, explained Baker, who is executive director of the Whitman-Walker Clinic in Washington. Church and family have a strong pull, and much of what they teach make a gay man's lifestyle taboo.

"There are a lot of people who do have girlfriends -- who do have wives -- and then have a secretive sexual life beyond that," he said.

The CDC has estimated that 1 in 50 black men and 1 in 160 black women is infected with HIV, making them 10 times more likely than whites to be diagnosed with AIDS and 10 times more likely to die from it.

New AIDS infections also are increasing among drug users and women over the age of 50, said Frasier-Howe

Roger Adamson ... says these stories are too common in the black community, where many families and community leaders still won't embrace gay men and women. "They don't want to hear that," Adamson says of black leaders. "So [they say], 'We don't want this around here,' or 'We don't want to hear about this issue. That's y'all's issue. Take it down there to the white area, don't bring it here with us.' "

Benston notes that while such homophobia is not more common in the black community, it is felt more acutely because of the "dual identities" it creates for black gay men, who need identification with the black community to counter racism in the larger society. It is one thing to be rejected by society at large; it is another to be cast out by the community in which you take refuge from that rejection.

Others trace the roots of the black community's rejection of homosexuality to early discourse about black power. As black gay activist and author Keith Boykin has written, the most virulent antigay sentiments have come from those who see black homosexuality as a white trait, passed on by the same racist forces that have ripped the black family apart and robbed the male of his masculinity.

Many argue that this association of the gay lifestyle with white people, coupled with an association of AIDS with gay people, has hindered the black community's response to AIDS. At the least, it has pushed black men who have sex with men to the community's margins. As a result, an already at-risk group becomes more difficult to reach with HIV prevention messages.

"We live very segmented lives, across the board ... There's black music and there's white music. There's R. and B. and funk and whatever. This has always bothered me. People don't see things in streams, they don't see what tends to connect us all together. That's what I see. That's what I try to get to."

The release of Björk's next album, Vespertine, has been delayed from its original date of May 22 to sometime in August, according to a spokesperson for her label.

The Icelandic singer/producer has also postponed the launch of her tour in support of the album. The San Francisco experimental-electronic duo Matmos, who supplied one of several remixes for the release of Björk's 1998 single "Alarm Call," will still open for Björk on the tour and perform as part of her band. New York harpist Zena Parkins will also appear on the tour dates.

"The reality is that you can't run a multimillion-dollar corporation and be a thug at the same time."

Almeida acknowledges that racism is a problem in getting blacks and Latinos together, and compares it to the privilege that lighter skin color carries within black communities. "Every Latino who ran is light- or white-skinned. What we have in common is that we come in shades, and we need to accept that within ourselves, as who we are." He explains that as people of color, "we're more apt to run against ourselves than someone white," since there is a fear of taking on the power structure.

Gwen Andrade, an African American political and community activist, warns that racism has created a wedge between blacks and Latinos rather than forging a bond. After running for state senate in the Elmwood and Reservoir Triangle neighborhoods in 1992 and managing successful campaigns including her Puerto Rican husband's bid for city council, she sees this election as a sign that many Latinos will respond to racism by more readily aligning with whites. This is especially frustrating because the Caribbeans who make up the vast majority of Providence's Latino population share not only African roots but also a history of slavery and brutal oppression with North American blacks.

"In America the further away from 'black' you get, the better," says Andrade. "That's the perception that's been set up--it's the historical perspective of any group of people that has African roots. If you've got that African heritage that comes out in the skin color, or in the hair, you're fighting even harder to distance yourself from it because of what black means in this country." Or in this hemisphere, one could add.

The myth of the Internet - and one I believed for a long time - is that most people really want to share the stories of their own lives. The fact that content is king proves that they don't. They need images, stories, ideas and sounds through which they can relate to one another. The only difference between the Internet and its media predecessors is that the user can collect and share social currency in the same environment.

The success of creating online content is directly dependent on your ability to create excuses for people to talk to one another. The real measure of content's quality is its ability to serve as a medium.

"There is nothing like a good woman to make a brother want to be a man."

I know: I'm not supposed to think too hard about the trailer. I'm just supposed to go see the damn thing. But I wonder: What kind of brother needs a good woman in order to be(come) a man? What kind of woman is going to bust her butt to become "good" in order to transform a brother in the first place? And what about men and women who aren't thinking about the opposite sex? Should they buy tickets too, or should they just sit off to the side with me and make fun of moviegoers?

Let me cut to the chase: I rickety-resent the hell out of a glossy, flossy ad campaign that makes so many assumptions about its viewers. I didn't watch "Diner" the first time around; I'm not watching it this time just because you got a bunch of us to go see "The Best Man" and you're looking for create a male "Waiting To Exhale." I want the two minutes and thirty seconds that you spent showing me that damned movie trailer back, Sony. With interest.

You know where to find me.

The trailblazer along this new path is Richard Hall, better known as Moby, the electronic musician (and descendant of Herman Melville) whose album "Play" proved the power of advertising to sell not just soap but CD's as well. When it first came out in June 1999, the album's beguiling mixture of electronic beats and old gospel and blues recordings drew great reviews, but radio and MTV didn't have a spot for it.

Blocked at the conventional routes, Moby started to license songs for commercials, movies and television shows. Suddenly, his music was everywhere: on sitcoms and movie trailers, on ads for Nordstrom and American Express. The label made deals for every song on the album. "It was very short-lived, but we made a lot of money," says David Steel, head of special projects, including licensing, at Moby's label, V2. In all, Steel says, they signed more than 100 licenses in North America alone, for which Moby's cut is approaching $1 million. More important, the exposure opened doors at radio and MTV, pushing sales of the album past seven million copies worldwide.

Ankita: If they made a sequel to "Besieged," what would it be called?
George: (pauses) "Besieged 2"

Isn't Barry concerned about the ethics of lying?

"To my knowledge, in all 50 states, it is not illegal to lie," he says. "The only people I listen to are the United States Department of Justice and state and local law enforcement officials."

What about dumpster diving -- going through someone's garbage?

"Dumpster diving is perfectly legal, providing there is not a sign posted," Barry says. "The courts have held that if it is left to be accessed by commercial carters, then it is no longer private property. It is only private property if there is a 'no trespassing' sign and you had to trespass to get into the dumpster."

What about using an answering machine pick -- a device used to remotely grab someone else's message off the target's answering machine?

"That's probably a gray area," Barry says.

"Do you use picks?" we ask.

"Fine, and you?" Barry answers.

No matter where he was, he championed newsroom integration, staying in touch with his own personal network of hundreds of journalists -- "my children," he called them, with a roll of his eyes. ...

In 1969, he was hired as the second African American reporter on the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Jackson had walked in off the street to apply for a staff position. Shortly into the interview, the personnel director said, "I'm sorry, we don't have any porter jobs available." The ever unflappable Jackson leaned forward in his chair and responded, "No, no, no! You misunderstood. I said RE-porter. RE-porter!"

The accident that became nortec occurred in 1999 when Mr. Mogt, in search of a snare sound, stopped by a local studio where norteno bands recorded the demo tapes that they used to get work in restaurants. The studio owner gave him an armful of norteno demos and, after listening to a few, he left excited, quickly calling several musician friends. They divided up the tapes, went home to build new songs around them, and met again three days later to share results.

"The bands on the demos were very raw and off-tempo," said Bostich, who continues to use tapes from the studio in his work. "And I think that's the key to nortec."

Mr. Mogt said that when the group reconvened, the results floored him. "I was thinking nortec was an ambient music," he said, "but then Bostich played the song he had made, 'Polaris,' and it was a slam in my face. I was like, 'You created this with what I gave you!?' Then Panoptica came by, and he had done something completely different."

The musicians burned their songs onto a CD, and that night, as legend has it, they went to a friend's birthday party. When they played the music, everyone clustered around them: graphic designers said they wanted to make visuals for the music, artists said they wanted to play the songs at their exhibitions, and writers said they would build science fiction stories around them. The music was a magnet for the disparate elements of Tijuana's alienated artists, a concept they could gather around and identify with.

"It was just a play on words that doesn't have anything to do with any ethnicity or anything like that, but you know how people call people 'yuppies,' it's the same exact thing," the Realtor said defensively.

"It didn't have anything to do with discrimination. I've had a lot of people call me about that. It had nothing to do with that whatsoever," she said.

Turns out the phrase comes from a Times profile of the neighborhood - which basically tells "Manhattanites" looking to escape outrageous rents that Sunset Park is a fairly safe place to venture out to, filled with lots of Dominican and Ecuadorian immigrants who speak with colorful accents and serve up exotic food in local restaurants.

There's something here worth discussion at the next community board meeting - and the ads only scratched the surface of it.

"So, I don't have to be a 'Manhattan Anglo?'" I asked.

"No, you don't. I'm not either, so it doesn't really matter," she said.

"I'm black."

"We built the economy of the South, and here you have the banks saying so ... But no one had seen these images. No one realized what was on the bills."

NewsWatch: About Us: Jackson has been the editor at the Oakland Tribune since March 1998. In 1999, the Society of Professional Journalists Northern California Chapter recognized him with their Career Achievement award. During his 34-year journalism career, Jackson has worked as a reporter, copy editor, make-up editor, city editor, and news editor at many papers including the Wichita Eagle-Beacon, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, the Dallas Times Herald, the Washington Post, and the Cincinnati Inquirer. Charles has been at the forefront in the fight for newsroom diversity throughout his career.

Good journalism teachers, take a bow: Jackson of The Oakland Tribune admitted that although he was a bright student, his "mind wandered a lot. I made straight As but a C in citizenship." Teachers steered him into journalism and theater to get him focused. "They figured if I could act up, I could also act. And I did." He also spent four years on the school newspaper, drove his adviser nuts and was told that "I'd never make it in journalism because I was not serious enough. Little did she know."

"With the information age explosion," Jackson continued, "we need writers. We need people who know how to handle words."

Minority hiring in newsrooms sees slow progress: "Demographics in the U.S. are changing," said Oakland (Calif.) Tribune editor Charles Jackson. Members of minority groups make up nearly 48 percent of his staff. "It's imperative that newspapers seek out reporters who reflect the diversity in the community you cover."

That takes networking, Jackson added.

"I've been doing this for three years," he said. "I am African American and I know a whole bunch of people. I can call my sources and hire people of color whom I have trained. ... Good people of color are at a premium," said Jackson.

Chips Quinn Scholars trade advice, call for more diversity: Regarding her internship at The Oakland Tribune, she said: "I'm looking at (editor) Charles Jackson and I'm about to cry, I'm so happy to see him. You couldn't pay me enough to trade those three months."

EPMJ focuses on technology, coverage at summer session: On the first day of instruction, editors learned the details of plans to introduce them to new technology in the newspaper industry. Charles Jackson, director of programs for the Maynard Institute, promised to take the eight fellows on a ride into journalism�s 21st Century.

Jackson had spent months putting together an ambitious list of goals for the class. He said it would be a summer of firsts for the program, which had just ended its 17th year. The class of �96 would be the first to be instructed in the art of pagination. It would also be the first to be involved in on�line publishing.

�For people of color, it�s essential to be part of the change that is taking place in journalism, he said. Jackson said there was a danger that people of color would be poorly covered by new electronic media if minority journalists did not have a role in making decisions.

Editors got their first taste of the latest technology when they were introduced to EPMJ�s new Internet Web site.

Jackson worked with production coordinator, John Seelye, to develop an on�line site for the program. They got support from two advisers from Phoenix Newspapers Inc., Dan Hontz, an on�line editor; and Howard Finberg, senior editor of information technology. The result is an EPMJ Web site linked to Arizona Central, the on�line operation of Phoenix Newspapers.

Soon after the eight editors arrived in Tucson, their pictures were posted on the Web site. The cover page of the web site featured a color photograph of Old Tucson taken by the program�s photographer, George Leinonen.

In ensuing weeks, the pages of the broadsheet would be posted on the Internet Web site. And there would be updates on the progress of the eight�week program.

The class would be the first to publish its newspaper on�line and to print its broadsheet publication, the Tucson News, using QuarkXPress.

All this was planned by Jackson before the summer began. And the editors learned that Jackson would deliver all he promised. The curriculum covering new technology would supplement EPMJ�s traditional program of instruction covering the skills of copy editing, headline writing, page design and management.

I am in awe before the extent, the power, the range of human need. Need is a seething presence beneath the polite fictions of our everyday lives. If need were a force field, the city would glow at night. You could hover above it and see the lines of light reaching out and crossing and missing and connecting, everyone pretending there is no light at all, everyone making their dinners, reading their books, watching their televisions. But I see it.

The survey showed that residents of the Peninsula and Silicon Valley have a strong sense of social and interracial trust -- 70 percent have Hispanic friends compared with 49 percent nationally, 67 percent have Asian American friends compared with 34 percent nationally and 57 percent have African American friends compared with 61 percent nationally.

The Peninsula and Silicon Valley are not just diverse communities. We tend to travel freely across those lines of diversity -- residents say they have had a friend of a different race to their home 14.3 times in the past year compared with 11 times in the rest of the country, and 47 percent say they have a gay friend compared with 35 percent nationally.

But when it comes to using such openness to form a more perfect society, huge gaps appear. ...

Indeed, all the numbers lead inexorably to some not-so-attractive conclusions about those who populate the cubicles of Silicon Valley.

Residents have allowed work to supplant a social life, or are stuck with a social life that is largely driven by the connections and acquaintances they have at work.

And, sadly, the numbers suggest that many regard the work they're doing as their good works, as their service to the community.

That's not a failure of scheduling. That's a failure of the spirit.

MT: In your book, you mention about how none of our leaders, going back to the '60s and maybe further, included love as a solution. Why do you think they missed that? Is it they thought it wasn't important, or we didn't have time for it, or it wasn't safe?

hooks: Black folks are having to confront how deeply Western, how deeply American we are. And the heart of that is every immigrant group in this nation has believed that the key to the good life is material advancement. Part of what America promises is that if you just get money and goods, people won't look behind that to see what's really going on. ... We want to be able to say that as black people that a lot of this self-worth stuff is too connected to racism. But a lot of it is also connected to what is going on in our families. I found a lot of resistance in black people not wanting to ... you know, a lot of people beating me down trying to say, "We're not lacking in love." And I'm saying, hey, there's a brutality in black life, cross-class, that should be telling us that we have changed. Black folks are killing their kids, and people don't want to face that.

Buoyed by the success of the gay and lesbian liberation movement, freed from enforced isolation by changes in the medical and psychiatric establishment, and brought together by the Internet, the transgender community has emerged in the last five years as a new voice in social activism.

This voice suggests that, although gender is an identity we are born with, an identity that no amount of social influence can sway, it is too great and varied a force to shoehorn into those ubiquitous boxes marked F and M. While human desires -- for love, passion, work, respect, friends, family -- remain constant, the way those desires are felt and expressed cannot always be categorized at the moment of birth. Anatomy, as feminists have long argued, is not destiny.

"This is the last phase of the sexual identity movement," says Vern Bullough, a USC adjunct professor of nursing who has written extensively on sexuality in America. "The community is much more organized than it was five years ago. It's learning to live with its own differences, and becoming more mainstream. The long-term effect will be interesting. Certainly, it will blur gender lines even further." ...

"Many mixed-race people are saying that race, as a means of categorizing people, no longer works," says Robert Dawidoff, a history professor at Claremont Graduate University. "Transgender people are showing us that gender, as a similar construct, has no meaning either. Which is, of course, very frightening to many people."

The panel, appointed by the Legislature, said up to 10,000 whites stormed the prosperous Tulsa neighborhood of Greenwood, once called the "black Wall Street," killing at least 40 people and destroying 35 blocks of homes and businesses. But the commission's call for reparations received a more skeptical response.

Gov. Frank Keating expressed the state's regrets, calling the events "an unforgivable, unexplainable part of our history," but stopped short of endorsing reparations. saying what the total package would be, and until we know what we're being asked to consider, we're taking a 'wait and see' attitude."

The commission's report said the amount of reparations was a matter for the Legislature to decide.

It all goes back to one of the first things I put up lo these many moons ago, a quote from Eddie Faye Gates of the Tulsa Race Riot Commission.

"For decades, even in schools here in Tulsa, children can grow up and not know something like this happened in their community. How can we expect them to learn from it and do better if we don't teach them?"

I tell myself that it's different this time. The first time an ex (a Jamerican, 'tho you didn't ask ;/]) suggested I grow my hair out and stop going to that barbershop on 14th Street, I wasn't interested. I liked the short-sharp-shock, close-cropped cut I had. But I tried it, started to like it and got into getting it tended at east-of-Lake-Merritt shops like Oh, My Nappy Hair! and Nappy or Not. But after two and a half years, I started feeling like a hair farmer -- like what was coming out of my scalp wasn't connected to me. So I went clean, and started hitting the barber's again (I got married wearing a box fade).

I haven't cut it since December 1999. I don't expect I will for a good long while, if ever. (I did just get my driver's license photo done. I'm rockin' the one tendril/strand/stalk of hair angling straight up from my scalp. Part Buckwheat, part Alfalfa. *grrr*)

It makes more sense to me now, who I am and what's happening to me. It's not about a significant other's idea, a desire to conform to a standard or expectation or even some of the quasi-mystical or pseudo-Rasta stuff you may hear falling out of certain people's mouths.