An Open Notebook
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First ride on new mountain bike.
First time I have had a mountain bike, so really my first time out ever.
At Redwood Park in Oakland CA.
The bike is a Commencal MT AM, in the price range at the bottom of credible mountain bikes. It’s a nutty amount of money to spend on something I am new to, but this seems like a necessary leap of faith for this sport since you can’t easily rent a bike.
It’s too wordy to be a good handle, but it is a reasonable meaning.
A test I’d apply to any alternative word for white is whether it captures me, a white of African descent. My grandmother was born in Africa*. Her parents or grandparents were from France. My father, her son, was born in Africa. His father was from Belgium. I was born in the US. So I am African-American but the one-drop rule would name me white.
There is also the smell test for alternative words. Is it violent or supremacist, like “master race” or “Aryan”?
“Non-diaspora” would pass both these tests.
http://freemusicarchive.org/music/The_Joy_Drops/Not_Drunk_EP/
First of all, these are just three songs to have fun with.
But the other 23 tracks are for remixers. New music shouldn’t be frozen and hard. It should flow into culture.
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Maybe video makers, podcasters and remixers only need a single track. In that case the variety of lengths and types makes it more likely that one will fit.
Also I hope that having a collection of related snippets will enable podcasters and video makers to use them together as an integrated theme, similar to a Twitter Bootstrap theme for web pages. My hope is that people will be able to tie together the elements of a podcast or a video using these sets of different but similar pieces of music.
Posting a collection of samples is an outgrowth of projects I have done at Freesound and CC Mixter, where I’ve been posting sample packs with a bunch of closely related snippets, from a few seconds to 60 seconds.
Freesound and Mixter aren’t for fully mixed songs, though. Free Music Archive is the right place.
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These recordings are under a Creative Commons license. There are a bunch of CC licenses. I used the Attribution license, which says you can do anything you want (even commercially) as long as you give credit. It’s almost as permissive as you can get. I have everything to gain and nothing to lose. Also, it’s an official Free Cultural Work, which I think is just the right thing to do.
I realized it was a talisman of White privilege that I had been unaware of. The fact that I paid no attention was a White thing. No skin off my back.
I unfolded it and looked closely for the first time. Then I tossed it on the trash. Later I came back and saw it on top, and stuffed it into the pile to hide it.
A thing I love about YouTube is that I can see the kinds of sports that interest me. Which includes pretty much anything but teams with stadiums. If it’s a team with a stadium, fuck it. If it’s motocross, snowboarding, martial arts, parkour, rock climbing, BMX, surfing, skiing, mountain biking, running, skateboarding, diving, fishing, wingsuits – etc etc etc – I’m into it.
When I look at the sports pages, it’s all teams with stadiums.
Teams with stadiums are decent enough. I get the appeal.
But boring, obvious, predictable. Nobody is ever going to do something different with football, baseball, or basketball. Innovation comes in ultra tiny packages.
They’re corporate. Without a super rich owner, there is no team. Stadiums are named after massive corporations. If a player threatens advertising, they’re gone.
The players bust ass, but you the viewer couldn’t be lazier. You watch TV. You gain cred by watching even more TV than other people. You eat crappy food.
Obviously the whole thing is sexist to an extreme. Commercials. Cheerleaders. Separate and unequal leagues.
You identify with your local team. You must be for that team, except when you are so true to another locality that you never stop identifying with them. It’s the height of meaninglessness.
It could be about outdoor recreation. Hiking, rock climbing, mountain climbing. Fishing and hunting. Camping.
Or aggressive riding sports: BMX, motocross, mountain unicycle, mountain biking. Skateboarding.
Or combat. Martial arts. Kickboxing.
Or instead of narratives about competitions, it could be about participating. How to improve your basketball shooting. How to pick running shoes. How to do a kickflip. The Internet has a huge amount of this stuff. The interest must be there.
Or fitness. Get In Shape articles. “Hey You! Reader! Drop the doughnut and do some crunches right now!”
Maybe the underlying issue is the economics of print and television news. There isn’t enough real estate to cover more than a few sports, and only stadium sports appeal to a critical mass.
On the Internet real estate isn’t a problem. You can always make more pixels.
And on an on. The list of alternatives to the status quo is not short.
It bothers me that the “Sports” section covers so little about sports.
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