I'll Come Too

I'm gonna say what I need
If it's the last thing I do
I do
I do
I do
I'm in that kind of mood
I've thrown my hat in the ring
I've got nothing to lose
With you
With you
With you
I'm in that kind of mood

I'll go under your wing
I'll slot right in between the
Cracks between you and him
I don't wanna go home
Shall we drive from zone to zone?
I wouldn't do this on my own
But I'm not on my own tonight

Oh, you're going to New York?
I'm going there
Why don't I come with you?
Oh, you've changed to L.A.?
I'm going there, I can go there too

I'll go under your wing
I'll slot right in…

Vogue

Into the Red

JAMES BLAKE

The list of things I could live without
Grows longer as I move everything around
Behind all the furniture
Pointed towards her
To keep her in my sights
To keep her in my life

By all means, she can get ahead of herself
I'll already be there
I'll already be there to meet her

She's no traitor
I've got no chaser
For a leg up
I've got no chaser
She's no traitor
For a joint account
She gave me everything that she had left

Anything for herself
But for me she goes way in, way in
Way into the red

She saw every hand in my pocket
She saw the gold rush
She watched me lose face everyday
Rather than lose me
She was the gold rush
She was the gold rush
She was the gold rush
She saw every hand in her pocket
And she sawed off every hand

Anything for herself
But for me she goes way in, way in
Way into the red

She saw every hand in my pocket
She saw the gold rush
She watched me lose face everyday
Rather than lose me
She was the gold rush
She was the gold rush
She was the gold rush
She was the gold rush
She was the gold rush
She was the gold rush

What I have will believe you until now
Even doing nothing, I am making the most of somehow
And the credit goes to her
It's the bad day speaking red
Gotta keep her in my sights
Gotta keep her in my life

By all means, she can get ahead of herself
I'll already be there
I'll already be there to meet her

BASIC AND APPLIED SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY, 1991, 12(2), 145-155

Self-Deception and Its Relationship to

Success in Competition

Joanna E. Starek and Caroline F. Keating

Colgate University

We investigated the relationship between self-deception and success in competition. Self-deception has been associated with stress reduction, a positive

self-bias, and increased pain tolerance, all of which could enhance motivation

and performance during competitive tasks. We selected athletic competition

as a model and predicted that swimmers who successfully qualified for a

national championship would engage in more self-deception than swimmers

who did not qualify. Self-deception was measured by the Self-Deception

Questionnaire (SDQ) and by subjects' performance on a binocular-rivalry

task. For the latter measure, subjects' tendency to perceive words with neutral

rather than negative associations was construed as self-deception. As predicted, successful swimmers scored higher on the SDQ and reported fewer

negative words on the binocular-rivalry task than did unsuccessful swimmers.

The tendency to perceive words with positive rather than neutral associations

was not clearly related to competitive success, to SDQ scores, or to performance on the negative binocular-rivalry trials. Overall, the results were

consistent with the proposition that self-deception enhances motivation and

performance during competition.

Our mot iva t ion to negot i a te daily life depends on some degree of misplaced

optimism a b o ut what we are c apable of accomplishing (Taylor & B r own,

1988). Such informa t ion-proc e s s ing biases may be pa r t i cul a r ly a d v a n t ageous when compe t i t ion is involved. Dur ing athletic c omp e t i t i o n, for

example, individuals may be come anxious a b o ut their relative pe r formance

and distracted by the pain and fatigue t h at a c compani es s t r enuous physical

exertion. T h u s, athletes "psyche themselves u p" pr ior to c omp e t i t i o n. They

actively avoid forming ment al ba r r i e rs or pr ede t e rmining their p r o b a b le

We went dancing last night. This is before that. from t&a on Vimeo.

WORD

Jay-Z’s “Decoded” and the language of hip-hop.

by Kelefa SannehDECEMBER 6, 2010

Jay-Z writes, “Hip-hop lyrics—not just my lyrics, but those of any great MC—are poetry if you look at them closely enough.”

Last year, an English professor named Adam Bradley issued a manifesto to his fellow-scholars. He urged them to expand the poetic canon, and possibly enlarge poetry’s audience, by embracing, or coöpting, the greatest hits of hip-hop. “Thanks to the engines of global commerce, rap is now the most widely disseminated poetry in the history of the world,” he wrote. “The best MCs—like Rakim, Jay-Z, Tupac, and many others—deserve consideration alongside the giants of American poetry. We ignore them at our own expense.”

The manifesto was called “Book of Rhymes: The Poetics of Hip Hop” (Civitas; $16.95), and it used the terms of poetry criticism to illuminate not the content of hip-hop lyrics but their form. For Bradley, a couplet by Tupac Shakur—

Out on bail, fresh outta jail, California dreamin’
Soon as I stepped on the scene, I’m hearin’ hoochies screamin’

—was a small marvel of “rhyme (both end and internal), assonance, and alliteration,” given extra propulsion by Shakur’s exaggerated stress patterns. Bradley also celebrated some lesser-known hip-hop lyrics, including this dense, percussive couplet by Pharoahe Monch, a cult favorite from Queens:

The last batter to hit, blast shattered your hip
Smash any splitter or fastball—that’ll be it

Picking through this thicket, Bradley paused to appreciate Monch’s use of apocopated rhyme, as when a one-syllable word is rhymed with the penultimate syllable of a multisyllabic word (last / blast / fastball). Bradley is right to think that hip-hop fans have learned to appreciate all sorts of seemingly obscure poetic devices, even if they can’t name them. Though some of his comparisons are strained (John Donne loved punning, and so does Juelz Santana!), his motivation is easy to appreciate: examining and dissecting lyrics is the only way to “give rap the respect it deserves as poetry.”

This campaign for respect enters a new phase with the release of “The Anthology of Rap” (Yale; $35), a nine-hundred-page compendium that is scarcely lighter than an eighties boom box. It was edited by Bradley and Andrew DuBois, another English professor (he teaches at the University of Toronto; Bradley is at the University of Colorado), who together have compiled thirty years of hip-hop lyrics, starting with transcribed recordings of parties thrown in the late nineteen-seventies—Year Zero, more or less. The book, which seems to have been loosely patterned after the various Norton anthologies of literature, is, among other things, a feat of contractual legwork: Bradley and DuBois claim to have secured permission from the relevant copyright holders, and the book ends with some forty pages of credits, as well as a weak disclaimer (“The editors have made every reasonable effort to secure permissions”), which may or may not hold up in court.

Even before “The Anthology of Rap” arrived in stores, keen-eyed fans began pointing out the book’s many transcription errors, some of which are identical to ones on ohhla.com, a valuable—though by no means infallible—online compendium of hip-hop lyrics. But readers who don’t already have these words memorized are more likely to be bothered by the lack of footnotes; where the editors of the Norton anthologies, those onionskin behemoths, love to explain and overexplain obscure terms and references, Bradley and DuBois provide readers with nothing more than brief introductions. Readers are simply warned that when it comes to hip-hop lyrics “obfuscation is often the point, suggesting coded meanings worth puzzling over.” In other words, you’re on your own.

Happily, readers looking for a more carefully annotated collection of hip-hop lyrics can turn to an unlikely source: a rapper. In recent weeks, “The Anthology of Rap” has been upstaged by “Decoded” (Spiegel & Grau; $35), the long-awaited print début of Jay-Z, who must now be one of the most beloved musicians in the world. The book, which doesn’t credit a co-writer, is essentially a collection of lyrics, liberally footnoted and accompanied by biographical anecdotes and observations. “Decoded” has benefitted from an impressive marketing campaign, including a citywide treasure hunt for hidden book pages. (The book’s launch doubled as a promotion for Bing, the Microsoft search engine.) So it’s a relief to find that “Decoded” is much better than it needs to be; in fact, it’s one of a handful of books that just about any hip-hop fan should own. Jay-Z explains not only what his lyrics mean but how they sound, even how they feel:

When a rapper jumps on a beat, he adds his own rhythm. Sometimes you stay in the pocket of the beat and just let the rhymes land on the square so that the beat and flow become one. But sometimes the flow chops up the beat, breaks the beat into smaller units, forces in multiple syllables and repeated sounds and internal rhymes, or hangs a drunken leg over the last bap and keeps going, sneaks out of that bitch.

Two paragraphs later, he’s back to talking about selling crack cocaine in Brooklyn. His description, and his music, makes it easier to imagine a connection—a rhyme, maybe—between these two forms of navigation, beat and street. And, no less than Bradley and DuBois, Jay-Z is eager to win for hip-hop a particular kind of respect. He states his case using almost the same words Bradley did: he wants to show that “hip-hop lyrics—not just my lyrics, but those of every great MC—are poetry if you look at them closely enough.”

If you start in the recent past and work backward, the history of hip-hop spreads out in every direction: toward the Last Poets and Gil Scott-Heron, who declaimed poems over beats and grooves in the early seventies; toward Jamaica, where U-Roy pioneered the art of chatting and toasting over reggae records; toward the fifties radio d.j.s who used rhyming patter to seal spaces between songs; toward jazz and jive and the talking blues; toward preachers and politicians and street-corner bullshitters. In “Book of Rhymes,” Bradley argues convincingly that something changed in the late nineteen-seventies, in the Bronx, when the earliest rappers (some of whom were also d.j.s) discovered the value of rhyming in time. “Words started bending to the beat,” as Bradley puts it; by submitting to rhythm, paradoxically, rappers came to sound more authoritative than the free-form poets, toasters, chatters, patterers, and jokers who came before.

The earliest lyrics in the anthology establish the rhyme pattern that many casual listeners still associate with hip-hop. Each four-beat line ended with a rhyme, heavily emphasized, and each verse was a series of couplets, not always thematically or sonically related to each other:

I’m Melle Mel and I rock so well
From the World Trade to the depths of hell.

Those lines were recorded in December, 1978, at a performance by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five at the Audubon Ballroom, on Broadway and 165th Street (the same hall where Malcolm X was assassinated, thirteen years earlier). The springy exuberance of Melle Mel’s voice matched the elastic funk of the disco records that many early rappers used as their backing tracks.

The rise of Run-D.M.C., in the early nineteen-eighties, helped change that: the group’s two rappers, Run and D.M.C., performed in jeans and sneakers, and they realized that hip-hop could be entertaining without being cheerful. They delivered even goofy lyrics with staccato aggression, which is one reason that they appealed to the young Jay-Z—they reminded him of guys he knew. In “Decoded,” he quotes a couple of lines by Run:

Cool chief rocker, I don’t drink vodka
But keep a bag of cheeba inside my locker

There is aggression in the phrasing: the first line starts sharply, with a stressed syllable, instead of easing into the beat with an unstressed one. “The words themselves don’t mean much, but he snaps those clipped syllables out like drumbeats, bap bap bapbap,” Jay-Z writes. “If you listened to that joint and came away thinking it was a simple rhyme about holding weed in a gym locker, you’d be reading it wrong: The point of those bars is to bang out a rhythmic idea.”

The first Run-D.M.C. album arrived in 1984, but within a few years the group’s sparse lyrical style came to seem old-fashioned; a generation of rappers had arrived with a trickier sense of swing. Hip-hop historians call this period the Golden Age (Bradley and DuBois date it from 1985 to 1992), and it produced the kinds of lyrical shifts that are easy to spot in print: extended similes and ambitious use of symbolism; an increased attention to character and ideology; unpredictable internal rhyme schemes; enjambment and uneven line lengths. This last innovation may have been designed to delight anthologizers and frustrate them, too, because it makes hip-hop hard to render in print. Bradley and DuBois claim, with ill-advised certainty, to have solved the problem of line breaks: “one musical bar is equal to one line of verse.” But, in fact, most of their lines start before the downbeat, somewhere (it’s not clear how they decided) between the fourth beat of one bar and the first beat of the next one. Here they are quoting Big Daddy Kane, one of the genre’s first great enjambers, in a tightly coiled passage from his 1987 single, “Raw”:

I’ll damage ya, I’m not an amateur but a professional
Unquestionable, without doubt superb
So full of action, my name should be a verb.

These three lines contain three separate rhyming pairs, and a different anthologist might turn this extract into six lines of varying length. If Bradley and DuBois followed their own rule, they would break mid-word—“professio-/nal”—because the final syllable actually arrives, startlingly, on the next line’s downbeat. In “Book of Rhymes,” Bradley argued that “every rap song is a poem waiting to be performed,” but the anthology’s trouble with line breaks (not to mention punctuation) reminds readers that hip-hop is an oral tradition with no well-established written form. By presenting themselves as mere archivists, Bradley and DuBois underestimate their own importance: a book of hip-hop lyrics is necessarily a work of translation.

As the Golden Age ended, hip-hop’s formal revolution was giving way to a narrative revolution. So-called gangsta rappers downplayed wordplay (without, of course, forswearing it) so they could immerse listeners in their first-person stories of bad guys and good times. Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G. created two of the genre’s most fully realized personae; when they were murdered, in 1996 and 1997, respectively, their deaths became part of their stories. (Both crimes remain unsolved.) As the anthologizers blast through the nineties (“Rap Goes Mainstream”) and the aughts (“New Millennium Rap”), their excitement starts to wane. They assert that the increasing popularity of hip-hop presented a risk of “homogenization and stagnation,” without pausing to explain why this should be true (doesn’t novelty sell?), if indeed it was. There is little overt criticism, but some rappers get fulsome praise—“socially conscious” is one of Bradley and DuBois’s highest compliments—while others get passive-aggressive reprimands (“Disagreement remains over whether Lil’ Kim has been good or bad for the image of women in hip-hop”). Perhaps the form of their project dictates its content. They are sympathetic to rappers whose lyrics survive the transition to the printed page; the verbose parables and history lessons of Talib Kweli, for instance, make his name “synonymous with depth and excellence,” in their estimation. But they offer a more measured assessment of Lil Wayne, praising his “play of sound” (his froggy, bluesy voice is one of the genre’s greatest instruments) while entertaining the unattributed accusation that he may be merely “a gimmick rapper.” Any anthology requires judgments of taste, and this one might have been more engaging if it admitted as much.

Jay-Z grew up absorbing many of the rhymes that Bradley and DuBois celebrate. He was born in 1969, and raised in the Marcy Houses, in an area of Brooklyn from which Times Square seemed to be “a plane ride away.” (Nowadays, some real-estate agents doubtless consider it part of greater Williamsburg.) “It was the seventies,” he writes, “and heroin was still heavy in the hood, so we would dare one another to push a leaning nodder off a bench the way kids on farms tip sleeping cows.” He was a skinny, watchful boy with a knack for rhyming but no great interest in the music industry, despite some early brushes with fame—he briefly served as Big Daddy Kane’s hype man. Besides, Jay-Z had a day job that was both more dangerous and more reliable: he says he spent much of the late eighties and early nineties selling crack in Brooklyn and New Jersey and down the Eastern Seaboard. He was no kingpin, but he says he was a fairly accomplished mid-level dealer, and though he hated standing outside all day, he found that he didn’t hate the routine. “It was an adventure,” he says. “I got to hang out on the block with my crew, talking, cracking jokes. You know how people in office jobs talk at the watercooler? This job was almost all watercooler.” Then, almost as an afterthought, “But when you weren’t having fun, it was hell.”

Early recordings of Jay-Z reveal a nimble but mild-mannered virtuoso, delivering rat-a-tat syllables (he liked to rap in double-time triplets, delivering six syllables per beat) that often amounted to études rather than songs. But by 1996, when he released his début album, “Reasonable Doubt,” on a local independent label, he had slowed down and settled into a style—and, more important, settled into character. The album won him underground acclaim and a record deal with the very above-ground hip-hop label Def Jam, which helped him become one of the genre’s most dependable hitmakers. He was a cool-blooded hustler, describing a risky life in conversational verses that hid their poetic devices, disparaging the art of rapping even while perfecting it:

Who wanna bet us that we don’t touch lettuce, stack
cheddars forever, live treacherous, all the et ceteras.
To the death of us, me and my confidants, we
shine. You feel the ambiance—y’all niggas just rhyme.

Too often, hip-hop’s embrace of crime narratives has been portrayed as a flaw or a mistake, a regrettable detour from the overtly ideological rhymes of groups like Public Enemy. But in Jay-Z’s view Public Enemy is an anomaly. “You rarely become Chuck D when you’re listening to Public Enemy,” he writes. “It’s more like watching a really, really lively speech.” By contrast, his tales of hustling were generous, because they made it easy for fans to imagine that they were part of the action. “I don’t think any listeners think I’m threatening them,” he writes. “I think they’re singing along with me, threatening someone else. They’re thinking, Yeah, I’m coming for you. And they might apply it to anything, to taking their next math test or straightening out that chick talking outta pocket in the next cubicle.”

Throughout “Decoded,” Jay-Z offers readers a large dose of hermeneutics and a small dose of biography, in keeping with his deserved reputation for brilliance and chilliness. His footnotes are full of pleasingly small-scale exultations (“I like the internal rhymes here”) and technical explanations (“The shift in slang—from talking about guns as tools to break things to talking about shooting as blazing—matches the shift in tone”); at one point, he pauses to quote a passage from “Book of Rhymes” in which Bradley praises his use of homonyms. Readers curious about his life will learn something about his father, who abandoned the family when Jay-Z was twelve; a little bit about Bono, who is now one of Jay-Z’s many A-list friends; and nothing at all about the time when, as a boy, Jay-Z shot his older brother in the shoulder. (Apparently, there was a dispute over an item of jewelry, possibly a ring, although Jay-Z once told Oprah Winfrey that, at the time, his brother was “dealing with a lot of demons.”)

“Decoded” is a prestige project—it will be followed, inevitably, by a rash of imitations from rappers who realize that the self-penned coffee-table book has replaced the Lamborghini Murciélago as hip-hop’s ultimate status symbol. In his early years, Jay-Z liked to insist that rapping was only a means to an end—like selling crack, only safer. “I was an eager hustler and a reluctant artist,” he writes. “But the irony of it is that to make the hustle work, really work, over the long term, you have to be a true artist, too.” Certainly this book emphasizes Jay-Z the true artist, ignoring high-spirited tracks like “Ain’t No Nigga” to focus on his moodier ruminations on success and regrets. (The lyrics to “Success” and “Regrets” are, in fact, included.) Readers might be able to trace Jay-Z’s growing self-consciousness over the years, as his slick vernacular verses give way to language that’s more decorous and sometimes less elegant. In “Fallin’,” from 2007, he returned to a favorite old topic, with mixed results:

The irony of selling drugs is sort of like I’m using it
Guess it’s two sides to what substance abuse is

Bradley has written about rappers “so insistent on how their rhymes sound that they lose control over what they are actually saying.” But with late-period Jay-Z the reverse is sometimes true: the ideas are clear and precise, but the syntax gets convoluted, and he settles for clumsy near-rhymes like “using it”/“abuse is.” For all Bradley and DuBois’s talk about “conscious” hip-hop, the genre owes much of its energy to the power of what might be called “unconscious” rapping: heedless or reckless lyrics, full of contradictions and exaggerations (to say nothing of insults). If you are going to follow a beat, as rappers must, then it helps not to have too many other firm commitments.

One day four years ago, Jay-Z was reading The Economist when he came across an article bearing the heading “Bubbles and Bling.” The article was about Cristal, the expensive champagne that figured in the rhymes of Jay-Z and other prominent rappers. In the article, Frédéric Rouzaud, the managing director of the winery behind Cristal, was asked whether these unsought endorsements might hurt his brand. “That’s a good question, but what can we do? We can’t forbid people from buying it,” he said, adding, slyly, “I’m sure Dom Pérignon or Krug would be delighted to have their business.” Jay-Z was irritated enough that he released a statement vowing never to drink Cristal again, and he started removing references to Cristal from his old lyrics during concerts. (He eventually switched his endorsement to Armand de Brignac.) In Jay-Z’s view, Rouzaud had not only insulted hip-hop culture; he had violated an unspoken promotional arrangement. “We used their brand as a signifier of luxury and they got free advertising and credibility every time we mentioned it,” he writes. “We were trading cachet.” (Actually, the book, not free of typos, says “cache.”)

It’s hard not to think about Cristal when Jay-Z insists that his lyrics should be heard—read—as poetry, or when Bradley and DuBois produce an anthology designed to win for rappers the status of poets. They are, all of them, trading cachet, and their eagerness to make this trade suggests that they are trading up—that hip-hop, despite its success, still aches for respect and recognition. It stands to reason, then, that as the genre’s place in the cultural firmament grows more secure its advocates will grow less envious of poetry’s allegedly exalted status.

Another great American lyricist has just published a book of his own: “Finishing the Hat” (Knopf; $39.95), by Stephen Sondheim, is curiously similar in form to “Decoded.” Sondheim is just as appealing a narrator as Jay-Z, although he’s much less polite. (While Jay-Z has almost nothing bad to say about his fellow-rappers, Sondheim is quick to disparage his rivals, subject to a “cowardly but simple” precept: “criticize only the dead.”) But where Jay-Z wants to help readers see the poetry in hip-hop, Sondheim thinks poeticism can be a problem: in his discussion of “Tonight,” from “West Side Story,” he half apologizes for the song’s “lapses into ‘poetry.’ ” And where Bradley and DuBois are quick to praise rappers for using trick rhymes and big words, Sondheim is ever on guard against “overrhyming” and other instances of unwarranted cleverness. “In theatrical fact,” he writes, “it is usually the plainer and flatter lyric that soars poetically when infused with music.” Most rappers are no less pragmatic: they use the language that works, which is sometimes ornate, but more often plainspoken, even homely. (One thinks of Webbie, the pride of Baton Rouge, deftly rhyming “drunk as a fuckin’ rhino” with “my people gon’ get they shine on.”) Maybe future anthologies will help show why the most complicated hip-hop lyrics aren’t always the most successful.

It’s significant that hip-hop, virtually alone among popular-music genres, has never embraced the tradition of lyric booklets. The genius of hip-hop is that it encourages listeners to hear spoken words as music. Few people listen to speeches or books on tape over and over, but hip-hop seems to have just as much replay value as any other popular genre. Reading rap lyrics may be useful, but it’s also tiring. The Jay-Z of “Decoded” is engaging; the Jay-Z of his albums is irresistible. The difference has something to do with his odd, perpetually adolescent-sounding voice, and a lot to do with his sophisticated sense of rhythm. Sure, he’s a poet—and, while we’re at it, a singer and percussionist, too. But why should any of these titles be more impressive than “rapper”?

In the introduction to “Finishing the Hat,” Sondheim explains that “all rhymes, even the farthest afield of the near ones (home/dope), draw attention to the rhymed word.” But surely rhyming can deëmphasize the meaning of a word by emphasizing its sound. Rhyme, like other phonetic techniques, is a way to turn a spoken phrase into a musical phrase—a “rhythmic argument,” as Jay-Z put it. Bap bap bapbap. Rapping is the art of addressing listeners and distracting them at the same time. Bradley argues in “Book of Rhymes” that hip-hop lyrics represent the genre’s best chance for immortality: “When all the club bangers have faded, when all the styles and videos are long forgotten, the words will remain.” That gets the relationship backward. On the contrary, one suspects that the words will endure—and the books will proliferate—because the music will, too. ♦

"Politics," as the late Mayor Harold Washington was wont to say, "ain't beanbag."

What he meant is that electing officials to high office is serious business, in which hardballs are thrown, blood is shed and little quarter given to the opposition.

But Mr. Washington was wise enough to know the limits that civility and humanity dictate -- even in the nasty business of politics. And I think he'd frown at the kind of stunts his African-American would-be successors pulled over the holidays.

What happened is that, with public and private arm twisting, Chicago's black political leadership finally got what it wanted: a narrowing down of the mayoral field to just one major African-American contender, former U.S. Sen. Carol Moseley Braun. But to get there, it had to play a blatant race card, the kind that would have been condemned had it been played by, say, Edward Vrdolyak in the name of white unity.

That's just wrong -- ethically, morally and perhaps politically, too.

I understand why leaders concluded that they had to get out two of the three prominent blacks who were running: Ms. Braun, Congressman Danny Davis and state Sen. James Meeks.

All successful political candidates start by unifying their natural political base, and that hadn't happened in the African-American community with all three in the contest. As a result, candidate Rahm Emanuel has continued to run away with the contest, as I talk about in my column in this week's issue of Crain's, which was written before Mr. Davis dropped out a few hours before the New Year.

But seeking to unify your base is one thing. Saying that only a candidate from one ethnic or racial group deserves to be mayor is another.

It's bad enough that a committee of African-American religious, community and political leaders spent weeks during the fall trying to select one, and just one, black candidate to present to black voters for rubber stamp ratification.

Imagine the reaction if a bunch of white ward bosses had met with the stated goal of selecting one white candidate.

The committee failed. All three filed petitions to run, with Mr. Meeks saying he wasn't going to be the black candidate but a candidate for all. He even signed up a prominent Republican as his finance co-chairman: former state GOP chairman Andy McKenna Jr.

But on he eve of Christmas Eve, he changed his mind, declaring that what's really important is to a unify behind the black candidate, because Chicago needs a black mayor -- not a qualified mayor, or a schools-savvy mayor, or a sensitive mayor (at least not according to what he said) but a mayor of one particular race.

A couple of days later, Rahm Emanuel's campaign let it out that former President Bill Clinton -- for whom Mr. Emanuel served as chief fundraiser and a top White House policy aide -- would come here to campaign for him.

Mr. Davis and Ms. Braun could hardly contain themselves.

Mr. Clinton is trying to "thwart the legitimate political aspirations of Chicago's black community," Mr. Davis declared. Campaigning for Rahm would be a "gaffe, Ms. Braun said. "I think he'd be more sensitive...given the support that (the African-American) community has given him in he past."

Heaven knows what they'll say if President Barack Obama offers anything more about how Rahm Emanuel did a great job as chief of staff for America's first African-American president.

Finally, after insisting he was in the race to stay, Mr. Davis pulled the plug and endorsed Ms. Braun. "In unity there is strength. In strength there is success," he said.

Or, as Mr. Meeks not-so-subtly phrased it, "Unity is something our community desperately needs."

It could work. Depending on how quickly Ms. Braun moves to reach out to voters, how non-African-American voters respond and whether Mr. Emanuel steps it up after returning from what, frankly, was an ill-timed two-week family vacation in far-away Thailand.

But the events of the past two weeks could backfire, too.

The "it's our turn" rhetoric echoes Mr. Vrdolyak's appeal to voters in 1983 to back an unknown Republican over Mr. Washington "before it's too late." The moral high ground now has been lost -- even if some black leaders now say that, of course, the next mayor will serve all of Chicago, not just African-Americans. Given recent events, many voters will be skeptical.

The pity is, it didn't have to be this way.

Mr. Obama didn't get to be our senator or president by running as the black candidate, but by running as the best candidate -- who happened to be an African-American. Neither did Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle, who easily won a Democratic primary race filled with other blacks, and just one white, because she was the best candidate of any race.

Chicago, black voters and white voters alike, has grown beyond enmity. We've shown that another way is possible.

Now, some are trying to pull us back to the bad old days, the days when desperate politicians used race as a weapon, regardless of the damage it did and could do to Chicago -- blacks, white, Latinos and Asians alike.

It's ironic, because although Mr. Washington had extraordinary support from black voters, he became mayor because he brought liberal lakefront whites and Latinos into his coalition, too.

Harold Washington was a smart man, a good mayor who was just hitting his stride when he died. Too bad too many people out there have forgotten his message that "unity" means everybody.

Greg Hinz

Banks and WikiLeaks

The whistle-blowing Web site WikiLeaks has not been convicted of a crime. The Justice Department has not even pressed charges over its disclosure of confidential State Department communications. Nonetheless, the financial industry is trying to shut it down.

Visa, MasterCard and PayPal announced in the past few weeks that they would not process any transaction intended for WikiLeaks. Earlier this month, Bank of America decided to join the group, arguing that WikiLeaks may be doing things that are “inconsistent with our internal policies for processing payments.”

The Federal Reserve, the banking regulator, allows this. Like other companies, banks can choose whom they do business with. Refusing to open an account for some undesirable entity is seen as reasonable risk management. The government even requires banks to keep an eye out for some shady businesses — like drug dealing and money laundering — and refuse to do business with those who engage in them.

But a bank’s ability to block payments to a legal entity raises a troubling prospect. A handful of big banks could potentially bar any organization they disliked from the payments system, essentially cutting them off from the world economy.

The fact of the matter is that banks are not like any other business. They run the payments system. That is one of the main reasons that governments protect them from failure with explicit and implicit guarantees. This makes them look not too unlike other public utilities. A telecommunications company, for example, may not refuse phone or broadband service to an organization it dislikes, arguing that it amounts to risky business.

Our concern is not specifically about payments to WikiLeaks. This isn’t the first time a bank shunned a business on similar risk-management grounds. Banks in Colorado, for instance, have refused to open bank accounts for legal dispensaries of medical marijuana.

Still, there are troubling questions. The decisions to bar the organization came after its founder, Julian Assange, said that next year it will release data revealing corruption in the financial industry. In 2009, Mr. Assange said that WikiLeaks had the hard drive of a Bank of America executive.

What would happen if a clutch of big banks decided that a particularly irksome blogger or other organization was “too risky”? What if they decided — one by one — to shut down financial access to a newspaper that was about to reveal irksome truths about their operations? This decision should not be left solely up to business-as-usual among the banks.

Is Banksy’s Mr. Brainwash an Art-World Borat?

4/14/10 at 8:55 PM

Today, the New York Times' Milena Ryzik investigates Banksy’s new documentary (and Sundance hit)Exit Through The Gift Shop — asking, essentially, if the film is actually a satire, and the subject, French-Californian filmmaker turned street artist Mr. Brainwash, has been created to dupe the art world and mock the burgeoning art-factory system. Mr. Brainwash himself, a.k.a. Thierry Guetta, didn’t respond to her queries, but we spent three hours with Mr. Brainwash before the opening of his recent Manhattan art show "Icons." Our two cents? The show was so wretchedly derivative, repetitive, and insultingly insipid that we felt it could only have been an intentional prank: With its prints of famous figures Mr. Brainwash said he couldn't name from memory, and art made out of broken LPs (a staple of junk sales), it was as if they were taunting hipster collectors into buying the worst possible art to prove their hideous, herd-following taste. (Not to mention journalists' unethical gullibility: Mr. Brainwash kept trying to push a framed print on us, while mentioning how much we could sell it for on eBay.) We definitely felt put on (even if we respected the prank), but we couldn't prove it. So we tried to get him to admit it. The process was maddening.

So, this show is about icons. I see Bill Gates.
I know a little bit about Bill Gates. I don’t know deeply about his story, if it’s true or not true, but only to think about it and see what I hear is good enough for me.

Um, is that how you hope people approach you?
Like I say in the end of the film, I said, I cannot judge you. I’m not here to judge. If there is a judge today, it’s God. For me here, it’s my life. I cannot have somebody who says you are fake. Who are you to judge me? You know, you can judge me, it’s no problem. I am fake. You are fake … But it doesn’t mean I’m going to stop continuing what I’m doing — and the next step might be bigger and bigger and bigger ...

Plenty say this feels like a prank. Can you prove it’s not?
What do I do to prove? To live my life? One day for me is one life. The next day is another life. It’s not important what people say.

It will become important if a significant number of people come to your show saying it’s a prank.
By Banksy, yeah? Yeah, yeah, this is something, but it’s like what I’m going to do? If I do it, it’s my heart and I believe. I’m a guy who believes above all. I believe in God.

Sure, you believe — but are you playing a role?
No. No playing a role ... It depends on the role

Look, if you’re playing a joke on the art market, it’s a pretty fun joke.
Playing a joke on the art market? But the art market, is it a joke? When you think of white on a white canvas and sell it for millions of dollars, is it a joke? Is it a joke that some people are going to spend millions on this?

So if anyone deserves to be pranked, it's the art world …
No. I don’t believe that the art market is a joke or there is not a joke. I’m not here to judge. Is it a joke, like putting [an artist’s] name onto something by someone else, so the whole world become a joke? It’s how well you play your game. Jeff Koons making millions of dollars: People have said it’s not good what he does; it’s crazy. I respect him to play well his game.

Earlier, you said that, like Madonna or Oprah, you’re going to build a school with your proceeds? What proof do you have of that?
You cannot know. I can open my heart to you, or I can be a villain. [Maybe] I can grab the money and count my money and I say, “Oh, I joke them.” But somewhere I’m a believer.

For Banksy to direct or produce a fictional artist wouldn't be surprising. Let’s say you’re a paid actor, and great at improvising lines, like Borat. People might even think this will make these pieces more valuable, not less.
Yeah, definitely. But somewhere it comes to a point, like in the first hour of the film, you see that you’re dealing with a madman already, so a madman somewhere doesn’t have a limit. You're talking to a madman ... Art for me is everywhere.

For instance?
See that garbage outside? I wanted to make a sculpture inside — take all the garbage, put it on top of it, and make New York City. Very simple: The garbage is free. But I felt like human is the most beautiful piece of art for me.

If humans are the most interesting art, then it would make sense that your performance is your real art.
I feel like I said — it comes to a point, even artists that I have bought some art from, the more I know them, the more I know what they are, the more I don’t want [to know]. Art is the artist. Understand?

No. You’re steering around this question.
If I’m really an artist?

How do I know you’re not an actor?
Like I say, a big artist — I don’t want to say name — but this big artist has 140 people working for them. Sometimes, they don’t even come up with the idea. They say: “Like, No like.” But I respect that. The mind goes too fast. It’s not me having a nail and building a box, who cares, it’s a box, take it.

Yes, someone like Jeff Koons employs actors to create his pieces. But that's not the same as an actor playing a guy who runs an art studio. Are you someone else acting as Thierry Guetta?
The problem is I don’t understand really the question: Are you an actor to interview me? How do I know?

For starters, if you asked me, I would just say, "No, I’m not.
And I would say, "No, I’m not." Some way I’m not an actor. If I was an actor, I wouldn’t be here. The movie makes a big question mark of everything because you see the evolution of all this. Some people say, "Oh he copies this and he copies this." Who says that there is rules in art today? Who says what you cannot do? Learn about my past and tell me what I am in the present ...

But you don’t seem to have existed before your first show.
But everything comes up: You’ll find space, you’ll find art. I film everything. I make sculpture of Charlie Chaplin in bronze in 1989, or I don’t have timing, so I might say '89 if it’s '91, you know, but for me I know that I made it.

By: Logan Hill

E-Mail Gets an Instant Makeover
By MATT RICHTEL
SAN FRANCISCO — Signs you’re an old fogey: You still watch movies on a VCR, listen to vinyl records and shoot photos on film.

And you enjoy using e-mail.

Young people, of course, much prefer online chats and text messages. These have been on the rise for years but are now threatening to eclipse e-mail, much as they have already superseded phone calls.

Major Internet companies like Facebook are responding with message services that are focused on immediate gratification.

The problem with e-mail, young people say, is that it involves a boringly long process of signing into an account, typing out a subject line and then sending a message that might not be received or answered for hours. And sign-offs like “sincerely” — seriously?

Lena Jenny, 17, a high school senior in Cupertino, Calif., said texting was so quick that “I sometimes have an answer before I even shut my phone.” E-mail, she added, is “so lame.”

Facebook is trying to appeal to the Lenas of the world. It is rolling out a revamped messaging service that is intended to feel less like e-mail and more like texting.

The company decided to eliminate the subject line on messages after its research showed that it was most commonly left blank or used for an uninformative “hi” or “yo.”

Facebook also killed the “cc” and “bcc” lines. And hitting the enter key can immediately fire off the message, à la instant messaging, instead of creating a new paragraph. The changes, company executives say, leave behind time-consuming formalities that separate users from what they crave: instant conversation.

“The future of messaging is more real time, more conversational and more casual,” said Andrew Bosworth, director of engineering at Facebook, where he oversees communications tools. “The medium isn’t the message. The message is the message.”

The numbers testify to the trend. The number of total unique visitors in the United States to major e-mail sites like Yahoo and Hotmail is now in steady decline, according to the research company comScore. Such visits peaked in November 2009 and have since slid 6 percent; visits among 12- to 17-year-olds fell around 18 percent. (The only big gainer in the category has been Gmail, up 10 percent from a year ago.)

The slide in e-mail does not reflect a drop in digital communication; people have just gravitated to instant messaging, texting and Facebook (four billion messages daily).

James E. Katz, the director for the Center for Mobile Communications Studies at Rutgers University, said this was not the death of e-mail but more of a downgrade, thanks to greater choice and nuance among communications tools.

“It’s painful for them,” he said of the younger generation and e-mail. “It doesn’t suit their social intensity.”

Some, predictably, turn up their noses at the informality and the abbreviated spellings that are rampant in bite-size, phone-based transmissions. Judith Kallos, who writes a blog and books about e-mail etiquette, complains that the looser, briefer and less grammatical the writing, the less deep the thoughts and emotions behind it.

“We’re going down a road where we’re losing our skills to communicate with the written word,” Ms. Kallos said.

Mary Bird, 65, of San Leandro, Calif., is another traditionalist, if a reluctant one. “I don’t want to be one of those elders who castigate young peoples’ form of communication,” she said. “But the art of language, the beauty of language, is being lost.”

Ms. Bird’s daughter, Katie Bird Hunter, 26, is on the other side of the digital communications divide and finds her parents to be out of touch.

“They still use AOL,” she says, implying with her tone that she finds this totally gross.

Ms. Hunter says she seeks to reach friends first by text, then by instant message, then with a phone call, and then by e-mail. “And then, while I’d probably never do this last one, showing up at their house.”

Like a lot of younger people, Ms. Hunter, who works in construction management in San Francisco, says e-mail has its place — namely work and other serious business, like online shopping. She and others say they still regularly check e-mail, in part because parents, teachers and bosses use it.

David McDowell, senior director of product management for Yahoo Mail, conceded that the company was seeing a shift to other tools, but said this was less a generational phenomenon than a situational one. Fifteen-year-olds, for example, have little reason to send private attachments to a boss or financial institution.

Yahoo has added features like chat and text messaging to its e-mail service to reflect changing habits, as has Gmail, which also offers phone calls.

“Mail is now only a part of Gmail,” said Mike Nelson, a Google spokesman. “It’s video conferencing, texting, it’s I.M., it’s phone calling.”

Mr. Katz, the Rutgers professor, said texting and social networks better approximated how people communicated in person — in short snippets where niceties did not matter. Over time, he said, e-mail will continue to give way to faster-twitch formats, even among older people.

The changing trends have even some people in their 20s feeling old and slightly out of touch, or at least caught in the middle.

Adam Horowitz, 23, who works as a technology consultant for a major accounting firm in New York, spends all day on e-mail at his office. When he leaves it behind, he picks up his phone and communicates with friends almost entirely via texts.

Yet he sometimes feels caught between the two, as when he texts with his younger brothers, ages 12 and 19, who tend to send even shorter, faster messages.

“When they text me, it comes across in broken English. I have no idea what they’re saying,” said Mr. Horowitz. “I may not text in full sentences, but at least there’s punctuation to get my point across.”

“I guess I’m old school.”

The Health Benefits of Artichokes

The Health Benefits of Artichokes: "In a trial involving 208 adults, results provide support for the notion that artichoke leaf extract has potential value in relieving irritable bowel syndrome symptoms."