Decoding Dragons

[Intersect] Pocahontas meets Slip of the Tongue

I normally try to keep most of my posts connected to WoW in some way, but this spoken poem is amazing. I kind of want to do a Machinima of it, using Tauren instead. I might have a go, in fact. Please read the full text (at the bottom of this post)

The video was created by a student, Samantha Figueroa, as part of an assignment to taken two different forms of media/art and create a piece that would inspire a critical perspective.  Source:  Socialogical Images [via Racialious]

The full text of Slip of the Tongue

by Adriel Luis

[via]

My glares burn through her.
And I’m sure that such actions aren’t foreign to her
because the essence of her beauty is, well, the essence of beauty.

And in the presence of this higher being,
the weakness of my masculinity kicks in,
causing me to personify my wannabe big-baller, shot-caller,
God’s gift to the female species with shiny suit wrapping rapping like,
“Yo, what’s crackin shorty how you livin’ what’s your sign what’s your size I dig your style, yo.”

Now, this girl was no fool.
She gives me a dirty look with the quickness like,
“Boy, you must be stupid.”
so I’m looking at myself,
“Boy, you must be stupid.”
But looking upon her I am kinda feelin’ her style.

So I try again.
But, instead of addressing her properly,
I blurt out one of my fake-ass playalistic lines like,
“Gurl, you must be a traffic ticket cuz you got fine written all over you.”
Now, she’s trying to leave and I’m trying to keep her here.
So at a final attempt, I utter,
“Gurl, what is your ethnic makeup?”

At this point, her glare was scorching through me,
and somehow she manages to make her brown eyes
resemble some kinda brown fire or something,
but there’s no snap or head moement,
no palm to face, click of tongue, middle finger,
roll of eyes, twist of lips, or girl power chant.
She just glares through me with these burning eyes
and her gaze grabs you by the throat.

She says, “Ethnic makeup?”
She says, “First of all, makeup’s just an anglicized, colonized, commodified utility
that my sisters have been programmed to consume,
forcing them to cover up their natural state
in order to imitate what another sister looks like in her natural state
because people keep telling her
that the other sister’s natural state is more beautiful
than the first sister’s natural state.
At the same time,
the other sister isn’t even in her natural state,
because she’s trying to imitate yet another sister,
so in actuality, the natural state that the first sister’s trying to imitate
wasn’t even natural in the first place.”

Now I’m thinking, “Damn, this girl’s kicking knowledge!”
But, meanwhile, she keeps spitting on it like
“Fine. I’ll tell you bout my ‘ethnic makeup.’
I wear foundation,
not that powdery shit,
I wear the foundation laid by my indigenous people.
It’s that foundation that makes it so that past being globalized,
I can still vocalize with confidence that i know where my roots are.
I wear this foundation not upon my face, but within my soul,
and I take this from my ancestors
because I’ll be damned if I’d ever let an American or European corporation
tell me what my foundation
should look like.”

I wear lipstick,
for my lips stick to the ears of men,
so they can experience in surround sound my screams of agony
with each lash of rulers, measuring tape, and scales,
as if my waistline and weight are inversely propotional to my value as a human being.
See my lips, they stick, but not together.
Rather, they flail open with flames to burn down this culture that once kept them shut.
Now, I mess with eye shadow,
but my eyes shadow over this time where you’ve gone at ends to keep me blind.
But you can’t cover my eyes, look into them.
My eyes foreshadow change.
My eyes foreshadow light.
and I’m not into hair dyeing.
but I’m here, dying, because this oppression won’t get out of my hair.
I have these highlights.
They are highlights of my past atrocities,
they form this oppression I can’t wash off.
It tangles around my mind and twists and braids me in layers,
this oppression manifests,
it’s stressing me so that even though I don’t color my hair,
in a couple of years it’ll look like I dyed it gray.
So what’s my ethnic makeup ?
I don’t have any.
Because your ethnicity isn’t something you can just make up.
And as for that crap my sisters paint on their faces, that’s not makeup, it’s make-believe.”

I can’t seem to look up at her.
and I’m sure that such actions aren’t foreign to her
because the expression on her face
shows that she knows that my mind is in a trance.

As her footsteps fade, my ego is left in crutches.
And rejection never sounded so sweet.

[Intersect] Pocahontas meets Slip of the Tongue was published on September 2nd, 2010, with the tags , , , , under the Analysis, Geek Life category. There are currently 1 comment on this article so far.

Shared Topic: This is a Conversation

No comments = better bloggers?.This is the question posted by this week’s Blogazeroth shared topic, as proposed by Anea. I don’t normally do these as they tend to be a bit offtopic for my blog (which already runs the gamut from mental health issues to elemental shaman theorycrafting, and I find that a bit stretching at times.) However I think it is important to establish why one blogs.

Blogs, Journals, Diaries, Letters

Blogging is not entirely new and unique to the computer age, in my opinion. It follows in a long line of semi-public correspondence, memoirs, journalling, letters to the newspaper. Granted, the responses are much quicker and the readership more random and open. And anonymous. And unedited. I think you get the picture anyway, but the readership is open, and topics are subject to public response. On matters believed important enough, this happens via newspaper opinion columns, letters to the editor in more serious papers, and full on journal articles in the humanities and sciences.

I swear, during my post-graduate studies, half the journal articles I read were littered with passive aggressive personal attacks on ‘rivals’ in the field. Pettiness does not disappear in more academic circles, sadly.

In the days before the telephone and the more widespread newspaper, letters could be fairly public things. Many an intellectuals personal correspondence is published after they have passed on. The privacy of letters is something of a modern concept. Letters controlled the spread of ideas, and formed the basis of intellectual exchange between philosophers and scientists for hundreds of years, and were often written under the assumption that they would be read by more than the intended recipient.  As letter writing has declined, blogging increases. Even if the blogging is sometimes bite-sized. Twitter is many conversations, formed a line at a time, and displayed for public consumption.

Blog-o-sphere is not a forum or a guild

Now, there has been recent hubbub that I feel Tam has summarised neatly here, and one of the topics that came up there was ‘it is a public forum, prepare to be publicly answered.’ I think it is very easy to forget that our posts are accessible by everyone. You can of course make your blog accessible to only a few, and the privacy of what you post is then under your control. Post it in the sphere of ‘opinionators’ and it is subject to dissection, denouncement, praise, and so on – possibly from people you had no idea existed.

Now, where blogging does differ from the literary/academic/newspaper mediums is the immediacy of the community. However this community is not like other communities. The blogging community is not like a forum or a guild, because it is hundreds (thousands) of individual opinionators, opinionating in their own style and with no moderator or editor to slap their hand and tell them to write something else, or avoid certain topics. If a blogger wants to post paragraphs of nonsensical babble, there is no moderator to come along and delete the post as spam. If a blogger wants to post an article condemning raiders for being elitist no life bastards, there is no guild leader to /gkick them for disrespecting other members of the community.

There is a certain amount of leadership by popularity, but large blogs such as PPI and Tobold would never claim that he is in charge of anything, and I don’t think any little blogger would want that to pass.

So, Pewter, ‘conversation’? Remember the title of this post?

I blog when I feel I have something to say to the WoW Community at large. I comment on others because they say things which prompt things in me, and get me mulling over certain topics. I blog to share information, to improve my writing (slowly but surely, thank you for your patience.) I blog to hear points of view thrown back at me. To link in to the earlier analogy of letters, I write in my blog because I don’t write to my friends and certainly not on these topics. I don’t think turning comments off, or ignoring other blogs would make me a better blogger, because the dialogue would inevitably be one-sided.

Not that it isn’t already. A blog without comments is something like a soapbox or a pulpit. We would denounce, we would preach, but we wouldn’t connect, and connecting and the desire to connect is one of those fundamentals of being human.

Shared Topic: This is a Conversation was published on March 22nd, 2010, with the tags , , , , , , , under the Meta-blog category. There are currently 2 comments on this article so far.