connecting*the*dots

Artist: Clement D. Mallory (Greensboro out of Brooklyn)

Song: 10 Million Dollars

==========

1 million, 2 million, 3 million…
1 million, 2 million, 3 million 4 million, 5 million…
1 million, 2 million, 3 million 4 million, 5 million, 6 million, 7 million…
1 million, 2 million, 3 million 4 million, 5 million, 6 million, 7 million, 8 million, 9 million…
1 million, 2 million, 3 million 4 million, 5 million, 6 million, 7 million, 8 million, 9 million, 10 million dollars!
What will I do with 10 million dollars?!
With my first million, like Oprah, I’d have a show
And you know that Russel Simmons he would be on that Def Poetry, yo
With my second million, I would give it away like Bill Cosby
My charity would be me and my family
So I would know exactly where my money is going
Right back to my black community
With my third million I would build a school with free food
Just like George “The Iceman” Gervin
But it would be the Clement D. Mallory Foundation, in parenthesis (School of Poetry)
I would take my fourth million and invest it in my own damn stock
Like my clothing, my books and my CD’s would be all be making that Dow Jones money
Like non-stop
Them I’ma bank my whole fifth million
So all I’m doing is just chillin’ — livin’ off my interest
With my sixth million, like Jay-Z, Nelly and Puffy I would own a basketball team
But of course you know it would be a youth league
Cause in reality, in would cost me much more than a million to even be a part-owner of a NBA basketball team
3/4 of my seventh million would go into real estate
250 of that would be for land that I would smack
Right in-between all the Malcolm X’s and Martin Luther King Jr. streets
Cause they gain so much more than money
700 thousand of my eighth million
I would use to do what Mrs. Antella did, which is financing a magazine
But every one of my articles would strictly be on graffiti
That leftover 300 thousand would be doled for miscellaneous things
Like, maybe I might buy some jewelry
With my ninth million, my advertising power would go straight into commercials
It would be me and Spike Lee teaming up with Hype Williams to produce some of the hottest ever made videos
And with my tenth and final million, I think with half of that I would purchase a couple of laundromats
Cause quarters make dollars
With the other half, I would put on some Jerry Lewis type Walk-a-thon
And where ever I’d go, I’d have 500 thousand dollars for 500 thousand homeless people that ask for a dollar
Yeah that’s what I’d do with 10 million dollars
With 10 million dollars, I’d be the black Bill Gates
Stay up counting my money
Like 1 million, 2 million, 3 million 4 million, 5 million, 6 million, 7 million, 8 million, 9 million, 10 million, 10 million dollars!

Lisa and I hunted around Greensboro yesterday afternoon for locations and people, as we’re looking to illustrate a number of sections of the eventual The People, Yes interface. I’m not sure how successful we were, but Lisa will be heading out again on her own soon.

Would you like to help?

We’re looking for landscape images (they’ll be used mostly in the header, so think wide and short) of a number of subjects:

• Memorable locations - it could be an abandoned lot or City Center Park, just try to include people, in some fashion, within an interesting composition
• Everyday folk at work - from the local barber to an insurance agent, capture them doing their thing
• Homeless people - stay away from stereotypical images (i.e. beer bottles, strewn clothes, etc.), go for portraits and contextual settings

So if you want to help us out, simply tag your Greensboro-based images on flickr with “thepeopleyes.”

I’ll subscribe to the feed and contact you if we’d like to use your shot (we’re a non-profit, so you’ll have to apply a CC license that allows reuse with attribution). I’ll probably setup a flickr group as well in the near future.

Thanks.

every man has a vocal chord
but not every man has a voice
some choose to live life that way
others simply have no choice
with too much to think about
too much goin’ on
too much tryin’ to survive
too much watchin’ their own get gone
so what’s the worth of words
these mere utterances in time
these rearranged thoughts
in both rhythm and rhyme?
i’ll tell you their value
but you probably won’t hear me
being caught up in the matrix
you’ll just craft reason to fear me..

when i’m struggling to get by
and trying to fly
but instead i get high
and dance that fine line
it’s the words that come save me
like dry turkey in gravy
i flip back to my quest
and push along like scorsese
to craft a moment in time
script the next one to follow
not some hollow ass production
of bling pursuit do i wallow
in the mire i find the depths
the inspiration
the desire..

to live by the pursuit of the grade
A
performance bonus
A
white picket dream
A
life with no compassion
A
way to drown out the screams
the shit just ain’t for me
and i know i’m not alone
so pick up your pen
your pad
your phone
dial me into your realm
put on your friday night best
cause when we hit the streets
it’s all about the people
yes..

It’s time to get down and dirty with real political discussion.

Nick Reville just pinged me a few minutes ago, pointing me to a new Participatory Politics Foundation project called Open Congress.

Don’t look now folks, but we’re about to 2.0 the hell out of government.

I’ve dropped that phrase a bunch of times online, added some potential feature flavor in a comment thread and even spoke to dev friends about what it would take to build something like this, but there’s no need now; this puppy looks like it’ll grow strong legs moving forward.

And from a first glance, I really like the approach that PPF took to legislation being the primary object of focus in the domain.

The original idea for my project was to position a domain around the 535 seats within Congress and pull in information and data that contextualized the job that individuals were doing in their role serving their constituents — keeping a record of all current and future seat information.

I hoped that if we could build a rich interface for displaying information about and by representatives — voting records, financing, news events, press releases, blog posts, video, audio, etc. — then a Digg-like rating system could work with an “on the job” algorithm to rate each representative. They would then be forced to step up and be more transparent with their rationale for, say, voting against the will of their constituents on particular legislation.

I still think that approach is important, but it should be secondary if we, the people, are participating in a democratic institution.

The actual job focus of our representatives is the business of the people — the legislation that shapes our lives within a representative democracy.

So if you design a domain with too much of a focus on the Senators and Representatives, you just might create an even greater echo chamber for rumor mongering and feeding polarizing bloggers gallons of liquid for their pissing wars, whether they’re Democratic or Republican.

With this approach — legislation first — bloggers are given the opportunity to track what matters first and foremost. And if our representatives fumble within those processes — like a Ted Stevens with his Bridge to Nowhere — then we can hop on them like flies to shit.

What I’m hoping happens now is that other political transparency domains — like Jim Harper’s WashingtonWatch and Denise Roth Barber at FollowTheMoney — ping Nick and crew, with an invite to share their data for the OpenCongress interface.

As Robert DeNiro so eloquently stated in Brazil: “We’re all in it together“

An impressive and eloquent artist.

(uploaded by Thomas Hawk)

The back-story.

UPDATE: Thomas Hawk reports on the other side of the story.