Visit Fight Night photos in the Media Gallery
Over 12 rounds ropes on all sides of the ring sag under the mass of two heavyweights. The fight is a brawl. When it finishes Danny Williams sits on the edge of the floodlit mat with the golden belt over his shoulder, joking with reporters. His mother, stage right, keeps knocking the back of the head of his trainer, pointing at his nose, pointing at his ear. A drop of blood leaks from his right nostril but he inhales it back in before the cameras catch it in light.
His mom isn't paying any attention to what he is saying, just rubbing her hands together and licking her lips with post trauma nerves. Her mouth curls in a smile when the reporters laugh and she looks with pride to her son. A TV monitor in the foreground replays highlights of the fight but the sound of glove on body sounds so mute compared to the BOOM BOOM BOOM of real life just minutes before.
Boxing in Britain is a heartbeat of multicultural representation. When Takaloo enters the arena an Iranian beat shakes the speaker stands as the Margate, Kent fighter grooves his way through a gauntlet of fans. His trainers are garbed in the red and green of his native land. Later Amir Khan will showcase his fists of fury in his sixth professional fight and 9,000 fans will pay tribute to the rising star of the British boxing scene. Late in the first round, halfway through the Round 3 destruction of his opponent, Khan gets hit by an uppercut and his gaze drifts for a moment. You wonder if his life is flashing before his eyes and he sees himself in 10 years looking bloated and considering an ill-advised comeback like Prince Naseem Hamed sitting ringside.
But Prince Naseem is a real gentleman, like so many of the fighters we meet ringside. Time for the fans, always equipped with a quip or charming gesture. Maybe Amir Khan is just taking a moment to glance at a group of Muslim youths sitting in the front rows chanting his name. Later these bearded young men will go more Malcolm X than Muhammad Ali challenging British whites who complain to stewards that they weren't sitting in the right seats and were obstructing their view. Men from each group grab the ringleaders before any clash can occur but the simmering heat remains. Fight night all around. Nowhere in my experiences is the social context and struggles of post-London-bombings more evident. "WILLIAMS, BOMA-YE, WILLIAMS, BOMA-YE" starts behind us in an Ali-like tribute to a Muslim convert (Williams, Kill Him) and spreads to quarters of the crowd. SKELTON, SKELTON, SKELTON echoes in response. But nothing compares to the spine-tingling rhythm of the crowd in response and in unison chanting Khan's name with feet on metal stands proving the CRASH, CRASH, CRASH of goosebumps.
The ideas swirl in the air doing somersaults and occasionally crashing into each other with a sound louder than the BOOM, BOOM, BOOM of big men hitting each other. You just have to listen. Racism, Violence, Compassion, Entertainment, Multi-Bloody-Culturalism. In a matrix when you change your position you don't just change your perspective on a matrix, you change the whole matrix. Everything is different. This is true of any social interaction but boxing is one of the more demonstrative social pursuits.
At one point my friend and fight night companion Ilyas Mohammed turns to me as Khan shoots past the adoring crowd down the gauntlet with his hands on top of his head, bridged, and his path uncrowded by a posse of minders: "He's a pro." And my mind wanders to the Muslim boys, Williams' mother, the glory of Khan, the ring card girls, Takaloo's disarming charm, Williams climbing in the ring, and the crowd. Fight fans all looking different. Some of them drunk, some of them involved and a whole bunch of observers. Do we really have to listen that hard to hear the rumblings of the sweet science? Long live the fight game. Real Sociology Live.
Labels: london, photography, sport
My Toshiba Satellite laptop is a proud new participant in the world's largest ever climate experiment - a full simulation of climate change from 1920 to 2080. The
BBC project uses the same distributed computing software from the University of California, Berkeley that drives
SETI (Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence) and the
World Community Grid, advancing knowledge of human disease. So while you are doing the dishes, eating dinner or having a snooze your computer can be helping find a cure for cancer, spotting ET in the cosmos or predicting if we are all going to one day live in a great big dust bowl.
Basically these projects ask people around the world to sign up to have a small open source client application installed on home computers. This Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) application runs as a screen saver, using the computing power of millions of distributed machines when otherwise not in use. The client software crunches data in a very efficient way. A BOINC project with a single Linux server can provide computing power equivalent to a cluster with tens of thousands of CPUs. There is no limit to the applications of this type of distributed computing and because the project is open source anyone is encouraged to create software on the platform for specific applications.
Unfortunately the climate change project only runs on Linux or Windows XP so Mac users are out of luck if they wanted to take part in this one. But it has an excitingly quick turnaround with the results of the study to be broadcast on the BBC in May. UK viewers can see a television documentary describing the project on February 20, 2006 on BBC4.Labels: internet
Visit Faces of Deptford photos
Participating in Live Sociology at Goldsmiths College is an inspiring experience. The first workshop focused on photography as a method of sociological representation. The 20 participants from around the UK are a diverse group with lots of good ideas. Phil Mizen, senior lecturer in sociology at Warwick University, joined me in snapping shutters. He even posed for me. We all went out and took photographs for a couple of hours in the afternoon as a form of experimental sociology in southeast London following an inspiring introduction to the topic from Les Back and some practical photography training from Paul Halliday.
For my project I selected Assignment 1 in the workshop suggestions: "Produce a series of portraits of people in Deptford". You can see the results by visiting Faces of Deptford in the Chris Brauer Media Gallery. The topic of the first workshop was "Redesigning the Observer" and you won't need to look further than the steady gazes of the portrait subjects to understand what this means. Who was the observer and who was being observed?
Live Sociology is similar to the London Project we have planned at City University as a study of London people, places and things through journalism. Interestingly this is the same title as a project Paul Halliday has been conducting in photographing London over the past 15 years. What was fantastic about this workshop experience was interacting with the people. The subject of the photograph featured in this post was a very cool guy. Anyone who participated indicated a willingness at the first question but this gentleman was particularly responsive. In cropping and editing I noticed the Jose Morinho ad in the top right corner. My decision to not include any text of words with each photograph was a conscious one. Introducing the photographer's terms of reference for these photos would in my opinion and in this case only further complicate your interpretation.
Labels: internet, london, photography, sociology
Just finished reading the
Seven Daughters of Eve by
Brian Sykes, professor of human genetics at Oxford University. It weaves a fantastic account of human history as revealed by the mitochondrial DNA inherited from mothers to daughters. Sykes finds that "almost everyone of European origin is descended from one of seven ancient women" who lived 45,000 to 10,000 years ago.
Every person on earth is, in turn, the descendent of one of only 33 women, who are themselves the matrilineal ancestors of "
Mitochondrial Eve", a common ancestor of all living humans.
So it turns out that as factions in the world continue to tear each other apart along perceived racial, geographical, economic, and religious grounds, we're actually all brothers and sisters from the same mother. And while we are reaching back in time to learn from modern science, why not grab some language from the epic poet Homer: "A sympathetic friend can be quite as dear as a brother". Be sympathetic and compassionate with your fellow human beings. We're all in this together.Labels: history, literature, science
Spreading the word on the possibilities of new media can be a tedious process. Trying to explain the transformational power of blogs, citizen media, social networking, and the like to the uninitiated takes great patience and determination. Often you end up most frustrated with yourself for not being able to describe what you see happening before your eyes in terms that make sense to people less involved in the early stages. That might be one of the reasons bloggers tend to save these conversations until speaking or linking with each other.
Particular warning goes out to those initiating these discussions with traditional (print/tv/radio) media veterans whose careers are setting against the rising tide. Usually you reach an agreement that "we will just see what happens" with both parties confident of vindication in time.
That's why the "long bet" placed between Dave Winer of Scripting News and New York Times Vice President Martin Nisenholz in 2002 is so intriguing.
The Bet in 2002:
In a Google search of five keywords or phrases representing the top five news stories of 2007, weblogs will rank higher than the New York Times' Web site.
Superblogger Jason Kottke decided to jump the gun a bit and check the results on eight top news stories in 2005 including hurricane Katrina, the London bombings, elections in Iraq, the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and the appointment of a new pope.
He selected a Google keyword search for each and compared the results for the NY Times, blogs, "citizen" media like Wikipedia and other "traditional" media like the BBC or CNN.
The results make tough reading for Nisenholz as blogs trounce the NY Times on six out of eight events and there is still two years before Winer is coming to collect. But by expanding his analysis to other traditional and citizen media Kottke highlights that on six out of eight events traditional media still scores higher rankings than citizen or blogging sites.
So not sure if the conclusion is that the NY Times continues to suffer from an odd website strategy (presumably at the direction of Nisenholz) where content is often deemed premium (members-only) or requires payment for access. The ultimate triumph of other traditional media in the assessment suggests this might be the case.
Another take would be that there are only a few surviving powerhouses of traditional media that have managed to hold their position in the face of the rising tide of citizen and blog media and it is only a matter of time (perhaps by 2007) before they too fall on their swords.
Regardless it is a terrific exercise in providing a baseline for this debate in 2005 and would be useful to repeat in future years to understand trends and settle bets. And it provides the digerati with a new starting point for describing new media to the old hacks ... "OK. For example. There was this bet in 2002 see ..."Labels: blog, media
