Guardian Article: M.I.A. Talks About Her New Album Maya & The Internet.
MIA takes on Google, YouTube and Wikipedia
Sri Lankan military take down my videos and bully my fans, says the controversial star on a trawl through her web profile. But she’s fighting back by communicating in characters
- By Malik Meer
- The Guardian, Saturday 7 August 2010
Battle star: MIA, as depicted by unique wedding snapper Ravi Thiagaraja Photograph: Ravi Thiagaraja”Mathangi ‘Maya’ Arulpragasam (born 18 July 1975), better known by her stage name MIA, is a Sri Lankan/British songwriter, record producer, singer, rapper, fashion designer, visual artist, and political activist.” And right now, perched on a sofa at the XL Records office in west London, staring into her gold Apple MacBook, MIA is reading the above words on her Wikipedia entry. Seven years after her first single Galang spread across the web like an art-school-incubated virus – confirming her status as one of the first pop stars of the digital age – she’s back with /\/\/\Y/\ (or Maya, for those who can decipher the slashes), and the Guardian has asked her to talk us through her online presence in an attempt to sort fact from fiction. On paper this sounds like a straightforward process. In reality though, as with MIA’s music, a single answer can see her head off across continents on dizzying tangents, and encompass pop references, multi-layered political rants, occasional bouts of paranoia, identity politics, and what was the question again?
We meet 10 days after the music blogs have gone into meltdown following her “trufflegate” feud with the New York Times after its writer Lynn Hirschberg suggested MIA wasn’t as 4REAL as she claims. MIA responded by posting the writer’s mobile number on Twitter and uploading a clip of the interview online. “This is the new shit,” she says unabashedly. “This is the new way to interpret the news for artists because we have got the internet, we have got Twitter, we have got all our fans right there. So why do you have to let someone like Lynn shit on you?”
A prolific web user, she says she doesn’t really have a favourite go-to website or music blog because she doesn’t trust many of them. “I do go on my Twitter [@_M_I_A_] and look at what my fans say though,” she admits. “If my fans are funny then I’ll retweet and read what they’re saying about other shit.” Other than that she says she spends a lot of time looking at “stoopid shit”, Mexican gangs, Islamic art, images of “3D mosques”, and web art, which is where she discovered the photo illusions of Jaime Martinez and signed him to her label NEET.
Recently, MIA also warned fans that Google was developed with the help of CIA seed money. And her new album opens with The Message, a robotic skit that goes: “iPhone’s connected to the internet connected to the Google connected to the government.” Still, she’s game for our Google challenge. Let the digital dissection begin …
MIA on her Wikipedia entry
Firstly, we ask her to pull up her Wikipedia entry. It’s fairly generic, detailing everything from her name in Tamil script to her love of Harmony Korine and radical cinema. “I hate my Wikipedia page,” she announces as soon as it loads up. “It’s really boring to look at. I’d get rid of all this white space. And I’d make the font a bit more interesting.” If you’ve ever seen the fluoro overload of her own website or Twitter page this should come as no surprise. As Wikipedia is notorious for its user-generated inaccuracies and also prone to sabotage, has she – as someone with form in using the net to set the record straight – ever doctored her own entry? “No,” she insists. “I really don’t know how to do that.”
We scroll through the page. In the “Art and Film” sub-section it says, “Jude Law was among early buyers of artwork” after her stint at St Martins. That’s a lie, surely?
“It’s true, actually. He said that his house got burgled and someone took it, though.” So, somewhere in London a burglar is sitting on an original MIA print? “Yeah and he’s probably, like, peed on it or something and couldn’t give a shit,” she jokes. We whizz through the sections on her time working with Elastica and meeting electro sex pest Peaches who encouraged her to make music – all true. Is there anything on here that is incorrect? “Are you working for Wikipedia?” she laughs. “I haven’t actually read it in detail but … I thought it was interesting that the section on Diplo got removed when we stopped working together. He emailed me about that; that’s why I know that section’s missing.”
Does she know who removed it? “I have no idea.”
MIA on why her new album is un-Googleable
MIA often tweets using nothing but keystrokes and punctuation. So it’s hardly surprising that she used the outer reaches of the keyboard to spell out the title of new album, /\/\/\Y/\. Why? “I know it’s hard,” she says sarcastically, “but once we get there it’s gonna be OK. You’re learning to use keys that are not letters …” She instructs me to type: “Forward strike, backwards strike, forward strike, backwards strike and so on, then Y for ‘Why are we doing this?’ [laughs] Then we go back to forward strike …”
So we put /\/\/\Y/\ into Google, hit return and – drum roll, please! – no matches are returned (possibly because Google doesn’t recognise slashes as characters). “OK, it doesn’t come up, yeah, but one day that’ll be coded and take you somewhere amazing.” Ask her why she didn’t choose something more Google-friendly and her response is another declaration of war on The Man: “To resist the internet is really difficult to do. I mean, there are so many cunts on there. Loads of Wall Street dudes are stepping on to the internet and seeing it as the gold rush and I think it’s [about] not wanting to be used for that reason …”
MIA on the music blogs
On the day of our interview, the music blogs are running a story about the appearance of a new MIA vocal on a track called Toldya by British outfit Sali. It rates highly when we first Google “MIA” (alongside the Born Free video and, unexpectedly, her version of The Wire theme with Baltimore’s Blaqstarr). NME.com, meanwhile, runs the story as “MIA lends her vocals to new underground track Toldya.” So, how did the track come about? “That’s not me,” she quickly corrects. “It’s somebody that’s taken a bit of my song and now they’re saying that I worked with them. They asked for permission but I didn’t write back so they put it out anyway.” She sighs: “I already have to deal with being misrepresented all the fucking time but when it’s people you know adding to it, then it gets really hard.”
And there’s another misconception that she’d like to clear up: that former boyfriend and collaborator Diplo produced her first album. “That annoys the fuck out of me because I met him way after I finished it. Everyone is always [adopts mardy voice], ‘The producer who made all the songs.’ If you read the credits, he worked on one song and that’s just putting somebody else’s song next to my vocal. Diplo was the mediator with the phone numbers.”
MIA on YouTube (and the Sri Lankan government)
MIA’s fraught relationship with the Sri Lankan government has been well documented. She named her first album after her father, Arular, a key member of the Tamil separatist movement, and his links to the Tamil Tigers have earned her a “terrorist sympathiser” tag. She has spoken out against the events which last year saw Tamil civilians rounded up and placed in prison camps after the defeat of Tamil Tigers; she says she agreed to perform at the Grammys with Jay-Z, Kanye and Lil Wayne to bring international attention to the cause. She’s also tweeted links to executions carried out by the Sri Lankan government. But it’s when we direct her to YouTube that she really begins to vent. Type “MIA” into the site and her Clash-sampling, film-soundtrack-bothering global hit Paper Planes is the first video up. But it’s hosted by US video channel Vevo, not by her own channel, or any of her fans.
“They buried my Paper Planes, none of my fucking shit comes up,” she says. “All my videos have been constantly pulled, the latest thing that’s up there is from 11 months ago.”
Who’s pulling them? The record company?
“No, the Sri Lankan government is writing to them and saying, ‘If you stick MIA videos up we’re gonna take you to jail for supporting terrorism.'”
What follows is a convoluted, impassioned, 15-minute rant covering death squads, Californian internet servers and Sri Lanka‘s defence minister. In summary, here are the key points:
1) The Sri Lankan government bombarded fans who uploaded her videos, asking them to remove them: “They’ve Facebooked and MySpaced my fans saying, ‘If you support this person you’ll get done for terrorism because under the PTA [Prevention of Terrorism Act] you’re supporting someone who supports a terrorist group and you’re a terrorist because it covers anything to do with affiliation.'”
2) For a developing country, the government is also scarily clued-up when it comes to the internet, due to its IT links with the west: “They really fucking know what they’re fucking doing and it’s crazy fucked-up that I am the first artist on the internet who happened to be a Tamil. And the first government that took down the Tamils is the most internet-championing family of the third world. So it was a battle of the internet when we got on there.”
3) Her track Sunshowers from 2004 is one of the oldest MIA videos on YouTube. It’s hosted by someone called TubeyBooby and the user comments tell their own story. “He’s the only fan that’s got shit up,” she says with pride. “Whoever he is and wherever he is, he doesn’t give a fuck, I like him … I have the Sunshowers comments printed out.” There are 10,000 of them, she says, and if you look, you can see where “the military started going in and commenting”.
4) By 2008, she says, the propaganda was kicking in and she was “getting boxed in by my own shit”. But she doesn’t regret anything she’s done or said and puts it down to experience: “That’s a great lesson to learn, like, this is how it can be manipulated.”
MIA on internet skits
As things are, unsurprisingly, getting a little heavy, the Guardian suggests we lighten the mood by searching for “MIA + comedy”. “Didn’t you find my Born Free video funny?” she jokes, about the Romain-Gavras video which comes with an age restriction on YouTube. “I try to be funny but it’s always misconstrued.” Although there’s a great sketch in which comedian Aziz Ansari tells how he planned to employ his best Tamil chat-up line on MIA, little comes up. However, one site does: Amiright.com advertises itself as “making fun of music, one song at a time” and includes parody songs (All He Wants To Do Is Shoot And Kill Bugs Bunny to the tune of Paper Planes) and a section called “change a song letter in a song title” which sees MIA’s Galang become Galant, a Mitsubishi car model. MIA stares at it blankly.
“What? That’s meant to be funny? There’s loads of fun stuff in my songs; you’ll get it if you listen,” she protests. “Anyway, I say jokes and people think it’s the most fucking controversial thing anyone’s ever said. The thing I said about Justin Bieber was a joke but no one got it …” (She said she found his video “more violent and more of an assault to my eyes and senses than what I’ve made.”).
“So I’m not gonna say jokes any more,” she jokes. “You can’t trick me, I’m not gonna walk into that trap.”
Associated Press Article: Tiger Woods Crashes Out At PGA Event! Is It Time For Tiger To Take a Break From Golf?
By DOUG FERGUSON (AP) – 1 hour ago
AKRON, Ohio — Tiger Woods has never looked worse.
As he has done so often on Sunday at the Bridgestone Invitational, Woods doffed his cap as he walked up toward the 18th green to warm applause from fans who occupied every seat in the grandstand.
Only there was no trophy waiting for him. This sounded more like a sympathy cheer.
The world’s No. 1 player looked utterly beaten, and he was.
“Shooting 18-over par is not fun,” Woods said. “I don’t see how it can be fun shooting 18 over.”
He missed one last birdie putt to close with a 77. That gave Woods the highest 72-hole score — 298 — of any PGA Tour event he ever played, even as an amateur. It was the first time he shot over par in all four rounds since the 2003 PGA Championship at Oak Hill.
This from a guy who had never finished worse than fourth at Firestone in 11 previous events, who had not shot over par on the South Course since 2006, who last year made PGA Tour history by winning for the seventh time on the same course.
The numbers associated with Woods always have been staggering, now more than ever.
His 298 was 39 shots higher than the record score he shot 10 years ago at Firestone. He tied for 78th, the highest finish of his PGA Tour career. Only Henrik Stenson (20-over 300) kept Woods from finishing dead last. He set a career low by making bogey or worse on 25 of the 72 holes.
No one expected him to dominate as he did before revelations of his sexual escapades in November.
No one could have imagined this.
“He’s just not the regular Tiger we’re used to seeing,” said Anthony Kim, who played his first tournament in three months after thumb surgery and beat Woods by two shots. “He’s obviously had a lot of stuff going on, and he’s dealing with that, and that’s obviously more important than golf. Because I think golf is an easy thing to do once your personal life is straightened out. And I’m sure it’s going to happen soon for him.”
How soon?
Not even Woods knows. Perhaps more troubling for him — and the PGA Tour — is he doesn’t know how much longer he can play this year. With two tournaments remaining before the FedEx Cup playoffs get under way, Woods is not guaranteed of being in the top 125 to get into the opening event at The Barclays.
CBS Sports, which televises the most weekends on the tour, has not had Woods live on Sunday since the Memorial two months ago.
Woods will slip further down the Ryder Cup standings, and the question is no longer whether he would play as a captain’s pick. The question is whether U.S. captain Corey Pavin should even pick him.
He looks like any other player out there. Just watching the shots he hits, someone could question what he’s doing on the PGA Tour.
On the par-3 seventh, Woods got the club stuck behind him and caught the ball so fat that he came up 25 yards short, barely getting into the bunker. Worse yet was the 14th. He came up just short into the collar of the rough, about 45 feet short, leaving him a straightforward chip. Woods knocked it 12 feet by the flag, just off the green, putted 5 feet by the hole and took double bogey.
Even in the best of times, Woods has hit bad shots. Everyone does.
But this was amateur stuff.
Pavin might be doing him a disservice to put him on the Ryder Cup team and expose him at an event where players have to be sharp in their thinking and the shots they play.
Woods began the week by saying he intended to qualify for the Ryder Cup team. Asked if he even wanted to play, Woods replied with a stoic look, “Not playing like this, definitely not.
“I wouldn’t help the team if I’m playing like this,” he said. “No one would help the team if they’re shooting 18-over par.”
Would he pick himself if he were captain?
Woods isn’t ruling himself out, saying there is a lot of time between now and the Ryder Cup on Oct. 1-3 in Wales. That starts Thursday with the PGA Championship. Does it end there, too? Because if Woods plays at Whistling Straits the way he did at Firestone, he won’t be around for the weekend and might not be eligible for a PGA Tour event — unless he plays Greensboro — until the Ryder Cup.
His mood has not been that dour despite the low scores. He worked hard on his swing on the practice range Sunday morning, constantly rehearsing and exaggerating some moves to get the club where he wanted it. And he smiled and chatted with Kim throughout the round.
Toward the end, however, Woods looked resigned. There was only so much he could take.
The double bogey at 14. Then came a tee shot on the par-3 15th so far right that it hit a spectator. The loudest cheer Woods got all day was signing his glove and giving it to the man, and then he tossed him the ball after making bogey.
On the 16th, Woods didn’t finish his swing as the ball sailed into the trees. He hit a tree on his next shot, which went 20 yards. From 261 yards out, he tries to slice a 3-wood out of the forest, back toward the green and over the water. It was vintage Woods, the gallery stunned by the flight of the ball, cheering in anticipation as it neared the green.
Splash!
It came up a few yards short. Another double bogey.
It was strange to see Woods playing the eighth hole, and realizing the entire back nine at Firestone was empty. He was in the second group off for the final round. As he lined up his putt on the 18th, a volunteer came over to her colleagues to hand out lunch vouchers.
By lunchtime, Woods was on his way to the airport for a quick flight to Wisconsin, where he planned to play Whistling Straits.
“I could probably play 18 and still watch the guys finish (the Bridgestone Invitational),” he said with a smile.
Woods felt as though he were making baby steps. His driving was the best it had been all year at Aronimink and St. Andrews, only for his putter to let him down. This week, nothing worked.
Woods said he was not surprised.
“It’s been a long year,” he said, looking and sounding like a player who has lost his direction.
Ny Times Article: Former Wonder Years Star Danica McKellar Talks About Her Love For Math!
Between Series, an Actress Became a Superstar (in Math)
On her Web site, Danica McKellar, the actress best known as Winnie Cooper on the television series “The Wonder Years,” takes on questions that require more than a moment’s thought to answer.
A co-author of the Chayes-McKellar-Winn theorem, top, is Danica McKellar, above, the actress who played Winnie Cooper on “The Wonder Years.”
“If it takes Sam six minutes to wash a car by himself,” one fan asked recently, “and it takes Brian eight minutes to wash a car by himself, how long will it take them to wash a car together?”
“This is a ‘rates’ problem,” Ms. McKellar wrote in reply. “The key is to think about each of their ‘car washing rates’ and not the ‘time’ it takes them.”
Ms. McKellar, now a semiregular on “The West Wing” playing a White House speechwriter, Elsie Snuffin, is probably the only person on prime-time television who moonlights as a cyberspace math tutor.
Her mathematics knowledge extends well beyond calculus. As a math major at the University of California, Los Angeles, she also took more esoteric classes, the ones with names like “complex analysis” and “real analysis,” and she pondered making a career move to professional mathematician.
“I love that stuff,” Ms. McKellar said last month during a visit to Manhattan after a play-reading in the Hamptons. Her conversation was peppered with terminology like “epsilons” and “limsups” (pronounced “lim soups”).
“I love continuous functions and proving if functions are continuous or not,” she said.
She may also be the only actress, now or ever, to prove a new mathematical theorem, one that bears her name. Certainly, she is the only theorem prover who appears wearing black lingerie in the July issue of Stuff magazine. Even in that interview, she mentioned math.
Ms. McKellar was 13 when “The Wonder Years” started in 1988 and when it ended five years later, she took a respite from acting to attend U.C.L.A. She expected that she would resume acting when she graduated, and she expected that she would major in film.
In her freshman year, though, she found that she missed the structured logic that she had enjoyed in high school math, and she started taking math classes at U.C.L.A. “I felt my brain was getting mushy,” she said.
To her surprise, she excelled. Later, she was surprised by her surprise, because she had done well in math classes from elementary school through high school. But she had never considered studying math or science in college.
“It wasn’t like I thought about it and thought, ‘No, I can’t do that,’ ” she recalled. “It just never occurred to me.”
Next, she took the more complicated complex analysis course. The professor, Lincoln Chayes, invited her to enroll even though she had not taken all of the prerequisites. And then she had another class, real analysis, also taught by Professor Chayes.
She quizzed him with enough questions that he offered her and another student, Brandy Winn, the opportunity to tackle some original research, the first time he had given a research project to undergraduates.
For a simple model of magnetism, Professor Chayes thought that they might be able to prove a property that would indicate when the magnetic field would line up in a certain direction.
Professor Chayes tutored the two women for months on the background knowledge they would need. Then the students spent months more, up to 12 hours a day, working on the proof.
“I thought that the two were really, really first rate,” Professor Chayes said.
Sometimes, they spent days on an approach before finding an obvious flaw. Other times, they thought they had finished, before Professor Chayes would find an error or oversight. And, finally, Professor Chayes found no more gaps.
A paper with an imposing title – “Percolation and Gibbs States Multiplicity for Ferromagnetic Ashkin-Teller Models on Z²” – appeared in a British mathematical physics journal, and Ms. McKellar presented the findings at a statistical mechanics conference at Rutgers, the only undergraduate to speak.
Today, the proof is known as the Chayes-McKellar-Winn theorem.
Ms. McKellar had toyed with the idea of going to graduate school. “She certainly had the capability and talent to do that,” Professor Chayes said.
But by then, she had decided to return to acting. The academic world, she said, was too isolating and lonely.
Professor Chayes said he was not disappointed. “I think disappointed is too strong,” he said. “I would have been even happier if she were doing what she is doing now coupled with a career in mathematics.”
Since graduating in 1998 with highest honors, Ms. McKellar has reappeared on television, in her recurring role on “The West Wing,” and as a guest star on shows like “NYPD Blue” and “Navy: NCIS.” Her voice has been heard in the cartoons “King of the Hill” and “Justice League.” She has also written and directed a couple of short films.
The other member of the math proof team did continue in math. Ms. Winn, now Dr. Winn, completed her Ph.D. in mathematics at the University of Chicago this year.
At U.C.L.A, Dr. Winn had decided to major in math before even meeting Ms. McKellar.
But she said she had not expected to continue in the field beyond her bachelor’s degree.
“Pretty much because of Lincoln and Danica, I did go on,” Dr. Winn said.
Ms. McKellar remains enthusiastic about math.
She even managed to combine math and acting for one role, in a production of “Proof,” the Pulitzer-winning play by David Auburn, in her hometown, San Diego. She played the main character, a young woman who claims to have solved a complicated mathematical proof.
“I don’t think there is any other time in my life when I knew that this role was supposed to be for me,” she said.
At an audition, the casting director asked about what she knew of math. Ms. McKellar said she was co-author of a mathematics proof.
“She went into a five-minute explanation,” said Sam Woodhouse, the artistic director of the San Diego Repertory Theater. “Which was a stunning and mystifying five minutes.”
Ms. McKellar said she hoped to be a role model for future mathematicians, especially middle school girls. She testified to a Congressional subcommittee in 2000 about how to draw more women into science and math.
She has just signed on as spokeswoman for the Math-a-Thon at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, where children work through a book of math problems, and their friends and family pledge money to the hospital for each problem that is solved.
For several years, Ms. McKellar has also been answering math questions at danicamckellar.com, under the “mathematics” link. It helps her maintain some of her skills, although she sometimes needs to consult old notes and textbooks.
“I have all of them since the seventh grade, except for my ninth-grade geometry book,” she said, “which my sister used when she was in ninth grade, and she sold it at the book sale when you sell your books back.
“I was like, ‘You sold my book?’ She’s like, ‘Yeah.’ ‘But that was mine.’ She’s like, ‘Oh, oops.’ I have every other book.”
To the person asking about the time it would take to wash a car, Ms. McKellar worked through the calculation of how long it would take if Brian and Sam worked together.
The answer: a little less than three and a half minutes. “Yes, I think they should work together,” she wrote. “It gets done much more quickly that way.”
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