Misstra Knowitall

Mama Feelgood

2012-01-15T08:06:00.001-06:00

This is in honor of my queen, Missus Knowitall, who always knows how to make Misstra feel good, even when the world tries to push me off The One.

And for those that don't know, this is Lyn Collins, one of the funkiest sisters to ever step to a James Brown groove.

Life after death at ACT Charter School

2012-01-03T01:04:00.000-06:00

You want to think of it kind of like a food court.

In my second year of high school teaching at the Academy of Communications and Technology (ACT) Charter school, I was wondering about the long term vision the ACT board had for this place I had come to love. The place where I felt like I finally had a place to grow as a teacher. There was talk amongst the teachers of starting a union, but an administrator was explaining to me how this action wouldn't fit with the new dominant paradigm at ACT. No longer was my school simply a school; it could be best understood as a food court.

As one of the longest standing charter schools in the city, ACT was uniquely positioned because they had the ability to "self-replicate" or create more "campuses" without having to get additional charters from the city. As charter management organizations chomp at the bit to dive into the Chicago public education racket, our school, as unsuccessful as it was considered by some, was extremely valuable.

With a friendly, mustachioed-smile, my administrator used his hands as visual cues to draw out the familiar layout of a food court.

Let's say you have Burger King over here. Pizza Hut in the corner. Maybe a Taco Bell. All of those restaurants are going to rent space in your food court. But they are only going to feel comfortable in certain types of food courts. If you have a union in your school than the other franchises aren't going to want to move in.

Dread bloomed in my chest as I realized how shady and ill-conceived the plan sounded. My fear was compounded by the earnestness of my administrator. He was carefully explaining the strategy like my apprehension was due to a lack of comprehension. No matter how he shifted his hands around and talked about "the best interests of our students," I couldn't arrest the thought that the whole thing was educationally unsound, and slightly immoral, but it also just seemed like a dumb idea.

After we were told that unionizing might cause members of the support staff to lose their jobs, we decided to cease unionizing. Instead we agreed to investigate an alternative teacher bargaining structure that is used in some of the state's top schools. But by the time February came around, we got word: the ACT board was pulling the plug on our operation.

A community meeting was held in the church next door. I had previously visited the pews for graduation or the day they let the students watch Obama's inauguration, but the poorly lit basement gave a funerary sense to the event. It smelled like melted funeral candles and cut flowers. Milling near the entrance were two large men in vanilla cream suits, smiling and handing out fliers for Hope Academy charter school. Their lack of ironic self-awareness was terrifying.

My administrator thanked everyone for coming out and reassured us that everyone would get to speak, but said that he would also be "respectful of people's time". Students, parents, and teachers lined up in a neat row to speak loudly and passionately about the school. About the children they had sent there. About the things they had learned at the school. About the family they felt they had there. About the few educational options there were on the west side of Chicago. About how little control they felt over a decision that affected them most of all. And there were a lot of questions. Some of them answered, some not. When the board spoke, all of the members drew from the same word bank: Student's best interests. Tough choices. Appreciation. Reality. Options. Achievement. Funding. Suspension.

The students left angrily before the board completed its ceremony. My administrator raised his hands skyward and pleaded with the children to show respect, but they were gone. The vanilla cream men rushed to dispense their recruitment fliers to the departing stampede. Shortly afterward the gavel was struck and the decision was official.

And that was supposed to be the end. Well, the end--not considering the long painful demise that was the Spring semester at ACT. Local charters scavenged the school for students, teachers, computers, books, desks, even our building. Once we left, we thought that would be the end of our school.

Until about a month ago.

Buried in a Chicago Tribune story about a school board update about "district reorganization" was this note:

The district also is furthering its long-standing practice of merging underused or underperforming schools into facilities occupied by existing schools. CPS proposes:
Moving the Academy of Communications and Technology into a shared building with Nash Elementary. ACT is a charter school that was closed last year because of academic and financial concerns, but it is reopening next year under the management of KIPP, a nationally recognized charter operator.

In the words of Bernie Mack: Sommamaabiiich

What that means is the school will open again in the Fall under KIPP, a national charter management group. If ACT holds true to its food court dictate than the new school will likely have little in common with the structure and culture of its namesake. The only thing that is sure to survive is the entity's ability to self-replicate.

Although I loved my school, it was by no means perfect. Maybe it was best that the school closed if there wasn't enough money or we weren't helping students achieve up to expectations. But something feels downright sinister about the reopening. During the closing meeting, all the people in suits kept using the word suspension to describe what was going on. Like they had already moved on to plan B, which didn't involve most of the people in the room.

And that's the way public education is being transformed now. It's people in suits, armed with word banks and multi-colored graphs, making decisions for communities that have little to no voice in the matter. Without that input, these new/old schools will be doomed to replicate the failures that came before them.

The Ace of Spades

2012-01-01T02:54:00.000-06:00

So, now that Rick Santorum and Ron Paul are getting serious consideration as Republican presidential candidates, can we officially stop the charade and just punch NeO's ticket for 2012?

I was convinced that it would be George W. Bush who would benefit from the incredible political leverage the death of Osama Bin Laden would provide. Before the election of 2004, I was convinced that Bin Laden would stumble out of a CIA spider hole somewhere, just in time for the Iowa polls. President DwB and Vice President Chixon would ride in on an F-16 and blow him to kingdom come.

In those days we knew not to trust the dominant narrative. We knew something was funny with 9/11. We knew the first Iraq was a business transaction, the sequel an inartful jack. We knew that the Bin Laden could have been killed at Tora Bora, but was not. And even when GwB was able to get reelected and talk about how he didn't think about Bin Laden, we still worried that the Bin Laden card would be played in June of 2008, launching the tortured man and his be-speckled caretaker to the White House. We held our breath and didn't exale until NeO was sworn in, basking in the glow of Aretha Franklin's hat. And then we kind of forgot about Bin Laden.

NeO was destined to be one of the most unpopular presidents of all time. Not only was he a brother, but the high and low swings are just a part of governance. You earn political capital and then you spend it. Along the way you have to break some promises and call in some favors. Perhaps bury some bodies. But the key is to have an ace in the hole. And wouldn't you know it, he sho nuff did. One suspects that the same interests who put Bin Laden off limits nearly ten years ago gave the green light for NeO to drop him in May.

It was perfect. It played right into NeO's invincible narrative. In the clutch, the man doesn't lose. He lion-strutted up to the podium and told everybody that he had killed the ghost, with two helicopters and a couple dozen SEALS. Driveright. Rightfootplantlefthandsweep. Perfunctory crossover. Rise up. Wristflick. Game.

The outcome of the 2012 election was announced that night in May, no disrespect to the DOA Republican candidate who stumbles out of Iowa. Before Bin Laden was Byron Russelled, it was really over when they said NeO raised more money than all of the Repugs combined. In the American political equation, the one with the biggest checks gets the keys to the house.

But why do I not get a good feeling about NeO in his second term?

Well, there's the fact that the gap between rich and poor is wider than it's ever been.

Or the fact that more immigrants have been deported under NeO than any previous president.

Or the fact that the Justice department was involved in the selling of illegal weapons to Mexican drug cartels.

Or the ongoing race to sell public education to private corporations.

Or more secret wars in Africa.

60% of the world's uncultivated land is in Africa. What does this emblem look like to you?

Or that as people were concentrating on their New Year's celebrations, the president just signed a law permitting the indefinite detention of American citizens. That's right, the son of slaves just alienated the citizens of this country from their inalienable rights. Of course those rights were only really supposed to apply to White males, but even they are getting screwed on this deal.

NeO, as much as I want to love him, is just a card dealer for the elite, working at a casino where the house always wins.

Oscar Brown, Jr.

2011-12-10T00:35:00.001-06:00

If you have never heard of Oscar Brown, Jr., don't worry. Allow him to apologize.

Misstra Knowitall's artistic statement

2011-09-04T23:30:00.001-05:00

Courtesy of the Artistic Statement Generator 2000:

Through my work I attempt to examine the phenomenon of The Road Runner as a methaphorical interpretation of both Van Gogh and swaying.

What began as a personal journey of Damnism has translated into images of cheesburger and leg that resonates with Black people forcing them to question their own Redness.

My mixed media track suit embodies an idiosyncratic view of Pat Robertson, yet the familiar imagery allows for a connection between River Phoenix, Gators and clams.

My work is in the private collection of Fred Grandy who said 'Big ups!, that's some real bitter Art.'

I am a recipient of a grant from Folsom Prison where I served time for stealing mugs and tie clips from the gift shop of The MCA. I have exhibited in group shows at Burger king and the National Gallery, though not at the same time. I currently spend my time between my kitchen and Berlin.

To Lucille

2011-07-25T13:40:00.001-05:00

Narratives of Terror

2011-07-23T02:00:00.000-05:00

Shortly after the brutal Gabrielle Giffords shooting earlier this year, the name Jarod Loughner was injected into the American consciousness. Listening to the devastation that he caused, one couldn't help but grimly do what we do when we need answers to things: Google Search.

The news media studiously instructed that the footage would be disturbing, and it was more than that. All of them are eerie, but America: Your Last Memory in a Terrorist Country, terrified me when I first tried to watch it. With its Death Metal soundtrack ("let the bodies hit the floor" is the refrain), it featured a desert scene with a single American flag posted on a dirt mound, scrapping the ground. A figure appears in a black cloak and a happy face mask. Happy face mask has only one arm ("his right one!", the on-screen comment prompts). While the music rages, Happy face mask lifts the flag and lights it on fire (patriots burn flags to preserve their honor, fyi). Then he creeps off like a creep.

I felt like I was in that scene from The Ring when that creepo girl crawls out of the TV. I stopped the Loughner video because I thought happy face mask might crawl out of my laptop if I let it run to the end. In the immediate aftermath of the shootings, this message directly from a killer was a surreal experience (if we're even allowed to use that word anymore) and a natural extension of our conversation to the digital world. Jarod Loughner probably knew for some time that his name would be searched for. (Afterall, that's what it means to be truly famous; people have to search for you.) He knew that they would search for him and he wanted them to see something special. Not some dumb skateboarding videos. Not some girlfights. Not some stupid mass transit rider beating on some other stupid mass transit rider. No, his videos would explain to people why he was doing what he was doing. Not only would he take lives, but as a child of our culture he knew the most important thing to control was the narrative of his actions.

It turned out that this became kind of a moot point afterwards. Most of the videos were just rambling PowerPoints about world conspiracies, bad grammar, and the like. He seems to be wanting to say something about the power structures that lay under the ones we see. He wants to uncover the conspiracy that deceives 85% of us. Now, I believe the world is run on conspiracies, but the narrative Loughner kicked just didn't make much sense. There were snippets of truth tied together with a lot of nonsense. That's one of the real shames. He didn't even make sense. All that suffering he caused, that suffering he carries, all because of a war raging in his own head.

So what do we learn from it? If you thought the Giffords massacre would deliver the public support for stricter gun laws, you're crazy. With a Negro as president, we all just feel a little safer if the White man gets to keep his guns. Americans like being able to kill, and they don't need anybody to tell them different.

And as far as people taking the shooting as a message to tamp down the political rhetoric, have you seen "Give Us Your Cash, B****"? If you haven't, you really need to take a look to get an update on what the worst racist and sexist thing you've seen in a while. This is some cutting edge racism and sexism. It's educational. Sadly, the song and video look like they really were directed by an employee of Black Entertainment Television.

But maybe this doesn't have to be a meaningless event. Maybe we could actually learn something real about a danger we face. We are entering the age of narrative reassignment. Now, before someone does something horrendous, their first concern will be how to frame their own story. We've been constantly told that we have to "sell ourselves as a brand" and this is no different. Before they do what they do, killers will actually set the table for the crimes they are going to commit.

You know Facebook had to get their credit.

This came to mind recently because of the coordinated bombing and shooting that took place in Oslo yesterday. Apparently someone detonated an explosive and then later opened fire at a kids camp, leaving an estimated 80 92 dead in his wake. The suspect in the crime, Anders Behring Beivik, who looks like he stepped from the pages of of Norwegian Vogue, has a twitter account with only one post. What does it say? "One person with a belief is equal to the force of 100,000 who have only interests." There has also been mention of "disturbing" right-wing internet postings from Beivik. Don't expect to see less of this kind of thing. Whoever conducted the 9/11 operation inspired a generation of murderous auteurs who want to control their own narratives.

And to be honest, it's not the Loughnersand the Beiviks that we really need to be worried about. They commit theircrimes and become footnotes. The real controllers of narratives are theMurdochs and the Liebermans and the Bushes and the Bin Ladens and the...waitfor it...Obamas. These are the men who sow narratives before they do theirkilling.

9/11. The Taliban. Al Qaeda. Osama Bin Landen. Weapons of Mass Destruction. Saddam Hussein. That pretty much summarizes the last ten years of fear. It would almost be funny if not for the thousands of lives lost and the trillions of dollars wasted (stolen). Although the way Loughner and Beiviks managed to coordinate their online presences with their crimes may be disturbing, itpales in comparison to the horrors that await if we don't stop consuming these narratives that explain away murder and exploitation.

Oh, by the way, how's that Libyan petroleum extraction project going?

Patti Labelle Takes the Alphabet to Chuuch.

2011-07-17T20:46:00.001-05:00

My Peoples

2011-07-02T01:06:00.000-05:00

How often do you look at a blog's links, anyway? They're just there. Half of them don't work. Some of them haven't been updated in twenty years. They're all out of context, with no description or reason for you to want to click on them.

So, as a public service, here's the rundown on my current list of "My Peoples" and why you should read them.

Crystal Wilkinson

Crystal Wilkinson is the author of Blackberries, Blackberries, Water Street, and Birds of Opulence (forthcoming). I had the pleasure of both taking a class and being an associate instructor for Crystal back in the good ole days at Indiana University. Even though I didn't get a chance to have her in workshop, she taught a young(ish) Misstra Knowitall a ton about writing and teaching.

Her blog is a must read because it gives you insights into not only the writer, but also writing and the writing biz. I would recommend starting with her post about how she has to remind her mama that she's a writer and what that actually means. She's also got a dynamite post about the pressures that writers feel now that social media and the writing business have formed such a close (incestuous?) relationship.

Pedro Bell

Pedro Bell helped develop the P-Funk cosmology and his writing and visual art are essential to understanding any endeavor that purports to be "on The One". This links to Pedro's MySpace account. I haven't heard from my brother in a while, but there's some good autobiographical information and if you leave him a message he might write you back. You should check out the series of interviews I did with him. Dude is deep.

"So I don't steal nothing." Miss you, ND.

Under the Blue Light: Indiana Review Blog

What can I say about my baby? She's grown up so much *sniff* since I was editor. Now they've got a new design and they do awesome contests and they have interviews and authors reading. *Sigh*. Well, check out the newest posts, but if you want to walk back down memory lane, take a look at the beautiful IR editors at AWP in 2007.

Cake and Potatoes: Jackson Brown

Jackson Brown and I were roommates back at IU. I thought I had it going on, but this brother is a writer, cartoonist, musician, and one of the coldest MCs to darken (ahem) the hallways of Ballantine Hall. Cake and Potatoes is all that and a bag of corn chips. Funny, silly, searing, smart ass hell, and beautifully drawn. It looks like he's on hiatus (or is that "hi-itis?) but check out his greatest hits. For my taste, Off the Chain is one of my favs.


I so tried to find a pic without a Black hand holding a link card. Alas.

Jericho Brown

I was lucky enough to meet this brother during my Funk Issue days. This links to the book site for his collection, Please, which if you ain't got, you need to get. It's funky and all that. I also did an interview with Jericho that is, of course, quite funky.

Remember me?

Post No Ills: Kyle Dargan

Post No Ills is Kyle's brain child, which like a lot of his brain chilluns, is both smart and cool. You can find great reviews of the latest in literature, movies, and politics here. They just did a review of Evie Shockley's The New Black, which I gotsta go cop. Oh, what's that you say? Did they do an interview with Misstra Knowitall himself? Well, as a matter of fact they did.

Patrick Rosal

My best memory of Patrick Rosal is at the end of the Indiana Review Funk Issue reading when he jumped on the piano and started everybody to singing Billy Ocean's "Suddenly." (I'm glad he knew all the words because I wasn't doing nothing but humming until "...wake up and suddenly you're in love!") Pat's an amazing poet and someone who writes with his heart. He's been blogging for a minute and on his site you can find everything from poetics to politics to boxing.Check him out.

Play Vicious: Ro Pulliam

I met Ro in Baltimore during my Americorps days. I lived in a house with four(!) roommates and somebody got the brilliant idea that we needed another one. Thank God we did. Ro's my man. A renaissance man who holds it down with the words, music, and web design. His site is complex and fly, just like him.

Datsun Flambe: Rion Scott

I met Rion Scott during the Funk Issue (see a pattern?) and if you want to read somebody, you should read him. He's smart and funny as hell (see another pattern). He's publishing some great stuff over at PANK magazine, but his updates at Datsun Flambe are keepers.

The Spire: Shawna Ayoub

Shawna Ayoub is a writer of Lebanese-American descent that keeps it real. I met her at Indiana University and that was one of the first things I learned about her in workshop. She's thoughtfulness, humility, and honesty shine through in her work. She shares a lot of her work at The Spire, along with life reflections. Cool stuff.

Sorry, I couldn't resist

Tayari Jones

Writer, teacher, hustler. I picked up her first book, Leaving Atlanta, while I was still in the wilds of Minnesota, and I had to keep stopping myself from trying to write like her. This site is not only good for getting insights into her process, but it's essential for keeping up with what's going on with African-American fiction. Oh, and does she have any interviews with Misstra Knowitall? Funny you should ask.

Secret Inside Girl: Vanessa Mancinelli

From her "About" page: Vanessa Mancinelli: 1. Writes fiction. 2. Teaches literature. 3. Lives in Los Angeles.

I would also like to add: 4. Is obsessive about her teaching 5. Is obsessive about her planning. 6. Sings a mean Bill Withers. You need to check out her Seriously, this just happened post. Hilarious.

Ten Amazing Obama Facts

2011-06-27T17:44:00.000-05:00

Amazing Fact #1. In order for President Obama to be defeated, someone must beat him.

With his poll numbers flat-lining, the economy in the tank, and the government on the verge of shutdown, things look rather bleak for NeO. But before Rethugs get too happy, to paraphrase Guru from Gangstarr: Who's going to take the weight? After all the speculation and punditry, someone's got to step to the podium against this dude. Who is going to be able to not get blowed away? This fact segues nicely into the next...

Amazing Fact #2: People who bet against NeO tend to lose their money.

Jack Ryan

John McCain
Alan Keyes
Clark Kellog

Jesse Jackson
Hillary Clinton
Somali Pirates

Bill Clinton
Donald Trump

Jim Demint
Osama Bin Laden

Questions?

Amazing Fact #3: Incumbent presidents hardly ever lose.

Not only do they have access to the full resources of the United States government, they also have considerable power in shaping the national conversation. Plus, if the President is serving the interests of the rich elite, they are going to give him their economic support instead of supporting an unknown quantity. Tax rates are lower than ever. Corporate profits are at near-record levels. The war business is booming. Isn't this the change that the economic elite believe in?

Amazing Fact #4: Killing Bin Laden will not get Obama reelected.

As much as people imagined that Osama Bin Laden's death would ensure President Obama's reelection, they fail to realize that NeO won't get credit for it because it doesn't fit the narrative we have for him. Dubya was the cowboy, busting his guns, scalping Injuns. In the last act of his presidency, after billions of dollars spent and thousands of lives lost, he was supposed to be able to bring Bin Laden's head home for the wall collection. Instead, the more he tried, the more the terrorists laughed and called him a dumbass.

Frankly, by the end of his term I just felt kind of bad for the guy--in that Tiki Barber/John Edwards/slow-motion-car-crash kind of way. Bin Laden (and Bin Laden's colleagues at the CIA) so obviously outsmartted Dubya that it didn't seem fair, cruel even. The American people were ready to move on in some respect. New movie, please.

Obama killing Bin Laden is kind of like Superman killing the Joker. There's no emotional subtext to the thing. I mean, thanks and all, but what does Seal Team 6 have to do with Dreams From My Father?

Amazing Fact #4: Osama Bin Laden was assassinated, and we're all cool with that.

According to dictionary.com, "assassination" is to kill suddenly or secretively, especially a politically prominent person. But assassinate is such an icky word, right? It doesn't seem appropriate. An assassination has a "victim," and a "perpetrator". Bin Laden was evil, so he couldn't have been a victim. America was in the right, so we couldn't have been perpetrators. So, instead, we'll just call it a "military action." Ah, that's better.

The first accounts of the military action had Bin Laden going out like Tony Montana, guns blazing. And then it turned out he was unarmed, but was "going for something." And then one of his wives said that he was actually in custody when he was shot. And then finally the military said they weren't going to comment further. It's amazing that Bin Laden didn't know better than to listen when the Navy Seals asked him to take out his license and registration. They been getting brothers like that for years. Word to Diallo.

But when you get right down to it, this amounted to nothing more than another instance of CIA downsizing; a former employee got cut from the payroll. Bin Laden joins a long line of other former employees who have suffered similar fates: Saddam Hussein, Manuel Noriega, Pablo Escobar, Freeway Ricky Ross, Rafael Trujillo. All given similar pink slips. Don't call us, we'll call you.

Amazing Fact #5. The President is a blues comic.

I saw the Obama impersonator who got pulled off stage at the Republican Leadership Conference and I was impressed. The President can be a bit stoic sometimes, so it's understandable that a lot of impressions are overly wooden, but this guy was putting on that Barack Bright Boy comedy swag. Although the audience was initially uncomfortable with the racial themes of some of the jokes, the loud guffaws reflected the reckless abandon one might enjoy at a Republican event, free of the harsh gaze of sensitive Negroes.

Even though the jokes (Barack celebrates half of Black history month; Barack's mom loved a Black man, but her name wasn't Kardashian; Barack and Michelle as Esther and Fred from Sanford and Son) weren't the most clever in the world, they were cringe-inducing like the best of NeO humor. He has a way of implicating his audience in a joke. Kind of like Richard Pryor in Live on the Sunset Strip, joking about the jokes people told after he caught himself on fire freebasing. He tells the joke to not only make you laugh, but also shine a light on what you're willing to laugh at. I think that's also called the blues.

What's that? Richard Pryor running down the street.

Remember the time he went on national TV, called a policeman stupid, and joked that the Secret Service would shoot him down if they thought he was trying to break into the White House?

Remember his first presidential press conference when he called himself a mutt?

And who can forget his "I-don't-come-to-your-job-kicking-****s-out-of-your-mouth" moment at the White House Correspondents dinner? Trumpwnd.

***BONUS***

This Chinese ad for KFC is not only fantastic because it features the President getting squashed by a fried chicken sandwich, it also shows Americans having more enthusiasm for the offending sandwich. And although it's probably racist (having the first Black President assassinated by a piece of chicken is all types of messed up) it seems more like a scathing critique of how dumb Americans are. Good one, China. Oh wait, isn't Kentucky Fried Chicken an American company?

Amazing Fact #6: Lupe was right.

Lupe Fiasco recently called NeO a terrorist. Actually, he said that President Obama and all the past and future presidents of the United States have used and will use terrorism to advance American interests. This statement may be shocking to some, but in the words of Gil Scott-Heron: "America leads the world in shocks. Unfortunately America does not lead the world in deciphering the causes of shocks."

Although he is the first Black President, Obama is beholden and controlled by interests that continue to deploy terrorism to achieve their aims. I think we're sadly learning that the adjective (Black) hasn't done much to modify the noun (President).

Amazing Fact #7: Being an Obama supporter ain't what it used to be.

So, refresh my memory. What does it mean to be an "Obama supporter" nowadays? What exactly are you supporting? I've been thinking about that a lot lately. I had an earlier post about how NeO was encountering the "Presidential" narrative, which is pretty much like the Western Cowboy narrative. Swagger into town, kill some brown skins, and save the day. These days the Obama doctrine sounds more like an OutKast remix: Bombs over Baghdad. Bombs over Waziristan. Bombs over Sana'a. Bombs over Helmand Province. Bombs over Tripoli. Is he going for the record of brown people bombed at the same time? Sad to say, but I think he's got W beat already.

Of course there are reasonable justifications for every one of those conflicts. Something about democracy. Something about terrorist infrastructure. Something about protecting civilians. Something about surgical strikes. Something about insurgents. Something about rebels. Something about regime change. To paraphrase Zora Neale Hurston, these are just "words walking without masters, all together like harmony in a song." However you sing it, the song is about the control of natural resources at the expense of human life.

Powerful you have become, the dark side I sense in you

The depressing fact about our President is that he's good at his job. What other human on the planet would be capable of coping with the kind of crisis that this brother has dealt with? He's phenomenal at his job, but the job is imperial in nature. John Wayne had to bust guns to be John Wayne. And somebody's got to be at the end of that gun. That works for the movies, but it has little to do with ensuring democracy or human rights. So even though a part of me really loves the brother and wants his narrative to keep on teaching and inspiring me, there's an ugly element to this narrative that's more troubling by the day.

Amazing Fact #8: The President, for one, welcomes our robot overlords.

Did we really need to reauthorize the Patriot Act by robot? Has everyone forgotten that Skynet went operational on April 19th and by now is well on its way to annihilating human civilization? As if we didn't have enough to worry about.

Today's Word: Judgment Day

Amazing Fact #9: NeO can still save America.

The health of American democracy depends on the balance of powers. NeO has failed so far to reign in the executive branch. We've got more secrets. More wire taps. More restrictions on civil liberties. Less transparency. This type of environment lends itself to the type of efficiency that is attractive in times of crisis. However, this type of environment serves to weaken democratic institutions in the long run, and it ironically foments more times of crisis. Whatever you may think of NeO, you have to concede that it could always get much worse. If he doesn't work to restrain executive power we'll be destined to have a crazy president with immense, unchecked power. Need an illustration? Three words: President Michelle Bachman.

In related news...

Amazing Fact #10: He's probably not going to do that thing that you thought he was going to do.

Remember that thing that you were really hoping NeO would change way back on election day in 2008? If he hasn't done anything on it in his first term, it's probably not going to happen in the second term either. Just so you know.

Amazing Fact #11: If he doesn't do it, we have to do it ourselves.

As true today as it was in 2008 or 1908 or 1808.

Don Belton: Truth Teller (Revisited)

2011-04-15T22:18:00.000-05:00

Yesterday Michael Griffin was convicted of killing novelist Don Belton. The jury put aside Griffin's nonsensical defense that the former Marine was driven into an insane rage after being sexually assaulted days before by his victim. The truth of the matter is painful, because of its awful consequences for both men and the people who love them, but this truth is easy enough to see: this crime was not about who Don was, it was all about who Griffin was afraid of being.

In a way, Griffin was asking the court for the same thing he sought from Don on that chilly December morning. He was asking for absolution for his actions. Not denying the act, but the responsibility. This act couldn't be a part of who he was. This act had to be the fault of someone else. Not someone who had served his country in war. Not someone who had a girlfriend. Not someone who had a son. Not someone who was all man.

It was important that the justice system rejected Griffin's argument and recognized this as the brutal murder it was, but it's hard to feel that justice has been fully served. Part of the reason Don died was that he recognized love and integrity as two sides of the same coin. His love for himself, and presumably for Griffin, wouldn't allow him to give the absolution his murderer sought for making love to another man. He knew that the only person who could find Griffin innocent was Griffin himself.

And that's what doesn't feel all the way right about this. Don's physical presence was stolen away from all of those who loved and respected him and that absence can never be filled no matter how many years Griffin is punished. But the only person who can bring true justice to the matter is Griffin himself.

Novelist/lawyer Alyce Miller, who posts to an excellent blog started by friends of Don, asked that in the spirit of Don we extend peace to Griffin and his family. Additionally, I wish Griffin the courage to face whatever it is he was running from on that fateful day. The person who took Don's life lacks the bravery to recognize his own guilt for his crime, but, just as importantly, this person lacks the bravery to recognize his own innocence in loving a man, a great man, like Don Belton.

***Link to the earlier Don Belton article

The Coming of the Light

2011-04-12T01:27:00.000-05:00

What a difference a year can make. Misstra Knowitall is living the aphorism these days as he celebrates the birth of his first child, Lucille Pauline Shakur. Some things I learned:

People still ask me from time to time whether I wanted a girl or boy, and I say that it didn't really matter to me, which it really didn't. I have to say that having a girl has already given me a brand new appreciation for women. This whole thing about them being the life-givers is not just feminist propaganda. Men are great and all of that, but women are closer to that divine energy that gives life.

Case in point: during the ultrasound our nurse showed us where we could see Lucille's sex. All you saw was just three little lines. That's it. But looking at those blurry three lines I remembered that a female has over 500,000 eggs in her ovaries at the time of her birth. That means that within the black and white confines of that ultrasound was not only my living child, but enough potential life to populate a small city. Deep.

I was not clear on how the whole feeding thing went between the mother and the child she was carrying. Basically, I thought it was important for the mother to eat so that the baby wouldn't go hungry. But the doctor set me straight. She said that whether the mother gets enough food or not, the baby will eat regardless. As terrible as it sounds, if mother is not supplying enough nutrients to feed the baby, the baby will take nutrients from the mother's body. That's right, baby eats mommy. And when you think about it, that makes perfect evolutionary sense. This generation sacrifices for the next.

They say a baby is more likely to look like it's father at birth. Why, you say? Well the thinking goes that displaying traits from the male of the species may help motivate said male to stick around to raise the little rugrat. Word to Maury P.!

I married a superhero. You haven't seen nothing until you see your wife bring your child into the world. Not to get into too much detail, but it gets real, real. Yes, I will wash the dishes. Yes, I will put the seat down after flushing. Yes, I will even go to the store for you.

There's a big difference between teaching other people's children and loving your own child. I can feel it already. As a teacher I feel very strongly about my students, but I always have to keep in mind that they are not my children and boundaries are important. Professions of love to any student, even if they are true, are more apt to backfire than benefit. But when it's your baby there is no one more responsible for letting them know they are loved in the world. That's my new job. And Missus Knowitall, of course.

To take a page from Chris Rock, you want to spend your money in your own community, but it's hard. We recently took a trip to our local medical facility for an infant checkup and witnessed two grown women get into an altercation over divergent methods of child rearing. This altercation resulted in three police cars out front, too too many cuss words to mention, and one call to DCFS. Good bye, West Side. Hello, Oak Park.

And what about this world, right? What a time to be born. Earthquake, tsunamis, nuclear fallout, oils spill, economic collapse, Tiger Woods missing putts, Arab revolutions, wars everywhere, 2012 coming up. Lucille, what have we gotten you into? Well, when the last days do finally come, odds are that we're not going to know anything about it. Civilizations throughout time have been convinced that they were the ones who were going to have to turn out the lights on their way out. I'm betting that statistically we aren't even that lucky. That's not to say that the world isn't about to transform in ways that we could never even dream of--of course it will. But the smart money says that things, for better or worse, are going to keep on keeping on.

We should also keep in mind the number 223. Let's say that chattel slavery lasted for somewhere around 400 years in America. That's 20 generations of people. Probably even more with life expectancy being what it was. In order for us to get to the point that we're at now, generations had to live and die through agonizing enslavement, with little hope of a better life. So when it seems like things are getting too bad and we should throw in the towel, just think of being born in the 223rd year of slavery. Somebody was, and they didn't give up. In the words of James Baldwin, who gave you the luxury of such elegant despair?

Finally, my baby is funky. In my experience, creating funk actually makes her happy. A starchild: my type of baby.

We Almost Lost...

2011-03-18T23:16:00.000-05:00

In light of current events.

Things that make you go "Hmmm..."

2011-01-19T23:30:00.000-06:00

Richard Daley unexpectedly announces he will not seek a record seventh term as mayor of Chicago. The announcement leaves potential candidates scrambling to prepare for an election that will happen in just five months.

Shortly after the announcement, White House Chief of Staff, Rahm Emannuel resigns and announces his candidacy for mayor. His name recognition, political connections, and financial resources make him the overwhelming favorite for the job.

Then President Obama announces his pick for the new White House Chief of Staff: William Daley, who just happens to be the brother of the retiring mayor.

Hmmmm...

And now this dude is involved:

Double Hmmmm...

Beloved Community

2011-01-17T18:07:00.000-06:00

Back in elementary school, it seemed like every year we did the same art project involving the likeness of Martin Luther King, Jr. We cut his profile from construction paper, colored his face with rainbow crayons, and pinned him to a multi-hued bulletin board near the front of class. This activity was usually followed by the teacher telling us about dreams and how this man, the one with the wide mustache and shiny forehead and chubby cheeks, had had a dream, and how this dream was about a peaceful world without Black and White, and how we were a part of his dream, and how we should never let go of our dreams because he hadn’t ever let go of the dream he had for us. George Washington had a cherry tree, Abraham Lincoln had a stovetop hat, and Martin Luther King, Jr. had a dream. That’s what I learned.

And as a young child, King seemed like a kindred spirit. In those days, I too did a lot of dreaming. I dreamed

I would finally get a little brother, I dreamed I would make webs shoot from my wrists a la Spiderman, I dreamed I would finally get to kiss a girl. Rarely did you hear adults talking about their dreams, especially to us kids, but here was a man who was unafraid to share his, indeed had died as a result of his sharing.

But as I got older, and I became (sadly, perhaps) less of a dreamer, King fell out of my favor. I started to realize that it wasn’t just enough to dream about things, that without action, dreams were forever deferred. I started to notice how his talk of dreams was used more often to pacify than inspire people. By high school I was rocking an X hat, a neck full of African medallions, and had little time for a preacher’s dreams.
It wasn’t until I became a teacher myself that I started to see the error in my thinking.

As a young man, it’s hard to shake the crippling feeling that no one is qualified to tell you a daggone thing. I describe it this way because that feeling keeps you ignorant to how dependent you are on other people, and this limits your world-view. But as I became responsible for the education of young people myself, and as I read more of King’s writings and speeches, I saw another side of things. I saw that I had been wrong to think that this man was all about dreams and not about action. I discovered that although he was buoyed by an incredible faith in the goodness of the human spirit, he also took a pragmatic approach towards countering the grim realities of the world in which he lived. Nothing illustrates this more clearly than his advocacy for “Beloved Community.”

King describes the Beloved Community as a system of individuals working together to promote justice and nonviolence in thought, speech, and action. This Beloved Community is by no means perfect, it can only rise as high as the imperfect potential of its human members, but it is based on the premise that all of humanity shares a single spiritual connection.

It goes like this: If you do violence to your neighbor, than you too are subjected to that same violence. And if you choose to ignore your neighbor’s pain, than you increase and perpetuate your own suffering. King believed that the Beloved Community should strive to provide a social, political, and emotional framework for its members to resolve conflict without violence. He believed that if we could get a critical mass of people to commit to these principles than we could move the larger masses of peoples and governments as well.

Members of the Beloved Community must have an open heart and a capacity to give and receive love. This helps to keep people strong, hopeful, and inspired, even in times of trouble and doubt. But members of the Beloved community must also possess the critical faculties to discern truth from what we merely wish, or fear, was true. These critical faculties provide structured thought that allows for the movement from feeling to action. And King was all about action. He wouldn’t have called people together just for the sake of hearing his own voice. He knew his time on Earth was short, and that the task before all of us was great, so he didn’t have a moment to waste.

For me, teaching is an important part of how I am trying to create and support a Beloved Community. King wrote that the community’s individuals should strive toward a three-part balance. The first part was the degree to which they showed care and concern for themselves. The second was the degree to which they showed care and concern for their friends and family. The third, which of course was the most difficult, was the care and concern they showed for the larger world, all of humanity. As I see it, King’s description of three-part balance should be the standard for any successful education. In a word, school should make us better people, more thoughtful, more capable of community.

This outlook has had a profound affect on my approach to teaching. One of a teacher’s primary objectives, in any subject, should be to foster an environment where development of critical faculties is not only encouraged, but expected. This expectation lays the foundation for Beloved Community because it requires students to interrogate the rigid structures of identity they bring into class and hopefully enlarge their self-concept to include the needs and concerns of others in the classroom and the world.

No matter if we’re rich or poor, from the city or country, Black or White, we all suffer. And we all need to learn to cope with that suffering in ways that don’t create more violence and injustice in the world. If we fail to teach our students this lesson, then we’ll be merely training perpetuators, instead of educating reformers.

Some students aren’t ready for this type of community; maybe they’re afraid, or brainwashed, or even worse apathetic. And sometimes I’m not prepared enough, or I don’t articulate the message clearly enough, or I don’t even believe in it enough to help my students. But sometimes we do get it. Sometimes we start to truly understand the necessity of striving for non-violence and justice. When that does happen, and when we are able to make our little class a Beloved Community, even for just a few moments, a tremendous power courses through the room. There’s a connection, like we’re doing important work and maybe what we’re learning will help change things for the better. This feeling, unfortunately, often passes when I hand back graded essays, but hopefully some students leave my class hooked enough on the experience to seek opportunities to build more communities, Beloved Communities. This is the critical mass of which King spoke.

I think the real genius of King’s Beloved Community is that it requires so much action from us. It’s not about creating a perfect state devoid of all our woes. It’s not a club you enter to leave your earthly concerns at the door. (King would gently remind us that there’s a name for that place already.) No, this club has a different type of membership policy. It’s not predicated on degrees earned or bank accounts filled or church services attended or essay contests entered. This membership is renewed daily, in our spirit, in our thought, and in our action.

Five Pounds of Grits

2010-12-15T22:57:00.000-06:00

Still looking for that special gift this holiday season? Cephus and Reesie to the rescue.

Pardon me, Brother

2010-12-03T22:15:00.000-06:00

Dear President NeO,

Although I appreciate you finally using your pardoning power after all this time, I don't think carefully considered my earlier post, Top Five Black Men That Need Pardons. Instead you pardoned somebody for "mutilation of coins" (?). That's okay. We knew that we would have to wait a while for you to bring some food out the backdoor of the big house, but it's been two years now and we must all deal with the harsh reality that if you don't send these pardons through now, before the Presidential election season really starts to heat up on January 1st (!), then they're not going to happen. Here's an updated list:

5. Remy Ma

They told Reminisce Mackie to Lean Back in the belly of the beast for shooting a close acquaintance after a bout of heavy drinking. Word to Dick Cheney.

Sorry, Remy. The "Four Loko" defense only works for Rethugs

4. Michael Vick

Have you seen this brother throw the football lately? Who would have thought that Michael Vick would be more popular than you, NeO? If The Michael Vick Experience ends with a Super Bowl, you might actually pick up a few percentage points by giving out this pardon. Don't worry, Bo is nothing if not a pragmatist.

I'm tired of defending you, Mr. President.

3. Shyne

Well, he's out now. I mean he's free, not that he's got an album out. Swell guy though.

2. Kwame Kilpatrick

I can see the wisdom with this one. If you were going to issue Kwame a pardon, you might want to wait until his ignance reaches it's peak. That way you don't have to double pardon him later. Although Mr. Kilpatrick has been a marvel, a phenom of ignance if you will, you have to believe that he has yet untapped reserves. There's a Marion Barry in you yet, KK.

Maybe it's time to call in that Rick Ross collabo.

1. Clarence Thomas

I'm with you on this one, NeO. Not only is it impossible to pardon someone from their own mental incarceration, even if you did, we both know Ichellemay would go up side your head. Get your, girl, CT. She's really not helping your case with the phone calls.

Don't be playing on my phone.

And while you're at it...

Blade

They got the Daywalker, NeO! You know Deacon Frost is somewhere laughing his ass off. Forget about North Korea. What about the world wide vampire conspiracy to suck our blood using pointy fangs and a Constitutionally illegitimate tax code?

Elbows: A Meditation

2010-11-28T03:27:00.000-06:00

Mr. President, I feel your pain. I've seen pictures of you on the news, holding your swollen lip like a piece of sour candy. The image will undoubtedly be more fodder for the tragic narrative they have been waiting to apply to your presidency. After the mid-term elections, it's obvious that you're not perfect like you tried to make us believe. You aren't strong enough. You're not tough enough. You can be beaten. In Jim Demint's words, you can be "broken". In your own words, you can be "shallacked".

Note to Pres. NeO: Find another word to describe defeats. Despite its etymology,

"shellack" sounds like something a slave master does to a slave. *No KuntaKente*

Mr. President, I knew this day would come. Ever since they said that you were not only a regular hooper, but in fact a baller. Ever since the summer of '08 when I saw you sink the most clutch three pointer in the history of politics during a visit to troops in Kuwait.

Did McCain ever really have a chance?

Ever since I saw you out-shoot the University of Connecticut Huskies women's basketball team in the White House backyard during their post-national championship visit. The same team that has won 80 straight basketball games (and counting). I knew this day would come.

Ever since I saw you dismantle former all-American Clark Kellog during a "friendly" game of POTUS, I knew this day would come.

I guarantee you Clark missed a couple of those shots on purpose,

but only because he didn't know he was going to lose. You can't give me that kind of room. Indeed.

The game, and its adherents, often leave marks that can't be concealed. I knew the day would come when evidence of your hoop life would be writ large across your flesh for all to see. On this day the people you are charged to lead would read these marks and create new meanings, meanings that you couldn't control. Meanings that speak to your frailty (humanity?). I knew this because whether you're President of the United States or a high school English teacher, if you get bruised up, you about to get talked about.

Mr. Shakur got socked in the eye, y'all! Dang, Mr. Shakur, you got lit up! I told Mr. Shakur he better have my money! Why they have to hit you all in the eye like that, Mr. Shakur? It was like, bink! [mimic slow-motion punch to eye,then punch-drunk-stagger around classroom]

I have heard it all.

But basketball is a passport for me. My face and complexion always raise more questions than they answer when people see me. I'm hard to place. I have to spend more time explaining myself, where I came from, why I'm here. The truth of my story is too complicated for people to grasp in a short time, so seeing me play basketball offers a Cliff Notes version of my identity.

My students have often had a similarly difficult time placing me, and that's why I try to let them know who I am by getting on the court. As soon as I start working somewhere, whether it's Minneapolis, or Baltimore, or Chicago, I play. Basketball is part of my teaching philosophy.

It's amazing how much extra effort you can get from a student in the classroom if you can take them to the hole and finish with your left. The court gives your students insight into who you are as a person. My students learn that my jump shot is often shaky, that the hardest shots for me are the easiest, and that I have a tendency to curse myself when I'm frustrated. But they also learn that I don't neglect my defensive responsibilities, I'm not afraid of contact, and I'm more likely to praise a teammate than criticize one.

When I get the opportunity to play students, I try to show that my fetish for hard work is not limited to the classroom. That I'm not just a teacher that believes in them because I don't have anything else to believe in. That I can operate on multiple levels. That I will block your shot if it's weak.

More than anything it allows for a coaching relationship that's different than the classroom. When you play basketball with students, you literally have to work together to score points. In a real way it makes all of the success and challenges communal. The things I encourage my students to do on the court are the same things I ask them to do in the classroom: Stay focused. Keep your eyes open for your teammates. Don't be afraid to shoot. Keep hustling!

But as you demonstrate your ability to operate in multiple realms, you also are subject to the norms of those realms. On the court the teacher can be physically challenged without consequence. Sometimes these challenges result in injuries for said teacher.

In Baltimore, during an after school game, I got an inadvertent headbutt from a student. This caused a nasty cut above the eye brow, that required a few stitches. That wouldn't have been terrible if this hadn't been the same week I met the parents of my then girlfriend (future Mrs. Knowitall!) for the first time. Awkward, to say the least.

About a month later, a student pushed me in the back during a layup. I caught my feet, but not before I turned and slammed the back of my hand into a brick wall. I finished the game, but my hand swelled up like a balloon. This was in the salad days of my barely existent Americorps medical benefits, so under the wise advice of my roommates (If you can move it, it can't be broke!) I didn't seek immediate medical treatment.

Misstra Knowitall stupidity quiz #4080

After I shattered my hand, I:

A. Attempted to bind my wounded ring finger to my middle finger for stability.
B. Created a makeshift splint out of a popsicle stick and some medical tape.
C. Played basketball again, a couple times, despite the sharp pain in my still swollen hand.
D. All of the above.

If you chose D then you obviously know how dumb I can be about basketball injuries. By the time I went to the doctor, they told me that my hand had already healed--crookedly, of course. I'm lucky that my backroom orthopdeiatrics didn't leave me with a hook hand. However, the rest of my born days my ring finger will tuck shyly beneath its sturdier brother.

I read a brilliant essay by the poet Ross Gay where he talked about the "visionary" elbow of a student taking out his teeth during a basketball drill. Ross considered the elbow not as an instrument of revenge or turpitude, but as an expressor of primal possibility. The elbow as teller of survival stories. The elbow as speaker of those magical words: here's how my story goes.

I don't drive through a lane of sharp-boned, loose-limbed children like I used to. I have to admit a sort of perverse pride in being able to endure injury. Even if you've never read Don Sabo's classic essay, Patriarchy, Pigskin, and Pain, you realize that somebody who continues to play pickup basketball with a broken hand has issues. As I've gotten older, I have realized that I don't need to shatter bones to help children. I've learned to be a better teacher in the classroom so I don't have so much to prove on the court.

I have also realized I have told more of my story on the court than I have story left to tell. My knees sing sermons as they bend, and the day when my story is more appropriately told outside the confines of the court's white lines, rather than within them, grows closer by the day. But that's okay. Now I'm more focused on helping the young people I teach tell their own stories. Teach the benefits of being active, rather than passive, participants in their own destinies.

The President finds himself in a similar position. In his autobiography he talked about the ways that basketball helped shape not only his identity, but the way that people perceived him. As petty as it sounds, if he didn't have a reliable jump shot, there would be very real questions about whether he was a Black man or not. But he's also getting older. He's probably in excellent shape, but years wear you down, especially when compounded by the stress of the job. Although both Bubba and Dubya came running into the presidency, they both left with a limp.

Big Daddy Cane

So our President's days as baller-in-chief are certainly numbered. But like I said, that's not the worst thing in the world. You enjoy it while it lasts, then you move on and help the next ones out.

In the comments to one of the news reports of NeO's injury, a reader speculated about whether the man who busted the President's lip would ever be asked back to the White House game. Maybe Obama would hold a grudge and ban him from the court. Those comments show a profound misunderstanding about the heart of a baller. Seeing the President holding his lip, seething, it's clear to me what's on his mind:

Let's run that back.

Well aren't you Miss Information?

2010-10-14T21:21:00.000-05:00

In case you're wondering, Misstra Knowitall would like to be Nathan Spewman when he grows up.

Part I

Part II

The Profound Insights of Viagra Online

2010-10-11T01:18:00.000-05:00

I have seen the coming of our computer overlords, and they have posted comments to my blog.

As you might imagine, blogging can be tough to regularly maintain, especially when you put a lot of time and effort into writing a piece and don't get much response. You can use Google Analytics to look up data on people who visit your site, but it's hard not to be discouraged by the deafening sound of crickets after you press "publish post". That's why it's cool when readers take the time to comment on a post. Whether the comment is informed or not, it's always nice to see that someone out there thought enough of you and your writing to give some kind of response.

And that's where my friend Viagra Online comes in. Back when I first started blogging, I would get comments on posts that were basically like email spam. Just a few words, they would direct you to a link where your computer would download the latest digital VD, infecting your operating system and giving your hard drive the digital drip. Blogger got smarter after awhile and made up that annoying Rorschach test thingy which required you to correctly interpret a series of words and numbers to leave a comment. That worked for awhile, but then a couple weeks back I noticed a comment on an older post, Five Pearls of Incredible Hulk Wisdom:

The lesson this movie left us with was impacting. I really find the true meaning of the movie, or at least I guess so.

The syntax was a little tortured, and the misuse of "impact" made me cringe, and the insight wasn't much of an insight, but at least someone was reading my stuff, even if they seemed only semi-literate. I smiled and all the work seemed somehow worthwhile.

But then I noticed the author: Viagra Online. My heart fell and I chided myself for being such an easy mark for a dumb computer. I promised myself to never again let my enthusiasm for post comments blind me to Viagra Online's deceptions.

A couple months later I got an interesting comment to my post about the connection between Rick James and Neil Young:

In 1965 a great deal of things were going on, I was a kid by then, so I couldn't notice any about music or the popular bands at the moment like Rick James and Neil Young Buy Viagra Cheap Viagra.

This comment threw me for a loop because although Viagra Online was obviously still fixated on luring me with the promise of cheap Viagra, I couldn't help but be touched by its endearing reflection on growing up in the topsy-turvy sixties. At some point during its daily spamming, Viagra Online had read something that had touched its binary soul, and caused reflection. It was almost enough to make me consider visiting the poison link, just as a gesture of reciprocation (not for the cheap Viagra).

A couple days later Viagra Online visited my site again, this time reading a post on Funk artist Pedro Bell:

I have always thought that funky issues are cool, indeed. However, I am pretty impressed to see how did you managed to organize your several ideas in such a great way, then thanks a lot for sharing this matter

I had to stop myself from replying to this comment. I wasn't sure what was happening, but I seemed to be witnessing the dawning of intelligent consciousness in a spam computer. Not only that, but a spam computer that thought funky issues were cool. And a computer that was impressed with how I organized ideas! It dawned on me that with all this talk about how technology will shape our lives, maybe writers won't even need human readers anymore. Maybe instead of trying to get 1,000 human fans to read and support me as a writer, maybe I can get a 1,000 computers to visit my blog and say nice (although inane) things about me. Instead of a book tour, I could just let Viagra Online spam my next book to millions.

I was feeling pretty good about our relationship until I got a comment a couple weeks later on my post about John Mayer and his KKK member. The writer posted as "Anonymous" but I recognized the voice:

Thanks for sharing this, it's pretty cool to know about it. By the this handsome guys turns me on to visit Viagra Pharmacy to enjoy with my husband.

My old friend Viagra Online was posting again, but had decided to leave its name off the comment. There was the familiar friendly tone, but I could see right through its vague reference to my post as being "pretty cool to know about." For a moment I thought the reference to "handsome guys turns me on" might be some kind of compliment, but that seemed highly unlikely. The bastard had not read a single word.

The final straw came later that day when I noticed another comment from "Anonymous" on my post about the re-ascension of the Light Skinned Brother:

Most of this brunette guys are pretty handsome, in fact I just loved black mans they are different to the others. They turn me on to visit Viagra Pharmacy to enjoy with my husband.

Not only did this comment show a profound lack of understanding for what I was writing, I was also troubled by the possibility that my new friend Viagra Online might be a racist. What exactly does it mean that "black mans they are different to the others"? And the confession that they "turn me on", what's that about? And now Viagra Online was married? Having a spam computer readership was supposed to make things more simple, but now I felt more confused and alone (and unread) then ever. I racked my brain to think of a clever Facebook status update that might capture the absurdity of the situation, but I couldn't come up with anything.


*I Just Loved Black Mans*

And maybe that's the point. Maybe that's how the computers will do it. They'll separate us into our own digital enclaves and then get us hooked on their vague, positive affirmations. And before we know it we'll all be clicking our way to an oblivion of Viagra Online.

The Undercover Others

2010-08-28T01:44:00.000-05:00

Out of all the older people gathered in the school library to hear me talk about how I was going to be supervising them, this Black woman was most clearly trying to distinguish herself as not a fuddy duddy. Her short hair was immaculately styled. Her eyebrows were impeccably plucked and thinly penciled to her brow. Her ears sagged with gems. She wore a purple and rose-red jumpsuit, satin soft. The thickness of her lenses could never undermine the stylishness of her gold frames. Her smile was church-pleasant as I offered my hand to shake.

This was my first official foray into the purgatory of public school education. After kicking around Minneapolis for a couple of years as a journalist/strip mall clerk/Notary Public extraordinaire, I signed up for Americorps Vista. Back then I was shocked by the events of 9/11, but I was even more shocked at the world that was being formed in its aftermath. I remember being in a park near my house, shooting baskets with some shorties when it struck me that this was just the beginning of a lot of suffering. That these youngsters would be growing up in a new type of world. Although I felt sadness for the people who lost their lives in the Towers, I couldn't help but dread the deaths yet to come. Prodigy of Mobb Deep described it perfectly on Survival of the Fittest, There's a war going on outside, no man is safe from. So instead of joining the military, I signed up as an Americorps VISTA in Baltimore Maryland. I worked in a school as a programs coordinator. One of the programs brought retired seniors in to tutor elementary school students. I acted as site supervisor, which mostly involved a lot of paperwork. I hadn't had much experience, but I always enjoyed talking to older people. They tend to be wise, and willing to candidly share that wisdom.The word "wisdom" is, of course, at times open to interpretation.

Her hand shake was soft and firm. Her teeth bright.
"Hi, my name is Abdel," I said.
"What did you say?" she said. Her hand flinched back to her ear, like she had been suddenly struck deaf.
I'm used to people clowning with my name. White people usually just have a pronunciation issue. In Minnesota people heard either "Ed" or "Bill" when I told them my name was Abdel. They didn't have the linguistic palette to hear what I was saying, so I often had to repeat the pronunciation. Having a name like mine requires one to have a sense of humor, but sometimes it's a struggle.
"It's Ab-del," I said to the woman, trying my best to reassure the anxiety I saw brewing in her eyes.
"Abdel?" she said, her voice quivering. "What are you, some MUSLIM?"

For the record, I am not a Muslim. Even though my name is Arabic for "servant of Allah," no one in my family is Muslim [not that there's anything wrong with that!] and I have never actually been inside a mosque. My name, Abdel Shakur, is a product of two non-conformist individuals who wanted me to have a unique name that would signal a new age in both of their families. So they gave me the last name of Black liberation icon Assata Shakur. If I was a girl, I would have been named Assata Shakur, and probably would appear at the top of every government no-fly list ever. So, my name is an expression of belief on the part of my parents, just not in the way you might think.

I couldn't tell if the library had gotten colder or whether it was just perspiration cooling my skin. We stood in the aftermath of her question, standing close, both confused. I thought at first that she was joking, but I could see that the fear and disgust curling within the folds of her face was genuine. It made me sad because I got the sense that I was always going to be an Other to this woman, no matter what I said. Despite my wanting to build a sense of connection with this woman, I was destined to only be a young man of indistinct nationality with a terrorist name. I smiled broadly and tried my best to change the subject.

That incident comes to mind as we witness the NeO narrative enter an ominous phase. Before your eyes you are seeing our first Black President transformed into the Other. First there was doubt about his origin. Then doubt about his Blackness. Now it's about his god.

I guess I'm not surprised. In 2008, Barack used his special mulatto powers to bend himself into whatever hopeful shapes people could imagine. It's called passing--duh, our people invented it. Even as he stood taking that oath, supported by throngs, I knew it would get bad. Every president is destined to reach a point in their presidency where they are unpopular. Everything has a season, politics are no different.

Despite his seeming transcendence, one of the primary tenets of race still remain: a white man's cold is a Black man's flu. My father often notes that a Black man's negatives are easier to exploit than a White man's. In our culture, very few of the narratives about Black men don't end in some kind of depravity. Michael Dukakis lost the presidency because of one of those narratives. Barack is essentially his own Willie Horton.

Now, it's important to say that I count myself among those disappointed in the NeO presidency thus far. Health care was a major victory, but we thought 2008 would mark a turning point in the battle against the complete corporatization of our political and economic systems. We had the crazy dream of keeping the wizards of finance from actually going ahead and selling our country away. But day by day it becomes more clear that the bill of sale was given a long time ago. Our President has become merely a delivery man in a messiah uniform. I still love the brother and find inspiration in his intelligence, strength, and swag, but I realize the jig (so to speak) is up. In the words of Biggie, things done changed.

Despite my disillusionment, I realize the consequences of abandoning a prominent and controversial Black man during a time of strife. Black people on the whole were ambivalent about Martin and Malcolm at the time of their deaths. Everybody loves them now, but as their narratives were shaped by powerful unseen forces, Black people had mixed feelings. First, Malcolm was too militant. Later, Martin was not militant enough. Both died much less popular than they had been previously.

And let me also be clear: I'm not suggesting we issue the "R-Kelly Pass" for Barack. You know, the pass that makes a prominent Black man morally immune to any kind of scrutiny in the eyes of Black folks? Those who claim to be our advocates need to not be our pimps, no matter how much swag they have. NeO promised us a lot and has not delivered like he said he would. Although not recognized as such, civil liberties is one of the most important Black issues in this country. Historically, we have bore the brunt of the coercive power of American government. At one time we were actually owned by our government, so there is no bigger priority than Never Again. And our President knows this. And yet after almost 20 months in office, it's still not clear how the Obama presidency is indistinct from the Bush presidency on the issue of civil liberties. And that sucks.

But this thing about him being a Muslim is inexcusable. This brother is being setup. He is being called "tyrant," "traitor, "criminal," "alien". If you put the word "Black" in front of any of those words, you start to see the danger that is brewing.

A lot of people doubted the wisdom of the president's remarks regarding the so called "Ground Zero Mosque". People said he wasn't involved in the controversy until he propelled himself into the debate, but they're wrong. The controversy has been ginned up to get people to reset their consciousness back in time to 2001. In the ruins of the towers, Bush waved his bullhorn and told everyone that we wouldn't forget the events of 9/11, but he really meant we wouldn't forget what we felt that day: fear and anger.

NeO realized that the intolerance being shown in the political discourse was not disconnected to his own political fate. NeO and Tinkerbell have one thing in common: their existence is dependent on our ability to believe in the fantastic. Whatever you want to say about him, our President doesn't draw his power by catering to the baser instincts of his constituents. He's no fearmongerer and he's too intellectually proud to become one. Contrary to popular belief, NeO didn't invent the idea of hope, he's just the most gifted manipulator of it in American political history. If he's going to be a two-term president, he's going to have to get people hoping again. That's why the mosque is important.

I felt a lot of pride when I first read his comments :

As a citizen, and as president, I believe that Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as everyone else in this country. And that includes the right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in Lower Manhattan, in accordance with local laws and ordinances. This is America. And our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakable. The principle that people of all faiths are welcome in this country and that they will not be treated differently by their government is essential to who we are. The writ of the Founders must endure.

The message underlying the speech is quite simple: We are a nation of laws. One of those laws prevents discrimination based on religion. You can't discriminate. End of story. Nothing really controversial there, but in desperate times even the idea of religious freedom becomes controversial. But NeO knows that he couldn't stand on the sidelines on this one. He made a beautiful and very clear statement about what he believed. And then he equivocated. And equivocated about his equivocation. And then he just stopped talking about it.

There's a part of this narrative that NeO has very little control over. If America is determined to erode all of its civil rights, than there is only so much he can do, especially considering the state of the economy. But whatever he does, he shouldn't equivocate. If he wants us to believe again, he's got to show us that he's willing to take slings and arrows for greater purposes besides political expediency. It probably won't get him a second term, but it's probably the only way he'll be able to leave that big White House not haunted by his own presidency.

And we can't afford the luxuries of bitterness and apathy. We have to realize the need to speak out for those outside of our communities who are being Othered. Whether it is about gender, sexual orientation, race, religion, or national origin, we've got to fight for the civil rights of everyone in our society, even if they have a name that's scary or hard to pronounce. Second term or not, if we don't take up these fights, we'll lose the only thing that can save us: hope.

Archie Bell and the Drells

2010-08-24T20:29:00.000-05:00

We all need to tighten up.

Snatching the Pebble: From Writing to Publication

2010-07-29T08:22:00.000-05:00

Have you read our submission guidelines, Little Grasshopper?

I'm teaching a class on literary publishing at the Martha's Vineyard Institute for Creative Writing this week (side note: yeah, Martha's Vineyard!). I'm going to write more about what I'm doing later, but I thought I would share some literary links that I found helpful. Check them out. (If you know of any others, please feel free to put them in the comments section)

Duotrope.com: Exhaustive list of literary magazines, their response times, percent of work rejected, and percentage of personal responses they give. Very helpful and continually updated.
1,000 Fans. This article is all about the idea that all an artist needs to “quit their day job” and write full time for a living is 1,000 fans. Basically, it’s about creating a network of people interested and willing to pay for your work. Must read.
Literary Journal Rankings. This author ranks a wide range of journals. Ranking journals is kind of a rank concept, but it helps to have a sense of the reputation of the place you’re submitting.
Newpages.com. They have an excellent listing of literary magazines, all of which are reviewed. This helps out a lot to give you a sense of the work that journals are looking for. Their blog is also a good resource for finding out about what’s going on. Keeping your eye out for contests and special issues is a good way to increase your chances of publication.
Literary journal blogs. This is a good way to find out the latest about what’s going on at a literary journal. Ninth Letter, Indiana Review :) , Third Coast, and a gazillion others use blogs to let writers know about current events at the journal.
Author blogs. Neil Gaiman has probably the most popular author blog. Tayari Jones provides an excellent example of how to create a community around your writing. Joy Harjo also has a pretty cool blog.
Nathan Bransford is a literary agent with a lot of helpful advice, from writing query letters, to finding an agent, to publicizing your book once it’s published.

And here's Jim Carrey's take on snatching the pebble. Seems appropriate for writers.

Peep Game: Inception

2010-07-19T23:12:00.000-05:00

Things I noticed about Inception:

1. There were no Black people in this movie.

2. This wasn't one of those movies where the absence of Black people really got on my nerves. Chris Nolan is a great writer and he just so happens to not feature a lot of Black people in his films. Why does everything have to be so political these days anyways? I voted for Obama, okay!

3. Is it just me or isn't the idea of inception, basically implanting an idea in someone's mind and having them unconsciously make it their own, isn't this the basis of any healthy committed relationship?

Now hold on a second. I know what you're thinking.

It ain't like that. This type of inception has to go both ways. Both partners have to be able to influence each other without explicitly telling the other one what to do all the time. And even more importantly, there has to be trust that the other partner is trying to help that person become the best person they can (and want) to become. That's how you get to that Michelle/Barack Fist Bump Status.

This also requires you to not ruin all that good influencing work by constantly putting your influence in the other person's face all the time too. At the very least give them some time to enjoy their successes before you let them know how much they owe you.

4. Who cares if the whole thing was a dream? I'm sorry, did I say that? I know somebody just closed the Misstraknowitall tab right then. But really, on a storytelling tip, would it really matter if it was a dream or not? Would we really look at any of the characters, or the changes they went through, any differently?

Inception was just a big puzzle. There wasn't some underlying statement about human consciousness or the morality of transmitting ideas or about the imprisonment of women inside male "projections" of femininity. All of those issues/ideas could have been wrestled with, but in the end it was just a really cool Rubics cube.

I was shocked to hear the movie theater erupt in a pained groans as the film ended right before Leo's top stopped spinning. I assumed that the last scene represented reality. More importantly, I would be pretty disappointed if it didn't turn out to be reality. Otherwise it would seem like some half-assed M. Night Shamalayan move.

5. With all due respect to observations #1 and #2 in this post, can I get a Color Check on Marion Cotillard? Me thinks she looks a little bit like a egroNay? Pardon my Swine Latin, I just don't want to mess up the sister's career. If this got out, next thing you know she's battling Gabriel Union for a role in the new Tyler Perry film, "He's NOT my baby Daddy," starring Malik Yoba.

I've researched her background and haven't come up with anything just yet, but something has my "mula-dar" tingling, so I know I'm on to something. Plus, according to her Wiki page, she was awarded the African American Film Critics Association Award for Best Actress in 2007. (We weren't that post-racial in 2007 were we? It's hard to keep track.)

You sure that's not pronounced "Mari'On?"

Anyways, whatever she is, she was the best thing about that movie, which is a high compliment. Her character, ironically,was the most human and complete out of everyone in the film. In fact, the saddest moment for me was when Leo dismissed her as a figment of his own imagination. That broke my heart.

6. And no, Chris Nolan didn't invent the idea of inception. Break it down, Goldie.

Werkstatt

2010-07-14T02:01:00.000-05:00

About ten years ago I had a transformative experience at the Hurston/Wright writer's conference in Washington, DC. At the time I was on the fence about the whole writing thing, although I was encouraged by novelist Alexs Pate, who I met at the University of Minnesota. I knew that there were writers of color out there working, but I just didn't know any of them. Alexs was teaching a fiction workshop at Hurston-Wright and told me that I needed to come through. Boy was he right. (BTW: he's got a new book, In the Heart of the Beat: The Poetry of Rap. It's dope. Review forthcoming)

Portrait of the Misstra as a young Knowitall, w/Alexs Pate

In DC I found a vibrant community of writers who were talented and serious about their work. I ended up meeting some incredible people who I still keep up with to this day (I even got to work with a couple of them when I was at Indiana Review). More importantly, I finally found an audience that I felt could critique my work without critiquing my cultural context. In my previous experiences it was hard for me to figure out whether the feedback I received in workshops, whether positive or negative, was because of the merits of my work or because people were unfamiliar with the type of story I was trying to tell, or why I was trying to tell it. The experience was a revelation.

VONA gots Fyre!

I had a similar experience last week at the VONA writer's conference in San Francisco. The conference is one of the oldest and largest venues for writer's of color from all across the country to get together and work on their craft. Diem Jones, the former Parliament Funkadelic cover photographer, (who was featured in the Indiana Review Funk issue) runs the show, so you know things are funky. The workshops are taught by heavies like Junot Diaz, Chris Abani, Ruth Forman, Willie Perdomo, Evelina Galang, and Tayari Jones, but the best thing about the experience was the amazing community of writers who keep coming back. There's nothing like being able to sit around and just talk about writing with people who share your experience. The feedback I got from Evelina Galang was quite helpful and my workshop mates gave me a lot of great energy to keep me writing. If you haven't attended, you need to start making next year's plans now.

My new favorite coffee shop all-time: Coffee for the People

All writers, regardless of color, have to take the time to invest in their art. We display our values by the way we employ our resources. Time and money are our greatest resources, so if we don't spend either on our writing, how can we credibly say we care about our art?

My new favorite bus bench all-time: Haight and Ashbury

Which leads me to my next pitch...

On July 25th, yours truly will be teaching a writing workshop at the Martha's Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing. The class I'm teaching, called "Publish Before You Perish" is going to be informative, fun, and of course, funky. Check it.

Oh, and here's Ruth Forman and Willie Perdomo reading at this year's faculty reading. Do yourself a favor and watch both.

What is done can't be undone, son.

2010-07-13T21:03:00.000-05:00

Spllice is not a new story. It's all about the consequences for those whose vanity and arrogance lead them to play God. We've seen it before. What's troubling is the terrible punishment Splice imagines for its female Frankenstein.

**Word of warning, if you haven't seen Splice, don't read further because I'm about to spoil the hell out of it.***

Splice acts like it's concerned with a lot of different moral issues surrounding genetics, but it basically boils down to a gruesome parable about how female fascination with vanity leads to rape.

You have two scientists, Clive and Elsa, who are in love and also the top genetic "morphologists" in their field. They are paid by a corporation to design life forms that synthesize proteins. The life forms are composed of genetic material from cows, horses, pigs, etc. Once they have matured fully, these synthesized organisms produce proteins that that can be sold by the corporation. The creatures are hideous, but they make dough, so everybody's happy.

Dear Adrien Brody, we still ain't cool. We ain't forgot about Halle Berry.

Billy Bob wasn't enough for y'all, huh? Signed, All Black Men.

Except for the woman. Elsa wants to take the logical (to her) next step and create a hybrid using parts of human DNA. Clive doesn't think it's such a good idea, but is helpless before her feminine wiles. Before you know it, they shake the tree of knowledge and out comes the future.

The future, a creature named Dren, looks like a walking penis for the first half of the movie, so I guess I should have been known that something was up.

uhhh...

Earlier it was revealed that Clive wanted to have a baby "conventionally" but Elsa said she didn't want to have to give birth. "Maybe when we figure out male pregnancy," she jokes. In the mad scientist stories we're used to (hint: Frankenstein is a man) the creation of the monster is motivated by the character's vanity, but this vanity is of the intellectual nature. The man wants to be able to out-think God. Elsa, on the other hand, is just concerned with creating without increasing her dress size. "Is this even about science?" pleads Clive. Uh, nooo.

Throughout the movie, we see pictures of Elsa staring at herself in the mirror or staring at pictures of herself with her mother when she was younger. She even teaches Dren to look in the mirror and to embrace her "feminine" gender by putting on makeup and wearing jewelry. She does too good a job because Dren starts exhibiting her own symptoms of vanity.

One of the most interesting things about the movie is that as Dren becomes more and more human in appearance, her mother becomes less and less humane. After a nasty confrontation with Dren, Elsa's vanity and arrogance push her off the deep end, and she cuts Dren's stinger off. Unfortunately, she later learns that the stinger doubles as a youknowwhat.

And Clive ends up sexing Dren for some reason, which is just about the weirdest thing I've ever seen in a movie. Maury to the millionth power. Although it's disturbing, at least it still feels new. I can't name too many science fiction movies that so embody the Electra complex. But, just when you think you're going to get something new, Dren dies and becomes a dude.

And for what the movie was trying to do, this is the only way it could have ended. The Frankenstein story always requires a punishment for the foolish scientists. In this case, the male scientist is punished with death because he bit the apple, but the female scientist requires a punishment that Dren isn't capable of.

'sup, girl?

Dren as a dude is bigger, faster, and stronger. For some reason he can also talk, although he obviously wasn't Hooked on Monster Phonics because all he can say to Elsa is "inside you."*

Which brings us to the end. It's too bad that a movie which opens up so many possibilities in terms of looking at gender ends up settling for a lot of cliches with frightening implications. The woman looks in the mirror, falls in love with what she sees and is punished. Elsa loses the man she loves, her career, and ends up being impregnated by a monster.

In the end I just ended up feeling bad for Elsa. Too bad she wasn't born male, maybe then she would have been lucky enough to die like a man.

*Side note: BARF

Can You Get to That?

2010-07-11T21:50:00.000-05:00

Maggot Brain has a special place in my heart as being one of those songs that has the power to make you feel as if your life has changed after a single listen. Even if it hasn't, the song, with it's wailing, somber, playful, celestial guitar solos, offers you the chance to alter your consciousness.

Ironically, the first time I heard it I was in a state of altered consciousness. I had just laid down on my little futon couch, in my little shoebox apartment. In those days I kept the incense blazing constantly, so the air was heavy with sandalwood. I had forgotten to cut off my stereo, and hadn't really noticed until George Clinton boomed from the speakers, announcing in a solemn voice that Mother Earth was pregnant for the THIRD time. As if that wasn't bad enough: Because y'all have knocked her up.

Groggy or not, I knew I needed to hear what kind of song could uphold an intro like that.
And boy did it. I think the song is one of the most beautiful pieces of music ever composed. I love Jimmy Hendrix, but he never got the chance to play that song. Neither did Chuck Berry nor Bo Diddley nor Muddy Waters nor Wes Montgomery nor Ernie Isley nor Bootsy Collins. It was Eddie Hazel who got to play the best guitar solo ever. That doesn't mean he's the best all time, but I've never heard an instrumental render a narrative in that way. First beautiful, then painful, then redemptive.

And although there is a lot to appreciate about the album, lately I've been thinking quite a bit about how funk looks, and especially considering the work of Pedro Bell, Overton Loyd, and all the great funk artists of the period, (particularly the ones featured in Indiana Review's Funk Feature) I took a closer look at the Maggot Brain album cover.

Of course you have to start with the front cover. What can you say about it? A woman's head sits in a mound of dirt. Her eyes are pitched, her forehead ripples with exertion, and her mouth is in full scream. The back side has a skull posed in the same position. Evocative images, to say the least. The cover is even more shocking when you consider that Funkadelic was a group still trying to cater to Black musical tastes. But you can ask Redman and Erykah Badu about its enduring influence. Joel Brodsky, a legend in rock photography, who worked with everyone from Jim Morrison, Carly Simon, Gladys Knight and the Pips, KISS, Isaac Hayes, and B.B. King, took the cover shot.

On the inside left jacket there is, naturally, a huge maggot framing the top of the liner notes. Not an unfriendly maggot, mind you, but a maggot nonetheless. Beneath the maggot is an excerpt of "Process Number Five on Fear" from the Process Church of the Final Judgment.

Fear is at the root of man's destruction of himself. Without fear there is no blame. Without blame there is no conflict. Without conflict there is no destruction.
But there is fear. Deep within the core of every human being it lurks like a monster: dark and intangible. It's outward effects are unmistakable. Its source is hidden...
But to a greater or lesser degree, and manifesting one way or another, all human beings are afraid. And some of us are so afraid that we dare not show our fear. Sometimes we dare not know our fear. For fear is itself a terrifying concept to behold.

Sometimes we dare not know our fear. For fear is itself a terrifying concept to behold. Sorry, I thought that bared repeating.

For those that don't know, the Process Church of the Final Judgment, got famous in the '60s for deifying both Jesus and the Devil. Tangentially related to both L. Ron Hubbard and Charlie Manson, the church could be classified as flying the freak flag at more than half staff.

Although it's unclear how deep into the Process church Funkadelic was, their selection of this particular quote was not incidental. This album is not only about fear and death, but the process o transcending both. The epic title track came from a session where George Clinton asked Eddie Hazel to think about his greatest fear. Hazel played about the death of his mother, and the rest was history.

The inside cover features a photo of the group, funky as they wanna be. Cowboy boots, gators, tennis shoes, tassels, bell bottoms, posed next to what looks like an abandoned building. Everyone in good spirits, except for the brother leaned to the left, boulder coolly held behind his back. Blackrockcool at it's best, and an album cover that reflects the heavy funkiness of the vinyl inside.

And as a special treat, here's Eddie Hazel performing Maggot Brain live. Make sure to light your incense before viewing.

The Bill Cosby Alphabet

2010-07-11T12:37:00.000-05:00

The guy on the left needs a little help.

We Gone Have Rocks This Big Tonight!

2010-07-07T22:12:00.000-05:00

One time my dad and I were watching the local news about a huge drug bust in Oakland public housing. Police laid out the seized drugs, guns, and money like trinkets at a garage sale. There was talk of the "street value" of the contraband and local "community leaders" were consulted about the impact of the arrests. However, as the reporter made his final remarks, a group of young men clamored behind him to make their own comment. "We gone have rocks this big tonight!" one of them yelled out. Ahh, another seminal moment in the effort to set Black progress back a couple hundred years.

"Move token back to 1864. Do not Collect $200."

Needless to say, me and my dad still think it's hilarious to yell that out as loud as possible. However, it wasn't until the recent Gulf oil spill disaster that I truly understood what that kid meant.

First, I should say that the BP disaster has bummed me out. The feeling is similar to the aftermath of 9/11, when the totality and brutality of the disaster is just so great that it's hard to find words. I kept starting posts and not knowing where to go with them. I stopped watching the news to avoid images of ruined beaches and storks covered in tar.

...

There's no comparing the loss of human life during 9/11, but at least the events of that disaster were confined to that day. This spill doesn't seem anywhere close to stopping. The relief wells are supposed to stop the thing, but what happens if that doesn't work? (Am I the only one who is not comforted by the fact that the best solution we have to a drilling disaster is...more drilling?) Even if it does work, it will be months before they are up and running and by that time, millions and millions more gallons of oil will coat the gulf.

9/11 was a bit more accessible because it had a cast of villains that were easy to identify, and bomb. We know the major players in this disaster, BP and Haliburton, but you unfortunately can't bomb a corporatoin. Which brings me to sadness that has become the NeObama administration.

NeObama was supposed to defy the rules of the Matrix. He did it somewhat effectively with health care, but no matter how many bullets he dodges or digital baddies he highkicks, he can't get around the fact that his power is contained within a machine, and that machine is powered by siphoning the heat of newborns.

Hang in there, baby.

In other words, although the Executive branch is more powerful than it's ever been, our President (for whatever reason) seems to have little power to act on his own accord. He can frown and cuss and wag his finger, but there is very little the president can do. It's hard to shake the feeling that he's in the same position as his predecessor, stuck reading The Pet Goat while larger forces determine our fates.

Some would say that NeO has sold out, or that the whole hope thing was a big deception, but that's hard for me to believe. I think a lot of people are upset because NeO convinced us to not only believe in him, but to believe that the presidency would be the sight of revolutionary economic and social change. That has been proven false. Maybe I'm naive, but although I have lost faith in the presidency as an institution, I still believe in the man who inhabits it.

However, there's no getting around that the oil and war interests still run the show. If 9/11 couldn't cause a meaningful rethinking of our energy policy, is it feasible to think that that a few thousand oily birds are going to change things?

Which brings us to "We gone have rocks this big tonight." I first took the young man's usage of the word "have" to mean "smoke." In other words, it doesn't matter how many drug raids you have, you can't keep us from smoking rocks. But now I realize that I was off. What he was actually doing was a form of defiant advertising. He wasn't saying he was going to be smoking rocks, but rather he was going to be selling rocks, no matter what the police did. He wanted everyone to know that business was going to continue as usual. In fact, he probably gained a couple customers who might have otherwise been dissuaded by the bust.

That attitude is no different than a corporation like Haliburton, which caused the spill. No matter what anybody says, they are making their money, and will continue to make their money.

By the way, does anybody else think it's strange that this particular corporation has been at the center of every major catastrophe that's befallen this country in the last ten years? The Bush presidency, Iraq, Afghanistan, Katrina, Gulf spill, etc.

If this corporation was a person, they would be a definite candidate for the "No Fly" list. At what point do we decide that it's in our country's interest for a company to just not exist? It may sound silly, but can we install a death penalty for corporations?

Until we do take serious action to reign in these bad acting corporations, and their overwhelming influence, we're all going to be sitting ducks until the next disaster.

Marvin Isley

2010-06-07T23:26:00.000-05:00

I just read that Marvin Isley, bass player for the Isley Brothers, died today. While this is sad news, especially since the brother was only 56, it does provide a fantastic opportunity to highlight one of my favorite funk/rock albums of all time, 3+3.

After leaving Motown and starting their own label, T-Neck records, the Isley Brothers added two guitar playing little brothers, Marvin and Ernie, and their pianoman cousin Chris Jasper. The Isley's had been making hits since the late fifties, but the youthful funk of their younger siblings made 3+3 something special.
Doubt it? Check out "Who's That Lady" and peep Ernie's soaring Hendrix-inspired* guitar riffs being perfectly balanced by Marvin's funky bass lines. Trust me, you need this album in your life.

*It's not widely known that Jimi Hendrix actually played with the Isley's back in the day before he hit it big in rock. From Rickey Vincent's Funk: The Music, The People, and The Rhythm of the One:

Hendrix wound up in Harlem in late 1963 looking for lead guitarist gigs in an R&B act. He was picked up when Ronnie Isley went to the Palm Cafe looking for a lead guitarist for an upcoming Isley Brothers tour of Bermuda.
Hendrix thrived in the Isley Brothers band, performing his wild stage show, licking the air, biting his guitar, wearing loud bandanas, and getting the most out of his solos. He made $30 a night and didn't complain.

Check him out on the group's mid-60 release, Testify Parts 1+2.

Standardized Teaching

2010-05-23T00:10:00.001-05:00

The death of the book (as we know it) will hasten the death of the teacher (as we know it).

Book, man

At my current school, and many others like it, I have been told to instruct and assess with a careful eye towards "replicating the standardized testing environment."

The thinking is simple: if you want kids to do well on an assessment, then you make sure you teach them so they can know how to do the things you're going to ask them to do on the test. And you practice in those conditions, over and over.

And then it occurred to me the other day that we surprisingly still do standardized testing with paper books. The grading is all scanned in, but there are more inefficiencies in the system. Why kill all those trees? Why not have the kids just take tests on the computer?

That question may take a few more years to resolve logistically, but very soon computer testing will become standard. And that shouldn't really seem like a big deal until you think about how we "replicate the standardized testing environment." If you are going to be assessed in a digital environment, wouldn't you want your learning to be in the same realm?

And if learning is based mostly in the digital environment, what role does that leave for the teacher? The teacher who battles for the attention of students who are progressively more emotionally invested in their consumptive technologies?

Not much.

My students are generally on their best behavior when they have a computer in front of them. They don't disrupt, they don't talk loudly, they keep their hands to themselves (thank God, finally!).

Of course that doesn't ensure effective instruction, or even actual learning. If we're trying to socialize competent, productive members of society, you need a human leading the instruction. Otherwise, the results will be less than ideal.

But that doesn't mean people won't try to use alternate methods, particularly in lean economic times. Human teachers are expensive, in terms of investment of time and money, and wouldn't it make sense to invest more in software (as it were), as opposed to hardware? If you had a program that could show the same test results as a human, wouldn't you hire the program? Some might even say it would be immoral to do anything less. Again, that's taking for granted that learning is only worthwhile if it can be represented by a number.

Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not opposed to numerical assessment of student learning. When you're trying to teach someone a piece of information, the most important question is not one the pupil asks, but the question a teacher asks to check for understanding.

The problem with this new approach to education is less in the principal, but more in the practice. Mahatma Ghandi's philosophy of non-violence is well known, but less attention is devoted to his reservations and distrust of technology. He uses the introduction of trains to India and the virulence of British colonialism as an example. Ghandi says it wasn't trains themselves that were evil, but they were transporters of evil across large distances. The rapid movement of goods was a catalyst for exploitation. Can anyone say cotton gin?

Student performance scores represent a technology that can tell us a lot about how to instruct our children. But it can also be used to transport the evil of greed. Once education is completely corporatized, and once the test performance of children is tied to profit, that's when the evil will be most easily transported. That's when schools will close and open like fast food franchises. That's when caring professionals will be cast out like "obsolete" autoworkers. That's when a generation of students will be taught to value test performance over knowledge.

But we're not there quite yet. We have to be willing to weather the storms of active minds, without relying on electronic pacifiers. We have to work to ensure the careers of educators are not determined merely by test data, but the activation of student thinking and learning. That's why we need to craft an educational philosophy informed, but not enslaved by data.

Like a ham hock in your cornflakes, personified

2010-04-19T00:30:00.000-05:00

Real Talk

2010-04-08T00:32:00.000-05:00

A student from my school was killed the other day. Walking down the street last Wednesday night, someone snuck up behind Jarren Lindsey and shot him.

I didn't know Jarren well. I had his cousins in a couple of my classes, but he was a tenth grader and I teach freshmen. I did take some pictures of him during an art project for another class. They were working on a project where they painted out a significant moment in their lives. It was amazing to look at the things the kids shared. The kids looked like "regular" teenagers, but they had these incredibly heavy stories behind them. Jarren's was no less heavy, but you could tell he was proud of the painting he had done. In one of the pictures he smiles at the camera, like he's telling a joke. In another, he's looks sober, older.

According to the newspaper, Jarren and his cousin had just walked some girls to the bus stop and were on their way home. That was the first week of spring break and the weather had just cleared up and was unseasonably warm. People were out and restless on the street. Out of the shadows, someone struck down Jarren and sent his cousin running for his life. Jarren was 16 years old.
To be honest, I've tried not to mix the world of this blog with my teaching world. I'm a compartmentalizer and it's easier for me to deal with the demands of all my little worlds as long as I can keep them separate. I've tried not to write about personal stuff that's not directly tied to the topic at hand: funk, in all of its forms. Sticking to the script, so to speak, has been tough this year. The second year of teaching is no joke, and to go along with all of that, my school has been slated for closure because of test scores and budgetary reasons.

But something about this feels different. This is about Jarren, but it's also much bigger than Jarren. Two days before Jarren lost his life, I was heading out to play basketball at the rec center near my house. It was 9pm, which I consider early when it comes to playing ball, and my wife and I heard about six gun blasts near our house. We sat up and talked for a little while, but despite my wife's protestations, I grabbed my ball and got in the car. I was driving a block over when I noticed a bunch of guys standing in front of a house. They looked heated about something, but I didn't immediately connect it to the gunshots. When I saw unmarked police car waiting in the cut, I knew something was up.

And something was up. Soon after I left, the police stopped somebody on that corner and, according to the news, shot him after he drew a gun. Unfortunately another one of my students lives in a house right on the corner in front of where the shooting happened. I've chided her about being out late, but the whole thing happened right before her eyes. William Hardy, the young Black man who died, was 27 years old.

And just yesterday morning, a freshman at Douglass High named Danny Gilmore was on his way to school and was shot in front of a grocery store. He wasn't killed, but he is paralyzed. Police believe it might have just been a case of mistaken identity. The alleged shooter is 18. This all happened 8:15am, mind you.

As I get ready to teach my last quarter of freshman English, I've got all of this heavy stuff on my brains. I was planning on seeing my students again for the first time on Monday. I would have all my energetic, engaging lessons planned. I would lead us head-long into a journey of inquiry and discovery that would motivate them to give their best, even in the school's last moments.

But that's not exactly what's going to happen. Instead, I'll see many of my students at Jarren's funeral on Friday. Instead of having everything figured out and planned when I see them, I'll probably have just as many questions as they will.

Ironically, the feeling reminds me of how I felt when Obama was elected. I was caught up in all my reservations about the implications (political, social, economic,etc.) of having a Black president, but my students swept away all the reservations and allowed me to just feel that moment, even if the forces at work were too big for me to understand.

That's what makes this type of post so difficult, because the events of a life generally don't interest me as much as the causes or implications of those events. But lately it seems a little trite to talk about causes or implications. I could link to articles about the schools crisis. Or the gang crisis. Or the gun crisis. Or the drug crisis. Or the roots of poverty laid down by years of racial segregation in Chicago. But I guess this ain't the time for that.

Now's the time to mourn these young men who have had their lives shattered by violence, and pray that no one else falls victim. It's also time for me to continue to plan this last semester for my students. The goal won't be for me to explain all of the causes and implications of incomprehensible events, but instead help them develop the tools they can use to fashion new understandings of the world around them. Understandings that will change things. Understandings that might save lives.

But Friday comes first.

Mister Magic

2010-03-26T23:24:00.000-05:00

Thank God for Spring break.

Roberta Flack - Mister Magic - 1970
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Questions

2010-03-19T19:41:00.001-05:00

1. Who would have thought that America would have a Black president before it had universal health care?

2. Could Hillary Clinton, with all of the baggage from the first health care run 15 years ago, have passed health care if she was president?

3. Isn't the thought that this young brother hasn't even really hit his prime kind of scary?

Do yourself a favor and watch the President teach on why health care is a battle for America's character.

Teaching Writing and Blowing the Whistle

2010-03-18T22:49:00.000-05:00

Lately I've been thinking quite a bit about teaching and why I'm doing what I do. Writing is a big part of what I do with my life. I would even like to make a (gasp!) living doing it. But it wasn't always like that for me. There was a time in school where I didn't really enjoy writing all that much.

When I was in the 7th grade my PE teacher, who I will simply call Coach (his mirrored sunglasses and obscenely bulging neck veins are crystal clear, his name a mystery) introduced us to our school’s “weight training facility”. Volleyball, football, and baseball had been the physical education staples up until this time. In junior high, however, we were crammed into a grimy portable classroom with a circuit of shiny machines that would help us “train”. Class would consist of us moving from one machine to the next, pumping away until we heard a shrill blast from Coach’s whistle.

Coach inspired us with fear (again, the veins and the sunglasses) but after awhile we learned how to slack off just enough that he wouldn’t fail us. Undoubtedly many of us exercised muscles that we never would have otherwise (I never understood the appeal of that weird leg-spreader machine) but there was an unreality to the experience that made it seem silly.

Previously, exercise had been a pleasant and unconscious byproduct of play, but PE class turned it into what seemed like a sophisticated punishment—something to be tolerated or avoided. Looking back on the reading and writing I did in school, I see a strong parallel.

Of course I was “prepared” by my school experience in the strictest sense of the word. Our trips to the weight training facility “prepared” me to interact physically with weight machines, but didn’t prepare me to address my most immediate athletic concern—improving my atrocious jump shot. Instead of motivating me to squeeze as many repetitions as I could out of the 90 seconds we had at each station, Coach’s glowering, punitive presence actually made me want to do less.

Similarly, school taught me how to write a standard five paragraph essay using a bare minimum amount of thought and time to achieve a satisfactory grade. Essays seemed less about discovery than recitation, and that wasn't of much interest to me. Grades were held over our heads to motivate us towards success, but too many times this was articulated as “not failing”. There was little inquiry about our own academic goals, beyond college, and we were rarely asked to synthesize what we learned in readings or in class to other areas of our education or lives. The experience was not much different than a visit to the "weight training facility" where you worked a single muscle with no thought towards coordinating those tissues towards flexible movement.

I realize that education is primarily a personal endeavor. Every student has to demand to be educated in order for anything to happen. And I’m not saying I learned nothing in school; I just wish they had expected and required more of me as a writer and a reader. With the focus on easily digestible bits of information, I think I got lost in the tedium of repetitive motion exercises. I wanted to write things that would change and engage the world, but I don’t feel like I was challenged to do that. So I was “prepared,” but just not in the way I needed.

I think about this a lot now that I am the keeper of Coach’s proverbial “whistle.” My high school students work on five-paragraph essays: five reps of hooks, two sets of contextualizing statements, three concrete detail crunches, and 60 seconds on the commentary sentence step machine. The mastery of these elements is important because they set the foundation for good writing and thinking. But the reality is that I’m also having them work on them because that’s what’s going to be on the test that’s going to be used to gauge how “educated” they are.

Tests have their place, but the danger is that this type of learning becomes rote if it consumes the entire learning experience of the student. It's also dangerous because it's easy to assess whether or not a kid knows how to write a standard thesis statement. It's much more difficult to assess whether a student can think for themselves and create something new. In a test-heavy environment, sometimes the learning that can be easily assessed is the learning that gets emphasized the most. (Coach could read the newspaper as long as he heard the squeaks of the metal equipment.) The English teachers I remember most fondly are those who were not concerned with just the recitation of knowledge, but how this knowledge might profoundly effect what I wanted to do with my life.

Kids need to master content and skills in order to be good writers, but if we never make a connection between a student’s interests and how what we’re learning can aid their pursuit of that interest, we can blow as hard as we want on our whistles; no one will be listening.

Some people will...

2010-03-17T22:34:00.000-05:00

...do thangs, do thangs, bad thangs with it.

This song is so funky that no matter what the time or occasion, it's always appropriate.

Misstra Knowitall's philosophy of technology education

2010-03-13T00:01:00.000-06:00

A thought:

Merely, putting a pencil in a child’s hand does not teach writing. You have to begin with basic skills: how to hold a pencil, how to write within the margins of a lined sheet, how to erase mistakes, etc. Next, a child needs to learn how to interpret and shape the language they will use to record their thoughts. Grammar, syntax, metaphor, structure, etc. During this instruction, a child must learn the power of words; their role as vehicles for ideas; their potential to both liberate and tyrannize. That is writing instruction that will allow students to more clearly understand the world around them and articulate their understandings of that world.

If this is true, then why is it so often that we feel we are doing enough for our students by shoving computers underneath their noses without giving them a clear understanding of what they can, and should, do with the enormous power at their fingertips?

Needless to say, as our society becomes increasingly integrated with technology, students need to have a greater level of understanding about the technology that surrounds them and how it affects them as scholars, and more importantly, as people. Without these types of understandings, we are setting up our children to be mere consumers of technology (and culture), instead of producers.

As technology advances, people are required to use less and less of their brain cells. Calculators make the ability to add redundant. GPS systems make it even irrelevant to know where you are in the world.

Although students have access to more information than any previous generation, their ability to analyze and understand this information is not keeping pace. This raises a number of concerns, but one of the most important is the role it has in the diminishment of our students’ curiosity. Without an analytic filter to parse the useful from the useless, students are drowning under a tsunami of information that taxes their curiosity and makes them apathetic to learning. What’s the point in learning something new when you can just look it up on the internet?

It behooves us to help students understand how they can use technology to manipulate the world around them, but also how that technology can be used to manipulate their understandings of themselves.

Ron Banks and the Fabulous Dramatics

2010-03-10T22:45:00.000-06:00

You know you're too busy when you miss the death of the lead singer of The Dramatics and you don't even hear about until a week later. Ron Banks died of a heart attack on March 4th. The Dramatics were one of the funkiest soul groups of their era. "What You See is What You Get" is up there with almost anything that the Stylistics or Temptations put out. And check those moves.

Some of you may be more familiar with their work in one of the greatest (ignant) video/songs in hip-hop history. The Dramatics sweet smooth touch was a perfect accompaniment to Dr. Dre's rumbling bass and Snoop's drawling vocals.

The Mystery of Chessboxing (Lego)

2010-02-22T21:35:00.000-06:00

Perfectly captures an average Monday on my job.

The Best and the Brightest

2010-02-20T04:20:00.000-06:00

Tiger offered a humble apology to everybody: his mama, his wife, his kids, his corporate sponsors (!), his non-profit foundation, his fans. But what about the real victims in all of this? Light skinned brothers

For those of you new to the program, I have been documenting the comeback of light skinned brothers for some time now. Back in 1997, Pierre prophetically predicted our re-ascension in "How To Be A Player," and the 2000s have been heady times for those of us who ace our paper bag tests. We were down for so long during the "Wesley era," where a "darker the berry" ethos made tan skin on a brother less popular than a ham sandwich at a Saviours' Day convention.

NeObama, Cory Booker, Harold Ford...heck, even Drake. Quietly, we've been turning back the clock to the DeBarge era. And it's all because of Tiger. His ability to hit a little white ball across a golf course, better than anyone in history, opened the door for us. We smiled as everyone talked about how he advanced the plight of Black people, but WE knew who was really going to benefit from it. And indeed we have.

Who you calling pretty pretty princess?

But lately, there's been a little trouble. NeO is less popular than ever. Cory's got trouble. Harold Ford is, well, Harold Ford. Drake got played to the left by Sade. And then there's Tiger.

Over the years he has been a steady producer for the cause. He showed how a light skinned brother could leverage double and triple consciousness into a formula for success and make billions. Instead of light skin weakness just being a foil for dark skin strength (think Barkley vs. Jordan), he was kicking ass and staring folks down with a bright boy swagger.

Ahhh...that's a familiar fit.

There's been the occasional hiccup, of course. We grimaced when we heard about the whole Cablinasian thing. It reeked of Tragic Mulatto and sounded dumb enough that even White people felt comfortable making jokes about it.

~~Cablinasian~~ Bruce Leroy

There is also a stereotype that light skinned brothers have a problem with Black women, so we would have preferred that he find a wife that was a little less...well...Nordic. But of course we'll be the last ones to talk down on interracial marriage. We secretly realize that no matter who we're with, our marriages are all going to be "interracial."

But the last three months have been trying times for our people. Cheating on his wife was bad enough, but with cocktail waitresses, porn stars and strippers? You are one of the most powerful men on the planet, and that's the best you could come up with? Lord knows that Black folks are willing to forgive the infidelities and sexual deviance of their male public figures [see: Michael (any of them), R. Kelly, MLK (sorry, true), Jessie, etc.] but it gets a whole lot more complicated when his taste in women is so, forgive me, White and skanky.

Now every time a light skinned brother tries to talk to a Black woman, a Tiger resemblance is a liability.

You gotsta step you're game up, player!

But we haven't given up hope on you, Tiger. You've got a couple of things going for you still. No matter how much your competition runs their mouth about you "disrespecting the game," they are all still trembling. You're lucky enough to be playing in a sport where a player's "prime" can last for two decades, so when you come back and hit that ball long enough, this thing will blow over. Golf is still a White man's game and that's who pays your bills. He doesn't really care about the infidelity thing. The White woman thing is an irritant, but the rule is that you're just not supposed to flaunt it like that.

Word.

So, it's okay that you didn't apologize, Tiger. We'll be alright, just make sure to put on a couple more green jackets. Give it some time and NeO will be able to return your calls again (Michelle still checks the Blackberry).

And our revolution will continue. Besides, you know the gods are with us when Vin Diesel is still getting work.

The KKK Member

2010-02-15T16:55:00.000-06:00

So, John Mayer says his privates are racist, but his heart isn't. Wow, that's a new perspective for a White man. About this I have several thoughts.

1. The news media was tripping over itself to get the perspective of Black women on this issue (that's right, clean it up Holly Robinson Peete), but what about White women? If we extend (ahem) Mayer's KKK metaphor into the broader historical context, we see that the rallying cry for White supremacists has long been the preservation of White female purity. However, the subtext of this "purity" has always been control of the White female body. White supremacists want their woman on a high pedestal so they knows where she is at all times and can control what she's doing. Mayer was not only insulting Black women, he was checking White women to let them know that his "c***" was an instrument of domination. Message: Your body is a wonderland, so stay in your lane. Read the whole interview if you have any doubts.

So many times we understand race as just an issue that effects Black people, but it's tied into a complex set of systems of domination (also involving class and gender) that touch everyone's lives. It's more than just a Blackthang.

2. I'm usually against the whole punitive iPod purging that some people advocate after an artist does or says something despicable (see: Chris Brown). To me it smacks of digital book burning, and in this evanescent age, I can't help wonder how quickly and easily a voice might disappear forever if we all decided that it was too "wrong" to be heard. Plus, most of my favorite artists, from James Brown to Michael Jackson to Amy Winehouse (!) to Marvin Gaye, were either unsavory, or half-crazed, or both. Funk stinks sometimes, by the way.

Funky, without a doubt

3. So, I won't be deleting Mayer from my iTunes, but after listening to some of his music again, I have to say it makes me pretty disappointed. My favorite song of his "Daughters," talks about the impact that a fathers can have on the type of relationships a woman has later on. It's a really wise, sweet song. I always thought of it as a nice (almost feminist) take on the importance of valuing women. But now, not so much.

4. My father warned me about you, John Mayer.

Scene: Driving in my car with my wife in the passenger seat and my father in the backseat. We have just come back from dinner. My dad, Doctra Knowitall, gives me a look in the rearview mirror when John Mayer comes on. I ignore it.

"Uhh...I don't really like that dude," he says, undeterred.

I could feel myself stiffen, becoming defensive. I want to remind him that no one asked him. "Why you don't like him?" I said, trying to remain casual.

"I don't know, something about him..."

I could feel him nodding a doctor's prognosis: terminal whiteboy.

"Well, he's got some good songs," I said finally. My car, my stereo. So: there.

I cringe at the memory, but I know there are a lot of innocent Black men out there, just like me. Kanye, Jay-Z, Dave Chapelle, they all let you borrow their "nigger" pass (as you say). And look what you did, John. Usually I'm pretty good about not being taken advantage of Jazz Singers such as yourself. I NEVER liked Vanilla Ice or his dumbass song. I KNEW Justin Timberlake was a phony long before he talked mess about Prince and threw Janet (and her piercings) under the bus. Now, I feel like such a fool.

After the State of the Union address, Chris Matthews said that Obama's speech was so good that Matthews had forgotten he was a Negro. People got upset, but I know just how he felt. That's how I used to think of you, John. You sung good enough that I almost forgot you were a Cracketycracker. Almost.

5. The dumbass comments came up within the context of a remark about Mayer talking about people saying he has a "hood" pass because he sings "bluesish" music and has been on a couple of hip hop albums. He made an interesting observation about how the term "hood" is really just a stand in for the word nigger. That's a good point, but he also went out of his way to say the actual "N" word. He had to know that the use of the word would take away from the intent of what he was saying, especially in our soundbyte culture.

But I tend to think it wasn't about questioning how society uses new words for old concepts. No, I think he was trying to be "edgy" by demonstrating that you are so post-racial that you could actually make it cool to be a racist. Just because double-consciousness is something new to you, that doesn't mean that your racial deconstructionist navel gazing is profound. In the words of Jay-Z, "we don't believe you, you need more people."

6. As I was brainstorming a list of White artists with "hood passes," I couldn't avoid the most obvious choice: Eminem. In some ways Eminem is a whole lot smarter than Mayer because he knows that there are some topics within the genre that are off limits to him. He learned long ago that he could not say the "N" word, and that all of the women that he raped and killed in his lyrics would have to remain White, no matter how many records he sold. (Mariah Carey was about as close as he could get, and even ended up taking an L on that when she made a hit song at his expense)

Don't make Nick take it to the streets.

Although Mayer may have been stupid for running his mouth, I appreciate his willingness to take a risk. One of the things that has stunted Eminem's growth as an artist over the last decade has been his timidity. He talks big about being able to say whatever he wants, but he stays securely in his lane. He is the crazy White boy with lethal lyrics, but he talks about nothing and beefs with whomever he sees on MTV that can't fight back. He sells millions of records and is acclaimed as a genius, but still plays the role of the crucified (ax-murdering) savior. He talks about real hip hop, but supports one of the biggest underachieving, sellout musicians of all time: 50 Cent.

Yeah. Definitely...definitely...definitely going to sell a million records. Definitely. Yeah.

I give Eminem credit for being one of the first major artists to question President Bush after 9/11 when he released "Square Dance" in 2002, but it seems like after the re-election in 2004, he gave up. If Eminem really wanted to do something as an artist, he would have to step out of his lane and examine himself in a different way. He's smart enough to recognize White privilege. He has seen first hand the psychotic cycle of violence that robs so many young Black men, like his childhood friend Proof, of their lives. He has seen corporatism rob hip hop of its heart (he was actually an accessory to this robbery). He's got stuff to talk about.

But it's not just about making political or social statements in the music. I want an artist to level with me; show vulnerability in a way that is not necessarily cool or accepted. Take a risk. I promise I won't delete you from my iPod.

7. Something about my last comment seemed a little too safe, on second thought. It's easy to wag your finger at someone who has a complete body of music and say they haven't done enough. As artists, don't we all constantly fight that battle of wanting to be loved ($), versus telling a "truth," that can often seem so illusory or crazy or wrong?

But I guess that's what's required to make art that is truly great. And that's also why it's easier to talk about then do.

8. The Mayer interview is worth reading. I disagree with those that say he needs to shut up completely just because what he said was offensive. He has some (interesting/smart/stupid) things to say about fame, love, race, and even (gasp!) masturbation.

You better tell your story fast...

2010-01-25T00:09:00.000-06:00

Junot Diaz had an interesting article in the New Yorker about the lack of narrative in the year long presidency of President NeObama. Diaz argues that NeO has not been able to frame his legislative efforts inside a greater narrative of his presidency. Diaz cites the rethugs' use of 9/11 as a masterful example of how narrative can be used to drive policy.

To this, I have a few things to say:

1. The first year of the NeO presidency reminds me of how I felt after I watched the sequel to the Matrix: slightly disappointed. The Matrix ends with Neo ascending to a seemingly infinite level of power. He tells us that he is going to get rid of all the rules and boundaries. He crosses from the Rubicon of potential and (literally) flown into the realm of actualization. It might sound corny, but the first movie left me wondering if some large part of myself had not been just changed by what I had seen on the screen. Maybe everything was different now.

And then came the sequel. I've written extensively about the dreaded White Dreads from Reloaded, but let's just say that no matter what happened in the second movie, we were bound to be disappointed. The election of Scott Brown was my White Dread moment.

No, we don't use gel!

2. Diaz makes a good point about the importance of narrative in a presidency, but he doesn't recognize the genre that NeO is "writing" in. We are talking about the story of the Presidency of the United States here. Don't get it twisted, this is a Western. The main character has always been a White man. This particular White man has always had to bust his guns. The vast majority of the bullets have been caught by colored folk (whether they be Injuns or Hajis or Charlies or run-of-the-mill-Negroes) in the interest of "settling the land."

What? That's what I thought.

Bush and the Rethugs rode that narrative so well because they were traveling a well worn path that everyone could understand. On 9/11, once again the White man was under attack and answered the call, reluctantly, of course, to save the day. (The story got a little old near the end there, especially when it became blatantly clear that the rethugs were more apt to blast their friends in the face than smoke out and round up the offending redskins.)

That's why the Tea Partiers have it so easy. Hell, all they had to do was watch the first twenty minutes of Birth of a Nation to figure out their political platform.

Well, we don't care what Senator Brown said in his speech. His daughters are NOT available.

But there's no question about NeO's writing ability. On the campaign, he constructed one of the greatest political narratives the world has ever seen. He reached out as a beacon of redemption for an entire nation. If our country could put centuries of prejudice and hatred aside and take a leap of faith for this brilliant, special man (and his family), than maybe there could be hope that the vision of America we always here about could be real for all of its citizens. And if NeO had been able to fly into the clouds on inauguration day (high, high over Aretha Franklin's hat), that would have been the perfect ending of that story. But that's not what happened.

What's happened is that NeO is in the midst of about ten different narratives, from overt and covert wars on multiple continents, to health care, to immigration, to economic disaster, to natural disaster, to an education system in turmoil, to Scott Baio (!) trying to clown his woman. Trying to unite all of these these narratives within a single overarching structure is something that would even make Dickens shake his head. It also doesn't help that in the traditional POTUS western NeO would be the one wearing the feathers, shaking a tom-tom. Western's are all about the domination of the Other, and in order for NeO to be successful against his opposition, he's got to rally White support against the an Other that is White. That's complicated.

For real? Charles in Charge. Do you really want it? Because we can make it happen for you.

3. But in the end, I think Diaz is right. NeO has made some decisions, like state secrets, like the bank (giveaway) bailout, like escalation in Afghanistan, like the expansion of executive power, that cause me considerable pause. One of my favorite professors, Alexs Pate, used to always talk about the importance of discovering the "goodness" of a character. Goodness doesn't necessarily mean that the character is good, but that you have a firm grasp on the motivations behind their actions. They are consistent with who they are, even if that consistency makes you shudder. Dick Cheney may be many things, but his goodness is not difficult to grasp, though his narrative may be shallow. He is a satisfying villain because you know what he is going to do: evil. NeO, on the other hand, is harder to get a sense of because so many of the things that he has done, or not done, have gone against my understanding of who he is a character. Not that I've given up on him by any measure, but he's getting a lot more complicated than I imagined.

You just had to put on the black hat, right?

4. My hope for NeO, which I guess is the hope I have for all of us, is that he take the risk to evade the Western genre. It doesn't matter if you put Tyreese Gibson in the starring role, the Western is about domination. To regain the confidence of the American people in his POTUS narrative, some will advise that he needs to dominate, he needs to start collecting some scalps. Historically, during similar ebbs in popularity these scalps have been "scalps of color". (See: Clinton, Bill; Bush, W. George; Bush, George H.W.; et cetera)

Although I give NeO mixed reviews so far, I hope he has the courage to resist the trappings of the genre and take a stand that's principled, even if it costs him a sequel.

The Brother From Another Planet

2010-01-08T20:54:00.000-06:00

Say what you will about President NeObama, he has given us the gift of some amazing iconography.

Don Belton: Truth teller

2010-01-01T02:23:00.000-06:00

I first met Don Belton when he visited Bloomington to apply for the professor's job at Indiana University in 2008. I got to sit in on a dinner with some faculty members and I was immediately struck by the man's warmth and intelligence. You could tell this was a brother who had not only read and written extensively, but also had the life experience to inform his work and teaching. This was a wise, caring person.

He also had that James Baldwin aura about him: he was a truth teller.

On December 27th, Don Belton was brutally murdered in his home. Police later found a journal entry Belton wrote about a man named Michael, and how happy Belton was about their relationship. This lead police to Michael Griffin, a 25 year old former Marine. Griffin quickly confessed, but portrayed the murder as a revenge killing. Griffin, who served a tour of duty in Iraq, claimed that the 53 year old novelist was able to sexually assault him, not once, but twice, on Christmas day.

With all due respect to the judicial process and the rights of the accused, this is, of course, the worst kind of fiction.

Griffin, who has a girlfriend and a two year old son, says that he came to Belton's home seeking something. He says it was an apology, but maybe it was an absolution, or an answer to why what happened between them happened on Christmas. Whatever he found with Belton in that house left him disturbed enough to stab this man, this loving man, to death.

Describing Belton as a loving man, I think of Baldwin. He once said, "love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within." According to Baldwin this love principle requires us to remove our masks and come to grips with the truth of what lies underneath. This principle also obligates us to share this truth with those that we share our love with, even when it painfully unfastens the masks they hold. The consequences of this truth telling are often great, and it takes a person of great bravery and integrity to uphold this standard. I'm not sure what happened between the two men, but it seems that Belton's faithful adherence to this love principle is what cost him his life.

He will be sorely missed.

A candle light vigil is planned at IU from 5-6pm. Friends of Don have set up an excellent blog dedicated to memorializing Belton and bringing his killer to justice.

***Update after the trial

Tell me you're going to be...

2009-11-28T00:31:00.000-06:00

Hopefully you're in the midst of people you love. My wife and I bought a house a few months ago and lately I've been thinking a lot about the nature of houses and homes. A lot about being thankful.

It's amazing to see Luther so self-assured, so powerful. Dude could sing.

The Way Mulattas Make Me Feel

2009-10-30T18:35:00.000-05:00

After reading all of these good reviews about the new Michael Jackson movie, I think I'm going to jump over the cliff like the rest of the lemmings and go see it. I wrote a post about MJ's iconic Black or White video a couple months back and that lead one of my old IR compadres Hannah Notess to ask me to write something for the journal she's at, The Other Journal.

I always tripped off the video for Michael's "The Way You Make Me Feel" because it's such a sweet song, but such a strange video (which is often the case with Mike). Basically, it's off the BAD album and it's Michael's version of an NWA video. (As a matter of fact, I think the video's female lead went on to even greater success in Dr. Dre's "Ain't Nothing But A G-Thang" where she got 40ozs of St. Ides dumped on her head.) Anyway, the piece is called The Way Mulattas Make Me Feel. You can check it out here.

Max = Not Marriage Material

2009-10-18T02:22:00.000-05:00

When I was in kindergarten my dad taught me how to feed insects to ants. In the backyard of our house we squatted down, looking for bugs and swarming ant's nests. If you found the right size bug and the right location in an ant's nest, you'd have a show that beat anything on Wild Kingdom. Years later, my parents divorced and I spent a lot of time turning over stones in the dry brush of our backyard, "playing" with bugs by myself.

Thinking back on it, I'm a little shocked at the cruelty of the pastime. I like to think of myself as a compassionate person. Torturing bugs is the recreation of sociopaths, after all. But my regret is tempered by an appreciation for how I was battling my own loneliness and trying to assert some control over a world that seemed so far beyond me.

And it's also true that you end up doing a lot of (strange!) mean stuff when you're a kid.

So, watching Where the Wild Things Are, I felt partially transported back to that backyard, with it's rough stones and soft dirt, and solitary malice. Spike Jonze's beautiful adaptation of the Maurice Sendak story is picture-perfect in creating a world that is somber, hopeful, cruel, weird, melancholy, menacing, and joyful. The experience is similar to one of those strange dreams where you're know you're sleeping, but the dream world seems real anyway.

But I was not Max. Although I missed my mom and dad because they worked so much, in the movie Max's father is absent. It's never explained, but the sadness that hangs over the family suggests that the absence is permanent. My dad was still there to show me how to hit a baseball or play chess or drive a stick shift.

Plus, I never tweaked on my mom like Max does in the movie. He jumps on a kitchen counter, in full wolf costume, yelling at his mom to "make my dinner, woman," (even though she's got company and it's obvious she's trying to get her groove back.) He later takes a bite out of her shoulder and runs off like a wild animal. My mother is a kind woman, but I was smart enough to know that the consequences for that kind of behavior would be unspeakable.

And quick word of advice for all the single ladies out there trying to get someone to put a ring on it: if you find a wolf costume, with a pointy crown, in the closet of the man you are dating, keep stepping. As much as I like Where the Wild Things Are, it might as well be called Portrait of a Woman Batterer as a Young Man.

One of my quibbles with the movie is that I wasn't clear how the movie wanted me to feel about Max's cruelty to his mother. Early on we get that she cares a lot for him and is sacrificing for her son. (The scene with him dictating a story to her to make her feel better was a very "writerly" moment by the way. Word to Dave Eggers.) But then we see there's some new guy in the house who looks kind of wormy and mom is giggling with him and they're popping bottles. When Max comes through looking for some loving attention, all he gets is frozen corn. Although we empathize with the mother (even mama should get to swerve), the scene sets the stage for a justification of Max's crazy behavior.

Later, one of the movie's most touching moments is also one of its most troubling. When Max returns home, his mom doesn't say anything. I thought she might at least shake the teeth out his head, and then give him a hug, but no. From her reaction, I thought she was going to apologize for hurting his teeth with her skin. And despite his incredible and harrowing journey with the Wild Things that taught him about empathy and family and love, he doesn't have much to say to his mom when he gets home. No Sorry about that. No My bad. No My fault. No See what had happened was...

As a matter of fact, the main lesson he learns is that if he wants a home-cooked meal all he has to do is go missing for a couple hours. He gets all of mom's attention (no swerve for her!) and a fat piece of chocolate cake. The grin on his face as his mother falls asleep from exhaustion is not chastened with regret, but emboldened by self-satisfaction. That doesn't seem like a good sign.

Despite these quibbles, the movie is amazing. Visually it's stunning, but the characterization of the Wild Things is even more so. In fact, I haven't had this much fun since the great stink beetle/ant hill battle of 1988.

Nobel Swagger

2009-10-10T00:05:00.000-05:00

So what if he hasn't earned it yet. Your president has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Pop some bottles and stop all that vacillating, b*****s!

But seriously, the Nobel thing does seem a bit ill-timed. Obama's got a major decision to make about troop deployments in Afghanistan. Everyone knows the war is a losing proposition that is going to cost America more blood and treasure. But if they withdraw, the Taliban is going to be back to their old tricks, stoning women and planning terrorist attacks. Either way, NeO is going to get the blame.

And that's what makes the Nobel thing a little confusing. Ideologically, NeO seems to be a world apart from Bush, but on policy, whether it's Guantanamo, state secrets, privacy concerns, Iraq, corporate bailouts, etc, they are closer than I would have ever have imagined. I think part of this has to do with the ingrained corporate power structure that controls the presidency, but part of it has to do with Obama.

Accolades aside, NeO will be judged on his ability to step back from the Rubicon that has already been crossed by Bush (and Clinton). He has to pull back the power of the executive branch if that Nobel prize is going to mean anything because an unchecked Executive branch means war, war, and more war.

You may have guessed...

2009-08-24T23:35:00.000-05:00

School started, y'all. Your homie is staying funky, but I gotsta get ready for these chilruns. In honor of the season:

Get it? They're bears.

Rick James & The Mynah Birds

2009-08-10T23:03:00.000-05:00

Did you know that Rick James and Neil Young were in a band together back in 1965, long before the days of Super Freak? Strange, but true. The Mynah Birds featured James as frontman and Neil Young and Bruce Palmer on guitar. Apparently Rick was in love with Mick Jagger's sound, which is ironic because Mick was in love with Muddy Waters' sound. If you're keeping score at home, that's a Black man imitating a White man, imitating another Black man. Funk's got some serious layers (word to Margo Crawford.)

The Mynah Birds recorded a bunch of songs and were signed to Motown (don't forget that Rick's uncle was the Tempts' Melvin Franklin). But the album was never released because Rick had actually gone AWOL from the Navy and was on the run in Toronto when he started the band. Rick did a year in the brig, Motown shelved the album, and the Mynah Birds got their wings clipped. But listening to the songs, "It's My Time," and "I've Got You in My Soul," you can't help but wonder what might have been.

You can read about the whole sordid affair in this article on Spinner.

Rock Sex rocks!

2009-08-07T06:55:00.000-05:00

It's Friday, so you should do yourself a favor and check out Rock Sex, a blog I stumbled on that charts the connections between blues, funk, rock, soul, and whatnot. Basically, it tracks how songs get adapted by different artists across different genres and features a lot of cool music so you can hear the similarities yourself. Instead of grumbling about how an artist has "stolen" a song from someone else (although the Beach Boys robbed Chuck Berry!), the site takes an enlightened approach. According to author Tym Stevens:

"Rock'n'Soul music is a baton relayed by everyone. ROCK SEX is about all of the creative connections that link our shared culture together."

A good place to start is Al Green's Take Me to the Water, which is a personal favorite of mine. Stevens shows how Bryan Ferry and the Talking Heads both made derivations of that excellent soul cut.

But you also got to check out how he tracks the development of "Tainted Love." I'm used to the Soft Cell Version, but I did not know that Gloria Jones recorded the Soul version first. Cool stuff.

Where everybody knows your name...

2009-07-31T01:14:00.000-05:00

I'm working on a Cheers metaphor for Obama Beer Summit 2009 (of course Cheers didn't have any major Black characters, so that makes this difficult).

Sorry, Nick Tortelli doesn't count.

Well, they did make it a little easier by adding Joe Biden to the meeting, who makes a perfect Ernie "Coach" Pantusso.

Hey, let me tell you about those dumbass russians...

And Henry Louis Gates would be the natural choice as Frasier. A somewhat snooty academic who when agitated exhibits loud and tulmultous behavior.

IS IT BECAUSE I'M A BLACK MAN IN AMERICA?

Sgt. James Crowley, dedicated public servant, would be a great Cliff Claven.

Hey Woody, Did I ever tell you about the time I kicked down Cornell West's door...?

And I guess Obama, the lady-killer ex-jock serving up the brews at the White House would be a natural Sam Malone.

uhh...nevermind

Well, inapproriate Cheers allusions aside, I think we can all breathe a sigh of relief that our country survived this crisis and that Sgt. Crowley didn't have to take the two rogue Negroes into custody.

Don't forget to save a little Blue Moon for the dead homies...

All jokes aside, you have to commend NeObama for his sense of political theatre. He stepped in it last week, but he wiped his shoe off and kept striding.

Obama in Ghana

2009-07-27T11:34:00.000-05:00

Wow.

Talking Points Memo posted new pictures from Obama's Ghana trip. Do yourself a favor and have a look.

Uhhh, Awkward!

2009-07-23T23:07:00.000-05:00

I'm not going to spend a lot of time telling you how I felt about the way Henry Louis Gates was treated by the police. (Let's just say that I immediately adjusted my Facebook status to reflect my outrage.) However, I do have to make a confession: I think that may have been an inopportune moment for our first Negro president to invite himself into (White) America's homes and call the police stupid.

I know that we need to stand in solidarity behind our leader, especially in his moment of need, particularly when he is defending another brother. I know. I know. I know.

But allow me to make a confession: right now I could really care less about racial profiling. Or what it "means" to be Black in America, as reported by CNN. Or whether X person was hired/fired because he was Black. Or what Reverend Wright said. Or what Reverend Jackson said. Or what Reverend Sharpton said. Or what any other Reverend said.

Sorry, Reverend, I don't have time to discuss Thelma's biological clock

Or what Chris Brown did. Or what Michael did. Or what Michael didn't do. Or the inordinate sentencing of Black males. Or the merits of reparations for centuries of slavery.

Some of these "Black issues" are worth giving attention to, but the only "Black issue" that's important right now is health care.

If you give me the assurance that all Americans will have access to basic health insurance (and maybe even throw in equal access to education), then you can keep reparations. Even if the government gave us money for slavery, Black people would be spending most of their reparation checks on going to the doctor for diabetes, heart disease, HIV, etc.

If we're going to have a "national conversation" right now, it shouldn't be about whether Black professors should be arrested for loud tawkin' a White man. Of course they shouldn't but I'm sure even Mr. Gates would agree that his case is only really important within the context of a broader conversation about the way Black males are treated in society. The most troubling thought for me is how many brothers have been caught in similar situations and ended up jailed, beaten, and even worse.

Mr. Gates, please step away from the tricycle

But we can't have that conversation right now. This isn't the moment. There's too many things going on for us to start having Obama become Black before White people's eyes. That was one of his main appeals, kind of like Will Smith, he has the power to make White people comfortable, even while he is displaying his strength. But he's got to be careful. I wasn't trying to hate when I said that he is destined to be deeply unpopular at some point during his presidency. It's bound to happen, but what really matters is how he acts when the heat really gets turned up. That will be his crucible.

But I still believe in him like it's nobody's business. I admire his brilliance and his ability to keep an open heart, even if it makes him vulnerable at times. The difference between him and his predecessor is that Dubya was never made to feel ashamed for being a White man. He wore his cowboy boots and his smirk and his flight suit and ran his mouth whenever he saw fit. When he declared his Whiteness to the world, it was called patriotism.

Laura Bush thought bubble: Put that down and act like you got some sense.

Obama's showing us how to do this thing, this thing that has never ever ever ever ever been done, but this was a misstep.

I know we were in dangerous water when he joked about getting shot by White House security. Basically the humor of the joke is based in the idea that the security apparatus that is designed to protect White power is so entrenched that it would sacrifice the life of it's own Black president to preserve its symbols of White power. What kind of thing is that to lay on people? That's too heavy. Although there were a lot of criticism you could make about Dubya, that's one thing he did: keep it short (and stupid.)

Caption unnecessary

I'm not suggesting that Obama dumb down his message, but on Wednesday I got the sense that he was feeling pretty frustrated. Like he was tired of hearing about wise latina judges and overweight Black women Surgeon Generals and White men talking about they were going to "break" him. And he did what a whole lot of brothers would have done a long time ago: let 'em know.

I definitely understand the sentiment, but we can't allow anyone to take their off the ball now. Our people need health care. Now.

*****But, if we're going to have a "national conversation," let's hear what Mr. James has to say:

Indiana Review 31.1

2009-07-22T15:20:00.000-05:00

One of the unfortunate side effects of teaching this past year was that although I was teaching literature, I hardly got a chance to read literature (let alone write literature, but that's another story.)

Where the magic happens

That was a big change for me, coming from being editor at Indiana Review where I was constantly reading good (and not so good) fiction and poetry. We published two issues a year, but read constantly to find the best material. There was a lot of reading, a lot of meeting, and a lot editing, but the product was always so rewarding.

The Last (Fiction Meeting) Supper, 2007

Anyway, I recently got some time to sit down and read through the latest issue of IR, and although it made me a little misty-eyed to see my name not featured in the masthead, the material inside reminded me how excellent an institution IR remains.

Shelly Oria's story, "New York 1, Tel Aviv 0" is a gut punch of love story about a unrequited love in a three-way romance. It evokes the landscapes of both New York and Tel Aviv, while giving us a narrator whose voice is surprising and consistently engaging.

"When you smell another man on one of the women you love, you suggest we all hop in the shower; you say you feel sticky. When the same woman says, But I don't feel sticky, you say, Do it for me then, in a way that tells her a shower is easier than a conversation."

It's enough to make me miss the 1st reader box.

Melanie Rae Thon's story, "Seven Times Seven" is another piece that kept me turning pages. A fractured narrative about an uncle returning from war, still struggling with the voices of ghosts and monkeys and birds. Written in second person, Thon does an amazing job of juggling both her poetic and narrative instincts that allows us to both enjoy her language play and the story she's telling. Beautiful piece.

On the poetry side, Traci Brimhall's "Aubade in Which the Bats Tried to Warn Me," stands out. What a strange subject: a lover who beats bats with rackets for fun. But the piece has such a sense of lyricism and danger that you can't look away, even if you wanted to.

"How your father paid you to kill bats, a dollar a body/Last summer you let me watch./As you waited with a racket, timber wolves announced/ the moon, bats crept out of the attic. /The soft pulp of their bodies struck the house."

My thought: Dannnnnnnnnnng!

The non-fiction in the issue also nicely pushes the "typical" aesthetic for the genre, two of three pieces (Daniel Nester's "Cousin Mike: A Memoir" and Ander Monson's "The Essay Vanishes") offer engaging experiments with both structure and the interplay of the visual and literary.

I haven't finished with the issue, but I wanted to write something before I didn't get a chance (school starts soon. Ahhhhh!). If you're looking for some awesome late summer reading, go to the IR website and cop the new issue.

***Actually, it looks like you can score a free copy of the issue if you can answer a little Richard Pryor-related trivia.

Everything is Everything: Mitchell Douglas' Cooling Board (Part II)

2009-07-21T14:04:00.000-05:00

Mitchell Douglas has a new poetry collection out, Cooling Board. It's dope. Go buy it. This is the second part of our interview...

What's your favorite Hathaway cut?

That’s a toss up. It’s a tie between “Thank You Master (For My Soul)” and “For All We Know.” The former is on his first album Everything is Everything, the latter is on Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway. “Thank You Master” gave me the title for the book. There’s a moment in the song that feels totally ad-libbed when he starts testifying with the familiar phrase “My bed was not my cooling board, my sheet was not my winding sheet.” When the music gets quiet and it’s just Donny on the piano delivering those words, you feel like you’ve witnessed the most private moment in the world. It’s not the kind of thing you can plan.

I'm real fond of "Be Real Black For Me" on that Roberta and Donny album. I think the title is a little corny, but there's a lyric, "Our time, short and precious/Your lips, warm and luscious/You don't have to wear false charms" that kills me every time. The "Thank You..." joint reflects how amazingly Donny could switch from gospel to secular.

What are you working on now?

I’ve got a manuscript of autobiographical family poems called stitch that is on its eighth or ninth life. I started working on that book before Cooling Board and I’ve continued to write new poems and revise it. Every time I think it’s done, I make another major change. We’ll see where it ends. I’ve also got two other projects I can’t say much about right now. Those works, in part, will be a return to persona poetry. One looks at an infamous death in the world of rock’n’roll, the other honors the life of an artist from my hometown, Louisville, KY. Of all these projects, stitch is nearest completion, the others are in early writing and research stages.

Last, but not leastly, where do you poets get all that money from? And how can I be down?

Ha! You know there ain't no money in this!!! When folks start making movies after books of poetry, the world will be a better place (lol).

Mitchell is a low-key brother, and I knew he was going to try and play it cool, but Misstra Knowitall was at Jericho Brown's book release party during AWP and has actual visual evidence of all the dollars these poets are clocking!

From left: Jericho Brown, Mitchell Douglas, and Frank X. Walker

Dang, I got to write me some poems.

**UPDATE:

This picture needs an appropriate caption. Ideas?

40 years ago today...

2009-07-20T15:13:00.000-05:00

Sorry, I couldn't resist. My boy Stephen put me up to it. Gil Scott Heron on vocals. I don't know who put this crazy video together.

Everything is Everything: Mitchell Douglas' Cooling Board (Part I)

2009-07-20T00:29:00.000-05:00

Photo by David Flores (dflo.net)

You couldn't tell Misstra Knowitall I wasn't going to change the whole game up when I first stepped up on that campus in Bloomington, IN. I going for an MFA, but I was going to show them Hoosiers something! I had my scholarship check (nobody told me it had to last all semester) and was about to let them square suckers know what was up! I thought I was too cool! That was, until I met Mitchell Douglas--who taught me what a for-real, smooth-writing-brother looks like.

Douglas' debut collection, Cooling Board, was published recently by Red Hen press. When I read that it was a "long running poem," I have to admit that I (briefly) thought: "Kneegropleeze. No way I'ma sit here and read a whole book of poetry in one sitting."

Next thing I knew: I was sitting there reading a whole book of poetry in one sitting.

Needless to say, it's dope and you need to get it (as in, buy it, not text message Mitchell to see if he's got a copy you can "check out"). It's all about the life of singer Donny Hathaway, a personal fave of mine. It's funky and soulful and beautiful. Just like Mr. Hathaway hisself.

Donny Hathaway - "The Ghetto"

I asked Mitchell some questions. He had some answers.

Taking the leap like you did with this book, investing so much time and creative energy into a collection that surrounds a single figure, must have made you nervous. What makes Donny Hathaway such a compelling figure for you?

My initial idea for the book was to have an entire collection devoted to my musical heroes. The catch was that they were all dead and the poems were a kind of commentary on their lives. The more I thought about it, the more I hated the idea. I stopped thinking about writing Hendrix and Cobain poems and narrowed the focus to Hathaway. The choice was easy because he was the artist I knew the least about. Also, there were plenty of books about the other artists I wanted to write about and none, at that time, about Hathaway. I wanted to give him his due. I did worry about doing Donny justice and writing poems that would capture his spirit , but the more I got into my research and talking to people that knew him, I stopped being afraid.

In your acknowledgments you big up Kevin Young, particularly his long form poetry class at Indiana University. How did the experience in that class inform your approach to Cooling Board?

That class was the start of the book. We had a great reading list: The Spoon River Anthology, Berryman’s The Dream Songs, and a book that opened my eyes for Cooling Board, Langston Hughes’ Montage of Dream Deferred. Kevin explained that Hughes intended the book to be a long poem and we discussed as a class if he succeeded. With each poem as a treatise on a different resident of Harlem, we decided that Hughes’ single focus in many poems/layers constituted a longer poem or narrative. What was also fascinating to me is how he used persona. There was, for example, the Southern dialect in the epistle “Letter” and a voice that could be considered a heightened sense of Hughes’ own in poems like “Harlem” and “Theme for English B.” Hughes taught me how to raise the hollers of many tongues to speak for one cause. We had the option of doing a research paper or turning in our own long poem as a final project. I chose the latter, and turned in 30 or so pages of Cooling Board. This was about four years before the book was published.

One of the things I admire most about this book is the breadth of voices that speak in these pages. I'm really interested in the way you begin by telling Hathaway's story through the voices of all these people who loved him (Miss Martha, Eulaulah, Roberta Flack, Curtis Mayfield), but then it seems like you start to mark his depression by introducing other "uninvited guests" that represent the voices of Hathaway's schizophrenia. What were you trying to achieve with this dynamic?

Donny was who he was because of love. I’m a father, so when I see kids and a parent is telling them to shut up, I wonder what their lives would be like with someone who took the time to say “Hush, baby. It’s time to be quiet.” He was nurtured as a musician early on by his grandmother, Martha Crumwell. Miss Martha had Donny on a stage at revivals playing the ukulele at three (she was known as a strong gospel performer herself). His mother, Drusella Huntley, wanted the best for Donny, so she moved from Chicago to St. Louis to be with her mother (Crumwell). If she hadn’t done that, the world may have never known Donny. So starting the book with the voices of those who loved him, as you note—his grandmother, his mother, his college sweetheart Eulaulah, his college friend Roberta Flack—was a way to show where he came from.

By introducing the “uninvited guests,” and the more frequent appearance of alternate takes, I hoped to disorient the reader and show him/her what living with schizophrenia was like. I think Donny was fiercely independent and, from what I’ve been told by family and friends, he didn’t like to take his medication. There is a published account by a friend that says in his last days, Donny would talk in one voice in the studio and answer himself in another voice. Sometimes, I think I could have added even more of the “uninvited,” but what is there now, I hope, gives everyone a sense of Donny’s struggle.

Donny Hathaway - A song for you

Next...

Everything is Everything (Part II): How do poets get all that money!?

When you play this good you don't need no shirt...

2009-07-16T00:57:00.000-05:00

Chuuch!

See what had happened was...

2009-07-10T12:21:00.000-05:00

Allow me to re-introduce myself...

We should be worrying about whether we're going to get universal health care, but instead we're worried about a photo that (seems to) show President Obama and French Prime Minister Sarkozy, checking out a 17 year old delegate like they were standing outside a corner liquor store. Were they looking? The short answer: yes. The picture captures a moment in time where two men were (sexually?) gratified by the presence of a (young!) woman. However it's worth noting a few things:

1. The picture makes things look worse than they appear. In it, Obama seems to be trailing the sway of the women's booty, stepping up with one leg, bout to holler out "Damn, girl!", but the video tells another story.

In the video you see Obama is already looking in that direction when the young lady walks by and she passes through his line of sight. To be fair, this is actually one of the oldest tricks in the book, when it comes to scoping booty and shows the markings of a true player. (Guys, if you need to deny you know this, please feel free). If you see the booty approaching, you have to plot its trajectory and figure out where it's going to be. Wherever that is, you find something meaningful in that location. Ahh, look at that, I have a piece of fuzz on my shirt... The only thing that gives Obama away is the little pause he gives as she passes. You can see him enjoying the breath he's drawing in a little too much.

I think it's worth mentioning that the picture portrays Sarkozy in a more restrained pose, almost like he finds Obama's enoyment amusing, but the video makes him look much worse. He almost trips over himself trying to look at the young lady. Clearly been hanging out with Weezy and Drake too much. Word to Carla Bruni!

Got to stop hanging with this dude. He bout to get me kilt.

2. But, it's still not a good look for the President. One of his greatest strengths is his wife and this puts her on front street. He can try and plead his case and play the innocent role, but she's still going to go upside his head.

3. Let me just take a moment to thank God that she was not White. Can you imagine what that would have looked like in the news? And ain't it kind of messed up that it would be different?

4. Is this the kind of equality that Sarkozy was suggesting French muslim women are being denied by wearing a burka? And further, what kind of moral argument can Western governments make to the rest of the world when you have so many of our male leaders in emotionally abusive relationships with their wives (I love how South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford told everybody that he had found his soulmate in Argentina, but now he was going to try to "fall back in love" with his wife.) Word to Berlusconi!

5. Barack really has to watch this because there are already so many negative narratives about Black men, especially surrounding sexuality, and I would hate to see him portrayed like that.

What you trying to say?

6. Which leads me to my next point: You got to handle this NeObama. You have helped Black men considerably in the public opinion polls (we haven't seen these kinds of numbers since the Gary Coleman era), but we've noticed an unsettling dip lately. Our agreement was that we wouldn't do anything too stupid in your first three months of office that would make White folks try and impeach you (we even delayed the release of that new Souljahboy album), but you got to keep lifting us up by our bootstraps. White people don't smile as much as they used to when I wear my "Barack the Vote" t-shirt. That's not a good sign.

C'mon, now. Will Smith can't do this alone.

The King of Transcendence

2009-07-07T13:56:00.000-05:00

“I always wanted to be something. I never wanted to be White...I always wanted to be something different, you know, than a nigga, because niggas had it so rough. I tried to be a Black cat with neat hair. I thought that was the problem: the hair. I said "if my hair was straight than whitey will dig me." So I got a process. Wrong.” -Richard Pryor, Live and Smoking

Michael Jackson didn't want to be White, he just didn't want to be Black. That's not to say he was ashamed of his Blackness, necessarily, but he found himself in the place Richard Pryor describes, where a Black man is unable to transcend being "just another nigga." Michael's transformations, of his hair, his skin color, face, weren't attempts to become White, but rather to be "something different," as Pryor said, something that could allow him to transcend the markers that he felt kept people from seeing the real Michael.

Ironically, the real Michael was very funky. Funk, with it's power to subvert dominant paradigms, can't help but be political, and despite the common narrative, so was MJ.

I used to think the music video, “Black or White,” was just about the lamest thing I had ever seen. It seemed like a shallow and naive attempt to address the turmoil of the Rodney King era, especially compared to sonic revolutionaries like Ice Cube, X-Clan, and Public Enemy, it seemed over-produced and yet another attempt by the artist to appeal to White listeners. But watching it again, I see how subversive a statement it makes about race and interraciality. So bear with me as I expose my inner analysis nerd.

The video opens with a young Macauly Culkin, at home jumping on his bed to MJ's music, fantasizing about being a pop star. The stereo is so loud that the little White boy doesn't hear his father (George Wendt) shouting at him downstairs.

(Cultural) Norm!

Pops stomps upstairs and screams at Mac to stop “wasting [his] time with this garbage!” He slams the door, sending a framed glass picture of Jackson shattering to the floor. Mac then faces the camera and gives his million dollar eyebrow wiggle.

You gotta fight for your right to party.

In the next scene, Mac pulls out a guitar, a single black glove, and a pair of dark shades. He pushes two outrageously large speakers into the living room, where his father is watching baseball, and his mother is absorbed in a tabloid newspaper. Mac tells Norm to “eat this,” before strumming an ear-splitting chord that propels his father through the roof of the house, and into deep space. This is all about playing on White patriarchal fears about the influence Black artists might have on the behavior of White children (traditionally on White girls).

It gets even more interesting when Norm lands, in his easy chair, on what looks to be an African savannah, complete with tall brown grasses, a pride of lions, and a tribe of painted Africans. So, not only has Jackson’s music turned White son against White father, it’s also removed the White father from his context of domination and introduced him into a completely foreign (and perhaps dangerous) context (wild Negroes and wild animals).

Damn, Tito, slow down!

Then the video cuts to MJ, leaping from one scene of cultural performance to the next. He dances with Africans, Cambodians, Native Americans, Indians, and Russians. Each time he seamlessly integrates their “traditional” dances in with his own signature steps. The camera then pulls away from MJ, showing that the settings we’ve witnessed are all contained within a small snow globe. The camera pulls back further and we see two diapered babies, one Black, one White, sitting on top of a large model of planet Earth. The White baby grabs the snow globe and the camera swirls around while the White baby seems to keep the toy away from his Black companion. (Message!)

That's my ~~bike~~ globe, punk!

The video then cuts to Jackson dancing through a wall of flame that transforms into a large flaming cross. In just a few scenes and images, Jackson has linked White supremacist ideology to the containment of cultures and peoples. He’s also violently resisted the attempt to control his free movement through interracial spaces by exploding forth from the snow globe and exposing the underlying specter of racial terrorism.

Jackson’s interraciality allows him to adapt the cultural performances of a range of peoples, irrespective of geography and it also allows him to transcend these spaces to make a larger, more significant statement against White supremacy.

Word to Joe Pesci>

Okay, the scene is more than a little ridiculous, but as in the earlier scene, Mac is inhabited by a Black presence and speaks out against traditional racial attitudes. His rhyme suggest that identity should not be based on race, but instead an understanding of a type of geographical heritage (deep). This line is vital to recognizing the significance of MJ’s projection of interraciality. He is no longer rooted to his (majority Black) hometown of Gary, Indiana, but is now able to use his interraciality to move from one location, and corresponding identity, to another, without missing a beat. Like Pryor said, he aspires to be "something different."

The tragedy of Michael was that he never seemed to recover from the knowledge that this kind of transcendence was illusory and no matter how many videos he made or records he sold, Black or White still matters.

The Natural Way to Dro (Part III)

2009-07-05T23:25:00.000-05:00

Funk art pioneer Pedro Bell got his first taste of the Black power movement during an extended visit with family in Florida.

"When I was in sixth grade I stayed with some family in St. Petersburg," he said. "They had separate schools down there, but that allowed them to do some things that you could never get away with in Chicago. They had an Afrocentric curriculum, which I had never seen before."

By the time he enrolled at Bradley University in the late '60s, the Black power movement was in full flower, even in Peoria. "I was just glad the revolution had finally arrived," he said.

On campus, Bell met people like Mark Clark, a Black Panther leader who started a free breakfast program for public school students in Peoria. "Youngblood was real cool with me," Bell said. (Clark was later tragically murdered, along with Illinois chapter president Fred Hampton, by the Chicago police in 1969).

Like many artists of the time, Bell's work began to reflect this Black Power aesthetic. His piece, "Motherhood in Red Black and Green" features a mother and son wearing thick brown Afros and defiant glares, their outlines suggestive of the African continent's shape. The piece was part of Indiana Review's Funk feature and is one of the few Bell still has from that period.

"I lent some artwork to the Black Panthers for an art show they were doing," Bell said, with a laugh. "Later I asked them when I was going to get my shit back and they told me that it "belonged to the people."

That incident, along with Bell's brief participation in a Panther protest that caused his expulsion from Bradley ("I was there holding a sign for five minutes and they got me for perpetrating some shit!"), soured Bell on the running with the Panthers, but he never soured on the Movement itself, particularly the music.

When James Brown dropped Say It Loud (I'm Black and I'm Proud) in 1968, Bell said the whole game changed. To illustrate how much, peep The Godfather's performance on Playboy After Dark.

With it's proto-funk bass line and soul-centric message (We're people/We're just like the birds and the bees/We'd rather die on our feet/Than be livin' on our knees) dropped like an atomic bomb on the consciousness of Black America.
"Some revolutions have happened to the sound of music," he said. "But with that record, James Brown helped make it cool to be Black. That was important."

Before he started working with George Clinton, Bell said his musical education was rounded out by two other legends, B.B. King and Jimi Hendrix.

"I saw Hendrix in May and B.B. in June," he said. "The first time I saw Hendrix, tears started coming down my eyes. Then I went to see B.B. and all these white kids were yelling in the crowd and I had to tell them to shut the fuck up so I could hear him play. And when you think about it, Funkadelic is just Sun Ra + Hendrix + B.B. That's it."

Judge for yourself:

Peep Hendrix on the Dick Cavett show, talking about his Electric Church, which sounds like something right out of the book of P-Funk.

Here's a clip from Sun Ra's 1974 movie Space is the Place. Sun Ra is credited with his jazz innovation, but he is one of the first Funk philosophers.

And then there's B.B. Of course. This footage is taken from the 1974 concert in Zaire, during the Ali/Foreman fight. Thanks to my compatriot Vanessa, who hipped me to the fact that there's a movie coming out about the concert.

***Bonus
I wasn't sure how to work this in, but when I asked Pedro what contemporary stuff he was listening to, the surprise answer: The Stanky Legg. This was surprising because the only way I learned about the Stanky Legg was through my students, who never tired in their conversations about who did the best Stanky Legg, what personal variations they put on it, which teachers could do it (no, I will not do the Stanky Legg, even after you finish your writing prompt!), etc.
"Nice hooks, beats are okay," he said, with a smile. "Lyrics could be better, but I don't expect much."
Without further ado, the soundtrack to my first year of teaching: