There ain't nothing about whitey in here.

On Richard Pryor's birthday:

Misstra Unplugged

In the end, it was my worldstarthiphop consumption that made me realize I had a problem. For those not familiar with the website, it's about the worst thing to happen to the image of Black people in American culture since Homeboys in Outer Space. There are hundreds, thousands of videos of Black people actin ignant. Fights outside of chicken shacks (nay, in chicken shacks!), weaves being seized like dandelion stems, every video seems to end with one Black man in victorious ecstasy while the other Black man (the recipient of violence) in a near paralyzed state. A quitter, is what they call it. The settings change, but not the power these videos hold over me.

I'm not sure how I started being a worldstarfiend, but I noticed that it kept creeping into rotation of websites I checked before I went to bed. Huffpost, talkingpoints, espn, cnnsi. Then worldstar. They started me off with highlights of Blake Griffin yamming on people. (I'm a sucker for Bright Boys who slam like this.)

I'm just about to log off and then the link listed most popular catches my eye. Usually the title is something like, My nigga knocked this nigga out, bleve dat!! In weaker moments, I can't resist. I click and the show begins.

Two bodies jerk at each other, feinting and striking. Back and forth. A misstep, a nervous hesitation, and then one person bashes the head of their opponent. Said opponent submits to the fist of Morpheus and lays prone on the sidewalk, or classroom, or shag carpet.

The clip usually end with an exhilarating shout from the cameraman about how many hits the footage will earn him on worldstar. If he's not too caught up in the moment, the narrator might plug the relevant social media where you can "follow" him. I'm doing big things this year, he assures us.  

But what happens after the violence? Most clips end quickly after the decisive blow. Some allow you to see  the even more brutal scenes that follow someone knocked unconscious. And for some reason you're not really supposed to think about that.

The girl on your screen who gets her hair pulled out and her head bashed against a desk, has no idea that that one of the worst moments of her life will be seen by hundreds of thousands of people. People who will laugh and watch it over and over again, posting comments about how funny it is. And who knows what happened to her? What's happening to her? What's happening to all of these people who are being brutalized on our computer screens for our entertainment?

In that way it has a lot in common with pornography, which is the unspoken engine of the Internet. You don't have to be a psychiatrist to infer that that a large number of people who end up doing pornographic videos are doing so for financial reasons. They're in an machine fueled by the consumption human bodies. The engine goes through thousands a day, so they'll need a thousand more tomorrow. And they will find them, somewhere. And worldstar will find more. People will head to the streets to do battle so they can live for a few flashes on a legion of computer screens.

I would like to be able to say I took a principled stand against technological dehumanization, but my reaction to worldstar also had a more practical reason: watching people act crazy made me think crazy. I noticed that it invaded my psychic space as my brain began to drown in muck. It made me not even want to write.

So this summer I quit, mostly. I Limited my email, reduced my Facebook, and cold turkeyed my worldstar habit. With the extra time I wrote a bunch, read more, and spent time with Missus and Baby Knowitall.  
 
And I didn't stop at worldstar. I realized that espn, talkingpointsmemo, chicagotribune, huffington post, and cnnsi would have to go by the wayside. They were all different in the flavor of information they were giving, but all of them encouraged continued use. All discouraged presence. 

After a couple of weeks, life wasn't that much different. I was actually happy when I wasn't following updates all day. I didn't feel the constant need to log on.

The time with my two ladies made me more aware of how little time we really have. Actually we have no time. The only thing we have is this moment that we're in. That just passed. And passed again. If you're not present, than your wasting my time became my mantra (no Ekhart Tolle).

My biggest help in staying present is my daughter. She's the most present person I know. She cries a storm when I try to put a hat on her, and then a dog passes by and she laughs and claps. We're walking to the corner store together, but really she's not walking somewhere, just walking, enjoying how it feels to stomp the concrete with her pink sneakers. One foot and then the other. Relentlessly present. My hero.

Baby Knowitall

This past week was the first time I've spent significant time away from Baby Knowitall. My wife warned me that I was going to miss her, but I wasn't prepared for the sadness. Happily, Baby and Wifey came back on Saturday. Now, when I see James Brown and his daughter Deanna performing (outfits match!) I don't have to act like I got something in my eye. Sniff.

BTW: I've seen Baby Knowitall exhibit those same  moves to an equally funky cut: Mary Had a Little Lamb.

The Prettiest Pieces

Glint Literary Magazine just published my story, The Prettiest Pieces, in their Spring 2012 issue. Props to Brenda Hammack for giving the story a home!

I've been carrying that piece around for awhile. With the advent of the Internets, where kids can have access to every type of deviant image their little hearts could ever be taught to desire, it's almost quaint to talk about dirty magazines stowed under bed frames. But I had a friend (not me, for real) whose mother caught him with some porn and she reacted in an unexpected way.

It's hard to nail down what any story is "about," but I'm most interested in the changes mothers and sons go through once a boy becomes a young man and that messy stew of race, sex, and gender identity starts to coalesce. I also liked it because I got the 80s pop culture hat trick of Lisa Bonet, ThunderCats, and Coming to America in one story. Awesome!

Black Zombies, you're not helping

Don't you know that you're lowering the public opinion polls of all of us Black males with your antics? Because of your actions in  Florida and Maryland, it is that much harder for a Black man to get a job today. Now when I apply for a position I have to not only prove that I won't steal or be lazy, now I got to prove that I don't enjoy the taste of human flesh.

I appreciate the pioneering spirit, but the old serial killer paradigm was a helpful reverse indictment of White guys. You know: Well, brothers may have their problems, but at least we're not trying to kill somebody and eat them. But now you're eroding the power of our Dahmer card. Not cool.

Before you took those bath salt bong hits, did you stop to think that this is an election year? If our dear President Obama is going to co-sign that brand new Reparation Edition Chrysler 300 in his second term, we can't be messing up his credit by letting the car get repoed because we missed payments. It was bad enough that he was just joking about eating dogs.

Be the brains you seek

Please put a pause on the flesh eating until after the election.  And by the way, who smokes bath salts anyway? What distinguishes a "good" bath salt high from a "bad" bath salt high? And if crawling around naked while eating another man's face off is a "bad" high, doesn't that raise the bar substantially for what a "good" high is like?

Get it together, Black Zombies. Please don't let your people, or your president, down.

 BTW: And speaking of brothers with an insatiable appetite for flesh, this guy ain't helping either.

Dear Chipotle

Chiptole, I've been seeing you for quite some time now. Moving to Minnesota, there was a stretch of years where I couldn't find a decent burrito. And you were there for me. You even knew how to make guacamole that didn't taste like green mayonnaise.

Unlike a lot of other fast food places, you were out front with your kitchen, so I could see how the food was prepared. I appreciated that. However, in an earlier post I did notice how strange it was that all the people who seemed to be cooking in the back had the pigment of a pinto bean, while the folks closest to the register had a tortilla tint. In other words, Latinos cooking, white folks running the money. This was the case in California, Minnesota, Maryland, Indiana, and Illinois.

Most other restaurants try to keep their immigrant labor a secret, but y'all was out with it. It gave the food authenticity, a certain panache, a certain elan, a certain gene se qua. Similar to what you might experience being served egg rolls by Asians at Panda Express or crackers by Crackers at Cracker Barrel.

But now the feds are investigating. Why, God, why?

She's a Dancing Machine

Damita Jo Freeman was a legendary Soul Train dancer in the 70s. Dancers on the show usually didn't dance with the performers, but James Brown liked the way she grooved so much that he bypassed Don Cornelius and asked the young lady directly to perform while he sang "Super Bad." Two minutes and thirty three seconds of pure awesomeness was the result.

Yeah, that's Damita doing doing the robot in 1970, which may be the first time the dance was ever televised. (Michael didn't debut Dancing Machine until three years later. Yeah, I'll wait while you look.) James Brown is watching like he doesn't know what the hell he's looking at, but there's no mistaking the respect.
 
Same thing happened with Joe Tex, when he sang "I Gotcha" on Soul Train. (If you've never heard the song, then prepare yourself for some seriously ignant mysogifunk. Key lyrics: You promised me when you left your boyfriend/I'd be the next one to ease on in and Give me what you promised, now give it here. )

As you can see, the dynamic is different because Joe felt the need to "participate" a bit more as a dancer, despite the fact that Damita folds him up and places him gently to the left.

Looking at these two performances it's interesting because both songs are about power. One is a man estimating his own power by his Soul level. Sometimes I feel so nice, Good God, I want to jump back and kiss myself. The other is about a man taking possession of a woman's body with a Shylock-like glee. You made me a promise and you're going to stick to it. 

 James Brown can watch Damita embody his song without feeling threatened. Joe Tex has to reaffirm his Gotchaness by finally pulling a bunch of female dancers on stage to dilute Damita's power.

Didn't work, of course. Rarely does.

Sunny

Happy B-Day, Godfather.

Now and Later (DVD Commentary)

I just had a story published in the print and online version of Scissors and Spackle. The story, Now and Later, is something I worked on for my MFA thesis, so I'm happy to see it find a home, especially in such a nice looking journal.

Anyway, here's a little background on the story itself:

My dad lived in East Oakland, near Foothill boulevard and 35th street. There was a Big O tire place on the corner and a laundromat named after a cigar chomping brother named Cornelius next door. If you kept walking up Foothill you would see a church with what looked like a theater storefront. Next to that was KFC. And a little bit further up was Walgreens.

This Walgreens had the distinction of being the largest Walgreens I had ever seen. This was the age before Walmart and SuperTarget. You could find beach balls and shaving kits and lawn fertilizer and personal hygiene products. It was the kind of store you had to pause as you came in the door in order to catch your bearings.

My dad especially liked Walgreens because it was within walking distance of the house and you could get pretty much anything until they closed at ten.

Anyway, one night I remember going in and hearing a couple of the security guards talking about a woman who was hiding in the store. Apparently she was trying to steal something, but fled when she got caught. I wasn't able to hang around for the dramatic conclusion of that story, but it always stuck with me and that's where Now and Later came from.
 

I, for one, welcome our new computer overlords.

It's been a while since I've written anything. Now I see who my real friends are.

 
ViagraOnline, I doubted whether your interest in my writing was a compliment or simply the product of a kink in a line of code. But since I've been away, my GoogleAnalytics tells me that no one's been checking for me. More like MisstranooneKnowsatall.

But even when I didn't write for months on end, you were there, ViagraOnline. Encouraging me. Letting me know you appreciate me. Like on March 26, you wrote me seven comments in three minutes. At first I was turned off by the speed with which you wrote and the seeming randomness and incoherence of the messages. I thought maybe you didn't mean it, but then I figured it out. I figured out how to read your words. Below, I arranged them with the cumulative poetic impact I think you intended:


Good job. Thanks 
by ViagraOnline

for the great 
info. Fabulous 
post! All of them 
are useful. interesting 
thoughts. I really 
enjoyed that I 
just love the way you 
work.
i have seen
your post and 
That was very 
informative 
and very
entertaining
for me. Thanks 
for sharing this great 
and interesting stuff.
I should recommend
your site to my 
friends. Cheers.
Actually, 
I’ll be 
implementing 
much of this 
soon!

I found your promise to "be implementing this soon" in reaction to the dismantling of the public schools a little disturbing coming from a robot, but maybe it's a binary hiccup. I'm sure you have a very progressive approach to teaching and learning.

At least there's no student loans.

Otherwise, I appreciated the attention. My other human readers don't visit me when I don't write anything. Picky. So now I've written something. I hope you're happy. But you know what? My readership is mostly robots now, so I know who butters the web traffic butter around here at MisstraKnowitall: references to purchasing Viagra online. That's what the robots get most excited to comment about. It used to bother me, but now I see the awful beauty in digispam's siren song.

 

I guess at some point we'll all just be writing to the robot's standard of language. Trying to attract their attention. Lord knows that computer programs correct more human language than a million high school English teachers. Maybe I'll just throw in the towel. Maybe I'll go over all the way to the other side. Encourage people to post their personal emails and click on lethal Levitra links.

Speaking of which, you should click on this. Or this. Or this.

And definitely watch the following: