On the Sugarfoot

Remember this?

That came from this:

RIP Leroy "Sugarfoot" Bonner

The Grey: A Screen Shot Collage

Through an unfortunate series of events, Misstraknowitall finds himself home alone. Instead of fixing my leaky shower or grading a desk full of student essays, I delved into my Netflix queue and finally watched The Grey. Maybe it was missing my ladies at the beginning of a new year, but something about Liam Neeson's battle against wolves and his fear of mortality grabbed me. So, I used screen caps to make a collage about it. The words are all captions from the film. Wannaseeithereitgo. 

  

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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.

Don Belton: Truth Teller (Revisited)

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

***Link with  Don Belton's brilliant work

Marvin Isley

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.

Don Belton: Truth teller

 

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

The Way Mulattas Make Me Feel

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.

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

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!?

The King of Transcendence

“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.

Don't Stop Til You Get Enough

I always lived in a world where Michael Jackson was the world's biggest living star. I'm not sure how to feel now. It seems like a seal has been broken somewhere. Is this a sign of the apocalypse? Michael was our pop-cultural Jesus Christ and now it feels blasphemous to have thought (and said) all of those things about him. But the world was never really ready for Michael Jackson. Michael Jackson wasn't ready for himself, he was so talented. And funky. And funky. And funky. Always funky.

Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough @ Yahoo! Video

You should be healed, just as soon as your check clears

Rev. James L. White for fundraising chair, NeObama '12.

The Wisdom of Jericho Brown (Part 2 of 2)

Jericho Brown's got a new book of poetry out, Please, which is so funky and beautiful it hurts. One of the featured poems, "All That Crawls Beneath Me," was in last summer's Indiana Review Funk feature. Jericho drops some more knowledge on you.

1. What is your favorite Donny Hathaway song?


I've been listening to the "You Are My Heaven" duet with Roberta Flack as this is something I've been thinking about a good deal lately in the midst of reading and re-reading Ed Pavlic's Winners Have Yet to Be Announced.


Right now, I'm pretty sure that Hathaway's voice is somehow the saddest--yes, even sadder than Phyllis Hyman. Hyman manages sass and grit in upbeat disco numbers; Hathaway, on the other hand, takes a lyric like "I won't let them take you away" in a song as light as "You Are My Heaven" and focuses on the fear of actually being left alone. Something in his voice seems to see the awful in even the sweetest of expressions. A good example is the way in which Lalah Hathaway, his daughter, manages to fully mimic him in her version of "For All We Know" (The Song Lives On with Joe Sample) save for the tragedy in his version. It wasn't until I heard her version that I realized that the song was about trying to get some and using a really lame line to make it happen. In contrast, I always thought the song was about the real possibility of death arriving before the opportunity to make love when I listened to the late Hathaway sing it.

 
Hathaway is special. More than that, I believe he was at once conscious and unconscious of how special he and his voice is. We can't say that about Aretha Franklin: she knows good and well what she's doing every song, every God damned note.


But none of that answers what you asked me. While growing up, my favorite was “Song for You” because the piano in it always made me cry. No matter how many times I heard the bridge, I couldn’t get myself ready for it. It’s one of those songs that put my childhood in slow motion. I mean that literally. I thought it was some kind of magic. I could play that song and people who only knew how to yell would start whispering.


Donny Hathaway - A song for you
Uploaded by benedictinelight. - Music videos, artist interviews, concerts and more.

Lately, though, it’s been “For All We Know” because it’s really good for foreplay.

2. Funkier: Neck bones or Candied Yams?

Neckbones. Yams are too sweet.

3. What are you reading?

George Oppen and the really good unpublished manuscripts of Dwayne Betts, Jennifer Chapis, Deniz Perin, and Sasha West. It’s a great show. You gotta see it.

4. What advice would you offer a writer whose considering an MFA?

Go to the University of New Orleans. It’s the only MFA in town.

The Catwoman

Sadly, Eartha Kitt just passed. I remember her playing Catwoman on Batman back in the day. She growled and purred and clawed and even looked like a cat. Although she fit right in with the campiness of the show, it was clear that she owned that role long before she ever put on the costume.

Unfortunately, I didn't know much more about her than when she starred with Eddie Murphy as his oversexed boss in Boomerang.

"Maaaaaaaaaaaaarcus." I can still hear that voice in my nightmares.

But last year my wife bought Rhino Records' Hipster' Holiday record (which is an awesome album--especially considering the fact that I can't stand most holiday music) that features Eartha Kitt's "Santa Baby."


I loved the song (people who heard it already are like "uh duh") and it made me appreciate how talented Ms. Kitt was. I've heard a couple other people sing it, but it's the same thing as Catwoman: she owns that performance.


Her voice and demeanor are similar to Nina Simone, except more playful, less angry(!) and melancholy. But they both could mesmerize an audience with an almost otherworldly presence.