Unbeached Whale

The Measurements -- Revised

2007-11-28T18:08:00.000-05:00

Today, I left work after an hour of professional development (a series of classes run by one of the school's literacy coaches, math coaches or assistant principals) with a colleague that is 10 years younger than me. And that is cool. We got onto the train and he gave me a much clearer landscape to contemplate.

He knew the former profession of some of the other male teachers. There are only 5 in the whole school. The most organic of us used to be involved in heavy industry, building parts for large engineering feats, like damns and generators. He is very cool.

To hear this story from my colleague was a glimmer of hope concerning the types of conversations I could have with my colleagues, but also showed astuteness of the young 20-something. Sometimes I wonder what the ultimate end is to such astute observations. In America, I believe it is marginalization. You have to somehow buy into the consumerist ideology to benefit from it, or just sit on the sidelines. You gotta be in it to win it, that is for sure.

"He is a blue collar worker, so he comes in does his work and goes" the young teacher said.

I need to learn to take teaching in this manner, despite the age of the students, the level of the students, or the subject matter. And for a moment I had a flashback to some crazy discussion with academics and bibliophiles concerning that certain other "other" -- the worker.

I guess the tyranny of the well intentioned missionary -- may they be actual religious zealots or actual Marxist zealots -- never dies with white folk. The program I entered has a modus operandi and under-pinning that is the same as the Peace Corp in Africa except it is aimed at the inner city. And I guess in our quest to assimilate into the folds of American society, some of us black folk have replaced our own corneas with theirs. And in their quest to help, some liberal white folk can not forgive us for being successful or not falling into their idea of what collards/coloreds should be. In other words, to help is to be a black missionary in the great sea of white missionaries that have helped other minorities assimilate into American society. But to say that you don't need their help places everything on edge.

I wonder how long it will be before I see clearly. I am the only black male teacher in the school. I was the only black male in my publishing office 10 years ago. It just seems to be fate in someway.

Beyond the Blog

2007-11-27T15:18:00.000-05:00

OK,

I have had a total change in latitude over the last couple of months. I now work in the South Bronx as an educator working specifically with the Latino and West African communities.

So, on top of the culture shock, the mistaken identities (a couple of people have called me Habibi in the bodegas that I have thought were Spanish, at other places people have not bothered to stop speaking Spanish to me), the graduate work (it is turning out to be a lot of busy work, observations, and self-reflecting . . . who knew that a formal education as a pedagogue would turn into a deep Freudian/Saussurean examination of self and signs) and moments of sheer exhaustion I have not been able to write a descent blog entry. In fact, I feel like my blogging brain cells have been rearranged yet again. I find myself asking the man in the mirror "What is blogging?" and "Are you a writer or an educator or a linguist?" Each time the clock is ticking very loudly and I have very little time to answer my own questions.

The other problem with my blogging is that I am too busy critiquing my own teaching style, or observations concerning a gigantic administration, that I have very little energy to switch voices and talk about all the other things that come and go in my life. Add in not having a computer, and navigating our country's medical system with a chronic disease and it is amazing that I have a second in my mind to write these lines.

So, let this be the announcement that I am back to talk about this stupid campaign schedule that has all the talking heads going crazy, but not much of anyone else in my circles. But damn, Obama has some big balls, he is going after Hillary like a preying mantis. Let this be the announcement that I am back to talk about Heroes, The Ultimate Fighter and Project Runway. Let this be the announcement that I am back to talk about my fight to conquer my bills, act like I am grown, get interested in the plight of (fill in the blank), and finish some work that I started.

First step. French tutor.
It happens once a week for 2 hours.
I forgot how complicated the verbs can really be.
It has never been more apparent that "tenses" and not just "words" can have different meanings too.

PS
I have many blogs to catch up on concerning reading.

Man!

On the Contemplation of a Watermelon Caipirinha and a Brioche Recipe I Do Not Have Time to Make

2007-09-08T20:15:00.001-05:00

I have been so busy starting up my new gig that I have been unable to post. My thoughts are always elsewhere. Sometimes on a morsel of a larger fiction that I am contemplating; or, in joyous spurts, the fiction of my life; or, when I am feeling a little overwhelmed or just down, the realities of my life, which glare at me from every window of the 5 train. They mingle in the sunlight when I am above ground.

Funny, all thoughts abandon me at the Gunhill station as I make my way to Bainbridge.

Now, the reality of life is rising at 4:30 am to be at work by 8:00 am. We won't even talk about night school and the second job.

So, again I am forced to give a video. A favorite. It is from the Geiko commercial. I think the band is from Norway. I got a post today by the way from a friend who is a music producer. He is working in Sweden for a month.

That will be me again.

Someday.

One day soon.

Till then.

Prost.

Labor Day Weekend

2007-09-01T09:52:00.000-05:00

I have to work this weekend. But there are parties on the horizon (Labor Day Weekend is the second New Year's Eve Party for those in academia), plus a Harlem apartment is in my sights. I guess the Bronx will have to wait for now.

But I found this article in The New York Times today. I guess Condoleeza Rice and Peas will have to look for a position elsewhere after her tenure as Secretary of State is up. Maybe she could do the MLA Conference in November.

"Reading Bush Foreign Policy as Post-Post Modern Literature"

What other courses could she teach?

Saudade Revisited

2007-08-27T07:57:00.000-05:00

Cero commented on my Saudade comments found on Beached Bones. I am printing my response here.

Nostalgia that is the word! But that word does not translate now does it. The whole problem is that Saudade, as a state of being, is the substantive representation of ‘an act’ in the continuous tense by implication, not to mention it is “sweet” by connotation.

Saudade is a state that is far more ethereal than Nostalgic or Nostalgia, which are both more concrete. You can buy Nostalgia in a Time Life Series of CD's at 3:30 in the a.m., or even eat it at Crackle Barrel at lunch time (I interviewed with their corporate representative at a job fair once. It was crazy. All the companies in Nashville just examined me, one Christian publisher asked for my pastor’s name, another Christian publisher’s human resource person just held in a giggle when I showed her my resume . . . but I digress).

Nostalgia is not an individual experience; we can all experience it in someway.

I do not know Portuguese very well, but saudade is an important word no? That is the problem I think I have with cross-cultural studies -- without a certain linguistic mastery, things kind of fall to pot . . . in a certain genteel and polite Afro-dandy way.

But yes, Saudade leading into a discussion of Nostalgia and the Post-Modern is very interesting. I am going to come back to you on that. I have a problem with the absolutism of the Post-Modern theorist in practice; no holes are allowed to be punched, so I think I cut myself off from many useful ideas in the end. And in the end, I have cut myself off from ever really feeling comfortable enough to finish a doctorate based on theoretical methods. I have been looking for a safe strait in navigating that ocean.

Damn! I used the word “useful” in that jargonized way. I vowed never to do that in writing after I finished my first MA.

Second Chances

2007-08-21T23:50:00.001-05:00

The picture above is of Ganymede. Ganymede is the "water bearer" other wise known as Aquarius in the Zodiac. He was seduced by Zeus and made the chef attendent to the king of the gods. It is my sign.

There is a movie called Second Chances that deals with race and religion in a very interesting way. OK. Maybe not that interesting. I just know of the director from childhood and my mom plays bridge with his aunt.

I liked the film staring and directed by Jeff Carr. In some odd way, I think I am going through the same sort of wave of second chances. I think it was that sentence "Report to the Bursar's office, pick up your bill, get it validated and . . . "

Hell, I have not heard that sentence in 14 years. Two phases of seven, a cycle is repeating and resetting and repeating again,. . . and I am spinning out of my Saturn Return . . . only to return to 1993 . . . no, make that 1992. Interesting.

To be a student, in America, like this again.

And Now a Message from Our Sponsors . . .

2007-08-17T12:01:00.001-05:00

Per Ms. E and Malaika Adero. I think you should check it out.

For further information on the event check out http://www.upsouthinternationalbookfestival.com

Looking at the Boys and My Private Fangora

2007-08-15T09:33:00.000-05:00

Love, Cinnamon and Cloves, in the Morning
So, this morning I am surfing through my Myspace page and drinking coffee while listening to "Labios Compartidos" by Mana, which is the sexiest song I have heard in a while. It is more of a Gypsy Kings manly sexy Latin tune as opposed to an Eros Ramazzotti lyric which makes me giddy and happy like a 15-year-old girl speeding towards Jones Beach in a VW bug with no air conditioning. So I guess that this is a signal that some form of normalcy if returning to my life. I probably should enjoy this break because I have only the rest of this week before graduate school returns as well as my new nine to five.

The Needle and the Knife
I will finally be insured by the end of the month, but the havoc my finances have gone through in the past 2 years is enough to put me back on the drip. I still have to pay out of pocket for a while and wait for reimbursement. I just don't know where the money will come from. Sometimes as a teacher and instructor I just don't feel like a professional person. Security is just very, very shoddy. It is a shame what people go through in this country. Embarrassing to everyone, including the doctors that have no explanation as to how I am to pay for the care I require; and, it is embarrassing to me to have to ask for charity. Why the hell did I go to college?

Sorry, just venting. It really is a horror show.

The Wayward Spiral of the Dead Dowager Empress
I was sent an article this morning by a Cuban friend about Brooke Astor's funeral. The New York Times article ends by saying that the funeral is beyond the end of an era -- there has not been a Mrs. Astor in New York City for the last 150 years. Pity. Growing up I remember this noblesse oblige mentality as being the equivalent of corporate brand recognition at the end of all the PBS programs that I watched. I used to wonder about the Rockefellers and the Vanderbilts. I used to visualize them in my head as people running the world, still dressed in an Edwardian fashion tailored so tightly you would think that they were stitched into the upholstery of their Victorian furniture. I don't know how I made that association, but I did.

There is some sense of horror to this situation. There are no replacements to that world. The rich have changed and New York has changed again. Or, maybe the horror is my placement in the situation, I am witnessing the closing of one century and the dawning of the next and with that comes a hyper-awareness that this new fortress being built is one I do not recognize. New York is becoming Chicago, a Broadway lite poster board replica of the Death Star, as menacing as a prequel without the funk of the 70's. With each passing day and step I open the paper to see one more building bought, one more neighborhood striving to maintain after the closing of a Copeland's or a CBGB's, and now with the death of Mrs. Astor, the erasure of a certain aesthetic. Forget the Astor 400, it is the way old money made me feel as a writer, a viewer of the arts, a purveyor of Lincoln Centers tall columns before Balanchine died. Maybe I am still playing catch-up to that New York, because I came to the city for far different reasons as a boy (hip-hop) and now am returning to it hurt by what I didn't know about the legend of the philanthropists and their pack of muses. I should have payed more attention, but my head was in a whole different stack of books -- maligned by race, class and gender, the foundations of the city never touched my fingertips.

I am making up for it now though. And there is more to report.

Oliver's Morbid Twist
My father has always been good for giving me the most unbelievable speeches while I am in the car. I guess I can't escape. I have always been a reclusive child -- at least around my parents. My grandmother was who I sought out. And in certain ways that has continued to adulthood. Even watching my father return from work in his grey suit sets off something in me concerning expectations and values that is incongruent. I am not like him in so many ways, but I am exactly like him in all the other ones.

It is as if my father is unable to speak for hours on end in the house, but once we are alone in the car he digs into me, or imparts a gem of knowledge, or makes a confession. It is like when I finished my stint at my HBCU and I was riding with my father on the New Jersey Turnpike heading north. In middle of his tyraid, as my 21-year-old mind drifted to the reeds growing in the toxic swamps beyond the oil refineries my father said, "It is all corrupt from top to bottom." I remember pushing my dreads away from my ear in some sort of physical response to the words I were pretending to ignore.

My father was in his fiery mode of speaking. I can count the number of times the man has been in a church, but the passion in his voice is something that I have inherited for sure, just as I witnessed my paternal grandmother siting in her chair with her cane using "the voice" at points of frustration or when instructing my younger cousins to pull up their pants , then coyly asking if them if they need her to buy them a belt.

"It is totally corrupt son. The entire system."

And I sat their in my new found righteousness thinking something odd with my father. As time has gone on and I have transformed from dread bean pie eating collegiate, to insecure graduate student, to secretively sexually liberated night walker, to naive office worker, to wise instructor, to just not giving a shit I realize that my father was simply trying to protect me. And that conversation concerning corruption is one of two different speeches I actually remember out of the hundreds my father felt he could embark on as soon as we jumped on the New Jersey Turnpike at exit number 9A.

My father's words have never rung so true as when I read the New York Times article concerning the bribery charges and subsequent confession of New Orleans councilman Oliver Thomas. The disappointment that I am feeling oscillates between despair and disbelief. This indictment hurts me worse than the Quincy Troupe affair a couple of years ago (well, that didn't really hurt, that was just human folly). New Orleans is without governance and I am wondering if there is any order into the investigations. Those council people who are disappearing seem to be disproportionately black, just as Operation Tennessee Waltz swooped up several black elected officials in Tennessee. But in the end, the ball lies at the feet of Thomas and all of his infamous alumni. Conspiracy theory or not, New Orleans is suffering from an attitude concerning its public contracts and rights as being part and parcel of private funds accessible to elected officials. And, on top of that, the most articulate and visible personality representing the disenfranchised in this terrible fiasco of the post-Katrina picture show is now gone. Oliver Thomas officially stepped down from his post, and it is effective immediately.

His absence was felt by me just as instantaneously.

A Reading List for the Down Trodden but Hopeful Hearted in All Matters of Love

2007-08-13T10:21:00.000-05:00

Right now I am staring at the blank page. It has been a couple of weeks and just as I finished that piece on Marie Antoinette by Sophia Coppola, I started thinking about my writing in a much different way. I contacted old friends from the "industry" and started to hope for a lunch here and there. I also received word of a journal run out Paris, so I felt my writerly self and my concentration on French verbs congealing into a proper project -- a true transformation. Now after a couple of weeks of job preparation and learning how to navigate a bureaucracy that has to be one of the largest in the country, I am back to square one, so to speak.

That vision of my time and writing is different now. It is slowly starting to settle in on my psyche that I am in the New World, where I am not an ex-patriot. New York, for all of its international appeal is much different than the streets and avenues that cross each other like a dying matriarch below 14th street, and the perfectly kept bodies and mobility of Bloomberg's Mecca in the east 50's. That is the transient New World, rouged in new money and Hermes cologne. New York is its children I am starting to learn. All one million of them. Many of them multi-lingual and trapped in a world where cognitive linguistic communication stops on the surface level of all things. Solely spoken Spanish, half learned English from the streets, snippets from various advertisers and newspapers are creating a weird pidgin dish of French speaking West Africans, Mexicans, Dominicans and Chinese dialects. It is a world full of its own commerce, beliefs and norms. I am just starting to wonder how I am going to elevate my students' respect for their mother tongue and English so they are interested in learning the academic language required for them to master both languages. Right now I only see our American democracy concentrating on the pre-eminence of English with very little regard to the advantages and complexity of other languages. My assessment at this point is that we are producing adults who are functionally illiterate in 2 languages because of the neglect of our system to address children who may very well be the first in their families to received formalized education. It is evident in the number of teenagers who are unable to talk about language using the 8 parts of speech in very rudimentary descriptions of how they form a sentence.

So, I am wondering about this French lesson I started 7 weeks ago when I was 20 pounds heavier. It is already giving way to Spanish in the restaurants, in the bodegas, at the corner grocer and at my local dive where I enjoy 5 dollar plates of food and beer. French is already giving way to Hispaniola as a whole.

There was that night when I sat on a giant blanket in a Bronx park drinking a Heineken and a Dominican friend talked about crossing into Haiti on a truck and having to turn back. It was all to much. The way he paused, took off his hat and wiped his face of sweat made me embarrassed -- all this talk of the Creole world in the wake of a horror that defies all suffering. The difference between erudition and witnessing never was more apparent.

"We are all part Haitian. We are from the interior. We are near the border. We are the Dominicans with the most soul." the other friend added.

I remember the sky being so beautiful as twilight started to turn the green trees black and the drink of choice switched from beer to cognac.

Bloody Sunday

2007-07-08T07:47:00.000-05:00

Sunday

I love Sunday mornings.

I think it is my favorite day of the week.

Just Sunday morning.

(Dinah Washington Sunday Morning,

not Etta James Sunday morning).

I have not been blogging because I have just had a house dropped on my head. This summer is my formal but unorganized introduction to applied linguistics. So far I have gone through 3 weeks of graduate school, which has been great in terms of meeting people with similar experiences as me. The number of world travellers in my classes is comforting, and so is that collective and uneasy culture shock that lingers with us from 6 years in Thailand, 9 months in Brazil, or a brief love affair in Japan after finishing up university in Hong Kong. We all seem to have itchy feet.

The feat of applying certain linguistic concepts (These concepts are not really related to the type of stuff I did 14 years ago with cultural theorists, it is more concerned with function. It is the end product of a certain pedagogical analysis that looks at both the surface structures and deep structures found in learning a sequence of patterns.) is far harder than actually learning it. The majority of my students are Spanish speakers, and so are the majority of bilingual instructors in the program. I believe I am the only fluent German speaker, but I feel that my Deutsch skills are waning as time goes by. I speak fine, but my ability to use more cognitive skills in translating a text or reading academic writing (always hard in German) seems to be seeping into the Hudson.

After certification, the age of my possible students may range from five to 20, and many may never have had a formal education. This basically means that they have never sat at a desk all day in their entire lives, nor have they received information in such a manner. On top of that, their intelligence may lie elsewhere, which reminds me of the kids form Appalachia in my first grade class who could tell you the name of trees and birds as if they were reading a book printed on the blue sky. Or friends of mine who can make music with the ease and solace of a confectionerie's solitary mistress mixing and rolling truffles with a sticky right hand.

So, needless to say, the field work that I have been participating in has been interesting. I am just afraid that my artistic endeavours are suffering because I am starting to break down language and codes into very basic parts. The social problems of signs and signifiers is a subject that comprised the majority of my Infamous University experience; but studying it as a set of required verbal exercises and orthographic markings meant for providing all the neccesities of life to my young students make me feel as if I have walked into the ritual of language. I am working with the most basic of human instincts, which is to communicate -- I am learning to relate to the human experience, not as a full grown man, but from the eyes of a child. To apply theory in this way is rounding out my world and pushing my own intellect into other dimensions. Salt of the Earth. Soil. Tiling. Chocolate Ding Dongs. Hall Passes. Bells. Factor Trees. Crips. Bloods. Flagging. Testing. Testing. And More Testing.

Sextidi, 5 Messidor, Année 215

2007-06-24T11:42:00.000-05:00

Tête à Tête

Lately, I have been taking Gaulish odysseys in the mist of starting up a new blog, attending to required reading, lamenting over an unfinished field work assignment, surviving a job interview in the South Bronx, going to my survival job, battling a predatory financial institution and visiting that infamous hip-hop magazine where I set my eyes on a friend I have not seen in 14 years. Then he was a bald music critic/editor. Now he looks like a curly haired surfer, but some how just as young and spry despite a childlike girth that must be chasing him into his 40's.

I have not been blogging because I have been clumsily wanking my way through a French grammar review that is doing much to recharge my memory, but still leaves the language as a literal one for me and not a verbal one (which is the exact opposite of German, when I look into my deepest heart). There is something about the way the words are represented versus how they are spoken that is cause for deep concentration. Spelling in French is like walking through a minefield. Syntax seems easy enough once one can remember that what one says may be represented orthographically by 3 or 4 apostrophes, 3 accent marks and a circumflex.

The other thing that has been pulling me away from my blog has been all this New Orleans/Haitian bonding that is happening in my personal life. Chief among my crescent shaped cyber world nexus has been Professor Zero. For the past couple of days we have been in a joint diatribe of all things perilous about both academic and amorous life. Flirting, Lacan, political double speak, making a fetish of the oppressed and the different forms of Spanish spoken in the Americas have all been the soup du jour at one point or another. It has been "Oh, so middle class" in certain respects, as we look across the Gulf of Mexico into Venezuela, or into the bayou brackish waterways of young Cajuns studying English, or talking about the almost frozen Southern mentality that still clings to the first Reformation in a Afro-Anglo creole ritual that turns Cero and I into silent monkeys, able only to vulgarly gesticulate to one another our desire to add a red pepper to an iron clad Dutch oven. Thanks Cero.

According to American Zombie's blog the collapse of New Orleans' social services and fabric have brought much heartache to the residents and I imagine much unwanted affirmation for many Gulf Coast communities that they are not really a part of “America”, just located within its boundaries. The feeling that "we are different down here" is mumbled in Cajun and spicey versions of English, all dialects simply chalking up this current Bush era of neglect as a continuation of the same ole same ole (In fact I have an aunt that can't stand to have such conversations about Laura and George, it makes her physically disgusted.). Gentrification may just pave over the entire city devouring the old Creole houses. It seems to me that this is the beginning of the second American invasion which the master narrative has set to save the city. And if this New Orleans is to be Disneyfied through privatization; then, the villains in the eyes of the prince's white horse are the poor and the blacks. Nagin, who is suppose to be the prime custodian of New Orleans’ citizenry, and promote models of civic duty and responsibility is the darkest of wizards I suspect. Regardless of which side of the mirror you stand, New Orleans has been neglected, and its incestuous politics have disenfranchised the population to the point that they are now at the mercy of the sea. I just wonder how long this will transpire, and if the wild crime wave will become worse before it becomes better.

Nouvelle Orleans the lifestyle is free. Its history is un-replicated in any other latitude this far North; but, maybe all of this reading and speaking of about the Creole world is a certain sign of its physical demise in the United States. Maybe it is spirit converting concrete to fable and myth, ensuring its survival in some linguistic double helix, which may be unlocked like a flies tell-tale proteins in a lump of amber. Or, maybe it is the sign of a rebirth, a marching return by all of Louisiana's descendants to claim the bon vivant mantle of a grandfather who made white liquor in a secret spot just beyond a moss bordered pasture or an adventurous grandmother who danced in red on top of the pews one Saturday afternoon when no one was looking, whistling a jig catching a spirit with a striked match. We are at the crossroads. We are at the cross.

And so . . . that is what happened to me a couple of nights ago when I could not sleep and my ancestors kicked me out of my bed again (this is becoming a more than perennial occurrence). While channel surfing, I thought it beyond serendipitous that I caught part of a documentary on New Orleans music and culture called Make it Funky. I saw footage of the Mardi Gras Indians and Allen Toussaint before I returned to my lumpy bed.

From Sophia Coppola's Marie Antoinette, to Alejo Carpentier's Explosion in the Cathedral, to a sweet woman named Marie from Port-au-Prince, to studying French grammar in between my hectic schedule, I feel like I am migrating towards some other world. It constantly beats underneath the floor boards, beckoning me to loosen a couple of planks and descend through a hoodoo worm hole, to emerge in a more gentle and relaxed Atlantis.

“Am I comfortable in English?" is an unspoken question in constantly in my mind and heart. Only one other person has suspected the possibility that I was born with a misplaced language in my head.

Marie, the Fortunately Misplaced Interlude

At night, I exit my job and sit under the night sky that has become summer with an unexpectedness I vaguely remember not seeing since the break between my junior and senior year of college. You just wake up one morning and there is your life and all its faults appreciated by everyone, critiqued by no one. The difference now is that I am alone. There is no need for a jacket, and the humidity has leveled off just after the buses have stopped running, so I have no problem talking to Marie for those couple of minutes before my ride comes, and before her boyfriend arrives to pick her up.

Marie is from Port-au-Prince and ten years my junior. She comes from a neighborhood in the west of that fantastical and anagogical city. Marie's voice is very deep and eloquent and her accent is off register making it hard to place. Maybe Marie is from French West Africa, maybe Reunion Island, maybe some village in Dominica or Suriname. Each movement Marie makes with her fingers, while preparing inventory, is happening with strict purpose so that her mind can wonder elsewhere, maybe it is the floral arrangement she is doing for a wedding, maybe it is a conversation with her father about a Haitian first family covered in a local Creole radio talk show. The way Marie walks is erect and alert like the school girls in Ghana or Antigua, the way Marie holds her purse is in the manner of a woman of means.

At night we both sit on the same grey brick embankment that holds mulch and shrubs that are eclipsed by the boring grey structure of the storehouse. We then continue the small talk that we started days back when I uttered bad French to her, and she giggled. Later she confessed that she spoke French only in school, and felt fluent only in Kreyol. She also confessed that she does not read the written Kreyol with its li's and k's, they are extraterrestrial to her. "I spoke French in school, Kreyol everywhere else and studied Spanish and Latin, though I do not see why we had to take Latin." she said to me in a mass of jumbled boxes and women chattering. “The Kreyol I speak from Port-au-Prince is different from everywhere else.” she continued, like a city girl ripped to the suburbs of a Northern land.

I brought a book on Afro-Creole Louisiana and we studied the songs together with great interest as she told me where the words were different in Haitian dialect, in representation, form and cadence. She stared at it like a puzzle whispering to me later that she doesn’t read much, just French romance novels. I sipped on my watered down red soda and took her confession to heart, books make life very complicated.

Each day our conversations would become more intimate in details. Because I did not want to talk to her about her Haitian-American boyfriend who does not speak Kreyol, I talked to her about Haiti. "How do you say Aribonte?” I asked in the middle of her impromptu lesson concerning the regions and provinces of Haiti. "L'Artibonte" she corrected me, but she told me that no one says that, they just say "Bonte". We talked about Jacmal one day. She said that she loved it somehow, though she has never been there. She said that she is going to go there next time she returns to Port-au-Prince. I told her that I had heard of it and wanted to go.

"Yes, that is where the whites are."

"Excuse me." I said

"I mean the people that are light in color. They are not white. They are beautiful."

We both laughed.

I said mélange. She said mulate. I said class. She said en masse. I spoke of Boyer and Petion. She stared. She walked away to the back room commenting on my knowledge, I told her I had few people to talk to about what I know, just academics.

Later that night, she touched on a level of violence in Haiti I could only surmise before from details in the New York Times. Her voice was of regret. "I do not believe." she said in reference to violence and the folk religion. She talked about the beauty of those that practice it in West Africa and other ceremonies here in America, but she also hinted at the violence of other communities in her homeland. She touched on the prejudice she has felt against her person due to her "perceived" beliefs.

Our conversations often begin with the beginning of each others stories with us not telling each other the endings.

"You have not been married?" She asked. I told her "No, I have been close, but no. “I stared at the moon on this night, and Marie's voice seemed so honest and pleasant that for a split second I felt like a wounded soldier being tended too. These feelings of some sort of affection are so few and far between in my modern world of genderized power negotiation that I could not help but notice that solitude with a woman on a warm night is something that has evaded me for some time.

"What happened?" she asked, and the most extraordinary thing happened, all of my disappointments in love collapsed into one, and though I was telling her about my latest, I was truly telling her about all of them. She replies, "Don't worry, it happens." Just then my ride pulled up, and as always I leave first, saying good night, aware of her staring at me as I walk away, and I am aware that my body is communicating to her that I am leaving for some loveless limbo that is the basement underneath my father's house.

Madame Capet

Daniel Mendelsohn's astute review of Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette in the November 30, 2006 issue of The New York Review of Books starts out by describing the type of woman Sofia Coppola has found fascinating enough to place at the center of all three of her movies. She is the privileged woman who finds herself in a world of foreign signs and symbols who must somehow negotiate her way out adolescence into womanhood. Some succeed and some do not (that is my assessment, but is there any way of measuring success and failure in such transitions, transition happens regardless if we 'succeed' or not). Because everything is so well written in the NYRB, I always settle into the critique with some over-arching expectancy. I feel as if I am receiving an education due to precise quotes from sources far beyond my post-colonial, handsomely erudite, and patch-worked required readings. I love to hear the writerly voice of a biographer or geologist talking about a 1930's New England mining town ravaged by copper in a well, or a 19th century émigré who must some how settle for winter at the Danish coast because of a decree viciously enforced after a czar was blown to bits.

Kirsten Dunst's performance as Marie Antoinette is by far one of the best I have seen for this time period. If there is any fault with her portrayal of Marie Antoinette, it is the eschewed context in which the director chooses to place the last Queen of France. Glenn Close's Marquese de Merteuil in Dangerously Liaison is for sure the best depiction of 18th century debauchery and female modification in all its physical and psychological baroque bondage; but, Dunst must manage a far more broad and nuisanced portrayal of Marie Antoinette. The woman was truly an invention created by the convergence of the European states. She was a rebellious teenager that tittered back and forth on the fault line that public life and the royal protocol demanded of her. Her crucifixion, ridiculed name, and slandered personality are parts of a larger world around her, and in the end the movie does not leave the audience with a greater understanding of the mob or its inciters, we are left with a cloistered soul peeled from the canvas of a painting; therefore, the audience is only able to see parts of Marie Antoinette out of context. It is due to this wavering juxtaposition of narrative success and historical failure that Coppola's flaws become a beauty mark. She doesn't want us to see it all.

The movie opens with the 14-year-old Archduchess Maria Antonia of Austria (Antoine) waking up from her palace bedroom in Vienna and being summoned by her mother the Empress Maria Theresa to receive the news that she has been betrothed to the Dauphin of France Louis-Auguste. This wedding was to bind the Bourbons to the Hapsburg and bring a great European Union, which may well have been seen in the same light as the current one, in terms of diplomatic possibilities for the continent, but limited by the conflicts of the time.

From there, Coppola’s film takes us down a winding staircase of "this" reality, but does not give the audience the proper perspective on the expectations of this marriage. Coppola's tome of reference, Marie Antoinette, The Journey by Antonia Frazer, deserves a close reading, simply to put into perspective Coppola's artistic choices. On the surface these choices are creatively sound and at points ingenious. Marianne Faithful as Maria Therese is perfect. Her voice is so deep and dark, with a placement of words that is so precise that one is given the impression that the Empress never speaks unless every syllable is thought out. Faithful impresses on her empress's opulent vocal chords the power to manifest into the physical world whatever she conveys. Absolute power is generative. If you don't want it, then don't say it.

Molly Shannon as Madame Victoire and Shirley Henderson as Madame Sophie embolden the court of Versailles with all the sly gossip and petite intrigue that in many respects just turns into a family joust under the hideous insignia of "the French" court. These castings were also surprising choices. Shannon and Henderson are slightly out of place in their jumbled English. One cannot help but think that the slide remarks in French must have been more cruel and complicated to decipher in the gluttonous ennui of court. Again, this is magic, because the cruel bridge club remarks strike up the condescending pettiness of their rank, which in the end is without power. They can do nothing but gawk and draw lines in the sand.

Judy Davis as Comtesse du Noailles is another superb touch that garnered a great height in the plot and portrayal precisely because Coppola decided not to develop the Comtesse any further into the story. The Comtesse du Noailles was the First Lady of Honor to Marie-Antoinette and nicknamed Madame Etiquette. In the movie she stands at the French-Austrian border ready to bang the young Archduchess Antoine of Austria into a Dauphine with a stern lip. In another scene, Comtesse du Noailles explains the customary dressing ritual performed by the dauphine’s ladies-in-waiting as prescribed by Versailles. Davis curtsies with a dip and slight sway in the back, demonstrating the strain of the morning salutations; but, with a tight rhythmic arch that steals the scene and reminds one of an Alvin Ailey choreographed step, or the relinquished pain of a tired seamstress, or Hagar quenching her thirst at Zam Zam (I wanted to scream Work Bitch!).

Other actors are cast with an eye towards perfection. Asia Argento as Madame Du Barry is haunting. She is callous and uncouth, but ravishing in her exotic feathers and velvet dresses that weigh her down in ill bought prestige as the nimble Hapsburg child runs rings around her on the velvet ropes and catwalks of the palace. And Rose Byrne as the duchesse de Polignac is a head turner, as the strong vivacious proxy den mother of the Antoinette krew.

Coppola is fixated on recording life in Versailles and in many ways that is the best part of the film. She fleshes out the beautiful prison the palace is in a scene where Marie Antoinette ascends the steps from the garden to the doors of Versailles to resume her court life. The celluloid texture becomes wavy as if bombarded by the radiation of black asphalt. It is a metaphor, as the glitter of the Sun King becomes shockingly brilliant and the reality that life under the guise of rulership is just that -- a guise, exhausting, asphyxiating and debilitating, leaving the young Queen constantly parched and short of breath.

In order to exhale, Marie Antoinette's choices are clothes, parties and endlessly jovial hours with her girlfriends. Here we have some greater understanding of her choices, since decapitation and centuries of degradation have turned her into a neutral allusion to the uber-feminine like Cleopatra, Helen of Troy and Marilynn Monroe. Her exorbitant spending and decadent lifestyle are shown with great care by Coppola. And to watch the scenes involving shoes, wigs, gambling parties, masquerades, champagne, hemp and the lustful giggles of hide and seek is to watch a PG-13 version of Bob Guccione's Caligula.

Marie-Antoinette was not the first fashionista, but in terms of public figures, she was the first to carry a brand image as a both a debutant and a consumer. So in many ways, the marriage of pop music to the film is again an ornate and achronistic scarification. Historically, there is no way that the choices can fit, but in many ways, it enhances the scenes. As Marie-Antoinette and her husband return to Versailles after a night in Paris, the Dauphine’s hand is extended outside of the window as the northern light casts a shadow in the carriage. The scenary of the carriage ride and the Dauphine's extended hands are elongated by Bow-Wow-Wow's version of Fool's Rush In. The first time I saw this scene I thought it unwise to "waste" time on such a giddy female afterglow when history is marching full speed towards our very neutral hero and heroine. The second time I saw it, I really did see the beauty and mastery of Coppola's music and image, of the post-adolescent princess and New Wave vocalist co-habituating in the misty early dawn. Then cut, the King is sick, and the impending responsibilities of being sovereign fall into their laps. It all made them seem like fat cats feed to be slaughtered, pampered to be torn to bits, but in the meantime there are loves and leisure . . . and music.

But outside of this beauty was a corruptible future that is hard to grasp -- a world where everything would be turned upside down. The days of the week would be re-arranged into intervals of ten, the churches would be ripped open with looters turning chalices into pure gold, and the masses would participate in the first public hysteria induced by the fermented tit of ideology. As quiet as the secret is keep, life, liberty and fraternity are the first songs of our theoretical age. In my high school we looked at the Thermidorians with a condescending tone of folly. It was in the Bible belt, I was an American, to dismiss God and the European church where it all started (Protestantism), was a natural reflex.

In my opinion the complications of the times are still loss to Americans. To Coppola the tragedy and mass killings of the French Royals is more than compensated for by the palace, the carriage and the rows of slippers. Will our American imagination every construct a Europe that is different, that sees beyond its overly powdered noses? It all is represented so clearly by a conversation I had with a German friend. She talked very excitedly about a long lost American cousin and his family visiting her in Stuttgart. They were aghast to see that their family did not own a castle.

Foreshadowing was somewhat surpringly absent in this film concerning the last Queen of France, a figment of the state who was born Maria Antonia, lived as Marie Antoinette and died as Widow Capet, Prisoner 280. Nor in the performances do we have a sense of the mobs’ wavering and finally being saddened at the beheading of Madame du Barry, who was in hysterics on the day she was taken to Madame Guillotine. There she spoke the famous last words “Encore un moment, monsieur le bourreau, un petit moment” (Just one moment, Mr. executioner, one brief moment). Nor do we have an idea of the eventual fate of other characters such as the duchesse de Polignac who dies of breast cancer shortly after hearing about the death of Marie-Antoinette, with Victoire suffering the same fate years later, both of them forced into exile.

The chapel scenes where the Dauphine endures compulsory services with princesse Lambelle can be thought of as a foreshadowing of martyrdom. In real life the princesse Lambelle dies at the hands of the mob. She is raped and bludgeoned to death with hammer blows to the skull; her breasts are torn off and her severed head is paraded on a pike in front of the window of Marie-Antoinette at the Temple. Her loyalty to the Queen was her downfall; she refused to denounce the monarchy, but embraced the ideas of equality. Even the comic performance of Judy Davis as Comtesse de Noailles is sullen in the knowledge that in true life de Noailles went to the guillotine together with her husband, daughter-in-law, grand-daughter and niece on June 27, 1794.

Such a mystical and violent experience is hidden under powdered wigs and chromatic filters that give us pastel almonds and champagne dipped raspberries in abundance. Even the ending is golden, with a wonderful shot of the quirkily handsome Jason Schwartzman as Louis XVI re-assuring the queen that the rising sun is not part of a dream. One would assume that a fantastic phase of her life ended. When it comes to this simple closing scene, I agree with Daniel Mendelsohn’s observation concerning this beautiful game of Hollywood indie film house as practiced by Coppola and the murderous historical reality:” You’d never guess this that men’s lives – those of the Queen’s guards – were also destroyed in that violence; their severed heads, stuck on pikes, were gleefully paraded before the procession bearing the royal family to Paris.”

Months later the woman who launched haute couture would have her head served to the roaring public like a sacred calabash. Coppola’s Marie Antoinette deals with the girl but forgets the woman, and barely highlights the slanderous habits of the revolution, the masses, the court and our inaccurate allusions. The film is a breath of fresh air, but strangely drifts to an enchanted kingdom that only manifest itself in 80's New Wave love songs.

Paris

Paris Hilton would have been my natural casting selection for Marie Antoinette if she could act her way out of a Frosted Flake commercial. It is like Stephen Spielberg wanting Tina Turner to play Celie in The Color Purple; their experiences are a perfect match. Tina said no because it brought back too many memories. Paris Hilton is currently too busy living the life of Marie-Antoinette.

Hilton is royalty, unreasonably beautiful, and seems to inspire ridicule in the highest sense of the word. Her excesses and poor choices in dealing with the public follow the doomed dauphine as if she is practically slipping her feet into the snowy footprints of a princess lost in the snow. And what she has done to change fashion, notions of womanhood and public life may be noted with greater congruency by historians in the next century; but, I know that the cosmic umbilical cord has brought us Marie again. And, if we can not phantom 18th century notions of mob rule, it is only because we are not looking into the mirror.

The arrest, release, and re-arrest of the heiress are our Tower, our Temple, and our death procession. Robespierre took 3 hours to reach the platform in order to greet Louisette, during which he was probably pummeled with rotten vegetables and fish. In our cyber age, Paris Hilton was speed away in a matter of minutes to her vaulted room, but we poured our yellow watered basins and spat out our globs of cloudy saliva onto her image for many more hours than Robespierre. We have removed her crown and declared our intolerance to transgressions that could only have been surmised about people in the 18th century. Today all of a princess's debauchery is filmed and dried in the sun to the point that even Madame Hilton's shaved genitals appear before us like an announcement for a sale at Norstrom's. We do no have to pour through an archive of first hand accounts or royal medical records to decipher her dietary and social habits. What luck, in the 21st century, this Marie Antoinette Re-Incarnate does not have the common sense to treat her forays as a masquerade, she is bold face and everyone sees; so, there is no difference between the transgression and the public humiliation. A guillotine would just confuse the situation more.

Un Petit Moment, Madame Louisette

Unfortunately the ending of this piece is chopped off. I wanted to talk more about Alejo Carpentier’s Explosion in the Cathedral which deals with the historic events of the French Revolution and their influence on the New World. That will take up too much time because I must finish packing up my things and head back out to the Bronx this afternoon; and, after that I must get ready for more work. I am completing two graduate courses in seven weeks, plus student teaching, so time is dwindling down to one blog entry a week I am afraid.

Lately I have been accused of being too European in focus, which may or may not mean that I am not Afro-centric enough (cultural people) I can’t decide. It is starting to bother me for some strange reason. Well, the reason is not that strange, I have experienced this before when writing for hip-hop magazines. Some editorial staffs just thought I just didn't fit. Now it seems that with African-American culture vultures, my delving into France does not signify a Creole World or Créolité, it harkens to the Old World vogueing femme. I remember one other fellow graduate student saying to me years ago, that the people in the black pack at Infamous University just did not understand, nor did they want to except that people of color willed a certain level of privilege and power in Louisiana. She said this and just walked off the stage after getting her degree. I guess I am having the same sort of experience . . . again. If I said that I was trying to get back to Africa, I think I would have a much different reaction. I guess the Antilles and the Gulf of Mexico are just too close.

The cultural wars are always raging in one way or another, but I must say I have evolved enough to want to discuss the suffering of people regardless of race. Two hundred years ago, during the Thermidorian Reaction, people used go to the cemeteries for balls where the only pre-requisite for admittance was to have lost a family member. Men wore shirts with material that sometimes covered their heads, women adorned red ribbons around their necks. If a man fancied a woman he would signal to her with a finger motion slitting his throat, the woman would react by bowing her head. There is something so beautiful and sad about that use of non-verbal language. To acquiesce to desire while dancing on top of headless kin is divine. And to think that with the guillotine that uncertainty was shipped to Guadeloupe, Martinique, Haiti, French Guiana, Suriname and anywhere else French dominance had irrigated a little earth. And that is where I will pick up with Carpentier and his beautiful master piece some time in the near-ever-after. I am sorry, I have to go.

Pause: The City: Amerika: Capital: Abstinence: The Coming Guillotine

2007-06-13T10:20:00.000-05:00

I wish my life could be like this picture for once.

Right now, I am simply running from job to job, trying to figure out all the things that need to happen before September. I guess I just long for a slower lifestyle, as opposed to the road rage and gridlock I see everyday on the Route 27, US 1, and the Jersey Turnpike. Hmmmmm!

Yesterday, I sat in a co-worker's beat up car, and sped from Edison to New Brunswick to catch the Princeton local Suburban Transit bus which drops me off at my sub-division. There were three of us in the car. One co-worker was dealing with a boyfriend that was abusing her, the driver was dealing with the daily life of getting by on the small amount of money he had, and there was me, thinking about another drama that is amplifying itself into something I don't want.

Maybe I should take my father's advice and just sing the blues, which I guess is the same as a cigarette and a short shot of espresso. But there was something placid about the silence we all enjoyed despite the small talk. I felt like I was in the middle aged caravan lead by a wooden effigy of St. Martin heading out for a better life in the movie Flesh & Blood.

I am working on a larger blog entry, so that is why there has been a long absence on Unbeached Whale. And with the birth of Beached Bones, I think I am seeing this project a bit differently, which seems to happen from time to time. So, please bare with me, my cyber world, my literary world, and my physical world are not congruent; they are disfigured to the point that what I read and write finds no loci in the persons I speak to everyday.

Give me a day or two to entertain you once again.

For two years I have been working shitty jobs (America's insurance debacle started this journey). And, though many people have thought I have been absolutely crazy, or completely lost my mind, I must say that I never knew that this America existed. Or, rather I have not experienced it; life at $9.50 an hour is emotionally and spiritually confining.

Other observations:

-- Immigration is wrecking havoc with our pay scale.

-- Our national mythos regulates Spanish to a lower tiered language, which is a common occurance concerning dominate cultures and sub-cultures.

-- There is a sense of entitlement by this new crop of immigrants that falls somewhere between Ellis Island and the reclaiming of California, I am not sure how this will be addressed and I don't think it is really wrong.

-- The Achilles heel presented to the new arrivals deals with issues of race; the binary opposition of white and black are expanding to add a third. What will that mean? How can all these ideas I have be applied to current public policy? It is my blind spot.

-- The current disucssion of race includes very blatant accessments by everyone that the majority of blacks have low expectations and a poor work ethic. Sometimes I wonder if that is why people of all backgrounds ask if I am African, Dominican or Haitian when ever I entire the American work environment.

I hope to take these observations back with me to the academy, to my high school students, to my writing and to my artistic cohorts. This travel into the restaurant kitchens, retail stock rooms and sales floors is something that is harder for me to write about because of a certain air of upper middle class appearances instilled in me from childhood, but at the same time, as with my experience teaching mechanical and electrical engineering students, there is something liberating about what has just happened. I can somehow focus better on the task at hand, because reality has been re-defined and the fluff is being discarded . . . again.

I am going to stop here.

I have to finish my coffee and meet Ava for lunch in the city.

More later.

I promise "it" will included former promised subjects like adolescent fun and the story of Marie Antoinette.

Ms. Honey

2007-05-29T21:56:00.001-05:00

Today I saw evidence of colony collapse in bees, I have heard so much about. I got off at the Baychester Avenue stop on the 5 train and walked across the walkway that is suspended above Interstate 95. There was slopping of earth that started just as you crossed the traffic jam below. Perched on high was a tall bush, in full bloom, smelling sweet and delectable. At first I thought it was honeysuckle, but the flowers did not have a bugle shape, instead it had a small gardenia like setting, white and with a light petal count. The blossoms were small and in bunches.

On this tree there was not a single bee. I know that I was in the Bronx and all. But damn.

Beached Bones

2007-05-24T21:37:00.000-05:00

I made an after-thought-blog.

It is kind of blog light, for when I don't have time to say what I want to say in a properly written construction.
I just looked in the mirror and decided to divided myself in a very Ego Trippin' sort of inspired moment of surrealistic Afro-Punk desperation in the middle of my Suburban/Subalternite Life.

Can you dig it?

It is called Beached Bones.

But it is cute.

Non?

Ciao.

Left Overs -- Notes from a Life Fiasco

2007-05-15T20:20:00.000-05:00

The past couple of days have been pretty long and full of unwelcome trials. First, my basement is still jacked up, so I am back to living out of boxes and bags since the lower level of my father’s house was in all actuality my de facto apartment. The ant infestation is still here. Yesterday I saw a larger black ant, which in Tennessee harkens drought because they live so deep under the earth. I wonder what they mean in New Jersey. I guess I should Google it.

My cell phone is dead and I won’t have money to buy another one till the end of the week. My commute took 3 hours yesterday and my day “job” work schedule is in full conflict with my scheduled field work. I also found out that my summer stipend, besides not being enough, will be distributed in two parts, one in the middle of the term and the other at the end, which means I have to wait one month longer than I expected to get my hands on it. Plus yesterday my father and I had a very touchy conversation concerning relationships, as in what floats my boat . . . wink, wink.

Oh! And, how could I forget, my computer has caught something. I was battling it last Sunday night while I was doing work for my father’s business. My father insisted on the deadline, I just don’t think he understands the gravity of the technical situation. I am glad that he is my father and my boss, and not just my boss. He has a much lighter hand as a father.

So, on to publishing . . .

The last couple of weeks I have been picking up bits and pieces of information concerning the state of the book business. Since my stint as a consultant for Reader’s Digest Germany I have been out of the loop.

Exhibit #1
The New York Times printed an article 2 weeks ago dealing with the demise of the book review as a separate section in many major news papers. I enjoyed the article because it dealt fairly well with the marketing and advertising issues that are essential in print media and how books are fairing in an ever more capitalist game. It also touched on the electronic media’s effect on the reading public and featured a couple of literary sites and blogs.

It is funny. Seven years ago I worked for a bunch of old Jackie O stalwart New Yorkers, who while smoking their cigarettes, exhaled through their open brown toothed mouths, scratching their tweed shoulder, staring at the computer like it was shard of crystal dislodged from a frozen comet. I departed for Germany after that experience. Now the nightmare scenario they could have headed off if they had one ounce of business acumen is perilously breathing down their necks. I know book businesses that were still working on typewriters at the turn of this century. Now the high nosed reviewers of that same ilk do not only have to deal with the habits of their readership, but the decentralization of their deafening gaze concerning what is literature and what is not. Even the white boys are tired of the drivel of critics whose economy of praise is governed by their inflexible molars. The thing that worries me is that there is a grave possibility that underneath all of these mergers and reductions of publishing houses and distributors, the nurturing of writers, editors, sales representatives, publishers and designers is at stake. I am not sure if publishing can replicate its own environment. Who can make a living doing it?

Exhibit #2
So, I have been listening to my sources at Vibe/Spin. It is not a scandal, but from what I can surmise, Vibe is restructuring and it might loose a little bit of its edge. But this is just a hunch. I dare not get too detailed because I heard more about the business side of things, which, again in the new media industry, treats editorial as the “content” division which is interchangeable with television programming, websites and infomercials. So, we will have to see. The ouster of Mimi Valdez and the placement of Danielle Smith at the helm have not moved my fingers to the magazine rack. So, I doubt if there will be a change in editorial vision just yet, which will have me wanting to write an article for them.

Exhibit #3
Jstheater has put up some great blog entries on poetry and distribution. The entries speak for themselves and contain an excellent resources.

Brainstorm #1
I think that the small publishers that do poetry should send a proposal to Ingram and see if they could work as a consortium. The Ingram family made their money originally in the barge business before becoming a book distributor and they donate tons of money to Vanderbilt and different organizations. If a consortium could assure the feasibility of having part of its operational cost being tax deductible under 501C tax status, then maybe poetry houses could gleam the benefits of both world. To have such a distribution giant as Ingram married to not-for-profit business tenants could breath new life and a mode of competition that is viable against the miss guided steps of Peruses who are over-stretching their staff to the point of breaking with mergers that in the long run will make reaching their customers ineffective. Did I mention I lived that life before?

The Imperative MEME

2007-05-11T00:31:00.001-05:00

Sorry about the long pieces. The "purpose" of this blog has morphed a bit, and it will probably morph again, as I have been thinking about blogging more in terms of art, writing as practice and writing as an experiment. A couple of my friends believe it to be a bit self-indulgent (Rat-mo and Ava), so, I give a shout out to them because they read it anyway and they are involved in the stories if they like it our not. Hugs Amigos!

Writing about politics is a bit nerve wracking for me right now simply because I have been very frustrated since Senator Barak Obama has requested protection from the federal government, and it was granted. I can't really discuss it. I just feel a level of anxiety equivocal to some silent threat circling my house -- that barely audible snap of a dry twig in the brush, followed by long irregular intervals of nothingness. Maybe this is what some people call ancestral memory. I truly that my nerve endings are honing in on the unrest of post-Reconstruction Alabama.

So, on to the Great Imperative Meme, thanks to Professor Zero by way of Geoffrey Philp

The great imperative of my life has been . . .

Man that is a really hard self reflective question. For me, it has been not to be scared of other people. I have a tendency to poke my head into a million different places, not altering myself, and figuring out if it is the place for me, or if it is hostile, or if it is indifferent to me. Sometimes I go so far as to learn how people speak. That is probably grounded from growing up between Nashville and Anniston, Alabama but spending many summers in the either Washington D.C. or New Jersey/New York. As a teenager I went through great pains to not sound like I was from Tennessee when every time I went Up South. That was from about the age of 12 until I was in college. In the long run, it has proven advantageous for learning how to replicate sounds in other languages.

First and foremost my maternal grandmother lived in Anniston, Alabama and traveled all over the world, regardless of what white people or black people said about her. She went to Egypt, Yugoslavia, Fiji, Italy, England, you name it. When I was about 11 she would brag that she had been to every continent except Antarctica. I would look at her in amazement. And her joy of life was so vibrant that she talked to me about her death like it was just a passing spring shower. Sentences such as, “I want to travel to the tip of Argentina before I die.” would just pop out of her mouth while she was doing the dishes. She seemed so fearless to me, able to plan and execute her travels oblivious to the fact that many people thought my grandmother was too proper and too high maintenance for her own good. The town’s people said that you needed a dictionary to speak with her. The world outside her door seemed to be tolerated; the world she engaged was far beyond our national borders. She would read articles in the paper to me as a kid, and then discuss them; or, my fondest memories were of her criticizing Ronald Reagan on television calling him an old fool. “He is older than me and has no business in the White House.” she would chide, especially when the administration tried to make ketchup count as a vegetable on school lunches.

My father has also contributed to my inquisitive life. While he was a professor at Vanderbilt University he would take me to the campus just to watch him work, and then immediately turn around and take me to the projects to get my haircut. What a great gift. You have to remember that Vanderbilt in 1977 was just being “intergraded” faculty wise, and I remember going to the faculty dinning hall a few years later with all the other professors and their families. It was my father, my mother, my grandmother, my sister and I. We were the only black family, and the only other soul people I remember seeing were dressed like they were from the set of Gone with the Wind. All the men were stiff cryptic looking butlers. The women wore all black with white lace and doilies adorned as aprons and pinned to the crown of their hair. The only things I remember are the waiters smiling at me and my sister as they served us. I was delighted and they were too, and in some way, I remember my race consciousness coming to me at that moment. I was suppose to be there, and not suppose to be there. My grandmother was such the grand dame, my mother was too militant to actually enjoy it, and my father leaned back with a Kappa swagger, oblivious to the chatter around him.

To move from that sphere to the barbershop in the hood was normal for me as a seven-year-old. I remember the drive with my father. I felt as if I was in a space ship, not only because he drove a 1977 Cordoba with Corinthian leather, but because the environments were alien to one another. I remember that these two worlds did not mix, and once we stopped by Farmer’s Market to pick up some part of the pig -- I must now eat with great convincing -- and headed into the Fisk and TSU area, we were in fact in another world.

Afros, decked out deuces, soul food sold through a large rectangle opening on rusty locked gated doors, tonics and salves of various colors and fragrances were all part of that world. The men gathered and talked about Jaws the movie, about Tina Turner’s real age (Dad remembers seeing her play at some juke joint, and figures she is much older than she is saying), about basketball, about the benefits of Aloe Vera juice, and about Ronald Reagan. They used to joke about my father being a Republican. They called him Doc. We always felt welcome. My father always made a point that you don’t change because your environment changes.

So, I learned, from these experiences not to be scared to walk into any situation, no matter what people may or may not think about you. As a writer I like to report what I see, but the impulse to open closed doors comes first. I don’t like to be told to act a certain way because white people will think this of you, just as much as I don’t like to be told the same thing concerning black people, French people, Puerto Rican people, Korean people, straight people, gay people . . . whomever. I will change if you tell me that my signs and gestures are offensive due to a cultural difference; and, I will want to know more about what I can and cannot say or do.

I am a man. I am not perfect. I get angry. I am amorous. I am smart. I get sad. I have feelings. I have armor. I am an Independent (don’t like the Republican/Democratic assumptions). I am convinced you can only afford to be a Socialist in a Socialist country. I think the Black church is a great social institution that could be greater if it did not close itself off from information. And, the list could go on and on. I have never seen why I have to be any different because my environment changes. Let’s be honest. I can see you. And, you can see me. I am willing to take the time to learn how to communicate with you, and I am willing to be misunderstood.

OK. I have to tag 10 people for this blog.

J’s Theater – because your blog has taken the place of the nightly news.

Jocko Homo – because your blog brings out the Soho prowling, elastic waist cargo paints wearing, inner muscle boy in me that I am trying to let out.

Blabbeando – because your blog is the Care Bear that is not scared to fight the dark Seth Lords.

Felix D’Eon – because your site is dedicated to the beauty of East Tennessee.

Lyrically Yours – because your poems are cool to the touch.

Hedonistic Pleasureseeker – because your blog is hot, literate, insightful and hot.

Black PhD – because your blog makes my heart race.

SWEAT – because your blog posts are the most cherished.

Angry Black Bitch – because your blog will kick me in the pants and get me to fightin’ for my life. Go on bitch!

&

You – cause I don’t know you. And I want to know you, but not in the biblical sense.

Your answer can be one line or a million. It doesn’t matter. Thanks again Professor Zero and Geoffry Philp

Obama Drama, Foreign Currency and Deemi

2007-05-10T23:56:00.001-05:00

These are the things that have caught my eye over the last couple of days.

Obamaphobia, by J. at J’s Theater is amazing. Again, I found it difficult to confront because all the Rush Limbaugh commentary really depresses me. The threats to Obama have put me on edge, especially since I have never known New York to be a place where you are attacked for being “liberal” (whatever that means), or for being an artist, and that is exactly what has happened to me in one of my numerous gigs. I know what is beyond the Hudson, and its fury must be harsher than I thought for it to reach me all the way over at 59th and Lexington.

Foreign Currency by Professor Zero is a post that brings into sharp focus a reality I lived for some time, though the country she describes is not named. I really don’t have a clue of where it could be. It could be any number of places in the EU. But it is an interesting set of observations.

Deemi – I have been rocking this for days and days while I work on the computer. She really hits it home for me, though our lives are very dissimilar (I am not a baby’s momma if you have not noticed).

I do recognize her story from good friends of mine that have had the same experience. Her songs are sad, but the story is real, and I love that she sings about herself and reality so passionately and candidly. And, it makes me feel like I am at home. NYC has become sort of an adopted home for me; and, the Brooklyn sound -- with its raspy songtresses over well worked and popular beats -- hits me in the heart everytime.

American Byways, Highways and Crossways -- The Freestyle Entry

2007-05-04T13:15:00.000-05:00

I am at a loss for what to write right now. Not so much because my vision or imagination has stalled but because I am embarking on teacher pre-training and graduate school. As I communicate with my new classmates and colleagues, I am super aware of my life experiences. Mind you, some of this is good baggage. I have stories from other places, great skill sets that I would like to expand, mistakes I have learned from and wonderful friends and relationships. But I can't help but feel cynical about the next 2 years and the process I am going through. I am constantly comparing things to Stuttgart, Nashville, or Cologne. I wish I could talk to someone and not think: "Our social system has too many wholes in it concerning retirement and health insurance?"; or,” Why is education so politically charged in the United States?"; or, better yet "Why do we spend so much time explaining Black people to White people? Are they that unconscious of the world around them? Aren’t there better things I could be doing with my time? Why is it always my responsibility to explain these things? Damn! It has been 400 years and people seem not to get it yet? Am I still responsible for White people's progress?" Evidently, after watching the Republican debate, I still am.

So, I feel a little mixed up. On one hand I feel happy that health insurance and a pension check I can actually see is coming down the pipeline. On the other hand, I feel like I am settling into a profession where the barefoot party monger side of me will have to sit still as I make my way into the community as a teacher. I must admit that people have shown some sort of respect towards me that was lacking when I was managing inventory for a publishing company, or when I was even teaching university. I would explain my ideas about the Creole world and people would immediately say, "What are you going to do with that?" But now I seem visible to everyone as a black man that is a teacher in our community. And with that comes all the race pride and preacher complex salutations that make me feel a bit asthmatic. I am not worried about the teaching part; I have that down packed after four years. I am worried about the family reunion, Christmas, the barbershop and my gym in mid-town where I am forced into a wool, double breasted, black pin stripped suit of African-American normative behavior where rice and peas with coconut milk and steak au poivre become either exotic or the signifier of an uppity Negro.

Whew, I need some water on my face.

For example, I talked to my friend Kurt last night. I was busy typing on myspace with all my crazy cats and cool babes when a message came up from him at 1:57 am that I should give him a call. My self proclaimed “project” before bedtime was a meme sent by a barefoot stomping party gal/church worker who was run out of New Orleans by Katrina and is busy making a life for herself in S.C. I decided I could not send it to everyone on my list because many of the people were professional colleagues and I did not want them to know such private things about my life; and, because many people were friends, but they used their myspace as a promotional tool and I did not want to interrupt anyone’s vibe with what I sometimes think to be childish. But, hey I still want to party.

Kurt is now a famous lyrist and producer with work on a Jennifer Lopez album, many European hits and trips to Norway for house and electronic music stuff. But ten years ago, we were just 23 or 24, traveling between Rutgers and New York City and all points in between just to finally settle in Harlem. Kurt and I learned from a friend I will call the Mighty O everything about ball culture, clubbing, orishas and uptown institutions (like Ralph Ellington’s address). We were the Mighty O's acolytes and he was the bestower of our most piercing criticisms; divinator of our most unattended and deepest feelings; and, our truest benefactor with a wealth of uplifting heart felt words for our battered self-esteem after being dogged by the music and publishing worlds. The Mighty O took us to the Octagon and Sound Factory Bar like they were weekly temples in the summer. The Mighty O cooked cornbread and greens in his kitchen. The Mighty O strolled with us through Harlem, Mid-town, Chinatown, The Cloisters, Washington Heights, Columbia and Times Square like we were out bird watching or shopping for a new blade for the lawnmower on Main Street. For Kurt and I, The Mighty O was our greatest wish in the flesh, a guide through the looking glass and into the New York we were searching for but could not find without his special key.

Kurt and I talked about that decadent afterlife in quick flashes of disjointed memories. The majority of the discussion was the demise of The Mighty O, a fall that wrecked havoc on all who knew him. It was a string of other late night sentences and conjuring. But, the mourning tone was there, The Mighty O's misfortunes piled up so quickly and astonishingly that no one had time to act. His heartache was maddening. His manipulation was maniacal. The volleys of insults and control were terrorizing. All of it disguised in terms like "pouring tea", "throwing shade" and "trade". All of his towers seemed to fall after 9-11 and Kurt witnessed it and I did not. I was far away. The conversation soon turned to us, those that are left. Kurt and I were thinking about the young boys we were 10 years ago, and the parts of us that wanted that back.

"Who was I? Who was that kid?" said Kurt.

"I don't know? But there was nothing wrong with you then." thought the Unbeached Whale.

I just stayed silent as I let Kurt talk about that party time.
---------------------

I guess I am busy writing about that conversation because as I sent my meme out via e-mail to those select few (cause I did not want to bother anyone else with what I was feeling) talking to Kurt made me realize that not only is New York not the same anymore, but neither am I. And, that “summer of '97 and ‘98” guy is gone, smashed up into a million carbon atoms that only live in my brain; or, maybe he is all dead skin devoured at night by small mites; or, maybe he is a broken toenail at the bottom of a pool on the mezzanine level of an Atlanta high-rise hotel. But, in the meantime, this same Unbeached Whale is wondering when he will get a chance to dance and party like that again. Is the party really over? Is New York really dead? Or, is it just me, scared to jump into the deep water? Party life is a hard thing, even if you are there only for the music. The Mighty O is not the only person we have lost.

Waiting for the Love to Come

2007-04-28T23:09:00.000-05:00

Things have been pretty settled lately. I made a major turn around the corner last week; I had my first formal meeting with my new employers on Monday. As I got onto the elevator, I was the only male out of about 8 people occupying the large mechanical lift. We were all going to the 8th floor. I felt a vertigo like flirtation. I was super aware of myself. Again, the realization about my choice as an educator and writer conjured up a million question. The most paramount of which is, why does it seem that only women and gays read? If Bush had picked up a few books before he invaded Iraq then this terrible war would not have happened, but that still does not explain Condoleeza Rice. I will have to revisit issues of difference as outlined by Derrida at some point for my own sake and the country’s.

Anyway. Sexist and heterophobic . . . I know, I know.

Alas! Viola! The doors opened and I walked out into a more even crowd of fellow nubies.

My new employer is paying for a second Master's so I have been trying to be as attentive as possible despite wanting to simply disappear for a couple of weeks to the woods of East Tennessee; or, in a crowd of drunken twenty and thiry-somethings, bar hoping from one juke joint to the next in Oxford, Mississippi or Austin, Texas (don't sleep, me and Wine Tasting Lesbian are two coloured folk that wouldn't think twice about pulling that stunt off); or, follow some band through the deep South sucking on Coronas and swallowing raw oysters on the half shell. It must be the bottled-up frustration from the mini-construction site that my basement dwelling has become. But I always count my blessings . . . things could be much worse.

So language acquisition is in and history dissertation is out, at least for now. And blog wise, the last three entries took a bit out of me to construct, but I am glad I did them. This blog is becoming my creative compass in many ways; I find that I can focus better now that my professional future is a bit more decided. Lately I have seen that others have been blogging about poetry. Jstheater comes to mind instantly. I contemplated a poem, but since I went to the Gender Amplified Conference a couple of weeks ago I have decided on a video yet again. This one has been the constant backdrop of all my mental ramblings and internet navigations. But in the meantime I finished On the Road and have started on Alejo Carpentier's Explosion in the Cathedral. I have been surfing myspace like a basset hound listening to much contemporary Haitian music and wondering about this coming summer. Two graduate courses and field work. Plus this need I have to complete a creative mission and live a bit of the good life. I have been a miser for eight months, and it will last a little bit longer. Oh, boy! I am wondering what kind of fruits these seeds will grow. Man!, what a mélange.

Get at me!

Ciao.

Lady Beat Makers Black Mambo Masala

2007-04-23T08:33:00.000-05:00

The Author verses the Auditory

As an artist I find that I vibe with photographers best, but somehow I am always surrounded by musicians. I get along with photographers because I am a real aesthetic kind of guy when it comes to what I write. I feel as if I am constantly trying to play with ‘style’ the same way photographers play with lighting or Photoshop. I want there to be some sort of ultra-violet landscape in my prose that is bumpy and grainy, making one’s mind’s eye trace a barren backdrop or lush foreground only to focus in on some delicate flower, or brown skinned woman with one unexpectedly cold gray pupil, or a certain fowl's shade of blue that has ringlets of white. When I look at a book of photography or talk to my friend Lenny (the photographer), I feel equal.

As far as musicians go, I am unequal. I am a perpetual groupie, a hanger on. Part of it is due to how music makes me feel, and part of it is my jealousy of how they create – writers must face the page alone, while musicians all live like Robin Hood and his Merry Gentlemen. Or, maybe they are more like Shaolin Monks, practicing their craft in an isolated and tormented bliss, and then assembling themselves into a fortified fighting group – symbiotic duos, funky trios, uber-melodic stringed sextets – that practice their craft in a mystical one mindedness. My best friends overseas are all ex-patriot singers who are adorned, loved and fetishsized in a way that makes you think of Jimmy Baldwin and Bid Whisk on the Riviera. As friends and artist they are demanding because their bodies are their instruments and they do not shy away from the spotlight in their art or in their every day interactions. Pops Wilson once told me after I joined the choir: "Once you say that you are a singer, you must be prepared to perform at any time." Funny, even my male church going ultra straight friends, who are vocalist, are divas, grabbing the mike and rushing the band along at frantic speeds to get to that one special note that allows the audience to float back down to earth. ” To be professional”, as my friend Michael has told me many times, “is to deliver the exemplary notes exactly the same way every time.” It is the demands of zero mistakes, which accounts for the madness. It is also the illusion, the performance, the band, the key, the leadership, the divvying of the pot, the wardrobe, the connection to the audience and required nakedness of any performance artist that reminds me of what a turtle I really am. I do not envy being “present” in order for others to experience my art. I relish the written word. My body is not there to be picked over by malicious critics. The page is my physical emissary; I would rather they chomp over my sentence splices than to chop me up physically and emotionally. The advantage of being a writer in the face of the critic is the rebuttal, there is no such advantage for the performer. But, whom am I fooling; I am the critic in many instances -- the lofty loner intellectual who writes about My Chemical Romance, Dreamgirls and Whitney Houston, picking over their full red wine bodied whole notes and personal lives without acknowledging what my musician friends have taught me about deliverance.

Trepidation and The Women’s Hip-Hop Invitation/Innovation

Two Saturdays ago I went to the Gender Amplified: Women and Technological Innovation in Hip-Hop conference sponsored by Africana Studies at Barnard (sorry for the late entry but I was flooded out of my basement abode in New Jersey right after the festivities at Barnard). The title alone reminded me of how different hip-hop and my Gospel/Broadway/Funk/Soul/Boss nova experiences have been. I have not been in such a hip-hop inspired discussion for a long time and the parts of the conference that I did attend were a reminder of my truncated digital life. I have been one of many performers on stage when it comes to voice, but when it comes to hip-hop, I have only been the critic and many times it has not been the music I dissected, but the culture.

On that Saturday evening, I debated whether I was going to go to the conference or hang out at a bar and have a beer. I guess my hesitation about going to a conference that was focused on women was because of what it means to me. In terms of participating high academic theory, the knot in my gut is the equivalent of sitting in on my older cousin’s tea party. I was allowed in but there were internal and external voices asking me why I was not playing with the boys. I always get that feeling in these groups, because participants start talking about women and men from a vantage point that reduces being male to some essential and oppressive element or set of prototypes. I agree that our socialization, standing in society, markers for professional competency and ways of communication are different but what about when we lay down our swords? Can we have a conversation with one another that is not politicized? If we are in love, or choose to love, must it be a battlefield also? Maybe I do not get the female perspective, then again I sometimes marvel at all of the supposed networks and infrastructure I am suppose to access effortlessly because I am male. These assumptions do not call for questions concerning race or sexual orientation? And if we were to tackle those assumptions, then we would also see the horns of the black male Mandingo and faggot rear there ugly heads. But enough, we could start unloading from there, but I am not in the mood, and I swore off theoretical double-speak and Newport Lights around the same time.

In the end I decided to go. After I got off from my job, I walked from 59th and Lexington to the 1 train station stop not far from Carnegie Hall. My sojourn to Barnard included a discussion with a tall brown skinned middle aged man from Milwaukee who has been in NYC since 1970. "I have witnessed a great transformation", he said concerning the city. As we left, he gave me his card then walked up towards Harlem. With all the young college kids running around me, on a clear cool spring day (hours before the Nor’easter’s merciless deluge), I felt optimistic and reminiscent. A friend housed me in his dorm for months at Columbia University during the winter of 1995.

So, I missed Tricia Rose (who people said was dynamite) and Spinderella. Rose spoke sometime around lunch time, I am not so sure about Spinderella. I got uptown around 5:30 pm, in time for the “Gender in Real Time: Tracing Women and Technology” panel’s question and answer period. By the time I got there it had turned into a discussion of the Imus Affair. It was interesting listening to the female students talk about the “nappy headed” problem. Very interesting comments were made by one student about how women are boiled down to a sort of currency, devoid of personal power, but regulated to a sign of men’s power. At times, I had that childhood feeling again. I did not really know how to hug, introduce myself, talk or gauge relationships. Who I thought were sisters were mother and daughter. Who I thought female lovers could have been business partners. Who I thought male and female lovers could have been artist and producer. To top off this lack of sexual radar, all codes of hip-hop are confusing to me, because the facade of being hard is always with in reach with the turn of a baseball cap or the donning of a coat. Who is what, is never clear, but that did not hinder me from meeting new friends and people that were asking the same questions about hip-hop as I am. I also meet people that had stayed in the game longer than me, and it was refreshing to see grassroots organizing happening in the genre. I have been divorced from it because of location and in hip-hop location is everything (Brooklyn, Bronx, Uptown, the dirty South, ATL, Cashville, etc. . .).

When I was 21, studying at NYU I remember how much all of this gender based agitation upset me. The assumption that I was somehow going home to some bastion of power was an opinion held by several instructors and not just by fellow students. Part of it was the condescending voice of a new New York liberalism that assumed I needed to be educated about the plight of women despite being raised in a household consisting of three generations of women in one house. The other part was simply how I perceived gender specific arguments in my 21-year-old mind. Where most of my male friends from Hampton University were off to work for television stations, computer companies or entering law school, to be nurtured by male mentors; I was a singular male in many groups and discussions, and mentorship was coming in a haphazard way. Despite all the time I spent in Africana, it was the Latin American department that took me under there wing. In the end it made dating impossible and professional relationships with my age group tempestuous. First because the age difference between a 21 year old male and a 28 year old woman is probably more like 15 years than seven. And second, because the language that was being used in class was coming home to roost.

Me (21-year-old): "God he . . ."

The Girl/ (Wo) man (28-years-old and fucking me): "(eyes slightly crossed). . . God is a female, at least in my mind. But God should be referred to as 'It', because 'It' is a higher form of he or she because 'It' does not denote gender."

Me (the kid): "It" is an inanimate object. A higher form of he or she is "we" or "us".

The Girl (the grown-up): I am tired of playing games.

And that was what my whole undergraduate relationship to black women was to a certain extent. "Why is he so resistant" one woman would ask of another, and the answer became "because he is so young." I just felt like they were playing word games, I wanted to get to know someone, not fight. But then again, I made bigger mistakes, in my skewed notions of what honesty and fairness was, but I shy away from mentioning them, partly because they embarrass me and partly because in the end, my mistakes in relationships do not denote a position taken in the gender argument. Many times love was lost from this oil slick of love and identity politics -- for me gender distinctions and roles were always soiled, in the muddy waters of being a 20-something (at least until graduation).

How the Ladies Schooled the Pimps On Laying Down Green, Hot-Fire, Hip-Hop Tracks

My hesitancy about going to the conference was this feeling that I was slipping away from the all male road trips and beer binges to an afternoon chat with five women working on their PhDs and being completely lost in confessions of chauvinistic abuse by hyper-masculine signifiers; or being literally trapped in the middle of a debate on George Lamming and his portrayal of women in his novel Castle of My Skin. I wanted to desperately receive new information, but I was not sure about how I should behave as a male in one of those spaces again.

Lady Beat Makers vol. 1 directed by Tashelle "Shamash" Wilkes was an amazing movie experience. It chronicles the experiences of 5 women music producers: Josie Carr, Laticia "T.C. Lewis", Shakti, Jewel Brown, and Stephanie "Diverse" Whittaker. All five of these musicians/producers were totally different and fluid in their art form. In terms of shattering the gender myth, I reached an epiphany through the movie about God given affinities and life's passions as being totally different from gender. I was rocked out of my socks and had the feeling I had heard something that I had never heard before. And like a faux country and western television jingle, "I was very happy that I came."

The movie did not talk so much about their lives in a male dominated art form, but showcased their work and distinct backgrounds. The movie is actually several exposes stitched together in succession. It gives the feeling that you are actually taking a stroll through one single neighborhood, peeking into the windows of 5 extraordinary homes since many of the featured producers include footage of their family and parents. And it is the individual input of each artist that makes the film, since the director shots footage on their blocks, in their studios, and in their family rooms. You get a concrete sense of their lives in one moment in time, instead of a biography that tackles their lives from birth to final edit. This makes the film very fresh and new, and gives the viewer more time to actually "listen" to their music instead of ruminating on how hard it is to be a female hip-hop producer. That point has been made, though that film has yet to be made. The irreplaceable circumstance of viewing Lady Beat Makers is a chance to partake in the audio cacophany of Josie the Rock Star, T.C. the Soul Gifted, Shakti the Sweet Star Feminine, Jewel Brown the Self Invented Uptown Electro Beat Box Girl or Diverse the Street Blessed Warrior who seems ready to compete with any of the guys at the drop of a dime. In fact, all of them do. Behind their smiles, at the panel following the screening, it was a sight to behold -- all of these producers staring out into the crowd with a serene sort of battle raging in their eyes. They all seemed ready to fight and defend, their eyes all glared outward as if they were trailblazers in a dense forrest with no time to waste, they were all of few words. Their work speaks for itself.

Goddess From the Machine

The after party included 3 sets by DJ Ayana Soyini, DJ Sparkles (scratching behind her back) and DJ Rehka. There was more conversing and more personal flashbacks as I watched all these young people congregate on the edges of a dance floor in the middle of Barnard. It made me aware of the constant need to create and re-create places of culture. But it also made me aware that some people jump into the stream, some wade by the pool, and some refuse to take off their clothes. But as always, this did not mean people were not having a good time.

So, it turned out to be a good thing. Especially with all this stuff swirling around hip-hop today. Funny, just as French hip-hop is the center of social rallying calls and the anti-libretto to the French elections, the long view towards 2008 is bringing hip-hop into our political focus. But for us, it is not as vanglorious as the French hip-hop scene that reminds me of all my days listening to The Poor Righteous Teachers and Public Enemy. Our political discussions surround language and its devolution. Our political discussions challenge our communities' visions and views of itself. Does hip-hop really represent the people that Russell Simmons says it represents, or only a part? And, if it does not, then what about the people that are shut out of the game, may they be musicians, producers, rappers, writers, journalist or photographers? Is there a litmus test that countervalences the past Imus public relations test concerning content, language and artistic privilege? The gansta is dying in our mist, and when the bullet plugs are pulled out of the holes, hopefully we will begin again.

Gender Amplified (more pictures)did much in showing me that another community exists outside of the multi-media world I consume (but not always volunterialy) . Maybe these 5 producers and 1 film makers are the superwomen ordained to rescue us from the mediocraty of hip-hop and its money making complex. It is amazing what hip-hop has gone through in the last 15 years as it rose from a grassroots social and party anthem generator stretching beyond the 5 boroughs, to a megaplex of instant stars racking in the cash. Sometimes I am lethargic about it, like the bitter end of a relationship with someone I must see everyday. And at other times I look at it like a giant mammal stuck in a desert. It just needs a little resissitation. Lady Beat Makers vol. 1 made me believe that help is on the way.

My Darling Sugar Cube

2007-04-19T07:57:00.000-05:00

Today I received my old immunization card in the mail. I have two of them. One is from when I was a toddler in the seventies and the other is from when I first arrived in New York City just before my 22nd birthday. Due to my new gig, I have to provide proof of immunization and/or booster shots for a host of maladies that were eradicated in the last 50 years. I called my mother and asked her for the New York card since it is the most recent and I had mailed it to her for safe keeping over a decade ago. Since then, I have lived in so many different apartments and countries I am extremely proud of my forward thinking.

These immunization ruminations have made me realize that one of my earliest memories is that of my beloved polio sugar cube in Durham, North Carolina. The memory starts with my mother walking through automated doors; I am hanging onto her left hip, with my feet secured around her lower belly and her left forearm hooked midway under my backside. My mother had already obtained some sort of registration card. I was aware that there was an assembly line like quality to this doctor’s visit, and I must have been drawn to the number of children running around me. Also the array of children's furniture, the orange sherbet color of the sheetrock and the light yellow pastel color of the wood panels that stretched from the floor halfway up the wall like giant flatten reeds alerted my senses to the fact that this place was a sanctuary for kids. There is also the possibility that my mother told me what was going to happen. She had a knack for giving clear instructions to me, even though I was barely a toddler. I believe it was due to her being a graduate student. Her thesis concerning the Black Church was the pinnacle and homage to the type of activism that my grandfather had done in Anniston, Alabama. She has always been extremely conscious about not "dumbing down" any of her children and demanded clear speech from me at all times. This was balanced by her over-protectiveness which was so sublime and ready made I had made up a totem for my mother before I was in kindergarten. I have always imagined her as a deer.

A female doctor or nurse approached my mother and told her what I already knew, which was that I should congregate with the other children sitting at a large plastic table. The table to my mind's eye and bodily proportions was like a miniature round table in King Arthur's court. My only concern from the point my feet touched the floor was the snack I was about to receive since everyone else seemed to be having something to eat.

Now that I think about it, my mother may have been checking me in while I went to this waiting area. I don't remember her coming with me to the table, what I do remember is my mother whispering something in my eye before placing me down. She re-assured me in someway, but she was nervous about my eagerness. It was as if my slightly hyper-anticipation without the fear of being separated from her stuck in the back of her mind. Now and then we joke about my first day of pre-school at North Carolina Central University -- the picture shows me waving with my lunch box and backpack, while she is busy crying behind the camera -- it should have been the other way around -- at least it was for the other kids who I consoled at my table on the first day, but that was sometime after my polio sugar cube. Plus, I do remember crying later at the table because in all the mass hysterics I thought there was something to be afraid of, maybe school meant I would live here all the time and just visit home.

I remember walking, with this woman sort of guiding me from behind. She wore a white coat and had long red hair with big shaggy winged curls. I don't remember her face, but I remember her presence, she felt like some sort of teacher or coach. It was also odd because I sensed that she was very nervous about loosing me, or maybe she had not been around kids and was too apprehensive about the entire situation. I must have been taught to follow instructions very well, as I mentioned before, because I did not contest. Plus, I was in a trance; a table with kids meant a snack, which I always appreciated more than actual lunch or dinner.

Once I got to the table, I remember seeing a boy with black curly hair get up and walk away. It must have been his mother that got him. He had on a gray sweater, a white shirt and slacks. He was a bit older than me. And across the table, I remember seeing a dark haired girl in a dress. The exact color of her corduroy dress escapes me, but it seemed to me we were about the same age, which means I must have been sizing up all the other kids according to age and their abilities to communicate, which I believe most toddlers do. I was not intimidated, but I do remember feeling a little bit humbled because I did not really understand what we were suppose to do. I was awaiting instructions very patiently as my mother and grandmother probably drilled into my head by that point. I do not remember saying anything, but I remember the longing to communicate and ask questions. And, I remember being happy to be away from adults and being with others my own size. At that time I was an only child in a world of graduate students.

Immediately after sitting down in a hard plastic chair, I remember wondering if someone had wet their pants in the seat before I sat down. I must have had an experience where I had sat in some other kid’s cold piss, and it alarmed me that the seat I had chosen could have been a booby trap. I also remember looking at the red seats to my right and left, wondering if they had puddles in them too. I surmise I was starting to make judgments about things, because I have the faint recollection that depending on the condition of the seats I was going think the place a total unsanitary dump or I was going to get on with the wonderful meal I was anticipating while my mother was away working on the paperwork . . . whatever that meant.

I remember thinking that anytime my parents were at a counter, that I was suppose to be quiet and not interact with the person they were talking to, nor was I to interrupt them directly. I remember thinking, well if it is an emergency and I don't say anything she is going to ask me why I didn't speak up, while if I interrupted her transaction with something I deemed important and she did not, I would receive a verbal lashing. So, sitting at the table, I was glad to be away from that moral dilemma.

I also had an awareness that I was at a doctor's clinic (I don't think I understood the concept of a hospital until my sister was born), which meant that I had been to enough by now to know what was going on. I did not have white coat syndrome, and doctors did not mean anything particular to me. It was like I was going to get a bunch of task to do. Sometimes they were mental, like responding to auditory stimuli; and sometimes they were physical like looking into a light that made me tear-up, which really proved to be a test of nerve. I remember my father in these instances, and not my mother, giving stern instructions to look into the light, not to blink and implicitly somehow ignore the strange white man who was breathing heavily through his nostrils, with intervals of vulgarly heated air tickling my upper lip. I remember wandering what is this guy thinking so hard about, but I interpreted the test as a sign of strength with a reward at the end.

So, staring at the young girl across the table, I wanted to ask her something, and maybe I did. I remember a boy that was maybe three and a half or four sitting next to me on my right, and then there was another kid a few places to my left at the three or four o'clock position that started to cry. I expressed to the kid next to me, in a manner that I forget, that I had no idea what was going on because a crying kid is not a happy kid, and a happy kid has food. All I remember is him looking at me weird, and then swallowing a sugar cube in a small white cup. He looked at me with minor disdain that made me feel strange, but I somehow surmised that he was not in charge so who cares about his approval.

Now, I believe I have this as an early memory because I had not seen a sugar cube before that very day. It was in a little paper white condiment cup, and a nurse passed them out. In fact there were two different nurses hovering around the table at the seven and eight o'clock positions. Both had dark hair. Both had completely different temperaments. The larger of the two had short cropped hair and was working at a stainless steel cart with two or three shelves. I imagine she was placing the cubes in the cups, and then soaking them with an eye dropper. She seemed to be fairly excited and smiled throughout her task and I vaguely remember her smiling at me. The second one was skinny and looked a little like Linda Carter, but this vaccination was before the Wonder Woman series. I think I remember the women more so than the men because I was paying attention to long hair. Even men with long hair seemed to fascinate me, like the hitch hikers on the road in the 70's. I remember watching them from the car, totally spellbound by how their body sizes and figures changed according to how far away we were. As soon as I got a good look, I wondered how good a look it was; their perspective must have changed three or four times from the vantage point of a moving car. I vaguely remember the car seat, but I do believe my father and mother took me out of it early, as well as my baby stroller. My mother and father carried me everywhere.

So, I received my sugar cube and stared at it. The child that was crying was being taken away by his mother, and the tall skinny brunette looked at me unlovingly, and told me to eat it. That is all I needed to hear, I was there waiting for instructions, so I chewed it. I remember the less-than-child-loving-nurse looking over me while I felt this grainy block of sand disintegrate, making sure it went down. I did not turn to look at her. I was still staring at the girl that had caught my eye with her black hair. She was rushed off with her mother, her face without any emotions; she was in this confusing and crazy race of life just like me.

The number of children at this fair was enormous, because as I finished the flavorless morsel of sugar, I remember a feeling of disappointment that this was not going to be a real dessert or even a freakin’ meal for that matter. Somewhere in my brain I remember thinking it an injustice and that somehow my mom would make it right. Maybe it was the sense that my mother could go ask the evil nurse to bring her son out a tray of food like she was suppose to.

To be fair, the mass of kids and parents coming to this event was also the reason behind the nurses running in a mind numbing stupor of limited joy. They were probably scared they would loose an independently minded toddler or were fed up with dealing with literally hundreds of little temperaments, possibly having to force feed a sugar cube or twenty.

I don't remember much beyond being summoned from the table. I believe it was my mom who came and got me just as I had finished my cube. She smiled and grabbed me by the wrist. I don't remember turning around all the way, I kind of knew she smiled and I knew it was her automatically. But my eyes were fixed on the table and the kids coming to take my place.

This fair went on for some years because my younger sister Rosaline who is three years and eight months younger than I went to a similar set up. I remember that either it was not my turn or I was too old to participate when they dragged us back behind a curtain in assembly line fashion again and a nurse stuck a thermometer in my sister's butt like she was changing oil at Jiffy Lube. My sister screamed and cried and refused to smile at any one else that came into that little curtained off area. I remember that the curtain was not closed at first, and the nurse ran and partitioned my sister's bare buttock off from the rest of the public while she was screaming and kicking to high heaven. We were causing a scene, which my sister’s yelling did on many occasions. There was something visceral and revengeful in her tantrums and as she has matured to a woman I am slow to anger her because I don’t want to deal with the torrent of her rage, that remarkably out trumps my own calls for battle.

I was so shocked to find out from my childhood immunization card that I received my sugar cub on November 23rd 1973 a couple of days after my father's 29th birthday. I was not yet two years old, I was 21 months old. I was given a series of 4 different immunizations from birth to 21 months and this was the last one. I do not remember getting another shot until I was in my 20’s. I asked my mother if I was walking then and she said yes with a motherly giggle (I don't know too much about baby development). I don’t know why, I asked, I remember walking. I guess it just seem impossible and implausible that I was already a real person. I remember the beginning of that doctor’s visit so clearly, it is the rest that escapes me.

I don't think my vocabulary was very good because I remember wanting to say things, but not being able to, and I remember observing intensely everything going on around me. I guess it was partly because it was a new experience, but I guess it was also just mother nature -- some vestigial awareness that made me suspect of any possible dangers.

Until the revelation of this date, my mind had a slightly different picture. I thought I was older and I thought that I was bigger. Maybe I had an Afro, because I do remember it, but maybe it was just not as large and round as I had thought. The hair cut I had from pre-school until I was in the 3rd grade was called a New Yorker, because it was round on in the front and then completely square in the back with a thick kitchen. I remember my father picking that part out and me kicking and screaming to high heaven.

I talked to my father last night asking him what date we exactly moved from Kansas City, Kansas, where I was born, to Durham, North Carolina. He said it was September of 1973, so I guess that would make sense. I think I remember the drive from Kansas to North Carolina because it was such a long trip. I vaguely remember the change in landscape and watching the mid-day sun turn to twilight. I also remember a sense that we were not coming back to Kansas, or maybe my memory was sparked by the change in my total environment. In the recesses of my mind, I remember my yellow stroller with blue, red and white asterisks that spun around, and I remember the beaded curtain that hung like a veil before I walked out of one room into the hallway. It was like a shower of amber. But I surely remember the highway and traveling. My mother said that I did not make a sound during the whole trip and that they had a great sense of pride traveling with me. Then again it could have been a drive to my grandmother’s that I remember, crossing the Grandfather Mountains and my mother talking about the mountain range in very clear sentences telling me to look out of the window. “Aren’t they beautiful.” she would say.

The date also rings true in the practicality of me getting immunized at this fair. My mother and father must have felt a sense of relief that this fair was going on. I needed my last course of shots, and being new to Durham and balancing commutes to Raleigh, the event must have been an easy solution to a possibly stressful time in our young family’s life. Both of them started to teach in the university and there must have been a rush to figure everything out at the beginning of the semester.

My father answered the question, but there was also this sense that so much time had elapsed, and such a bold faced question about dates made me feel aware of my lifetime, just as it must have made him aware of it also. I wish I could find the proper way to end this entry, but I can’t, I just feel like explaining more about this time in between, especially the woman that kept me sometime after we arrived to the Southeast. She was a sweet elderly lady who cooked all day, keep a scant distance to me, but could make me fall a sleep on her big quilted and afghan covered bed in a ritualistic fashion. I remember getting up and wandering around from room to room, every wall was a freshly coated blazing choice of white. She was clean. She sometimes kept more than one of us. She set up a gate at the kitchen door. She was so slow, and seemed all knowing and totally trustful of me. I remember playing in her back yard full of crab apples, then coming in, to eat chicken and rice. I miss women like that, this calm, gardenia perfume smelling breed of women. You know the ones that only made cake out of Swan brand flour and hand picked walnuts from their sister’s backyard. Or received visitors from next door, but took the time to introduce you to a feisty eighty-year-old like you were an adult yourself.

Pop Gun

2007-04-17T13:21:00.000-05:00

Half German

Big Brother: Für welche Klasse hast du eine Aufgabe?

Little Sister: For English Class.

BB: Ist es einen Aufsatz oder eine Übung?

LS: It is an essay.

BB: Was ist das Thema?

LS: Uhhhh?

BB: Was ist das Thema?

LS: I don't know what Taahma . . .

BB: 'Thema' means theme. What is it about?

LS: The day I was born. I have to interview my mom and tell them about it. We are writing an autobiography this semester.

P-Funk

BB: Did you download any of Parliament Funkadelic?

LS: Gross.

BB: Why is it gross?

LS: They are gay.

BB: Why are they gay?

LS: Anything from the 60's or 70's is gay.

BB: But you love Carly Simon.

LS: Look they are gay because they wear make-up and those high heeled shoes and tight pants that show their . . . ugh! . . . it is disgusting.

BB: But . . .

LS: . . . Carly Simon has class.

----------------------------
As I get ready to move out from my father's basement (thank you Jesus, I just need to get a definitive plan off the ground) I realize that I am going to miss my youngest sister. I have not spent this much time with her since she was 5-years-old. And now she is in the 7th grade, a year ahead of everybody and heading off to a model government program for one week in DC this summer.

Before our brief run in at the computer was over, I gave her more details about the day she was born.

And now, I am getting ready to leave, and maybe life won't bring me back to her until she is full grown. I wonder what her taste will be like then. I wonder about me too. I wonder how one can explain black men in tight clothes and glitter. Is it safe to say they were not sleeping with one another? I won't bring up George Clinton again until she is 18.

Note:
Alyce brought up the point that gay is a negative word and I should ask her where those connotations come from. I know that that is part Jersey slang; kids in the suburbs call anything "gay" from commercials, to restaurant hang-outs, to television shows. It means it is old, weird and out modish.

Sometimes I wonder about such conversations with my young sister. Do I wave a flag and bring up those connotations when she uses the word? But what about subsequent generations that have experienced the ultra-masculinity of hip-hop and the UFC, can they interpret the signs, symbols and signifiers of George Clinton, Prince and David Bowie in any other way? Maybe not.

St. Landry

2007-04-03T22:41:00.001-05:00

Grifs (Me)

The job search is continuing. Yesterday I had an interview, which puts me in this pattern of meeting and talking to people at the beginning of the month, with my job search and resources waning by the end of the month. The past two weeks have been no exception due to my visit to the doctor for my diabetes and getting over my inflamed tonsils and stomach flu.

Yesterday before my interview at a marketing company -- where everyone seems to be 24-years-old and first generation American -- I kind of knew that I was going to get the gig. The interviewer was from Hungary and we spoke a little German. I told him that I want Portuguese and French to be next on the list and was very much interested in the traveling and international aspects of the job. I applied for the 10 month manager training program and was called into the office for the second interview on tomorrow. I am not so sure about the legitimacy of this "online" marketing team, there is much I need to research concerning their background and if they are registered with any nationally accredited association of marketers . . . and such and such. But screw it, I will check it out tomorrow, the job market has changed rapidly, so traditional avenues in business may or may not work out in every situation. Plus if this second day is too Cousin Vinnie-esque then I am out of there a pinch the wiser.

Refugees of the Union Army (My Mother)

The other thing that happened was a leap in my genealogical research. I have been doing this for a couple of years, but it has again been put on hold due to money, health and family issues. I have been concentrating on my mother's side of the family for years now. From what I can tell, my ancestors were enslaved outside of Atalanta, just south of the city, in Forsythe County. Then, sometime during or after the Civil War, my ancestors moved from that area and settled in Clay County Alabama, which was cut out of a portion of Talladega and Randolph counties by the Union Army during Reconstruction. This had to have happened sometime before 1870. Interestingly enough, my ancestors seemed to be living on different plantations in Georgia but kept in contact enough to put the family back together after emancipation (just a hunch). In fact, we stayed together as family unit in Clay County Alabama until 1923 when Clay County’s economy started to decline rapidly due to the lull in demand for graphite after World War I, its. Then the family moved to Anniston, Alabama.

I have a clear view of what happened to my mother's family's world after the Civil War, but very little concerning the time before. My oldest known maternal descendant is Neal Willoughby. He is my great-great-great-great-great-grandfather. He was born in 1807 in the state of Georgia, just before Alabama became a state in the union. According to the census taker in 1880, Neal did not know the origins of his parents.

There are a lot of interesting possibilities concerning Neal's household and the people who lived in it. He lived with his daughter Clarry Mann, and his two granddaughters Adeline and Ollie. Both are listed as mulatto, a distinction that will be erased from the American census by 1890. Adeline is 11 and her younger sister is 9 their younger brother Bait is not mentioned. They live next door to a woman named Harriet Jenkins, who by some sources is related to us (an older sibling possibly of Adline and Ollie), and by others not. Of course these sources are oral. And when I drove to the area where they settled after leaving Georgia, the cotton fields were shockingly dry and delicate, like puffed icicles on sticks. The sky was gray and the mountains looked uninhabitable. It was both beautiful and demanding.

I am going to ask my cousin Stan if he wants to drive there one day when I go visit him in Atlanta. I know that their graves have no stones anymore, and I want to see the church where they were members. I hope it is still there. According to a first hand account of life in Clay County, the black church was where the first generation of free children went to learn to read, and there was also only one recorded lynching in that small area in 1888. Even today there is no railroad pass that goes through that section of Alabama, and you can't take the main interstate to get to the county set of Lineville. It is also a dry county, so you can't drink when you get there. The library where I picked up the first person narrative is a white one room house. The stone courthouse where I picked up the marriage certificates still feels like a place where you make arrangements to relinquish livestock to the bank. Funny, I don't know why I miss it.

Abandoned on Dauphin Island (My Father)

So, my father's family is a far greater mystery to me, I know few of family members and even fewer family stories. My mother's family is a progression of family names, that included ministers and wayward black sheep that would go on to put their oratory skills towards secular educations; and, soothsaying women that could crunch great amounts of numbers and forms in their heads (on a spring day in 1908 my great-grandmother Ola received a dress for her 12th birthday that she didn't like, she took it apart overnight and resewed it into a new dress by the next morning).

My father's family is born with a great one sentence fable: "Our family starts with a mother and daughter named Mariah and Mirandi coming off a slave ship." Springing from this utterance are other chance sentences. Like, while driving on summer afternoon, when I was probably around college age, I asked my father of our origins. Without batting an eyelash he said: "You see, back in the 1830's they decided that blacks had souls. So we took our last name from the Quaker missionaries that baptized us." And most recently my grandmother told me at her birthday party very proudly, "My grandmother was one hundred percent pure African, she had no white in her." I have been reading and searching through all those that have my last name for pieces to the large puzzle. Our migrations between Florida, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana. Our acquisition of a great track of land in 1950. Our farms. Our scandals. Our tempers. Our bluesy accusatory creed: "You want other people to do for you, but you ain't willing to do anything for anyone else." And the question is still out. Are we a splintered branch of a larger Creole past, pure Africans, part Creek Indian, saved or conjurers? I am pretty sure about which traits I inherited.

Cadenza

My parents drive me crazy and over the past 2 years I have had to find things that help us communicate in a more loving and nurturing manner. It is not that we hate one another; it is because all of the rites of passage that come with marriage and parenthood are missing from my life; therefore, all things in my life are questioned. Personal progression does not register with my parents. Education is vocation. Relationships are to be affixed to the greater family unit. Personal experience (i.e. the search for some hot fucking) does not trump familial bonds and obligations (but it never has). The reason is that they were busy pushing further into America and assimilating to the mainstream world, while sexual exploration and the modification of gender specific roles transformed the rest of their generation (is this not the epoch of our parents' civil rights generation). Now, my mother is learning how to operate a computer as a 20-year divorcee, unaware of how life could have been happier if she had not taken so many things in the manner of a failed Ozzie and Harriet. She didn't look up to see that the social marker of divorce was melting away. My father is working in a cyber-world where all ideas of honor and decency no longer follow his John Wayne colorized world. He is raising a child and living his life as if he was 20 years younger, but every day he has to adjust to all the new stimuli that is pumped out of our media world. He is far from dazed and confused; he just etches out a world that is smaller -- working on the American Dream, which for baby boomers now means a world or perpetual unrest. As for me, I have come home refusing to drink domestic beer and watching soccer on the Fox soccer channel. I block out stimuli too. I am married to the road probably more than they would wish, but this is what I have always known. Custody meant time with my mother, grandmother and father. All were in three different places. School was always in one place, but life for me has always signified elsewhere. I had no family in Nashville; bonds of family have always been distant and transfered through second hand accounts about the past, like a hand-me-down that has surprisingly come back into fashion.

To get through the numerous impasses that my disease, lifestyle and career choices have made between my parents and I, a couple of exercises naturally create a truce. My mother and I both love gardening and the sense of pride it brings to a home. For my mother it brings back memories of my great-grandmother, Ola the seamstress, and her beautiful azaleas, or my great uncle's roses and miniature citrus garden. For me it is the physical labor, which I crave. Teaching and researching dulls a part of me that longs just to move my body and literally see the fruit of ones labor. To labor and simply be finished with it, instead of agonizing over a project for weeks, is how I prefer to work. Gardening means maintaining your rewards by spraying after a rain to keep the fungus away, constantly planning what to do with the landscape, kneeling, alternating the menu for your roses with rock salt one week and bone meal on another, etc . . .

For my father I just discovered a way to displace our body armor and blunted weapons, which may be aimed at one another, but with an unintentional maliciousness. We are simply bumping through our respective years in a dark cave, grieving over false promises, trying to remember which path we took before the light a the end of the cave gave out. Yesterday I was reviewing the Afro Louisiana History and Genealogy website, when my father walked in and saw the result of my search. The website is the brainchild of Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, who for me is the most amazing academic in the game.

"Wow that is amazing. Those are all slaves?" He said, standing over me with another of his company's many administrative assignments for me to complete before his meeting and my interview in midtown.

"Yes."

My father stared. He wanted to stop and continue the conversation, but he clearly had something else on his mind. It felt vaguely like my childhood -- I would be busy doing a painting or cooking and he wanted to stop and engage me more, but he had to catch a flight.

He continued. "Where is that document located?"

"Louisiana, Dad. The Catholic colonies were far more meticulous in keeping records of conversions, deaths, births and marriages between slaves . . ."

He interrupted, "How much would someone pay you for that information?"

Nothing I thought to myself. That is my problem.

"Don't know?" I replied.

"Ten thousand?" he speculated.

I thought to myself again, "This is my problem the expectations from society that somehow my degree and skill set rewards me the same way it does his". But maybe I am just being too cynical. My paternal great-grandfather Willy Mills was a cynic. He was part Creek Indian and part black and shot at anything that came down his driveway. An aunt said that he spoke a language to himself that no one really understood.

Awkward silence followed a feeling that my father was generally interested. And I did not feel like raising my voice. Maybe the ancestors are getting us over this hill.

"Do you know where St. Landry is? That is where I found this document." I asked.

My father giggled and heaved a bit of air out of his closed mouth at the same time.

That meant no.

Coda
I saw my own name in the entry of slaves. I was overwhelmed with a sense of displacement -- it was a melancholy and flightiness that was not induced by ideas of pain and suffering, but by how easy slavery was in its actual facility and practice. At one point slavery was just that normal and common place bondage actually effaced itself. There was this great sense of mobility about that other William Mills, who was 25-years-old in 1806. This William Mills was sold by a John Foley to Alexander Mills sometime in August of that year in Orleans parish. Did he stay long enough to become an ancestor or did he float on? I wonder if he actually became me, the man I am today, taking on a wife or shepherding someone else's child. He probably did not see emancipation, that was 60 years away, but he would have seen a quadroon ball, the advance of the Americans, maybe Andrew Jackson himself.

The problem I have with this documentation and so many others is that it does not have any thing listed under the subheading 'Personality'. Maybe the note takers would only mention the bad. But there is something so crazy about all these transactions. Men and women are shuffled and with no fixed identity. You can just slip them in and out of towns, names, clothes, jobs, relationships, languages and other people's willed inheritances with little knowledge of who they are. Documentation for that moment is just a fixed point; William Mills could have just as well turned into a butterfly by the fall of 1806 and flew back to Africa against the Harmattan.

There are 49 Mills slaves in Dr. Hall's archive. There are no Mariah's or Mirandi's among the Mills transactions. There are a couple of grifs. Many 'pure' Africans. I can't tell who was Christian and who was not. For whom is conversion necessary? Probably for me, who needs to be converted from 'the road' in order to establish a élan in executing out my plans; and definitely for the true solitary Mills ancestor who I envision as a boy -- a Black/Indian mixed lot -- a maroon, outside of New Orleans, forced into a new life in the aftermath of the Seminole Indian wars. I get the feeling he had to become a Christian due to circumstances he could not understand or comprehend, binding his own Afro-Indigenous American liturgy to his inner thigh with a piece of leather binding and a little red gris-gris. What an ingenious invention.

Sick Day Note

2007-03-27T18:27:00.000-05:00

OK,

I have been sick for about two weeks. First was a fight with a stomach flu, and now it is inflamed tonsils. So, I can't really write. Went and did my diabetic check up in the mist of learning where my tonsils are ("Doc! You mean that is not my throat? But it hurts when I swallow. Amazing!). Blood pressure was slightly elevated but nothing near what landed me in the hospital two years ago. Sugar, need a little help. Gotta keep up the blood testing and finding cash for the Novolog.

Man, this is expensive. I kick myself in my pants for not having insurance, and the more I stare adjunct teaching positions down, the more I think about changing professions. The kind of security I need seems to be impossible in the academic system. At least for me. I am becoming frustrated I guess.

So, that is that. More later.

PS
I wrote a note to Ms Portugal after a long time. She is not mad at me. Thought she was. Maybe we have grown a bit.

A Video for the War -- OK, Back to the War -- It Cost a Gazillion Dollars

2007-03-20T11:30:00.000-05:00

Whenever I get upset with New York, which is often, I usually listen to Stevie Nicks. In a perfect universe the both of us would have been twins or something, but a last, we are separated by space and time and I only consult her on Youtube (which, I continue to think is the second coming).

So, as I go through another administrative hell with yet another educational mastodon, I decided that I needed to talk to Stevie. So, magically (you know how Ms. Wicca operates) the first of Stevie's "Stand Back" music videos appeared on my Youtube search. This particular video is called the Scarlet Version. It is a corny re-enactment of a civil war scene and was trashed in favor of the now famous electric lights version of the song (funny, concealed in her "Scarlet" commentary is all I want to say about Bush's War, as well as the act of self editing). It still hits me in my gut,because I remember riding in many a dirty white cameo or rimmed out little black tinted windowed Toyota with the Appalachian foothills surrounding me in hump backed silhouettes listening to Stevie. I love her voice because it is preachy, bitchy and sisterly. Her vibrato draws a line in the sand like a lioness awaiting a watering bull.

It brings me back to riding with a chef from Anniston, Alabama to Birmingham, Alabama to escort him to one of his "meetings" because he had a hard week and did not want to relapse (what we do for the love of straight guys). I remember devouring canned smoked oysters and wine coolers. I remember watching lightening storms. I remember the smell of wet green leaves and Newports. I remember dish water blond white girls smiling at me on the bus smelling like Marlboro's. And, I remember watching Showtime's movie intermissions which included videos by The Police and Stevie. It was a whole Saturday afternoon full of a British Robin Hood mini-series and repeats of Clash of the Titans. A whole Southern world where we never talk about race, where everyone is a good ole boy, where recreation is work and sport is leisure. It is a world that is still there . . . oddly enough. It is still hot, humid and full of surprise visits from people you may not have seen in12 years.

It is my New York kryptonite.

The Death of the Roxy/Twilight World

2007-03-12T20:33:00.000-05:00

I don't have much time so let's get to it, my sister is in town and will leave tomorrow. I am also waiting to see how things pan out at work because we got a new budget in River City and I never like to stay at a place until the Sandman comes and forces me off the stage. Though that is not going to happen.

I am also in the middle of some essential reading, and working on a writer/painter collaboration hopefully set for May in Harlem (we know how these things go). I want to work on the project regardless of whether it runs or doesn't, but I gotta birth this literary exercise. So, I apologize for my blogging attendance, it has been dismal. When I finish reading this book by Joe LeSueur about the poet Frank O'Hara, I will free myself up to write about my New York experience. But in the mist of me reading about NYC's past I noticed a part of my past has fallen away. The Roxy closed.

It is depressing or is it progress?

The truth is I never went and I am not a Chelsea kid; and, I never scored at The Big Cup, nor could I keep up with the gym queens. But The Roxy's sudden death does make me sad, my entire youth seems to be erased block by block. The first kid I meet at work during my first year in NYC in 1993 who was openly gay invited me to the Roxy. He was about 23 or 24, thin and sick from the AZT that threw his stomach and bowels into fits. He called me a primitive Jack Kerouac, which I did not know how to take since I was stark naked in terms of critical theory and the ways of those north of the Mason Dixon line. But his invitation and slur/compliment was like a wet plastic gloved slap on my newly awakened upside down sexually free ass.

The crack of that comment nestled somewhere in my spinal fluid, and a thought was formed that sunk down to the base of my skull: "This is a Mary. This is shade. This is viscous. This is 8th and Broadway. This might be racist. This is a come on." He was in graduate school too, studying with some weird out spacey artist whose name I forget. I would have thought him a nerd, tall and slender, maybe from the mid-west, but the way he walked down the imaginary cat walk was not like a white boy, it was like a black woman giving her tidings in church. And, I guess that is why I find him still endearing, though I know nothing of his condition today. Again, another nameless and timeless New York happenstance.

Chelsea is becoming very upscale with the galleries and many of the old monied New Yorkers moving down town (a little birdy told me this). Maybe that is why it is happening. And so it is gone, the dirty little K-hole of manger that birthed muscle boys in 1991 after the city's population was devastated by Miss Kitty. I remember that too. 1989. A year that is now just another layer of soot in this city's history and in my mind.

So, that was The Roxy!.

Dream Time

2007-03-07T09:51:00.000-05:00

I had a dream last night that I had 2,000 hits on my blog. I guess it is a sign that I have not been writing. So far my cousin and 3 other friends have called specifically to tell me to get my ass back on that keyboard. Thanks Stan and Ava.

So, what have I been doing? The list could go on and on, but let's concentrate on Dreamgirls, shall we. I finally saw the movie at the Ziegfeld Theater on the same evening as the Oscars. German Musicologist and I rushed back to his hotel room to watch the show. I think I will watch a couple of movies on the same day as the Oscars next year because it makes the actors' performances and the award ceremony equal in immediacy. It is a great feeling of anticipation actually.

I guess what I liked about the film above all was how it delved into the complicated world of drugs, sex and attraction without a nude scene or Eddie Murphy's character bleeding out of every orifice after some caustic overdose of bad heroin. I have never seen the original Broadway version of Dreamgirls. I was just 8 or 9 when it first came out, and we lived in Nashville, Tennessee not in the Tri-State area. Even if my mother had asked me then if I wanted to go, I would not have gone, I would have wanted to ride my bike down some rocky glass laden side road with my dog or a couple of friends. So, I was surprised to see a composite of Marvin Gaye, Berry Gordy and a couple of the Temptations mixed together with the epic story of The Supremes. The tragedy of Florence Ballard deserves several operas in my opinion.

So, I think Jennifer Hudson deserved the Oscar. I loved the way she was delectable in that way big sisters can be delectable. She was love on the screen, soaking up all the lighting like Grace Kelly. Beyonce Knowles gave a more than worthy performance, but I don't think that film gave her enough space to go where she could have gone. And I wish over all that Anika Noni Rose got more attention, she has caught mine, so I am looking out for her.

In so many ways Beyonce Knowles, Jennifer Hudson and Anika Noni Rose feed into America's mythical stardom cortex of black girls in the entertainment industrial complex. All talented, all divas and all conjurers in a way. During the 2007 Oscar Awards ceremony you see Beyonce smiling, screaming, crossing her eyes and pushing up vibretto laden hallelujahs; Jennifer Hudson biting the ends of notes like hot pickled peppers straight from the jar; and, Anika singing like a 1970's Philadelphia Sound songbird given a chance to stick her head out from the overshadowing battle. It is enchanting somehow. It is a living trope. Its mustard powder and love charms.

I am waiting to see what comes next. In some funny way, with the way R&B, Hip-Hop and NeoSoul have been progressing, this seems like some sort of apex, from which no one knows how to dismount, or turn it into something else. It is like Lauryn Hill's debut album and the cashing in of an inheritance. For Hill it was the Marley set of miracles, for these Neo-Divas it is the heavily historical phantom hurricane of Miss Ross and the shunning of that original Dreamgirls cast in some obvious and not so obvious ways. Lauryn was our savior before our sugar and grandiose political land of Afro-Valhalla fell directly on top of her head. And by the way, where is Jennifer Holiday? Jennifer Holiday come back to the five and dime baby, we miss you.

Question: What did Tina Turner Say In Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome After the Children Tore Up Bartertown? The Answer: "We Will Rebuild!"

2007-03-05T20:22:00.000-05:00

A Postcard From Jazz @ Lincoln Center

2007-03-04T23:43:00.000-05:00

Well, the last 10 days have been me getting things together in my head to see German Musicologist and now it is Sunday night and I am having a tall tropical drink and relaxing from days of analyzing the world of musicologists and how they measure up in the academy, peppered with glimpses of jazz inspired debates. But in the end, I guess I was left wanting. Though the intellectual meals and epicurial dialogue were stimulating, I simply know what I like in terms of jazz music, but I can't form a coherent historiography of its study. German Musicologist and I talked about musicians, performance, and our performances (he is a better musician than I by far), but as with all things in Germany, his view of the world is not limited by walls, but by little blinds attached to his glasses . . . he studied jazz and that is what is safe. An impromtu conversation starter around Eddie Money was received coldly but with mild affection.

There is a poem forming in my brain as we speak.

Tonight, I feel like Woodstock from the Peanuts, dancing down an open field, singing "Happy, Happy, Joy, Joy" cause Spring 2007 is here.

I received word from PU that I was not accepted in an e-mail. I am not so interested in why, I am just happy that I got a response, and I am happy that after the ordeal of the application my family of accountants, under paid social science majors, biologists and engineers have a better idea about what I do and what I want. So with that, I am breathing a sigh of relief because my little universe is not teetering on the balance any longer. Definitive answers and resolutions are coming daily.

But, not to be so self centered, I would like to share a funky New Orleans and Nashville based band I found surfing the web tonight. The Captain Midnight Band is all that and a double dash of fish sauce -- just before I partake in some white beans, oven roasted chicken, southern style cabbage and corn bread.

But chew on these chewy promises . . .

-- I promise to fill in the gaps on the latest heartache -- I broke a heart this time, instead of mine getting bullet ridden.

-- I promise to fill in the gaps on the future -- I have another job possibility.

-- I promise to fill in the gaps on that short piece I want to write about Andre and me riding to East Nashville that summer -- it has been on my mind, but PU had my creative juices on lock down, my subconscious did not know where to go after organizing my thoughts for a larger historical project.

Blah, blah, blah

More to say . . . but . . . no real time.

Just rebounding after being a tourist for a couple days. . .

And waiting for a new Dream Time to start.

Ciao.

For St. Valentine's Day, Schmutzig Donnerstag, Rosenmontag, Mardi Gras/Fasching, and Ash Wednesday

2007-02-21T21:41:00.000-05:00

I wanted to say so many things, but the past week has been crazy with all the holidays that most people celebrate with less flare and attention (I had my obligatory helpings of red beans and rice with andouille sausage on Sunday and Monday afternoon) . . . St. Valentine's Day, Carnival Days, birthdays (mine included) and today, the beginning of the 40 day fast before the Resurrection Feast Days. I also noticed more sunlight. The sun rose before I made it to the the Lincoln Tunnel this morning.

So, for the lack of blogging, I leave a song that doesn't really sum " it" up, but the lyrics have been in my head for days now.

Renewed Infatuation.

Despite all the obstacles, it is funny that every spring I am surprised by the longer days as if I doubted the fact the days would lengthen. I am surprised by the feeling of love that is in the air also, as if the drudgery of nights that last half the day are always loveless.

Hit it Ella!

Gumbo Yaya

2007-02-16T21:59:00.000-05:00

I took a course on making a New Orleans meal on Thursday evening. It was taught by a colleague -- the colleague I had a fierce confrontation with a couple of months back. Chefs run their operations by intimidation, and I have yet to work with one that did not cause me to start yelling and screaming back . . . well, there was one that I did not scream back to in Anniston, Alabama . . . but that is another story. So, yesterday's menu consisted of Shrimp Creole, File Gumbo, Blacked Peas and Rice Salad and Pralines. It was not bad, I knew a lot more about the culture than they did, but not as much as my cousins or grandmother. But they are chefs, and I am an aspiring historian (really). But it was nice to see cooking techniques in play, I do love to cook.

So, let's start with 15 questions (can't think of 20), a sort of Gumbo Yaya of my own:

1. Why did the woman sitting next to me in the class say she had never seen a Black Eyed Pea before?

2. Why did the woman next to her wonder what Okra was? Is it a squash? What does it taste like?

3. Why do New Yorkers treat Southerners like they are from a different country, and people from the Gulf Coast like they are from Jupiter?

4. Is it just me, or does all this Anna Nicole Smith stuff feel strangely like the Princess Diana car wreck? The media blitz storm, the obsession over the welfare of the children, the laundry list of lovers (though Anna baby, you beat out Princess Di by a yard of fabric at the Elk's Ball), and our inability to leave Anna Nicole alone even in death all ring true to me.

5. Is the fact that we still judge Anna Nicole as a freak due to her marriage and personal life, as opposed to Princess Diana who we considered a saint due to her marriage and personal life, the only reason we are not remorseful about our media obsession over her? Scratch that, I guess bringing attention to land mines in war torn countries is much different than being a televangelist for a weight loss placebo.

6. Does Dick Chenney have nine live? And, no 9 mechanical hearts does not count!

7. How long will this war last?

8. What about them Dixie Chicks? Was the album that good, or was it more about the inclusion of fallen angels into the constellations above the Mason Dixon line? I did like there song Not Ready To Make Nice and it was on VH-1's top 20 for weeks on end.

9. Why did it take the Grammy Award to force the issue of American regional culture onto the table without dredging up the Red State/Blue State paradigm (I apologize for that word "paradigm", I try to stay a way from it) which thwarts discussions?

10. Why are some of my favorite YouTube videos all of a sudden unavailable?

11. Why did a good friend of mine from England tell me once again: "We see why Iraq is the way it is because of the way you Americans are handling New Orleans"?

12. Why do people not see that American credibility has been eroding since the rejection of the Kyoto Accord, the Arthur Anderson meltdown and the Enron scandal? Iraq was just the watermellon on top of the Sunday.

13. Why have I not seen Dream Girls yet?

14. Did I miss something, Bounce is on the cover of Sports Illustrated? Was it difficult to keep that a top secret? My multi-media industry sources gave no hints.

15. Why do all the cool people in NYC seem to be 30 and over? Maybe it is because they remember NYC before its current incarnation?

A Glimpse at the Feast Exotic (Whitney Houston and Serge Gainsbourg)

2007-02-10T22:58:00.000-05:00

Andrew Sullivan how did you brush up on this gem of exoticism?

This clip is epic for so many reasons.

The Death of the Music Journalist

2007-02-10T21:45:00.001-05:00

Yesterday, I arrived in the city at mid-day through Portable Authority. I had a good amount of time to get from mid-town to the nether regions of the Upper Eastside (59th and Lexington), so I glanced around the Hudson Newsstand. Imagine my childlike delight when I saw the latest Spin Magazine and My Chemical Romance gracing its cover. I guess I stood there for about a quarter of a minute before I did my compulsive purchase for the morning. I don't know what it is about New York, but I am constantly picking up magazines, gum, newspapers and toiletries. It is something about the urban landscape I guess. Years ago a cat told me that the tarot card that corresponds to New York City is the Hermit card because people live in such isolation. I guess that is why I feel so comfortable in the city, and at the same time why it is a dangerous place, I have a tendency towards withdrawal, I stay with my thoughts more than most people suspect.

In that spirit my Spin purchase was part of my own private anthropological study. I have not picked up a Vibe, Spin or Rolling Stone in ages. I used to work in the music writers' world for a split second and wanted to desperately be a part of it; but now it just seems to be a dream deferred, a sour little minutia from my past. I thumb through a music magazine at the newsstands now and then, reading it like an old sixth grade love letter. I feel transported in that same sense, rapidly perusing the masthead for a name I can recall, feeling a tingle of former infatuation, then discarding the rag after the unfamiliar names ring an atonal tone in my heart, an emotional discord that is slightly out of pitch – “Ah, the disappointment. What legendary writing could have happened if Vibe/Spin/Rolling Stone had only done such and such”. . . i.e., “If only they had kept me and my friends who are all doing wonderful things anyway.” Now, even the majority of the founding saints and villains of that former Biggie/Tupac mega death hip-hop monthly libretto have been axed.

So for $3.99 I made a commitment and started to read what I could of Spin. The brevity of the the articles was caustic. I felt as if I had missed something really important in each one because they were not written as meticulously structured exposés describing the time and place of the interview nor the inner tinkerings of our rock gods. Unfortunately, the articles were written as short data entries to be digested with little saliva – their dietary nutrients molecularly compact. Granted the cynical tongue-in-check language adds flavor, but everything tasted the same.

Back in 1993 when I was an intern at Vibe I remember language pouring out of every office. On a typical day I saw Hilton Als working on the Chaka Khan piece, Diane Cardwell blasting Janice Joplin and everyone talking about the Fugee promotional package. I got a green long sleeve Fugee T-shirt that I wore like my lion’s skin. Vibe, as Spin was 10 or 20 years ago, was thicker at its inaugural. Even Vibe's 5th anniversary issue, in which one of my pieces appeared, was thicker. Granted, much of it was ads, but other bits of it included Scott Poulson Bryant, Michael Gonzalez, Greg Tate and Joan Morgan. But in those first five years, there were several scandals and turnovers, and even Alan Light found his way lighfootedly from Vibe to Spin, maybe he was even a joint ruler of them both at one time, if my memory serves me correctly.

I do remember my interview at Spin after graduating from my beloved HBCU. I was dressed in a suit that was too big, and everyone at the entrance way to the interview was totally grunged out. I was settling into the New York area from the South before Eryka Badu and Master P made it cool. My first impression was that the Mid-Atlantic petit bourgeoisie air, New England secondary school polish, Ivy League feminism and Boston white boy college sensibility clashed against my New Negro haberdashery. The interviewer was very nice. He told me they were not paying very much, but he would keep me in mind. In fact he was really sweet in some memorable way -- just a T-shirt and jeans. He might have been pushing thirty, but his honesty rang so true to me in some older brother type of way. He later died of a drug overdose while covering one of the wars in Eastern Europe. It is a shame and embarrassing that both his name and the exact conflict escape me.

And so, I landed at Vibe instead and worked there a semester. Then after that it was graduate school, Ghana, malaria, diabetes, Israel, Master's thesis and a switch to book publishing, in that order. All that time the idea of being a music journalist, or more specifically a pop critic, re-shaped and morphed until I ended somewhere totally different. You see the problem starts with the timeliness of periodicals and the fact that they could be at the point of closing an issue anywhere between 2 and 3 months ahead of what is actually on the newsstands. Books take more time. There is more lead way. You are an elephant, your heart does not race at the rate of a mosquito. So I asked God to turn me into an elephant.

The February 2007 issue of Spin is a special issue entitled "The State of Music". It is funny that the way the magazine's layout is done betrays the problems or rather the shift of my generation being in the vanguard, to us becoming elephants, if not mastodons, of the old music industry. Again, I found myself in the dark. This declaration of the death of the album is new to me, but then again I don't really buy new music. Even My Chemical Romance, which is the first new rock thing I have actively participated in since the turn of the millennium, has not made me run to the store. Also the economic reasons behind the death of the album seem to harbor more credence among the pop literati than what Nelson George talked about in Hip-Hop America a decade ago. In it George points out that the hip-hop generation shows no loyalty, the fans simply follow a succession of artist of which few accumulate a true following. It is just one single after another, one anthem after another, one player playing the game after another. And for those that make it to legendary status, so many in the hip-hop industry opt out like Lauryn Hill, or find their heads served back to them on a platter like the current shunning of Jay Z. And, as Spin points out so directly, with beat driven hits saturating the market, the loss of melody is palpable. With these factors, plus the power of the consumer to make a line item veto concerning the selection of tunes for purchase, no wonder things are changing.

We are in the age where you can just download the single and incorporate it into your i-Pod generated sound track for your own personalized march through the subzero streets of New York City or while gliding on your treadmill. Take Beyoncé's “Check On It”, which was so hot I drove for miles from Nashville to Atlanta alternating between that joint and Labelle’s Moonshadow album. And maybe, with that image, we have the struggle between this new hotness that you consume like cafeteria jell-o and a 4 course Wonka stick of gum that delightfully turns you into a blueberry full of soul juice and conceptual nectar -- nectars unripe with heartache, ripe with social calls of rectification, or overripe with personal triumph -- Virgin, Mother, Crone (Madonna ?) -- Knave, Knight, Emblem (Prince). Our Marys, our Princes and our Nirvanas mystify us and stitch us up in a larger overarching view of our lives, not the immediate snare drum licks that accent our staccato on concrete. After looking through this issue of Spin I realized that I am getting old, I am an elephant, I do not own an i-Pod, I cringe at the thought of becoming so wrapped up in Maria Bethânia that I could be hit by a truck crossing at 60th and Lexington where the traffic bottlenecks and there is always one delivery truck gunning it on red to make a left turn. Always!

III

And so after reading that Perry Farrell has been in the business for 20 years, that Courtney Love is working on “something” and feeling famished after a meatless 400 word burp about the Swedish music scene, I sunk my teeth into the My Chemical Romance article. And there it was, the great divide in music history, these cats are nothing but the Smashing Pumpkins in drag, but from what I can tell, we need the Smashing Pumpkins in drag today . . . and I could not agree more. Timothy Gunatilaka's article basically focuses on how these guys are needed by many young people today, and it seems that the band has experienced this truth in their performances. The article’s layout is ingenious; the text is littered with little green blurbs from My Chemical Romance's Myspace page, ImnotOkay.net and MyChemicalRomanceForum.com. Most are tinged with the salvational salutations to the band for creating music that intervened during the time of their planned (or spontaneous) suicides. Of course as a teacher I got a funny feeling in my stomach, a feeling that I have had students in that place, and I have witnessed at least one intervention collapse, not resulting in death thank God, but institutionalization. One person sent a message bluntly stating ". . . You save lives . . ."

So, is this the state of the album? Are my little generation Y'ers and Z'ers missing what I devoured with great delight, what my fellow high school and college classmates picked without asking? What would life have meant for my freshman roommate who listened to Tom Petty's "Free Falling" every night; for my single white female best friend (to the raised eyebrows of both our parents) if REM's "This Is The End Of The World As We Know It" and everything after didn't exist; for me if Prince's double album Sign of the Times (that I listened to for 3 years straight in high school to the chagrin of girl named Deborah who called me strange for 4 years straight) was never produced. This is the landscape now. Napster and i-Tunes have nipped away the security of young Americans according to this hypothesis if you introduce a little anti-matter to it. They have no Dick Clark to breast feed them, only Paula Abdul's Novocaine tit to drip feed them celebreality. Who knew that the record store was the teenager’s Temple of Delphi, but now the barbarians are at the gate in the true Harold Bloom sense of the old reactionary adage. The American record store’s death throws have turned to convulsions. The tower has literally collapsed, and according to friends and reports, the music industry may evaporate as if zapped by a sonic death wave, a wrong chord reverberating from a Queen LP played backwards.

Miss Industry is a behemoth made of bricks and mortar. Who would have thought, that books would prove to be more nimble (for now at least) in the cyber age? In 2000 the publishing industry asked collectively, what was going to happen to the book, but that was so naive. Shakespeare is unmovable, written language has been around for millennia and moveable type for centuries. Records didn't even close out the century, CD's survived for only two decades. Nothing is permanent.

So maybe I am a nimble little elephant with twinkle toes (many would say that already for varying reasons). I have a Myspace page and on it I have a community of musicians, writers, friends and perverts that share my taste in music, literature, politics and perversions. I do not feel so alone, in fact I am indulging my senses with old G-Force footage and Gothic styles as we speak. Myspace has given me a world to express myself in ways I did not have years ago. A thought comes to my head and I will research it and add it to my page, giving a picture of myself, with close self-editing of course, for not all of me can fit on one page. And in this world where the visual and auditory are supple and correct by simply cutting and pasting information in HTML, how are young people learning to receive information? Hell, how are they dealing with relationships, because as much as I love my virtual communal nest, they are not really friends in the brick and mortar sense of the word.

But back to music rags . . .

Beyond the market forces that force these thick mini-catalogs of hip-hop and rock and roll to reduce their page sizes, are there issues concerning what is music journalism and what is not? I believe that there are, but I can not address them now, I have only bought one music magazine in the past 2 years. My anthropological research into the manhandling of the music and its musing rags will need further investigation.

When I was working at Reader's Digest in Germany during the winter of 2003, there was a music marketing manager from Spain who moved from Barcelona in the 1970's to southern Germany and fell in love with Freiburg. He stayed and had a family. I remember my seminars with the editorial and marketing teams were always really pleasant when he was around. He talked about playing music constantly and wanted me to teach him how to stop rolling his r's so pronouncedly, as well as working on other consonants that escaped his grasp with each English utterance.

"It is so sad Bill," the marketing manager confided in me one day, "the way music accompanied my life and your life is not the way for my children and will not be that way for yours."

I stood there and looked at him. I did not know it then for sure, but somewhere in my subconscious I had received the news that the album was ill. I wonder what that means for the music journalist in light of all that has happened concerning record company/media mergers, bottom-lines and the musical interest of young people unable to find the ballad that gets them through their first kiss, break-up, heartache, separations, growing aparts and finally the death of the relationship all together. For a lucky few the companionship will blossom, for others the isolation in their lives may have more sinister sources than puppy love. And what about us, the over 30 demographic so despised by notions of fashion (except for the gay demographic), are we left without albums also?

“Hey!, Mr. DJ I confess. I have been through some traumatic shit and I need a hero, but 10,000 Maniacs will do me just fine."

A Few Of My Favorite Things

2007-02-06T23:41:00.000-05:00

1. We have a bunch of brawlers at my job. Very interesting to know that I am not the only one. There must be about 4 or 5 of us liable to get down at anytime.

2. Tonight on television I saw the Billy Strayhorn documentary on Independent Lense. He was only 16 when he wrote Lush Life. It is interesting, all of his band mates called him Sweet Pea -- he was black, gay and Duke Ellington's major composer taking little credit during his lifetime for his work. Diane Reeves sounds so good in this documentary.

3. Brazil versus Portugal on Fox Soccer Channel. It is a friendly in England. I am glad I don't have to be at work until 11:00 am tomorrow. Downing coffee as we speak.

The re-broadcasting of the match is from 11:oo pm until 1:00 am. I could die tonight. Earlier I watched Fox Football Fone-In . . . marvelous evening!

The End of the Earth

2007-02-04T10:39:00.000-05:00

Das Experiment called from the most southern Western city on earth last night right after I posted my blog entry for Saturday. He lives in a city called Invercargill. It is at the most southern tip of New Zealand. We had a ten minute conversation about life.

He said that Invercargill would be too boring for me, I would have to live in Auckland.
He said that most Americans that ex-patriate to New Zealand end up in Australia.
Most Europeans that ex-patriate stay.
He felt that things were 30 years behind.
He said there were some hot girls in his MBA program.
He said I could handle it.
It is like rural Germany.
But, it is more like Ireland.
Or England.
Or Scotland.
I said life was the same for me.
I looked up Invercargill on the net, and yes that shit is at the end of the world.
Might make a nice trip.
But that is just a mental note.
Das Experiment sounded a little down and isolated.

I also saw parts of Female Trouble by John Waters on IFC this past Friday night. Now I will have to see this Trash Trilogy.

For Once

2007-02-03T19:44:00.000-05:00

Well, I don't have really anything to say. My boss wants to get me moving in a couple of different directions. We will see. This temporary job may lead to where I wanted to be in the first place . . . behind a desk somewhere moving inventory in foreign places. I have heard stories of meteoric rises to the top at this place. My language skills do come in handy and that is a plus for me.

Otherwise, I spent the day with Ava yesterday. We had a good time. We talked about relationships, I watched her shop (I am not a shopper), had a nice Thai meal, another nice meal at a diner on 3rd and 60th (I love that diner, very good food and fresh Lemonade year round) and just walked through the city.

Still looking for work. A financial institution wants to see me at the Jersey Shore on the 8th. I know how these places work . . . almost like a pyramid scam plus commission. So, I am weary. Did four applications this past week to different places. I will have to get back to five a week at least!

German Musicologist comes at the end of the month. We will talk about a project that Alice and I have been tweaking for some time.

That is all.

Nothing to really say. Just contemplating a character and sketching it out. It is funny, after my application to Presbyterian University the voice I was writing in has evaporated. At least that is the result of the query I instigated concerning my spiritual and emotional well being. I wonder if my creative voice will be diminished more in my use of more academic styles of writing. I guess the intended issue is the intended audience.

I need to turn myself back to a stage coach after my brief stint as a pumpkin.

ciao, ciao

A Snapshot Of A Conversation About Ms. Scott

2007-01-29T22:44:00.000-05:00

Today, while doing inventory and eating some of the food that our co-workers brought in I overheard two ladies and one guy talking about not understanding Jill Scott's Family Reunion track.

It went a follows:

"I don't understand it, listen . . . listen to that . . . did you hear . . . listen, listen . . . she sings about scallions and then says celery. It is a weird song. I just don't understand it."

I feel like a college instructor in everyday clothes, and I was just about to leap across the counter and pull out a flow chart . . .but I did not. I just looked and took note, and I let them see that I was looking at them and taking note. What could she not understand, I guess it was the songs articulation and the ROUNDNESS OF THE SOUNDS.

I felt sorry for them. Like their hearts are closed off, but by no fault of their own. I need to liberate my office space. There is some bad vibe in it . . . but maybe it is just who we are . . . in that space.

They don't represent everybody.

Conversation with Tony

2007-01-28T23:38:00.000-05:00

I talked to a childhood friend of mine for the first time in almost 10 years. Two memorable quotes from the conversation that focused on music for about 30 minutes out of a two hour conversation (as with all my childhood friends):

Unbeached: Yeah, man. I dig My Chemical Romance. They are amazing. If the Cure and Queen had a child together it would have been named My Chemical Romance.

Tony: Dude, it even all that. It is something like the Roots, they deep, but without all the Toni Morrison grooves in it.

Skooter Libby Libby Libby Canned Pineapples

2007-01-27T14:47:00.000-05:00

So,

I guess I am back to living in America for real, I am personally caught in a medical care vs. other bills crossfire. It is demeaning, that is all I can say right now, and I am thinking more and more about issues of the chronically ill. Something is really wrong with how I am being treated by the insurance industry, medical industry and financial institutions. And the answer, "Why should you be any different from anybody else." is really fueling a brighter fire in my head and heart. What a convenient lie that is to keep people from believing they can't organize against something as ghastly as not being able to pay for the medicine that enables you to have life. My answer to that question will now be, "Because you should be treated different from everybody else also."

I would love to talk about Scooter Libby, but I will talk about my new found love for Tom Sizemore and the show Shooting Sizemore (it sounds like a porn star's documentary, but he is one now). I know, I know. This is another boring train wreck via the idiot box (and who does the idiot box better than VH1? - - NO ONE ELSE!). But I do have a soft spot for Robert Downey Jr. and it goes into overhaul for Tom Sizemore (Mickey Rourke could have achieved a spot in my sublime pantheon, but his plastic surgeon ruined it for me).

This second tier love has to do with the fact that they are tormented artist first and foremost, but it is also the whole tie me up, tie me down self abuse they are trying to deliver themselves from. Drugs, strange sex habits and spurts of anger are interesting things to follow while they are doing great work like Saving Private Ryan, True Romance and Natural Born Killers. They are Hollywood IT men turned to Charles Bukowski chic parodies of themselves, who must overachieve to survive themselves. I love it! There is something very American about this process as we move from 15 minute of fame culture to an entire "television season" of fame that knocks the facade clean off (with careful editing of course). It goes back to the idea of confession as redemption, but now we have the added twist of "reformation" that we have not seen until our technological age. To relapse is to be both witness and witnessed. Weren't the puritans wonderful people!

I was captivated from the time Sizemore sitting with a facial mask in the Northern light of a Canadian sun chomps down on a spoonful of oatmeal. The effect is an illuminate ultra-violet glow to his smooth facial mask which contrasts with the rest of the room. He is a kabuki actor, even on his off time. His anxiety, his particular flavor of angst, his past, his isolation, his career and his detachment from drugs mixes into an everyman close-up, a broken metrosexual, a heterosexual alien munching on Quaker instant Oats.

On top of that he has a personal assistant named Luree. I need a Luree in my life. She reminds me of the inventory managers and female truck drivers I dealt with in LaVergne, Tennessee. Chain smoking, screaming, yelling, realistic, one-day-at-a-timers and aware of how to take care of every little situation in every paper ridden detail. Luree, like them, is a good reader of character. They are a perfect match. Luree is like a barren wet nurse that knows nothing about delivering babies, wiping asses or singing a cradled enfant to sleep. She simply knows how to keep a grown man to task.

So, between I Love New York (which is a total hot mess), and Shooting Sizemore my television consumption is pretty consistent. BBC, Euronews, Fox's Soccer Channel and Rome fall through New York and Sizemore's natural rhythm. I don't watch, Lost, Ugly Betty, Grey's Anatomy or The Amazing Race. CNN is becoming boring now that it focuses basically on child abductions/molestations and the 2008 election. And a good number of shows on PBS don't catch my eye anymore in a world where things are so evident to me.

I spend most of my time on the computer. My media diet consists more and more of old 70''s and 80's footage of Fela Kuti, Nina Simone and Paulinho da Viola. Then there is the required time on monster.com and mediabistro.com, not to mention networking and talking about work with former colleagues.

So, Scooter, I am sorry, I just don't have the time to follow you the way I want.

This guy is pretty intriguing. His silence and face betray a lot to me . . .

And to Lindsay Lohan, I did not even know who you were until last year. Gosh, there is so much interest in you and that former Miss America that it makes me nervous. Please, who cares. I wish you the best in gaining weight and I sincerely wish that one beer was enough for you. You are so young, maybe not even 21 if a year over that, hell.

There is so much to live for and to explore, don't do it all at once.

And, Fergie, I just listened to the lyrics of "Fergalicious" for the first time. Nice production. Nice delivery. And I just heard your speaking voice on the VH1 commercial for the Superbowl show. Girl, you sound like a black girl. But for the life of me I can't remember which one you were on Kids Incorporated.

Mississippi Goddam (Free Styling about My Life and the State of The Union)

2007-01-25T04:39:00.000-05:00

I woke up to Nina Simone and Mississippi Goddam.

Alabama's gotten me so upset
Tennessee made me lose my rest
And everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam

I guess I identify. Everything seems to be moving too slow, especially on the race and gay marriage stuff in the Volunteer State. And in the end I am wondering what the real motivations for migrations and ex-patriotism are. Looking at me and Nina at 4:44 am in the morning I am starting to think that it is almost a primordial/patriarchal/matriarchal Freudian response (take your pick) to what is around you. A feeling of a betrayal that prompts self orphanage.

When younger I was enamoured by Huckleberry Finn.

I am dwelling on this with Nina a bit more than normal this morning because I used to sing with some of her former musicians in a gospel choir. And everyone that was in Germany that was African American was running from something out of a sense of deep betrayal. I guess, I was one of that number.

Looking at the State of the Union address, I started to think about my choir director, the professional singers that I knew, and a vibraphonist whose story on how he came to Germany still sticks with me (its that personal, that I just can't say). Condoleezza Rice's face on the PBS coverage of the speech spoke volumes about where we are now in this historical moment. She was dressed in black like at a funeral, and the darkness in her eyes was so complete and shadowed it declared something else about her well being besides being tired. It is terrible what it actual takes to become successful in the this country when you are coloured. I listen to the way black folk speak, from successful NFL coaches to leading politicians and I can't help but get this sense that you have to get with the party line. And the only thing about this mega-assimilation that I can gleam is that I am not following the right steps. I guess my hesitation comes from the inevitable change so well mapped out by Jill Nelson in her book Volunteer Slavery.

You set out to change the system, and the system changes you. Jill said it so correctly.

Maybe me listing to Nina was a premonition. I didn't find any joy in the occassion. Justice is a hard thing.

So is letting go.

Jomanda

2007-01-23T16:55:00.001-05:00

The classic song that plays in my head all the time.

Black Box-I Don't Know Anybody Else

2007-01-23T00:21:00.001-05:00

The Over-Cooked (but still delicious)

I have always felt Martha Wash deep deep down. Black Box is this weird contradtion in my heart and always will be.

Nina Simone: Feelings

2007-01-23T00:16:00.001-05:00

The Raw

I stumbled upon this one. It somehow fits the other two in a weird way. Nina is talking about love inspite of the heart's anti-optimism. Is'nt that what happens to us all overtime.

I am still fighting this weird version of writer's block, but this brought me back to earth tonight. So, I wanted to share it.

Ode to Socks

2007-01-21T15:41:00.000-05:00

OK. I have caught a cold. And I am doing my usual thing to get over it which involves a couple good nights' sleep, drinking fresh lemon tea, and some drugs. It works very well only if you call out from work the day you start to feel sick and fight for at least 48 hours. If not, then you will be really sick before your body gives out and the rest is history . . . it will take a week or weeks to get rid of it. I advise fighting it when it is a scratch in your throat or a runny nose and don't give the evil germ an inch in terms of settling in your respiratory system, your head or your nasal cavity.

So, while in the kitchen today, I tell my stepmother that I had a revelation, I need to where socks. I live downstairs in the basement where there is an office for working, pool table for boredom and a long bar for stacking all my books. It is very cold downstairs as compared to upstairs, so my winter long habit of no socks has been abandoned in the wake of my cold.

I meant my statement to be a joke, but my stepmother immediately starts shouting at me telling me that as a diabetic I always need to wear socks, and that I just choose not too. OK, here's a list of issues.

1. The majority of diabetic information, magazines and promotional gimmicks are designed for the elderly -- so, sometimes I feel like all of the precautionary measures make me feel old. I don't particularly like house shoes because they make me feel like the guy from Father Knows Best, and I prefer beach shorts and long sleeve shirts in the winter. Just me.

2. If I am not wearing socks those that have me under dietary (and now podiatric) surveillance think I am not "fighting for my life".

3. I should wear socks because cuts on my feet may not heal, though my healing rate from minor surgery 9 years ago and the removal of a rotten tooth that shattered into 3 pieces in my mouth 2 years ago were above average. I have said it before, I am a fast clotter and heal on cue. For how long? I don't know, but I knock on wood.

4. I don't like this perception that every waking moment is a fight for my life. No one in my family talks to me about my love life, my professional life, or my life as an artist anymore. I am just the sick member of the family.

5. Being treated constantly as a sick person is a form of being a none person because everybody knows what is best for me from food, to clothing, to work, to insurance, etc . . . Maybe they should make the decisions. There is also this perception that you are not living "right", because you are sick. I have encountered that among a lot of people, especially African Americans when I first came down with the disease. I could give a million stories about going to the pharmacy and elders not letting me leave without shedding a tear for me while I am trying to make an appointment across town. I will leave that for a later blog.

6. The soles of my feet are red and show good circulation. I know this from conversations with several doctors. Which are private and I should not have to recite my discussions with doctors all the time. But sometimes I do in the mist of reaching for something to drink from the refrigerator.

7. My protest at being interrogated this afternoon was looked upon as having a "shitty attitude". I understand that people are concerned, but I don't like being talked to with a raised voice and a critical eye and then stand blindly in the face of such preaching. Why do I not get to ask questions of other peoples behavior, even if they are correcting me?

8. People constantly come to me telling me what they "heard" about diabetics, but no one talks to me about what I know about being a diabetic. I have been one for 12 years, I do know a thing or two.

9. The same people that have all this new found concern after 12 years of not really asking are pissed when I buy diet soda because they think it is selfish because no one else can have any.

Now, I write this list because I think being diabetic is as much an identity crisis fought against a backdrop of those that are not diabetic, as it is a medical issue. There are several assumptions made about you and who you are. To voice any consternation about how the non-diabetic perceives you is to have a "shitty attitude" about your own health.

To say that you have a problem with what seems to be a small rule, like socks, because it is not "you" invites the response by the non-diabetic (who could be channeling a recent memory of their grandmother's foot amputation) that "your opinion does not matter" in terms of your health. It is the same as saying that "you" do not matter. And to go further and say, "Hey, I need some help dealing with this Father Knows Best Conservative Republican Subconscious Issue behind my objection to the rule" is lost in the commotion. It is probably dealt best with another medical/psychological professional than by the person pointing out your lack of self worth because you are not wearing socks. To not listen to a diabetic while passing judgement is dangerous. How would you react to someone saying to you that you have no self worth over and over and over again?

Before diabetes so many things were of just no consequence, I could just run around without socks, and my bare feet would connote a certain freedom or Southerness. It could also be taken as a sign of being a simpleton without many cares. Bare feet may be sensual to some, a larger fetish to others or a claiming of territory. Still for others it is an issue of not soiling the carpet with shoes, or a lack of formality. But, let a diabetic run around without shoes or socks and it becomes irresponsible, suicidal, a lack of self respect, amputation, foot ulcers, neuropathy, passive in the face of disease, stupid, idiotic and the waste of a young life.

Before diabetes, minutiae were plentiful and fights were few. After diabetes, fights overflow, my stubbornness abounds and a certain spite is brewing towards those that seem to know everything about having sugar, but have never experienced its social ordeal, the personal guilt and the restrictions everyone is willing to verbally and emotional enforce on you despite you trying to change. It is as if anytime you falter, people read it as moral lack, when you are just being yourself -- despite not wanting too.

Maybe I should just develop a sock fetish. Hell, I think I already have.

Arduousness

2007-01-20T12:57:00.000-05:00

OK. Payday was yesterday. After I sat down and figured fiscally everything that I needed done immediately, I realized that I had only 9 dollars left from my check. A co-worker of mine said he had only 69 cents left from his paycheck once he did what he had to do. Then, later in the Subaltern Transit ticket line, while I was contemplating what bills will have to "wait" and which ones I would "pay" because I was about to buy a 10 trip at the Port of Authority costing me 88 bucks, equaling 5 days of round trip bus fare so I could get to work, the woman in the line next to me was being told that both of her cards were declined and she could not get to where she needed to go.

Amazing. The woman was middle age, professional, and standing with what looked like a leather bound notebook full of credit cards. I realized later that it was her billfold. But in the moment, she was so desperate and starting to shamefully dismantle the assuredness she must have flexed in her office earlier that day, that I felt sorry for her. There was a sound of freshly earthed uncertainty that tainted her voice as the sister behind the window screamed pretty loudly "I said both cards were declined!" And from there you could tell that that this corporate associate, assistant, manager or partner had just a few seconds before my arrival verbally assaulted the woman behind the counter, and as a formidable counter-strike the transit clerk let one singular and sisterly volley of words out of her mouth forcing the corporate minion to fold her cards. For anyone in shouting distance there was a collective gasp, followed by a confused bewilderment at the professional appearance of the woman at the window. Then the delay at my window because the ticket machine ran out of tickets and I had to wait for the machine to be re-stocked and prepped with fresh ticket cards. Then there was the impatience of the man behind me and his non-smile. Then there was the mad rush onto a packed bus after searching for the correct gate since the rennovations have rained havoc throughout my normal quadrant of the terminal.

Everyones exhausted, no one smiles, no one talks, on the bus. Some read, most sleep, other look out of the window.

I wonder if I snore?

Breaking Bread -- A Dinner in English, Spanish and German

2007-01-15T12:45:00.000-05:00

Today is MLK Day. It is interesting to watch it morph into an African American version of a national church service, like the Palm Sunday of my childhood as delivered by the Rose of Sharon Club at Mt Zion Holy Tabernacle, or Men's Day Services at any congregation's house of worship found on Nashville's Church Street near Fisk University. James Brown's funeral gave me the same feeling, especially after he has appeared on the cover or Rolling Stone and other magazines. It is kind of like a potluck, where you don't know which black man or woman is important in the constellation of American heroes till they are dead. So Ed Bradley gets a yes, while Gerald Levert gets a no.

For my MLK festivities, I went and had dinner with Sylvia and her kids. I walked into a room full of ladies and babies, between the ages of 3 and 8 or so. All boys, all part Venezuelan, African American, German, Argentinian, Jamaican and a couple of other countries. Great! Before our dinner, the kids sat down and were given a great speech by the Sylvia about how it is important to stick together and not allow other people to be teased because they may be different than the group. Then we ate fried chicken. That was one of the best dinners I have had, not just because of the food, but because of the company, and the spirit of the evening. I felt like it was done right, kind of like Christmas, but kind of not. It just turned into a German, English and Spanish verbal love fest. The only problem was that I was the only non-parent, so I didn't know how to let it end. Parents get going, I feel like I lingered a bit, but not too long. Talking to Sylvia's husband Andre at the end was great, he gets my anxiety about being back stateside. He grew up outside of Muenster.

This is the first MLK Day without Coretta Scott King, so it is significant to me. It is like the festivities are set to start a life of their own. I wonder what it will look like in 100 years, will people have an inkling of what it was really like, or will it be just sound bites and a collage of black and white images presented as the totality of the experience. I saw footage from Meet the Press from 40 years ago, and I must say that I am impressed beyond a doubt every time I hear Dr. Martin Luther King's speaking voice. But the true kind of fighting and blood letting I heard from my grandmother is never talked about in this part of the country (Up North). She talked about black soldiers rioting, about a cousin shooting to defend his property in the 1920's or 30's, about hiding her brother when the Klan was riding and the death of a child after a car accident because the ambulance only picked up white people. Before and sometime after MLK and his non-violence stance, I always received the message that at some point, in order to defend their property, many blacks resorted to violence or tactical cunning. For some the outcome was divine benevolence from a judge or God him/herself and for others it was death by an angry mob, but in the end . . . c'est la vie.

------

I saw I Love New York on VH-1. I know that many of my friends dislike the show, but I really don't like entering the American workforce or dealing with people without knowing what the prevailing stereotypes are, nor why the white people at my job look at me funny when I tell them about my work experience and life. Many of the people think that I am lying because "black people don't do", what I do. Everything from their change in posture and their switch to the vernacular betrays this. So, I like to keep current.

Virginia Heffernan's review in NYT is an anthropological interpretation of this season's Celebreality. The review is really efficient in its dramaturgical dismantling of the minstrel show, but the reviewers language is definitely crafted for the middle-class and the Uber-middle-class of NYC. In short, the show itself was less alarming to me than for the sweet and salty New York Times reviewer of this new Negriod Heaven by VH-1.

I am going to watch this show regardless of what my friends say though. Many believe it is acting (and it really is), staged, retrograde, reprobate and derogatory. Yeah, that is there, but there are also some interesting issues concerning character. New York is fascinating to watch because she has no internal core, just an internal compass for her desire. Her responses to people and different environments are truly protean. Her inner demeanor changes, but the body stays the same. In terms of race, the "negrita" comment by Rico and New York' s response was very good for people to see on television. Plus, there is a good amount of nice booty in this bunch, and as far as I can see it is all being pimped by one woman. So, I am wondering how the contestants and the producers play this angle.

There is one thing that the reviewer pointed out that hit close to home. All the guys that were rejected were the ones that were not hard enough, but might have had something going for them. The ones that stayed were completely crazy. I remember this being my life in high school and college for the most part. Black women blatantly told me I was too smart to date, then when I dated someone outside of my race I was pounced on like a intruder at Artemis's bath (been watching HBO's ROME, excuse the metaphors). And when I said I had a relationship with a man then I became this strange non-person, or privy to some black women's secrets concerning other men but with no desire of my own. New York's selection is staged and arranged by producers, but then again, doesn't this happen in real life too? If New York has ratings to maintain, then what is the reasoning behind what happens in our community concerning hard and soft men? A reverend years ago said that this was a problem in the black community that will come home to roost. I have heard no other analysis of this situation since that chance meeting twelve years ago.

The Lines of Demarcation, Beauty, and Liposuction: Or How the Daughter of German Immigrants Changed the Land of the Samba

2007-01-14T16:30:00.000-05:00

I have been thinking about my relationship to food, and how sometimes I wish I could talk to someone about it. In our society only women have problems with food, but I guess I am part of the long list of male diabetics, horse jockeys, male body builders and corporate manorexics that live in silence and/or pleasure because of their relationship to wine and bread.

This article on Brazil, food, women, beauty and Brazil's beauty culture is very, very telling.

O Trem Azul -- A Life in Conversations

2007-01-14T16:15:00.001-05:00

Well, I guess I should just say that I missed the the fight. I worked late on Thursday so the whole Condi Rice versus The United States Senate was totally over and out of my normal visual range. I did not see nor hear of anything till this Friday morning glancing over the front page of the New York Times even though I have been far more satisfied with the Wall Street Journal this past winter.

This morning I watched Meet the Press and the Mclaughlin Group. Both seem to miss some major points, mainly that the talking and bickering of congress is of little consequence, the powers of the Middle East will respond according to their own self-interest and those of their particular religious and political lines. I guess it is sobering to ponder an army of warriors without ideology or tiresome 200-year-old Western notions of the nation-state battling to the death in the largest oil fields of the world. Talk about Newt Gingrich, Pat Buchanan, Harold Bloom and the barbarians at the gate. It is unfortunate for them and their analysis, soon they will not be the center of the world.

OK, I promised to relax the political slant.

Otherwise Friday was a haphazard diabetic day. Blood sugar normal till I got to work and tested and saw that that my sugar was high (snacking on some Cheeze Its before the evening shift). Was under control till I kept getting delayed from eating my 6:00 pm meal, so I started to feel a low. Then I evened out after that cause I was really hungry. The sad state of affairs is that good food choices require lots of money and if your money is funny so is your diet. Period. Maybe congress should hold a hearing on that.

The only other things to report is that I was talking to a co-worker. She graduated from the same HCBU (Historically Black College or University) that I went to. She works with hedge funds. Very, very interesting world she belongs to during the day. I want to hear more about her everyday -- much different than the motley crew and career choices I have made.

Thursday night I had dinner with Alice and a friend of hers we will call SC. First Alince and I went to Borders in the new (to me at least) Time Warner Center. We sat at Dean and Deluca and talked for a good while about my younger sister, her niece, her girlfriend, women in dance hall, future projects, newness in my life and how to raise a child. I am not sure if the people around us liked her rants on capitalistic society, but fuck it, ten years back that same street corner would have seen a handful of old 60's radicals and septarian cold war socialist dotting its quadrant at anytime. Now I am astounded by the consumerist milieu that is sprinkled on top of normal heady New York literary behavior. I guess I shouldn't be a sour puss . . . but I kind of am.

After the Dean and Deluca experience (I have only eaten in one other Dean and Deluca, about 10 years ago in Soho), we went to meet SC for dinner on the Upper Westside in the upper 60's, lower 70's. Again a different NYC, but at least more neighborhood like. There we talked about Vibe,where I interned eons ago and wrote a couple of articles. Seems they are looking for a copy editor and posted it on Craig's List. Well this is a sign. Then we talked about Vibe's trajectory an arc from test issues, to New York darling, to Fashionistas secret choice, to not being hood enough, to being gangster, to writers being beat, to staff turn overs, to now. It is epic and it is symptomatic of something else in hip-hop that I am honing in on, but decline to comment on till I have thought my hypothesis out clearly. But at the end of the day, Vibe showed so much promise when I was younger, that I am still speechless on what a waste it has become in comparison to its expectations. The wisdom I have earned tells me that people are more apt to tearing other people down (and their institutions, notions and dreams) rather than building them up. You choose what you will fight for, and I must admit that hip-hop is not what I am fighting for anymore. I just had a flashback to me and other interns standing alone sipping our gin and juice. Just watching.

But that was the past.

Otherwise the dinner was more about this season of The Wire and Clive's rescue of Whitney. We all agree, this will be the comeback of comebacks. All she needs is a cigarette and an orchid in her hair and bitches will be throwing tantrums.

Other conversations:

-- We talked about Hunt's Point at work on Friday. It is a stroll in Brooklyn that was featured on HBO where there are a mass of prostitutes. I like to think of it as an ass mall. There is a young gay guy at work who talks to everybody with much respect about everything from politics to Sanitorium (the inanimate noun, not the person, I will say no more), which can be political. It was nice because we are all of varying sexual identities and we just talked about all the types women, transgendered and male hustlers found at the ass mall. That would never have happened in Tennessee. I forgot that I like NYC for that reason, and I think that many black men have gotten a bad rap uptown for being portrayed as homophobic. Many straight uptown brothers are very open minded and will not shy way from any questions concerning sex and what one likes.

-- I have been playing O Trem Azul by Milton Nascimento to calm myself down a bit. It is nice. It is helping me get into a position to get through this plot issue I have with a particular project.

-- Jochencito! Congratulations.

A Year and Several Days Into an Experiment

2007-01-14T01:24:00.000-05:00

It has been a year since I started this blog. And true to form, I have lived in two different places Nashville and NYC/NJ. I feel as if I have two different blogs just thinking about it. Now I am trying to figure out what to do with my blog. December had to be the worst blog month for me concerning entries and making sense to a wider audience. In other words, I felt that I was trying to capture snapshots of what was going on around me but had insufficient time to flesh them out. And right now, I want to talk about Saddam Hussein's execution, the President's revised Iraq policy and the swearing in of a new Congress and Senate, but it has all become background noise. Things on the home front concerning immediate family, larger family and the future are pretty tight. Plus, I am starting to wonder about blogging. I can write whatever I want, but the question becomes in the end, "Who is my audience ?". And there is the crux of my dilemma.

So, in 2007 I want to start all over.

There are a ton of things concerning sex and sugar that I have been pretty tight lipped about because I wanted to touch on larger issues concerning the world, but my desire to talk about that is waning in the catastrophe that our political process has become. I also have felt that treatises on the larger world or the application of my political views to the world around me can become boring to my readers. I have thought of myself as a writer and an artist probably longer than I have thought of myself as a bumbling teacher/academic and reporter, so for now, my everyday observations are what I want to concentrate on in my blog entries. After all, being diabetic, that is all I do. I sit in observance of how I feel physically. I watch for mood swings. I watch for sudden hunger and the shakes as I approach blood sugar rock bottom. And, I watch for sluggishness and grogginess after lunch, signaling a dangerous blood sugar high and its required guilt.

So, I promise to get to what I felt was the story I wanted to tell at the end of 2006 and the beginning of 2007. In 2 previous posts I talked about tiring of boys and my 14-year-old excursions to the projects with my play big brother Andre as he conquered 2 women there. In some weird way they are linked. Sugar and desire, maybe this is my life's journey.

The Hustled and Hustlers

2007-01-11T00:23:00.000-05:00

Not much time, it is already the following day. I am a little bit tired from having to be in the city by 7:45 this morning. Inventory is coming up and I am not really looking forward to it.

The thing that really tripped me out yesterday was my ride on Suburban Transit which I call Subaltern Transit because I leave this really well to do suburb in central Jersey (practically Pennsylvania) and head to my Brooklyn, Harlem, Financial District, Upper Eastside work-play-stomp almost everyday. I take either the 5:55 am or the 6:15 am to be in the city at around 7:00 where I drink my habitual Red-Eye (coffee with a shot of espresso), read a surfing magazine, watch the European tourist try and turn Port Authority into Gare de l'Est and just stroll up 8th on what used to be the craziest Red Light District in North America. It is now just a former X-rated world where I giggle at the people that go into to this comedy club that was a strip joint in a not so previous life. This is the same stripe joint where I saw the most toothless set of strippers this side of the Mississippi simulate the most torrid of sex acts in front of an all female group of Japanese tourist. Oh, and there was a cigarette involved. Now look at the place.

Great Jupiter! What has happened to MY CITY!

Well, the thing that was interesting as we hustled onto the bus like a bunch of Flash Gordon automatons (preparing for battle to the soundtrack by Queen) was that out of the 3 other passengers sitting around me I was the only one reading a book. I was brushing up on Rodo and Retamar, another commuter sitting diagonally from me was sleeping, the gentleman directly in front of me was playing solitaire on his lap top and the guy adjacent to me was watching Al Gore's film An Inconvenient Truth on a portable DVD player. So only one out of the four of us was reading. That says a lot to me about the publishing world, people's habits and how we receive information. I was actually more shocked by the fact that once we arrived at Port Authority the guy who was watching his DVD immediately put on his earphones and marched out of the bus with an introverted cadence of the heart. I bet you he dates on line.

The academic snob in me wanted to say "Pity, maybe I shall eat a peach."

But Littlemilk said, "C'est la vie, maybe I can make it to work on time if I walk today. It is cold, but its nice to get the blood pumping and to feel my cheeks become tingly at their most rounded tops. And who doesn't like Central Park South and the view of the trees."

So I walked to work en mass.

Nothing else to report.

Apologia

2007-01-08T23:32:00.000-05:00

The past couple of days have been extremely positive. I have not gotten to the writing that I would like to do for this blog, but some unplanned things happened that were nice, just the same.

So, I must apologize to the King Cake that could have been. I decided to make Pots de Creme instead because I could not find the right color icings for the cake, nor could I decide if I should make a real traditional King Cake that involves making a dough (and yeast I think), or just making a moist bundt in a Fleur de Lis pan. Turns out that my family doesn't like dark chocolate and they found my choice in chocolate to be too bitter and strong. So the King Cake will have to wait till another free day. And, there are three ramekins of chocolate that will have to be disposed of. Maybe I will take it to work.

And to the exhibit at the Bronx Museum that could have been, I must apologize for forgetting that on Monday many places like the MET, MOMA and you, are closed. So the exhibit will have to wait, but Ava and I spent a nice day together on my day off. I walked her to NYU and waited outside on Waverly fidgeting with my phone on a day that felt like the breaking of winter rather than early January. I stood in my Mossimo jeans and soccer shoes like I was in some Italian movie and waited. I felt so cold, and a little down as I watched the people walk by. They seemed so disconnected or in the middle of a tedious humdrum that I do not envy. There is something about Washington Square Park that feels flat like a postcard, perfect in every dimension, but slick to the touch and hostile to the taste. Maybe it is because I remember when it was a little bit different, more like Saint Mark's Place.

And to the evening that might have been, I saw Perfume last night instead. I was disturbed by its premise, amused by its denouement and disappointed in its ending. But most of all I was disgusted by the anti-hero. Rat-mo and Ava had great commentary on the film, and I was spazzing out afterwards as usual, reciting all the things I know about these 18th century novels that incorporate Egyptian mysticism and issues of self awareness. All this happened in the cab. Again I must apologize for the subway ride that could have been.

And to the blog entry that could have been, I apologize again. I went to Labyrinth on 112th and Broadway and bought a book on fascism and the male body. Studying fascism has become a sort of past time for me, and I did not feel very attuned to writing about growing up black and in the South, specifically Andre and I riding to the projects from our middle class neighborhood. It is so expected of me as of late, especially in NYC. Back in Nashville, people would find my tales no more amusing than any other, but here they are transformed into a Briar Rabbit smorgasbord of Americana, the type romanticised by the cosmopolitans. After buying the book I walked down to a Haitian restaurant, bought a snack and walked home. I also decided I would watch Rome on HBO on Demand. It is more important than my Southern sex and cigarette tale that some critic is sure to call a sort of Black Huckleberry Finn. I could do with out the shame as a result of my labour this evening.

Besides, I find that the Roman Empire and its operation spark my imagination like reliving a past life. Throughout the movie Perfume I thought about Roberto Fernandez Retamar's book Caliban, and his declaration that the history of Western colonization is a series of Roman conquest re-incarnated. Is that why we think of Pre-Revolutionary France and The Antebellum South as epic backgrounds. The masters and the slaves, the lords and the servants, and the enlightened senatorial classes that rule appeal to someone. Or shall I say, it appeals to some sense of the Western World. Art surrounding its celebration is beginning to bore me. Sometimes I think its praise and critique are part of a class status lexicon, a way of being esteemed in some obtuse manner, a way of sniffing out who belongs to the ranks and who has not done the sufficient reading. What about all the worlds that could have been, if the need for empire and subjugation did not exist? Are there not times and lands in our human history where empire did not existed to such an organized and exploitative extent: otherwise, there would have been no where to colonize.

Lastly I must apologize to the dinner on Wednesday night in Brooklyn that will not exist. I was scheduled to read from a set of vignettes, but a key member and friend is going to move away and start a life somewhere else. Plus, I want to work on new installments, I have a problem to solve with the next two. So, Sylvia we will have to eat and share our ideas for illustrations on another day. Gregory, I hope to see you and your art work soon. Have a safe trip to the borders of our empire.

And Simone simply get better.

In A Land Far Far Away

2007-01-06T14:17:00.000-05:00

The other war that is raging in Europe. Check out these placards. Courtesy of Fabulon (lutte contra le Fascisme) -- Careful opening his page at work.

You might want to wait to check out Fabulon's myspace page if you are at work, the pictures are full of lush male bodies and positions. His myspace blog is dope -- great French hip-hop videos. Overall, a strong political statement an interesting view of the evolution of hip-hop and masculinity.

Junior's Got Sugar

2007-01-06T11:59:00.000-05:00

OK, I have been unashamed to write about black things, cultural things, New Orleans things, book things, bisexual things, gay things, "the children" voguing uptown, my wine loving lesbian friends, sperm thieves (well, that has yet to be written about), Nashville hell, Germany, ex-loves, true loves, faux loves, a one night stand, Brazilian women and snapshots from a New York present that still needs a bit more focusing. What I have not written about has been my diabetes in great detail.

The reason I am coming out as a diabetic, though you have all known this for sometime (just like most queers creeping from behind the coat hangers), is because of the guilt I have concerning my eating habits at points. I have not always the best choices, and sometimes it is because I don't want to be excluded from the places and people I enjoy. Plus, I can't stand being under gastronomical surveillance. I abhor it when people start inspecting my food without knowing what an insulin pump is, the difference between bolus and basel doses, or that if I faint you should not look for my needle. That will more than likely kill me. I NEED SUGAR! But I think you should know about my illness in a more formalized manner, and I think you should understand that a spoonful of cake is different than a whole slice, just as a bagel is far deadlier than half a Twix candy bar. And that, my friends, is the motto of my life.

I must make a detour today. I was about to write about my daily rides when I was 14 to the projects with a childhood friend named Andre. That piece I wanted to construct in a proper manner because part of my New Year's resolution is to construct better pieces over longer periods of time, rather than constantly running to the computer with frothy tid-bits of disconnected parts of my compartmentalized life. I am looking for something else in this writing project. But yesterday I received my first diabetic reader (that I know of) and I have been introduced to a whole list of people brandishing glucometers and trying to deal with the same disease I have. So, it is nice to feel a sense of community beyond my doctor's waiting room where I see a whole bunch of supportive families and solitary professionals. Some families in my waiting room experiences are so overly supportive that you can see the actual diabetic patient retreating into some smiling silence, on the other side, 10 years ago many were running into offices with a incomplete charts, desperately trying to fill in little squares with numbers for the epicurean miss deeds that the nurse practitioner will demand in your confession.

I remember one nurse at the Joslin Center telling me that the psychology of diabetics is very interesting. It dawned on me then that my very character was changing. No one told me that when it first happened, and no one has explained it to me since. Nor did I know the importance of living with someone when diabetic, just in case your blood sugar goes so low you can't get up. Great, another reason to get married, or maybe to pass a gay marriage bill!

So today I am coming out of the closet. I am a Type One Insulin Dependent Diabetic. Only ten percent of all diabetics are Type One. I am not like your Type Two grandmother. If I go jogging and watch what I eat the disease will not go away. If I go jogging and watch what I eat, I will still have to put a needle in my stomach, my ass, my arm or my leg at some time of the day. There will never be a point when I am not going to have to do the work that my pancreas should be doing. He gone. But if I exercise, watch my weight and eat correctly I will have a better quality of life and reduce my risk factors for complications -- a public relations sort of double speak by the medical community to make the realities of kidney failure, blindness and my feet getting chopped off more palatable for discussion. Don't call me cynical, just trust.

So on that note, today is January 6th. The first day of carnival in New Orleans. It is the Feast of the Epiphany when the kings arrive to the manger and present gifts to the King of Kings. So, I am going to make a King Cake for my father. And, I will have a whole slice today.

Thanks Kerri.

I like your blog Scott.

Zero Time

2007-01-04T01:01:00.000-05:00

OK.

Happy New Year! Sorry, I haven't been blogging, I got caught up in life. I worked over time hours for about two weeks, commuted about 3 hours a day, wrote a 25 page essay (well, 19), took the GRE, had to find some extra money, celebrated xmas and new years, and typed documents for my dad's company. That was December. It turned out to be a big detour from my original plan of looking for a more corporate environment, compared to the gig I have now, but I enjoyed it. I forgot what it was like to communicate in the terse language the academy requires (which can contradict the complex but sometimes empty vocabulary). Some of the issues that were prevalent when I was a graduate student are still there, but many of the contentions about theoretical language that happened 13 years ago have cleared up like a bad case of acne . . .at least at this particular place. Yet, there are still fears of sudden eruptions and outbreaks.

Before the university application (thanks for the help M+K+Doktor Doktor), an overstressed visit from corporate offices at my gig, petty politics from the head manager (which caused an exodus of the subordinate managers), the xmas rush and an infected cut on my hand, I was reading Women in Love. Now I am busy looking at I'll Take My Stand and a book entitled The Agrarians. They are boring, but in terms of intellectual movements they are essential to 20th century American thought and New Criticism, and to think all this happened in my hometown of Nashville, Tennessee in the 1930's is amazing. I should at least know that part of American intellectual history. More comments on them later.

Otherwise talked to R, my best friend, whose family is my second family. Lots of drama, but I am simply floored by the fact that both of her nieces are pregnant. One is 20 and the other 21. This is the first for the 20-year-old, and the fourth for the 21-year-old.

The way that a lot of young people are conducting their relationships is pretty bad concerning self-esteem, self-respect and understanding what is needed to live with one another. I feel like sometimes independence is declared by a marriage or a baby in certain circumstances. Why aren't we making education a meassure of independence (and I mean something higher than the GED). And, why are people not using condoms? The 21-year-old is married, but the 20-year-old is not, so assuming that the elder one's husband is faithful, why is the younger one not scared of catching HIV? That is what is on my mind this evening. Where is the disconnect? My best friend R basically said it is low-self esteem. I hear it, but I just don't know how to address it, though I know all of the environmental reason behind the young women's decisions (insight from watching someone grow up from pre-school to adulthood).

... I have to make a note to myself to write about my rides to the project when I was 14 with my friend Andre. He was 4 years older, had just graduated from an all white, all boy catholic prep school, and went to bang chicks in the hood ever chance he got. I used to listen to him talk about sex all the time, and the way he felt about the ladies he conquered. His emotions ranged from love to a disdain he tried to hide with chatter about hips, breasts, legs, faces, etc . . . We rode from our middle class neighborhood all the way over to the then Preston Taylor projects in the spring and summer. I turned into a pretty fit 14-year-old for a little while. I used to just sit on the steps smoking cigarettes and drinking wine coolers (the newest thing at the time) oblivious to the reality of living in the projects. It was like I was a tourist. Man there is more to that story . . .

. . . In my life I feel like I have zero time for advancement, for love, for sleep, for eating properly, for exercise, etc . . . but, when I look back home sometimes, even at these Agrarian writers (who seem to have been behind the curve in the 1930's as well) I feel a different sort of measure in time concerning maturity, ideas and a sense of self . . . like I have lived several light years beyond, moving with other celestial shards of ice that are invisible to my childhood friends and environment.

Holy flying fish! -- days, hours, seconds -- what a motley crew.

The Dawning of the Superficial

2006-12-25T14:49:00.000-05:00

OK,

Rat-mo said that most blogs are self-centered and self grandizing, so he doesn't read them.

Well good for him.

But, the last couple of post have been that, on my blog for sure.

I will have to get back to serious stuff in 2007.

And, I will read my blog again to see what is up,

Maybe the self needs to be tempered in this experiment.

I seem to have nothing to say about anything but me . . .

And the pictures in my head . . .

Which I enjoy.

Ciao, ciao.

Ding Dong the Witch is Dead -- A Bullet Point Life

2006-12-24T21:34:00.000-05:00

OK,

I have been listening to Ding Dong the Witch is Dead by Kermit Ruffins which is playing on my myspace page . . . myspace.com/ unbeachedwhale (cut and paste if you will).

I am still in the middle of the secret project. Tired, muscle aches from lifting an oven, and commuter fatigue. But I march on, though this Xmas Eve is hard. I want to celebrate with everyone else, but I have to finish this stuff. It is like I am a kid with the mumps, watching everyone play from my window.

So, bullet point life:

1. Meet a girl. Trinidadian. Very nice. Will ask her if she wants to go to the opera. I gotta find some opera money first. I can't turn down the Magic Flute.

2. Boys bore me now. No idea why. It is like when I ate a lot of candy corn when I was about eight-years-old from the Sears Department store on Lafayette in Nashville, Tennessee. Now I can barely touch the stuff. Must be the porn, quick sex and lack of conversation.

I need some conversation.

3. Received a book on Jazz that the German musicologist edited and compiled. Makes me miss Germany and the types of projects that are going on there.

4. BBC and Euronews are the bomb . . .who knew half the shit that is going on is going on? I am stuck in capitalist consumer land and Jersey Turnpike purgatory, so no information what so ever.

5. Merry Xmas . . . if I don't speak to you.

Interventionist Thoughts

2006-12-16T23:51:00.000-05:00

I got a psychic message the other day about my current job. Today I got confirmation that I should take it.

Anyway, there were several things that got my mind working besides the slight altercation that had my blood raging for a full hour at work.

Things are OK, the cold Chicago brick house food artist, who I wanted to slap in the face with a poisonous jelly fish, and I are going out for a beer later. . . some time very later. I am still looking into some anger management type stuff. I get so worked up, it is like I am ready to fight entirely too much.

OK.

Interventionist Thoughts.

-- I saw a woman so pale that when she walked straight through moving traffic on 58th street tonight her skin and light hair reflected the beams radiating off the head lights of oncoming traffic. It was at about 10 o'clock pm and she was in a total daze, passing through the traffic without flinching, like a Shaolin monk in deep contemplation, wearing a black ankle length coat with a hood. But death was on her walk, she was almost hit.

-- I saw a Christmas tree near Bloomingdale's that I wish my grandmother could have seen. It was beautiful. I just realized that I have received a good amount of my aesthetic sensibility from her enjoyment in observation.

-- When I lived in Germany I sang in a gospel choir with Izora Armstead Rhodes from the Weather Girls. She was in my section, the tenor section, because she was a contralto. Amazingly we had 3 contraltos in the choir that were women. In the short time I knew her I learned a lot about music, and I also learned somethings about church that I did not expect. Izora was not one to change her behavior in a church or out of a church because God watches always. She also said in very direct language that discrimination against people because of their sexual orientation is simply not fair. I miss her in no uncertain terms and wish I could have sung more with her. I just thought of her this moment while writing this post.

There was another singer named Harriet who was the lead alto with Izora's daughter Dee, and mother of the choir. She is wonderful and still tours, but I will never forget when she was talking to me about her first coming to Germany from Philly and not knowing how to act. The world was so open and free to her that she walked the streets taking fruit from the fruit stands thinking it was free.

I don't know why that image visited me so strongly today. Harriet walking down the street, with her long long weave flowing through the air, in a shawl or cape, kept bouncing through my mind. I see her smiling with her bright glossy teeth and speaking to people, touching apples and quinces with her long finger nails, picking her fruit half heartedly because all of Germany is so sweet to her.

Hiatus

2006-12-08T10:40:00.000-05:00

OK,

I am beat up. Seriously. Running around in NYC is tiring me out. Plus work is hard now too, so I will have to take a pause from the blogophone to take a nap and catch up on the world. The Baker report looks promising, but also more like the beginning of the true fiasco rather than its logical conclusion.

Need I explain.

Think not.

Gone to fishin'.

PS
I am thinking about this blog differently too. I think it has to do with the job and PU. We will see.

A Thought

2006-12-02T22:02:00.000-05:00

What the hell? The Russians are busy spraying radiation all around public places to kill this one guy who has some shit on somebody. Now, if they are doing that, with all their nuclear stock piles and clandestine puffs of smoke, what else have they been doing? Selling uranium to other players?

Meanwhile, my tax dollars are going into Iraq! Please. And Rumsfeld admits that the Iraqi offensive is not working. Can someone give me a double "please" to the wigger in the middle. Man!

We need to call somebody to help get Russia into line. I mean, screw Iran and North Korea! Condi needs and invisible jet and a lasso of truth to figure this one out.

Sexy List for the Future

2006-12-01T03:02:00.000-05:00

I am nervous to say what is on my mind. I started this entry and cannot complete it.

Don't know why?

Let's leave it with brioche in the morning, made by me, and some great music. Sun Ra prefered.

The Benediction

2006-11-29T23:41:00.000-05:00

Have you felt like you discarded an old idea about yourself or the world but you can't remember where you lost it? Kind of like a scarf forgotten on a transit train, but whether it was the A or the 1, it is of little consequence. You are now standing cold, without protection, experiencing the new world for the first time now that the old swaddling clothes have scattered onto an electrified track; or, maybe you are lighter and faster from the tattered fabric's unnoticed departure. Sometimes the baggage is not so heavy; it is the tediousness and tenacity it takes to keep up with bits of cloth or yarn that wear us out.

That is the best way to call my feelings this afternoon after a crazy day at work. I was forgetful with my personal belongings, forgetting a check book in the company bathroom after changing this afternoon and getting caught behind the eight ball in terms of time management. I also almost forgot the book I was reading on the bus, an out of print gem of a book. Maybe it is sleep deprivation? Maybe it is the bird flu I got? Maybe it is a love jones that is faintly starting today after a conversation with a chef? Maybe it is the office politics I am trying to rise above?

The death of a young 23-year-old on the eve of his wedding in a fury of bullets has put me on edge I guess. Today my delivery guy was harassed by a cop if you ask me, and I can feel a certain level of self-editing happening in these situations. I don't like it. So, rather than loosening my tongues, I feel some part of my outer armour falling away -- where I was once all clad, I am now becoming uncovered -- naked and exposed one limb at a time. I don't want to live like this, always having a part of my person pre-occupied by a ghastly race deed of injustice, just to pretend that things are OK, when they really aren't.

So with that goes a benediction of self in a way. And I thought of DMJ today and his concepts of "things". I like this concept.

I bought some new pants at the Gap for 20 things. I noticed that everything at H&M is 40 things. I got some lotion, shampoo, Odor Eaters and Noxema from Duane Reade for 27 things and that was my day.

Came home. Waited for Blogger to comeback to life, and surfed the net after 2 days of non-stop action and work with Rat-mo.

Peace out.

Another Battle With Flu

2006-11-26T23:49:00.000-05:00

Maybe I have bird flu. I feel like crap. I also realize that I need an editor, or that my sleep deficit is affecting my verb tenses.

Reprieve!

MEME from my friend angryblackbitch.

1. When you looked at yourself in the mirror today, what was the first thing you thought? Do I have a clean shirt?

2. How much cash do you have on you? $47

3. What’s a word that rhymes with “DOOR?” S'more!

4. Favorite planet? Neptune

5. Who is the 4th person on your missed call list on your cell phone. Rat-mo.

6. What is your favorite ring tone on your phone? I don't have one. And I don't know the name of the one I have now.

7. What shirt are you wearing? A 10-year-old dark gray Banana Republic long sleeve knit with a whole in the bottom front left hand part.

8. Do you “label” yourself? Not really. I shop on the sales rack.

9. Name the brand of the shoes you’re currently wearing? Adidas

9.5. Bright or Dark Room? Bright.

10. What do you think about the person who took this survey before you? She is slick, tight on the blogophone and right on time.

11. What does your watch look like? No watch.

12. What were you doing at midnight last night? Typing, organizing, analyzing, planning, eating potato chips and listening to Maroon 5.

13. What did your last text message you received on your cell say? Minutes Remaining . . .

14. Where is your nearest 7-11? Like what the hell is that about? Probably Pennsylvania. I work and commute on all points of the Jersey Turnpike cousin.

15. What's a word that you say a lot? It's bananas.

16. Who told you he/she loved you last? My cousin Stanton Allen.

17. Last furry thing you touched? Dust ball in the storage room at work.

18. How many drugs have you done in the last three days? 2 Rolling Rocks, 3 glasses of Chardonnay

19. How many rolls of film do you need developed? None, I ain't got one of those old contraptions.

20. Your worst enemy? Those closest to my person who don't see the true me, yet I still look to them for validation for some odd reason. I guess I am complicit in the conspiracy too.

20.5. Favorite age so far? I would say 29.

21. What is your current desktop picture? A black bird looking into a window from outside, tens of stories high, in NYC.

22. What was the last thing you said to someone? Have a good trip.

23. If you had to choose between a million bucks or to be able to fly what would it be? I need the money.

24. Do you like someone? No. Still getting over a possibility that just wouldn't happen no matter how hard I tried, prayed, pleaded to the ancestors, etc . . . Finally, accepted that this mofo is just crazy, as in Beautiful Mind crazy . . . and I ain't a long haired brunette of a white woman. Time to float on. I am obviously being saved from something.

25. The last song you listened to? Bjork "It's Not Up to You"

26. What time of day were you born? 11:53 pm

27. What’s your favorite number? I have more than one. I like 8 and 13.

28. Where did you live in 1987? Nashville, Tennessee.

29. Are you jealous of anyone? Yes, a little.

30. Is anyone jealous of you? Don't know.

31 Where were you when 9/11 happened? On a train to Stuttgart.

32. What do you do when vending machines steal your money? Start kicking, cursing and shaking the machine violently (I am ashamed of my behavior, but it is true).

33. Do you consider yourself kind? I am kind but, I curse a lot.

34. If you had to get a tattoo, where would it be? I have three and working on others.

35. If you could be fluent in any other language, what would it be? Japanese

36. Would you move for the person you loved? I don't know.

37. Are you touchy feely? Always

38. What’s your motto? For now. Keep it moving.

39. Name three things that you have on you at all times? My cellphone, insulin, a wristband from Bahia.

40. What’s your favourite town/city? Don't know anymore. It depends so much on who is living there at that moment.

41. What was the last thing you paid for with cash? 2 egg whites, bacon, and cheese on whole wheat toast and a small coffee.

42. When was the last time you wrote a letter to someone on paper and mailed it? Application to a Foundation in Belgium for work.

43. Can you change the oil on a car? No. And if I ask now, people think I am a fag (I think there are other reasons to think that) cause I am so old. I will just have to ask another fag.

44. Your first love: what is the last thing you heard about him/her? She has a 3-year-old.

45. How far back do you know about your ancestry? 1807 for my mother -- for my father legend has it, our family started with a mother and daughter named Mariah and Mirandi. They traveled on the same slave ship.

46. The last time you dressed fancy, what did you wear and why did you dress fancy? Interviewed at law firm. Blue shirt, yellow tie, brown khakis, brown shoes.

47. Does anything hurt on your body right now? No.

48. Have you been burned by love? Burned? Not since 1994. Heartbroken, yes.

Turkey Day

2006-11-23T20:48:00.000-05:00

I woke up this morning and started to watch the Age of Innocence with Daniel Day Lewis, Winona Ryder and Michelle Pfeiffer. It was pretty good. I had to stop so I could do some of my dad's business this morning. I was too tired to do it last night. I had seen the entire Masterpiece Theater version of Edith Wharton's The Buccaneers a couple of years ago. It was like 6 hours and featured Mira Sorvino smoking in a tree. It was nice.

I guess my Thanksgiving revelation is that I should not be so scared of Edith Wharton, she is more foreign than difficult, but somehow in my mind she is viewed as such. It could possibly be that anything that smacks to hard of an isolated high minded society or has worn a whole into the mighty sarcophagus of American letters should be held at hands distance and declared irrelevant by so many in my academic camp, Faulkner excluded. But I like Edith on film, so I must read her now, she writes about a world that I have had to deal with in so many ways, working publishing houses.

Otherwise Thanksgiving dinner was nice. I slept most of the day. I needed it. My father, stepmother, sister, grandmother and I ate together around 4:30. We cooked half and ordered the other half. The dressing was pretty chemically laded. But everything else was good. We will be eating this stuff for days.

I tried to start The Pilgrim at Home by Gonzalez Eschevarria but my family won't let me. My mother called, interesting conversation. Lots of talk about the family reunion. It is interesting because I had a dream where both sides of my family and I were eating at a table in Switzerland. All of a sudden, one half of my family got up and left the table, while the other half stayed. I think I know what that means and I am subconsciously waiting for it to play out.

I am starting to feel overwhelmed by this application to Presbyterian University. I have other things that I need to do for my survival and I am not really sure how to balance all of this. I think I am delving into Brass Band music as a natural alleviator of stress. Rebirth and Kermit Ruffin (thanks Catherine) have been my on heavy rotation, a sort of penicillin for this feeling that I am drowning in mediocrity and spicelessness as far as my future intellectual world is considered (more the PU visit than anything, not my friends), not to mention clubbing, drinking, eating and just enjoying life. Life in NYC feels like a long chore where there is no time to do anything but commute because friends blow you off and reschedule at a drop of a hat. That is the NYC way I think. So, big brass bands will be it for a while. It all makes me feel much better.

Happy Thanksgiving. Tomorrow is black Friday. Good Luck for you lucky shopaholics.

The New York Review of Books, The November 30th Issue (A Work in Progress, Draft III)

2006-11-21T00:04:00.000-05:00

I am really exhausted. I worked for several days straight after being attacked by a stomach virus that made it impossible for me to climb the stairs at Grand Central Station a couple of days ago. It felt like I had a tank of helium nestled between my solar plexus and diaphragm. Damn!

Then I went to the Ivory Tower, and let me tell you all, it is a walk through Oz. I missed the bonfire at this Presbyterian institution, all of my fellow coloureds didn't have a stomache for them, but I find beer and frat boys interesting. I never really experienced that world, but it did remind me of Tuebingen in a strange way.

And yesterday I picked up The New York Review of Books (November 30^th, vol. LII, no. 19). I wanted to write a whole essay on this distinguished journal and the life it reminds me of, but with the onset of a graduate school application and the other things going on in my life, I don't have time to read the entire thing and write an essay that is tailored to my heart. So, I will write about what I have read so far.

I wonder if the Portuguese word saudade goes for terrible experiences as well as good ones. I think I am fascinated and in love with a struggle I have learned to recognize as part of New York. I know the Gotham Bookmart, Edward Gorey's work, the cultural effects of Balanchine's brand of bulimia, in verse the strange tight rope of the Dance Theater of Harlem, and the bestially antiquated Edwardians that inhabit East Coast liberalism. And there is a part of me that misses that awkwardness. It is interesting; their influence is waning as they wrestle with the passing of Susan Sontag, the Kennedy's Democratic Party, and Saul Bellows literary presence. Reading The New York Review of Books brings back many memories about being outside that community but nestled in it.

The review brings up that terrible symbiotic dysfunctional relationship of white folk and black folk -- that terrible assumption, which turns quickly into a need to help the Negro and my complicity in feigning helplessness. I was always thanked very graciously by the institutes that I roamed, re-shelved, interned at and performed minor tasks of maintenance on many a rainy Sunday afternoon in exchange for a piece of pauper’s bread and a place to sleep.

I look back at the mid to late nineties as part of a longer love affair with New York that never really balanced out correctly. In the mist of dusty Edwardian pre-war buildings was where I found refuge after a little rejection by the hip-hop community in 1994, just before the string of high profile murders started. I found a safe place at a British publishing company and a Caribbean cultural institute by 1997, as many of my writer friends fled to other publications, graduate schools and video hits channels. I was “the one” that found himself in the company of the tweed jacketed and dust bunnies prancing on hard cherry wood floors. So imagine my surprise when I picked up the latest issue of the review to find it emaciated, lighter, of different paper quality and with a much smaller classified ad space than 7 years ago. It was the same reaction I had seeing the new Time Warner Building, it is a sense of Darwinist progress that such real estate ventures bestow on America’s Brazilified reduction of the very rich and the very poor. New Yorkers are expecting to see several more of these palaces dedicated to the societied before the end of the decade.

The New York Review of Books of 2006 is a denatured landscape where not only its landmarks have been re-invented by fewer pagers, but its very components have changed like alchemical algebra. It has turned water into Italian soda – yes, it is a fountain in neoclassical style, but in a Willy Wonka land of intellectual proportions instead of a true reflection of the world we inhabit. It is Old Europe colored funny, not New Europe in shocking realism. Its perspective is ornate and wonderful to read, but its reach is not as curly and wavy as I once thought. It is just stubble unable to grow into a full beard. Europe of everyday use is far different than this little American intellectual miracle.

The two articles I read dealt with two of my favorite subjects, Marie Antoinette and Gore Vidal.

Daniel Mendelsohn's "Lost Versailles" deals with Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette. Its opening is absolutely perfect making me remember why I loved the journal in the first place. I found Daniel Mendelsohn's observations to be pretty good, and he confirmed what I suspected about the movie.

As a pre -pubescent historian, I have wandered far away from Hollywood renditions of the past Can we really know what influence great men and women have had on any of us in two hours? I understand the artistic exercise in rendering the decomposed bodies of our exalted in the cinematic flesh, but to condense true life into plot sequences, or combine real life people into composite characters, always hurts me as a historian, even if I understand that narrative and voice can override such literal interpretations. So, to know that this was a meditation on how Maria Antonia became Marie Antoinette devoid of the complete political and social context outside of Versailles bothers me, but like a teenage girl, I am still dying to see the movie. I am dying because I love this period of history first and foremost (Haitian Revolution and all), and also because Marie Antoinette's biography was something I read in high school. I probably read several versions to satisfy my anima's need for watching a woman imprisoned in am age of decadence and my animus's need to see the guillotine's blade, the heads on spikes and the God anointed stripped to naked human forms.

Mendelsohn pours over Coppala's three films with a fine tooth comb. He lays out the ways of Coppala's lost women and ultimately he gives the good points and the bad points in unequal measure to Marie Antoinette. Coppala seems to focus on showing what life may have really been like for a girl plucked from Vienna to rule on the French throne at a time when all pomp was Parisian and all of Paris had an eye on Versailles. Antonia/Antoinette must master a new language, a court culture that was very different from the Hapsburg's and the quirks and intrigues of a family that was much different than her own. The thing that is not explored in detail is how this woman's very presence was meant to solidify an alliance between France and Austria and how her frivolous nature and lack of political cunning turned against her family.

I will say no more about Mendelsohn's review, but I will say this about the premise of the movie though I have not seen it (I know not a good thing). As a historian I think there is a problem in assuming that just because Marie Antoinette was a 14-year-old Austrian girl figuring out 18^th century French politics that somehow her story holds resonance with the 21st century. I am not sure if this is a feminist project of re-imagining, but the leanings of Coppala's project are revisionist none-the-less upon the premise that it must have been extremely difficult for Marie-Antoinette in ways that would have been recognized by us. First that is not true, the idea of a teenager is a 20th century notion, and the ways of European royalty are an extreme experience that made people not owners of their own person but both the embodiment of the state power and subject to all the restraints that the role of governance require. In other words, she was probably expected to do what we would consider very adult things by the age of 14, and the strata she inhabited included re-occuring themes of fratricide and impersonal invasions of private life that are not kin to our world today, even for the most followed rock star.

I think Coppala addresses these issues, but I wonder if her interpretation of Antonia/Antoinette measures up to the past, I know that she wants it to be part of our present. I am probably better off reading Antonia Fraser's Marie Antoinette from which Coppala gets her rendition of the famous/infamous queen to answer these questions. But in the end, Marie Antoinette was not very bright. Even her tutor used to write her lessons on trace paper so she could print them out on clean sheets of paper to show to her mother the Empress Marie Theresa. Did she possess the most basic intellect to know the social crisises in that moment of history, or to take heed of her mother and brother’s caution? Is this shown in the film? I will have to wait and see, since I have taken on the task of reviewing the film before seeing it. Stay tuned.

Bits of Gore Vidal are expected in every New York Review of Books. He is the great pontiff of American letters who, with age, is moving in what seems like measured steps; or, maybe it is simply my own ex-patriot experience that has cloistered him from my view. It seems as if all of New York literary society is smitten by his eternal good looks, his bisexuality, his adventure, his politics and his pedigree. I love Gore also, but there are times, just as when I read Tennessee Williams, where I realize the very American and peculiarly institutionalized paradigm of race raising its ugly head from Vidal's hallowed skull like a cobra lifting a toupee from the rim of a woven basket, only to settle back into the cranium nestled and docile in its position, but striking out at random unbeknownst to the well mannered speaker. In those circles black folk are something to be commented on, not engaged with in real terms nor taken as part of the whole.

Larry McMurty's introduction smacks of those lofty questions that only those in Vidal's caste can ask. Who cares if you had only one tomb to pick as your constant companion on a desert isle? Vidal's complete opus is McMurtry's obvious pick and from there we are transported to Vidal's latest installment and sequal to style="font-weight: bold;">Palimpsest, Point to Point Navigation: A Memoir, 1964 to 2006. In this review we learn of Vidal's great loves, their deaths, and his life now that is spreading out like the fingers of the Mississippi, tracing the ending of real lives and the people who are now memories in our American epoch. The great literary world of the last mid-century is a society that exist no more, today writing is a profession of isolated rites. We will not see that collective picture in real time ever again, there is no Johnny Carson or Dinah Shore to help nurse a neat scotch and tight molars expousing sexual conquests with Jack Kerouac or nights listening to jazz records with friends of Dorothy .

But I am getting too poetic.

There is much less to say about Gore Vidal than the Marie Antoinette project, his mere presence in this journal is enough to summon up the picture of our contemporary court culture. Vidal is a well adorned mascot, beautiful in many ways, sensational in most other, larger than life, charming, astute and half American in his gleaming observation from the class of people that have always looked at America from their summer villa in Capri where the weather and temperament of the locals envelopes their bruised soles and blistered hearts from a spring and summer pounding the pavements of New York.

So, I am seeing this part of New York dying a weird death if not an isolated one. Where literature and the literary world lie in this miasma is beyond me. New York seems more Republican to me than before, as I sit at lunch with my new co-workers and they talk about a world that I do not recognize. No free love. No weed. No dancing with the socialist devil in the clear moonlight. Most of the older New York liberals that I knew who were either young socialist or acolytes to Jackie O.'s Manhattan have died or are displaced in a city where their neighbors are younger and more affluent. Looking back in my “saudade”, these modernist hangers on in this post-post-modern juke joint also seemed in their discussions of the e-book and the role of the Internet in the historical trajectory of the bound word. These off beat Edwardians were running like monks trying to save ancient texts from an imaginary fire in the nineties; however, the true hordes at the gates are white, middle class, from Middle America and hungry for money. The inclusion of other people and world views into their velvety chambers of brass dotted upholstered seats is of minor consequence. Look at this government. Look at this war. Look at this situation. Look at our foreign policy. Look at the administration's cultural illiteracy in decision making.

In the same issues, Max Rodenbeck's piece "How Terrible Is It?" exclaims that the rest of the world was skeptical of our accusations directed to Mesopotamia and its environs, but the American people were not. With that statement we are left with what the New York Review of Books sales itself as, a rarefied course for those on a Eurocentric diet; yet, this menu is as antiquated as brandy soaked duck fetuses in aspic. I am not sure if the point-of-view that is exposed is more a glance and longing for an intellectual tradition to which we as Americans will always feel inadequately matched, linguistically inferior and shall always overtly covet; or, is it another case of “saudade”. The American Empire ruled with an emphatic assurance and a feeling of inheritance to the West because we saved Europe from itself several times over through war and Edwardian aged New York marriages. Are East Coast liberal minds glancing over the pond like a Portuguese countess peering over the boat on her way to Brazil escaping Napoleon's army? Was there a miscalculation on which road the hordes gathered and will it be fatal to a jovial and lively intellectual New York elite?

Bullet Point Life

2006-11-16T22:10:00.000-05:00

1. I don't know where to go with the Harlem Baker? I can't give the attention he would like and I feel guilty. We talked about how our relationship would go as long as it lasted. We will just have to wait and see. That is in the back of my mind, how much access do I give lovers in my life.

2. I have a meeting with some folk at a famous institution about my future tomorrow and I am tripping about it. This is big, but somehow I am not suppose to sweat it. It is kind of like the white people in Pride and Prejudice -- you are suppose to be cool about wanting Mr. Darcy, and it is considered to be in bad taste to express your desire too heavily. Anglophile Americans kill me.

3. I gotta haircut. I have not had a haircut since my stay with the Harlem Baker sometime in September.

4. I have been in the mist of a discussion on Clay Cane's blog concerning the now infamous "Bishop Incident".

5. Discussions about the Black Church and Gay Folk has revealed a lot to me about how people think on the other side of the fence.

6. There are a lot of papers coming out concerning New Orleans. Not sure how I feel about all this contemplation. There is a part of me that just wants to say that it is not that deep. Coloureds were drowning, America watched and demonized Black Folk for trying to stay above water in the Super Dome, whole towns are gone, nobody is going to get the insurance. The other part of me simply wonders if the steeple of my grandmother's church in Picayune, Mississippi was ever picked up.

7. Skip Gates needs more entries for his tome. 100 dollars a pop. If I write ten that is a thousand dollars.

8. Who am I kidding, I ain't writing shit.

9. Need to call Auntie who works in Slidel to see if she can get me some fresh file, I refuse to buy that vile pixie dust that has been sitting on the shelf for 3 years at Zabar's.

10. Time to look at the Police's Syncronicity concert on DVD in the morning.

11. My youngest sister and I have the same taste in music. I am starting to think that I am a total fag, or she is growing up to be a total fag hag. We need to figure this out quick.

12. My job is fun. Not taking it serious at all. Trying that for a change. If it works out it works, if not, then on to the next thing . . . I am already looking.

War Of Time by Alejo Carpentier

2006-11-13T12:12:00.000-05:00

War of Time by Alejo Carpenteir, is the first book in months that I have finished. In the meantime I have been getting fat, looking for a new job, dealing with complicated doctor's instructions, arguing with my father about politics and beginning several chapters of my epic dealing with an African Goddess. I will tell no more.

I loved War of Time. It is a collection of short story that plays with time and narrative underneath the cover of larger epics such as Ulysses, Noah's Arch, pilgrimages and voyages to the New World. As usual, soldiers, saints and sailors litter the stories with minutia that Homer, Virgil or the chroniclers of Columbus simply forgot. Carpentier is the master of creating endearing reflections of the everyday making specific points in time exotic instead of places. I liked the love scene of Penelope best and thought that the short story "Journey to the Source" was just a simple exercise, a beautifully one at that, but the unconsummated love of Ulysses and Penelope in "Like the Night" triumphed, in my opinion, what many consider to be his best work in Journey. Night's reasons, its truthfulness of a man and woman bare in bed, the failure of making love because of drink, a visit to a whorehourse or inner inertia combined into an embarrassing honesty that I don't normally read. Man-honest-truth is something that I like and wish I could read more of as I get older. While studying in undergrad and grad school, most of my professors were women and they just took for granted that I was reading or had read the male centered cannon. If I admit that I read Norman Mailer or Philip Roth back then I was usually stoned by the politically correct warriors. But that is old salt in an old wound. I am not so much upset about it, as I am always amazed when I read about the relationship between a man and a woman from a male perspective in literature and can identify with that failure. Miscommunication of the body is worse than words.

So in that vein, D.H. Lawrence is next on my list of completions. I am reading Women in Love. I started Lady Chatterley's Lover in the German translation but that book is not with me.

------

I woke up this morning thinking about my friend Moa. He sent me a letter asking when I am coming back to Cologne. I miss Moa, we sung together in the tenor section of the Brazilian choir. I miss singing in the gospel choir too. But there is more to that and Moa and the gospel choir. He sent me the letter on the first day of carnival, November 11th. Hmmmmmmm.

I mention it because I have been sitting through the madness of a certain hip-hop magazine's reshuffling wondering about my writing and getting it on the page. But, I guess I am done with it. All the promises that many in my generation thought we were going to have fulfilled has not been and will not be. We are a decade out, the legacy is now established and what is done is done.

I also woke up hearing the groundbreaking of the King Memorial. Well, he should be deified. Oprah and Obama (they should run in 2006) were speaking, and Andrew Young was crying. While riding in the car with my father to the bank on on to the pharmacy to pick up my insulin, I sawthat we are more a like than I thought. He doesn't feel like he belongs with the party's march or procession of people claiming that a certain emancipation is done and fixed. He wants to play the game, even if he is a Democratic voting Black Republican this time around. I am the same. I am not really following the party lines, I got pushed out the game for being different too, I just prefer to play down on the Lower Eastside for now, and across the pond later. But, there is something I have to figure out in my hand about the pary line that lines up with Harlem, Black Studies departments and the destruction of New Orleans and the family and friends I have there.

I am rambling, I know. But I will flesh it out somehow.

Rumsfeld and the Rest of The World

2006-11-08T16:30:00.000-05:00

Ain't this a bitch. The Republicans ain't been out of the House of Representatives for 24 hours and Don had to clean out his desk in 20 minutes and be escorted by security to the door . . . well, voluntarily of course. So be it. Donnie knows that if he stayed the Democrats would haul his ass into the House once a week and wear dat ass out like they were the running the Salem Witch Trials and his name was Tituba!

We just have to wait for Virginia. I can't believe there was so much support for Allen. So, be it again.

I am crying over Tennessee and the senatorial loss of Harold Ford and the support for a marriage amendment to the state constitution defining marriage as that between a man and a woman. So for the record, I don't care if Nashville is popping right now economically and socially, I am still not feeling it. New Jersey is doing just fine by me. . . for now. Civil Unions could still come to pass in the land of Dixie, but I am not so sure.

That's all for now.

More later.

Blogging Blaaaahs

2006-11-05T23:15:00.000-05:00

I am taking a break. There are some things I need to take care of in my everyday life and in my head (which is a constant for me -- I think too much); therefore, there seems to be very little creative broth flowing towards my blog.

I think it is a combination of the following:

1. This freakin' election on Tuesday. CNN has had some interesting coverage on it, but there is a level of over kill. I enjoy the anatomy of a airline disaster feel to it, but honestly, why weren't people so discerning 3 years ago . . . or in 99 during the Gore/Bush campaign cycle?

2. Worried about my home state of Tennessee and Harold Ford.

3. Dealing with my conservative family that has lived in that state (one parent is religiously conservative and the other politically).

4. Father issues -- He is a black Republican -- I forgot how much of a big deal that is for people. And it is increasingly becoming a problem for me . . . there is more to that, cause he is not really going for the stuff that the Republicans are doing now, but certain fundamentals about being a Republican at heart puts us at odds in life.

5. The Ass Hungry Meth Addict of a Christian Fundamentalist Scandal.

6. Depression over sex and sexuality being such a central force in our public discourse. Can't the pastor just have wanted the dick. You can want "the dick" and be against "the gay marriage". That should not shock people.

It is a sign of immaturity, all these lines in the sand about desire and politicizing desire to such an extent. That is just my opinion. I need medical insurance for a chronic disease and I insulted that I have to endure this public spectacle concerning ass play instead of a true discourse on universal health care. There are thousands like me that watch the political landscape turn and boil with no solution in site. Medical problems are hypothetical to the ruling class. It is not hypothetical to me.

7. Depression over the use of New Jersey's gay marriage decision by our president as a "wedge issue". And greater depression over the American anti-intellectual slant that has John Kerry speaking in tongues, and the religious right spurring inaccurate information concerning the place of marriage in Western civilization to a mind numbed public.

8. Perplexity over Saddam Hussein's death sentence early this morning. The timing is so off (or on, depending on how you look at it) . . . just before this election? . . . come on.

9. I am in the middle of reading some Alejo Carpentier and staring at D.H. Lawrence when I should have been finished with Saussure a month of Sundays ago. But come on, admit it, Saussure is interesting, but kind of like calculus . . . and who relaxes with calculus?

10. New chick at my job has caught my interest. She doesn't like to party. I do. So, that leaves me wondering should we get started. Should I play where I work? I normally don't. Especially if there are a ton of women in the office, which there are, it is New York, there are always a million intelligent women everywhere.

The Day of the Dead and Maryspotting

2006-11-01T08:02:00.000-05:00

I do like this holiday, it is kind of like a personal reckoning for me because I start to think about the year that just past and what I want in the future. It is also about ancestors, friends that have passed and respect which I dig.

Today I have to get moving. I need a haircut, I have not had one for months and I have another little interview today. I also have to take some of my writing downtown for submission.

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I have been wanting to link this up cause George Michael is a trip. I don't know what this old queen is turning into, but it sure is damn interesting. He is caught on TV smoking a dooby while this other chick beats face. Fabo!

Travelling by Land

2006-10-31T19:32:00.000-05:00

I don't really have much to report. I wish I did, but the truth of the situation is that I wish this election year would hurry up and be over. The evening news terrifies me, partly due to the war, partly due to the Tennessee senatorial race, and partly due to domestic affairs here in the states. Minimum wage has not been increased in about a decade, people work without security of health insurance or retirement, and from what I can tell, few people question it. There is an inner belief that hard work will solve everything and we can all be like the rich guys.

I commute about 3 to 5 days a week to the city, and the thing that is fascinating about the morning commute is the number of people that sleep on the bus. Add to that the fact that there is a certain etiquette that I have not really been able to pick up on, due to the intimate nature of sleep, and I think I have stumbled upon an American cultural trait that is pretty interesting.

I guess I should describe the last two commutes and my sleeping neighbors. First and foremost, when I get on the bus it is already three quarters full, so I have to walk to the back of the bus to sit. On last Thursday there was a guy that smiled at me and said good morning, then he promptly went off to sleep. It was as if we were skydiving, and his nod was an act of kindredness and security in our journey to earth. He slept on the right side of the bus, and I sat in the middle next to a small career woman that looked like she ate and pooped numbers all day. Her wardrobe was completely black, while me and the other guy were more casual.

When we woke up, he did the exact same non-verbal signals, then a set of stretches probably designed to decrease the probability of a blood clot, and we got off the bus.

Then, on Monday I was in the back again. I had noticed this really tall athletic looking guy who must have been in his mid to late fifties. He had a young face, but this weird haircut that either garnished a crappy toupee, or was in need of more off the top. His hair almost looked nappy, but not quiet, just thick and swollen and possibly dyed with some thick agent which made the style look coagulated and lumpy.

I sat to the right this time, and he in the middle. He was professionally dressed and rambled through the morning paper's sport section with such speed and vigor I could hardly do anything but notice. I was busy reading a short story by Alejo Carpentier, as he fidgeted more, folding the paper, adjusting his briefcase and finally sleeping while sitting on his hands. There was something weird about his sleep, as I finally put my book away, it was as if he was awake, staring forward, or meditating. Maybe he was one of those over achievers, soaking up every moment with purpose and focus.

As the bus pulled up through Port Authority, he awoke with an arched back, rubbing his eyes, expressing a limberness of a child and not a middle aged man. It was as if he was ready to go kayaking or rock climbing.

When he was fully awake, he grabbed both hand grips mounted on each chair on either side and pulled himself up in one swing like a muscle man from 1950's Atlantic City, and dashed off the bus.

I started my long walk to work thinking about the moment and thinking about New York. The thing I have become most unaccustomed too is being so close to people and not being involved. I am not sure I can sit on a bus and sleep next to anyone anymore because I don't want to be in total control of my mind and body during that time. I did fall asleep on the bus both Monday and Thursday, but completely aware that some stranger was sleeping not very far from me. I don't want to be seen nor see anyone else doing what I think to be pretty innocent. There is something indecent about it, just like when passing by people with tongues down each other's throats (well, that is not exactly innocent) or smelling a meatloaf sandwich being devoured by a fellow subway rider. Sleeping side by side as I snore, or burp, or fart should be reserved for my significant other. I wonder, is the mundane body for everyone?

I also feel like a voyeur when I notice people so closely, especially during sleep. It seems so impossible to sleep next to someone and not share something . . . even if it is for 45 minutes . . . on your way to work . . . right after daylight savings time . . . noticing the sunrise for the first time in a month of Sundays.

Love Jones for Henry Rollins

2006-10-28T08:52:00.000-05:00

I am going to write a love letter to Henry Rollins. His torso, his music, his politics and his gorgeous face pretty much sum up what I am looking for in a man. I do believe that he is still single, and we can get married in New Jersey so maybe we stand a chance. He has a show on IFC (The Independent Film Channel) that I ran across channel surfing late last night. I watched in amazement as it brought back memories of walking through New Brunswick reading the Aquarian newspaper every week.

It is a rainy day, I can afford to dream a little.

I have been so slow to write anything as of late. I can't really start any long post because I have started back up the slow road of making a living and dealing with the man, which saddens me in a sense. I miss Bohemia and all its delusions.

For the first time yesterday I thought about abandoning working in the university for the shear fact that working with 20-somethings is far less stressful than teaching them. There is always that feeling that I have to put on airs and act like an authority. At my little mini-job I meet a lot of interesting 20-somethings that make me remember how open 20-somethings can be. One guy is from Coney Island, another young lady is from South Carolina and has been in NYC for only 4 months, then there is a really cute guy who speaks about 4 languages. We spoke a couple of words of Portuguese yesterday.

I have been doing some non-blog writing, and that has changed my energy and perspective. It is not a bad one, it is just that I am receiving more responses from my creative stuff, and feedback for me is everything. It helps me feel like a writer and I kind of need that since my current living situation and work don't give me that directly.

Well, I have to work a bit tomorrow. There is a big event coming up with a celebrity I won't mention. She has a new book coming out and we have to prepare for the signing. I am sure her books are where they need to be (I am back in inventory management for now), but we will just receive more calls. I missed the Michelen event. It would have been nice to see the intellectual snobbery of chefs. I like acts of intellectual snobbery, and if you add the sensory element of French cooking, then baby you can cut the cord, I 'm birthed.

PS
I have a craving for File Gumbo, and I would like to try and make Turtle Soup. I will make File Gumbo for Kwanza for sure, and maybe for my father's birthday in late November, and maybe before then if I get my hands on 40 to 50 bucks. Turtles for soup can be obtained in Chinatown, alive. How do you kill them, does anyone know?

Madonna and Child

2006-10-27T09:17:00.000-05:00

OK,

I am sorry. I have been beat up after the last couple of days of work. Waking up at 4:30 am to commute to NYC has has been a bit taxing. Especially since I seem to get up early so I can do my father's work first, then catch the 6:00 am bus to do my own job. Commuting back was hell today, it took 2 hours and 15 minutes due to traffic. I hate commuting. I hate sleeping next to someone I don't know. I sleep hard and I snore, it must be terrible for the other person.

It is very, very weird. But maybe this is something we Americans don't mind seeing. After all people have moved all the way to Pennsylvania to have affordable housing and a yard for their children.

Anyway.

Today, let's have a moment to ponder Madonna and child. I have only one thing to say: "I am afraid that the trial concerning this "illegal" adoption may have more to do with the patriarchal and patronizing views of some humanitarian organizations towards Africa as much as with anything else."

I am not saying that Madonna is right or wrong, but why is it so hard to adopt in some African countries? And, as heart breaking as this is, what is the exact benefit of living in Malawi for 18 months? Ultimately it is to establish residency, and I am sure that it is part and parcel of any naturalization law.

The Malawian government has broken its own law . . . I see that, but I am not so sure about how this situation is going to turn out, or who is right and who is wrong. Is this law really functional, and what is its exact function? Is it cultural? China pumps out children for adoption like Willie Wonka bars.

So be it . . .

The only other aspect to this that I find problematic is the African American community's response concerning adopted black children as accessories. OK, I hear the argument. But how many of us African-Americans understand abject poverty? And, why does our race solidarity kick in during spats of racial objectification/alignment and not economic inequality here at home and abroad?

No more soap box now. Gone to watch the movie The Island.

Lost in the Motion

2006-10-26T03:44:00.000-05:00

I had two emergencies in the last 24 hours that have left me in NJ. I missed Ayana's thing. I am sorry, Ayana but I am pretty beat up. But without revealing all but over looking nothing, let's give some numerical points.

1. One of my emergencies was diabetic related, so as far as the Michael J. Fox/Rush Limbald controversy I just want to say how could Rush every know what a chronic disease means for people's everyday lives and especially in this system. There is something really wrong about what he said and it puts a focus on how people belittle and emasculate those with physical health problems. It is not really about being politically correct, it is far more vicious and our competitive out dated social Darwinist views on life are feeding it.

2. Tuesday, first full day of work at nondescript, but very posh place on a posh street . . .well, all but the thing about the elevator not working, so I had to help empty a UPS truck with about 600 items on it. Some not too light. But it was nice. Great view of New York from the back of a stationary truck, never seen it before.

3. When the Michelen guides arrived we received one whole pallet for a special event that happened yesterday. The trucker jumped out, and then this older lady from maybe the Philippines of Korea jumped out too. Maybe his wife? It was interesting. She wore a blue jean jacket, a blue jean skirt and she sucked on a lime green glow in the dark orb that could have been some Everlast brand of electric candy for all I knew. I thought nasty thoughts, and I think she knew I thought nasty thoughts.

4. I have a myspace page with a picture on it. I look like an actor. Funny. And the my picture doesn't go with the backdop, but I think that is just me anyway. I am far different than I seem.

Me Friend

2006-10-21T17:00:00.000-05:00

This is Ayana Soyini, I am working on her marketing materials and helping to promote her stuff in the Nashville, Washington D.C. and New Haven arenas. She is having her listening party at Negril in the Village on Wednesday from 7pm til 11pm. There is no cover charge.

Ayana's eclectic groove pulls from several different genres which places her in the realm of DJ, performing artist and talented produce.

Come get you some if you can.

A Boiler Maker and 3 Shots of Whiskey

2006-10-20T01:59:00.000-05:00

I will have to blog again later today. It is 3:00 am and I have just gotten back from the city. The meeting I had went well, there are somethings I might finally get published, plus an interview with a filmmaker that I want to do for an art journal. So that is good.

I talked to Lenny before the meeting for a couple of hours. We had coffee (I had one coffee with a shot of espresso before that) and shared a dessert at a cafe on 36th street between 5th and 6th avenues. Lenny is working with Elite and some other agencies. He is going to try and pull me in on any deals that he gets, and I am going to do the same. He is a photographer. I am a writer. So there has to be something we can do together. Lenny gave his rants on American society and politics and talked about himself for a while; then, he proclaimed that the places where I want to work are not his style because people talk to much about themselves.

That is Lenny. He isn't selfish though, he is just hyper aware and extremely independent and anti-establishment.

After that I was off to the East Village. It was very interesting. I just talked about the end of a the punk world. The East Village is the end of a certain world. So few people stay there for long, it is a place fore people with itchy feet, but I know some die hards. Interestingly enough my mentor at NYU is down there.

Today after the shots of whiskey and the meeting I realised that Harlem is not where my support has come (lived), it has always been downtown. I just have not embraced it before. Harlem is different. I also realized that 10 years ago my life looked a lot like the two young women that were in the gallery. One was doing the artsy thing after getting fired from her job, the other was doing the graduate school thing. It is funny how we all end up on the other side, looking back in on what we used to be.

Old giants can become as small and redundant as a slinky after half a score.
----------------------
I got more comments on the Foley-Priest thing. I will look into them later. But I must say I was just waiting for relationships between men and boys to take a more stark and explicit flight in description. I can do without the lewdness, and thank heavens we have been spared that. I have to see what the pundits will say, maybe tomorrow.

Three Blind Mice

2006-10-19T07:16:00.000-05:00

First, my blind item.

What infamous congressman released the name of the priest that molested him to the proper authorities, though the name of that priest is not being televised. And what is the subtext of this conversation? Is it, "I am gay because I was molested as a child otherwise I would be normal."? Or is it, "I am going through treatment for my alcoholism and irreversible homosexuality because I was molested."? Or is it, "I am gay because I like dick."?

Who is to say what anyone is or is not. I am not really into that labeling stuff and I think it brings up a lot of fascist behavior on both the radical liberal side and the fanatical right. It is like splitting hairs after while. I mean how many dicks do you have to suck to be a gay male? Is it like the one drop rule. That can be taken literally when it comes to mouth and penis. But seriously, I find Foley's motives and timing concerning not only his identity as a dick lover interesting, but how it fits (or conflicts) with his identity as a Republican. We are all being forced to ask ourselves just what is a Republican?

Second, North Korea.
What can Condoleeza Rice & Peas (I love me some Paul Mooney)really do about this situation. I hope she can do something and win the Nobel Prize next year cause Kim Jong-il seems to be ready to flip out regardless. No one wants any of this, but what can one really do?

Third, my weekend.

I heard that there is a threat of dirty bomb activity at different stadiums around the country this Sunday. And, this warning came from CNN not a viral e-mail, or my cousin in Anniston, AL. But, don't worry, we are not suppose to worry about this one.

I can't believe we are having conversations like these.

A Line in the Sand

2006-10-18T07:44:00.000-05:00

I am going to take a break from the blog today to simply clean out some stuff upstairs. I got up this morning and did a walk around the block. It was before dawn. I bumped into a jogger and a couple of cars.

Last night I ran up on this BET interview with Patti Labelle where she received roses from Phyllis Hyman. It seems like ancient history somehow. There is something spiritually resonant about that moment too. I spent the night looking at her videos and searching for bits on LaBelle. I do miss Phyllis and this clip makes me feel like there is something epic about the best song birds.

Weltanschaltungen

2006-10-17T19:57:00.000-05:00

There is not much to report here. I was busy trying to read Groove, Bang and Jump Around by Steve Cannon, but I am having trouble getting through it. I read it about 7 years ago, but I am in a totally different space. I will hopefully meet with him on this Thursday, just to chill out for a bit. I am getting a bit antsy here in New Jersey. My stepmother just confessed to me that she doesn't like fiction. My father doesn't read it either. The irony of my life.

I finally got a survival job. I will keep it at that. I will have cash to get some stuff done in NYC. I still look at NYC as being a great place to sale my wares (writing) and not much else. It is too expensive to actually live there unless I look at the Bronx, but something is about swing in terms of living and real estate. The stock market is going up because people are rushing to put all of their money in the market since real estate is diving. So, again, we have empty numbers. It is sad, but in true "don't hate the player hate the game" fashion it is time to manipulate the situation.

I have been listening to everything from Skunk Anansie, Pattie Labelle (I have been listening to several versions of "You are my Friend" on YouTube), and Daft Punk for the last 3 days. I am in meditative heaven.

I have been trying to read all this deep stuff like Saussure, Foucault, Husserl and Levi-Strauss. It will take all winter.

And I will do some nude modeling at Sylvia's studio. We have been talking about it for a while, and I am going to do some painting with her (she is the master, I am the little grasshopper). I want to work in charcoal, we will have to talk. But that is still a bit off. We both have a lot on our plates family wise.

Dying New York Rebirth

2006-10-17T01:16:00.000-05:00

CBGB is gone. I read an article in the New York Times describing the last concert with Patti Smith. I have been lamenting it hard because I have noticed this big whole in my artistic and spiritual world due to a lack of connectedness and information about the whole punk music movement, and all that Andy Warhol stuff I mentioned earlier. So for me it felt like a double loss of sorts.

I went to CBGB once with a friend of mine from Vibe back in 1994 or 1995. We were interns together at the notrious magazine. D-Man had graduated from a college in Boston, and lived in the area. He followed the whole music scene, had his own band in the East Village and cried when Frank Zappa died. I did not really feel any of it at the time, I was still in black university jubilee choir mode from my early twenties. I did not have a sense of exploration, or rather it was in a different direction, more like Brazilian Bossa Nova and Musica Popular Brasil. For my day job, I was courting hip-hop hard, but little did I know, there wasn't really anything underneath . . . at least after a certain point (Snoop Dog's inauguration into the game on the first cover of Vibe comes to mind, that was when the horror started to descend).

I never got a chance to see what was underneath Patti Smith and the punk world. I only saw her one time in person on the street with her long bone straight salt and pepper hair, chiseled jawline, and walking with a speed that was astonishing. A young girl was trailing behind her like a gothic red riding hood in a plain cotton spun button down dress and non-descript jacket. With an agility of mind and body, the little girl stayed alert to everything that Pattie did, like a baby dolphin or killer whale tucked underneath her mother's flipper. And, in a flash, I was descending the staircase to the subway below, and Patti Smith marched north, up The Avenue of the Americas. It was such a dark night. The streets were crowded. I would have missed her if she was not glowing.

They say punk music has not died, and it has not, it just experienced a little death.

Breaking Bread Together, Or The Last Days of Flava Flav

2006-10-15T22:53:00.001-05:00

I was invited by Keith + Mendi to the Schomburg in Harlem but could not make it. I believe Mendi was reading. I have to conserve my cash, movement is only for job interviews or meetings that will lead to some freelance work. So, I stayed in today. I have been feeling funny, not too good.

My father made red beans and rice -- New Orleans style (or maybe I should just say our family recipe). It was delicious. He showed me a bit of how to make them today. He just lifted the lid and I saw the beans and smoked hocks bubbling. He has great pots, I am jealous of some of the cookware. I grew up in a family where eating is very important -- like, to a point, people judge your character by how well you can cook -- well, almost.

So today, Flava Flav won out over uptown high culture and ancestral continuity in Harlem (sorry, I missed you J). In the end I watched the Flava of Love 2 marathon. I was interrupted by life as usual. I typed a memo for my father. I have become his on call typist for a little extra money, today I did my work for a pack of Gillette Fusion razor refills. So, I missed the first episode where one chick shitted on the floor and got into a fight. That is one crazy chick. How can you just shit on a floor? Then I fell a sleep during the very last part of the episode where the porn queen was outed! That episode was a bit too drawn out and I woke up early yesterday morning. I needed to catch up. Then I kind of roamed around the house during the episodes I saw. Did stuff like taking my medicine, eating dinner (I had too much of the rice and beans), talked to my ex-girlfriend in the Bronx, a good friend from Nashville (let's call her Nashville Mamma), caught a bit of the Duke rape case coverage on 60 minutes (I didn't see all of it so I won't comment, but what I did see was riveting and very telling about Southern politics and the shift in demographics and political tools used by the black community), blah, blah, blah. In the mist of all that life, running around me, I missed the third-to-the-last-episode which I had never seen.

By 9:00 pm I endured New York's mother's visit to get to the anti-climactic finale at 10pm. Flav picked Deelishis in the end because New York was acting too much like her crazy mother during the final date. So, her face was cracked twice. Check VH1 for the details.

I talked to Nashville Momma, these were her observations.

1. Flava Flav looks like a burnt iguana over an open spit with olive oil spread all over his body.
2. Flava has a big dick.
3. Some people are so ugly they are beautiful (I still have a crush on Tricky that no one understands, and another friend has a secret crush on Shabba Ranks).
4. Flav loves New York.
5. Some cast members are actors (maybe most).
6. The show is degrading to Black people, since for most peopletelevision is all they see of the wider world regardless of race, money, or neighborhood.

I empathized with New York to a certain extent in some weird cosmic way. I have waited for a person. But I am a man, so I just eat the shit and keep pushing, maybe that person doesn't even know.

But as for Flav's choices, I think just about all the chicks had these unbelievable bodies, especially Bootz and Buckeey. My repressed heterosexual self, who I will name Sam, wants a threesome with those two.

On the homosexual side of the stream Michael J. Sandy was taken off life support on Friday October 13th, after being hit by oncoming traffic while fighting off and fleeing from his assailants. Keith Boykin and Blabbendo have posted blogs about the crime. Moving back to the NYC area is piquing my perceptions of danger, and it sometimes seems as if parts of Brooklyn/Queens are disjointed bones of a Southern county locked into the 5 borroughs. There are random attacks and lynchings there. It makes you wonder about education, people's contact with the outside world, and how people will face the re-working of New York by outside forces.

Michael J. Sandy was black and bi/gay(?).
Brighton Beach.
Howard Beach.
Crown Heights.
"1989 the number another summer (get down)/Sound of the funky drummer"
Public Enemy.
Me, 17-years-old, riding shot gun in August of 1989 from DC to New Jersey in my stepmother's Maverick. We hear the song "Fear of a Black Planet" on the radio. We hear about a boy getting killed. This was exactly 1/2 my life ago. I wonder what star I am living under? I am going to track it and navigate by it, cause this is no coincidence. Nothing is a coincidence.

A Herculean Day, Several Petty Hours Of It, A Synopsis Of A Non-Event

2006-10-14T06:19:00.000-05:00

5:59 am (on a Saturday!)
-- I woke up this morning thinking. The German Musicologist said I think too much. He is probably right.

-- I thought about how many academics I know live with their parents. I suspect a high number. My favorite professor at Hampton lived with her mom. I remember a lady in gender studies at my first conference in Africa said that most people do not understand what this profession takes when referring to borrowing money from her mother to get to Africa. The head of the program I taught in in Germany in 2004 and the visiting professor both lived at home. The visiting American professor was old and retiring. He was just newly married for the first time and had a mint of money. Hmmmmmm?

-- Made coffee. Turned on the computer.

Damn! I thought again.
I just thought this computer is making me fatter.

7:28 am
-- Finished organizing my 'favorites list' which includes research on possible interview guests, journals, university sites, photos, freelancer's union website for NYC, contact lists and the Bloodhound Gang.

-- Watched Pattie LaBelle on YouTube and saved 99 Red Balloons in German and English in a new play list called Deutsche Popstars (along with Die Arzte, Rammstein has their own list). I guess I am turning into a German fairy. Nein! Du kanst nicht meinen Schokoschwanz haben!, as my friend DMJ used to say.

9:43 am
-- Working through applications at Austere University, Goliath State University (it is the size of a small city), and Simon LeGre of the Right Pedigree University in the mid-south. Just finished 2 online applications at Austere University for administration. The one I finished weeks ago is under review, I am pretty happy about that. After Austere, I will look at Goliath State. I never thought that being sick would have knocked me out of the game for so long.

11:49 am
There is an invader. It sounds like one of my stepmother's girlfriends dropping something off. I am a bit nervous about who it is since I am in my pajama bottoms. I walk up the stairs to find a copy of the Watchtower on the table.

3:16.
-- Just laid down after talking to my family. My father walked in during lunch from Puerto Rico with briefcase and suitcase in hand. My stepmother had made sandwiches for her and Bonnie and was fatigued from her walk without the cane. It was the first bit of exercise since double hip replacement surgery. The talk was about my diabetes, insurance cost and student loans which are really effecting the quality of my life. My father was in the dark about a lot of things concerning both my physical and financial condition, and has generally been out of touch for a long time. He does not want to admit that. Life is suppose to be a stroll in the park for me because his life has been a real struggle.

When I told him I was getting fat from being so close to home, he said that it was aristocratic and very middle class to complain about such things.

Stop. Reverse. Rewind. Edit.

When I was 17 my father yelled and screamed for at least 27 minutes straight on US-1, north bound, between Franklin Park and East Brunswick -- Tower Center. The subject was how capitalism is the greatest system in the world, and that communism and socialism are utter failures.

I had declared that I was a socialist just two nanoseconds before he started to scream at me like some old black coachman pissed that his page has screwed up massa's pants legs with mud.

Now, probably 17 years to the day since that conversation, my father is using words like aristocratic and middle class like he never raised us to be little John Henry old school black power/race pride spitting blue blooded hell hounds thrashing through the halls and throats of pampered Anglo-Saxon bastions of intellect and culture. It was not his mission for the collective economic liberation of all coloureds to happen through these efforts, but for the singular economic liberation of the most talented, so there are more black folks in the club and at the party. Elitism. This ensures that other Blacks that can compete, will compete, and win! Maybe he is softening after seeing the world a bit more since 1989.

In the background my 11-year-old sister, who is a cross between Moesha and Molly Ringwald, is flipping through channels, and blasting us with MTV2 until she finally settles on the musical Rent. I like the part where the black girl sings about three hundred thousand . . . something . . . something . . . something . . . "minutes". Then, after that, I usually change the channel. But not today, cause Mollyesha is going through a binge of consumerism and suburban girl tantrums. The volume kept going up and down between Nellie's grills and a Broadway libretto. Today she mentioned Manolo Blahnicks at the lunch table (I stopped breathing). I hope she learns some coping skills (a down home and around the way form of theory) to accompany her choice in shoes. I gotta talk to my father.

7:10 pm
-- Seeing that I only had 4 hours sleep and I am stressed over my life in every aspect, I caught up on the other4 hours sleep. Woke up to hear the UN sanctions debate. The North Koreans were talking about wiping out entire cities. What the fuck? The tripped out part of it is that it did sound like fighting words, cause in effect, they said that if anyone else increases the embargo that has been placed on North Korea by the United States' "gansta" (and yes, he said it just that way, I wish I had TIVO) acts of persuasion it will be seen as a declaration of war. Now, let's get hood for a second and think. The talking heads say that it is impossible for N. Korea to harm us with a missile, but this is the same group of people that said that Iraqis would welcome us with open arms. I don't care how big that test nuke was, I am a bit nervous. We have a track record of underestimating foreign coloured folk here in America, but they have brains just like us, and it seems to be that they work just as good as anybody else's.

Great. Now the pundits will really be talking tomorrow morning during the political talk shows, followed by the Flavor of Love 2 marathon, followed by the finale. I have only seen 2 episodes of this skank ass form of Americana and I love it.

But, to swing back a minute, what are these blue boys and red heads going to really do about this tiny bomb making nemesis, anti-matter flinging, maniac. He could blow some shit up, and them red and blue boys would just talk, while the rest of us have to live our lives. This is bogus.

But I digress . . .

We are having Chinese food tonight (I wish someone would take out that MSG reheating death trap of a Schzuan buffet I went to that gave me food poisoning 3 years ago). I am going to miss a friend's birthday party, but it is OK, I have something else that I need to do anyway concerning my trip to Austere University next week. Plus, I have one unfinished application for Goliath University to do. It is the most challenging job of them all.

12:16 am

-- I wonder how long I will sleep tonight. I just am a bit tired. I have watched the Pagan Poetry video a million times (an all time favorite) and several others by Bjork. Very nice. Tomorrow a trip to Harlem, possibly. It seems my whole life is being reconstructed there by some divine design, like a most high spirit sent my stuff their in advance. Or it could be that Harlem attracts people like honey. Or it couple be that we all have to confront our monsters again in order to see how small they really were. I had a few of those monsters there, and they seem the size of teddy bears now.

1849 Syndrome and the 2006 Nobel Prize for Literature

2006-10-12T23:59:00.000-05:00

1849
There is a correlation between being ahistorical and our current spate of continual hysterics. They both cause and magnify a failure to self-reflect. If we were to self-reflect then maybe we could discuss problems of wealth, access to fresh food and our sexual being out loud and without shame. This is just a thought because I have noticed a couple of things about myself and my surroundings of late. OK, I am back to pontificating today. . .

Violence is the other thing that is off the chain; as well as the quiet desperation of the poor and those on the fast track to becoming impoverished. Just yesterday I saw a mass of people riot in Orange, New Jersey trying to get their hands on housing vouchers. And I have also heard a couple of media whores talking about the number of public servants from Congress who are jumping ship to become lobbyist. Their reasoning was that many of these former aides, advisers, lawyers and speech writers wanted to put their kids through college. Can anybody really blame them? It means that their pay is not allowing them to push their children through the same system that placed them in their current class positioning.

To the manor born.

But all this rambling and running is making our society into the greatest saloon of them all. Everyone is out for themselves. We all sit and wait to hear where gold has been found next, so we can start the dishwasher, wash a load of clothes and figure out how to get the money. Hell, I know I am.
----------------------------
Orhan Pamuk

Orhan Pamuk has received the Nobel Prize for Literature. I have not read any of his works but I used to hang out with these Turkish photographers. We used to party and chain smoke some wickedly European cigarettes and drink until we fell down (those were some great days and nights). And during one of these discussions I talked to a cat about Pamuk. I had read about him in one of the brainy rags I followed like a teenage girl. I believe it was the New York Review of Books. I also used to see him on television in Europe now and then. I am sure this will bring some great discussions in the German papers. I will have to start reading Die Zeit to hear more.

Scared of Dry Land

2006-10-12T13:27:00.000-05:00

Last night was pretty cool. I did some drawings, which I have not done in forever and a day. I think all this "questioning" from friends who are writers, painters, and media artists about me being an artist (or returning to it) is clearing some things out of my head. Ms. Portugal could see much clearer than Das Experiment, that is for certain. I just never imagined that the world could be so unforgiving to creative types, especially by those who are scientist, engineers and accounts. But this burst of creative energy from friends and colleagues has taken a good toll. Kind of a knife that is cutting through all this other pandemonium that seems to be increasing each passing day in my inner world and the one outside.

I drew this picture among a couple of others last night. I might start back working with pastels. It helps me stress wise more than anything else. I think I am going to call this drawing "Le Bois". I made two La Sirens. One I called "La Siren Dimanche" and the other "La Siren Samedi". I think they are going to end up being a prototype to something larger -- when I have time.

Man Bukkake

2006-10-11T15:07:00.000-05:00

Today was another normal day. Last bits of the Washington project are coming together for delivery. The revamping of this blog makes me feel like it is moving more smoothly. It is starting to rain now so it is very quiet. They are talking about freezing weather this weekend

So, in order not to loose my mind over Iraqi death statistics, Foleygate and El Nino I do what most Americans must be prone to doing with increased working hours and mortgages that are approaching the stratosphere, I watched VH-1. Video Hits One is so vapid in its programing, and flavorful in its celebrity (celebreality) message that one cannot resist becoming a convert for a spell or two. First there was Vern and Da Brat; then, Omarosa, Janice, Jose and Pepper. Then I took a break. A long break.

Today I caught All Access Hollywood Anorexia or something like that, and an episode of Flavor of Love 2, which makes all the middle class black folk in my mostly white and East Indian community cringe with some indescribable fear. It is as if the minstrel show is riding every Sunday night, crucifying any and all aspirations to assimilate. What can you do? We watch it anyway.

The thing I liked about the anorexia special was the fact that I learned a new word -- Manorexia. It is such a perfect word. It is so much more clinical and precise than metrosexual, defying all those that wish to make it a fashion statement or trend because it is actually a physical condition. Carson Daly, Daniel Day-Lewis and Orlando Bloom all suffer from its clutches, though they admit that Bloom is not really a victim, he just dropped the weight from his crusader movie Kingdom of Heaven, which was not that bad. I liked the Leper King Baldwin IV, something sexy about a mask and a British accent -- always.

Anyway, I am simply a maniac over manorexia. There is something terribly American about it like "issues", "Bennifer" and "bling factor". Sadly, up to one million men may suffer from the disease in this country. But I just can't resist the etymological charm of this portmanteau.

It reminds me of an article I read in one of my favorite magazines Butt. There was an interview with Mark Simpson, the writer who coined the word "metrosexual". In the Q & A he talks about his term originially describing the phenomena of men becoming things to be desired, not its tranformed meaning concerning men's vanity as a target for cosmetic companies. So, in this light, the manorexia condition plays into our inner Ponce de Leon quest for an ingestible (regurgitable in this case) form of Adonis like blitz. And, if that Spanish explorer was running through Florida looking for the Fountain of Youth in1513, what makes us think that this condition of masculine vanity is arising from this particular moment in the rise of the metropole?

Diving Deeper

2006-10-11T05:22:00.000-05:00

I made some cosmetic changes and expanded my links. Easy enough. I have one more picture to try and get into the box above and then I will be cooking with gas.

It took long enough to do all that I have already done.

PS
Added Andrew Sullivan to my lists of links because he made the observation that it is impossible for the religious right and the pro-gay-rights-Republican-gays to be in the same party. Reminds me of basic physics. Two things cannot occupy the same space at the same time. Though there is probably a theory I have missed from the past 60 years that may say otherwise. Something about bisexuals and two-spirited folk. I am very sure of that.

A Stranger Rings Twice -- A Disjointed Love Letter

2006-10-10T15:55:00.000-05:00

OK. It is Das Experiment again. Not sure what I am suppose to do. He called while I was trying to fill out a xxx application that I could not bring myself to do. Not that I am above the xxx, but this job is 2 buses and 2 hours away. It is already going to be a cold weekend and something tells me it will be even colder this coming up winter. The other thing about this stupid job is that Xxxxx Xxxx Xxxx is where I worked before xxxxx xxxx xx Xxxx Xxxxxx and in a way it was a great experience and in others it was not.

Anyway, Das Experiment called to tell me he was going to go to New Zealand as soon as he got his money straight for the degree. He is going to get a MBA, he just finished his PhD about 2 years ago. This need for constant education is a whole different story.

I guess the thing that bothers me is that I am in the middle of trying to get some interviews, find some Christmas work, contemplating a move to Augusta, Georgia, eyeing what is going on in the Black Academic world (X xxxxxx xx xxx xxxx xx xx xxxxx xxx my heart, xxxxx xx xxxxxxxxx xxxxx, xx xxxx xxxx xxx xxx xxxx xxxx xx, but my mother told me not to say anthing if it ain't nice), and filling out applications. I don't have time to deal with Das Experiment and his world. He asked me once to go to New Zealand with him, but what am I going to do in New Zealand? He asked if I wanted to go to Morocco with him and his son if I come during Christmas. I am will be lucky to get money to cross the pond, how am I going to be able to get to North Africa?

I am rambling, I know. As a female friend once told another female friend after some really questionable grossed out sex with a guy who had a pierced penis -- "This is my life, Xxxxxxxx."

Last night I started to think of a poem about Das Experiment. It is about sleeping alone, looking over into the other spot and not seeing that person there, but you feel their presence. From one lover X xxxx xxxx xxx xxxxxxx, and from another I never got my xxxx xxxxxxxx in terms of longevity. Now, I am xxxxxxx sombody else and we are doing it well.

Talking to him it felt like I was talking to someone else. He wanted to know what was going on in my life. I couldn't bring myself to tell him the whole thing, everything. It is not really about the job it is about all the things in terms of family -- xx xxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxx xx xxxxx, X xxxx x xxx, xx xxxxxx xx x xxxxxxxx xxxxx -- and introspection that we all refuse to put forward to those that are not thought of the best intimates. Das Experiment was my best mate. I guess I just did not feel like telling him what is really going on. He is really far away and is moving farther. I am here in the muck of the life after us.

Oi! In such beer indulged hyper-masculine hiking and swimming romances who turns out to be the bitch. Is it me because I am writing this letter or him for calling?

He said he would call tomorrow.

I told him sure.

I might be in a better mood.

X

Distractions from the Holy Rollers

2006-10-10T13:11:00.000-05:00

I guess I am a bit done with the television news. I mean what does this North Korea thing mean in the end? I am not talking about the lava shits that many in the diplomatic community get when a “third world” country gets the bomb. I am not even talking about a militarized Japan, which I personally am all for becomes times have changed; and, they should never have been demilitarized to the point of almost being castrated with China and her many reincarnations spinning to the North. Not that China will attack Japan, but China does effect so much that goes on around her who knows what their influence may bring. When I question what this all means, I am not talking about non-aggression treaties and pacts or the current “do nothings” and oval office eggheads. I am talking about this collective hysteria. The pundits are saying that the sky is falling. It is not like we can invade, and any humanitarian mission is going to dwarf what we are doing in Iraq and what we have failed to do in Dafur. We don’t even know how bad it is. Are we really ready? Has it ever been really a problem we could solve realistically? Alone?

So, with that and Foleygate I started to read Little Joe Superstar, The Films of Joe Dallesandro by Michael Ferguson. Not a bad read at all. I want to explore it a bit more because there are some very interesting encounters with black people in the telling of Joe Dallesandro’s life. Granted I have not seen one of his films, only the iconography of his photographic history. And in the end, I have not really thought much of Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground. It simply was not a reference for me; I have never understood anything about it. From Nashville, Tennessee, we looked for our information about the world in New York boroughs and DC go-gO. And when I got to Hampton, that was re-enforced, probably in ways that were not too positive for its cloistered views of art and sexuality, but not its Brownstonepolitik and innovative uses for Philly Blunts.

Lately, I have been thinking more about Andy Warhol’s Factory and its effect on the New York art scene because I know that I did not know what New York City really was when I arrived in 1993. I was one of the first sets of interns to work at Vibe, and when I was there I was surrounded by a whole group of kids from the East Coast, and Seven Sisters schools. All of them thought of the Beats as ancient and Frank Zappa as god. And there I was at a hip hop magazine surrounded by these confident somewhat privileged fresh from college former Bostonians or Vassar sojourns and I could not tell you one Grateful Dead song (I thought they were some venomous devil worshipping band) nor did I think Lou Reed anything special. Talking Heads and Blonde were additives to UTFO and Roxanne Shante. White folk in a hip-hop magazine soon proved to be less odd as contributors to the glam. I soon was to wonder how to get the oh so Hilton Als of it, to be more New Yorker than New York Magazine, more club kid than house, more innovative anthropologist of Negro norms than grassroots. Soon, my true self would betray me and the lesson of what you imitate must be eventually learned became my capital life lesson of the 90’s. Till this day I look at Andre Tally and think what a flux, what a beautiful project, what a New Yorker. The sin is that I have not read anything by him.

Anyway, I have come to the realization that I missed something vital by not becoming fluent in signs and parole of 14th street to Houston, 6th Avenue to Thompson Square Park. As a friend of mine used to say in Harlem psycho-faggot speech, “That’s the piece that's missing.” Because I did not know anything about that world I was unable to communicate with the members of the intelligentsia that were talking and writing about rock and rap music. I don’t think that it helped or hindered things concerning my career, I believed that the people at Vibe were a little of their rockers. Time and assassinations would unfortunately prove that to me and other writers. I just could have understood my surroundings better and a certain tradition that I did not understand when I first came in. I could have been enriched by it a bit more if I was not so segregated in my thoughts concerning race and what was useful (and little did I know, the nefarious term “useful” was soon to be transformed into canonical catatonic mantras of theoretical truth and consequences for those that could utter it and the heretics that didn’t bend it like Homi Babba at NYU).

Fresh from a HBCU, my college experience was devoid of such mentioning. Warhol was a heretic. A white gay man that looked like death warmed over was one thing, the fact that he was not connected to the Great Debates nor was he seen as advancing black folk was another. Were there any black folk in his gaze? I am sure there was one or two in an early movie. I am sure that there is a black ass poking out of some Polaroid, expose and glistening against a burnt orange back drop bright like a gum drop or Diana Ross in Central Park. I am sure that Grace Jones and Andy got along well. But the truth of the matter is that my kind of black folk at that time dismissed Diana since she killed Flo (well before the umpteenth white man she dated caused Ebony to shiver) and Grace was OVAH regardless of that little frigidity mop head monster that seemed to prance his kind of ugly like a goddess. In the mist of all this gazing at the image I missed the point somehow.

I walk down the East Village now and mourn its demise. I remember when it was a scary place, and I remember when I and my friends hung out there. We could afford to live there if we were willing to eat peanut butter and crackers. Now we can’t even afford that. I have an old mentor that is there, but she seems to be sadder and harder. Part of it is the profession of writing, working and teaching. The other part of it is the world that she sees around her in her rent controlled Manol Bonik riot. She commented once that during the last blackout there was not one broken window, just yuppies sitting on steps with light candles and sipping wine. It broke her heart, and maybe as a child of the city who has matured into a lioness of esteemed and delicate intellectual certainties this broken city is sliding away block by block is turning her into stone. In my mind she is becoming the angel Bethesda meandering on where to bury the oracle in St. Mark’s.

All that said I want to save my observations concerning black folk and Joe Dallesandro (D’Alessandro). He was poor and grew up a foster child until he was re-united with his father at the age of 14, but his descriptions of black folk is an interesting study. This hidden world is nondescript in his confessions. Black folk seem flat and almost like adornments. Kind of like “And the black girls sing/ Doooh-Doo-Doo—Doo-Doo—Doo-Doo-Dooh” Or however it goes. <BR>“This Hidden World”, it sounds like a song to me. Something torchlight and Dinah Washington.

This is to be continued.

Multi-Tasking Sunday

2006-10-08T14:15:00.000-05:00

Not much time to blog.

This morning I watched a bit of talk Sunday. I think the Mark Foley legal thing is about to blow over soon, it can go on but for so long because he did not do anything wrong that we know of yet. It is all just talk on message services and cell phones. And jacking off on the the other end of your telephone or broadband brings up certain legal issues that I hope I (and about 70-something million other web surfers)will never have to face in public.

No one goes to jail for foreplay. Especially self inflicted foreplay.

So, that is that for Mark Foley. He will be in Siberia for a while.

On the flipside . . .Gays, pedophiles, sexual predators, and Republicans . . . that is a whole different conversation.

This is karmic payback for the Republican Party's symbolic gay bashing of the gay marriage issue with a faux George Washington wig, rogue and powder. Plus!, they pissed on the Log Cabin Republicans by not excepting their money or formally inviting them to the ball. We got a tongues untied situation concerning what Republicans desire against the backdrop of the policy they uphold. It is uncertain whether the conservative powers believe in the theology and morality of their populace; but, it is for certain, many may not practice these beliefs in bed.

This conversation will mutate more concerning closeted behavior; there are whispers concerning the other shoe dropping in the congressional halls on the page issue. I wonder if any are democrats.

Had dinner with Mendi and Keith 2 nights ago. It was really nice. Saw R and his "ex" A. We had a great time. Talked about graduate school versus writing, America versus Germany and all the variations of those two questions.

I am going to make the transition to NYC pretty soon, or maybe just closer to that area. There are a lot of artist around and I am finding that I am gaining greater support from those communities than from my immediate family. Not that family is bad, but I think that you can guess the situation. Accountants, Biologists, Engineers, white suburbs, sidewalks, mall rats and me. Which one does not belong?

OK. I am doing research for pitch letters, reading Keith Boykin's interviews with the cast of Noah's Arc (among other articles) and doing more applications.

Ciao for now.

PS
What if this pushes the ultra-conservatives to forming a 3rd party? They very well could do that. Then we will be off to coalition based politics where several parties try to gain the majority by getting in bed with their neighbors. Could be positive in that people could show alligence to their "politcs" and not rely on a party to express them. I would start the Universal Health Care Coverage Party and then Sleep with the Gays and the Greens.

Brave New World

2006-10-06T02:31:00.000-05:00

OK.

I have looked at all of my backed up postings and just decided to post everything as is. I have been away for a while because of life. In the meantime I have watched a bit of UFC (interupted by sister's German assignment, she actually came into the room and began to talk to me in German . . . she is doing very well), saw Project Runway (I know what the controversy is all about, will wait to see it unfold), and saw the season finale to Noah's Arc (predictable, and I can learn a bit from this bitch Noah about dumping boyfriends, he seems to do it like changing underwear . . . but isn't that gay life? Well, sort of? I feel like Noah is caught between the real gay world and something completely unreal. All the other character's have a life that is more varied than Noah's. More on that later. The ending was so predictable that I started to feel like there was not much hope for it at all.)

So, I might go to Princeton tomorrow for an event, and I might not. I have an assignment that is due at the end of tomorrow and I just don't know. It is late (3:00 am) and I am going to sleep for a little while longer than usual. I am pretty sure.

Missing You - John Waite

Signing out to Missing you by John Waite. I have been in serious eighties music mode for weeks.