Category Archives: Americans

the art of storytelling part 1.

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Confession: I love Auditorium.

Here’s the thing: I’m not really a hip-hop head. I don’t have a vast encyclopedia of knowledge of beats, rhymes and tracks of everything produce over the past 30 years. I know certain songs from memory because the beat was so sick it moved me, or the lyricism was so ill I couldn’t possibly ignore it. So I know some rhymes that are part of the basic lexicon of hip hop (Paid In Full, Rappers Delight, The Message, The Show, Children’s Story) as well as some recent classics from MCs like Black Thought, Eminem, Jay-Z, Biggie… I like what I like and I listen to it religiously.

For instance, I understood the importance of learning every single word to Lose Yourself and Lost Ones.  And I was so far from being a teenager but when the shit’s hot, you got act like you know, right?  But I’m really a girl from the Midwest and we love beats.  I like to believe this is a universal known about our creed. If the beat isn’t dope, I’m not really paying attention to it. Seduce my ear with a pulsing bass line that I can feel in my chest, and you got me. Lyricism is icing on the fucking cake. On the real, why I’ve listened to Mos Def’s Auditorium from his album, The Ecstactic, an embarrassing number of times simply stem from nostalgia for brilliant lyricism juxtaposed against melodic tones and break beats.

I geeked out about this with a couple of friends after brunch a while ago (What up Mara and Elon?) Have you heard Slick Rick’s (aka The Ruler) rhyme on this track (2:35)? Seriously, check it: Continue reading →

phoning it in.

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Ta-Nehisi Coates touches on something that I’ve been stuck on too with respect to the ‘freeze’ and POTUS most recent comment about his presidency:

Andrew also notes that it’s largely a symbolic measure, but has faith that Obama will eventually move to the hard choices around defense and entitlement. I don’t know. I think the way Obama has evidently decided to fold on health-care leaves me with little faith that he’ll actually do the hard work.

It is, potentially, like this with all presidents. And I heard his point the other day about being happy with serving as a great one-termer. But I’m struggling to understand what he deeply, truly believes in. What he believes must be done right now. What he’d fall on his sword for. Again, maybe it’s this way with all presidents, and maybe my larger beef is with electoral politics. I’ll sort it out over the next few weeks.

I feel a lot of ambivalence too. On one hand, I really hope that the freeze is a strategic boondoggle, symbolic as Andrew Sullivan says, to weather the midterm election season. Yet, I know that this ‘strategy’ won’t necessarily yield any substantive results in deflating the Right’s objections to the Democratic Party’s governance.  A freeze on discretionary spending won’t silence POTUS most vehement objectors. I’m not sure if anything will. If this is in fact a fake pass, that will allow POTUS to effectively quarterback the real work of governance -creating policies that support job creation and restore some balance to our economy– by canceling out aspirations for a second term, we’d be lucky.  It’s a leap of faith in taking that tact.

I’m not sure what Obama’s doing right now.  Junot Diaz wrote a piece for the New Yorker last week bemoaning the loss of story in Obama’s rhetoric as he moved from Candidate to President.  And although there’s some validity to that in terms of connecting the message of candidate and man capturing the imagination of the electorate (election platforms are aspirational), governance is an entirely different beast. I don’t need Obama to tell me a story to tuck me in at night. I need him to reform the banking system. There’s nothing inspirational about debating the merits of Glass-Steagall. I need for him to reform the banking system so my friends who run small businesses can secure loans to build and grow and hire people (ahem, job creation). I need for him to push for diplomacy that will inevitably lead to our military withdrawal out of Afghanistan and Iraq, which would reduce defense spending. There isn’t a pretty story for that. I need him to put a foot up the ass of the leadership of the Democratic Party to pass. the. damn. bill. already. Jeez.

This question about the state of our democracy, the state of our union, is invading my dreams. A couple of nights ago, I dreamed I had 8 missed calls from David Plouffe? And the only meaning I can derive from that is that these guys need our help.

lost in translation.

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Warning: This is an extremely meta post.

In response to a recent NYT article in which I was quoted, a very clever reader I assume, googled me, found my Facebook profile and proceeded to send me the following message:

Speak for yourself. Asian and Indian men are raised pretty much by doctors and engineers, and doctors and engineers only. They get married relatively young, don’t cheat, don’t even look at other women, do more household chores than anyone and everyone, and expect their women to be equal (if not greater) partners who achieve at a similarly high level.

There are a lot of things problematic about this statement. One, I AM speaking for myself. Two, that generalization is sort of racist.

I feel like I grabbed the third rail of some conflict I’m not sure how to define. The Pew Report is interesting, however, as a culture, our response to its findings is fascinating. And not in a good way. At all. Some people are downright Catty McBitchy.

Others are misogynistic:

This is a disastrous trend. Can anyone name one society in history that has been dominated by women and which has prospered and survived. I can’t.

Others are comedians:

Big buff dude, who is for some reason shirtless in a library (who may also be carrying an axe in order to appear lumberjack manly): Hey babe, are you done with the microfiche?
Syreeta (turning slowly, flicking her hair, pushing her glasses down to the tip of her nose): Why yes, yes I am? Say, you wouldn’t happen to have a passport handy now would you?

Others just think I’m bitter:

‘I read the article in the Times that you were quoted in and looked you up online. Were You quoted correctly? “With men of any ethnic group, it’s a little intimidating for them to encounter smart women.”
Really? All men? All ethnic groups? The stereotypes that you generate are worse than the stereotypes than men generate about women, but you went to Sarah Lawrence, so I know that you are a bitter, angry, unbalanced and unpleasant young lady who will spend most of her life contriving ugly things to do and say about men (how’s that for a stereotype?)’

Um, WOW.  And regardless of whether or not I was quoted correctly, or because I went to one school over another and that says how I feel about everything is also a bit ridiculous. I also love the internet for encouraging some seriously bold assaults from people who wouldn’t dare say any of this to my face. Many of whom are women. Seriously. I’ve had more women assault me with vapid commentary about what they *think* I meant rather than engage me seriously about the conversation. People were angry, cynical, bitchy, frustrated, bitter or assumed that I and my lot are. *kanye shrug*

Continue reading →

remaining awake through a great revolution.

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The first words of a Martin Luther King speech I learned is from a speech he gave the night before he was murdered. My father knew this speech from memory. And on one cloudy Saturday afternoon in January 1982, he wrote it down and made me sit with him to memorize it.

There’s always a story that comes with a gesture like that. This is my father’s: he was 14 years old in 1968 and lived in Memphis. He had joined the sanitation workers march earlier in the week. He heard MLK give this speech at the Mason Temple in Memphis.  The rest… is history. I can assure you at 7 I didn’t fully understand the weight of these words. I knew they were important. I knew my father’s story in relation to those words were important. My father tried to teach me MLK’s intonation and inflection in his turn of phrase. In my little person voice, he wanted to evoke as much as possible the language and moment. So some weeks later, LP recordings of Martin Luther King’s speeches surfaced. I remembering listening to The Drum Major Instinct often.

I haven’t thought about those lazy Saturday afternoons in years. Or even the essays and speeches I wrote from elementary to high school for the Milwaukee Public School’s annual MLK Speech and Essay contests (yeah, just when you think it couldn’t get any nerdier in my past, booyah). But today, I’ve read some great posts from other writers about the other words he said beyond I Have A Dream that you can read here, here and here.  I’d also point out that the arc of the I Have A Dream speech in our sanitized canonization of King ignores the a key detail about  the March on Washington. The 1963 March was called the March on Washington for JOBS and FREEDOM. That was not a mistake.  A. Philip Randolf, a prominent union leader, was also a keynote speaker that day as well (something I also learned from recorded LPs of great black men in history courtesy of dear old dad) and according to some stories I’ve heard, was a better speech than King’s.  Yet, in King’s speech, he also clearly made an argument that not only addressed racial inequality, but also quality of life for workers. Civil Rights and unions have long history in mobilization and action.  A fine detail one discovers in college seminars or in documentaries.

I got the title of this post from a lesser known King speech given in the weeks before his death. It still carries a profound resonance today:

We are not coming to engage in any histrionic gesture. We are not coming to tear up Washington. We are coming to demand that the government address itself to the problem of poverty. We read one day, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” But if a man doesn’t have a job or an income, he has neither life nor liberty nor the possibility for the pursuit of happiness. He merely exists.

We are coming to ask America to be true to the huge promissory note that it signed years ago. And we are coming to engage in dramatic nonviolent action, to call attention to the gulf between promise and fulfillment; to make the invisible visible.

All of this is a longer way of saying, if you haven’t read his other speeches, please do. The social justice agenda is a common thread in all of his writings and speeches and worked  in concert with his philosophy regarding racial inequality and human rights. The call to action and the deep understanding that change takes great effort and perseverance.

Algophobia

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flickr image. by 68esc

Fat girls named Precious. I think it begins there for me.

In the 2nd grade, I was terrorized by a fat girl named Precious. She wore pink berets and ribbons in her hair. She was her mother’s first born. She was her mother’s only child. They lived across the street. My mom insisted that we play together because she was in want of new friends. Precious went to my elementary school.

Precious was a bully.

I didn’t know how to fight back yet.

I got transferred to a different school. Precious moved away. I don’t know what’s become of her. I’m not sure if I care. She was a bitch; a precocious, insufferable, spoiled bitch that had everything. I had government cheese.

So I may be the last black person on the planet that will go see Precious at the theaters. Continue reading →

Zombie

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I can’t seem to get away from them either.

The Daily Beast recently unpacked what appears to be a trending topic in our cultural lexicon.

So what is it about zombies? Arguably, they are the perfect interchangeable metaphor for everything from Nazis, to consumerism, to the loss of individuality, to the collapse of civilization, to the impending doom of swine flu, and most recently representing mindless bankers, stumbling around and feeding on whatever fetid bad debt they can, however unsavory it later turns out to be.

Unlike other more glamorous monsters that always come across as a little too cool and a little too chiselled, the zombie is the reassuringly accessible underdog—often vulnerable, powerless and alone, but also blissfully unaware. Theirs is a condition that is far closer to that of the human being than we would like to admit, and it is perhaps for this reason that zombies will always have resonance in times of social and economic upheaval: We start losing our jobs and homes, and before long we’re all completely lost, left to shamble around mindlessly until someone takes pity on us and shoots us in the head.

So this isn’t just coincidence. Insolvent banks are commonly known as zombie banks. And with good reason; practically every Friday, a new bank failure failures. One of them was a beast. I’ve come to expect announcements of bank failures around 4:30 PM -7:00 PM every Friday with a bit of disaffection. I don’t know if that’s good or not. But with the threat of something so familiar in ‘normal’ life as a un-dead flesh eating beast, there isn’t any room for nostalgia. Continue reading →

remember, remember the 5th of november

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Allison Kilkenny takes a deeper look.

A quest for accountability really was the root of Fawkes’s plot. Admittedly, he picked the crudest, most violent means to express his disdain for the governing principles of the royals. However, a suppressed people who feel they lack representation in their government usually lash out in “uncivilized” ways. Human beings can only be beaten, mistreated, and marginalized for so long before they snap.

[snip]

The oligarchy is misbehaving once again. Corrupt, overfed, and cruel to their constituents – who are poorer, sicker, and angrier than ever — the residents of the Houses of Power should not raise their brows in surprise when a flaming effigy floats by them. It’s just a sign that the people finally recognize the true villains of history — and it’s not some dead dude who wore a funny hat.

Despite the awesome casting choice of Hugo Weaving as “V” in V for Vendetta, the film overall was… meh. However, watching and reading the news of our times now, the film still resonates. The fact that I value fake news over the establishment, a flu pandemic, the backlash and undeniably repressive stance our fellow Americans take against same sex couples, the fact that we’re debating the legalities of torture and fail to hold ourselves accountable to our own rule of law. Jeez, am I stealing plot lines from a Hollywood blockbuster or am I talking our lives now? Even today, the “Right” and its fringe are convening a rally bemoaning the ‘loss’ of American values and whining about persecution because of the specter of universal health care reform or in its most weakest incarnation, the public option.

This speech in the beginning of the film totes the line between fiction and reality.

Crazy right? Personally, I’m interested in topics and solutions in our national conversation that lead toward a sustainable future. I’m not a mother yet, but I’m an aunt and godmother to some. Somehow, during this time of great difficulty, more of us will have to rise to the occasion and make the ‘right’ choice: to affirm life.

Remember, we’re the ones we’ve been waiting for.

once in a lifetime…

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I’m posting this as yet another ‘stub’.

Indulge me a little bit here. Talking Head’s dance interlude aside, the sentiment and lyrics of this track strikes hyperreal nerves. This track is twenty years old and still struggles with all of our middle class, bourgeois aspirations. Compounded with my Mad Men obsession and simultaneous crash course in Feminist history (I’m currently reading Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique) and the uber-timely post on Huffington Post about modern woman’s happiness (or lack thereof) there seems to be an issue worth looking at closely.

Over the last couple of years, I’ve been deeply engaged in conversations with friends, or just people of my generation about the pursuit of happiness. We’re still parsing out our answers. However, the key question for my generation at present, prior to our economic woes, has been, is this it? All the hard work, staying in school, brand name education, mountains of student loan debt, inevitable marriages and mortgages, the job… and we still find that we still trying to find our bliss. I’ve had too many conversations these past two years where people from my generation still feel that something is missing once we achieved some measure of success in our careers, or in owning a home or condo, or marriage or baby. There is this lingering longing that kinda hangs in the ether, some gnawing sensation that says that the individual desires something more that brings them closer to wholeness.

Friedan referred to it in the context of mid 20th century housewives as ‘the problem with no name.’ I’d even posit that ‘the problem with no name’ in early 21st century America cuts across gender, class and ethnicity. I think the problem with no name lives is present in the lives Generation X and the millenials as we try to determine our economic and cultural future going forward.

Same as it ever was? More later.