Category Archives: Culture

crossing brooklyn ferry… a PUP story.

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There’s no reason for you to know this, but Crossing Brooklyn Ferry is one of my favorite poems. It found me at a time of great sorrow (I’ll save that tale for another time) but it left me with such a gift.

At Fulton Landing on the Brooklyn side of the East River Coast, you’ll find Whitman’s words stenciled on the guardrail:

FLOOD-TIDE below me! I watch you face to face;

Clouds of the west! sun there half an hour high! I see you also face to face.

Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes! how curious you are to me!

On the ferry-boats, the hundreds and hundreds that cross, returning home, are more curious to me than you suppose;

And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence, are more to me, and more in my meditations, than you might suppose

I hear these words every time I cross the Manhattan Bridge from Brooklyn to the City. Long gone are those days of ferryboats shuttling people between boroughs. Yet Whitman’s clairvoyance and eloquence, his hymn to New York City, to America, more than a century later, haunts and comforts. Perhaps in this instance, we can consider Whitman the patron saint of Poets in Unexpected Places (PUP). Poets Samantha Thornhill, Jon Sands, and Adam Falkner are the triumvirate behind this ars experimental endeavor. A few weekends ago, they gathered at the feet of the Gandhi statue in Union Square, corralled a few of their poet friends and took poetry to the streets– err, the trains. It’s something that many of us in the scene had talked and talked of doing one day, many years ago. Leaving the comfort of our sleepy or vibrant open mics, bars and ‘sanctioned’ places for sharing art, to engage audiences elsewhere. The world doesn’t always know how much she needs poetry sometimes unless she hears it.

Continue reading →

“Develop a negative into a positive picture…”

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On the other side of paradise, a conservative blogger (Debbie Schlussel) goes after our nearest and dearest, Urban Word:

Um, how can they use the word “scholar” and “hip-hop” in the same sentence with a straight face? Ditto for pedagogy. With hip-hop, it’s more like pedophilogy.

Institute participants will learn proven, hands-on techniques that will help them to develop lesson plans and strengthen their course study, as well as create a platform from which they will understand the scope of hip-hop history, culture and politics, Cirelli said. The learning component is supported with night programming by lecturers and performers who will synthesize the day sessions with effective strategies and cutting-edge multicultural educational approaches.

“Hip-hop history”? Is that like memorizing the day that Russell Simmons and Rev. Run bought their first pair of laceless Adidas? Or is it the date the first naked butt was shaken in front of the camera in a rap video? Or maybe it’s the first day Ice T smoked his first crack pipe with a stripper. Forget reading, writing, and ‘rithmetic.  Perhaps it’s the day Professor Griff of Public Enemy uttered his first “Dirty Jew” reference.   It’s very important to America’s future that kids in school learn the important facts of hip-hop.

Math problem:  If 50 Cent has 9 bullets in his body, but gets two removed while all but two of his 30 tattoos are lasered off so he can star in movies, how many women did he infect with herpes divided by how many used condoms need to be recycled to keep things green?

Ugh.  I’m not posting the link because I can’t subscribe to steering more traffic to her site. Besides her unbelievably flawed, ignorant and racist assumptions about Urban Word’s poetry and hip hop education model,  it’s unfortunately not a surprise. It’s blog baiting, again from the mouth of a Coulter wannabee. I feel like I’m repeating myself a lot about the symmetry of uncertain times, however, I feel compelled to note that uncertain social, political, economic times often breeds lazy commentary looking for scapegoats (see Thomas Chatteron Williams.) Hip Hop and a black president are excellent fodders for noting the decline of ‘real american values’, no? And for the past 20 years, hip hop has definitely been a prime target. Music generally. If it’s not Jay-Z, it’s Marilyn. Forget individual choices. Marilyn and Jay-Z have nothing to do with the person who chooses to pull the trigger to harm classmates or neighbors. Continue reading →

“What difference do it make if the thing you scared of is real or not?”

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A school district in Indiana has decided to ban Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon.

Students at Franklin Central High School had to return an award-winning but controversial novel halfway through reading it Wednesday after complaints surfaced about its appropriateness.

District administrators say Toni Morrison’s “Song of Solomon” is being reviewed after it was pulled from two classrooms, and a decision on it is expected by Monday. A Franklin Township School Board member has vowed to keep it out of students’ hands.

“I was about as appalled as I’ve ever been in my life,” said board member Scott Veerkamp. “I wouldn’t want to expose my children to that garbage.”

Veerkamp said he and fellow board member Randall Bland received complaints about the book. Veerkamp then asked district administrators to pull it, which triggered a formal review.

“I couldn’t even sleep last night when I read some of the excerpts,” he said, adding that descriptive sex scenes, profanity, demeaning language and suicide were some of the material he found offensive.

Ok, that last part might be a bit of hyperbole. And this isn’t the first time that the Pulitzer Prize winning author had been subject to the scrutiny of school board members. In 2009, Song of Solomon was removed from the curriculum of a Maryland school district but later restored by a narrow school board vote.

The subject of banning books from schools and libraries often stirs alarm in me. And certainly, it’s valid for parents to question the content of some works of art in terms of ‘appropriateness’ for children. However, I have to wonder a little about this district and how ‘insular’ they are. Continue reading →

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 →

the black tea partier…

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At last year’s Tax Day Rally in New Dorp, Staten Island, I did in fact, meet ONE black Tea Party supporter. I’m not sure if he’s still kickin’ it with them today. He was a curious oddity to me. I don’t remember his name, but I do remember that he was a Cuban immigrant, naturalized American. And after a year of vitriol and obfuscation, I wonder if he is still aligned with this movement. A movement that at its heart invalidates his right to claim America as his home.

UPDATE:
So I got this comment on my rather benign commentary:

This man integrated, joined America – as proven by his being a Tea Partier – and no other Tea Party supporter would gainsay his status as a right and proper American.

Get over your racism and your hatred of all things White and all things truly American and maybe, just maybe, you’ll earn the same privilege.

I won’t hold my breath though.

I can accept critique, but if this commenter were a regular reader of this blog, he’d recognize that my supposed hatred of ‘all things White’ is unfounded. I mean, seriously, who blogs about Procul Harum, Foo Fighters, and Bartleby, the Scrivener??? I don’t even need to unpack all the things wrong with that premise. Perhaps I do? I don’t know. Continue reading →

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 →

there’s a party at the crossroads…

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A few months back this earworm invaded my mental mind and prompted me to post it as a stub. Today, it’s my writing prompt as I re-read Pygmalion and think about the code/switch.

For the uninitiated, here is a sampling of X-Clan’s tome to the complexity of black identity in the black and white imagination:

Let me tell you about blackness,
Grits and cornbread how can you act this?
I exist on a plane, where the jar is my brain, I’m livin’ to retrieve
cells,
Antenae my stick, picture bigger, made of liquor, figure,
The pull of the trigger goes zoom not boom,
Not a bunch of sissies, but saviors braver,
The red, black, and green,
It’s just so much more than red, black, and green,
You ask what I mean, but yet the sundial shades on lights and dreams,
Watch too late, oops, upside your head!
You drop through abyss like lead,
Where you goin’, what’s your speed, what’s your pleasure, what’s your
need,
Trees to branches, roots to seeds, forwards, backwards many
degrees,
Questions answers, what’s the sum?
We have come.

Continue reading →

Quote of the…

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Day? Maybe of the week. A friend passed along a recent interview with The Wire creator, David Simon.

It’s one thing to recognize capitalism for the powerful economic tool it is and to acknowledge that, for better or for worse, we’re stuck with it and, hey, thank God we have it. There’s not a lot else that can produce mass wealth with the dexterity that capitalism can. But to mistake it for a social framework is an incredible intellectual corruption and it’s one that the West has accepted as a given since 1980—since Reagan. Human beings—in this country in particular—are worth less and less. When capitalism triumphs unequivocally, labor is diminished. It’s a zero-sum game. People paid a much higher tax rate when Eisenhower was president, a much higher tax rate for the benefit of society, and all of us had more of a sense that we were included….I guess what I’m saying is that the overall theme was: We’ve given ourselves over to the Olympian god that is capitalism and now we’re reaping the whirlwind. This is the America that unencumbered capitalism has built. It’s the America that we deserve because we let it happen. We don’t deserve anything better. The Wire was trying to take the scales from people’s eyes and say, “This is what you’ve built. Take a look at it.” It’s an accurate portrayal of the problems inherent in American cities. Continue reading →

‘post-racial’ hubris.

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Someone sent me a link to yet another piece of writing admonishing Tiger Woods and its inevitable knee jerk comparison to liberal disappointment with Obama.

Le grand sigh. I think my greatest complaint stems from the following paragraph:

Both men are of mixed race. Yet the majority of the country, including black Americans, sees them as black. That’s not a bad thing. Except when such men of intelligence and talent, men who have such influence and power, can’t help but succumb to the age old twins of greed and power. Although each has risen from ordinary beginnings to be at the top of their field but now things don’t look so good for either of them. Woods income is as tied to endorsements as it is to his talent. And Obama is so caught up in party donations and the power that those who donate have, he can’t allow himself or his party to do anything to thwart those donations. If Woods had been smart he would have kept his head down, played golf and taken care of his beautiful family instead of publicly destroying them. If Obama had enacted campaign reform as the first order of business real change could well have happened. But money and fame go to the head and any other result seems to be a fairy tale, a dream, an impossibility. Somehow money corrupts the moral compass, whether for one’s self or one’s party.

Let’s be clear: Woods is an athlete, not a world leader. And believe me, I’m no shill for Obama, but his job is a little different from an athlete who’s amazing, innate talent earned him the right to be a cog in corporate beast. The author’s presumption lumps Woods and Obama into some black monolith. Dowd did the same thing with Desiree Rogers and Woods in a vapid column last week.

Post racial America seems to lack discernment. And anyone who’s paying attention to the struggle for health care reform knows that the blame is shared, mired in the intrigues among insurance/pharmaceutical corporations, lobbyists, AND Members of Congress.

Health care reform is not the same as the Green.

UPDATE:

Actually, language and logic is what really bristles. ‘If Woods had been smart he would have kept his head down, played golf…’ The sentence seems innocuous except that in our complicated racial history, a white person suggesting that a black person self-identified or otherwise, should ‘keep their head down’ is a flash point to language from the segregation era. It’s just bad diction here. Certainly, the immediate turnoff when we compare marital transgressions to perceived failings in leadership to pass legislation begins with, ‘Both men are of mixed race…’ Yikes. And? So? I don’t presume that this author is racist, but the language and logic speak to a problem some of us are sensitive to when engaging white liberals. A blissful unawareness of the racist attitudes embedded in the language. It’s like that time when Joe Biden said Obama was ‘clean and articulate’ and the New York Times wrote an op-ed to explain to everyone why that’s a non-starter with Black America.

Bartleby.

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I read Bartleby, the Scrivener in the eleventh grade. It was required reading for IB English I at my high school.

For the uninitiated, Bartleby was a scrivener, a writer, if you will, who worked for a real estate lawyer. Our modern tongues would define his position as ‘administrative assistant’, or ‘paralegal.’ And while the narrator of the story itself suggests that Bartleby offered no indication of any emotion to his circumstance, I’d submit that underneath the veil of ambivalence, Bartleby hated his job. Bartleby was bored out of his mind. Bartleby only offers a very controlled and passive response to all the directives issued by the boss, ‘I prefer not to.’ We watch this détente between boss and employee unfold over a period of time, and the slow degeneration of Bartleby, the office relocates and Bartleby, the everyman working in the offices of a boom economy, condemned to banal tasks of recording mortgages, deeds for would-be moguls, all the while passively resisting any work that demanded more of his mental mind.  The story concludes with the discovery that Bartleby lived in the old offices and died bereft.

Yeah. Continue reading →