Saturday, December 28, 2013

Women of a Certain Art: Simi Linton & INVITATION TO DANCE - Trailer 2013

   Long ago in a shining city far away I made an opera with Bill T. Jones and Leroy Jenkins.  While doing that I met two of the artists who danced in the piece,  Edisa Weeks and Homer Avila.  We became friends.  Then years later Homer Avila introduced me to his friend, disability activist, scholar, dancer and memoirist, Simi Linton.  Then Simi and I became friends.  We used to see a fair amount of each other.  In Central Park and Koreatown.  Then she started making a movie.  And I moved here.  Our 3D relationship is now 2D.  But whatcha gonna do?  Above is the trailer for Simi and Christian von Tippelskirch's work.

Check out the blog, Invitation to Dance, and look for the film to premiere in 2014.

Sunday, December 1, 2013

I Shot A Man In Tucson

Well, not really.  But one of these days someone will walk up to me while I'm buying coffee for my milk and confess to me that they did that very thing just to watch him die ....  This has been going on since I was prepubescent:  strangers seek me out and tell me things.  You'd think after 19 years in New York where averting one's gaze is the penultimate survival strategy that it would stop.  But, it didn't and it hasn't.  And to this day people come to me having decided I have or am the answer to their question or I'm the one they want to tell It to and they proceed to tell me.  So, I am in the supermarket the day after Thanksgiving.  It seems crazy to be shopping after having spent 2 days cramming the refrigerator with all manner of great American foods -- turkeys, brussels sprouts, peas, mashed potatoes the size of salt domes, yams, pies and pies and more pies.  And here I am with a-tisket a-tasket and little purple basket picking up milk (which, frankly, I don't like) and half 'n half (which I'd sell my firstborn to have).  And this lady and I cross paths in front of a display of toilet paper and she says to me out of the blue, "I ain't nevah gonna get that stuff again it take a whole roll to wipe your butt."  And then she marched off to find frozen green beans, I guess.

My eyes don't even widen anymore.

And how was your Thanksgiving?  Mine?  I let go a bit.  Didn't polish the silver (hee hee).  Didn't make any noises about cooking.  (I made some stuffing a la hockey puck last year.)  Just cleaned house, set the table, made runs to the train station and politely consumed my usual measure of "My mother wasn't...." "My sister isn't... " My wife doesn't...." that is my gruel for being the starting point of a Hasse diagram called My Family.  I've survived what has been a debilitating 2 weeks as I nearly threw in the towel and quit studying math, met with a dying friend who is finished fighting, medicated myself through a head cold so I could take Exam IV, and waited for the check to clear.  Things are the same but better now.  I go on.

What keeps me going?  Music from Mozart to Gregory Porter to Shostakovich to Drake.  Friends near and far.  They carry my history; they are my memory.  Children being their beautiful delicious selves.  Art and the need to create.  Waking up in each morning to start again.  Being in the presence of those who are deeply religious (not pious, but religious) and spiritual.  And love.  In all things love.
 

Friday, November 22, 2013

With Friends Like These Who Needs Enemies?

In a fit a sodden pique, I stomped my foot to alarm the skunk who was probably fighting with one of those 15 lb. feral cats who visit my yard.  I made the skunk who lives behind and underneath my office both scared and mad.  S/he has registered her/his displeasure by employing the nuclear option.  I am sitting here listening to Drake's "Hold On We're Going Home" as the stench leaks into my office.  It has been that kind of week.

Cuthbert, who has never had any liking for me going back to school, has seized upon my despair of ever getting abstract algebra into my brain to berate me for doing this instead of travelling the world (with him, I suppose) ordering 3rd world people around while the dollar is strong.  And my oldest, in an attempt not to be burdened with a wheelchair-bound drooling misanthropic and senile mother, lectured me on how I should be making sure our property in New York was profitable and chastising me for going back to school instead of being the next Conrad (not Paris) Hilton, because going back to school at your age is a fool's errand because you know, she said, nobody's going to hire you.

What's a mother to do?  I went to the gym.  On a Friday night it is pretty damn empty, and I lifted weights while bopping to Drake, who has now displaced La Beyoncé as the pop artist whose music I am obsessively fixated on.

And, too.  There will be a time when Xtian or Chinese anthropologists will write about the current obsession with Jackie's pink brain-splattered suit as the English and American scions of the elite wrote about the strange and quaint customs and folkways of the Africans, the South American Indians, the Pacific Islanders, the Japanese, the ancient Egyptians, and so on and so forth.  Maybe even hang it in one of their national museums.  Yeah, I was alive in 1963, and I remember vividly where I was and what I was doing when Kennedy was assassinated, but Americans please, give it a rest.

Over and out.







Friday, November 15, 2013

I Want Someone Who Looks Like Me

The first truly competitive New Haven mayoral race in almost 20 years is over.  I have not written much about it deliberately.  A couple of post-election observations:

1.   I've always considered New Haven a very conservative town.  Not just in comparison to NYC, but also I suspect from its cultural DNA -- Yankees, African-American agrarians, relatively new South American immigrants, the traditional white ethnic Catholic settlers.  There's an aspect of "wait your turn" in so much of what happens here and we've just elected a 65 year old mayor (which to me is a more significant factor than her gender or her race -- which I'll get to in a minute).  I will say about her what I say about myself:  at this age much of one's energy is spent overriding resistance to change.  We can learn new things and we can do new things, but our willingness to do so is much less than before.  (An enduring difficulty studying math at my age is an asinine conviction that there's no more room in my brain for new material and enough skill at rationalization to convince myself that it's true.  Some people call that the Devil; I call it self-defeating.)  We have elected someone who will probably be a caretaker Mayor, an incrementalist or gradualist.  I hope there is room in her dynasty for younger, innovation-focused risk takers.

2.  My second point is the oft-repeated remark I hear from other African Americans:  I want someone who looks like me.  That has never set well with me.  Perhaps because before it was fashionable I was raised in what's now called a multicultural environment, a university town with students from all over the world.  But that was in the context of growing up in Iowa that even in the 1970's was 98% white and 2% colored.  Even if I wanted to be with S.W.L.L.M. my mother would have to drive me to Cedar Rapids (where we got our hair done) or Des Moines.  All of that to say, it usually wasn't possible.  Instead, through good experiences and bad, I learned that race or ethnicity has little to do with character.

Now, I'm not so obtuse that I don't understand what my friends and colleagues are saying.  In the pecking order of these United States, African Americans have been brutally short-changed in occupying the higher rungs of the social and occupational ladder.  So much so that symbolic achievements such as a gorgeous brown girl becoming Miss America contain as much value as a brilliant and gifted brown-skinned once-in-a-lifetime politician becoming president of the country.  They get conflated.  And it makes us feel good, salves the wounded collective ego, holds at bay the doubt and shame until the next Young Black Male performs some egregious crime that shocks the nation or a Young Black Woman (who should know better ) comports herself in a way that makes her indistinguishable from a street prostitute.  It is as if we are connected via our umbilical cords and their guilt is our shame; their triumph is our success.

Given that, while Toni Harp being Mayor-Elect of New Haven is laudable, the symbolic significance of her election and of her subsequent tenure can too easily overshadow any clear-eyed assessment of her strengths and weaknesses as a legislator, and soon-to-be chief executive.

When we so readily set the bar at S.W.L.L.M. then we allow ourselves to valorize and excuse all manner of bad behavior including criminality,  (cf.  Marion Barry, Kwame Kilpatrick, William Jefferson, O.J. Simpson, R. Kelly to name a few).  More commonly we excuse mediocrity as if race or gender sufficiently makes up for it, (cf. Jesse Jackson -- father and son).  All I'm saying is that race triumphalism often trumps actual accomplishment and character.  Just because there have been (and will always be) white hacks doesn't mean that I want to be unjustifiably proud of and an uncritical defender of African-American hacks.  Because that says to me that deep down we don't believe we can do or have better than that.

One of the many reasons I've eager to teach is that I know role models are valuable.  (Someone wrote that you can't be what you can't see, which is pithy and memorable, but, eh, not really true.)  I used to do Career Day at my oldest daughter's school.  I would have the children guess my occupation.  Teacher.  Social Worker.  Token booth clerk.  Nurse.  That's what we -- African-American women -- do, right?  It would surprise them when I said artist, writer because I was probably the first professional of that type they'd met and certainly the first African-American one.  So, I get it.  The shock of the new can open up worlds for kids who are isolated by poverty and a homogenous culture.  But this world that these children are entitled to is not made up of people who look like them.  It is made up of people good, bad and everything in between, some of whom look like them, many of whom do not.  And the sooner they learn to learn from, to know, to work with and to negotiate and interact with all the everyones, the better off they'll be.

I fully intend to be a very good math teacher.  But, if someone who doesn't look like me comes along who can do better by my students than I can, that's the teacher those students deserve.  Nothing less.

Get the F#*@(!ck Out of Here You Asshole

And thus that's how my yesterday began.  I was in my office (as I usually am) at 9 in the morning taking my weekly blood pressure reading.  (I kid you not.)  At that time in the morning, day workers are gone, kids have been picked up for school, the block is very quiet.  I glance up to see a skinny hoodie standing in my back yard looking at my bicycle.  I bust out the door sans shoes (which I leave outside) and scream, "Get the F#*@(!ck Out of Here You Asshole!" and in my stocking feet take off after the kid who, mirabile dictu, was long gone before I could get to the end of the driveway.

It is rare that my Inner Tigress comes out.  That has always been so; I can be preturnaturally passive and I know it.  In the last 20 years my aggression has mostly been wasted on take-no-prisoner arguments with Husband No. 1.  (A futile enterprise if ever there was one.)  Anyway, she surged yesterday morning and I hope I made that kid shit his pants a little bit and tell his buddies to stay out of that yard because that old lady will Fuck.  You.  Up.

It wasn't about the bicycle.  I've lost more things from theft and carelessness than many people have owned.  It was the the presumptuousness of coming into my domain without my explicit permission.

I am not in the mood.

Saturday, October 26, 2013

A Tragedy's Second Anniversary Without Press Coverage

Exactly two years and a few days ago there was a shooting in a house 2 doors down from us.

I remember it being fairly early in the evening, schoolkids were still up and the air was cool.  We neighbors came out to see what was going on.  Was it a shot we heard?  A voice yelling?  The police arriving as they do, driving the wrong way on our one-way block?  At first we knew little, but when you see EMT's strolling instead of trotting, you know for whoever it is, it is too late.  Many, many years ago that section of the house was a candy store, when this was part of a close-knit Italian and Jewish neighborhood.  That evening it became a crime scene, a tear in the fabric of a city becoming known more for its young male homicide rate than its universities.

The dead one was a 13 year old boy.   He was shot in the head.  By a friend.  In a house that seemed to be connected like adjoining hotel rooms.  There is not much more that I know as fact:  his killer was 18 years old at the time and ran away, leaving behind the other witness, a young man who lived there.  The killer turned himself in and as could be expected, lied to the police (and probably himself).  The newspapers and TV stations lost interest after all the salaciousness was squeezed out of the story -- the boys' ages, the quiet street, the speculation about where and how a gun wound up in the room, the entreaties for money to bury a child.  After a few days there was only a tiny TV reporter in a cheap pantsuit standing alongside the antennaed van, shivering in the late October sun waiting for someone who wanted to be the center of attention at all costs to come outside so she could make her bones.

I'd written here previously about what happened last October.  Since then the family that was living in the house moved out -- traumatized, a little heartbroken, ashamed.  The original charge of murder was revised to manslaughter, and 2 years to the day that it happened the boy's mother and family and still very young friends gathered outside the house to remember him.  Where else can they go?  It is the one place on the planet that they are certain he was at, because this is where he died.  So, a small group gathered to light candles and tie balloons around a street sign, and not say much at all.  As each person left she thanked them for coming.  Then more kids would arrive to pay their respects, walking that cool night across Legion and Frontage from The Hill.  No cops, no press, no curious neighbors.  Just a woman enduring the longest night of her life, her remaining children and family including a couple of toddlers too young to remember, and a handful of teenagers crying.

Each night someone has been lighting the memorial candles.  And then that will end and the balloons will wither in the cold air.  And then that boy's mother will count the days until she must come back.  I plan to be there with her again.

Saturday Poetry: Noon



I was reading
on the teaching of poetry
and it galvanized me into
being consonant, too.

I believe in the word
and I love it as I do her.
Breaking the morning’s regimen
I stop reading and start writing these poems.

It has to be done:
Commemorate
life’s entropic beauty.

Saturday, October 19, 2013

Saturday Poetry: Where the Title References Itself and Is Longer Than the Verse


Dear Lord,
Have mercy on this poor soul.
I am studying math and
the more I learn the less I know.
Selah.

I feel like one of Beckett's hapless creatures.  Wandering the campus muttering, "You must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on."  Seriously, folks.  This course is Killing Me™.    My weekend Times pile up.  The days shorten and the leaves fall.  I don't return phone calls.  Anniversaries come and go.  I see nothing; I know even less.

I'm getting desperate here, people.  Might start a Kickstarter campaign to pay for a boob job.  (I have my scruples -- maybe I'll just have one done.)  I used to sneer at people who complained about The Hawk in Chicago.  Then I spent an October long ago working there.  As far as I'm concerned, the wind off of Lake Michigan violates human rights.  And there were my parents' friends, the doctoral students, complaining about Statistics.  They have my full sympathy now.

That is all. 

Friday, October 11, 2013

Going To the Motherland This Weekend

No, silly.  I'm not going to Africa (which, ehem, is not a country) but to New York which is why I'm writing today because I will not be sitting in some Wi-Fi'd cafe cracking out words tomorrow.  And I haven't written for a couple of weeks because when one is having one of many Mathematics-Dark-Night-of-the-Soul™ moments, there is nothing to say that doesn't begin and end with:  {Shit.  Shit.  Shit.}  Math joke, so close your eyes:  The aforementioned set is a vector space under the standard operations.

I realize now that acquisition of knowledge is elastic.  Mathematics is vast, worlds-within-worlds and all that, and one of my seminal problems is knowing what to learn and knowing what I should be able to know at this level of training.  Also, many of us who do math got our start as computers and calculators:  We are good at arithmetic, geometry, algebra, trigonometry, and gasp, even calculus.  And we pride ourselves on cranking through numbers and equations and deriving The Answer.  But the skills that got us that far are less important with higher level math.  It is about conceptualization:  One has to think.  To be able to "embrace" realities that one cannot see or physically produce, e.g., R4, a vector space.  And then perform operations on it as if it were in front of you.  That, as you can imagine, can take some doing.

Yesterday's impending exam, with me being 2 quizzes behind and completely mystified, forced me to look at the work differently.  I listened to what the professor deemed important, and it was to know the theorems and lemmas that make the foundation for the study of vector spaces, linear independences, bases, representations of bases, and so on.  If, he seemed to infer, you understand the principles, then you'll see how they need to be applied to the problems.  I followed his lead and approached each problem (those I could solve and those I couldn't) with the question:  what is it that we are suppose to determine?   And also told myself that, hey, whatever I know by Thursday, I know.  I can't speed up this process.

Those 2 things seemed to have opened the door for me.  I finished studying Wednesday evening before 9 pm, and spent the next day doing paperwork, housework, cooking.  Anything but math.  The object was to relax and to hoard my energy to focus on the evening's exam.  I showered, dressed and went to campus 2 hours early.  Ours, unlike Yale's, is not a beautiful campus.  It has some beautiful buildings, but everything else about it is as imaginative as a new suburb.  Nevertheless, I hung out in the Adanti Center, with it's vast windows and simply let my mind wander while watching 19 and 20 year olds and cars go by.  Eating pasta with pesto, chillin'.  As I told Cuthbert this morning the one place I didn't want to spend a lot of time in was the landing a few feet from our classroom where we students wait for the professor to unlock the door.  The tension, the anxiety is palpable.  So, I arrived there a few minutes early, closed my eyes and just meditated.  And I took the exam, using almost every minute he gave us, enjoyed the hell out of it and call myself ready to climb the next mountain.

That's enough of that.  Going to see my friends' work:  Magdalena Goméz's, Dancing In My Cockroach Killers, and Fred Ho's, The Sweet Science Suite.  Hot.  Diggity.  Ciao.

 


Tuesday, October 1, 2013

Obamacare or Nobody Gets Out of This One Alive

Remember this day all you Chicken Littles.

The World As We Know It™ is coming to an end.  At least according to those who think broad-based mandatory health insurance coverage is an awful thing.

Two things I do know:

1.  Nobody, no body stays young and healthy forever.  And I don't care how much echinacea you quaff.
2.  In theory not having insurance seems like an wonderful idea until either you have a major medical calamity or illness.  (cf.  Doctor, Will I Be Able to Play the Thumb Piano Ever Again?)

Like abortion, you can be against it if you want.  And then you find yourself pregnant for all the wrong reasons.

Now back to Give Me Linear Independence or Give me Death!

Saturday, September 28, 2013

Saturday Poetry: This Is Where That Teacher Got Shot

Time?  I don't have any.  So, another poem from Turn Left At the Dead Dog.  It's based on the 1992 murder of a beloved Brooklyn principal, Patrick Daly, who got shot in crossfire in Red Hook.
  

This, she told me
pointing with an acrylic nail
her lucky charms colliding like teenagers in love
is where that teacher died.
Some hoodlums shooting at each other.

You know, sometimes I think I seen them
coming out of the projects
They’re the ones laughing cause they never get caught.
But God knows
God always knows.
Rest that poor man’s soul.

Annie’s wand swipes the humid air
and makes those hoodlums their bullets the projects
and that early autumn day disappear for
that poor man, rushing back to school
with treats to surprise his kids when
the crimson buzz of a lonesome mosquito
bit him like it was personal
and he went down.

Look.
Go away she means.
I wish --
oh I know it’s a sin, a mortal sin --
but, I wish that their mothers had gotten rid of them
the minute their red-headed aunt didn’t come.

Saturday, September 14, 2013

This Will Be Brief ...

... because -- you know -- I've got systems of linear equations to solve.

A snapshot of my life:

1.  This is my month off as a wife.  Cuthbert is visiting the family in Ireland.  This means several things -- I have to cook for myself, I'm the head Home Skooler for Lilli, the house stays, if not immaculate, at least tidy and clean, and I don't have to use my we're-in-the-middle-of-a-firefight voice.

2.  Three times a week I meet Lilli at the bus stop and we snack, read and learn.  She is doing a traffic study.  We go to the grassy knoll and she counts cars at rush hour.  Each expedition she chooses a different color -- first day red, next time gray, and so on.  She records the day, date and time and the number of cars of a certain color that passed by in 5 minutes.  When she is done with fieldwork we'll look at the data and construct a pie chart or a bar graph.

3.  This week the daily temperatures went from the low 90's to the 70's.  I suffer from summer PTSD.  The hotter it gets the more I hate life.

4.  I am cooking.  Easy stuff that I can do.  Today, having been brave and and thawed a packet of pollock.  (What a great title -- A Packet of Pollock, A Gaggle of Geese) I'm all in for cooking.  Even found an easy recipe.  So as not to repeat the fiasco of a September past I will stay in the kitchen and study while the fish broils.  I'm slow, but I do learn.  If it's good I'll ask L&L to come over for dinner.  If not, well those goddamn feral cats that use my backyard as a litter box will get their version of The French Laundry.  Anyway, what do I care?  There's always popcorn.

5.  As Cuthbert predicted, New Haven's mayoral primary was decided along tribal lines.  Tribes of race and class.  Reminds me that this is essentially a very conservative town.  What I wouldn't give to be a NYC voter right now!  Crazy Anthony Weiner?  Bill Blasé-Former-President-of-the-NYC-Board-of-Education-Warmed-Over-Placeholder Thompson?  Bill de Blasio who's got a son who looks like what Michael Jackson should have looked like at 16?  Christine-I-Woulda-Been-A-Better-Fireman Quinn?  What's not to love about that field?!?!?!

So it's study, class, gym, home, cook, clean, iron and sleep.  A quiet life.  Ciao, bella!


Sunday, September 8, 2013

Before I Return to the Salt Mines of Linear Algebra

In my Google quest for who the hell knows what I read a NYTimes article about Norman and Elsa Rush.  (I'd caught the tail end of an NPR interview with him and the hook was that he broke a promise to his wife.)  A good read; an enviable marriage.  I've said it before and I'll say it again, the mantra of all women writers:  I wish I had a wife.

And.  Too.  There's a great thumbnail description of the father-son mystery:
The youthful form that honoring took was a sort of graphomaniacal mirror image of his father’s former ambitions, actions Rush has called “filial-pietistic,” defined as “the carrying out of the perceived life-project of a dominant parent, the replication of it if the project has been successful or the completion of it if it has been thwarted.” Rush began to write “because my father didn’t or wouldn’t.” 
That (and Bill Clinton's inability to control his idiocy) was why George W. Bush was our president.  And because George W. Bush was our president, the US Congress and the public it so richly represents is throwing itself all over the floor about bombing Syria.

Ciao, ya'll. 

Saturday, September 7, 2013

An Urgent Plea to All My Friends



I really hope you get this fast. I could not inform anyone about our trip, because it was impromptu. we had to be in Philippines for the Pope’s visit. The program was successful, but our journey has turned sour. we misplaced our wallet and cell phone on our way back to the hotel we lodge in after we went for sight seeing. The wallet contained all the valuables we had. Now, our passport is in custody of the hotel management pending when we make payment or solve this linear system (whichever come first):

Solve each system using matrix notation. Give each solution set in vector notation:

 x        -y       + z              = 0
            y               +w      = 0
3x      -2y     +3z     +w      = 0
- y               -w      = 0

I am sorry if i am inconveniencing you, but i have only very few people to run to now. All else have peeped my shit before when I got stranded in Nicaragua on my world tour of failed socialistic states.  i will be indeed very grateful if i can get a short term loan from you ($5,000 dollars). this will enable me sort our hotel bills and get my sorry self back home. I will really appreciate whatever you can afford in assisting me with. I promise to refund it in full as soon as soon as I return from. let me know if you can be of any assistance. Please, let me know soonest.

Thank so much.  I anxiously await your wire transfer.

Yours truly,

A Nigerian Princess

Saturday, August 31, 2013

I May Be Wearing White After Labor Day

If only to signal my surrender.

Class started on Thursday.  It is called Algebraic Structures.  I thought it might be a survey course on bridges and buildings built from first-degree equations.  I was wrong.  For the first hour I was following along, my head nodding as the professor's hand danced over the board.  Then he started to do matrices to solve for systems of linear equations and all of a sudden the board was analogous to the meta-joke about telling familiar jokes:  These guys had all been in prison together for a long time and a new inmate arrived.  When it was night and lights out, someone said, "16" and everyone cracked up. Someone else said "23" and people cracked up again. Someone else said "45" and everyone was rolling.  The new guy asked his cellmate what was going on and was told that they'd all been together so long, and knew all the jokes that instead of reciting the whole joke they'd numbered them.  And I'm sitting there going, What the hell?!?!?!?!???  What have I gotten myself into now?

I better check and see if the Sushi and Vegan Pastry Institute of Lower Transylvania will take me as a grad student. 

Saturday Poetry: What Did Thou Do to Thy Master?




Old Dead Tunneler:

Look at thee
A young man, strong and black
A musket tore your back.
Three hundred guilders lost
Did Master rue the cost
of his African
so strong and black?

Old Dead Tunnelers (chorus):

It is true
that thee are with us now
Thy Master’s guilders gone
No doubt he mourns the loss
but killed you nonetheless.
One of his best.
What did thou do, my son
to thy Master?

Old Dead Tunneler:

Look at thee
Rings burned around thy neck
Eyes plucked from thy face
The Pearls of Africa
are missing from thy case.
Thy master stole thou eyes?
No others tell thou that
they still are used
to find your way, to this our home?
Young slave made blind.

Old Dead Tunnelers (chorus):

Thy Master’s guilders gone.
No doubt he mourns the loss
but killed you nonetheless.
One of his best.
What did thou do, my son
to thy Master?

Look at thee
Africans strong and black.
(Look at me
African strong and black.)
Thy Master’s loss our gain
Thy mutilation is their shame.
Three hundred guilders thrown away
is not the measure of
Two warriors in our midst.
Returned to the Mother’s land
because of what thee did
to thy Master.

Fear of a Black (Male) Planet, Part V

Lately I've been thinking a lot about American slavery.  Not quite sure why, perhaps it's where the mind goes when reading or listening to commentary about the 1963 March on Washington.  Perhaps it is, as I alluded to before, being in Myrtle Beach and Pawley's Island in the summer.  The other day a friend related a story about the lives of her forefathers.  She is a Yankee, a tribe that I hadn't encountered with any frequency until I moved here.  Her family has probably been here as long as Europeans settled these lands.  In her youth she read a history of her ancestors' town (located in the lobster's tail of Massachusetts).  It was published shortly after the Civil War (in part to make sense of the newly re-ordered Republic) and she found it remarkable for the book's candor about the North's complicity in chattel slavery.

The history's foreword tells a story about a slave named Pomp who one day walked to the water's edge with a parcel of food, laid the parcel down and then hanged himself facing the sea.  He had brought the food for the journey home and he faced the sea because home was across the vast Atlantic.

Back in the mid 1990's I created The Negros Burial Ground with composer Leroy Jenkins.  It was inspired by the discovery of the African Burial Ground in lower Manhattan.  In order to write the piece I researched 17th through 19th century New York history.  Prior to manumission (in 1829) New York benefitted from not only the sale of slaves, but the owning of slaves in the city and country.  It wasn't like the antebellum South with its plantations.  A farmer may have had 2-3 slaves, an affluent urban householder a few more.   Armed with that knowledge I wrote a libretto that was fueled by my imagining the lives and deaths of enslaved Africans in New York City, and contemporary victims of police violence (Michael Stewart, Eddie Perry, and Eleanor Bumpurs).  They became wanderers in the Land of the Dead struggling to go home.

To make a long story short, a shitstorm ensued.  (I'm here to tell you that the best colon cleanser ever is sheer unmitigated terror.)  Were it not for the courage and vision of The Kitchen's Laureen Amazeen and John Maxwell Hobbs, of my collaborators Leroy Jenkins (now deceased) and the playwright and director Dominic Taylor, this work would never have been seen.  And in its totality it is a beautiful thing.  We were never able to mount a fully staged production.  What we presented at The Kitchen was an oratorio version.  I am grateful for that.

The poem that follows in my next post was the lyric for what became "What Did Thy Do to Thy Master?"  I read it today and can't help but think of Trayvon Martin.  Selah. 

Saturday, August 24, 2013

Saturday Poetry: Annie

from Turn Left at the Dead Dog:

On the train
A woman prettier than pretty
hair a red not found in nature
black stilettos worn for stature
butt made to serve tea.
She gets out from the same door as I
follow her down the steps
through a steel shamrock.

I am curious how easily she walks
and knows where she’s going.
To the token clerk, a lift of her hot ‘n cold cup.
He in his booth like a banished pup.
She turns around.

Come on, she says,
go with me.
You’re a nice girl.
Nowhere else you could be
but at the Shipyard.
Come on.



Friday, August 16, 2013

I'm Still Not Hearting Diane Ravitch, Part III

I am going to keep this short because I've already used up my quotient of profanity for one day.  Came across this about Diane Well-I'll-Be-Goddamned Ravitch.  Like I said when I referenced her before here, here and here, I don't trust apostates.

What's the count now?  Three post-education reform books to tell the world what any person with sense already knew?  When schools like Choate, Dalton, Foote, Hopkins, St. Ann's, Sidwell Friends, Brooklyn Friends (you get my drift) start insisting on standardized tests and the curricula that love them, then I'll be convinced that No Child Left Behind is not the spawn of Satan.  In other words, in matters of education, I'll have whatever the elite is having.  Thankyouverymuch.

Etc.

I knew about the wrinkles and the aches and the pains.  I even was prepared for one's big nose to get bigger.  The sometimes not-so-subtle decline in energy, the been-there-seen-that attitude towards everything.  But the beard and mustache?  The teeth that break while you're eating a hamburger?  Come the fck on!?!?!?!?!

Geez.  Louise.  I'm old enough to expect that every quarterly visit to my internist will be followed with a "Let's run some tests ..." remark sure to send me into an anxious frenzy about tainted blood and exponentially massing tumors.  But waking up in the morning looking like a Snidely Whiplash avatar?  I.  Did.  Not.  Sign.  Up.  For.  This.

 When did I get old?  All of which has made me consider how to best get into the classroom as a math teacher.  Thinking now that I'll work towards certification so that at the pace I'm going (one class at a time) I should be finished by 63 years of age.  (Driving around the other day in the big-ass Nissan Cuthbert bought, slowing down just enough for some 10 year old boys to get out of the street before they became human Mobius strips and one of them says, Hi Grandma!  I'm done.)  I am trying to keep soul and body together enough to be effective.  (This summer's sojourn at the Fitness Center has been a life-saver.  My blood pressure is astoundingly normal.  It's so low that that I take my pulse to make sure I'm alive.)  The semester begins in a couple of weeks and along with the premature September weather (except there's still August light) -- watch, it'll be followed by one hell of an Indian Summer -- and the V-wedge of geese I very much feel that the summer is coming to it's end.

99% of the grand plans I had for the summer remain grand, and undone.  I've been working on the same short story for 3 months.  I'm practically rewriting every sentence (with the ghost of Raymond Carver looking over my shoulder) yet it feels premature and illegitimate.  Like putting lipstick on a pig because I don't think the story is fully baked, but without this kind of cosmetic attention I don't know if I'll stay embedded enough to figure out how to fix it.  I am putting an artificial deadline on getting it done.  I cannot, can't even conceive of doing fiction and doing combat with my next class, Algebraic Structures.  (4 credit hours of begging the professor pull out my fingernails instead, I'm sure.)  Off goes the writer's beanie, on goes the mathematician's beret.  If summer weren't so hot I'd order another month, but 30 additional days would just be the Sword of Damocles over my head 30 days longer.  So, it ends when it ends.  The story and the summer.

There are 2 things that I did accomplish:

1.  Strength-trained myself into better shape.  Now when I raise my arms I don't cause a tsunami in Indonesia, and

2.  made quite a lot of progress on my Front Yard of Eden (notice the pumpkin taking over):





 

Monday, August 5, 2013

If I'd Wanted Heat I Would-A Moved to Myrtle Beach

It is August the 5th and I'm sitting here in my sweatshirt.  Now, this is the kind of summer I'm talkin' about!  I can wear shoes without fainting, and my head has ceased to be one big sinus cavity and now I can think about something else besides pining for last winter's snow apocalypse.  I'll be honest and repetitive -- I detest hot weather.  A few weeks ago I was working out stunned by the amount of sweat pouring down my face.  I knew it wasn't because I'd loaded up more weights; it was simply the ambient atmosphere.  Were I living 150 years ago in Myrtle Beach instead of strength-training scientifically I'd probably be horseshoed over picking cotton.  Or not, because by my age I'd be dead dead dead.  I don't have the imagination (or the stomach) to think what life was like then.  I only have the gratitude for living now in an era where my biggest problem is a slow DSL connection on rainy days.

My father was one of nine siblings.  We went down to celebrate the 80th birthday of the last remaining child of Bessie and George.  Otherwise funerals were our only family reunions.  My parents were from Georgetown, SC (as is probably 1/5 of the African-American population in this town), and I lived there with my beloved maternal grandmother, Mamie, for a minute between bouts of staggering depression.  My memories are punctuated by gaps of four years, the intervals between visits.  That's not enough time to know a place, but it is enough to have disorganized and unsorted images that may or may not make sense.  When I moved there at 19 the experience of Georgetown was different.  I was different -- a difficult, tactiturn college dropout from up north.  A child only a grandmother could love; to the others I was either a curiosity, an object of pity or incontrovertible evidence of the gods' rebuke of my parent's ambitions.

Back then, the early 1970's, the place was real.  The social order of centuries was just barely giving way.  My grandmother and her contemporaries were still alive radiating a quiet pride in what they'd accomplished under apartheid -- beautiful well-kept homes, good livings, children who went to college.  The small downtown was still a real downtown, not the theme park for bored golfers, foodies and boaters it has since become.  Georgetown and its environs stank when the paper mill operated.  It was awful -- an almost hostile amalgamation of farts, cornered skunk and sulphur.  There was a synagogue 2 blocks down the street from home.  (I had walked by that building dozens of times, but only realized what it was the last time I was there for my mother's funeral.  After I'd read some about the history of Jews in the American South only then could I see evidence of their presence.)  And undisguised poverty.

And now, with most of the older generation dead and the strip malling, well, there's very little there there for me.  I don't mind so much; my attachments were the people, not the homes.  But still, it's become harder to distinguish Georgetown from suburban Connecticut.  Dunkin Donuts.  Walmart.  AutoZone.  Starbucks.  Sprint.  And Myrtle Beach?  The arable land, the wealth of the Confederacy turned into golf courses and town houses and Columbia, MD-like new communities sprung whole from the real estate developer's mind.

So I visited my Aunt Johanna, she the last of the Pawley's Island Browns.  And we took Lilli to the Holy Cross Faith Memorial Episcopal Church graveyard where my mother and her kin are buried (and where my mother would not recognize the church building or the congregation that now worships there).  And frolicked in the ocean for a day and shared the beach with the new south.





Saturday, August 3, 2013

Friday, July 19, 2013

Fear of a Black (Male) Planet, Part IV

Remember, I said that I was almost finished.  From one of my favorite blogs, The Phil Dyess-Nugent Experience, There's No Riot Going OnHe's uniformly brilliant in his analyses of American culture, literature and politics.  I don't get there often enough.

And, from a humane perspective, and it dovetails with the work our own West River community is doing, a commentary by Michel Martin, on NPR's Tell Me More an audio essay entitled Is It Time To See Each Other's Tears?

Word.
 

Thursday, July 18, 2013

Fear of a Black (Male) Planet, Part III

I'm almost finished.  One thing that saddens me is that as we've turned into an almost entirely secular culture, the voices speaking about the morality of actions exits, or at least merely whispers in, the public square.  In it's place is legalistic hair-splitting, high school debate tactics deracinated of any purpose other than to dominate an opponent.  Amy Davidson posted a thoughtful piece, What Should Trayvon Martin Have Done?, and for me the most valuable byproduct of it is a post by someone tagged theoutsider that comes as close to anything I've read so far of looking at what happened from a moral dimension:
OK, there are a lot of things that bother me about this case, but the thing that's getting to me the most right now is that a lot of people, when talking about how Martin behaved or should have behaved, are talking about him as though he was a fully-fledged adult. I don't personally believe he was a helpless innocent child, but he was also not a fully-grown man. And the reason I find this so irritating is because there are so many laws - not just in America but in many countries - which are predicated on the idea that until a person reaches a certain age (16, 18, 21, whatever) they are not allowed to do certain things largely because they lack the capacity to make good judgements in certain situations. It is assumed (sometimes correctly) that most people cannot make responsible judgements about things like alcohol, driving, sex, smoking, and enlisting until they reach a particular age.

Monday, July 15, 2013

Fear of a Black (Male) Planet, Part II

Ta-Nehisi Coates, Trayvon Martin and the Irony of American Justice.  For me it's this:
 
That conclusion should not offer you security or comfort. It should not leave you secure in the wisdom of our laws. On the contrary, it should greatly trouble you. But if you are simply focusing on what happened in the court-room, then you have been head-faked by history and bought into a idea of fairness which can not possibly exist.

The injustice inherent in the killing of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman was not authored by a jury given a weak case. The jury's performance may be the least disturbing aspect of this entire affair. The injustice was authored by a country which has taken as its policy, for the lionshare of its history, to erect a pariah class. (n.b.: emphasis mine)  The killing of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman is not an error in programming. It is the correct result of forces we set in motion years ago and have done very little to arrest.
 And, for the record, yes, OJ was guilty as hell.
 

 

Sunday, July 14, 2013

Fear of a Black (Male) Planet

When I turned on the radio this morning one of the first things I learned is that George Zimmerman had been acquitted.  I was not surprised.  Long ago I learned that criminal law -- either prosecutorial or defensive -- has little to do with ethics.  I was about to say justice but even that term is loaded.

After have read a few of the past days' postings and the subsequent comments I stopped.  There is very, very little more to be learned from the immediate commentary and too many people commenting think they know 1) exactly what happened and 2) that they passed the Florida bar and are qualified to practice law.  But here are a few, I'll call them psychosocial, thoughts: 
  1. Males fight.  And fights escalate.  The presence of a knife or a gun changes the dynamic and it allows one of the fighters to become more aggressive, or at the very least turn defense into disproportionate offense.  When that occurs, 2 things happen:  a) one of the aggressors de-escalates so much so that both parties internal "threat" switch is turned off, or b) extraordinary physical harm and/or death happens to the unarmed fighter.
  2. Black males are the King-Kong of the American landscape.  And we all know it.  Charles Stuart knew it.  Susan Smith knew it.  Both used that knowledge to great effect.  Extreme examples, I know, but there was little or no initial skepticism of their claims in each instance that black men had been the perpetrators of the crime because it seemed so plausible.
  3. A 17 year old kid is dead.  With an acquittal of the man who killed him, how do you possibly square that circle in a moral universe?


Saturday, July 6, 2013

Saturday Poetry: Mantra (excerpt)



to be read aloud in staccato con brio:

Words words words
I make my loving from the
words words words
For instance
these words
the beginning of
another story.
Let's call it
2 trench coats
(or a cure is discovered
for polio).

She comes to he
who is a stranger
she is wet
through and through
her hair is
curling all around her
he is dry
as a bone
he has been
being taken pictures
of
for the Fashions of the Times
layout.
A trenchcoat in July.
But no matter
he doesn't sweat
his pores are too fine
for that.

Scuse me she says to him
tapping him on the shoulder
which he whose profile cuts
the air like an
origami bird
doesn't like
scuse me she ways
again and again and again.
Your attention
I want your attention
please.

he turns to her
he looks at her
trench coat
a good coat
in good shape
she may be worth
listening to
at
for
have you seen him?
she asks
him he says
him who?
God, she says
have you seen him?
He pauses poses
thinks
(Beauty can think, too)
and replies,
no.

No, he says
again
no.
But if I do
(for he expects to see him
but without leaving this earth),
if I do, he says,
you got anything
you want me to tell him?

Oh yes
she says
tell him tell him
tell him this for
me will you?


You're hurting me
You're hurting me
You're hurting me
You're hurting me
(how many times I got to say)
You're hurting me
You're hurting me
You're hurting me
You're hurting me.