Take Em As They Come

Walking Their Own Walks--Mary J. Blige and Rihanna

2012-01-24T22:49:00.000-08:00

The fact that the great Somali rapper K'naan released a new EP today tells me I got to get off the stick. My stack of singles I want to write about is getting so deep I can't focus on any of them and all my other work's picking up. Meanwhile, the CDs I'm playing most (alongside both of Ariana Gillis's records) came out at the end of 2011 but missed my year end list.

The sad truth is I knew Mary J. Blige's My Life II would be a beautiful and important record, but the very nature of it (a sequel to 1994's My Life) made it feel like something I could get to in time. Mary J. has such a classic quality that her new one didn't feel urgent to me right away...

(Does anyone else have such idiotic rationalizations for inaction?)

And I know this is going to seem like the strangest pairing I could have dreamed up, short of going with Hot Chelle Rae or something, but it was Rihanna who shamed me into a mad dash to the store a couple of weeks ago to bring home both of these women's new records. The 875th time I heard "We Found Love" and realized I was liking it better than ever--that if I didn't watch it I was going to lose it over this club candy--I felt ashamed that I'd turned my back on Rihanna (yes, I've been a fan since "Pon de Replay"). Once at the store, I couldn't buy her new record without also picking up the past two decades' queen of soul, Mary J. Blige.

I call it "club candy," but it's ridiculously intense what Rihanna does with Calvin Harris's "We Found Love." I soon learned she does similar things throughout Talk That Talk. Rihanna overmatches everything cold about techno gimmickry--the kind of record you think you would only really appreciate in a club for its sonic equivalents to D-Lysergic 3D Surround--with the warmth of her vocal. The arrangement is like a keyboard-driven videogame soundtrack escalating out of control, but she makes those "yellow diamonds in the light" shine and darkens the songs shadows enough to feel their chill. I think the heart of it for me is the way her voice lilts through "The way I'm feeling I just can't deny," and then barely avoids freefall with "but I've got to let it go." That's resolve and vulnerability tightly wound, and if you really hear her, that "hopeless place" not only clutches the throat, it shuts out the lights. Her voice offers the only way out. When I had to go to the store, I heard this single as core to what matters to me about music.

I wasn't wrong. And Rihanna's and Mary J. Blige's most recent releases set a high bar for whatever comes next in 2012. In some ways, they're opposite of course--Rihanna, the maybe 24 bratty sass who embraces celebrity like the Black Carribean version of Madonna she seems to want to be, and Mary J. Blige, the first hip hop R&B singer who really mattered, who was Rihanna's age when she made the first My Life (out-of the-box an old soul in the midst of an infantile pop culture). Even the concepts behind these two albums are polar opposites. Rihanna's record is an orgy of DJ wizardry--house, techno and electro-whatchamacalitpalooza. Mary J.'s statement of purpose with this album focuses on returning to live instrumentation and a return of "the real."

Comparing these two albums shows just how "real" music can be whether its made with the latest studio gadgets or acoustic, old school flavor (despite how Mary J. portrays the album, I wouldn't call much of it genuinely retro--it's 1974 soul with an ever-present hip hop eclecticism and 2012 production values).

Rihanna's album is the more obviously experimental--kaleidoscopic shards of beats swirling and exploding, while Rihanna's intensely present (and often raunchy) vocals bounce from bass thump to synth pump, always finding the warmth in the most cerebral and even conceptually cold sonic effects. But the stand out moments come when the songs lock into the vulnerability lingering behind the singer's bravado--particularly in the middle movement from "We All Want Love" to "Drunk on Love" to "Roc Me Out" (the bravado regaining strength in this last only to confess, "I'll let you in on a little secret/I just want to be loved"). "We All Want Love," in particular, is the album's grand gesture. An anthem about loneliness with the singer
fronting a chorus of her own backing vocals, this song comes close to being the "All You Need Is Love" for the perpetually lonesome.

When I started writing this, I wondered whether I should mention that I hesitated to pair Mary J. Blige with Rihanna because I feel protective of Mary J., her vulnerability (and, oh yes, that awesome strength) is so palpable. But, the truth occured to me, and is underscored by writing about these two records here, that I feel equally protective of Rihanna, a young artist whose relationship abuse has already partially defined her career. She talks tough, but she genuinely seems more isolated than Mary J.

Mary J. starts her album by calling up My Life's producer, Puff Combs, and asking for his blessing, which he enthusiastically gives. Her collaborations with Nas, Busta Rhymes and Beyonce sound more than inspired...they seem joyous, but that real kind of joy, that forged from pain. When she moves from the heart beat groove of "Feel Inside" to "Midnight Drive," she actually does something like Rihanna, singing
with herself, her alter ego, Brook-Lynn. But the effect is different. She seems to be confiding her passion to a girlfriend, and later, on "Next Level," when she says "I'm gonna tell my girls to go out tonight," it feels right. When this girl wants to be alone with her man, she has people who understand her and give her space. She has people.

I can't remember the last R&B record I heard with this level of warmth and community present in
every performance. Like Rihanna's record, this is a record about throwing one's self into relationships and tough situations (you know, living) no one else understands completely. But Mary J's openness invites a sense of communal intimacy, the kind born from musicians fighting forward together. The cover of Rufus and Chaka Khan's "Ain't Nobody" perfectly embodies that vibe.

A review by my friend Lee Ballinger beautifully captures the beauty of the last three songs here, particularly the breathtaking acoustic guitar, piano and voice on what may also be my personal favorite, the heartbreaker, "Need Someone." (Review soon in RRC.) But the song I can't get out of my head tonight, "No Condition," comes at the midpoint. Cast upon waves of layered percussion amidst washes of keyboard and strings, Mary J. resolves, "I've made my decision/Loving you's been a mission/I'm in no condition to love you." Backing vocals shift from descending counterpoints to something like an African tribal chant, reassuring her this loss does not have to be a defeat. And anyone who's found liberation by accepting the inevitable can't help but be shaken by the beauty (even the hope, certainly the affirmation) in the pain.

In the end, I suppose it still feels I'm matching a heavyweight with an underweight upstart. But they've both had me happily cornered in a conversation I very much need to have. For one thing, they're both musically pushing in directions my instincts would have cautioned them against, and they're proving how much you miss when you try to limit an artist to your expectations. Rihanna's challenging me to open myself to experimentation that I might dismiss as superficial and gimmicky in the hands of an artist I trust less. Mary J.'s reminding me that looking back to what's been left behind in today's music does not mean rewriting history or embracing nostalgia. Most importantly, a kid half my age and a woman I could call my sister are both reminding me not to beat myself up over my isolating failures. Our loneliness connects, and in that connection, we remember we may not be alone after all.

King Day, America Future, and The Black Power Mixtape 1967--1975

2012-01-16T11:11:00.000-08:00

"Took a while to learn how to smile/So now I'm going to talk to my people about the storm"--Mary J. Blige, "The Living Proof," 2011's My Life II.

Watching Swedish filmmaker Goran Olsson's The Black Power Mixtape 1967--1975, I'm thrown back to my childhood, the heart of which could be encapsulated in those same years. I remember King being alive; I remember telling my mother that Bobby Kennedy was dead; I remember key figures throughout the film, some of which became great inspirations later in my life (I'm thinking in particular of Angela Davis and Elaine Brown).

But the heart of what I experience watching this film is a strong sense of how the world changed between 1967 and 1975, from my first memories at four and five years old of Civil Rights as the America Dream to being 12 years old and entering junior high with only a sense of confusion about my black classmates... We were an integrated school, and black and whites, in small numbers, did interact, but there was a gulf not breached, and I could not wrap my head around the anger I sensed there.

And I'm saying this from the perspective of a kid who had some kind of ongoing interaction with blacks. As I suggested, my family was very pro-Civil Rights. And my mother worked in the black community, and after my parents' divorce, many of her friends were black. She played soul records, and my older brother played jazz. I knew the girls at the west side center where my mother worked; I listened to their Jackson 5 records, but I was also terribly shy of them. They seemed so bold, knowing and worldly, and I to some extent was correct in knowing that I was an ignorant visitor in their world.

The down side of that mindset is that it allowed me to think we lived in separate worlds. The culture I lived in told me that the Jackson 5 was the music of the girls on the west side, that R&B music was the music of my mother's black friends, that our cultural differences were not to be bridged. After the initial explosion of rock & roll in the 1950s, which had everything to do with whites being energized by black culture, even after the Beatles invaded America playing Motown and Vee-Jay records (supposedly saving rock and roll), followed closely behind by the Rolling Stones and a slew of others playing blues records, the next musical revolution would not be about race mixing.

In 1977, my generation would see the birth of two new movements--punk and hip hop. In general, in the broader culture, these two threads have stayed separate to this day--one morphing into what people call "alt/indie" today, blacks playing only a small role, and the other morphing into a thousand variations of R&B, generally featuring some form of rap. Though there are a mix of races involved in both forms of music (as there always has been in each genre of music), race only asserts itself as an important factor in the R&B/rap thread. And that division suggests a cultural divide that has been more or less static since the end of The Black Power Mixtape in 1975. One of the great virtues of the film is that it keeps this issue framed as the heart of the American story--what America stands for, what it has yet to become.

Any reviewer points out many of the key scenes that make this film worth watching--moments like that when Stokely Carmichael takes over for a Swedish interviewer talking to his mother, getting answers out of her she might not otherwise give. My favorite moments would probably be Harry Belafonte in 2010 talking about the danger to the system posed by King's Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign in the last year of his life, rapper Taleb Kweli talking about being detained at an airport after 9/11 for listening to a Stokely Carmichael speech, Attorney William Kuntsler admitting to his own unexamined white supremacist assumptions unlearned "the hard way" during the Attica prison riots, and a young panther organizer explaining that Panther detractors "try to distract us with race when capitalism is really the problem."

If I had to pick a scene to recommend in isolation, it would be Angela Davis after she is asked her stand on violence. You can see her steeling herself to stay calm as she explains that no one can abhor violence more than her, no group more than black Americans. You can see that steel quiver as she recounts bombs shaking her house in Birmingham, Alabama and the four little girls, one of whom lived next door to her, killed in the 1963 16th Street Baptist Church bombing. She ends (and I'm going on memory here), her passion taking over, "When I'm asked about how I feel about violence, it just shows me that the person who's asking that question has no understanding of what's been done to black people since they were first kidnapped and brought to this country." She seems to regret her anger after that righteously on-target indictment, and she drops her head. That's the image above, the poster for the film, for good reason.

The Black Power Mixtape 1967--1975 certainly isn't the definitive film on this era in our history, and it is a film, oddly enough, brought to us by Swedish filmmakers. What it also is, though, is a vivid portrait of a moment when America glimpsed a new future filled with possibility, suffered numerous assassinations and brutal disappointments and retrenched to a freshly jaded sense of just what is possible. It is a portrait of the revolutionary history of America that, especially after King's assassination, tended not to cross the race divide. It's the story, on one level, of why I could have been more conscious of Civil Rights as a five year old than I was at twelve, and that's an American tragedy.

But this is not a film without hope. Though there could have been more, the music--from the Jackson 5 to the Roots--adds to the texture of the many rich images of changing black culture over the 9 years profiled. It's the indomitable spirit of the people in these images--prisoners, white and black, giving the black power sign at Attica; children studying the revolutionary history of America in community-based schools; even after the flood of narcotics overtakes the ghettos in the early 70s, the determination in flashes of a young woman's eyes as she recounts the horrific abuse she has suffered to maintain her habit and her newfound belief that the worst is behind her. She is who I think of when I hear the closing track, "Living Proof," off of Mary J. Blige's gorgeous new album, an album that serves as living proof itself that what's great about the American dream still lives. In the history of civil rights, we see the inextricable connection between fighting for that dream and lifting as we climb.

For the King day holiday, which is when I am writing this, The Black Power Mixtape 1967--1975 serves as a fitting tribute to Dr. King in part because it does not romanticize him. Starting with Stokely Carmichael, it often captures viewpoints sharply critical of King's legacy. At the same time, it celebrates what King's leadership and the Civil Rights Movement did accomplish. And it reminds us that King's emergent vision, much like the Panther's, was focused on the same issues so vividly before us today--particularly in the vision of the 99% movement, particularly in those aspects of the movement most informed by the history of Civil Rights.

Not in the film, but during the first year of the film, Dr. King made his famous "Where Do We Go From Here" speech to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. In that speech he said many great things relevant to the world today, but this particular passage resonates. King says--

A nation that will keep people in slavery for 244 years will "thingify" them - make them things. Therefore they will exploit them, and poor people generally, economically. And a nation that will exploit economically will have to have foreign investments and everything else, and will have to use its military might to protect them. All of these problems are tied together.

It reminds me of a famous picture from the Occupy movement, a white worker in the Rust Belt holding up a sign that says, "It's not one thing; it's everything." Evident in this movie, the Black Power movement at its core (it was certainly in the program of the Black Panther Party) understood this. More than it's depressing to see how little has changed in these four decades, it's heartening to see how many people have shared a truly transformative vision of America.

King follows these statements with, What I am saying today is that we must go from this convention and say, "America, you must be born again!" In the context of the speech, it's clear he's not talking about individual moral baptism; he's talking about the light in the eyes all too evident throughout The Black Power Mixtape, a vision beyond the mountaintop to a world where racism is recognized as everyone's problem
and the system that promotes it everyone's job to confront.

30 Songs to Reach for When You Fall, This One's for Guy Clark

2012-01-09T09:07:00.000-08:00

Guy Clark's 2009 song "Hemingway's Whiskey" gives this tribute to the great Texas songwriter its title, This One's For Him. Kris Kristofferson's performance of the song serves as a fitting centerpiece. For one thing it speaks to aesthetics that tie Hemingway, Kristofferson and Clark together--"warm, smooth and mean/Even when it burns, it will always finish clean." And as much emphasis as writers like to place on Clark's (or Hemingway's) conciseness of language, it's worth noting what makes this piece so beautiful has as much to do with the performance as the words themselves.

Kristofferson reads that line biting down on the word "mean," wincing at "burns" and tapering away on "clean." Spurred on by Shawn Camp's dancing and sparkling mandolin, Kristofferson tenderly sings here, allowing his voice to crack for the reach on the words "sail away," soothing and being soothed by the melody. Verlon Thompson's guitar and Mike Bub's bass take one deliberate step forward at a time, while Kenny Malone's snare throbs like a racing pulse. (Liner notes claim Jen Gunderman plays piano, as she plays some instrument on virtually everything here, but the fact that the piano is all but undetectable testifies to the subtle interconnectedness of the musicianship throughout.) As is true more often than not over the course of these 30 covers by over 30 different songwriters, the tension of this performance is so palpable it evokes simultaneous and contradictory physical reactions, a gut punch in a kiss.

For this listener, the highlight of this record is its music. It's in the way Patty Griffin's voice climbs up on that roof with the little boy in "The Cape" and it's in the way she soars through the refrain's "leap of faith." It's in the way Lyle Lovett finds a way to dance through the pain alongside Griffin and Shawn Camp on "Anyhow, I Love You," aided immeasurably by Matt Rollings' gorgeous piano. And it's in the way Steve Earle spits out the "smell of the black powder smoke" in "The Last Gunfighter Ballad."

The beauty's also in tough guy James McMurtry sailing away on that "Cold Dog Soup" chorus and in John Townes Van Zandt II singing that wino back home with the final refrain, "Let him roar/Let him roll" and the way that three note progression on his guitar has set this moment up throughout the long story that comes before. Everything here works, on some level, and Rosie Flores's sauciness suits "Baby Took a Limo to Memphis" just as Suzy Boguss's delicacy caresses each moment of "Instant Coffee Blues." Ray Wylie Hubbard, on "Homegrown Tomatoes," and Gary Nicholson, Darrell Scott and Tim O'Brien, on "Texas Cookin,'" make straight-up party records out of the joys of good eating (Hubbard's "what'd life be without homegrown tomatas," resonating as one of life's great hunger-inducing questions).

Particularly unforgettable is the way Kevin Welch inhabits the character in Guy Clark's 2006 song, "Magdalene." His voice sounds both ragged and world weary, so "ti-erd" he's inches from not getting that word out. But this is a song about a choice to live, and that voice rallies. By the second time he invites that girl to join him on the "Greyhound leaving at midnight," you're not only betting on him to win, you're wanting to join him in the fight.

In the end, it's this life-affirming vision in the face of abject loss and loneliness that makes this album, and Guy Clark's music, so special. On a record filled with radio-ready singles, the two that cry out most

strongly for contemporary country play are probably Willie Nelson's "Desperadoes Waiting for a Train" and Shawn Camp's "Homeless." Giving epic scope to the poignant grandeur inherent in this story of a young man and a father figure whom the world has passed by, Nelson seems born to sing "Desperadoes." Camp's full-bodied vocal points up the gorgeous resonance of one of the finest melodies here, digging in close to the meanest aspects of American life and insisting on compassion.

But my favorite moment may well be Rodney Crowell's exquisite opening cover of one of the oldest songs here, 1971's "That Old Time Feeling." Crowell feels his way through this waltz of puzzle pieces in search of other missing pieces--connecting desultory salesmen and guitar pickers and soldiers walking on crutches with that final image of an old lover who "rocks and spits and cries" thinking of "the girl with the clear blue eyes." As the song builds, Crowell's voice cries out for the right words, drawing close and quiet as each image takes shape. In a landscape of loneliness, pain and loss of direction, that voice--both lyrically and in this performance--is all about love. That's the record in a nutshell.

2011 in Review: My Occupy 25

2011-12-29T17:11:00.000-08:00

I hate making year end lists. I'm a slow listener, for starters. And other than superficial run-ins with the radio, I tend to listen to one thing at a time. Once I get into some music enough to write about it, I don't look up much until the writing's done.

I reviewed about 22 albums in 2011. Since my I-Tunes lists about 22 new album releases a month, I've deeply listened to (and this is being wildly generous to myself) at most 1/12th of the music high profile enough for a (let's call it) national conversation about the state of our music. Since about half of what I've listened to is regional and not likely to be listed in I-Tunes new releases, it's safe to guess I'm listening to less than 1/24 of what we might talk about in a year-end review. So, while I'm sometimes asked to do those things, I've never seen it as a gauge of what mattered most that year. It's what mattered most to me, which is, at best, an argument for the importance of some things others might have overlooked or undervalued.

But, then, I do have a desire to sum up the year, in some way that makes sense in terms of how I work. I started writing about music as an act of rebellion--against the cultural biases of both the academy that surrounded me in grad school and against the rock snobbism that immediately tried to steal away the liberation rock music gave me in the first place. I wrote in defense of the way the music taught me my feelings mattered. I wrote hoping that others would fight for their passions, too.

Not surprisingly, I suppose, my first piece for publication was about how music intersected with racism on my college campus. Specifically, I wrote an article for Rock & Rap (then Roll) Confidential about the connection between our campus's "Plantation Week" and the lily-white radio format of every FM station in listening distance. Little Steven's "Sun City" record, featuring dozens of black artists I only slightly knew alongside my favorite white (primarily male) artists, put me in our school's protest march alongside our campus's African-American Student Union, got me involved in the fight against South African apartheid and gave me my first article.

As I think about how to sum up 2011, I think about how little things have changed, in some ways. Yesterday, at the "America I Am" black history exhibit at Union Station, I experienced a vivid but unnecessary reminder, realizing that my wife and I were the only white folks visiting the entire two hours we were there. (I should mention the exhibit was moderately busy, even crowded at points, throughout those same two hours.) We may have an African-American President, but it still feels like white America doesn't recognize its debt to (dependency on, inextricable relationship with) black America.

I also think about loss... I seemed to know more people than ever before (this increases as we get older, yeah?) who lost loved ones this year. Having lost a best friend in 2010, it was a year of sad anniversaries for me. And, of course, with the economy continuously in some stage of crisis, it was another year of economic loss and the threat of even more loss. Most painfully for me personally, my friends and I lost our friend Eduardo Loredo (incidentally on my birthday). Eduardo was a great kid, 16-years-old, who was prepped for a heart transplant two years ago but could never even get on a waiting list because he was too poor and he happened to be living in Kansas rather than his home state of Chihuahua....

But all years bring horrific amounts of pain, and what seemed more unique about 2011 was the level of life affirming rebellion. The year started with uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt that have spread to at least 18 different countries, in the process helping to create the state of Southern Sudan. In February, protests erupted in Wisconsin, bringing firefighters and farmers alongside students and public employees in defense of collective bargaining rights. In September, Occupy Wall Street would inspire similar protests in hundreds of cities across America (and some count over 80 countries around the world) with the concept "We are the 99%."

For the first time in my own political experience (and I think it's fair to say American history), the concept of political unity I'd learned from rock and rap records excited the American imagination--challenging our mind-numbing array of subjective class relationships and getting us much closer to talking about the relationship between what Adam Smith (we don't even need to go to Marx) called the "masters" and the "workers." "I ain't your fortunate son" meets "come together."

Now, as the various conflicting groups brought together by Occupy fight through their differences and try to keep the movement rolling, I don't know how this will all turn out. In one respect, it doesn't matter. We've grasped a new sense of politics in America this year, and that idea is too true to die.

So, I figured I'd take my list of records I wrote about this year (and a few I didn't) and turn it into my Occupy 25. First and foremost, these records were my favorites because of the way the music stood out from other music I heard. Still, it's worth noting that each of these records affirms the fundamental concept of Occupy in some fundamental way--"We are the 99%!"

The 25 Records that Occupied My 2011 (order, roughly chronological) --

El Compa Chuy, Con Estilo--No nonsense set of corridos (by definition on behalf of the 99%) by the Sinaloan cowboy who brought Eduardo Loredo out on stage with him and posted the Kansas City, Kansas boy's story on his Facebook.

Lupe Fiasco, Lasers--"The Words I Never Said" and hit single "The Show Goes On" predated Occupy but serve as a primer on the basis for unity.

Gerardo Ortiz, Morir Y Existo En Vivo--though also from Sinaloan roots, this young Pasadena, California singer brings a hip hop sensibility to the production of his gorgeous, haunted corridos while singing with the voice of a man well beyond his years.

Michael Fracasso, Saint Monday--His "Working Class Hero" is as ominous and precise as the George Reiff bassline that drives it. Offering up the lines "There's room at the top, they're telling you still/But first you must learn how to smile as you kill" in a kind of musical equivalent to sculptured relief. The Lennon classic is an apt touchstone for this collection of Beatle-catchy rockers from one of Austin's finest, a record that even finds its way to a break-up duet with Patty Griffin in "Ada, OK."

Me Like Bees, Me Like Bees--The young Joplin band that made my year, drawing on their mutual love of White Stripes and Modest Mouse but, to my ears, doing something more fundamental--fusing the heaviest heartland rock impulses with utterly-contemporary, incendiary funk.

Howard Iceberg & the Titanics, Welcome Aboard! The Kansas City Sessions (7 volumes)--Gorgeous collection, beginning to end, featuring more than 50 regional artists and including "Hotel Alhambra," as beautiful and epic as any song I heard this year--hinting at the death of Western Civilization as we know it while focusing on images of such beauty that it becomes a tribute to the human spirit.

Jason Isbell & the 400 Unit, Here We Rest--a country-tinged record that dreams of freedom, at least at one point from the perspective of a returning vet, and draws on Southern Soul and the sounds of New Orleans as essential parts of that dream.

Julie C, Sliding Scale--Seattle rapper serving up Twista-swift rhymes with brilliant, eclectic production--touching on every conceivable front of the war of the rich against the poor and promising to find her way out of “the same old scenarios.”

Ace Hood, "Hustle Hard"--the hit single from an album I certainly should have picked up, a 2011 "Workingman's Blues" after the jobs are gone and they ain't ever coming back.

Grupo Innovacion, Lo Mas Importante--Booker, Texas-based norteno vets serve up gorgeous, romantic melodies with....saxophone!

Stewart Francke, Heartless World--35 of Detroit's finest musicians (black and white, that matters here), including Mitch Ryder, join this blue-eyed soul singer in a search for redemption. Even Springsteen shows up to the opening call for unity.

Mr. Marco's V7, Sparkin' Yo Mama--The Arab spring expressed through free jazz with heavy metal hard edges, maniacal and gorgeous.

Raphael Saadiq, Stone Rollin'--Retro Soul made urgent--at times, Sly and the Family Stone urgent.

Rise Against, Endgame--Opener "Architects" is a punk metal, proactive version of "Imagine." After 12 songs of such boundlessly energetic rock challenges, the question and answer lyric "Is this the end of yesterday? Lord I hope so" invites not only a laugh but an "amen."

Gilbere Forte, "Born in '87"--Flint, Michigan rapper aiming for (and nearly hitting) the intensity of Eric B & Rakim's "Follow the Leader," promising to live "the life that Martin Luther had dreamed."

Jason Aldean and Ludacris, "Dirt Road Anthem (Remix)"--When you're dream is "hitting easy street on mud tires," you don't have to add "we are the 99%."

The Hearers, In Dreamlife--This 10 member band lives nationwide, but the sound comes together in a basement in Merriam, Kansas they've dubbed Merriam Shoals. That works...because the punk-psychedelic vision that comes out of that basement is wide enough to take in the history of rock and soul and reach for the heavens at the same time (as it does quite directly on "A Star Can Be Your Home").

The Low Anthem, Smart Flesh--This Rhode Island group spent a fair amount of time occupying with Occupy. Though its music is rarely overtly political, its focus on an eclectic mix of roots music certainly comes out of deep listening to those who have the least in society, and the band's consistent focus on the beauty of our vision as well as the obstacles in its path reflect the hopeful contradiction that fuels the 99% movement.

Tom Morello (The Nightwatchman), World Wide Rebel Songs--Not surprisingly, Morello gets Zeitgeist Title of the Year Award, and the music here strives valliantly to deliver on that promise, most brilliantly on the title track, "Save the Hammer for the Man" and "Black Spartacus Heart Attack Machine."

Sara Swenson & the Pearl Snaps, Never Left My Mind--Exquisite music about (and I mean what Springsteen once called "a diamond hard focus" on) our need for each other, nowhere more beautiful than on the long dark night of "Brother."

The Bottle Rockets, Not So Loud--The writers of "Welfare Music," "1000 Dollar Car" and "Kerosene," all included in this acoustic collection, long ago established where their hearts lay. But the introductory tribute to Doug Sahm before a cover of "I Don't Want to Go Home"--"I thought he was a superstar"--is a fine 99% moment (that before the song's meditation on the balance between freedom and responsibility).

Rod Picott, Welding Burns--Heartland rock as beautiful and austere as a west Kansas horizon line, about poetic dreamers who also happen to be welders, yeah, and factory workers and sheet rock hangers and petty criminals.

Asa, Beautiful Imperfection--This Nigerian rocker's "The Way I Feel" serves as a 2011 rewrite of Langston Hughes' "A Dream Deferred," and the album argues repeatedly for payment due on a check that reads "liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

Ariana Gillis, Forget Me Not--Like Asa actually, who also debuted in 2009, both of this bravest of new songwriters' albums talk frankly about the costs of war and the need for love, and they do it anything but simplistically. Hard to beat the messy realities of this record's "Dream Street" for illustrating that point, but every gem offers another crucial piece to a very necessary mosaic.

Victor & Penny, Antique Pop--The birth of American pop through a playful, ebullient 21st Century lens. And what emerge as the central themes? Love, yeah, and diversity and justice and unity.

Rings on Their Fingers and Tears for Their Crowns: Victor & Penny Tell a Little Tale Called American Pop

2011-12-27T15:54:00.000-08:00

It's hard to imagine a record more ambitious and less pretentious than Victor & Penny's Antique Pop. From the moment Erin McGrane (Penny) kicks things off with her unadorned jaunty ukelele, pretension seems out of the question. Though the most democratic of stringed instruments is soon joined by Jeff Freling (Victor) with smart, sharp rollicking counterpoints, and though McGrane's voice rings forth precise and beautiful, the song is a musical smile. The duet soon makes it clear that the joy these two experience playing together is as high as this performance aims, and the record hits the mark.

So where does the ambition come in? Well, first, it would be a terrible mistake to underestimate the brilliance of the guitar part that dances all around the rhythm section provided by that uke and Jimmy Sutton's vibrant upright bass. And this is a terrific guitar record from beginning to end. Freling's two instrumentals more than hold their own with the classic covers that provide most of the album's architecture. "Victor's Dream" is, at once, delicately playful, yearning and tinged with remorse. And "Rickshaw Chase," his guitar battle (dance?) with Gonzalo Bergara is no less exciting and only slightly less ominous than their work together on the dazzling sabre dance of a face off on Django Reinhardt favorite, "Limehouse Blues," an eerie run through the opium dens of London's Chinatown ports.

And the Django Reinhardt nods from Freling only hint at the ambition. After all, this is a wonderful primer of the musics that attempted to reach beyond blackface minstrelsy and burlesque and build that first mainstream American pop audience. Most of these songs were by songwriters born in the late 19th century who worked vaudeville and helped build Tin Pan Alley from the early days of the record industry and the birth of radio.

Songwriting teams like Jimmy McHugh and Dorothy Fields, who wrote the opener "Exactly Like You," were Irish and Polish Americans who made a name for themselves writing for musicians in Harlem's Cotton Club. Black songwriter Shelton Brooks, who wrote the Sophie Tucker hit featured here, "Some of These Days," made a good part of his living as an imitator of the great African-American blackface minstrel Bert Williams. Tucker herself was a Ukranian-born immigrant, who also performed in blackface and was known as "The Last of the Red Hot Mamas." The Jewish songwriting team of Herscher and Klein offer up the whimsical "Dirt-Dishin' Daisy," which also sounds like a natural for the minstrel circuit. And New Orleans born black songwriter and performer, Sam Theard, also known as Spo-Dee-Odee, gives us the great "You Rascal You." The Chitlin' Circuit meets the Borscht Belt over and over here, and that idea of the American melting pot that refuses to become homogenous is, to my ears, the central theme of Victor & Penny's Antique Pop.

This is music about love--giddy "Exactly Like You," rekindled "I'll Never Say 'Never Again' Again," and under negotation "Anything You Say." It's also music about broken-hearted justice "Some of These Days," human decency "Dirt Dishin' Daisy," social injustice "Limehouse Blues," and those ideals we manufacture out of our pasts, "Way Back Home." More often than on Barclay Martin's wonderful "Slow Dance" (but certainly flaming brightly there), these are songs about the ongoing dialogue between danger and desire. In short, these are songs about all of the vagaries of the human condition, as consistently substantive as (and often more supple and light on their crazy feets than) any great American music from any era.

And Antique Pop is not quite like anything else. The mix of Erin McGrane's crystalline, forthright vocal style and Jeff Freling's megaphone-like vocal distortions is every bit as punk rock in its way as the tension between the most rudimentary acoustic instruments pushing at guitar feedback that sometimes sounds on the verge of flash fire. Sure Victor & Penny can play a cabaret or a nightclub and leave young and old music fans with smiles on their faces, but for anyone to think they've even begun to grasp all that this music says and does would be a silly, regrettable mistake.

Gonna Dream, Ariana Gillis Ups The Ante

2011-12-22T19:42:00.000-08:00

"Dream Street" gives this particular blog its title because it's the first Ariana Gillis song I heard. Dave Marsh sent me the MP3, and I'm glad I wasn't driving when I heard it. That insistent tom tom and occasional stroke of guitar behind this clarion call--

I'm gonna dream
I'm gonna dream street....

That might have driven me off the road. Nothing needs to follow, considering the immediate effect is something like Suicide's (or Springsteen's, take your pick) "Dream Baby Dream"...sung by a hopeful and determined young heart.

Of course, Ariana Gillis makes sure plenty follows, and those emotions would have surely made me pull over. "Dream Street" tells the tale of a young singer who yearns to connect with her dead mother and argues with her abusive father (David Gillis, her guitarist and co-conspirator dad gets special credit for being down with this) about the dangers of dreaming "too far." The song is a meditation on limits and desires. The singer's resolve to tackle that contradiction as a problem, not as a reason for defeat, is at the heart of the liberating vision that ties Gillis' sophomore album, Forget Me Not, together.

The record opens with "Money, Money," which echoes everyone from the Plastic Ono Band to Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five in a seething, taunting panorama of deception and violence, a song that describes the world the O'Jays would recognize with a determination to make a break. "Forget Me Not" celebrates the end of a relationship gone wrong, finding it in the singer's heart to "hope you'll change" [but] "don't change for me."

Like her folk ancestor Woody Guthrie, Gillis seems to prolifically generate art out of her surroundings. After "Dream Street," two songs (two songs and a narrative prologue to be exact) seem to be born from the 2009 dolphin harvesting expose The Cove. "The Cove" doesn't hide that fact, telling the story of Ric O'Barry, the dolphin trainer at the center of the movie, who regretted ever training dolphins because of the captivity industry he helped create and fights like hell to destroy to this day. Unlike, say, Guthrie's "The Ballad of Tom Joad," which retells The Grapes of Wrath in song form, Gillis's song manages to turn O'Barry's story into a more generalizable anthem for those fighting to correct their own past mistakes. Amazingly enough, that anthem is one of the most infectious, danceable uptempo singalongs on the record.

"John and the Monster," the song with the prologue, is something else altogether. It tells the story of a boy who discovers a creature with healing powers, which leads to its captivity. He ultimately has to sacrifice himself to restore the creature's powers, which not-so-incidentally are bound up in its freedom and happiness. This song is an exquisite ballad.

Which serves as a reminder I haven't said nearly enough about Gillis's voice. She can yawp like Dylan one moment and ride a laugh like Ani DiFranco the next. On "John and the Monster," she manages to deliver something like a Gaelic lilt, which rolls from a whisper to high tide, stilling itself with startling agility.

The delightful range of Gillis's voice is essential to sell "Samuel Starr," a song about a heart attack victim and a deep sea diver who find themselves engaged in conversation six feet under. What makes such a song work, aside from sheer audacity, is the way Gillis' voice delivers the horrors of death with the plainspokeness of each victim and expresses amazement at the realization of this miraculous second life. The delight in Starr's voice as he offers his friend a plan to protect his widow from a useless new husband--"We'll get up out of this graveyard and freak the bastard out"--has to be heard to give these words their due. Starr's new friend, Joe Jasper Cloverwood, suggests a trade off that will make his loved one smile. It's Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train where everything goes right; Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book with a jaunty rhythm and more hooks than you can count.

Another crazy catchy folk song, "Cannonball Sam," carries forward the theme of impossible escape well established by "Samuel Starr," hinging on the lilting refrain, "Free! "Snap Crack" breaks down the very method of musical transcendence while "Back on the Hill" simply delivers it, in the context of a decidedly un-nostalgic rock 'n' roll love song. There's a liberation in naming the reality, "I never loved you," which closes the song.

The album ends with "Oh the World," a song that starts with the possibility in a cut kite string. Then comes the memory of a mother's love. After that, a poverty stricken child on the street who seems to have all the hope the singer struggles for. In the end, she asks we "don't give up on her too soon." Not only does this music guard against any thoughts of giving up, we wake from these dreams hungry for whatever comes next.

Meanwhile, there's her terrific first album, To Make It Make Sense. If less focused, similar ebullient thrills obviously abound there. I'm a big fan of "Simon Brooke," the song of a lover lost to war. I haven't spent near as much time there yet. I'm looking forward to taking my sweet time with both, and oh the world to follow...

Bag of Bones A Knockin'--Rock Talk As Messy As It Is Necessary

2011-12-13T22:52:00.000-08:00

In a recent interview I read of Nigerian singer-songwriter (now rocker) Asa, she said that she picked the name Beautiful Imperfection for her new album because it summed up her ethos. She'd always had this funny bass-heavy alto that didn't fit in well with her church choir or any other choral group. And her songwriting, as songwriting can rightfully do, over-reaches as a matter of course. (Give or take what sounds to me like her musical reinterpretation of Langston Hughes' "A Dream Deferred," the song "The Way I Feel," which is as close to beautiful perfection as anything I've ever heard.)

That said, I think that sense of high-reaching imperfection is one of the things that connects my love of rock and rap's musical impulses to my love of horror fiction. To attempt a quote without the transcript before me, I believe Stephen King said that key to his attraction to horror was the understanding that the form was "assaultive" in its nature. My favorite music tends to share that trait. It may flub a note; it may veer downright foolish, but it gets your attention, and it's usually throwing down some kind of challenge. At their best, music and horror fight to change our most fundamental perceptions.

No surprise then, my favorite horror novels and movies teeter on the edge of artistic disaster. Some do more than teeter--they fall. Yet worthwhile things happen in that process. As an example, my great friend Erica and I shared two responses to Stephen King's Bag of Bones. We both loved it and the ending annoyed the hell out of us.

I thought about Erica, who isn't here to see it, watching director Mick Garris's TV version of Bag of Bones on A&E this week. I think she'd agree with me that some of the book's finest touches--ghostly rearrangements of refrigerator magnets and unseen presences in quiet, reflective moments--are perhaps impossible to pull off in a movie, and they only worked so well here. Still Garris (The Stand, Riding the Bullet, Desperation) is about as fearless a King tale interpreter as any there's been, and he manages to capture more of that book's wild (and often chilling) surrealism than seems possible. Grief has rarely been more palpable; the talking dead have rarely rung so vividly true.

But what matters most to me tonight about the movie version of Bag of Bones is the way it doesn't shy away from the racial and sexual violence at the heart of the story. Anika Noni Rose turns in a tough, beautiful performance as Sara Tidwell, the blues singer whose brutal rape and murder leads to the curse that fuels the story. In some ways, it's a thankless role, that of a vengeful spirit, but Rose manages to infuse her performance with a good piece of the hard fought dignity at the heart of the blues.

And that's a crucial piece of our pop culture history we better never forget. The music that gave birth to virtually every form of popular music we listen to today came at the most brutal price imaginable. Before the jazz era touched on in Bag of Bones, it came from the brutalization (including, of course, sexual brutalization) of generations of black Americans. During the jazz era and since, black artists have taken very real risks and paid prices akin to Sara Tidwell's in order to make a living and keep up their spirits and the spirits of those they loved in the process. When people condemn the violence and sexualized behavior in, particularly, black pop music today, they best not forget the centuries of the white power structure abusing, raping and murdering those blacks still at the bottom of the system of today. The most "offensive" black artists are typically fashioning some of our most vital art as a response, and anyone from David Banner to Nikki Minaj can say as much (and do).

So Stephen King and Mick Garris both deserve credit for grasping at these skeletons in our closets with what is arguably King's most effective ghost story next to The Shining. For the last five years, as I've worked on my own ghost story (yes, that's my "novel," and I hope one day you'll see it), I've been haunted by Bag of Bones more than any other book because I have a similar reach in mind, yet... Neither King or Garris quite pull it off. The reckoning with such evil is too easy, and the solution to this history of racial violence calls for a messier, ongoing dialogue.

And that's where the wisdom of Asa's beautiful imperfection serves as a reminder. Perhaps the most important thing these horror meisters are doing is talking about such issues at all. Most such stories are going to be flawed, but every word and image toward such ends matters, and matters greatly.

At the Risk of Madness: Mike Dillon and Mark Southerland's Snuff Jazz Find New Ways to Take Us There

2011-12-10T08:53:00.001-08:00

"In addition to it being Laura's birthday," NOLA-based but longtime KC vet Mike Dillon called from behind his drum kit, indicating a friend of the band sitting behind him, "it's also Bushwick Bill's birthday!"

Some laughed, some looked puzzled--did I imagine someone looking offended?--but to this listener, it was the perfect seque into perhaps the most raucous piece to close a wonderful evening of that free ranging collective called Snuff Jazz. Tenor sax player Rich Wheeler and upright bass (well, any kind of bass, but that night...) Jeff Harshbarger may be a bit stealth in their ability to offend. But a mad scientist of a jazz visionary like Mark Southerland (who I've seen do everything from fashion jam sessions out of deejaying 8 track tapes to playing horns wrapped around a dancer's torso) and Dillon (who goads the other musicians and the crowd with his insistent drum and vibe performances and that manic glint in his eye and that mischievous grin just a hair's breadth from a snarl), those guys certainly have a kinship with the most outrageous member of the Geto Boyz. Maybe the two Malachy Papers' madmen can most easily be labeled jazz, and Bushwick will always be known as gangsta, but they're all from an ancient musical impulse--the trickster ready to tear down all established institutions, while visioning new kinds of community beyond the disorder.

All of these musicians do it night after night, and that shout out to Bushwick Bill launched just such dirty (as in mud-pie-intersteller) work. Dillon taunted the other musicians with this charging drum pattern that pulled Southerland and Wheeler into a percolating response. Harshbarger began to vamp his way down to the bottom of the neck of his instrument, plucking hard, fast and fluid. He and Dillon seemed to be locked into a battling, percussive exchange until Wheeler and Southerland took the moment back with a melody seemingly shaped out of thin air.

Once that melody was established, Dillon stood with his four-head-per-hand mallets and exquisitely defined the melody on the vibraphone. He played those vibes with such supple, quick precision that the cascading notes soon took on multi-colored and multi-textured dimensions dancing in front of the rhythmic backdrop. Southerland brayed a brightly lit call to the left and Wheeler answered. And then they all began some frenetic tug-of-war merengue. All four musicians jousted and danced and drove the beat right through those club walls and out into some vast open soundscape. Having made its many points as one, the band sizzled to a finish. One more completely unnecessary--but nevertheless appreciated--coda-like number closed the evening.

For some of us, that Snuff Jazz set at the Grunauer somehow did the impossible--brilliantly followed Mavis Staples and her band having delivered a remarkable set at the new Kauffman Center a few blocks north. Of course, Staples' show had been hampered (at least from my cheap seats) by the fact that Helzberg Hall seemed to be a room perfectly suited for acoustic music and perhaps not even adaptable to amplified instruments and a rock and roll drum kit. A friend of mine who had been there before said that the sound had been perfect for the symphony, but for Mavis Staples, it was drums (snare, high hat especially) way up top, guitar way out front and Mavis's extraordinary low ranging alto just about the deepest thing in the mix even next to her three back up singers.

Because of the acoustics, the first clear musical highlight of the evening came with Mavis Staples alone on stage with guitarist Rick Holmstrom, singing the painfully beautiful Randy Newman ballad "Losing You." Later, the Stax-flavored Little Milton number "We're Gonna Make It" and, of course, the Staples' Singers classic "I'll Take You There" offered such hook-laden excitement that I might have imagined I could hear the nuance in Mavis's voice even if she'd tossed her mic away. (That might not have been a bad idea, actually...I could hear her asides about as clearly as anything else anyway.)

And, don't get me wrong, it was a terrific show from beginning to end. Staples' band--drummer Stephen Hodges, bassist (usually, he took some lead) Jeff Turmes and Holmstrom--were as engaging on their instrumental numbers as any band imaginably could be, especially considering one of the greatest voices on the planet is sitting a few feet away. Her back up singers--sister Yvonne, Chavonne Morris and Donny Gerrard also offered eloquent and exciting support, Gerrard particularly good at cutting through the mix.

Mavis makes sure the show is about the band, and she does it with a fiery display of human expression worth watching for its own sake. She conducts the band, pumping her arms and delivering handclaps that pop like the beat of a drum. And on "I'll Take You There," she prods and mimics each musician fueling that classic groove, testifying to the role of each part in the creation of the whole before she turns and calls on the audience to respond with happily returned singing and shouting and handclapping. That night, she said she intended to make us feel good "for the next six months!" The afterlife of her performance will extend way beyond that.

With that fire kindling in our hearts, some of us headed down to see those musicians at the Grunauer. Southerland, Wheeler, Harshbarger and Dillon did not disappoint. In "Sonny's Blues," an exploration of music so vital that I could spend the rest of my life writing essays based on its individual lines (and I probably will), James Baldwin writes:

"And Creole began to tell us what the blues were all about. They were not about anything very new. He and his boys up there were keeping it new, at the risk of ruin, destruction, madness, and death, in order to find new ways to make us listen. For while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn't any other tale to tell, it's the only light we've got in all this darkness."

Few lights shine nearly so bright as Mavis Staples and her calls to keep pushing down freedom road, but upstairs at the Grunauer, we found our way to another warming light and fresh visions of what could be if we could risk allowing ourselves to hear.

Mike Dillon and, it has been said, Go-Go Jungle perform tonight, December 10th, at the Brick. 10:30....probably not something to miss.

Why Can't We--Asa's Lyrical Questions and Musical Answers

2011-12-03T14:31:00.001-08:00

It's a wonderful surprise when something starts off feeling like a guilty pleasure before proving strong medicine against shame. I had just such an experience with the October release of Nigerian singer songwriter Asa's single "Why Can't We," which I bought off of I-Tunes on one of my Tuesday online shopping whims.

This ridiculously sunny record--a confectionary blend of pulsing acoustic guitar, bouncing bass and horns, highlighting the question "why can't we be happy"--brought to mind other records that have seemed irritatingly simplistic calls for attitude adjustment. Still, that kaleidoscopic party of a record kept pulling me back until I bought the frenetically catchy first single off of the new album, "Be My Man," and then the whole album, Beautiful Imperfection.

Even outside of the context of the album, all those repeat listenings made it clear this song was a question, not a presumptuous nod toward a predetermined answer. The song's main character is the one being counseled by a friend to enjoy herself. Her natural impulse is to "worry much about things you don't understand." In the opening verse, she's second guessing a lover's actions based on slim evidence. By the end of the song, surrounded by a festival of bright sounds, she's asking, "why can't we be smiling/why can't we be lovin'" with what has to be a grin on her face.

On the album's second song, "May Be," it is evident that such moments of joy are hard earned. The first line is "May be maybe, the sun will rise." Maybe.

And the questions never stop. Over a gentle reggae rhythm, she points out, "There's people dying everywhere" before asking, "Can someone tell me who's to blame?" On more than one song, she asks if her dreams are "a crime." The album even ends with a song called "Questions," which pulls no punches, often artlessly asking the unanswerable. Just as often delivering questions that act as a quick punch to the gut. "How many babies will be born just to die?"

She also asks for help. On "Preacher Man," she seeks redemption, obviously uncertain of the outcome. On "Dreamer Girl," she asks someone to "tell me that I should keep holding on." In this context, "Why Can't We (Be Happy)" clearly serves as the opening question for identifying a long list of intertwined personal and political obstacles.

"Why Can't We" serves another purpose as well. After Asa's eponymous first album, she was known for serious songs like "Jailer," which points out the mutually trapped condition of any metaphorical guard and prisoner, and urgent calls to action like "Fire on the Mountain," which calls out the seductive blindnesses of patriotism and power itself. Such subject matter has already led at least one BBC music writer to declare her a "twenty first century Bob Marley."

But when people say things like that, what they mean is that she's "serious" and "political" and potentially "important." What Asa's latest album shows is that she shares something more distinctive with Bob Marley. After all, since the birth of reggae, there have been many "serious" artists who play with the style, but few have the pop sensibility of a Marley. Beautiful Imperfection argues Asa just may.

As serious a record as it is, Beautiful Imperfection is also notable for the classic rock grandeur of the swirling confession at the heart of "Preacher Man," the blasting rock guitar bridge on "Bimpe," the Beatley pulsing keyboards on "Dreamer Girl," the lush strings of "Baby Gone" and the infectious, almost Americana refrain of "Broda Ole." Though three of these songs are in Asa's native Yoruba, all of them are impossibly accessible.

And in that context, "Why Can't We" tackles yet another question--why can't serious music sound anything but serious? The happy answer to that question is apparent.

"Let's Look This In The Eye," Me Like Bees Sing the "Naked Trees" of Joplin

2011-12-02T14:13:00.001-08:00

It's startling really, but kind. Luke Sheafer's lilting "Hey, we'll inch out all these miles," bursts from the speakers over two light taps of glockenspiel. A gentle, alternating guitar chord pattern follows, along with two more chime-like taps. Me Like Bees' new single (all funds going to the hometown habitat for humanity) begins like the hand of an old friend on the shoulder, side by side with the listener at the scene of the devastation.

The bass and drums kick in as the singer recalls where he was when it all happened, out of town, helping a friend "park his tired soul." He hears something has happened back home, and he can't get through on the phone. The tornado's destruction is all over the news. Pete Burton's guitar delivers a wall of sound that pushes the music to its first crescendo. The singer's narrative moves from a personal loss to tackling something near incomprehensible.

Now the music returns to the pattern in the first quiet verse, but the guitar is biting just as "the sky opened its mouth and showed its teeth." Friends are buried under homes. And "everyone was screaming..." this wordless refrain, "loo lay loo lay loo lay loo lay loo lay loo," but by the time the refrain is repeated, it's "everyone sang 'loo lay loo...'" Out of chaos, people build a common song.

That doesn't mean it's easy. "So, now you can't sleep when you hear rain," the singer sings over shimmering guitar chords just moments before the music explodes into an agonized, almost indecipherable bridge. The singer gnashes and bites. Band members shout back. The music is about to run off the rails...

It doesn't though. The band snaps back to that first verse pattern, whistling responses to the singer's calls, insisting on the melody, pushing forward with harmony. This time, though, unlike at the beginning, the whole band is backing the singer's summary of the story that's come before, and the guitar is raring forward with a funky percussive riff. Though "your mind keeps bracing for that howl again," the music works its way back to the sparest melodic line, embellished only by each instrument adding an essential pulse.

The song ends back in the present, outside of the memories and the nightmares, with that friends' hand on the shoulder. And he's saying in this lilting, beautiful alto, "I know it seems for miles the world's at end/But even in all this/Our naked tree's greening again." And then the song's over, with a final quick pulse from everyone in the band.

Wednesday night, when Me Like Bees first released this single, I immediately felt this song as a delicate, considered rendering of pain. Grief was the word that came to mind that night; still does. This is a song by, for and about the victims of the Joplin tornado, and it is thoughtful about the mistakes people typically make when dealing with a pathos so deep.

The song's talking to and for friends "despite the wreck that was all that you ever owned." And it knows loss like this can't be avoided, talked over or around, or minimized. It also can't be dealt with impatiently. Though the ending focuses on a small sign that life itself refuses to give up, such hope is offered only as what it is, an observation. The song's smart enough to end without editorializing further.

I know few things as well as this one--if there's one thing we can count on in life, it's pain. Friends stand shoulder to shoulder with us through our pain, knowing they can't take it away from us. The song's repeated advice, "Hey, let's look this in the eye" seems about as good as it gets. Music this naked, brave and beautiful makes it something close to bearable.

Me Like Bees single, "Naked Trees," is available at www.melikebees.com You can name your price, and the money goes to Joplin Area Habitat for Humanity.

Postscript: Me Like Bees' December 3rd Riot Room show delivered almost all new material engaging, thankfully, a decent-sized house and near-full floor. "Naked Trees" offered a particularly delicate beauty in a set that ended with a bit of destruction no one in the house is likely to forget. At that show, I also learned what I took to be a wordless refrain actually had meaning central to a metaphor I missed altogether. To promote the fundraising single, the band distributes postcards with the band's web address as well as lyrics far more clever than suggested above. I decided to leave my mistakes above intact; they're the honest reactions of a listener. And music is music, first and foremost, an auditory experience. (In addition, the record deviates in at least one meaningful way from the lyric sheets that I'm glad I caught.) Still, the lyrics add rich layers to the song, so I thought I'd share the right stuff in the same space. They read--

Hey, we'll inch out all these miles
All our friends' houses in piles
Either side they're forming aisles
We'll breathe those fallen walls in till we choke
Amongst the naked trees we'll bear the yoke.

I was north helping an old friend park his tired soul
And while a song to help his belle along was due
My town down south cut in with its own tune
But I couldn't make it out, those phones were dead
That didn't stop the whole world from feeling it.

Bared its snout, the sky opened its mouth and showed its teeth
I heard you heard your house get chewed through from underneath
Everyone was screaming
Loup! Le Loup! Le Loup! Le Loup!

And so now you can't sleep when you hear rain
Your mind keeps bracing for that howl again

Hey, let's look this in the eye
Fear causes only divide
Don't feel guilt for troubled skies
For by the hair of our collective chin
Lord know it wasn't we who let it in

De nulle part le Loup souffla et le Loup souffle!
Miracles! Miracles! Wind and grace, wrath and mercy!
Heroes and suitors, villains and looters sifted out in the scrum!
But it's not done
It's still at home on every tongue

I was north heading a southward course when you first called
When I arrived, I found you all despite the wreck
That was all that you all had ever owned
Good Lord, we sang it
Loup! Le Loup! Le Loup! Le Loup!

Hey, let's look this in the eye
Cease this mind-wrapping of why
Don't feel guilt for troubled skies
I know it seems for miles the world's at end
But even in all this are naked trees greening again.

Janelle Monae, The Hearers and A Trip to the Moon

2011-11-26T21:23:00.001-08:00

Gestures of love connect the seemingly desparate artistic events in my past day. The image that stands for all the rest takes place by the bar of Lawrence's Jackpot Saloon last night. Two men, probably musicians I don't know, running into each other after some time has passed. I accidentally watch too long and notice that their welcoming hug turns into a brief squeeze and a softness in the eyes. These street tough--looking dudes love each other.

Less overt but just as palpable an affection filled the Jackpot's air all night. Such warmth even flowed through and from the swamp-blues-by-way-of-punk Mad Kings and the ironic gutbucket stomps served up by Drakkar Sauna. Soft eyes all around. The college kids may have gone home, but those who have returned were back with long chosen families.

Nowhere was this more apparent than in the set by the Hearers, a band that can typically only get together for an annual Thanksgiving show at the Brick because they have migrated to every corner of the map. Last night's show was apparently down two members from the Brick, and it got cut way down as the last of three late sets, still I couldn't tell what I was missing.  What I do know is that watching the Hearers' stage framed by loving, perfectly placed strokes of harmonica and glockenspiel by Jay Kakert and sweet backing vocals and keyboards by Chris Braun spoke to the deep camaraderie of this band, a band that lovingly crafts songs that seem like pure studio magic, into a wonderous, heartfelt live experience. It was a beautiful set to close a beautiful night.

And that includes all of my night, which started in the early evening with my wife and youngest daughter at the mayor's Christmas tree lighting in Crown Center. I had to go because Janelle Monae, a young woman I've written about three times in just over the past year (for this blog, for Pitchweekly and for Rock & Rap Confidential), a woman who gives me a lot of hope not just for the vision of Kansas City artists but for the state of contemporary music, had been invited to help mayor Sly James flip the switch on the Christmas Tree.

Accompanied by Nate "Rocket" Wonder of the Wondaland Arts Society she helped create in Atlanta, Georgia, Monae left her bandmate's side and joined the mayor to say a few words in support of the Christmas tree fundraiser for the city's poorest. She spoke briefly, pointing out that she was from the other Kansas City across the river (not adding that she was from a part of KCK, Quindaro Avenue, that receives precious little attention from the larger city), but instead, adding, "but I'm all about unity, and I carry all of Kansas City with me wherever I go."

Those were important words to inspire youth who look up to her, a young woman who has gone from being virtually unknown to working with P. Diddy and Big Boi in the past few years, and just in the past year (and some change), to touring with everyone from Of Montreal to Bruno Marrs, Katie Perry, Prince and Stevie Wonder. As her father once explained to me, the wonderous science fiction universe she's created in her lyrics and that incredibly eclectic music that merges Sun Ra to Nat King (and Natalie) Cole to Michael Jackson and OutKast, all of it, in some ways came as a retreat from a city she knew as essentially some hard mean streets.  To know how much thought and perspective went into the honesty of Monae embracing Kansas City as she did last night made it all the more poignant.

And the fact that Monae's three suite releases were inspired by Fritz Lang's 1927 magical celluloid accomplishment (and 99%-er political statement) Metropolis connected directly with the joy I experienced today, again with my wife and youngest daughter, at Martin Scorcese's Hugo. Taking any of the joy out of experiencing this film by saying too much about the heart of its mystery would be wrong. But I have to say two things. I am extraordinarily thankful to see one of our finest filmmakers make thematically and visually smart use of 3D.  More importantly, Scorcese made a brave choice with this film, particularly considering the cynicism of his canon, to focus on light in the darkness, in this case, the very real light of the motion picture's first great visual magician, George Melies. Hugo is a love letter to Melies, that and much, much more.

Though I feel fairly confident that no one will ever try to write about Janelle Monae, the Hearers and Martin Scorcese all together again [wouldn't it be great if I'm wrong?], what they have in common strikes me, tonight, as something vivid and heartening. Inherent in their make up, but also particularly vivid in the present tense, these artists all reach for the moon with their work, and that kind of vision is hard to come by (even among many of our finest artists, musicians and otherwise).  After all, when the Hearers sing "the stars can be your home/they're not very far away," Darren Welch's sweet lyric fights its way through Marc Tweed's agonized cries of doubt. But what emerges from that struggle is a sense the limits of our imaginations are only problems to be solved.  All these artists show hearts and minds together find a way.

Lean Forward Again: The Bottle Rockets Unplug, Storytell and Fashion Warming Light from Biting Darkness

2011-11-25T08:40:00.001-08:00

The title Not So Loud reminds me of when the Bottle Rockets blew out the speaker system Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit hoped to use (they fixed it, he did) in Carbondale, Illinois. The Bottle Rockets can pretty much define the word loud, and righteously so, which may be part of why I let this acoustic set kick around my floor a couple of months before playing it. Or maybe (more likely) it was just my usual "glued to the ceiling, spinning around" state-of-mind. On either count, the band gave me what I needed this Black Friday morning, running errands on a cold, gray day, still overstuffed from yesterday and lonesome in that way only the holidays can make us lonesome.

For starters, lead singer, primary songwriter and--as shown here--hot banjo enthusiast, Brian Henneman makes great company. His introductions are always warm and often very funny, nowhere more so than on the hilarious story about trying to see Dolly Parton amidst a hostile St. Louis crowd, an experience which led to the song, "Perfect Far Away." The humor takes an edge off hard pathos when he talks about the year Doug Sahm and both of his parents died.

"Not saying Doug Sahm was as influential as my mom and dad, but he was actually more influential musically than my mom and dad were, so it was a heavy year to be sure, for me. So, we sat around and we waited and we waited and we waited for the Doug Sahm tribute album to come out because they'd made tribute albums to everybody I could possibly think of and people I didn't even know who they were."

When it didn't happen, the band decided to make Songs of Sahm. Before starting up a beautiful version of "I Don't Want to Go Home," Henneman says, "I was really mad at my musical peers for not doing it. It was kind of like they should have known better....I always thought he was a superstar. I had no idea he was obscure anywhere...." John Horton earns special kudos for the way his lap steel delivers all the yearning that goes beyond words here, just as he does later on "Kit Kat Clock," a song Henneman describes as a "little kid's favorite song about an old guy who's feeling very sad about being an old guy."

"Early in the Morning" and "Kerosene," of course seem made for this treatment, but a rich-textured song like "Gravity Fails" proves remarkably durable and infectious in this setting. "Turn for the Worse" and the barn burner "Rural Route" (both of which feature that aforementioned banjo and guest guitarist Kip Loui) never sounded better than they do here. Keith Voegele's upright bass and Mark Ortmann's "shaky things" add just the right traction to make this "Rural Route" both fun and dangerous.

But nothing here could be more poignant than the closer, "Mom & Dad," a song from 2003's Blue Sky, a song about talking to lost parents while mowing their lawn, picking up their mail and petting their cat. It's a song about those questions we all ask the dead, that dialogue that doesn't stop simply because one speaker's not here anymore to take part in the conversation. In a way, it's about the leap of faith that goes into writing a song, often as not, a conversation with ghosts.

And with guys like me....driving around on a holiday morning, needing the sort of magic to be found on a record like Not So Loud.

Sara Swenson, the Pearl Snaps and the Soft Touch of Human Ties

2011-11-23T12:01:00.001-08:00

It's a kind of irony that Sara Swenson's most famous song, "Time to Go," featured on the season finale of ABC's "Private Practice," is about letting go. Of course, valuing such an act enough to sing about it comes from thinking about our need for one another, and Swenson's music is about such precious needs. More often than not, it's about holding on.

Give or take that slippery fish on "Windows and Doors," her new EP, Never Left My Mind, showcases Swenson's voice as a means of connection--reaching out to a lonesome friend across a crowded room ("Never Left My Mind") and holding on "till the morning brings the daylight" ("Brother"). On verses, Swenson's words sound carefully weighed (if you can imagine the ballast that goes into the bouyancy of a Dolores O' Riordan), but when that soaring voice takes flight--with wings I can only describe as a kind of Gaelic lilt--she gathers the listener close against her well above the hard surface of the earth.

She knows "this night's impossible alone," and the musicians surrounding her, the Pearl Snaps, provide true fellowship in the darkness. Roger Strong's pulsing bass and the driving rhythms and splashes of color from Brandon Graves' drums create the almost invisible foundations necessary for such ethereal work. They also serve up a whip smart crack on "Windows and Doors" that more than bolsters Swenson's confrontation with an unreliable charmer--turning what could be profound sadness and vulnerability into irreverent strengths. The guitar work by both Ian Davidson and John Flynn never calls much attention to itself but serves just the right grace notes to complement Swenson's vision.

A perfect example of the way this band works together can be heard on the closing cut, "Always and Everywhere." Acoustic guitar and mandolin begin a soft conversation behind Swenson's nearly a capella opening pledges. On the second verse, Sarah Magill's piano works its way in alongside Davidson's steel, and the band's sound builds, turning the song's promises into a kind of manifesto.

Perhaps the most poignant moment here, though, is the quiet, long lonesome night of "Brother." Piano and electric guitar, drums and cymbal begin drawing beautiful soundscapes across the night sky. When Swenson sings, "I can't take this dark all on my own," anyone listening can be thankful she doesn't have to. Thanks to this EP, neither do we.

The Wyco Low Riders Save My Blog (Or Is That My Heart?)

2011-11-21T20:13:00.001-08:00

It's not all Don Lipovac's fault, but he's the most obvious culprit. After all, his name was evoked twice Saturday night, by both Johnny Hamil (speaking for Mr. Marco's V7) and Jason Beers (speaking for the Brannock Device). The King of Polka in Wyandotte County, internationally reknowned accordianist and bandleader Don Lipovac, genuinely inspired these two sons of the Dot, and their dedications were heartfelt. With some slight irony, in each case, the music that followed might well seem designed to scare off any Don Lipovac fans who may have wandered into the house.

But I don't think it would actually. It might well scare off most people who think they like cutting edge, avant garde indie rock (a style which seems more rigidly codified than the most traditional folk music) because such folks aren't used to having every presumption they ever owned about music overturned with such frenzied glee. And glee is the word for that mad delight shining off of Johnny Hamil's face as he percolates feedback off of his nearly horizontal upright bass, and glee is what I sense behind that sly smile when stoic madman Jason Beers lets such things slip, for instance during dueling basses with Hamil on an Iron Maiden cover. Yes, that sentence makes sense.

These folks are ornery, and ornery means playful, and that's at least one thing they have in common with Mr. Lipovac. If I remember one thing from a Don Lipovac show, it's that it's the definition of fun. The other thing both Mr. Marco's V7 and the Brannock Device have in common with the Don Lipovac Band is extraordinary musicianship. Marco Pascolini is in both bands, and if he's not the finest evil genius on guitar in the Twin Cities (yeah, those of us who claim the Dot can say that), he deserves the chance to fight for his title. Not taking notes Saturday night, I can't tell you a thing Pascolini did beyond surprise me with sounds I didn't think could possibly fit with everything else going on at the same time but, in fact, seemed to be part of the glue--or the electro magnetic field--that held things together.

I mean, a universe separates Mr. Marco's Arthur C. Clarke drunk on blotter lounge music--which can turn toward some kind of manic Turkish jam whenever it feels like it--from the Gang of Four circa Entertainment meets X doing its Ornette Coleman set vibe of the Brannock Device. But that universe has folds, you know, and to be at a show with the two together puts a listener in Warp Drive. All of it makes sense.

It makes sense that--during the Mr. Marco's set--Jason Beers takes the stage playing saw between Kyle Dahlquist and Mike Stover (both playing theramin) for an earnest cover of "Bali Hai." And it makes sense that 14 bass players take the stage at once, including a woman better known for her fiddle (Betse Ellis) and another known for her voice (Elaine McMilian), and do a cover of "Boris the Spider" with KC's premier rock and roll showman Cody Wyoming. It makes sense that twice as many people as are on stage are watching this nearly all bass player band, the Wyco Low Riders, at 2:00 in the morning. And it makes sense that one of the city's finest drummers, Kent Burnham, is willing to lend this molar drilling exercise his unabashed, supple and explosive, support.

It makes sense because this collaboration of over two dozen of Kansas City's finest musicians is born out of a great deal of love and mutual respect for the music and each other. It's also born out of both the desire to have fun and the guts to risk making a fool out of one's self in the process. It's born out of what it means to realize what it means to Be Here Now, as the good book says, and appreciate those around you. I can't help but think those are sentiments close to the heart of what makes truly experimental music enduring. That which challenges us the most, may even make us cringe, also asks us to stay present and in dialogue with the moment (and hopefully those around us).

I don't know. That's what it told me Saturday night (Sunday morning). It told me 5 years into my blog I might try writing a blog, not use the thing as simply a warehouse for writing that has no home. I'm so dissatisfied with the state of music writing anywhere and everywhere right now, I need to vent, I need to experiment, I need to talk back. Why not use this space, at least for now? And why not not worry about whether what I'm writing is ready for the world? I need to Occupy the whirlwind of activity around me in a more aggressive and present way, for my own mental health if nothing else. For my sense that I can do that, I thank Jason and Johnny and all the shamalama shamen and shawomen who took the stage Saturday night. Thanks to you, I'm ready to play.

2011-06-27T09:14:00.000-07:00

Toni and Clarence, Someplace Tropical

for Omar

From the moment I heard cancer took my great friend Toni Gentry, on the heels of learning my rock and roll hero Clarence Clemons died, I had a mental image of the two, someplace tropical, with umbrellas on their drinks. Not that either one of them was an umbrella-glass type, but both had a sense of occasion. It’s a huge understatement to say they were both known for their sense of style.

At Toni’s Kansas memorial service (her second, the first held in her now-home, Arlington, Virginia), a friend talked about the first time Toni walked into her shop, “wearing thigh-high leather boots.” Many, many things expressed my own memories of Toni at this service—we were colleagues in my school writing center, and her teacher’s reminiscences of her intensity in the school setting, an intensity that made every moment matter, brought back cascading memories. Her sisters’ memories of her going Mama Bear on those who crossed them reminded me of the ways Toni used to look after me, and her friend Eric Melin’s memory of the way she could make your jaw drop by saying exactly what she thought, that was uncomfortably (and hilariously) familiar. But those boots….if she wasn’t wearing those boots the day I first saw her walk in the Writing Center, then she should have been. Like Clarence blowing the door off its hinges in that mythical bar meeting with Bruce, that first image of her crossing the room takes on epic dimensions for me, and if she wasn’t dressed all in suede with thigh high boots, I’ll never know because that’s all I can see right now.

Just as Clarence’s style would have meant much less without the distinct sound and call of that horn, Toni backed her style with unique substance. Its outlines were in every story told at yesterday’s memorial service. It was even in the look and feel of the service, a yard full of friends and family against a rich wooded backdrop—some drinking beer, some holding each other, all laughing between the tears.

We had to laugh, you see, because Toni was one of the world’s great laughers. That’s the way I hear her right now, talking about “boi-oi-oi-yeez” [boys] or whatever subject amused her at that moment, her voice staccatoed by that laugh that was perpetually trying to come out. Sometimes, she just let it go, and, hand to mouth, her whole body rocked with delight. One of Toni’s favorite phrases was “great fun” because she looked for it everywhere she went and generally found it.
This meant she found “great fun” in and for others as well. Unlike many charismatic and creative people I know, Toni’s sense of occasion was always about who she was with. When you were drawn into her orbit, you realized you’d found your own groove. I don't know how else to describe it.

My finest memories of Toni were “great fun,” but they were quiet ones. I once called her on a long afternoon I was reviewing 3 shows back-to-back at Kansas City’s one-time great blues club, the Grand Emporium. I was worried about her. She was going through a divorce but still living in her married home, and I figured she needed a friend. [We were “pals.” I don’t know how else to put it. Buddies, pals, shoulder-to-shoulder-through-the-rough-times friends.]

Anyway, so she tells me she’s making this casserole [for dinner I’m presuming], and I tell her that I guess she wouldn’t be interested in keeping me company at the club. In half an hour, she’s there, and we’re out in the parking lot eating her casserole. I ask her how she’s doing and she says, “I’m ba-ha-had! I’m cooking casseroles and driving around with them in my back seat.”

Then came one of those body rocking laughs, for both of us. There’s a little eternity in that afternoon in that parking lot crying-laughing and trying not to drop that casserole. Most of my memories of her somehow fold into that one.

You know how with some friends you are the driver and with some you are the passenger? I always see myself as the passenger with Toni, but we’re busy going nowhere special in no hurry because the best part’s that time in the car.

So, I heard my story reflected and refracted through the stories of others who spoke during her service and others who I talked to in that celebration I didn’t want to leave. Though I knew almost no one at the service when I arrived (the time and space that defined our relationship being a specific in-between station in her life), I knew of them because she always talked of her loved ones. And they knew of me. And I felt like I was among friends, potentially close friends because we all knew and somewhat understood and definitely benefitted from the integrity of one of the most creative and beautiful people any of us will ever be lucky enough to know.

The theme that came up again and again—regarding her sisters and regarding her two sons, Tariq and Malik, especially—was the way she gave them all permission to be who they were, to be different as they wanted to be and to recognize that difference as something special. This gal from north of Topeka did that for everyone she knew. She certainly did that for me. She taught me a lot about who I could be. A lot of what’s best about who I am, I owe to her.

Aside from worrying about all their loved ones being so sad, Toni and Clarence no doubt have this common mission to talk about in this tropical place where they walk the beach, drinking something extravagant and silly, maybe simply for its na-ai-ame, with their little umbrellas. They both took us closer to free. They both left us trusting we’d carry forward their work.

I promise, Toni, to keep chasing that “great fun” and do everything I can to make the world worthy of your gifts. Pass the word to C. Thanks for getting us started.

2011-06-13T14:18:00.000-07:00

Open Hearts, Lost and Found

I wrote this several months ago for a special issue of Rock & Rap Confidential that never saw the light. It's not about Clarence Clemons, directly, but since he's on my mind right now, and since it's actually about all of the soulful music that didn't make it onto Darkness on the Edge of Town, it does stand as an indirect tribute to what Clarence brings to the larger story. If only it were as beautiful as a single note of a single solo.

Yes, listening to the The Promise and flipping through the notebook and supplementary materials available in The Promise: The Darkness on the Edge of Town Story says a lot about the smart choices Bruce Springsteen made in 1978 to cut some space of his own with those drums and those guitars. Songs like “Outside Looking In” reveal their synthesis of Buddy Holly and the Animals whereas Darkness still sounds like nothing else, not even much of the Americana punk it helped inspire. And the comparisons show the possibilities carved away for the original album’s hard focus. Thematically, the “lost” material shows the universes that lie between, say, “Racing in the Street” and “Candy’s Room” on the first disc, and, on the second, the necessities and dangers involved in proving it all night.

But I came into this with a certain faith that this was more than outtakes for comparison; I believed that this was a 2010 album. That faith was forcefully rewarded the first time I reached the closing scenes—“Breakaway” with the gorgeous “sha la las,” swelling horns and piano lending dignity to one desperate reach and miss after another. And then “The Promise’s” organ and strings and those overdubbed vocals on the “Thunder Road” refrain, capturing just how and why, “every day it just gets harder to live this dream I’m believing in.” That line, like all the rest here, have an added poignancy today, all the promise of “pullin’ outa here to win” ending in questions of just what’s been risked and what’s been lost. The sweetening of these arrangements may well be, as Bruce’s liner notes insist, “what I would’ve done to them at the time and no more,” but he didn’t do it then, and he has done it now, purposefully, to my ears.

Virtually all of this music is opulent in its production in a way that may call to mind 1975’s Born to Run but sounds to me like the man who made 2009’s Working on a Dream. From the first time I heard it, “Someday (We’ll Be Together)” particularly insisted this perspective with its richly layered pop arrangement and female backing vocals. But, in a more particular way, the middle guitar solo, doubled by piano (perhaps glock) and dressed in strings brings to mind the soundtrack-like grandeur of a song like “Outlaw Pete”—Ennio Morricone meets Phil Spector. And I don’t care when those lyrics were written, “I awake from a dream…Tonight, we’re on our own” sounds like Darkness revisited after 30 years of promises kept, sure, but also promises broken.

That song begins with the sound of “your voice…calling through the mist” which is a line echoed in the one largely new lyric on the album, “Save My Love.” That song begins, “Now there’s something coming through the air/That softly reminds me” and later adds, “Over river and highway/Your voice comes clear and true.” Unlike the despairing late night drivers of “State Trooper,” “Open All Night” and “Radio Nowhere,” this character hears something so tenuous it tears him apart even as it gives him hope. He knows he has his own voice, too, and that’s part of an exchange, so while he listens he asks the listener to “dial me in close.”

Perhaps, as much as anything, what I hear is the 61-year-old Springsteen consulting with the 29-year-old rocker in the same way he consulted with Buddy Holly, Elvis and Hank Williams at the time most of these songs were originally written. “Save Your Love” has an unassuming brevity reminiscent of The River B-Side “Be True” (and more than a minor thematic connection), but it defines commitment in much more delicate and sophisticated terms, as a sense of not just integrity but direction and need, well aware of the perils and distances that come between tonight and tomorrow.

The case that Darkness On the Edge of Town speaks today as urgently as it did in 1978 doesn’t need to be made here, but the way “Save My Love” starts up on the song "Darkness’s" hill with that same guy, older and maybe wiser but still waiting to be easily found, resurrects the ideas of Darkness as ongoing work.

Thematically, the closest song to “The Promised Land” on these two new CDs is “Someday (We’ll Be Together)” and unlike the lonely determination of the original album, this deliverance clearly depends upon community. In fact, by revisiting all these love songs and those little things our babies do—magical, fumbling and cruel—Springsteen’s uncovered new layers of questions at the center of a great album. On the single, he pledges, “if we open up our hearts, love won’t forsake us,” but that’s clearly an approach not a formula. The open hearts on these 2 new CDs make mistakes, and they get recklessly used, confused, broken, and discarded. These appropriately-named “Lost Sessions,” then, focus on missing pieces to clarify the complexity of that terrain we still gotta live every day.

2011-05-14T22:38:00.000-07:00

So Right

Me Like Bees and Reasons to Believe

So, every once in a great while, a band comes along with a call so hard and urgent that I find I have to write a response, even when I’m speechless. Me Like Bees has been calling hard a while now... And for a late 70s generation punk fan who finds himself listening to R&B and norteno as much as anything these days, the inspiration comes from a somewhat surprising source--four guys who started playing together in Joplin, Missouri; three high school football players from Kansas City, and the fourth, the drummer, a California kid whose dad used to gig with members of Captain Beefheart’s Magic Band.

That last bit may be something that makes some sense. The football does too…in a way. Though indie is the label they’ll be given, the band is not your typical effete alterna-rock band. In fact, the first time I saw them, their blue collar, punch-to-the-gut, sensibility made me wonder how come they weren’t playing straight up metal.

But I suppose that dates me. The first time I checked them out online and found a live video of them doing Rage Against the Machine’s “Bulls On Parade” I had a piece of that answer, if not the whole story. During that first show I saw, they had played Modest Mouse’s “Float On,” which lent another piece to the puzzle. Since then, I’ve heard them cover Gnarls Barkley and singer Luke Sheafer freestyle a little Biggie Smalls and Jay-Z.

I should understand as well as anyone. I’m from a town in Oklahoma not far from where this band formed, and if I’d made a band at their age, I would have been doing Lou Reed, Bruce Springsteen (who was still obscure around those parts then), Public Image Ltd, and the Clash, with maybe some refrains from Grandmaster Flash’s “The Message” thrown in post 1982….same difference. If I've learned anything over the years, creativity takes many forms and draws on many kinds of inspiration, often from directions that are attractive because they have nothing to do with one’s roots. And, first and foremost, a band is a band to break out of whatever box it may be handed.

Anyway, I fell for these guys the first time I saw them because they were both funky and heavy, and they had hooks, and they managed to convey a sense of humor without losing any of their sense of gravity. That was a show at the Coda, and the house was packed that night with people close to the stage who seemed to know every song, and a larger house that, despite not having heard a note before, was as riveted as I was.

That was five shows back (I saw my sixth tonight), and they only grow more fascinating each time out. I’ve seen them play to packed houses and empty houses. Tonight was a relatively empty house, a 7:30 set starting off an evening packed with too many bands at the end of a day of Westport pub crawling that found most people outside at that hour or catching a meal.

It didn’t affect how the band played…well, in any obvious way. Lead singer Luke Sheafer started in with the lilting verses of one of their newer songs, “Joseph Jones,” and bass player Asher Poindexter immediately began angling in on him with a full-bodied dance to match his rhythm. Drummer Tim Cote punched hard as the song built to a crescendo, and guitar player Pete Burton offered one shimmering line after another until something that started off sounding fragile, even diffident, became a powerhouse assault.

Such dynamics are typical of Me Like Bees, but the band defies any simple stylistic description. Poindexter and Burton both play their guitars in very percussive ways, calling to mind funk from James Brown to Gang of Four to whatever contemporary bands they actually nick. Cote keeps a supple rhythm but bangs the drums hard. And singer Luke Sheafer, well, he makes sure no one in the house doubts for one second his conviction or its urgency.

When the band launches into “Lazarus,” Sheafer takes breaks from the verses to mouth wordless refrains at Poindexter who wordlessly shouts back. Poindexter has this sort of body-twisting raindance stomp he employs while working his bass, while Sheafer twists, turns and widens his eyes, then shouts and cries and growls into the mic. Meanwhile, Burton peels off one great riff after another, playing the relatively stoic, mild-mannered role to the side (someone has to anchor this anarchy).

But nothing really anchors this music except for the rhythmic pulse that binds the band together. At times, Burton’s guitar seems to be starting flash fires off to the right and Poindexter’s bass throws gasoline with quick emphatic runs from the left. The entirety of the band’s sound swirls like some cosmic storm, shimmering light and tone colors beyond imagination. And Poindexter has a sly smile, and Sheafer’s beaming wildly, and the whole band looks like they’re aware yet nonchalant about the fact that they’ve, yet again, cut a space that extends from, in this case, the back of the Riot Room to Alpha Centauri.

And that’s enough…. Nevermind the resonance of these lyrics—about being the prey of capitalist sensory overload (“Iconica”) or about being a working stiff who gains nothing in particular for a job well done (“Good Machine”) or about a girlfriend with a “sweet left hook” (“She”) or about finding hope precisely when all is lost (“Doubt”). This is a band that has ample reason to mean it when Sheafer shouts, as he does on the Ep closer, “There’s a Man,” “As long as I have a choice, I’ll be raising my hand up/I’ll be begging to differ.” This is a band with something to say, many things to say.

So, I’ll be sorry when I have to miss next Friday’s Kansas City show at the Coda. But I’ll be playing them on my long drive to Chicago, and thinking about all the things I said here and what I need to say next. Because, though the afterglow I feel right now will be gone, I’ll remember what I’ve learned five times over, as I’ve gone back to one show after another wondering if they are really that good…

The answer is not simply yes. Each time it seems they’ve gotten better, or maybe I’m just better learning how to hear. Either way, I can’t bear to miss what’s next.

To see and hear for yourself-- www.melikebees.com

2010-12-25T00:09:00.000-08:00

EDUARDO ES JOAQUIN…..

The soundtrack to my Christmas shopping this year was El Compa Chuy’s new album “Con Estilo.” The title is almost ironic in that this Sinaloan homeboy delivers his corridos with precious little flair. These 10 songs fly by with buoyant energy to be sure, but no excess, not even the sort of gunshot percussion today’s narcocorridos seem to have inherited from their gangsta kin in hip hop. This is plainspoken music, straight out of the Sierras like Compa Chuy himself, with roots in Mexican folk music that date back to the corridos of the 19th Century, that date back to the songs of Joaquin Murieta, who “defended with fierceness…the humble and the poor.”

And this is the music of my friend Eduardo Loredo, which is why I'm listening....

“What is going on here is homicide. This is a blatant crime against humanity. The only difference between what’s going on here and a murder is that we are watching him die, slowly, every day.”
These words—roaring out of the small frame of Kansas City writer/artist/musician Monique Maes—went off like a bomb at a benefit last winter for 14-year-old Eduardo Loredo, a young man (uninsured and undocumented) in need of a heart transplant. The corporate-style banquet room that the, relatively affluent, Johnson County Community College had provided for the event was somewhat sparsely filled with a mix of people who wanted to help the young man. Maes forced the crowd to face the crime of Loredo’s plight.

Loredo had been receiving treatment from a local hospital that cared for the uninsured since the summer before, when the once strong soccer player was struck down by a mysterious illness and diagnosed with dilated cardiomyopathy. For a period of three months, he believed he was receiving a necessary heart transplant from a Saint Louis hospital, the closest facility able to perform such a procedure on a child. Everything came to a halt in October, when Loredo was informed he could only be placed on a waiting list if his family made a $100,000 down payment on the $500,000 procedure, which would also involve incalculable follow-up expenses. Though the hospital would continue to receive essential medications from the hospital, he was told he had less than two years to live.

Since that time, family and friends have organized, along with area students and artists, to try to raise the money for Loredo’s heart transplant, but knowing the futility of raising that kind of money, they have reached out to others to raise awareness so that the system might take responsibility for a boy in an impossible situation. The JCCC student club LUNA found few in the local community willing to help and wound up reaching out to the Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign and Health Care Now for help--organizations that helped the students plan strategy and sent statements to the benefit and declared a national day of solidarity with Eduardo Loredo on December 20th, 2009. Status aside, everyone recognized this case was about the value of a human life in America.

Maes threw her great big rock and roll heart into the struggle the moment she learned of the community college Latino club’s efforts to raise awareness about Loredo’s situation. She met with Loredo before the event, and, instinctively, she took him some comic books. She found Loredo loved comics, and then she asked him if he liked music. He told her, “corridos.” Since then, Maes has not only tirelessly worked to maintain a team of volunteers focused on addressing the changing issues in Loredo’s case, she makes regular trips to Eduardo’s KCK home to talk about progress with the family and to deliver comic books and CDs to the always appreciative Eduardo.

Since last winter, the case has only grown more confusing. Eduardo has managed to cut back on his meds and looks and feels stronger than he did last year, but the family has received conflicting advice over whether or not a heart transplant is even necessary to resolve his health concerns, and there is consistent pressure for him to get help from a hospital in Mexico that has not guaranteed him anything. The family is currently seeking a second opinion (from doctors inside and outside of the country) and, after the U.S. Social Forum in Detroit, working with youth and health care fighters nationwide on a variety of new efforts.

Meanwhile, Eduardo Loredo keeps fighting, listening to his music. He recently talked his way into an El Compa Chuy show in Kansas City Kansas, and the band wound up taking him backstage and featuring his story on their Facebook page. At the winter benefit, Maes talked about the significance of Loredo’s love of the corrido “that speaks of long lost love, of outlaws and bandits, of adventure and tragedy. The spirit of the pueblo.”

Tonight, I find myself thinking—2:00 a.m., Santa in the air along with Marley’s Ghost— from the beginnings of the form through to Loredo’s favorite Chihuahua/Sinaloa/Culiacan and Southern California songwriters today, she might have added “the spirit of Christmas yet to come.”

Eduardo Loredo’s Top 10

1. Larry Hernandez
2. Gerardo Ortiz
3. El Komander
4. Fidel Rueda
5. Noel Torres
6. Los Buitres de Culiacan
7. Bukanas de Culiacan (BuKnas de Culiacan)
8. El RM
9. Voz de Mando
10. El Compa Chuy

Donations may be sent to:

To donate you can go to any Bank of America and donate to the following account: Account Name: Gahutier Eduardo Loredo Transplant Fund

Eduardo has two Facebook pages—Eduardo Loredo and Eduardo Needs A Heart

2010-11-24T12:12:00.000-08:00

Unsettlement

Merriam-Webster’s,
The Elements of Style,
And an unsent postcard from Gros Ventre
That says “A-OK!”

101 Essential Hiking Tips,
Three Missouri travel guides,
And something called Beyond the Tetons!
--that card’s rocky sunset again.

From Shakespeare to Existentialism,
And a history of peace activists,
Along with that novel about the mass murderer,
You wanted me to read.

The Quickening of America,
The Design of Cities,
All texts I keep moving,
Tracing who you wanted to be.

Not the girl of 27, 583 ways
To make me laugh,
Able to set the world right
With a point of her finger.

Not the queen of bar trivia,
Or the emperor of the honest answer,
Patiently waiting while I flail
Through all the wrong words.

Those royal metaphors
Like the crown of thorns
You never asked for
But wouldn’t remove.

A martyr not simply by choice
But caught in some philosophical wasteland,
An expedition guide who’d lost count of the bodies,
An aesthete tortured by shame—

Burrowing through your heart,
Allowing no peace…
Like the calm that fell over me
With a brush of your shoulder.

2010-11-20T20:05:00.000-08:00

On the Outside Looking In

Bruce Springsteen’s Fan Interview at Sirius Radio, November 15

Working off no transcript, simply memory, as Mr. Marcus once suggested. My apologies for any lies that follow….

The best part, that’s easy—watching the greatest Springsteen fan in the world (IMHO), Randy “Drive-All-Night” Heaster (as Dave Marsh dubbed him), sitting in a close triangle with Bruce and Dave. Two of the best friends I could ever have engaged in a conversation with the artist who brought us together.

How I got to be a fly on the wall was wild happenstance. My buddy was one of 20 contest winners out of 3000 applicants. When I heard Randy was going on Dave’s show, I thought I’d go along for the ride just to sit in some Times Square bar and wait for the debriefing. Fortunately, I got to see the show.

Of course, there were 19 other fans there… and Chris Phillips from Backstreets, and Bruce’s producer, Jon Landau, and film editor, Thom Zimny, and guitar tech, Kevin Buell, and Dave Marsh’s radio producer Jim Rotolo popping in and out….and everyone of those fans had their own stories I didn’t know, all thrown into the same room for two hours to try to have an all-but-impossible conversation. Not surprisingly, Dave and Bruce gave it their best, and Randy reported, “I got what I came for.”

By definition, that meant I had too. But I actually have to write to get my finger on what that was. In the end, it had something to do with watching Bruce get outside of his comfort zone and learn a new thing or two about what he already thought he knew.

Bruce entered the room giving each of the winners a handshake and a how are you. From where I was standing, well outside the studio fishbowl, he didn’t look like a rock star so much as, say, a mechanic, a crusty aging craftsman. If not for the light in the contestants’ eyes, the charisma of this blue denimed character might be no more or less than that of someone who knows how to keep you on the road and charge a fair price in the bargain. He had that much swag, but he wasn’t exactly cutting a romantic figure.

Eye level with a group of fans rather than cloistered with a journalist, the craftsman struggled to get comfortable with the adoration in that room. It’s not like on stage where he could pull from his bag of tricks and send everyone home justifiably pleased. This was a different kind of reckoning, and it demanded some attempt to cut through the hype which the entire industry system had cranked higher than ever the night before an expensive, one-of-a-kind release.

That attempt to deflate the hype was the thread that ran through the night, becoming a sort of international auditory equivalent of the guy who just made the Darkness album climbing up on his own LA billboard to deface his image. “I hire folks to do that for me now,” he joked, but that’s the tip of the iceberg in an evening peppered with self deprecation.

The new 2-Disc CD, he reported, is nothing more than some pleasantly sequenced outtakes from the Darkness sessions sans the stuff that was already out on Tracks or made its way onto The River. He worked on it casually in the first part of the summer. He seemed happy it turned out good, but he wasn’t even going to imply it was great or important. Bruce’s sarcastic repetition of the phrase, “I’m a helluva guy,” eventually led Dave to say, “You’re beginning to make me worry that you are one of my friends who doesn’t like yourself as much as I like you.”

Of course, as big an ego as Bruce has to have, he’s also an important artist because he can’t quite like himself as much as any fan would, even someone who knows him warts and all like Dave Marsh. For me, the ultimate poignancy of the new material on The Promise is that, as joyous as the music often sounds, it’s consistently about the hardest sort of loneliness, desperate-but-almost-empty relationships, and the pain of living with dreams that indeed do tear you apart.

It is in this context (which I’d love to write about some other time), following the heartbreaking desolation of people taking chances and failing on “Breakaway,” that the song “The Promise” has finally taken on the depth and breadth it hinted at when I heard an unintelligible bootleg back in high school. It’s about how it’s getting “harder each day to live with these dreams I’m believin’ in.” It’s also about that point of betrayal when you “keep on living” with something stolen “from deep down in your soul.” To my ears, right now, it has a special resonance as the sound of my own secret scars and fears and as the sound of an America that doesn’t know what to believe anymore.

So, since we’re all in this shit together, it seemed all that much more appropriate Monday night that Bruce, clinging to a guitar for comfort, was sitting toe-to-toe with his fans and trying as best he could to answer their questions, not as the oracle but as a participant in a new kind of process. When he was not cutting himself down for tactical reasons, his honesty was welcome and often very helpful.

He called the much romanticized 1978 piano introduction to “Prove It All Night” “a device” that worked in a certain place at a certain time, allowing him to play some guitar at a certain point in the show, and he assured fans it wasn’t coming back. He said that he could not have done the things he did if he had not met someone with the wide angle vision and tolerance for insanity Jon Landau offered. He talked about his relationship with Steve Van Zandt in similar terms. Though he made it clear he never set out to make a lot of friends (note to a few thousand people listening in), he admitted that he has been very lucky to find a handful of collaborators he could trust. And once he trusted them, they were pretty much in for life. The cautious man’s strength acknowledged as several parts community, if a somewhat closed community.

He says many interesting things in the interview, and, for fans, it is certainly worth catching on a Sirius Channel 10 repeat broadcast, but it’s the way he said them that most interested me. There was a lot of humor, at times tinged with hostility—like a man trying not to put his guard up though his involuntary reactions want to go defensive. He said things like, “I often find the uproar of my fans amusing” and “you have to remember those first three albums were about getting out of New Jersey….I tried to move to California, where it was nice!”

When asked why “The Way” is a hidden track, he said it was because he never liked it, but the fans (and then engineer/now Interscope mogul Jimmy Iovine, apparently) wanted it. So, “there it is,” he said, repeating “there it is.” He explained the bizarrely possessive love song had always been “too red blooded” for him to be comfortable with it, and proposed the soundtrack of a perverse sex scene in a David Lynch movie would be “its righteous home.”

Talking about the album, Darkness on the Edge of Town, itself, he was more than happy to point out its strategic and tactical design. “I didn’t want to be perceived as a revivalist,” so anything that showed its influences was not long considered for the final album (this is apparent when the final cut is compared with the 21 genre-hopping outtakes that make up The Promise). “We needed to carve out a space that was our own,” he explained, and “it was what I wanted to say at that time.” He would never have to define himself so absolutely again.

That said, he admitted that the specifics of the record were indeed a reaction to a lot of things going on at that time—the punk explosion, the death of Elvis, reading Lester Bangs’ statement on the end of cultural common ground represented by Elvis’s death, and the fact that Bruce was getting sued by his formerly good friend and first manager, Mike Appel. This fan is probably not alone in feeling the two sides of Darkness may as well have come down from Mt. Sinai, but Bruce wanted us to understand a lot of specific conditions put that gun in his hand.

This even led him to a more general statement about every compelling musician (and he mentioned a number of people, but James Brown is the one who sticks with me)—they have something nagging at them, and their primary struggle is with themselves to deal with that issue before the concept of the audience enters the picture. The audience plays a role, but it’s after most of that work is done. This is why he believes the recent Paramount performance of the album, without any audience at all, worked so well—he was able to simply focus on his relationship to that music, and that’s a relationship that’s plenty intense.

So, what’s the value of Bruce Springsteen sitting down with fans instead of journalists? Have I suggested how it gets at something truly difficult? Have I said enough to show how it faces the limits of celebrity in its attempt to address universal human experience?

I dunno. I think it showed there’s more give in those limits than we might think. When Bruce pushed back, fans gave him space, and no doubt saw him some percentage more human than they saw him before. It’s tough when you live in a culture where your value as a commodity lies in all that makes you rarified. But the Springsteen vision has always tried to push beyond that to “all the redemption I can offer…beneath this dirty hood.” On Monday, November 15th, fans crowded around with the hood up and took a look at the works.

For Bruce, I hope it brought some relief. The kids (hardly kids anymore with about two exceptions) were all right, and they seemed more than happy to accept him just as he was. He played guitar more as the night went on, which may well have been a sign of increased nervousness, or stress, but it came off as an effective form of relaxation.

He played a little of “Come On Let’s Go” while explaining the effect of Elvis’s death on the recording, and when Dave mentioned a caller said Elvis’s ghost hung over the whole record, he slipped into the riff from “Mystery Train.” Most surprising was the outro instrumental he played while Marsh searched for the words to bring things to a close. Seizing on a caller’s earlier comment about the “highbrow” questioning on the show, Bruce said, “We were a little highbrow. How come no one asked me what color underwear I have on?”

Dave answered, “What color underwear do you have on?”

Bruce kept playing the outro but offered no response.

“See,” Dave said, “You don’t like it when I ask that.”

And the sprightly outro played on. At that moment, they sound like a weekly comedy routine, Misters Marsh and Springsteen, Fric and Frac, and it doesn’t sound like an altogether bad idea. Bruce would go on to appear more comfortable than I’ve ever seen him outside of a concert on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon the next day. Maybe it would have happened anyway, but it felt like the cautious man had led down his guard and found support he didn’t know was there.

More than likely, I’m projecting more than I should. Three years ago, I had a heart attack and found myself faced with the choice of finishing my semester teaching or giving up my classes. Now, I’m possessive enough of my classes that I probably went against my own best interests and returned to the classroom in a couple of weeks, but I’m glad I did. I was not strong, and I was hopelessly behind, but my students didn’t care.

They were happy to see me back and patient as hell. Some of them even shared stories of losses in their lives and took on the roles of my caretakers in one way or another. I’ll never forget them, particularly a young artist and mother who brought me a painting as a gift at the end of the semester. Few ironies in my life will match her loss to a brain aneurysm a year later.

Since that time, I’ve learned my guard can be my greatest enemy in dealing with my students, and honesty about my own vulnerability can allow students to meet me more than halfway in an effort to achieve our semester goals. Of course, I’ve known this intellectually for a while. Though he calls it his "Samarai record," that need that ties us together is there in almost every tortured but defiant verse of Darkness on the Edge of Town. But just what such lessons mean in everyday life has to be learned time and again.

More than once, and more often than not, I got a glimpse of Bruce Springsteen as a part of a community of learners along with his fans last Monday night. As I know from the classroom, he was in the position to learn the most. I want to believe he didn’t miss the chance.

(P.S. Thanks to Backstreets and other Bruce blogs where I saw the in-studio picture posted. I have no idea who took it, or I would certainly give credit.)

2010-10-24T15:10:00.000-07:00

Oh, How She Comes Alive!

I went to see Janelle Monae's opener for Of Montreal last night at Lawrence's Liberty Hall. I went with my brother and nephew, wondering if I'd talked them into it, and if I had, worrying and not certain at all that the show would be half as good as I imagined it could be.

I was a little worried about the almost all white crowd, clearly there to see Of Montreal, a phenomenon I knew nothing about except for the stuff they've done with Monae and Big Boi. Since this was as close to a homecoming as she's had this tour, Monae had her KCK family there, in a reserved area of the balcony, which made for an unfortunate racial dynamic. I mean, for the longest time I saw only one Black girl on a packed floor of people who looked like they were trying out for Cirque de Soleil.

Anyway, all anxieties lessened within moments of the set's start time. After some surprisingly effective theatrics--Her ArchAndroid Wizard of Oz head, hanging over the stage, explaining she'd sent her emissary Janelle Monae to essentially free our asses so our minds would follow--Janelle and her two women back up dancers threw off their hoods and took command...well, along with that terrific three piece band of hers.

I didn't keep a set list or anything, but she ran through that opening three-song suite on the new album, hitting harder and harder, and then she did Nat King Cole's "Smile" alone with her guitarist. Her performance of "Sincerely, Jane," from the first record was a real showstopper, with this casual bit of theatrics where she used a finger gun to shoot down these zombie-like figures (probably members of Of Montreal) lurking around the stage--pertinent lyric, "Are we really living or just walking dead now?"

The house was packed, people were dancing everywhere, the show was already what most shows would call a fever pitch.

After a few more uptempo things--the inevitable duet with the Of Montreal guy (which is okay, I think, on the album, but definitely the low point of the set) and "Wondaland," which was a kind of psychedelic explosion of energy, she slowed things down again for the Axis: Bold As Love-ish "Mushroom and Roses." During that song, she donned her cloak and painted a picture, suggesting a female backside, while guitarist Kellindo Parker did his best Hendrix impression--it was like they were both painting colors on twin canvasses. After the last verse, she capped the painting with some bright yellow Xs and wrote "I Love You" and posted the work at the side of the stage.

The Stevie Wonder-ish free form songs off the new album, like "Oh Maker," were particularly wonderful. Her voice was so strong throughout the evening--fluid and natural, swooping and diving and emphasizing the lyrics just as needed to focus the crowd.

When she hit "Cold War," my only regret was that I knew the set was drawing to a close. Shots of Ali boxing flashed across screens behind her...then, of course, she started throwing punches of her own after Kellindo took the "Kellindo!" solo. "Tightrope" was every bit as big a finish as expected.

The crowd called long and hard for an encore, and she and her crew came out to do "Come Alive," the punkiest song of the evening, and the one that makes me think of Screamin' Jay Hawkins. It was particularly aggressive and effective live. In a bit of smart planned spontaneity, dancers and other extras--there were quite a few, whether from Of Montreal or her own entourage--moved into the front of the crowd, so it was pretty evident she would stage dive or something.

At one point, she fell to the floor on stage in a sort of charismatic fit, before getting up and descending into the pit. I could see her head bobbing as she danced at the center of a tight circle of folks maybe fifteen feet away, but she was pretty much invisible (probably not from the balcony). Then she returned to the stage, picked her mic stand up like John Henry (or Jimi Hendrix, or Pete Townshend) and slammed it to the floor. One final conductor jump, with the group, and it all came to a decisive end with "Purple Haze" blasting over the house speakers.

My friend Ben Bielski and his daughter, who is a fan, showed up just before it started, and we were all pretty giddy after the set. Ben said something like "that's the kind of thing that comes along once a decade," and I found myself wondering if I've ever seen "that kind of thing"....

All I know is I can't wait to see more.

2010-10-22T22:42:00.000-07:00

Nana and the Monsters

I watched TCM's 2006 print of The Hunchback of Notre Dame tonight, 1923, Lon Chaney. What a movie it is. I never realized that until tonight. Tonight was comparable to the 4th or 5th time I saw Vertigo, a movie I'd thought was ponderous and dated until it grabbed me by the throat and held me against the back of the couch.

For all sorts of reasons, we don't see things right away, and most things we never see. The night Vertigo became my favorite Hitchcock movie (next to Secret Agent, which no one else seems to love), it was the only movie I wanted to watch for several months. I'm convinced I have Broken Embraces on my DVR simply because I suspect it might take me to a place as singular as Vertigo, because those are the comparisons people make. Unfortunately, I may not get to Broken Embraces for a while. I want to stick with Lon Chaney's The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Of course, as Robert Osbourne tells me, this movie was not just Chaney's, Irving Thalberg (at 23) pushed for its production, the very-familiar-to-any-Universal-Fan Carl Laemmle produces it, Wallace Worsley directs it, and the later, greater William Wyler served as one of 6 assistant directors.

It's one helluva movie. First, there are those incredible sets (16 acres, according to Osbourne), which served as the backdrop for many a Universal horror movie, this being the first where villagers (in this case Gypsy Parisians) run through the streets with torches. It is about as grim as movies get, but it also features wonderful comedy bits, most notably the scene where Phoebus won't let a starving Gregoire eat because Phoebus is too busy enthusing over Esmerelda (if this is not the model--forget Bride of Frankenstein as funny as that is--for Mel Brook's blind man scene in Young Frankenstein, I'll buy a hat and eat it). There's also the mirroring of tightly linked but disparate images. Phoebus slips Esmerelda's dress off her shoulder when he initially pushes to seduce her and then slips it back up when he is shamed out of his predation, later echoed by Esmerelda slipping Quasimodo's shirt up over his shoulders, showing him the only kindness after his public whipping. And it's a movie about complex, tragic social conflict which culiminates in Quasimodo pouring molten lead on Esmerelda's loved ones who are really only trying to do the same thing he is, save her life.

But what I think about, more than anything else, when I watch this movie, is my Grandma McKinnon...Nana, the one who first told me about it, the one who inadvertantly ignited my fascination with Lon Chaney, in particular, and with horror, in general.

I write about Nana a lot. She works her way into fictional stories I write, and if anyone goes to the trouble of checking these archives back to (hmm...) 2006 when I wrote my 13 days of Halloween blogs, she's prominent there as well. Nana was the storyteller of my childhood. I heard some other stories from other members of my family, but Nana was the person I turned to for The Stories. Nana is the one I think of when I try to figure out why I'm compelled to tell stories....

And the funny thing about that? No adult who knew Nana. I doubt my own mother, her daughter, would have perceived her as a storyteller. Mary A. McKinnon was a quiet, dignified woman who worked as a secretary for Cities Service Company...first in Shreveport, Louisiana (I believe), then in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, then in Tulsa. Her husband died of a heart attack in 1944. He was the gregarious one, the musician and the entertainer of entertainers (I mean, quite literally, he brought circus folk home to dinner). And she was the woman who put up with him, and loved him, and made sure that I loved him though I never had the chance to meet him.

But, alone with her grandsons, myself and James McGraw (holla), Nana McKinnon was many things. She was a superb sharp chedder cheese on toast broiler, she made the best scrambled eggs I ever had, and she was the only person you really wanted to be with when that ball dropped on New Year's Eve.

She was also our storyteller. I often say that she told me World War II stories, tornado stories and ghost stories as if they were all equally true, they were all part of the tapestry of our family. When Gabriel Garcia Marquez says that he tries to write stories that pay homage to the stories his grandmother told, I recognize magic realism in the world my no-nonsense grandmother handed me.

But sometimes I forget the simpler things. The stories about movies, the stories about being a child. And that's what a whole series of things have brought back to me this week, and what The Hunchback of Notre Dame really brought home....

Nana was born in 1909, which would have made her 14 years old when she saw The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and she would have been in her late teens when she saw The Phantom of the Opera. She would tell me about that moment in Phantom when the mask was pulled off of Lon Chaney's face, and she would make sure I understood the wonder of The Man of a Thousand Faces. But when she talked about Lon Chaney's Quasimodo, she went somewhere particular. It was a theme that ran through the way she would talk about other movies, even Phantom, but particularly things like Frankenstein. She made it clear to me that these monsters were not creatures to be frightened of but characters to be pitied because of the way society turned against them. Early on, and I'll give Nana McKinnon credit for this, I recognized the monster as someone or something that is not understood and is, wrongly, hated by society.

She had clear personal reasons for understanding this. As much as she was always the champion of my brother and I, always seeing us as the innocents who meant well no matter what we did, she tended not to romanticize childhood. She couldn't. Her brother, Louis, had been treated for a childhood speech impediment by a method that involved cutting away part of his tongue. Ironically, but not surprisingly, this barbaric treatment left him unable to speak clearly for the rest of his life. She had vivid memories of protecting her brother against bullies. In this week of media talk about bullying, I hear her time and again. She would cluck her tongue and say, "children can be so cruel," and I knew she was using that phrase to ride out a flood of terrible memories.

Nana understood the complexities of childhood, and one of those contradictions included her understanding why Louis spent much of his time teasing his sister and protector. One time he threatened to throw a can of worms on her, and according to her, he slipped and did it. She was horrified....but (and this is the important part) she only felt sympathy for him. She'd laugh and say, "He felt so terrible for doing that."

What I recognized tonight, watching Lon Chaney and thinking of Nana, is the reason why I am fundamentally turned off by our society's desire to shelter childhood from the realities of this world. Yes, we all want to protect our children from danger, and we want them to feel safe. We want them to feel carefree, and we want them to have space to dream big dreams. My grandmother gave me all of that, but she didn't pretend the world was pretty or safe. Most of all, she didn't try to hand me any idealized concept of childhood. She knew it was tough..... And, on some level, she knew I needed to empathize with the monster so, in the present or the future, I wouldn't feel so alone.

2010-05-08T09:37:00.000-07:00

For a Mother:

On this mother's day, I can't think about much more than a mother and son (and family) I don’t know how to help. I thought I did, for a while. But now we’ve all been put in a position where we’ve been asked to wait and see, even though time itself is the enemy.

Her name is Karina. Her son, Eduardo Loredo, was 14 years old when I met him. Within 5 months, this athletic kid began to feel ill, was hospitalized and diagnosed with dilated cardiomyopathy. He spent 3 months in the hospital learning that this disease was steadily going to enlarge his heart until it would no longer function. He was told he could get a heart transplant through another facility just 200 miles away.

Then, the story changed. He was no longer eligible for the heart transplant. Though doctors and hospital representatives hinted around about his weakened condition playing a role, the only thing he and his mother, Karina, were told for certain was that he would need $500,000 for a heart transplant. And, initially, they were told that he needed $100,000 to even be put on a waiting list.

Karina and Eduardo have no medical insurance, and he is ineligible for Medicaid in my state because he is undocumented. His father lives in Mexico, and after her split with him, Karina, Eduardo and his little sister moved here to live with Karina's sister. Eduardo's little sister is a U.S. citizen, and the family is caught between countries, neither country willing to put him on a heart transplant waiting list. So, his friends, including college students I work with, started to raise money and awareness, working with national health care and poor people’s right’s organizations. This was just before the holiday season, and we had some hope that a Santa Claus might appear if we made enough noise. We put out a call to people in the medical profession, politicians and organizations both nationally and internationally.

Our collective effort led to about $8,000, but it also led to a circling of the wagons by the very hospital that was keeping him alive. Folks there pulled me aside and told me we needed to stop “all of this media” before something bad happened. They said they were worried about him being deported. The hospital, the Mexican Consulate and other social service organizations began to urge Karina to take her son back to Mexico, although there was no commitment from Mexico that he would be put on a transplant waiting list. On the other hand, there was a letter from a local representative that urged him, for his health, not to leave the country.

Since Karina only speaks Spanish, she has often been isolated throughout this ordeal. The doctors and her other professional advisors only spoke to her through their translators. And although many of us have volunteered to help the family through consultations, only family members who speak very little English have been allowed to attend any of these meetings.

After the holidays, the hospital proposed to give Eduardo a procedure, cautioning Karina that the anesthetic necessary may kill him. Then they rescinded the offer.

That's when the stories Karina was hearing began to change. A hospital in Monterey, Mexico, where the Consulate wanted to send him, said Eduardo didn’t need a heart transplant. Soon, the hospital that originally said they would do the transplant declared that the boy may get better without a transplant. Now, the hospital that is taking care of him is saying the same thing. Karina, and everyone else who cared about the case, was terrified he was being sent home, yet again, to die.

One of the best pediatric heart hospitals in the Western Hemisphere has been reviewing the case, but they have not ruled on it yet, and if he goes outside the country to get a transplant, he may not be able to return. The family could be torn apart, or the sister would have to leave her home in the U.S. to be with her mother and brother. Of course, they would all go in a second if there was a clear chance, but these are just some of the prices they’d pay.

We have all now been given many reasons to keep quiet, including warnings that raising the case publicly was scaring doctors and hospitals away, yet we feel the serious danger in the silence. There could be something to the fact that he no longer needs a heart transplant, and we sure don’t want him to get one if he doesn’t need it. We also don’t want to risk his life based on the ever-changing judgments of people we’ve learned not to trust.

He is stronger than before. While he was pale as a ghost, he now has color, and while he was depressed and prone to tears, he laughs more and more these days. He had been written off when we met him, and today he seems like a young man with hope. It’s hard not to think a healthy psyche could give him a chance he wasn’t getting when he was originally sent home with, at most, three years to live.

This case raises so many questions about the justice of our health care system:

Why are life-saving procedures priced so high that working families can’t afford them?

Is the heart of a teenager not born in this country less important than an “American” heart?

What is a family that doesn’t speak very much English supposed to do to advocate for itself in this country?

What do we do when all of the usual social aid professionals that serve a Spanish-speaking community come to some friendly agreement that a case is simply a loss?

Is a second opinion, a truly independent second opinion, only for the rich in this country?

In other words, is something that should be a right in a just health care system only a luxury for a select few?

And what do you do when you are warned by social workers, as Karina was, that “you shouldn’t bite the hand that feeds you”?

(Of course, what that social worker didn’t say was this hand is also a hand that’s likely to kill your son. For now, it’s holding Eduardo dangling by a thread and threatening to lose its grip if Karina doesn’t play by its rules.)

What kind of a system pledges to fight injustice and, when faced with it, only multiplies the wrongs?

What kind of a system addresses a life-and-death emergency with smoke and mirrors, apathy and cynicism?

For now, we plan a new press release to ask for help finding a truly independent second opinion on Eduardo's condition. Representatives from our little ad hoc group plan on attending the National Council for La Raza conference and the U.S. Social Forum in June to testify on Eduardo's behalf about these issues and to network with others to address them.

Where I have found hope is with students like Will Suarez, Maribel Padilla and their organization LUNA, who were among the first to raise awareness about these issues. I have also found hope in friends such as Monique Maes, a poet and artist, who has worked tirelessly to network with others in the community and keep the attention on Eduardo's case, running down every lead and every source of revenue imaginable.

I have also found boundless hope in Eduardo's bravery and that of his mother, Karina. All of us who have been brought together by this family admire and love this woman who has done everything she knows how to do to help her son. On this mother's day and every mother's day to come, we dedicate ourselves to doing everything we can to address the questions above. And I certainly look forward to a long future working with Eduardo and Karina to find some answers.

My thanks for Miguel Morales for taking the above picture of Monique, Karina and Eduardo, and for all he does with LUNA, the Latino Writer's Collective and on and on.

2010-03-16T07:21:00.000-07:00

Something So Strong

The Uncut Vision of Nicolette Paige

Nicolette Paige is the kind of artist who makes you want to hold your breath. You know something’s going to happen with her, beyond the given that she’s going to write another song, and it’s going to be even better than the last. Despite an impossible economy with a record industry that ignores all rules of logic or integrity, you feel like you can lay money on Paige’s chances at some form of commercial success. She has all the most bankable qualities—she’s young and beautiful, with a full-throated, soulful voice and surprising songwriting chops.

But those bankable qualities are precisely the reason I, for one, hold that breath. They’re qualities ripe for exploitation. She’s a near complete package in danger of being sold as one thing or another that she’s not, and for being bound to far less than her promise. The more attention she gets, the more Nicolette Paige is going to have to fight to be Nicolette Paige.

What I mean by that is hard to precisely define. She’s essentially a singer-songwriter with a fresh style and vision. Musically, part of that freshness is the way she builds her melodies over a strong bottom, often a reggae rhythm. She does love reggae and often jams with local reggae bands, and her new band, the Iries, has a decided penchant for reggae. Yet, she’s not a stylist, and certainly not a genre artist. Her roots are varied and as clearly American as they are Jamaican. As she boldly declares in an onstage rap, she’s a “4 foot, 11 inch, Irish Latina,” and her music can sound like it comes off a front porch in the Delta (though a 21st century front porch, more weary with age and mindful of the ghosts in the wind), and it can sound like it’s catching the call of both a boombox and a tenement saxophone on a city sidewalk. Dreadlocked and playing lefthand guitar upside down and backwards like Jimi, Nicolette Paige is her own synthesis, and that’s what I’m afraid today’s industry is least likely to respect.

(Not that I have any illusions about the industry of yesterday. It’s just that, while Dionne Warwick could once make a hit out of “Don’t Make Me Over,” makeovers are all the rage today. Thank you Simon Cowell and company!)

While I think her band is remarkable, it seems to me that it’s still finding its direction, its way of expressing Paige’s vision. I look forward to that coming explosion of light and color. However, last night, I was lucky enough to hear Paige where her voice still has the most power—alone with her acoustic guitar.

My brother and I caught her set at Howell’s Bar and Grill in Gladstone, and after two previous nights of shows, including a high profile midtown show with the band, this show was under-promoted, so there weren’t many of us there. What made that more than okay, at least for us fortunate enough to be there, was that it allowed for a relaxed Storytellers kind of setting. The stories behind her songs were always compelling, sometimes harrowing and sometimes slight, but they tended to point up what makes Paige’s talent important—her ability to build out of whatever comes her way.

Her set moved in a series of contradictions, contemplating a situation with one song and then flipping the script for the next. “Catherine,” the song that started the set, pleaded with a girl friend to take a good look at an abusive relationship, while “Sometimes Love” followed with a beautiful soul refrain, contemplating the singer in her own romantic quandary.

These songs were followed by a trio of bluesy relationship songs—contemplating a needy relationship, “Mr. Unfortunate”; alternating between bargaining and acceptance in the contemplation of a suicide, “Daniel’s Notebook”; and going uptempo with the death and resurrection of “The Other Side.”

That first set ended with a couple of quasi-psychedelic numbers, “Vanishing Cars” and “Illusional,” which again dealt with contradictions by first reveling in the beauty and then questioning the meaning of transcendental experience. Paige’s second set would remain in this territory, starting with “Back in 1969.” This song, flavored by a Hendrixy chord progression, appeals enough to get away with its simple muse on a little glimpse of eternity shared with friends, but it doesn’t stop there. It ends by tying together a haunting awareness of Vietnam and Iraq. And that underscores what’s so grounded about Paige’s most psychedelic moments. As with her reggae, she uses these elements in such an intimate, clear-eyed way that they avoid settling for the exotic.

Although “Hinun,” the first song I heard her sing, is second to none, I did mean it that each new song she writes is generally better than the last, and her debut of a half written song, “Killers,” drove the point home last night. About what so much great music is about, putting one’s self in another’s shoes, Paige pulled in close to the perspectives of her friends tied up in gangs and others being called murderers as they enter the Aid for Women clinic in Kansas City, Kansas. Though the story behind the song involved her frustration with her friends caught up in turf battles, the song made it clear that she empathized with the complexity of their choices. That’s songwriting as what it wants to be, discovery, and every song Paige played last night felt like just such an unearthed oracle.

An artist only digs up such gems by constantly challenging her preconceptions and being true to her intuition. Last night, with a beautiful ditty of a song, “Fish Like Me,” Paige talked about how small she felt in the world of music, but even that unassuming quality is core to what makes Paige’s art so special. In a world where people are blown up into celebrity based upon cartoonish and often outlandish qualities, Paige works on a smaller scale in three dimensions with lush but rough textures. With her vision, small could be the new big, and I’d never underestimate the heights she could reach, but she needs to be nurtured with respect for her eye and ear and intellect. And I trust she will be. Little fish she may be, but these songs say tougher than the rest.

Note: If you plan to be at Austin's SXSW this weekend, Nicolette Paige plays two sets on Saturday, March 20th, a 1:00 showcase with hosts Go Girls Music at Austin Java, 12th and Lamar and a 4:00 showcase at the Agave Bar 415 East 6th.

2010-03-08T20:03:00.000-08:00

Across the Borders

The singing over the opening bass and synth carried a quaver that sounded a little like American Indian song, but this was clearly hip hop even before Arabic rhymes started cascading one after another. And all of that musical color served as a perfect complement to the slide show Sara Jawhari showed of her trip to the Gaza strip. Yes, these pictures featured a few shots of forbidding walls and wire and rubble, but the spirit of the music emphasize the dominant images, one beautiful child’s smile shining after another.

“I was getting mad during the presentation,” one of the students told me after the talk, “but when I saw those kids’ faces, I felt hope.”

And, on February 22nd, that balance of heat and hope lay at the heart of a very important evening at my school, “Viva Palestina: Report Back from Gaza,” hosted by Jawhari and the Johnson County Community College Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.

The Office asked me to introduce Sara Jo (as Jawhari is perhaps best known around school), and it was, indeed, an honor. Since I’ve been working with the diversity initiative, which takes me out of the classroom and into much more of the day-to-day life of the students around campus, I’ve been incalculably impressed by so many students, but it’s hard to think of many who work as hard to change our campus as Jawhari.

As I said that night, Sara is one of our school’s great unifiers, and Sara is one of our school’s great builders. She has worked as a student ambassador to represent our school to the community, she has worked tirelessly with human rights groups, she’s helped to network and mobilize students from throughout the city, and last year she played a key role in our first Multicultural Night Celebration….

For these reasons and more, many of us were excited when we learned Sara was going to be traveling to the Gaza Strip over our winter break. We were excited because we knew what Sara would do with such a trip. She would use such an experience to raise awareness, and she would use that experience to build and unify others around a compassionate vision.

Palestinian herself, Jawhari plans to double major in journalism and anthropology, and her dream is to travel the world documenting the struggle for human rights. During the Report from Gaza, she showed just how well suited she is for such a task.

Jawhari told the story of the delegation she traveled with to bring desperately needed medical supplies to the Gaza strip. Of six speakers, her presentation was perhaps the longest, but important. She dealt with the many difficulties the delegation faced trying to move through Egypt, finding itself in a police-instigated riot and interminably detained more than once. [For a longer version of that story, see http://www.campusledger.com/news/2010/01/26/aiding-worlds-largest-prison]
But it was also riveting because, as she said and made us feel, “all of my senses were heightened” in the short time she was actually able to be in Gaza.

She told a story of trying to sleep in a hospital on her first night in Gaza and hearing a birth in a nearby room. She tried to explain the magic of “witnessing a baby being born, though not with my eyes.” Knowing the power of hearing a child’s first cry, I found myself thinking that is, indeed, witnessing the event, and it added a beauty that lay at the heart of the night’s presentation, the unending struggle for life in the face of destruction.

And then she told the stories of her encounters with the generous people of Gaza, particularly the children, including an 11-year-old, she described as speaking as if she were 60, and a girl in a pink jumpsuit she would run into twice, whose family would almost coincidentally host her and whose picture, thankfully, would find its way into the later slide show.

She talked about the significance of the ruins in the strip, homes that served generations of a single family and that were completely lost to Israel’s bombs a year ago in December. She talked about the hundreds of stories she heard and how they deepened her perspective, recognizing how many of the efforts to isolate terrorism were horrifically keeping everything including food and clothing out of the hands of the people of Reza, people who were so generous with her and her delegation.

After Jawhari, spoke Mohamed Al-Housiny, a working architect currently pursuing an MBA at KU. Having grown up during the first intifada in Gaza, this experience was not as fresh and raw for Al-Housiny, but his testimony was every bit as passionate and moving. Though he was the first of the speakers interrupted by a frustrated group of Israelis in the audience, he emphasized precisely the key point, that none of us are guiltless when it comes to the kind of oppression that is taking place in the Gaza strip. Knowing his taxes contributed to the status quo, he plaintively and unforgettably declared, “I have blood on MY hands that I can’t wash off.”

His eloquent talk was followed by a passionate testimonial by Omar Bayazid, a Syrian-born business student who moved to the United States when he was 8. After apologizing that he wouldn’t be as eloquent as Al-Housiny, Bayazid also made an unforgettable impression, testifying, “I realized I came to be saved by the people of Gaza—by their manners, by the way they carry themselves.” He told of a farmer who had lost virtually everything, including two children, who maintained his faith saying, “I thank God for every day.”

As powerful as those three talks were, the next three speakers added an entirely new dimension to the evening. They were Melissa Franklin, Marei Spaola and Jodi Voice, three students from Haskell Indian Nations University representing the Comanche, Lakota, Muskogee, Creek and Cherokee Nations. They, too, had been to Palestine with an indigenous youth delegation that brought them together with the Palestinian Education Project (PEP), the Seventh Native American Generation (SNAG), the Middle Eastern Children’s Alliance (MECA) and the Xicana power group, HUAXTEC. Out of these experiences, they formed a group called the 7th Generation Indigenous Visionaries (7thGIV). Many parallels between the experiences of indigenous Americans and Palestinians resonated for them, including the history of genocide, relocation and elaborate systems of control.

Franklin spoke first, and she talked about the parallels between the Palestinian border wall and the walls that have traditionally segregated indigenous Americans, most notably the U.S./Mexico border wall. Franklin also pointed out how Haskell itself was established by the Bureau of Indian Affairs as a way to isolate and eliminate the American Indian as a people. She told of the roots of the indigenous youth delegation to Palestine, which was not desired by the campus and had to begin with meetings in her living room.

Spaola spoke next, talking of the way the Palestinians he met on his trip surprised him with their interest in his background. “Tell us your stories,” they said. “We thought Native Americans were extinct.” Even so, he talked of how knowledgeable even the youngest people he met were regarding world events. And perhaps the most telling part of his story involved a moment when he was filming the Palestinians he was with and someone in an unfriendly crowd hit him with a rock. A young Palestinian told him, “Marei, come on. This happens all the time. Just keep going.” The young man’s acceptance of such hostility rattled Spaola and made him think about how we in the U.S. are generally buffered from such open conflict.

Finally, Jodi Voice closed out the evening by talking about the cultural exchange between her delegation and the Palestinians they met. She talked about how they wanted to come to visit our reservations, and her fond memories of how they all shared music and stories and laughter. “They have a beautiful culture and they are a beautiful people,” Voice said, and she added, “They helped us to heal.”

Voice also did a beautiful job summing up one of the most important aspects of culture. She said, “Everything we do—the songs we sing, the connections we make, the stories we share. This is our resistance.”

After that, she played that song, the Palestinian statement of solidarity with the American Indian, “Resistdance,” by the Refugees of Palestine. As I mentioned at the beginning of this report, that song served to underscore the promise in the children’s faces in the slideshow that closed the evening’s formal events, and that moment gave a sense of hope to the student I talked to after the event.

For me, that spirit of hope as resistance was what the night was about. There was hope even in the fact that the group of Israelis that had a grievance with the presentation stayed long after to talk with the presenters, but that’s not to say they left happy. And that’s too bad, because I don’t think anyone in that room saw the Israeli people as the source of the conflict. It’s just so hard for everyone to get around all of the pain and resentment.

As an American who knows that the restructuring of the world after two World Wars has led to a series of oppressions for which I am certainly (albeit passively) responsible, I wondered how we could get past this concern of the Israelis that they were being blamed for all of the troubles between their government and the 1.5 million Palestinians living on a tiny piece of land 25 miles long and less than 7 miles wide. I think all of the speakers pointed toward the answer—at two poles perhaps Al-Housiny’s emphasis on our mutual responsibility and Voice’s emphasis on cultural exchange as a form of resistance.

What the Report from Gaza said to this participant was that none of us are innocent, but the conflict was also not really between any of us in that room. As with so many issues facing our world today, people are being pitted against each other when it is actually a power structure that is reinforcing the conflict. As long as governments, whomever they represent, are not genuinely after the best interests of the people—the majorities and the minorities—then the political status quo will attempt to blame all of the victims and pit them against one another. It is only when we begin to talk about whose walls divide us and whose interests they serve and, indeed, the cost of the blood on our own hands, that we can begin to get to a strategy by the people, for the people and of the people. I saw and heard such a vision in the Report Back from Gaza, and as with so many times before, I’m thankful for this latest lesson from a group of students to those of us called teachers.

Note: "Resistdance" is one cut off of a wonderful compilation of indigenous peoples' music contained in Snag Magazine, available at www.snagmagazine.com

2010-02-28T20:36:00.000-08:00

Can You Hear Me?

For Dave, on his big Six O!

From the moment Dave Marsh countered the Rolling Stone review of Gary U.S. Bonds On the Line with something of his own from Musician or Record, I knew what I’d only suspected before. When he validated my impressions and even went so far as to isolate Steve Van Zandt’s guitar solo on “The Last Time” and try to explain why that four note progression was changing my life, he told me I could trust myself. While the rest of the critics always seemed to send me the same messages—“you may like it, but it’s not as good as the last one”; “what you like about it is what you should hate about it” and “you should have been around when this shit was really rockin’,” Dave said something else. “You’re here now, and that’s what matters.”

Of course, Dave was records editor at Rolling Stone, and he’d been building up to this message for some time, but that’s the moment I remember it taking. And, though I often give Bruce Springsteen credit for this, it was really part of a scheme that involved the two of them and several other insurgents—they all told me my time mattered, and my voice needed to be heard. I hadn’t lost something by not being a teenager in the ‘60s. In fact, thinking that way was the only real danger. I needed to not miss the value of my own time—a time when hip hop and punk (read everything from New Wave to ska) led a conscious insurgency against the remote superstardom of the late 70s. Soon, I got to watch pop’s former outsiders—Prince and Springsteen most glaringly—and those people dismissed as only pop—Madonna and Tina Turner come to mind—all take the center as the topics of a national debate about what’s pop and what’s not and what matters and what doesn’t like we’ve never seen before. Then there were a string of benefit records—probably starting way back with No Nukes, but really exploding with Band-Aid—which began to actively change music’s relationship to politics.

It would be the great “Sun City” record by Artists United Against Apartheid which would start me writing professionally about music, and it would be Dave Marsh’s Rock & Rap Confidential that would publish what I had to say. I was writing to draw a connection between the cultural apartheid on my local radio and the politics of the record, which barely got played on our college station. Meanwhile, we had racist traditions at our college, including something called Plantation Night, which celebrated fraternity minstrelsy as a sacred tradition at our school. Because of “Sun City,” I became involved with the protests against “Plantation Night.” Because of Dave Marsh, I wrote about it.

Dave had just visited Oklahoma State University a couple of months before this spring event. He taught me a lot during his stay. We talked about the politics of the deconstructionism I was currently involved in with my graduate work, and I would consider his critique in the last major paper I wrote that semester, which I sent to him. After that, he put me in touch with his associate editor Lee Ballinger, and I’ve spent the next quarter of a century writing for their newsletter.

But I learned more during that visit. He gave me a sheet of paper with his home phone number and address, which also had two names on it, Spiver Gordon and Leonard Peltier. Spiver Gordon was accused of vote fraud in an election in Greene County Alabama at that time, and Leonard Peltier, of course, was accused of killing two FBI Agents during a raid on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota.

I was a member of Amnesty International, and Dave was encouraging me to look more deeply into these domestic cases. I did, eventually, wind up working with the Leonard Peltier Defense Committee, and I’ve stayed mindful of the way college activist organizations may be geared to involve students without encouraging them to look at the bigger picture. In AI’s case, they didn’t want international activists getting in trouble in their home countries. And, while that may be helpful in some politically unstable environments, that element of caution meant the powers that be in the U.S. stayed remarkably unthreatened. As a teacher today, I notice the same thing. Many political campaigns that target my students have righteous causes, on the surface, but they ignore the underlying politics of the situation. Because of this, the student organizations rarely target the root of the problem. This is one of the sad ways politics have progressed since the 1960s—better diversionary tactics.

Dave got me thinking about these things—most elementally, that there are not just two sides to a problem but there are many angles to consider. And that would all be well and good (if not clichéd) if he didn’t teach me something else at the same time. He taught me that complexity was not excuse not to take action. He handed me the great responsibility of being awake and alive and aware to the urgency and the complex dimensions of every battle ahead. I’ve never regretted the difficulties of that stance.

I would help form the Kansas City Missouri Union of the Homeless, the Greater Kansas City Coalition Against Censorship, the KC Music Alliance, the League of Revolutionaries for a New America, the national Labor Party and the Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign, all as an effort to act, as best I could, despite the complexity of the battlefield ahead of me. I never drank anyone’s Kool Aid; I just committed myself toward what I believed was right every step of the way. Dave convinced me that was possible.

Now, of course, Dave doesn’t get exclusive credit for any of this. He always pointed me outward toward other longterm revolutionaries and musicians and even back toward my roots with my own nuclear family, a mother and father tied to the Civil Rights Movement and an older brother who has always been a guiding light when it came to music. And he found many ways to remind me, essentially through his way of being, to listen to everyone around me, so I always knew the many doors of music open to me—through my wife, my daughter and my friends.

And for Dave’s birthday tribute, as much as anything, I want to focus on that essential quality he has modeled for me, the ability to listen. He may not always be agreeable, but that means he isn’t patronizing me; it certainly means he’s taking me seriously. He’s given me a big ear, as big an ear as he’s helped me find for music. He’s let me know what I heard mattered, and that what he hears from me matters as well. Even without the wisdom I’m lucky he has, that’s more than I could have hoped for from a mentor and all I’d want from a friend. I feel very lucky to count Dave as both, and I never want this conversation to end.

Today, I teach English, trying to listen hard to about a hundred community college students a semester. I also work on a novel and a book of political essays, both of which Dave (perhaps unwittingly) encouraged. I’m also working on campaigns to highlight the privatization of water in the Rust Belt, the upcoming Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign march from New Orleans to Detroit and the fight for a new heart for my friend Eduardo Loredo, a 15-year-old undocumented Mexican living in Kansas City, Kansas, who would have a long life ahead of him if he only had 500,000 dollars (spare change to some in this unjust system).

And, of course, I can trace all of this work back to Dave. 25 years ago, when he was a decade younger than me and I was just a kid, I got to meet my hero—a man who knew to listen, listen well and never stop listening. I’d like to think I do the same much of the time. It’s not easy, but Dave never fooled me into thinking it would be. He just convinced me there’s really no other choice worth making.

2009-10-22T19:46:00.000-07:00

Something Worse--
As In Very, Very Good

Sarah Langan’s new novel, Audrey’s Door, begins today, October 22, one hundred and forty eight years ago. It’s the birth of New York City as more than a “way station between the wealthy South and Boston’s aristocracy.” In The New York Herald story that opens this novel, Langan aims for the heart of the American dream—something truly new world, something free of old hierarchies and feudalism—and she finds herself with that something worse than a lie that stands as our reality. The decadence that threatens to consume the protagonists of this novel, as it has consumed generation after generation of New York’s most privileged and those who suffer their wrath (and neglect), threatens the ability of everyone here to even dare to dream. On some level, I think that’s what this and every other ghost story is about—the foolishness of hope, yes, but also its necessity.

Langan’s protagonist, Audrey Lucas, has almost no reason to believe she can persevere against the weight of time and history. Sure, she’s a brilliant architect, who recognizes the genius of the maddening apartment building she’s managed to rent for almost nothing. But she’s also obsessive compulsive, and she’s just broken up with a really decent guy, and her mother’s madness threatens to overtake her any hour of any given day. Though ghost stories are, in the end, all about such personal haunts, Langan has done a beautiful job delivering a great big, unique haunted house, a 110th street apartment building called the Breviary, that gives these ghosts room to ramble.

Many things make Langan distinct from any other writer in the horror genre (and I would argue in any genre). Though she writes the wildest kinds of surrealism--and her modernist leaps jump cliffs that would make Stephen King nervous--she earns it with a remarkable attention to the details of people's lives and exquisite, precise writing. Read the first page or two at the store for a sample of that. Even in the alternative voice of the Herald story, the aside regarding "one of Hearst's Negroes" who "took a bullet to the knee" says volumes about the blind prejudice and recklessness that mark this tainted ground.

But I personally love the little things that suggest Langan knows places too few of those writers touted on NPR and C-SPAN seem to know. When she brightens a mean childhood memory with the line, “On an empty stomach, Ball Park Cheese Dogs make the best meal in the world,” she says way more that ties me to this novel than I can adequately convey. In the same sense, in a particularly horrific revelation, she also finds what's funny about the blind impulses that drive the most malevolent of these characters forward: “In killing the superintendent, they’d murdered the only person willing to take out the trash.”

The opening of this book introduces us to that superintendent, a kind-hearted character named Edgardo who just can’t seem to catch a break in his halting conversation with his new prospective tenant. This is one of those beautifully wrought passages, where nothing should work, but it all does. Audrey Lucas is an almost unlikably round protagonist from the beginning—thinking him alternately clueless and lecherous and cruel, but finally realizing that he’s probably a decent guy. That last impulse is the closest to right, and she has a hard time finding it throughout the novel (as we all do in real life).

That’s what makes Sarah Langan so special. She knows what a ghost story is about—isolation and promises doomed by the past—but she also knows what makes such stories haunt deep in the heart. For a ghost story to reach that place, it has to be unflinchingly true in terms of the lives we lead every day.

Langan creates real people who interact in real ways—and Audrey’s boyfriend Saraub; her miserable boss, Jill; and her sad neighbor, Jayne, all ring true. There’s plenty of horror here—both in the real tragedies of these peoples’ lives and in some of the things that happen to them. They certainly all have to face real horror by the time "Audrey’s door" begins to open.

But any writer can terrorize characters and readers on some level. I actually think cheap horror is about as easy a trick as cheap sentimentality. Want to make someone cry? Hurt a kitten. Want to revolt someone? Dwell on that pain. We see tons of that kind of sadism in our popular news media, let alone our horror stories.

But horror fiction has the potential to do something more—something King can do, as can Joe Hill, and as does Sarah Langan time and again. Horror fiction helps us face places extraordinarily uncomfortable, some part of the psyche more disturbing than the fear of pain or death. Audrey’s Door asks us to contemplate the loss of all sense of order and justice and reason, and to compound that with the threat of the loss of individual integrity. What if the only things that gave life meaning became the most dangerous threat to that meaning? What if the things that make Audrey Lucas special threaten to bring her world, and the worlds of those she loves, to an end?

I can’t say much more without giving away a beautiful, rich and complex story. I will say the book's scary, in that shadows crawling way I most love. I also have to say that Sarah Langan has earned my trust. That’s why I’ll read everything she writes and no doubt blog about it. Like any good horror writer, she does terrible things in her writing, but she also makes sure they're all worthwhile. She cares about the people in her stories, and she cares about the reader. That compassion makes her more than a fine writer; it makes her important.

My previous Sarah Langan blogs--
Wednesday, January 23, 2008

A Keeper Indeed

She’s done it again. Sarah Langan's first novel, The Keeper, was more than a great horror debut--it set a bar that sorely seems to be missing in most contemporary fiction, much less horror fiction. Though he can't play a part in a movie without hamming it up, Stephen King's downright understated and realistic on the page. His strength as a writer stems largely from how well he seems to know people and the way his surrealism stays so firmly anchored in the world we know. Langan has this same pitch perfect ear, with a voice and vision comparable to King but distinctly valuable.

H.G. Well's famously said something like 9/10ths of fantastic writing must be rooted in a strict adherence to reality. I think that has more than a little to do with why the best horror writers manage to create realities that feel more genuine than most, ahem, respectable fiction. I know this teacher at the heart of the novel, a woman even her aesthetically disabled physician recognizes as beautiful but who only sees herself in terms of the gap between her teeth, her lisp, and her abandonment by the two most important men in her life.

And then there's the young Romeo and Juliet of the story, Maddie and Enrique. They are not romanticized as perfect kids, but they aren't ridiculed either. They are fumbling innocents from opposite sides of the tracks discovering sex one awkward step at a time. They are sweet, and they are selfish; they are real.That's what makes the horror of this story so shattering.

Figuratively and literally, Langan has mutated the monster that all but destroyed the working class town, Bedford, in her first novel and delivered it as a viral contagion on the more affluent neighboring community, Corpus Christi. And this second trip to the apocalypse is, if anything, a darker ride.For one thing, it's scarier. The Keeper holds a dear place in my heart for the beauty of its vision. But it was more of a ghost story, with that genre's tendency to find hope in a reckoning with the past.

The Missing doesn't offer hope, at least not an unqualified hope. The reader takes heart in the fact that people make it to the end of the book, and in the sometimes very small ways they hang onto their humanity against insurmountable odds. The beauty of this book lies in the quality of the fear. Time after time, sympathetic characters have to face down all but unimaginable horrors, dealing with the predators that have come under the control of this virus. They're as sick as those folks dying off in the first two hundred pages of The Stand, but they're also dangerous--they don't talk right, they don't walk right, they don't move right, and they somehow think as one and know their victim's darkest secrets and fears.

Most horror has a couple of good chills that stand out--Langan keeps them coming fast and furious without such moments losing their power.The scariest thing of all may be just how good she is.

My earlier review of The Keeper:http://takeemastheycome.blogspot.com/2006_10_15_archive.html

Tuesday, October 17, 2006

Where the River Runs Black

Happening upon Sarah Langan’s debut novel, The Keeper, at my corner grocery store has turned out to be a happy accident I can only compare to my “discovery” of Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot at a bus stop when I was 12 years old. And I feel doubly blessed right now to have read The Keeper on the heels of Bentley Little’s The Burning, two horror stories that also happen to be that most exquisite and rare find in the genre—distinctly American ghost stories.

Key to this is that this book begins with a quote from Bruce Springsteen’s “Independence Day” and manages to live up to that song’s haunted naturalism. The characters in this novel are real people living in the real America at the dawn of the 21st Century. Like so many Americans, these are characters who were born just a few decades ago into a society that promised, expected and planned for only the continued economic expansion that defined the American identity up to that point. And now those manufacturing jobs that served as the vehicle for that expansion have been automated away and become globally outsourced--leaving people who have given their lives to the company confused and betrayed and haunted by what never will be.

In this case, Langan focuses on the small town of Bedford, Maine, and a paper mill, but whether we’re from my ex-oil town in Oklahoma or Whirlpool’s lame duck home in Benton Harbor, Michigan, we know the scenario all too well, and that makes this setting universal.Even more important for satisfying fiction, particularly something as subjective as a ghost story, the focus on strong characters underscores the link between such political betrayals and our most personal secrets.

Rich, vivid characters abound in this novel—each with their own heroic qualities and each with dreadful failures that they can’t ever quite shake. All of them are haunted by the Marley family, particularly Susan Marley, a beautiful, preternaturally gifted girl who tries to save her family from itself but winds up all but destroying it and taking the town along for good measure.

Though Langan shows herself to be a writer with an unflinching ability to savage her characters and fling her readers right along with them into the abyss, she has the absolutely necessary counterweight that makes King and only a handful of other writers, never mind writers of horror, so special. She knows people, and she knows them too well to sell false hope or, an even easier trap in our age, to fall into an easy cynicism. Where this book ultimately goes, no reader is likely to expect, but it’s a conclusion that comes from a knowing vision and trust in the integrity of her characters.

Ultimately, what I think I like best about great horror stories and ghost stories in particular is the way they counter our daily inoculations against reflection. The best ghost stories are, almost without exception, rooted in a reflective quiet. That’s that psychic space necessary for those things that have their reasons for not staying buried to come out and play, and Langan delivers a sprawling universe of such spaces. Even during some of the most apocalyptic horrors that threaten to run the book right off the rails in its final third, the prose has a Bradbury-like whisper to it that serves to keep the reader close.

In another song from the same album as “Independence Day,” Springsteen asks, “Is a dream a lie if it don’t come true, or is it something worse?” The Keeper gives us a good look at the maw of that “something worse.” It has to. Some things will never rest until they are dealt with head on.Of course none of this would matter if Langan didn’t do it so well she’s only left me wanting more.Now if I could just get over the genius of such a title for a debut—not only accurately describing the book but the woman who wrote it.http://www.amazon.com/Keeper-Sarah-Langan/dp/006087290X/sr=1-1/qid=1161149105/ref=pd_bbs_1/102-3149483-3364948?ie=UTF8&s=books
Posted by Danny Alexander at 6:48 AM 0 comments

2009-09-02T22:18:00.000-07:00

It’s Gonna Be Alright: The Joey Skidmore Show Comes To Town

I have many reasons to recommend Joey Skidmore’s set Saturday night (September 5th) at the Record Bar. But the one that stands out is the hardest to describe.

For almost two decades, I’ve been trying to figure out what happened that first time I saw Joey Skidmore at Kansas City’s cornerstone blues bar the Grand Emporium. If I saw him before that show (because I do feel I was familiar with him), nothing quite prepared me for that night.

Why? That’s the part I’m grasping for…. Crucial to it was his full on commitment to the stage. Skidmore tends to wear eye-liner with his shaggy dog haircut, and we were just barely into the nineties, so it feels like there might have been spandex involved. (At least back in the day, Skidmore could look like he shared a closet with Little Steven Van Zandt. He certainly embodies the garage commitment Little Steven has come to represent.)

But dress is only dress. What matters is how the performer fills the clothes. Joey Skidmore and his crack band, featuring the wonderful Mike Costelow on lead guitar, transported those paying attention—and it felt like the whole house was paying attention—to a sideshow world of possibility, something magical and mysterious in a way that would make sense to both Ray Bradbury and David Lynch. By the end of the show, the world felt upside down—all the melodrama of that hard-rocking gothic psychedelia became the only reality that mattered.

I don’t think I’ve ever written about Skidmore without citing the carnival. His new album shows his taste for the freak show has hardly abated over the years—whether it’s covering Captain Beefheart’s psycho swamp rocker, “Clear Spot,” or speculating about the bodies in the nightmare run of “the guy in the white jeep” or engaging in a Halloween-ready cover of Buck Naked and the Bare Bottom Boys’ “Teenage Pussy from Outer Space.”

The most disturbing Goth on the record, though, is the title cut, “Ventriloquist Doll.” It’s a lonely post break-up song about a guy, like Anthony Hopkins in Magic, who’s got more of a relationship with his puppet than anyone in the outside world. As if acknowledging the absurdity of the scenario, Skidmore winks by ending each refrain with “he’s only 24 inches tall.” Still, that takes none of the edge off the weirdness.

“Don’t open up the curtains/You’ll let the darkness out,” Skidmore cries against a backdrop of tremolo guitar supplied by the great Eric “Roscoe” Ambel and a ghost of soothing acoustic guitar from the late underground legend Nikki Sudden. In other words, the song is musically earnest as hell--despite the absurdity. And the more I hear it, I can’t help but think about the tension between the persona of Joey Skidmore the performer and the humanity of Joey Skidmore the artist, and the concept of being alone with his ventriloquist doll becomes frighteningly real. (Not just his—there’s no distancing yourself from that one—we all have a persona, and we all have a reality. From time to time, they tend to collide…or worse…intermingle in ways we don’t really want.)

Of course, Joey Skidmore’s fundamental talents lend him a persona somewhat beyond his control. His CD Baby site compares his music to the Stones for its stripped down funky quality, but more telling are the comparisons to Iggy Pop and the New York Dolls, and the “Mood” label for his music is “Weird.” What that means, really, is that he has a baritone that lends itself to camp in a manner embraced by Pop and Dolls lead singer Johansen, and Skidmore indulges that as well (obvious from the titles mentioned above).

But in a world of whiners and screamers and mumblers who are considered hip and cutting edge, it is worth noting that Skidmore actually has a beautiful voice. His bass baritone (somewhat deeper than Pop’s, maybe not Johansen) is as richly elegant as Ambel’s tremolo and Julia Thro’s shimmering lead on "Ventriloquist Doll." And he has a surprising range, which can reach a couple of octaves higher, on the next song “Crow Tree,” for the counterpoint to Morrells’ drummer Ron Gremp's tom tom-like drums and Mike Costelow’s prowling bass.

That song was produced by Sudden, so the basic track was finished before his death. But the next song, “It’s Gonna Be Alright,” written by Sudden, was recorded after his death. In just the way the song needs it to be, it’s exciting and affirming to hear Skidmore sing in his upper register in a way that calls to mind the Swell Maps/Jacobites singer. It’s a fun, rollicking song, with wonderful Hammond B3 organ supplied by Morrells’/Skeletons’ keyboardist Joe Terry.

Despite the death that haunts this record (Sudden died while it was being recorded and Skidmore dedicates it to 7 friends he lost in the two years before it was recorded, including KC’s Ron Rooks and Springfield’s Bill Brown), this song looks the darkness dead in the eye and finds a way to smile. The refrain, “it’s gonna be alright/each and every night” insists on its truth. It works in part because it's by Sudden, who inexplicably lost his own brother years before. And it works because Skidmore sings it having lost his collaborator. It works by recognizing it’s not going to be near right for those of us left behind ever again. Somehow, that contradiction stands and finds its own joy. That strikes me as a Nikki Sudden thing, but no doubt it's a place where Sudden and Skidmore meet.

Sudden’s spirit certainly runs throughout this record. The opening cut, “Pistol in My Pocket,” was co-written by Skidmore and Sudden in Berlin, and they recorded it and the title track outside of London in 2003. With lines like “lost all my money, but at least I spent your advance,” “Pistol” is mythic fun from beginning to end—taken over the top by a final guitar battle between Costelow and Ambel, Terry banging away on the piano in the background. It’s the kind of explosive fun that might close a lesser album, but it sets the mark high for what comes after—and the record, generally produced by the one and only Lou Whitney (Morrells/Skeletons), refuses to disappoint.

In fact, one of my favorite songs is the penultimate, “Wicked Witch,” a sassy celebration of Condoleezza Rice (the record came out in early 2008). Sudden also planned to contribute to the writing of this one. Skidmore e-mailed him the chorus a couple of weeks before Sudden died. The song certainly suggests Sudden’s influence. And its power doesn’t depend on the Bush administration either—the chorus “wicked, wicked, wicked witch of the West” puts the emphasis on the West over and above the witch. The exuberant interplay between guitar and piano at the end of this record brings everything home even before what feels to me like the encore, a high energy live cover of the Who’s “The Good’s Gone.”

That live tease is another reason to go see Saturday’s show, but more fundamental is the chance to hear all of these songs live. Mike Costelow is off on the road with the Jon Joiner Band, but one of Kansas City’s best lead guitarists, Gary Paredes (of the Titanics), has taken his place. Longtime Skidmore bass player Cory Corbino will shore up the rhythm section with the band’s new drummer Don Cleveland.

In today’s fragmented musical universe, Skidmore’s steadfast commitment to his ethos seems all the more remarkable. The promise is there in “Crow Tree,” the psychedelic slow burn he co-produced with Nikki Sudden and Lou Whitney. Part of the Joey Skidmore Band lore is that a murder of crows filled a tree outside their first jam session; I’d like to think that’s what the song’s about on some level. With that in mind, the song promises, “just past the crow tree….you’ll get a surprise.” Joey Skidmore's record suggests that's an understatement.

2009-08-04T20:55:00.000-07:00

Learning How to Love

My great Oklahoma State friend Aileen Murphy has Nikki Giovanni singing her praises on the jacket copy for There Will Be Cats, so Aileen doesn't need me to pretend objectivity about this work. Still, our relationship has only a little to do with why I'm moved to write this blog.

My complex reactions to this book come from many directions. As I read and reread it, I find myself thinking of the many great people I've met this past year after getting involved in our school's first autism conference--ranging from parents struggling to understand their children and raise awareness about their children's needs to teachers and students on the autism spectrum, fighting to be understood and respected.

After all, to respect is to take another look, to take as many looks as are needed to begin to appreciate someone else's window on the world. With autism, this respect is particularly crucial because the objective reality is the same, but our place on the autistic spectrum (and I'm inclined to suspect we all have such a place) highlights a different aspect of that reality. A man I work with says that his son calls himself an "autist," suggesting the link between artistic perception and an autistic vision. Another friend's son loves David Byrne, and he seems to acknowledge that connection in the nature of the art.

I first heard the term Asperger's Syndrome a little over a decade ago when Aileen's son was diagnosed. I, along with most of the world, knew little about Asperger's or autism itself. We still don't know much. But everyone I've met with Asperger's has a unique passion for some aspect of the world most of us don't see, or see so clearly.

That's one reason this 14 poem collection is so important. It strives to see the world Aileen's son has seen as he has grown and learned--from simple childhood hostilities to an ambivalent relationship with his own reflection to a whole series of social rules that make no logical sense to school lessons that have no application to his real life. Sure, it teaches us a thing or two about autism, but it also brings forth echoes of all of our childhoods.

The flip side of which points up what I find most moving about this unique collection of poems--the way it distinctly captures the universal complexities of being a parent. Though many of these poems are from the son's point of view (which takes an act of willed perception crucial to parenting), three from the parent's perspective ("Armor," "Animal Heart," and "There Will Be Cats") resonate with me for all the ways they force me to confront my own parenting--the ways it hurts to perceive your child's defenses, the way such big love can turn "sticky" and "grasping," and the terrible way "the true future is unknown."

As these examples suggest, beyond parenting, There Will Be Cats navigates the many hard lines we all walk to love one another. More important, it captures the many reasons we need that struggle. Learning how to love teaches us to see the world all over again, every day, every time we listen a little harder, watch a little closer and strive for the give and take that is respect.

There Will Be Cats is available at Amazon and at http://www.fishinglinepress.com/

2009-05-15T08:41:00.000-07:00

The Balance of Our Lives

For almost a month to the day, I’ve carried around a piece of paper with four names on it—Cheri Woods, Amy Farrand, Abby Henderson and Kasey Rausch, four musicians, playing April 13th, pretty much in the order they played….

They were playing a Monday night show called the Rural Grit Happy Hour, at a place in Kansas City called the Brick. The Brick’s a great little club, in an old bar that used to be the hang out for the press at The Kansas City Star just across the street. It’s got all the charm of a great dive, with incredible (probably too good) food and a familiar warmth.

After 23 years of music writing, never having this as a day job, and raising a daughter and trying to hold together two successive families over the past 17 of those years, the idea of nightly club crawling to hear someone doing something fresh and exciting tends to lose some of its charm, so, frankly this was a rare night out. A terrible thing to say in front of all of my musician fans whose battle cry is “support your local music,” but I’d developed a fatigue.

I use that word “fatigue” because I had a student in my office yesterday, a former chemist from Iran. He is trying to start his life over in the United States, and he talked about working all night to support his schooling during the day. He said, “You know, with metals, there’s a thing called fatigue, and once the metal develops that fatigue, it never gets its strength back. I’m worrying I’m reaching that point.”

I said something about people being more resilient than metals, but I knew what he meant. It’s the state of the world. The three fourths of us who have jobs that keep our heads just above water are tired, and the water’s deep.

Which is not a tangent—that’s what this great (yes, great) night of music was about….
After all, the idea of the Rural Grit Happy Hour is a sort of weekly acoustic jam session that works its way into a few sets by guest artists. It’s a sort of hootenanny, though it often dips deep into darker moments not as celebratory as that term suggests. Whether the influences are more rock or country, it’s folk music-centered, and by definition that means it’s music about work, struggle, defeat and death. It’s also about fighting the good fight and glimpses of hope; it’s certainly about reasons to keep on keeping on.

I was there that night to see Cheri Woods and Abby Henderson, for different reasons. The week before I had more or less rediscovered Rural Grit when one of the great songwriters (and spiritual forces) of the Kansas City music scene, Howard Iceberg had brought together his terrific band the Titanics to play there. That night, I’d heard a woman perform a sort of acapella music that worked some ground between slam poetry and mountain home porch singing. I don’t think I caught her name that night, but when Howard called up every music writer in town to come down and check this woman out the following week, I figured Cheri Woods must be that woman I remembered.

Abby I wanted to see for many complex reasons. Abby’s husband, Chris, and I have been connected well over a decade, one way or another, at one time as two activists on the music scene who met each other in a bar in Warrensburg, Missouri. Later, he was one of the few friends I hung out with when I was going through a particularly dark and lonely time in my life. I’ve always felt a certain debt to him, but it’s not a matter of guilt; it’s a matter of recognizing a true ally in every sense that matters, someone that makes you feel less alone in the world, a brother.

Though she would have no clue I thought this about her, Abby weighs just the same in my heart. Over the past year, she’s been fighting a Stage III inflammatory breast cancer, and she’s been doing so in a way that has brought together the local music scene to fight for healthcare in a way it never has before. She’s a real hero, in part because she doesn’t see herself as one; she sees herself as part of something bigger.

But I knew she was a great one long before all of that started. The night I met her, at a little restaurant on the Plaza where bands play on Sunday nights, we had a long impassioned talk about women’s role in music. This had been my primary area of interest for about 12 years at that point, and she was schooling the hell out of me. That was one of those conversations when you actually realize you are experiencing a benchmark in your life.

But I’ve never begun to repay the debt I owe to either Chris or Abby. Their fine band The Gaslights put together its first CD at a time when I wasn’t writing about local music, and various arguments I had with the production kept me from saying much about it nationally. When their second album came out, I was recovering from a near fatal heart attack and the knowledge that not only had a 100% blockage stopped my heart, but I had multiple arteries 80 and 90% blocked. This disease was never going away.

By the time I was writing about local music again, even a little, Abby was fighting her own illness. For various reasons, I still haven’t seen them perform together since all that happened. So, when I saw Abby’s name on the Rural Grit playlist the week after Howard’s show, I knew I had to go.

I’m glad I did. Cheri Woods gave a longer set than the week before, and her songs inspired this scribbled note on the back of that piece of paper I happened to have in my pocket: “porch songs, moon songs, poems that turn into songs and songs that turn into poems. Pressing her shoe, stepping, singing ‘I am ongoing even when there is no going on.’”

Everyone that night sang about what it takes to go on. One of the boldest and bravest voices on the local music scene (a woman who once laid me out flat, metaphorically, and rightfully, for botching a half-baked organizing pitch I gave her), Amy Farrand sang a spirited number about a mouse taking on a cat and a dragon woman who dared to take some poor guy’s job.

In a song about a B-Movie cowboy, Abby delivered a line that would resonate throughout the evening, “Some things are real and they’ll never belong in the final scene in the greatest song.” Then she sang about the struggle to find one’s place with the band song “16 Addresses” and another called “Little House on the Market.” She sang a beautiful tribute to her husband, called, I believe, “Christopher.” After that, she delivered a political statement called “Star Spangled Eyes” that felt note for note like a “Masters of War” for the 21st Century. She ended with a song I assume was title “I Say Amen,” about accepting life—as in dealing with the fight you’re given. If I wasn’t kicking myself for missing at least two years of the Gaslights before her set, I was after.

This was followed by a beautiful set by local favorite Kasey Rausch. I was excited to see Kasey again (after probably four years) because a friend of mine always raved about her and tried to get me to go out to see her. This, too, was a beautiful set, with Rausch singing tough but tender songs about her East Texas roots, living in Parkville, Missouri, and sitting on her own front porch, contemplating her uncle’s death.

That last song, like so many others that night, captured the moment. When I looked to my right, I saw Chris and Abby fighting their fight, and to my left sat the great music editor for The Star, Tim Finn, who had lost his wife, restaurant critic Lauren Chapin, to a brain aneurysm just about four months before. (All of this is common knowledge in this neck of the woods or else I wouldn’t use these names.)

But I couldn’t help thinking about this group of us that sat at two tables, with connections that extended in all sorts of directions. Across from Abby, sat Erik Voeks, who made a wonderful record years ago that I reviewed, who later became my record store guy and who now played bass for the Gaslights. At my table sat the music editors for both the city paper and the alternative press (The Pitch) I write for as well as other music writers for both papers, including my two decades old friend, fellow music writer Mike Warren, the godfather to my child.

And that was significant because we felt a little like a family that night, not the nuclear sort that sees each other all the time, but an ad hoc assemblage bound together on more levels than we could count. And one of the things that tied us together more clearly than ever was a sense of our mutual mortality. Those healthcare struggles we’d all been involved in for years (every band plays damn near as many benefits as paying gigs) had become part of our own day-to-day lives. And, as Kasey Rausch sang that porch song in her final set, I was struck by just how fragile and precious this moment was, all of us together, hanging on each note, hanging on for dear life.

I couldn’t wait until I got home that night to write my friend Jenny about Kasey’s performance. Jenny had been a student in a fiction class I taught the semester I had my heart attack, and in those precious moments after I came back to work, I came to appreciate my students more than ever before because they helped me adjust to my new life in more ways than I could count.
One of those who stood out was Jenny, who had lost her own father to a heart attack when she was only 8 years old. With my daughter on my mind, I sought out her insights into what my daughter was going through and what she would be going through if the worst happened. She reassured me a great deal about the choices I was making, and we had other ties. She was an artist and a musician, pretty much on the same career path as my wife. We always talked about getting them together, and I needed to meet her husband, who played in a cover band, and her son, who she talked about all the time.

But those things never happened. We stayed workplace friends, her dropping by the office sometimes, talking on e-mail, always planning to get everyone together some day. And after a year, she’d moved to Tucson, Arizona, where her husband had taken a new job. It seemed like a good place for her—her family having plenty of places to do the kinds of outdoorsy things I knew they all loved to do together.

After I got home that night, I went on Facebook to write her, and it took a moment for me to process what I saw there. Friend message after friend message with the letters R.I.P. I found out from her sister-in-law, also on Facebook, that she’d died from a brain aneurysm two months before. I knew she had high blood pressure, her concern about her own impending heart disease being yet another tie that bound us together, but I always knew I would go before she did. She was just a kid, 34.

So, of course, one reason it’s taken me a month to write this is that I’m still processing that death. The fact that I’m writing this shows I’m not done. But that’s okay. I don’t even want to be. I found a stack of 9 Eels CDs she burned for me, along with her handwritten liner notes, in my desk drawer. I’d never gotten around to listening to them. I haven’t quit listening to the first album, Beautiful Freak, for any length of time sense.

After all, that’s yet another tie to the Brick, the fact that we all feel a little like freaks, and we’ve found our place in music, and in music, we can at least see each other’s beauty and feel some affirmation of our own. And despite the snarky tone of most of today’s music writing, what got me into music, and what characterized that group at the Brick that night, was a deep sense of compassion in music and a call to dream. My writing has always been a fumbling response to that call.

So, I write now about that call a month later—because I don’t want any of us to forget why we started to do what we do in the first place and why the needs that bind us together are so precious. Music has helped me dream of a world where everyone has superior health care and where everyone can do what they do best—whether it’s make music or paint pictures or write or build houses or fix electronics or save lives, or all of the above at once—and everyone can do so while having their physical needs met (clothing, shelter, a netbook in every hand) and while having the freedom to express themselves openly and honestly.

I don’t think it’s too big a dream, and I know it’s waiting to be born. I could glimpse it in the faces around me that night at the Brick, and I could feel it in the music. “Imagine,” John Lennon called, but he didn’t want us to leave it there. “Keep Ya Head Up,” Tupac said, but he didn’t want us to leave it there either. “Think,” Aretha sang, demanding the means to an end. The ties that bind us together, like the straw that binds together the proverbial brick, are the basic tools for working on that dream. We need to see that, never forget it and never stop building. As Jackson Browne once said, “There are lives in the balance,” only the balance of all our lives and those that come after.

Thank you Cheri, Amy, Abby and Kasey, for the beautiful and eloquent reminders.

Check out The Gaslights’ beautiful new single as a free download--
http://www.thegaslights.com/

2009-03-26T15:32:00.000-07:00

Before Lincoln Learned to Read

A Preliminary Reflection on Daniel Wolff's new book

As someone who dreaded going to school for about the first 12 years, and who has now found himself standing in front of two decades of English classes, I'm particularly thankful for Daniel Wolff's new book, How Lincoln Learned to Read. It helps me make sense of the contradictions at both ends of my educational experience. In fact, it begs me to think about the fact that I've spent half of my life as a teacher and half as a student. What better time to make sense of these oddly conflicted perspectives?

I'm only one third of my way through the book, but I wanted to write my thoughts down as I go rather than to try to sum it all up at the end. It's too dense a work for that. In fact, a chapter by chapter response may be the way to go. After all, each story is a life, more precisely a life's schooling, and each chapter is rich with lessons learned in and out of the classroom.

So far, most of it's been outside of the conventional classroom. After all, two of the four characters studied were 18th century women, not meant to be educated. Both were schooled in maintaining a household, Abigail Adams as a manager and Sojourner Truth as a slave. Abigail developed the wit and intelligence to famously go head-to-head with her husband John, the second U.S. President, reminding him to "remember the ladies" in his declarations of independence. She learned what she needed to know from minimal instruction by family members and access to the family's library.

Sojourner Truth learned her own brand of spirituality by building her own church in the woods, and she learned how to read and work white people to bring an end to slavery, the system that had schooled her in everything but conventional instruction. Both of these women gained enormous insights through their exclusion from mainstream education.

Ben Franklin, too, as a printer from what he called the "leather apron" class, received what education he did by the age of 10 because his father thought his bookish nature suited him for the ministry. He didn't take to that. But what he did learn was how to spot pomposity and how to poke holes in pretense (traits still not popular in the mainstream classroom).

Andrew Jackson learned war, in the meanest sense. As a Scots-Irish used to help put down possible insurrections by slaves or resistance by Indians, he essentially inherited the role of a thug. Experiencing the brutality of the occupying British firsthand, he took the role to heart, and though he never learned to spell particularly well, he did learn the art of war, a war of offense aimed at maintaining order in the newly formed United States.

There's so much to talk about in these chapters because each of these men and women--
receiving precious little formal education, much less 20th Century education like the one I got--each of them learned how to do things most of us have never learned to do. Ben Franklin learned the science of printing and Wolff goes into the complexities of this craft (as well as others) to show that this was no small feat--as with housekeeping, as with fighting, as with surviving and helping to bring and end to slavery.

Out of all these folks, Abby and Ben (as the book refers to them) probably came closest to the liberal arts education in which I was eventually indoctrinated. But they gained much of their curiosity through fiction--for Ben, it was The Pilgrim's Progress, and for Abby, it was Pamela. In their own times, this is roughly the equivalent of Springsteen's line, "We learned more from a three minute record than we ever learned in school."

I certainly did, three minute records extending to the horizon and beyond, as well as everything I learned from my father (a manager and sometime theologian), my mother (a movie lover extraordinaire and a civil rights activist) and my brother (a reader, a music lover and a rebel with more than a few just causes).

And then I think of how much I learned from either of my grandmothers, the one who was a one-room schoolteacher decades before I was born or the one who lost a brother to World War II and her husband to rheumatic fever but never lost her ability to tell stories or to give a little boy her memories of what it was like to see the Phantom of the Opera in the silent era in a little town in Louisiana with an organist fighting to maintain the pathos on the screen.

Though I am a teacher, a member of a teacher's union, and I will fight for our rights whenever they are threatened....

I think the teacher should never quit striving to heal thyself. There are some serious sicknesses going around in our educational system, and I don't think they have much to do with the liberalization of the curriculum but rather the aspect of school that is all about teaching the institution and teaching the status quo. A past that is quickly dying used to say that we held the keys to our students' futures. We have long declared that our curriculum is essential to worldly success. But the lie in that statement is akin to all that wishful thinking down on Wall Street. What we need to do is begin seriously talking about what it is that we do have to offer.

I think we do valuable things in the classroom. I feel extremely lucky to get to teach everything I know about writing to students who could use the insights, and I know it works for a sizable number of them. But I also know we've got a lot of work to do, particularly getting over ourselves. How Lincoln Learned to Read is an extraordinarily useful compass to set us in the right direction.

At least the first third is...

2009-03-17T18:20:00.000-07:00

Out of the Darkness

It's no bold claim to say that Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book is something special. After all, he's won the Newbury for it. Everything he does is fascinating, and one of my favorite new authors, Joe Hill, calls it "everything everyone loves about Neil Gaiman, only multiplied many times over."

And, yet, it's not easy to describe what makes this book work. It's a softspoken series of tales involving a little boy, driven from his home as an infant because dark forces wanted him dead (see Harry Potter), and who finds his refuge in a world most people fear--in this case the world of the dead versus a world of witchcraft.

But this book is nothing like Harry Potter, and it's nothing like anything I've ever read before. It reminds me a little of Clive Barker's The Thief of Always only because it is so elegant in the way it plucks just the right notes to evoke childhood, with a great appreciation of a child's view of the world but without nostalgia. In truth, though, the otherworldly wonderland Barker creates has more in common with the world of the Other Mother in Coraline. This book's up to something different.

Although it starts with a shocking series of murders, and the threat of that same danger lies over the entire book, The Graveyard Book isn't exactly horror. Gaiman and Stephen Colbert joked last night that, in this book, ghosts are nice people and living people are the ones that are scary. That's part of it. This is a book about the beauty of a child's fantasy world, and even the beauty of the world that's gone before us, the rich personalities and humor and compassion and stories of those we walk past in a garden of gravestones. The great folksinger Utah Phillips once said that history wasn't in the past. Picking up a rock, he declared something like "This is history, right under our feet." The Graveyard Book is about the wonder of a child's connection to that kind of sense of history, and it argues that those lives that led up to ours matter, even if they aren't lives as they once were.

Because, in the end, that's why the young protagonist, Nobody Owens, has to leave the graveyard. Lives are stored there, but life isn't lived there. He has relationships with the dead, including a poignant, yet subtle relationship with a teenager drowned as a witch. But they are static beings, and he is dynamic. They can prepare him for life, with their stories and lessons (including many that are humorously outdated, but then who didn't get some of those at home?). But he has to take the risk of leaving the cemetary in order to live it.

There's much, much more to this book--including a descent into hell in the arms of goblins, both a loving werewolf and vampire who shepherd the boy through his childhood, and even a romance with a living girl (no, not all living people in the book are scary--well, at least she's no more scary than the average girl). Figuratively, there's even a near Home Alone-style dragon-slaying of the Big Bad and his minions.

But, somehow, the story never seems to overstep a delicately wrought world we all half remember from, if not our own childhoods, our childhood imaginations and our youthful visions of possibility. That's what makes the book so exquisite, the way it captures those half-forgotten worlds, while--and this is the important part--insisting that the real world is out here, in this big old scary world of the living.

The book ends contemplating death, which I would argue any great book--for children or adults--ought to do, but it focuses on what comes before:

...between now and then, there was Life; and Bod walked into it with his eyes and his heart wide open.

Which is exactly what the book prepares the reader to do, and therein lies its greatness.

2009-01-07T06:21:00.000-08:00

THE CONVERSATION WE NEED TO BE HAVING

(in our own heads for starters)

Who Made Who

It’s never gonna come up in any cell phone
conversation

Or anywhere, out loud, across the nation

You’re never gonna admit it

Guys, ego to ego in the corner sports bar

Ladies, gossip to gossip in the hair salon

But deep inside

In your heart of hearts

In your nighttime thoughts

In your time on the can

On the street waiting for the man

America, you know it’s true

You think about how Bill Gates is better than
you

And not just Bill and that Microsoft crew

There’s also BET’s Robert Johnson

That Chicano dude who bought the Angels

Warren Buffett

George Soros

Oprah, Jay Z, Russell Simmons too

Anyone who’s light years above just making
do

Limousines passing in the night

They must have done something right

And you must have done something wrong

To keep sinking out of sight

Like the song says:“I don’t put down the man who’s got a better
hand

‘Cause I know I’m doing the best I can”

But those people on the cover of Business
Week

Are doing better than best

Is it really ‘cause they’re innovators or
because they never rest?

Their golden road was paved way before they
were born

Free labor from the slaves

Free land from the Indians

You could be as dumb as Dubya and build an
empire from that

Mexico and Hawaii

Stolen

Investments worldwide

Golden

You could be as dumb as Dubya and build an
empire from that

Bill Gates and all the billionaire boys and girls
didn’t start at the bottom and pull themselves up

They started at the top of a bloody ladder

The most they did was add a rung or two

And if that ladder gets shaky and they fall?

Congress says “Don’t worry, we’ll bail you out; you know how we do”

Seven hundred billion, and that’s just the
beginning

The top of the first inning

The corporate types are rewarded when they
fail

You get no health care, no job, and time in jail

Seven hundred billion wasn’t the first chapter
in the bailout book

Through boom and bust

With high tech industries and those covered
with rust

We’ve paved the corporate highway with
bonds, tax breaks, free land

In fact, we’ve given them anything they
demand

They make the dollars

But that really makes no sense

Since we paid for it all

Shouldn’t we own it?

We receive no crop although we’ve sown it

Instead

We’re dying at the gates of paradise

Just barely living in a country with more than
enough for all

A country where professional eating is a sport

And fourteen million children go hungry every
day

Can’t we take these funky economic relations
and twist ‘em

Get a new system

Where we can live our days

Instead of just counting our years

It’s time for you to step up and be the repo
man

To do that you need a repo plan

But you’ll never get that as long as….

Deep inside

In your heart of hearts

In your nighttime thoughts

In your time on the can

On the street waiting for the man

You turn history inside out, take the false and
make it true

And think that Bill Gates and Oprah are
somehow better than you

Lee Ballinger / January 2009

2008-12-21T11:06:00.000-08:00

Everybody is a Star

I’ve had a complex semester—tough for me on a very personal level. I’ve been working as an administrator, a program director for the school’s diversity initiative. And while I believe in the cause—to make our campus a more open, inclusive environment that fights for equal rights—I know all too well that if I do my job right, I’m going to hit a wall that gets me thrown out of it. At the same time, I never appreciated how effective I was as a teacher until I spent a semester feeling wildly ineffective as an administrator. This could all change. There are moments that make me want to hang in there, or at least appreciative of this moment while I’ve got it.

One was a recent show put on by our students.

Yes, my school’s “Multicultural Night for Invisible Children” was a fundraiser for a worthy cause, Invisible Children’s Schools for Schools program, which raises money for education in war torn Uganda (http://www.invisiblechildren.com/theMission/schools_for_schools).

But I thought the name of the event had its own resonance. It spoke to the best part of the vision of Invisible Children, as a movement, as well as the vision of my students. It speaks to something beyond charity—solidarity, recognizing the ties that bind a group of “kids” in Kansas to their brothers and sisters in Uganda.

Of course, these kids from Kansas were an international group, at its core lay the work of the International Club, Student Services and the Center for Student Involvement (CSI) in bringing together students from all over the globe. It was that network in the International Club and those that take part in the CSI’s Interclub Council that made this happen. In fact, my involvement came out of attending an Interclub Council meeting. The students told me about a multicultural event that one of our students from Northern Sudan put on in Lawrence, and that jibed with what I knew other students, particulary a Colombian and a Kansas (with parents from Kenya) had called for at our very first Multicultural event this semester. They had both said we needed to have more events where students from diverse backgrounds came together, simply to celebrate that diversity and the community possible in that diversity.

The performance in our Little Theater opened with a simple, natural expression of JCCC’s diverse talents. Many students and faculty had heard one of my former students named Natsuki play the piano that sits in the third floor lounge, and she’d even had her picture in the school paper for it. So, it was unanimously agreed that it would be right to start the evening with Natsuki playing piano. In semi-darkness, she played a beautiful, reflective piece by a Russian composer before taking centerstage and welcoming the crowd. This was followed by students from Costa Rica, Mongolia, Kenya, South Sudan, Gabon, Paraguay, India, and the Middle East (actually Palestine, I believe, but she chose to stand for the region) taking the stage and welcoming the audience in their first languages. Invisible Children leaders Ithar and Calvin then took the stage to emphasize that this was not about the particular regions represented so much as the people from all over the world coming together.

This was followed by a film clip about Invisible Children, explaining its origins and history, as a group of young men’s trip to Uganda has turned into an international network of microeconomic support for Ugandan youth. After this clip, a capoiera group of ten men and women took the stage. This form of martial arts dancing, said to have been passed down by slaves transplanted to Brazil from Angola, illustrated both the struggle and the celebration of the evening. And when the dancers went beyond the sparring to call and response clapping with the crowd and building fever in terms of drumming and individual dances, a high bar was set for the emotional intensity of the evening.

Local singer-songwriter Nicolette Paige then took the stage, not letting up on that intensity at all, but counterbalancing the spectacle with the power of one person, one guitar and (because her guitar cable didn’t work) an entirely acoustic performance. Her first song, “Hinun,” was this unlikely and utterly natural blend of a reggae rhythm, a Native American cadence and her powerful, yet lilting vocals. The second song, “Invisible Children,” was an eloquent reminder of the objective reason why we were all gathered together.

That simple, individual intensity was maintained by the poetry of Costa Rican by way of Lawrence, Kansas student Ignacio Carvajal. Aside from the power of a lone person standing alone at a mic, baring his soul, Carvajal also heightened the multicultural focus of the evening. His poem, about the complex and contradictory nature of his identity, was about something more than the fact that we were bringing together an international group of students but that all of our students carries a diversity that makes them who they are. In that sense, his poem built a bridge between Paige’s synthesis of cultural influences and the next film clip, which used rapper M.I.A. sampling the Clash to detail the successes of the “Schools for Schools” program.

This was followed by four Indian men and four Indian women (from our new Sikh organization, KSEWA) in colorful traditional costumes doing the Punjabi form of dancing, Bhangra. The free flowing choreography was beautiful in and of itself, and the rhythms were very upbeat and exciting. But like the capoeira troupe, the Bhangra dancers didn’t let up until a certain fever pitch was reached, an additional young girl taking centerstage, two of the female dancers spinning each other in circles on one side of the stage and another male dancer breakdancing stage-right. For me, that breakdancing was key—it took things up a notch, and it went beyond traditional differences to the wonder of cultures mixing.

At that moment, Purevsuren, from Mongolia, read two poems, one about identity and one about Invisible Children. Her identity poem transcended identity politics by embracing all identities—focusing on the idea of a greater whole that ties us all together. Her poem about Invisible Children boldly took on the persona of one of the Ugandan children and expressed her yearning for peace.

This was followed by a fashion show that became one of the great unifying moments of the evening. Northern Sudan followed by Southern Sudan (peacemaking central to the whole event), Brazil, Iran, Palestine, India (one man and one woman model), Colombia, Kenya, Ethiopia, Dubai, Mongolia, Nigeria (3 models, one man, two women, one in a floor length evening gown, just about stealing the show), and one from Moldova. Again, the cultural contexts varied—some wore traditional, somewhat conservative dress, while others wore everything from a carnivale costume to daily casual wear to rural chic.

As the final two bands set up, Ignacio and Calvin ascended the aisle stairs on both sides of the auditorium, reciting the tale of the abducted children forced to fight for the rebel armies in northern Uganda. This was punctuated by barked orders from a military leader in the darkness above, actually the student doing the lighting for the performance. When the tale, a tandem poem really, was finished, Ithar descended the stairs Ignacio had just ascended, reciting a poem of (a universal call for) peace.

This was followed by an Ethiopian trio, featuring two former JCCC students. They played two beautiful spirituals, one with a traditional bowed instrument, and the second accompanied by keyboard and guitar. This performance worked its way from quiet reflection to an infectious sing-a-long.

The show closed with the four person group, Tambo, led by Colombian singer Carolina Deardorff, appropriately one of the people who first suggested such an event. The band was playing against a few obstacles, including a hurt hand that kept one guitarist from being able to play, as well as sound problems that kept the drummer playing softly so as not to overwhelm the band.
But none of that mattered. The music was beautiful, starting with a gentle ballad, “Invierno,” by a musician from Baja, California. Before the end of the second song, a Gloria Estefan cover, everyone who performed took the stage clapping and singing along.

Although I recently made a point (in a campus e-mail) of naming the names of most of the people who took the stage at this moment, particularly the students who met with me from 3-4 every Monday to make this thing happen, I feel hesitant to do it here. It feels like a violation of privacy, so I've only used first names on those who don't have some reputation as a performer around here. But all of them have inspired me more than I can say, and I think what’s more important is that they have inspired each other many times over.

I don’t see an event as an end in itself, although I know there’s some value there. I will be happy when I see us build from here. But I did recognize this moment of celebration, even in some of the chaos before everything came together, as one of those moments that I should soak up and appreciate because it would stay with me forever, if I’m lucky. I think many of the students feel the same way, and that’s the deep significance of the event. Everybody showed and proved they were stars on this night, and I can’t wait to see where they next turn all that bright, revealing light.

2008-12-04T12:41:00.000-08:00

A Little Help From Our Friends

We live in a world of corrupt radio, concert ticket price-gouging, product placement in songs, Wal-Mart censorship—not to mention war, poverty, corporate bailouts, and the collapse of our health care system.

Music keeps us going through it all. Music makes us feel good. Music carries us past the stress. Music inspires us. Music makes the connections between people that give us hope for the future. Music insists that a better world is possible and music makes us believe that this can be true.

Rock & Rap Confidential is in the middle of all this, not just reporting but making those connections. We can do this because our musical taste has no boundaries and because we have a foot in every camp. We—RRC’s staff and its readers—are on this journey together. Our love for music and our desire for a better world bind us together.

RRC has never accepted advertising. Now we don’t even charge for the publication, which has enabled us to reach a broader and steadily growing audience. Every once in a while, we could use a little help.

Won’t you please contribute what you can to RRC? $25, $50, $100, $250, $1000 (or any amount). You can make your contribution via PayPal.com (send to rockrap@aol.com) or send by regular mail to RRC, P.O. Box 341305, Los Angeles CA 90034.

Thanks for your support. Thanks for our past, our present, our future. We really appreciate it.

Enclosed please find….

$25____$50____$100___$250___$500___$1,000___other____

Please make checks out to RRC and send to RRC, Box 341305, Los Angeles CA 90034. Thanks!

Your Name____________________________________________________________

Address_______________________________________________________________

City__________________________________State________Zip_________________

Email Address__________________________________________________________

Contact: rockrap@aol.com

2008-11-07T05:44:00.000-08:00

Wonderful World

I've never been more proud of my Kansas City community; I've never felt more like a patriot.

http://www.kansascity.com/entertainment/music/story/874646.html

http://www.pitch.com/2008-11-06/news/a-picture-of-hope-abigail-henderson-fights-cancer-and-rallies-musicians-for-health-care/

The names in these stories, including the by-lines, are on the short list of my heroes right now.

If you live around here and you can make it down to Davey's Saturday night, I'd love to see you there.

Tonight, maybe you could check out my wife's art show at Ottawa University. It's a thing of beauty, and she's on that list as well, for many reasons I'd love to give you in detail some time.

More about her show:

http://laurenalexanderart.blogspot.com/2008/10/framework-sneak-peek.html

I feel so lucky to be in this place, at this time, among these people.

DA

2008-10-07T11:02:00.000-07:00

Where's the HBO Series?

One of the benefits of my new job as diversity program director is that I get to do things like hold book discussions about books as remarkable as Sam Quinones’ Antonio’s Gun and Delfino’s Dream. Quinones is a Los Angeles Times reporter now, but he spent over a decade in Mexico covering immigrant issues. This book is a rich series of profiles of immigrants north and south of the border set to belie most of the simplistic notions Americans have about border issues and the people involved.

We talked for over an hour Friday, a little about every major aspect of the book, starting with the two ideas in the title. Antonio is a character who crosses the border to get a tool he needs to solve a dispute back home; once he has it, he comes home. Delfino is a character who continuously inspires the people in his hometown of Xocotla with his punk stylings, his break dancing and, eventually, his ability to fund and build housing.

But he can’t find the place for his talents in Mexico, so he keeps returning to the States despite his desire to return home. In both Antonio's and Delfino's cases, Quinones shows how the migration of Latin Americans to North America has little to do with wanting to be “Americans” and a great deal to do with the limits of the economy back home. If anything, the country that is losing out is Mexico because the best and brightest of its poor and working classes flee the lack of opportunity at home.

One of our discussion participants, from Puebla, Mexico, talked about the other side of the story that is hinted at by the book. How people like Mitt Romney came down to Mexico and made their fortunes before returning to the states, or how the maquiladoras have been undermined by trade with China, so what economic opportunity there once was for the lower classes has been lost to the globalized economy.

One participant talked about how she was impressed by the industry that went into the black velvet painting business described in “Doyle and Chuy Wrap Juarez in Velvet,” and many of us testified to how the black velvet craze of the 1970s affected our hometowns and we never guessed at the rich, complex story (involving Palestinians from Canada trucking in such contraband) behind it all. That chapter, like the chapter about an opera house that sprung up in Tijuana, of all places, underscored the way people will create the culture they really need out of what’s available to them. Tijuana developed a relatively serious classical music scene, and Juarez managed to raise up a number of very talented artists who gained their initial training in the art of black velvet painting.

Another chapter that was a favorite for discussion was “The Saga of South Gate” which showed just how dirty politics could get when a Mexican-American politician exploited PRI tactics, but we also noticed the similarities to our own current electoral system. The inspiring part of that story, as with each of these stories on some level, was the way people found their way to overturn the corrupt political system that ruled their lives. How did they do it? House by house discussions, taking the time and offering people the respect of deeply-involved political discussions, something all but missing in our dominant culture.

The book was initially picked by our diversity group because of “A Soccer Season in Kansas,” which described how Garden City, Kansas came to rally around its almost all Latino team, made up of workers from the IBP plant (owned by Tyson foods). In what we think of as the most reactionary section of the state, white and brown had some rough transition, but found a way to come together for the sake of their team and their community. Also, out of the team success, several players wound up being the first in their family to go to college, and even some of the soccer players’ mothers went back to college to encourage their children. Also, a women’s soccer league formed after the inspiration of the male team, and they would come to be the champions of future seasons.

What we all agreed was that these warts-and-all stories of an America in transition offered a vision of a new America being born. And it’s a hopeful vision. It asks us to reckon with some tough questions regarding the new globalized economy, but it suggests people can rise to the occasion, time and time again, if we have a little faith in our potential.

2008-09-23T09:49:00.000-07:00

Watching the Wheels Go Round

It will be interesting to see how long Democrats fight to stop “golden parachutes” and to help out homeowners... because they’re preparing to fall in line, as anyone who’s been expecting this bailout knows they have to. I’d say we have an almost unanimous approval of the buyout plan, give or take some token concessions, by midweek.

I hope that the American people start thinking about when and why Congress comes together, almost unquestioningly—after 9/11 with the Patriot Act, two calls to war and the S&L bailout, before the largest bailout and market restructuring since the Great Depression--not to save the rich individually (they may well cut those golden parachute strings), but to save the power structure. That’s their job.

But I think we could redefine the job. I think we could demand that our pooled taxes guaranteed healthcare for all and an equal quality of education, including higher education, for all.
Senator Bernie Sanders called the current situation “socialism for the rich and free market capitalism for the poor.” That’s really been the way for over a century, and despite a few decades of growth, the net result is that the rich have gotten richer and the poor have gotten poorer. When are we going to re-evaluate our priorities as a country?

At the beginning of the decade, the Labor Party proposed a $168 billion dollar transition plan to provide health care to all Americans. It's still the best plan anyone's come up with, and it costs about a fourth of what we're about to fork over to save the stock market.

A friend of mine recently pointed out that the government could have paid for all of the foreclosed houses in 2007 and 2008, and the cost wouldn’t match what the loan guarantees of the past few months.

That was before the $700 billion dollar measure that will pass in no time at all.

If we can't immediately begin to rethink health care and higher ed for all, just in the name of need and fairness, could we at least begin to recognize faith in the free markets for the mysticism that it is?

2008-08-28T18:35:00.000-07:00

My Take on Springsteen in KC--

http://www.livinginstereo.com/

2008-08-22T13:31:00.000-07:00

Holly Gleason's one of those folks who helps me believe in the promised land. Be sure to check out her webpage below. DA

Holly Gleason writes:

The Highways Jammed With Broken Heroes--Springsteen Tears A Hole In Music City

It's not much of a stage, no production, basic lights. As stripped down as a hockey rink stage can be. Lean, stark, unadorned. When you are Bruce Springsteen, though, what do you really need? Armed with the mighty, mighty E Street Band and a catalogue of songs that sweep the vistas of the flatlands, the flyovers, the blue collar, middle west and heartland, the bravura glory of a man in his element is its own juicy reward.

For it might be hard to be a saint in the city, but not on that stage or the backstreets, in the shadows and the cracks… those places you won't ever be found, not because they're for hiding, but because no one cares to even bother looking there.

And Springsteen's audience? They are people who deserve a superstar who is faithful... who knows about being a skew, a bar code, a number… who understands the notion a pair of hands without a face - at a time even those hands don't seem to matter because the works been sent to cheaper places. They need someone who is really, truly in touch with the struggle to get by.

At the core, it's not so much about junglelands or magic rats, tramps and gypsies, but those poor stiffs punching a clock, punching the empty handed destiny dealt'em. Because, ironically or not, what little bit that is, it's all they got. Period. End of story. If there's enough story to go around.

That's the beauty of Bruce Springsteen: he is the commonest man with the biggest heart, the broadest shoulders, the deepest sense of grace in the degradation of realizing the American Dream isn't one size fits all… and it's shrunk to where most people can't hope they'll ever wiggle their way into it.

But Springsteen's hold goes much farther back then that.

Growing up when desire was a band-aid you wanted to tear off clean, rip it away to feel the glorious relief of gone, there he was. Moaning. Witnessing. Creating a void you crawl into gasping, hoping to rub against whatever that was enough to be released.

“She's the One,” with its lyrics about “her secret places that no boy could fill… with her hands on her hips and that smile on her lips, because she knows that it kills me…,” tells you everything you need to know about the tension and the need for culmination. Not necessarily carnal, but recognition, because after all, “French kisses will not break that heart of stone…”

Onstage at Nashville's Sommet Center, “She's the One” crawls out of the very Bo Diddley beating/”Not Fade Away” expansion “Mona” where he gives it up for the love he's after. As sweat-stained as that hunger is, “She's The One” doesn't come merely from the urgency of hormonal centrifugal force, but more the recognizing the potency the promise of erotic potential delivers. It can be is so much more, that suspension of the unfilled on the brink. This is a revelation from someone who's been there, understands, surrenders, even admires that which overwhelms him.

That wisdom transforms much of the Springsteen cannon. The bolt'n'tumble breakneck nature of what was is now a slightly slower habitation of lives lived to their edges. In the brazen jauntiness of “Spirit In The Night,” Clarence Clemmons' sax honking and Roy Bittan's striphouse piano taunting the listener, it becomes the recollection of lost nights with vivid detail in the crossed headlights, the lake parties and exploration of limits sexual and otherwise. It is a survivors' tale savored, and it fits him like the jeans that hang off those well-oiled hips.

Make no mistake: Bruce Springsteen is a sex symbol. As Muddy Waters howled, “I'm A Man.” And Springsteen is. In full. Indeed. He doesn't pander, doesn't do anything except luxuriate in the screams, the signs - including a “Boys In Their Summer Clothes” emblazoned with a shirtless, quite cut-offs-sporting early 70s Bruce mid-baseball swing - and the idea that he's strong enough to be there, to stand tall, especially to like everything about the other sex without losing anything about musky virility.

That strength is an underlying, unspoken truth of Springsteen's longevity. Yes, his shows come on like a locomotive: ever-pumping, never slowing, never pausing. The momentum builds, builds - and you hang on, maybe exhale when he slows it down, but even then, the blaze is white hot and slow burning, so throw too much oxygen at the flames at your own risk.

Talking about a man who's “from here,” who'd cut a “few of my songs,” he offered they might not quite “get it,” but promised they'd head straight into something the always rapt, wholly powerful E Streeters knew. Then with an attenuated torch groove, Bruce Springsteen then moaned, “I keep my eyes wide open all the time…”

Embracing Johnny Cash's signature song of fidelity in the face of temptation with an almost Billie Holiday-esque ardor, it was bewitching. Suddenly, a song known to all turned into something even more aching, more taut, more consumed by its own intensity.

Without missing a beat, merely turning on a few chords, Springsteen neatly folded into his own consumed-by-want “I'm On Fire.” Oddly quiet, almost naked as a performance, it was a confession, but it was also a cage… a cage surrendered to if only for the hope of quenching that which was raging in his veins, his brain, his reason for being.

To own that possession beyond self so openly is to understand the truth so many deny. In a world where people strut and posture, Springsteen does neither. He shows up, shows you where these people are, where he is and judges nothing more than unburnished honesty. Instead, he honors that truth by giving the fallible their clay feet, demonstrating what frailties and dam breaks are made of.

So when “The Rising” rises, almost shining, it is a reminder of our better self. Yes, we are base, slaves to the lower instincts, but also made of a greater goodness. It is just a matter of not losing site of that fact, embracing it, turning it up so that becomes what defines us.

What defines us is the decision. It is a theme that goes unspoken, yet permeates much of Springsteen's career. To hear “Radio Nowhere,” it is not the venom of a man railing against a delivery system that is failing him, but rather a protesting cry of the squandering of something that once - blue light shining - gave definition to his prowls, his routines, most likely his breathing.

It is the same stand down that gave “No Surrender” its buoyant sense of “we're all in this together.” It isn't that the state of the nation isn't oppressive, it's that we all know - and in knowing we can come together to rally each other to higher ground.

That common field of lost souls and down trodden, too, is not some sad sack altar call. With the zeal of a carny preacher, Springsteen canvassed that stage, inquiring if everyone was ready to go, “cause if you aren't ready to go, you can't get there…” From such a no-nonsense split rail exhortation, it was about jettisoning the worry for the revelry at “Mary's Place.”

For all its feel good good feeling, “Mary's Place” isn't just about blowing it up on Saturday night. Yes, his audience needs -- perhaps more even than the have plentys -- a let-off-steam moment, but they need the permission to believe they're not suckers for thinking good honest work and telling the truth still matters. That is where the true pivot of letting go turns: knowing the values you hold are an anchor to ground the spin-out.

See that's the deal about the music that's built to last: there's more to it than the euphoria. Ahhh, euphoria, you could see it on his face when the band undulated through a raucous “Good Rockin' Tonight,” remembering every high time they had as kids. But memories are things that are gone, the endorphins released are gonna pass out of your bloodstream; in the end, only what you believe remains.

It's what made the accordion-draped haunt of “Youngstown” such a jaw dropper early in. The pain was raw, torn, palpable. This is not a new song, but it is more current right now. It's a chronic crisis spreading because no one paid attention… no one wanted to know… they shipped the jobs away, assuring there'd be plenty… until suddenly there weren't.

In the tangle of titles that further embroidered that notion - “Loose Ends,” Last To Die” - the devastation gets demonstrated. If it stopped there, this would be “the drowning,” but it doesn't. It never had, it never will, which is why the faithful still show up. The upper risers that weren't full a testimony to the impact on the disparity of tax breaks for the wealthiest and the lack of trickle down and rising prices for those below the comfort line.

For them, it's not even a raft, but a life jacket, the straw to float them til they can get to higher ground. It is a rallying cry to fire the beaten up for survival, and it works.

All these years later “The Promised Land” is a fist in the face of those who would take that last bit of respect away, the ones who'd strip what this country stands for bare - because you can raid the economy, sell of the debt, buy a Hummer and pretend that we're prosperous 'til bankrupt, but you can't wholesale the people. What they believe can never be taken from them, which is what makes the once youthful defiance of the declaration “I'm no boy, no, I'm a man… and I believe in the Promised Land…” into a refusal to let them trade away your faith in what you stand for as an American.

It was an equally impassioned “Badlands,” an outlaw song of sheer rebellion, the kind that brews where there's too much room and not enough opportunity. If the fervor that ignites it - “Gonna be a twister… to blow everything down… ain't got the faith… to stands its own ground…” can translate for a demoralized less-than-land-of-expectations to a place where we can perhaps create changes that give people back their more meaningful humanity.

For a man who truly doesn't stop, the amount of meaning he packs is deceptive. It is concentrated, but it is close to three hours of full-tilt witness to who we can be - if we will think beyond ourselves. The deeply sad “Long Walk Home” - a song that tinges with the saddest kind of beauty in the wake of the recent passing of core E Streeter Danny Federici - is tempered by that same power of owning where you are and what you're feeling.

As Little Steven, pirate scarf tied across his head, eyes sparkling with the vigor of the truly alive, takes his verse, there's a slight roughness to the voice that cuts through one of Springsteen's prettiest melodies the way a lone street light dissolves the abyss of the night where it falls. What could be an elegy becomes a song of consideration - of what we lost, what we can maintain, how we came be more right here where we are.

If “Long Walk Home” suggests one thing… it's that right here, right now is all we have. For the man who proclaimed in the set culminating “Badlands” that “it ain't no sin to be glad your alive,” this is the aware person's ownership of knowing that truth in a far fuller way.

Not that this was one long sermon on the bandstand. No, Bruce Springsteen is above all a rocker. He comes to swerve and thrust and bring his fast ball.

With an encore that opened with Magic's seasonally appropriate “Girls In Their Summer Clothes,” a song where innocence and invisibility give you a whole other set of reasons to believe, it was a slalom of the fan's perfect merge of everything they would ever want: “Thunder Road” straight into “Born To Run” with an - in honor of Joe Strummer's birthday - Clash-fueled revved up “I Fought The Law” and a free-for-all “Rosalita.”

What was once a song for young adults realizing their life as youth is fading, “Thunder Road” played to a very basic set of insecurities once upon a time. What's amazing is how much the quest for connection, the brittleness of being alone and the mocking way unattainable standards steal that right now from you resonates even louder, echoes even further inside your core as you grow up.

When Springsteen intones, “Don't run back inside, darlin' you know just what I'm here for…” and “You can hide neath your covers, study your pain… waste your summer praying in vain for a saviour to rise from these streets…,” it's a gentle enjoinder to not lose your life, not merely the quest for a flesh connection. Yeah, sex is part of it, but it's also to not have your moments washed away.

With the lights ablaze, it was urging a friend as much as a paramour, someone who sees the future and knows these moments may be the best there is. It's what gives the press-down and gun-the-motor rumble of “Born To Run” such gusto. Many of the people there - graying hair, pleated pants, 30 pounds or more past their prime weight and not in shape - came to believe, even for a moment.

What they walked away with was a new energy. Not just the momentary rush of being in that moment, but the idea that it is worth the fight, it is about digging in. If “Thunder Road” is the ghosts of the ghosts of who we were, a well-worn naugahyde lounger that is cracked and peeling from the years of sweat, smoke and sagging flesh, “Born To Run” is the super-hero self, the one that declares “We can.”

And in empowering people, Springsteen reminds us that people do have the power, that making a difference doesn't mean sour and overly serious. You need to pay attention, to be conscionable, to speak up and honor what you know is right… It's what gave the kerosene to “I Fought The Law”: the beat may've been the matches, but it's the righteousness that burns.
Still, there has to be fun, a reason to live, a bit of cotton candy dissolving on your tongue as the ferris wheel ascends. It is momentary, but it is saturated and adrenalin-fueled. Like that first thrashing make-out session with the one you could never have or the big deal that you close when everyone said you couldn't.

That is what “Rosalita” was, is and shall ever be. The defiance of “make you mine,” the Romeo and Juliet teeter totter of the parents who don't like the rocker - and the rocker who just doesn't care. We've all been there, blown through it, savored the fruit right off the vine.

Three chords and a cloud of dust, Dan Baird from the Georgia Satellites - the Replacements Southern cousins - would say with that tilted ally cat grin. Indeed. That's what else Bruce Springsteen knows: leave'em gasping. Not in shock, but in joy - because in the end, all we have is that moment. Think, yes. Feel more. But especially rock.

www.HollyGleason.com

2008-08-13T08:04:00.000-07:00

NOAH Scandal in New Orleans=Good News

Daniel Wolff writes:

You'd think it was depressing news. Today's New York Times reports that the FBI has raided the offices of NOAH: New Orleans Affordable Housing. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/12/us/12orleans.html?_r=1&ref=us&oref=slogin

Seems like the $3 million in block grants the agency has paid to contractors to gut and remediate houses was eaten up by corruption. Of the 20 contractors the city approved for the work, only 7 passed the requirement of being "in good standing." One who got paid well was Mayor Nagin's brother-in-law.

And a local TV station's investigation showed that much of the work listed in NOAH's records was never done. Either the houses were untouched or, in some cases, there were no houses at those addresses at all; the work had been bogus.

What's the good news? What prompted the TV investigative work and the uncovering of the scandal was a community activist, Karen Gadbois. Gadbois did the basic footwork that the Times-Picayune and the other media had neglected: she got the lists of houses that contractors had been paid to fix up, and she went and looked. And took pictures.

Gadbois' point is that the NOAH program betrayed people's trust and indicates a city government (and media?) that isn't actually interested in recovery. Here's the original TV reporting that broke the story.

http://www.wwltv.com/video/news-index.html?nvid=265515&shu=1

To me, the story's about the power of activism, the possibility of making a difference despite the system. Some heads are gonna roll because of this, and Gadbois gets a bunch of the credit.
The other good news is that this scandal is helping to reveal exactly how negligent city officials have been and are. Mayor Nagin's response to the TV show linked above? “How is that report helping this recovery?” Nagin asked at a July 22 press conference. “It is not, and it's hurting this city, and you need to stop it.”
Far from stopping, Gadbois and the (reluctant?) media have pushed it into national news.
Here's the story that describes Nagin's response and attempt at evasion:
http://www.wwltv.com/topstories/stories/wwl072808tpzurik2.110ee49b.html
Finally, in the last week, Nagin appeared before the city council and admitted there were some "discrepancies" in what the agency paid for and what actually happened. Nagin's repeated use of the attack mode -- blame the victim -- is revealed for what it is. And maybe his threats won't be as effective the next time he tries to bluff and bully his way out of real charges.
Corruption in New Orleans government doesn't strike me as big news. Hell, it's kinda assumed. But one of the themes Gadbois keeps striking is that the city has recovered because residents damn well decided it had to. And returned, rebuilt, recovered with little to no governmental help and considerable governmental interference. A bunch of the houses on NOAH's list did get gutted -- by the owners, not the agency.

It's a story about power. And the possibility that it might just be in our hands.

2008-08-09T22:52:00.000-07:00

As If I Could Forget....

Went out to see Howard Iceberg and one Titanic (the wonderful guitarist Gary Paredes) playing an acoustic set at Prospero's Books tonight. It was about as intimate a setting as you can imagine--maybe 30 feet from door to mics (maybe) and only room for a couple of dozen people, who were all there.

I never forget how great Howard is, but there's no way to fully remember that magical place his music can take you until you are actually experiencing it again. Every old song reminded me why it was my favorite of his songs, until the next one came along, but I fell hard and fast for his new ones. Check out "Disconnected" here--www.myspace.howardiceberg

Also, I did some reckoning with my own long history writing about KC music in a story for the Pitch this week. You can check that out here--http://www.pitch.com/2008-08-07/news/rock-never-dies-the-pedaljets-prove-that-sometimes-it-just-needs-a-20-year-timeout/

(And I'll try to remember most people who check out this page are looking for the music; that is the one that brung me.)

Danny

2008-08-08T10:24:00.000-07:00

Operation March for our lives:

Minnesota Statewide Caravan

On August 1st at 3:30 PM at St. Paul City Hall (15 W. Kellogg Blvd.), the Poor Peoples Economic Human Rights Campaign will launch "Operation March For Our Lives." Operation March for Our Lives will be a statewide caravan through Minnesota to collect economic human rights violations documentation. The portrait of poverty that this documentation paints will be presented at the Minnesota Truth Commission at 2PM on August 30th at Sabathani Community Center on August 30th at 2:00pm.

We are recruiting and training Human Rights Monitors to collect economic human rights documentation. Human Rights Monitors will be hosted by local communities and will march and sleep along the roadside. We're encouraging Minnesotans to watch our website and to visit us along our caravan and to bring us your stories of trying to pay for healthcare, losing your home to foreclosure, high unemployment on your reservation or how you didn't have enough food to feed your children this month.

Operation March For our Lives will also serve as a vehicle to place representatives of Minnesota's various branches of government & opinion shapers on notice about their obligations under human rights treaties.

If your interested in helping to host the marchers or if you would like to join us on the march, please email us at Louieppehrc@yahoo.com or call our office today at 612-821-2364.

Here is the tentative route for the Minnasota Statewide:

Aug. 1-2: St Paul to Duluth

Aug. 3: Taconite

Aug. 4: Hibbing

Aug. 5: Grand Rapids

Aug 6: Cass Lake

Aug 7: Leech Lake

Aug 8: Bemidji

Aug 9: Red Lake

Aug 10: Red Lake Falls

Aug 11: Crookston

Aug 12-13: White Earth

Aug 14: Detroit Lakes

Aug 15-16: Moorhead

Aug 17: St. Cloud

Aug 18: Waconia

Aug 19: Owatonna

Aug 20: Austin

Aug 21: Rochester

Aug 22: Minneapolis/St. Paul

2008-08-03T14:18:00.000-07:00

This Magic Moment

REVEREND JESSE L. JACKSON
RAINBOW PUSH SATURDAY MORNING FORUM ADDRESS
SATURDAY AUGUST 2, 2008

I want to thank all of you who are here today, and those listening and viewing around the nation and the world, for your prayers and expressions of support, and even your criticism. It is challenging but also often helpful. We must see the value of healthy critiques. We are accountable to each other.

But through all of this, while I went on my sojurn to the desert, I thank you. I fasted and prayed and reflected. I went to the valley in a real search for for my assignment and to renew the health and strength of my soul. I want to be morally and physically fit for this battle. I want my preaching and my living to be closely connected. Too often the preaching is higher than the living. The Gospel must not be compromised.

This is a magic moment in American history. I've been blessed to be a part of a great era. I was jailed in 1960 for trying to use a public library. I was jailed in 1963 going to the March on Washington for trying to use a public facility. I think about our journey from slave ships to championships, from 1948 to 2008---what a journey.

Jackie Robinson broke into the ranks of the white major leagues in 1947, before there was a NBA or NFL as we know them today. He, along with Jesse Owens and his victory in Berlin, and Joe Louis in his defeat of Max Schmeling, carried so much of our weight on their shoulders. They changed the cultural expectations. Our Sampsons beat their Goliaths. We rejoiced and named our children after them.

Then the 1954 court triumph that ended legal apartheid, followed by 10 years of test cases in Montgomery, Little Rock, and all across the South, culminating in the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Then the shift from seking equal protection under the law to seeking empowerment. A blow was landed by Fannie Lou Hamer and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party in 1964. Then the battle for the right to vote and the Voting Rights Act. White women couldn't serve on juries. Farmers who couldn't pay poll taxes couldn't vote—Selma. Eighteen year olds got the right to vote in 1970---Selma. In 1974, student residency, you can vote where you go to school---Selma. 1975, bilingual voting---Selma. 1990, the Disabilities Act---Selma. All of these victories were rooted in that defining moment in Selma, Alabama.

The 1984 and 1988 presidential campaigns which sought to break down barriers
and democratized the primary system by changing the rules so delegates were
elected on a proportional basis, not winner take all. The campaigns generated a multitude of newly registered rainbow voters.
Now, with the barriers down, we are running the last lap of this race with a brilliant
anchorman, Barack Obama---so able, intellectually, morally, and spiritually, to bring the baton home. This is a magic moment.

August 28, 1955: Emmit Till was lynched.

August 28, 1963: Dr. King addressed the March on Washington.

August 28, 2008: Barack receives the nomination.

This is a magic moment, one of those high peak moments for America and the world.

July 4, 1776: Independence from Britain.

1865: The 13th Amendment ending slavery.

1954: The Supreme Court Decision that ended legal apartheid.
August 28, 1963: Dr. King addressed the March on Washington.

August 28, 2008: We reach the political promised land Dr. King saw from the mountaintop.

On this journey we have faced trauma, and sometimes experienced errors of judgment, taste, and tone along the way. Yet, we play with our scars. I've had to reflect upon my traumatizing ordeal with sincerity and contrition. My private speech became public controversy. I addressed the hurt and the affected. I was not satisfied with my apology and response, so I went to the desert to see if there was any gap between my heart and my lips. It was a soul-searching journey. I wanted to examine my painful and errant language---whether private or public. I speak to you this way because I love you with a passion and pain, and with a pleasure and commitment that is immeasurable, to the death and beyond.

I find my deepest joy in lifting people up, whether in stress or distress. In a moment away from the high mark, I let you down. It hurts. The pain sticks to my bones. My soul cries out for understanding. There is an ongoing struggle to make a more perfect union and a more peaceful world. I want to address the wound in my soul, not just my words.
My investment in this struggle is not seasonal; it is a life's work.

As I enter this phase of our struggle and reflect upon my contributions and involvement, I want to be a productive finisher. I want it to be said that I kept the faith. I fought a good fight. I finished my course.

I have operated in two traditions. They merge, but sometimes there is tension between them---the political and the prophetic. The allegiances are sometimes different. Where is accountability? One to God, one to voters. They co-exist, often with great inner tension.

It is not my conflict with traditions that sent me to the desert. I have given much to our community and our nation, but a healed soul is required to serve.

David, a popular and talented politician with great favor from God and among the masses, was the chief politician of his day. Nathan, a supporter of David, had access to him. He loved David; but his allegiance was to his higher calling. He therefore found himself raising uncomfortable questions and concerns, not because of competition or jealousy, but out of love for his mission.

Dr. King would often say, vanity asks the question: Is it popular? Politics asks the question: Will it win? Conscience asks the question: Is it right? Ultimately, a matter may be neither politic nor popular. " Is it right ?" is the haunting question.

Conscience often swims upstream. It is deep in your bosom, covered up by your clothes and appearance. It is a tough negotiator. It will wake you up when all of your allies and enemies are asleep.

I went to the desert to talk to God, Dr. King, and myself. I tried to hear God's still and small voice. I felt I had fallen short of what would make heaven happy. I often asked God in prayer to search my heart because he knows my ways, my weaknesses, my strengths, and my struggle. I said to him, allow me to do your assignment, your will, and gain favor with you. If you find anything within me that should not be, any hatred, jealousy, malice, evil, or ungodly intent, remove it and make me better and more fit for the Kingdom. Keep me humble and sincere and grounded. Give me a tough mind and a tender heart. You alone know the thorns in my flesh and the wounds of my heart. Only pure hearts can see you.

In the presence of God you want 20-20 vision, and you will only see if your heart is pure. You want bold action, a pure heart, and vision. For my heart to be pure, I must deal with the sins that stand between me and God. If a snake bites you, you put on a tourniquet to stop the poison from spreading to the heart. Issues of life flow from the heart. Consistent with that, perfect love casts out fear. Fear of stature. Fear of sickness.
Fear of death. Fear of jobs. Fear of foes. Fear of money. Or the loss of those things.

I want to be fearless. Dr. Tillich would suggest that where love and power and justice meet, the new world we seek must begin in us. And we must start talking with God.

I talked with Dr. King. A certain sense of joy filled my soul when I was reminded of a scripture, Revelation 2:5, that says, "remember therefore from whence thou art fallen, repent and do the first works." I kept turning that thought over and over in my mind-- "remember your first works." The reason I packed my wife and young child up in 1964 and moved to Chicago was to be a voice for the voiceless, to fend for the poor, and somehow help the locked out get in.

He said remember the moral mandate to defend the poor, deliver the needy, and assist the fatherless and motherless. He said I told you at our last staff meeting it would be tough. You wanted this leadership challenge, and now you are into it. I observed closely our last staff meeting when he was in agony–-before we went to Memphis. I wondered why God would allow me to be a witness in that meeting. I was the agony, but I could not appreciate it fully at that time.

He said, I thought of quitting because I was under so much pressure. Nonviolence is under attack. There was such division in our ranks. And then I started to fast and pray to the point of death, just to convene our family. And then I decided to get up and go on to Memphis.

I saw him, in agony, turn a minus into a plus as we had done before. It was so much like the three steps of Jesus in Gethesemane. One, let this cup pass from me. Two, as he prayed the others slept. Three, not my will but thy will be done. I'm going to a higher calling.

As I talked with Dr. King and asked him what to do, he said: What is left to be done? Where did I leave you? I left you in and island of poverty, in and ocean of plenty. I left you in a valley of dried bones. We won our rights but we had to redeem the soul of America. That meant a real focus on the least of these. I left you in a valley to observe the impact of povertiy; to observe intergenerational poverty and joblessness, where there are middle class workers–-police and teachers and firemen and social workers and lawyers and judges, monitoring the poor. Where they have payday lenders rather than banks. Predators rather than protection. Where workers live without insurance.

Where airport security workers, who can't strike in the name of homeland security, have to go 40-50 miles a day round trip to work and can't afford to pay for the gas to get there.

Neighborhoods of fast food restaurants, jobs without benefits, $4.00 for a gallon gas and for a gallon milk. Houses with lead paint. Children brain damaged.

First class jails that employ the middle class, and second class schools. Second class schools are the feeder system to the jails. They need each other.

In chicago's school system, there are 500,000 students. 7 of 10 boys, and only 6,000 of 500,000, finish four years of college. A multi-billion dollar system, 46,000 employees, 26,000 teachrers, where janitors often makes more thatn teachers. There are police officers rather than truant officers in the schools. Secure teachers but insecure students. And teachers who are often forced to teach outside of their subject area.

In this valley, plants are closing and jobs are leaving. Education is funded upon a diminishing tax base. Government and the private sector are let off the hook.

I've been anointed to preach the gospel to the poor, Dr. King reminded me, and the broken hearted, and to set the captives free. In this valley, drugs are an industry, poor pushers or mules got to jail, while the rich go to college. Funeral homes are a growth industry.

Where Walmarts and big box stores are given free land and cheap labor, and the poor are forced to argue that something is better than nothing.

We addressed the Middle East peace process, European security, but we must also address the poverty in Haiti or Ickes housing project or the Delta. Haiti, where 70% of the population makes a dollar a day or less. Kids often walk five miles one way just to get one meal. Many eat mud pies.

Dr. King said, what's left to be done is largely unpopular, and its risky. To fight for the poor, you must first fight their monitors, their overseers, their predators, their sub prime lenders, and their drug and gun suppliers. If the poor got a return on their vote, their dollars, their work, they would end poverty.

They make governors and presidents, and mayors and officials. But they give their power away.

While in the desert, I recalled going to South Africa in 1979 for the first tme. While I walked the streets of Soweto, the overseers, with their whips and guns, were from the community.

In the valley there are broken educational systems with buildings in need of repair, and a need for equal, high quality, public funding. People are surrendering -- some drop out, some never show up. Ezekiel raised the question: Can these bones live?

Preaching alone is not enough. Ezekiel tried preaching and praying and singing. He finally surrendered. This issue of the poverty zone was bigger than the scope of his preaching. He was dealing with individuals not with the structure of the valley,

That's why Paul said the issue is not merely about the soul of individuals and personalities, but powers and principalities. Wickedness in high places.

Ezekiel stepped outside of the valley and went round about. He observed and studied the cause and effect of why the bones were dry. If at the top of the hill the water is cut off, the jobs are cut off, the airport is cut off, industry is cut off, first class school funding is cut off, decent housing is cut off, tourism is cut off, trade skills are cut off, and parks and recreation are cut off. Help is cut, promises are made, and hope is dashed. That's why the bones are dry.

You find yourself forever trying to put a size 10 foot in a size 8 shoe and think you can pray past the corns.

Often the rich are rich because the poor are poor. It is not that they are smarter and work harder, but they are protected by inheritance---intergenerational inheritance laws.

In that valley they trade life for life, eye for an eye, and conclude that a bullet is just a hot sensation, but then I sleep. Oh, a few get out---Tiger woods, the Williams sisters, Oprah Winfrey, Lebron James, Kobe Bryantt---very talented ones. But what about the rest of them, like 'Shadrack, Meshack, and Abendigo.'

Dr. King said to me: We must challenge the structure to work. We must demonstrate. Ghetto monitors resist mass action. Why demonstrate? Demonstrate to get attention, he argued, you can only ride a man's back if he is still lying down.

The biggest sins of the poor are feeling that nothing better is worth working for, and to adjust. We used to sing a song, "one thing i did wrong, let segregation stay too long. Hold on."

The poor are oppressed and trade off temporary convenience for long-term solutions. They have been taught that sacrifice is too risky. They adjust. Dr. King contended that we must be permanently maladjusted. This principle was the essence of the struggle in Birmingham; a massive few days of sacrifice tht changed the entire southern culture.

Even when we are on the isle of poverty, like John, we still have the right to see beyond our pain and predicament, a new heaven and a new earth, the old one passing away. The oppressor adjusts to privilege. The oppressed adjust to pain. And both get mad when you force them to change.

Dr. King, like Jesus, died unpopular. He became popular when they resurrected him---the power that bullets could not stop, jail cells could not contain.

The rich say I lose money if there is change. The poor say it's risky; I may lose what I have. It's hard to convince the poor they are giants with grasshopper complexes. That is the burden of preaching.

And they are locked in this perverse marriage. There is a tension between satisfying the lust of the rich and privileged, and the pain of the poor. But ultimately, lion and lamb; black and white; rich and poor must lie together to reach peace in the valley.

As I come through this valley, I urge you to join me in this reassessment, and in our actions. This is a high moment for our politics. We must vote like never before. We've been blessed to have a "who" in Barack Obama. But there is the "what", the unfinished business of eliminating structural inequality: a criminal justice system for profit, with 2.2 million Americans, 1 million of whom are black, incarcerated. Blacks are number 1 in infant mortality, unemployment, and have shorter life expectancy.

As we seek the Olympic Games, the budget for an Olympic education system is not on the agenda. I challenge you today: We must reclaim our children. Join with us in embracing our seven point educational plan for parents and students:

1. Take my child to school
2. Meet my child's teacher
3. Exchange phone numbers with my child's teacher
4. Turn off the TV three hours a night so my child may study
5. Pick up my child's report card each grading period
6. Take my child to church, temple or synagogue
7. Fight for equal and adequate education funding

We've lost $90 billion in home equity for blacks and $70 billion for Latinos. We must restructure loans and not repossess homes. And our banks are collapsing.

In this journey, I want to be more fit for the fight. So I fast and I pray. I don't want to let you down.

We must at once fight for political change and honor our prophetic moral tradition, which is often un-political. Jail visits will give you bad press. Addressing the criminal justice collapse is swimming upstream. Equal, adequate education for all children is swimming upstream. Building an airport rather than a gambling boat in the south suburbs is swimming upstream.

And yet, I urge bold action to see the big picture relating to the entrenched struggle against structural injustice. My soul cries out for relief and remedy for the poor, the downtrodden, and the disinherited. I've been anointed to preach the Gospel. We must drive out predators, the guns, liquor, and the drugs. The government must reinvest in America along with private sector incentives. We must develop new forms of energy.

I've seen a lot. I've heard a lot. But there is more to be seen; there is more pain to be felt. But the Bible suggests that we heal by his stripes. Our appetites may change but the formula for healing does not. Your stars come from his scars.

If my people who are called by my name will humble themselves and pray, and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then God will forgive their sins, and they will hear from heaven, and there will be healing in the land.

2008-07-17T12:41:00.000-07:00

Let Em Know!

I hope everyone who reads this will consider taking part; that's what it's all about!

Danny

What Can Be

is a film currently in pre-production which explores new possibilities for humanity through the lens of spoken word.

What Can Be

asks why can’t we have a world without borders, without war, without hunger or homelessness?

What Can Be

is centered on the words and performances of a multi-racial crew of Los Angeles poets. But this isn’t a “poetry film” which features the reading of spoken word pieces. What Can Be drips poetry but it’s also filled with live action, animation, computer graphics, conversation, and the re-enactment of a drive-by shooting. Locations range from Compton to Beverly Hills to the U.S./Mexico border.

What Can Be

moves beyond a culture of protest to promote a culture of vision.

*****

As soon as the film is done, we will share it with you and the world by giving it away via every type of distribution, every type of media platform imaginable. Meanwhile, please contact us to share with us your vision of what you think the future for humanity can be like. Just a note, a poem, a blog post, an MP3, whatever. It’s all good. We will post a selection of these responses (with full credit of course) on our MySpace page and/or on our web site. Hit us up at gobywhatcanbe@aol.com.

If you would like to be on our email list so that we can keep you up to date on the progress of What Can Be, just send an email with “Subscribe” in the subject line to gobywhatcanbe@aol.com.

“Don’t by what is, go by what can be”

Please forward this email widely. Thanks!

What Can Be Productions
Los Angeles

*****

What Can Be is…

Directed by Drew Amavisca… Actor in several indie films and the in house voiceover artist for the Honda Center in Anaheim…standup comedian with several improv projects…guitarist in Yayojones for ten years, a band which was an opening act for George Lopez and whose last performance was before a sellout arena crowd at the Arrowhead Pond…roadie for Helmet, Diane Schurr, and Ministry…director of three upcoming feature films.

Written by Lee Ballinger…. Author of Lynyrd Skynyrd: An Oral History…freelance writer whose work has appeared everywhere from the New York Times to Inside Sports…associate editor of Rock & Rap Confidential (www.rockrap.com)…Vietnam veteran.

Featured poets in the film are:

Besskepp (Cory Cofer): Appeared on HBO Def Poetry Jam, BET’s The Way You Do It, and Fox TV (Hip Hop Theater Festival)…hosts the weekly poetry/music extravaganza, A Mic and Dim Lights, in Pomona CA. Dim Lights, now in its eighth year, is the premier open mic in California…Besskepp’s play, Homeless Beatboxer, has twice been featured at REDCAT Theater at Disney Hall in Los Angeles…father of three, Besskepp has twice been named Teacher of the Year and been featured in the Los Angeles Times for bringing hip-hop and poetry into the classroom…Besskepp’s first book, a collection of short stories entitled Up the Street Around the Corner, will be published in August…follow-up CD to 2003’s Bluz Langwij drops this fall (myspace.com/Besskepp).

Mike the Poet (Mike Sonksen): Co-founder of the legendary Poets of the Round Table…author of I Am Alive In Los Angeles (his CD of the same name is a great mix of spoken word and music)…performs in art galleries, schools, and jails and teaches poetry at View Park Prep Charter High School…also works as a tour guide and knows more about LA than anyone you’ve ever met…currently at work on
Underground Heroes, a book of profiles and essays, and on a second CD (myspace.com/mikethepoet).

Metaphysicz (Reuben Chavaris): 21-year-old native of La Puente is one of California’s most intriguing new poetic voices….has featured at Whittier College, Urbane Culture Lounge, Lionlike Mind State, Rock A Mole Festival…host of We The People open mic…currently working on a book and a CD.

Luis Rodriguez: The best-selling Latino author in the U.S….award-winning poet… creator of Tia Chucha Press, which has published over 40 books in the past 20 years…owner of Tia Chucha’s Café Cultural in Los Angeles…travels the world speaking and performing…co-founder of Youth Struggling for Survival, which works to uplift both gang and non-gang youth (www.luisjrodriguez.com)

“I met a fella named Luis Rodriguez, a writer and a poet, who had a cultural center in Los Angeles. These are the people trying to fill the holes that should long ago have been filled by government. Those are the people who give me optimism. They are relentlessly hopeful, and they face it all on the front lines on a daily basis.”—Bruce Springsteen in Rolling Stone, November 15, 2007
Present tense / Future perfect

2008-07-10T21:16:00.000-07:00

Writers Helping Writers

I'm very lucky to be a writer who teaches writing. I always tell my students that they help me learn to write, give me material for writing, too, and in return, I try to give them everything I've got. It's not a bargain; it's a statement of the value I get out of my job. But there's always so much more to do, so much more that could be done.

Last spring, I had a stack of essays in my introduction to fiction class that I wanted to publish together and distribute in some way. It was a fairly simple assignment--relate a story in our book to your life and talk about what insights it gives you into your experience and what insights your experience gives you into the story. Anyway, I was blown away by the variety and the power of that group of essays, and I unfortunately was turning them back in the very last period and all I could really do was write many encouraging notes telling them to get these things out to other people. It made me think of the many missed opportunities I have had over the years to do more with my students' work.

The following post by one of the writers who's most helped this writer suggests new directions and demands that people like myself (and yourself?) answer its call--

Have You Helped A Writer Today?

Everyday we are given the message. Directly or indirectly. Writing is for the few, the special anointed ones.

Bullshit.

Millions of us are writing and writing well. Millions more will start writing if just offered encouragement and maybe a little guidance.

This is where Mike the Poet entered the picture.

For the past year Mike, one of LA's best-known poets and a co-founder of the Council of Venues, has been teaching poetry classes at View Park Prep Charter High School in the Crenshaw district of Los Angeles. His students have just published Views from View Park, a collection of the work of 25 student poets.

Views from View Park breathes fire and oozes sadness. The poets deal with everything from coming of age to war in the streets, everything from love and hate to war in the Middle East. They search for meaning as they define right and wrong. The poets write with the command and confidence which Mike has brought out of them. They all have something important to say.

What is the significance of what Mike the Poet has done? Is it to be a mentor, a facilitator, a comrade in rhyme? Yes, of course. But much more. America is changing. The vast majority now see through the 24-7 haze of lies and oppose the war in Iraq. 70 per cent say they want universal health care. Immigrants get support from across all lines of race and geography. Everyone except the cops wants peace in the streets.

Within this growing consensus for a new world is an army of writers picking up the pen. They must be heard or all is lost. The efforts of Mike the Poet and everyone else reading this email in making that happen are as important as anything on the planet.

What kind of world do we want? View Park student Alaina Scott describes it well in "Community Poem":

Rule the world through flavor...
jazz....food....happiness.

If you have a venue where one or more of these students can read, contact Mike the Poet at mike_sonksen@yahoo.com. Ditto if you would like to get a copy of Views from View Park.

Back in the day when I stumbled into my fifteen minutes of fame, I was in New York on a book tour and I called a well-known writer at New Yorker magazine to ask for advice on a few things. "Writers don't help other writers," he snapped before he hung up on me.

Is he right?

LB

2008-07-09T12:21:00.000-07:00

The Most Complicated and Difficult Part Is Just Beginning

If and when Barack Obama wins in November, and I do hope that’s the case, the movements Obama has talked about building will have to keep their eyes on the prize--not the Presidential seat but real change, substantial change. And that won’t come simply because we have a more likeable man in the White House. In fact, there will be an enormous threat that our rights will be compromised further by a moderate, popular leader. I remember Clinton, and I remember how he paved the way for George W, and if we don’t recognize that now, we’re going to make the same mistakes next time around, only the stakes will be higher.

Consider the following fine editorial, which speaks for itself. Then catch the video after….

Why does Barack Obama hate my family?

By Kevin Alexander Gray -

Addressing a congregation at the Apostolic Church of God, one of Chicago's largest black churches, on Father's Day, Barack Obama said:

"Too many fathers are M.I.A., too many fathers are AWOL, missing from too many lives and too many homes. They have abandoned their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men."

This was his "Sister Souljah" moment. Just as Bill Clinton during his 1992 campaign tried to reassure whites that he wasn't too cozy with blacks by denouncing a rapper, Obama was appealing to whites by condemning his own.

Even so, I wasn’t surprised to hear him referred to black men as “boys.”
Obama has often taken to “playin’ blacks.” Playin’ in blackspeak means to fool or use a person or persons. (George Bush’s selling of a war on the Iraqi people to America is an example that readily comes to mind or - “Bush played us cheap or, “he played us for fools.” )

Early in the campaign year, Obama used one of the oldest racial stereotypes in a speech to black South Carolina state legislators: "In Chicago, sometimes when I talk to the black chambers of commerce, I say, 'You know what would be a good economic development plan for our community would be if we make sure folks weren't throwing their garbage out of their cars.” Translation; black people are dirty and lazy.

One would think getting money is a better plan.

Then, the day before the Texas primary, he let loose again, in a predominantly black venue: "Y'all have Popeyes out in Beaumont? I know some of y'all, you got that cold Popeyes out for breakfast. I know. That's why y'all laughing. ... You can't do that. Children have to have proper nutrition. That affects also how they study, how they learn in school." Translation; black people are fat, stupid and lazy.

How would people respond if John McCain (or any person of a different race, nationality or ethnicity) threw out stereotypes like these? What would we say if white person had stood in the pulpit of a black church, or anywhere else for that matter, and referred to black men as “boys,” in any context?

But since it’s Obama, sounding like Bill Clinton before his fall from black grace, or Bill Cosby speaking out of his own personal pain, the change candidate’s remarks were met with hosannas mostly by a vapid, racist, white-dominated corporate media, the black people who say what their white bosses want to hear, and blacks and whites alike who shout amen even when Obama’s saying something plainly contradicted by their own life experiences.

It was no big surprise that after the speech those critical of Obama were dismissed “as out touch” with the new “post-racial” illusion. Bob Herbert of The New York Times appearing on MSNBC’s Hardball went so far as to say that anyone who disagreed with Obama’s Father’s Day admonition to black men was living in a racial “fog” of the past. Newspapers across the county affirmed the smear with headlines like “Obama tells black men to shape up” or, “Obama speaks ‘inconvenient truth’ to black men” or, “Obama calls black men irresponsible” or “he saying things people don’t want to hear” - with the inference that truth was flowing from his tongue.

Playin’ folk on any day is bad enough. But, as a father, grandfather and a black person, I see playin’ black men on Father's Day as even more repulsive. The day is for honoring fathers. We don’t honor the vets on Veteran’s Day by pointing out those who choose not to fight, or the cowards, or even the enemy.

The Obamalife narrative highlights that his dad abandoned him as a kid. So, maybe it’s his abandonment issues that he’s laying on the rest of us. That would explain why he kicked his father “under the bus” implying he had acted like a “boy” when he and his wife divorced each other. Was she acting like a “girl” at the time? It is as simple as one parent being good or a victim and the other a bad victimizer? And, what of the fact that both his mother and father remarried? Is it his wish that his mom and biological dad had remained unhappily married? Does he wish his half-sister had never been born? Is he against divorce? How does he feel about forced or even loveless marriages? Maybe he believes there should be a required economic declaration before a woman gives birth and that two signatures on paper are required before conception?

No doubt, there’s a difference in being a sperm donor as opposed to a nurturing, involved parent. But you don’t have to share a living space with a child to have an influence on him or her. And you can share a living space and be a lousy father or mother. That’s life. I was very young when I first heard the phrase “staying together for the good of the kids.” As I grew I learned that oftentimes living arrangements between ex-lovers have to change for the good of the kids.

I’m not claiming to know the story behind the picture of Obama and his father at the airport, but I suspect that joint custody between Hawaii, Massachusetts, Kansas and Africa would have been tough.

Writing about Obama’s speech gave me a headache. I found myself getting testy just thinking it through and what it means to me and those around me. A lot of people have approached me to talk about Obama’s speech. People walk up to me at the gas check-out line and strike up a conversation about Obama. Just the other day, a black woman behind me in line pipes up and says, “Things sho’ gonna be better when Obama gets elected.” She was not pleased with my response to her uninvited optimism. But I don’t think what she said was or is helpful in real terms.

I was speaking to a single, black woman lawyer about my unease with the speech and she immediately went off on black men in general. Now, my lawyer friend is a smart, progressive person. She’s a former New York State prosecutor but I’ve never consciously deducted points from her humanity for her past employment choice. But in our conversation she threw out all the standard lines, “black men aren’t taking care of their kids,” and “they are sorry.” I countered by saying most social scientists believe that an adolescent girl is more mature than an adolescent boy, so, who do we pin being the most irresponsible on? I asked her: if we believe that it is a woman’s right to chose whether or not to be a mother, then why should irresponsible black fathers be the sole point of Obama’s attack? And why should any aspect of black male-females relations be grist for the campaign mill?

What Obama’s bash black man game leads to is an environment where black people – separate and not equal – is the issue.

Moreover, it passes on one of the lowest of all the smears and stereotypes: the lie that black men have no morals. It reinforces the white supremacists’ notion of blacks as irresponsible, overly sexual beasts: a notion that far too many black folk as well as white unwittingly buy into.

I happened to have what turned out to be a very short breakfast meeting with a white female friend who was also a former Hillary Clinton supporter. She’s now onboard with Obama. As we spoke, after not seeing each other for more than a month or so, the topic quickly went to Obama with me telling her I didn’t plan to vote for him, his speech being just one of the reasons. She responded by threatening to never speak to me again if I supported Ralph Nader or Cynthia McKinney. I don’t know if she was serious or not.

On the subject of the Father’s Day speech she followed up by asking in a somewhat careful way, “Aren’t black women more responsible than black men? That’s what I’ve always heard?”

She’s been married 3 times and has kids by her first husband.

But I didn’t mention that. Instead, what I think might have ended our breakfast prematurely was my black man race card response to the ‘irresponsibility’ question. It’s the answer I give to anyone – black or white - who raises the question: a black man would have to be full of self or group hate to believe that black men are more irresponsible then white men or men of other races or ethnic backgrounds. George Bush, Dick Chaney, and a host of other white guys, that lied America into the Iraqi war, which has resulted in countless deaths, proves the point. And that’s just the most recent example of white, male irresponsibility. The history of the United States is drenched in blood due to the decisions of immoral, irresponsible white men.

A couple of weeks after the Father’s Day speech while waiting for a plane at Chicago’s O’Hare airport I found myself in a conversation with a white, female airport worker. The woman, also a mother of mixed-race children, worked out on the pad most likely unloading baggage and other such laborious tasks. She was sitting down resting between flights in the employee section, just a couple of seats away from me. She overheard me talking to a friend about the Lorraine Motel in Memphis and the 40th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s death. This prompted her to tell me about her taking her two kids on a trip to the historic site. I felt her pride as she told her story of her trip. She remembered how she welted up with tears looking up at the balcony and her kids asking why she was crying. She recalled how her kids responded when they got on the old ‘50s city bus and the recording yelled out, “Niggers move to the back of the bus!” She said it was then her kids understood why she had cried earlier. It presented her the opportunity to tell them how far things have come and what it took to get here. It was one of those moments when a parent feels like they’re teaching their kids something important.

At some point we started talking about Obama’s black man speech. She supports Obama. She told me of the pride her mixed-race kids felt thru Obama’s success, him being a mixed race like them. But at the end of our conversation she too concluded that Obama’s speech was aimed at white people.

When I first heard Obama’s Father’s Day speech, my immediate thoughts were of Camille, my recently married 30 year old daughter. Around the time she turned 25, she informed me and her mother that she planned to have a baby. I simply told her it was her choice since she had to bear the primary burden of raising a child. Or, as the song goes, “if you dance to the music, ya gotta pay to the piper..,”

When my daughter came to us, as parents, what we consciously didn’t do was lay a single-parent stigma on her since nobody really raises a child alone. At least where I come from. So, we got a granddaughter to help raise and nurture along with our two other grandkids by my son and his wife, who, coincidently was a teen-age mother before she and my son began dating in high school.

One of the jobs of a parent or grandparent is to prevent a child in their care from being saddled with guilt, self-hate or any other baggage society would strap on their backs. Regardless of the circumstance of their birth – which a child has no say in. I see our job as rejecting the stigma, which paints a child as “a mistake.” Or, in political terms, it’s as simple as reinforcing Jesse Jackson’s “I am somebody” in a kid.

You don’t need to be Alvin Poussaint to know that a child – any child, regardless of color or economic status- who doesn’t value their life or feel their worth as a human or feels unloved grows up to be an adult who doesn’t value life – theirs or anyone else’s.

When Camille and her child’s father were going through their break up, I had one of those heartfelt talks with the both of them. She and the young man had dated since middle school. And, although they had a child together, they were at a fork in the road with one another. It was one of those moments when young people learn adult things: such as, a child does not always make a relationship better nor can it keep an unhealthy or loveless relationship together. And, when a couple splits, in the heat of it all, it’s important not to do or say something stupid that would scar not only their individual lives, but their child’s future as well. We told the young man that he was the father of our grandchild and nothing could alter that fact. We assured him that we didn’t expect anything less than him having a full relationship with his child. He has done just that over the years. But we didn’t call him an irresponsible boy. That seemed not only counter-productive but holier than thou. Of course, we weren’t running for president; we were just trying to give a kid a chance.

Camille married 5 years after NyAshia’s birth, but it wasn’t to her child’s biological dad. It was to a fellow who has three children of his own. He also shares joint parental custody with his ex-lovers. In the three or four years of his courtship of my daughter, his kids called my wife and I grandmama and granddaddy. While a marriage license and church service made it official it didn’t take all that for us to be family. Everyone in this blended situation, the biological father of my granddaughter, the biological mother of our blended grandkids, and the rest of us, have always shared parental responsibilities.

Now, I’m not trying to universalize my family’s experience. But I sure wouldn’t lay Obama’s take on responsibility on the people around me. Nor would I suggest that they adopt his worldview of what a family is or should be. Because by his two-biological, heterosexual parents residing in same household definition of a family, every other type of family set up is inherently deficient in every sense of the word: economic, social, moral.

In the days after Obama’s speech, Ishmael Reed, Dr. Ron Walters and others rebutted the candidate’s targeting of black men with the Brown University study which revealed – surprisingly to some – that black fathers not living in the same domicile as their children are more likely to have a relationship with their kids than white fathers in similar circumstances. Walters, an Obama supported, warned his candidate, “Black people are not voting for a moralist-in-chief.”

So, in light of the Brown study should we conclude that white men are more irresponsible than black men when it comes to spending time with their kids? Maybe Obama should find a white church and offer white men advice on Father’s Day? Can we expect to hear him call them “boys?”

Or maybe he should take a trip to the hollows of Appalachia and tell the “trailer park crowd” that if they would just “pick up the garbage” from around their trailers and “stop engaging in incest” (or whatever other stereotype that comes to mind) they would not have it so bad.

And shouldn’t he be advising the polygamist families out west? Or, hopping on a plane to Massachusetts to lecture the fathers and parents of the pregnant teens in Gloucester?

According to Health and Human Services, throughout the 1990s, black teens have had the largest declines in teen childbearing rates of any group. While "Latinas have had the highest teen birth rate of any major ethnic/racial minority in the country since 1995." Why doesn’t Obama take his message to the barrios? Maybe he could go to a Catholic Cathedral in the heart of an East L. A. Latino community and challenge Latino men’s machismo. He should use “boys” in his speech and admonish the parishioners not to eat so many burritos.

Truth be told, I don’t wish to see a particular racial, sexual, religious or ethnic group singled out for derision or used as a campaign prop. Stereotypical remarks about blacks, Latinos and whites in Appalachia are just as inappropriate as remarks about Jewish materialism or Irish drunkenness.

I’m old fashion about some things. My mother is prone to say, “Keep your business out the streets.” I’m only putting out my family’s personal stories to illustrate why I’m leery about Obama.

Many of those around me plan to vote for him. For the most part, my response is to ask folks to look at their lives and check whether or not what Obama is saying squares with their reality. Never mind how they “should” be living – never mind how Obama’s “current” family looks. I just ask if, with all the troubles of getting along day to day, is it helpful to have his polish on how they should be living piled on top?

My new son-in-law has two young boys and a daughter. Like so many other black teens who weren’t as lucky as Obama, he got busted in his teen years and did a little time on a drug arrest. Obviously his life has turned around. Luckily, he’s a brick mason. If he didn’t work for himself in a skilled trade, it would be hard for him to find work. He knows that because he went to jail his sons have 60 percent likelihood of going to jail. He has to fight extra hard to make sure his kids are not that statistic. And it’s a tricky thing. You want your kids to understand the many race traps but not be defined by them.

After Obama won the South Carolina primary, whenever I was asked, I’d say that in the general election my vote was his to lose. Prior to and after their wedding, my ex-offender son-in-law, somewhat of a race man (he planned to vote for Obama ‘because he is black), who just recently found out he could vote despite his conviction, constantly reminded me of what I had said, “Remember, you said your vote was his to lose.”

Shortly after he and my daughter’s wedding, a couple of day after Obama’s Father’s Day speech, we were sitting together with a friend of his, a young, married father of one, who was in their wedding party. Once again he reminded me of what I had said about ‘my vote to lose.’ I let loose with just about everything I’ve said in this article. I told him to look at his own life and then tell me what he thinks about Obama.

I asked my son-in-law to think about his wedding and the people who were there. There were lots of young mothers and fathers and children, divorcees, second marriages, common law arrangements, ex-lovers, step-parents and grandparents, etc. Many of those people, if they believed Obama, could be passed off as being “irresponsible” and their kids “mistakes.” I asked him: did he truly believe that many of the people in that church, whose lives he knew, were less moral or responsible than others, as Obama inferred? Ex-offender, former unmarried father of three, rap music producer, isn’t he who Obama is condemning? On paper, anyway. Yet, he has raised three good kids.

Whenever I suggest to Obama insiders that he’s a lot like Bill Clinton, they go apoplectic. Yet, as race-baiting and race politics goes, Obama has proven himself to be as good, if not better than Clinton: long considered the modern master of race politics. If you believe, as I do, that he “played black men to court white voters,” then all Obama’s protestations about Bill Clinton’s race-baiting were just a ruse. And, in that light he is no better than Clinton when it comes to using race fears. He may even be worse than Clinton because he plays it both ways – assaulted and assailant. I’ll be willing to bet that if Clinton were honest in revealing how he really felt about Obama, that would be at the heart of his grievance.

No doubt, people are excited about the prospect of a young, vibrant, black person as president. They see their choices as between John McCain and Obama, who is “the only option,” or, “he will never be as bad as Bush. He will never be bad as Reagan.” Or they say, their man Obama “has a chance to win. We need to give him some latitude.” “We need to let the man do what he needs to do to win.” “We should trust him.” “Barack is one of us, no matter what he sounds like right now.”

As critical as I am, I actually want to believe he’s “one of us.” But I don’t see it.

That isn’t necessarily a bad thing for Obama. If people like me don’t see Obama as “one of us,” that strengthens the powerful’s belief that he is “one of them.”

For sure, Obama has most black voters in the bag. I’m pretty sure that my vote falls in 'the doesn’t matter so much' column. And from listening to Obama, a whole lot of my family members’ lives don’t matter much either.

I’m not really looking for change from Obama should he win. I’m looking for the fight to come.

From Killer Mike and Ice Cube—

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtbFLTB_hWU

2008-06-19T10:30:00.000-07:00

Southern Strategy

For Immediate Release
Please post and include in your blasts!

Hip Hop Congress Announces its 7th Annual Conference to be hosted by the Mississippi Artists and Producers Coalition
Energize, Organize, Revolutionize: Taking it back to the Roots

The 7TH Annual National Hip Hop Congress Conference will take place in Biloxi, MS from July 24th through the 27th at the Treasure Bay Hotel and Casino in Biloxi, Mississippi.

This year the conference will focus on building internal capacity and direction of the organization with a goal of improved service, clarified action and plans to further influence local communities where we have a presence as well as national. Special addresses will be also be given by Bakari Kitwana of Rapsessions and Cheri Honkala, National Coordinator of the Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign.

This conference will include a variety of activities and workshops in the elements of hip hop, use and development of media coalitions, direct action, digital distribution, music industry knowledge and detailed plans for HHC in the next two years. Hip Hop Congress will also be announcing the roll out of several new initiatives including increased resources for artists through the website and cultural services for schools, after school programs, and communities. Individuals and organizations interested in learning more about HHC are welcome to attend, enjoy the activities and learn more about HHC without any obligation to join. As always, there will be shows every night featuring artists on the cutting edge of Independent music as well as a headliner yet to be named.Previous artists who have performed at the National Conference are Blueprint, OneBeLo, Zion I, Jurassic 5, and Brother Ali.

Shamako Noble, HHC President, stated, "Last year we gave an open invitation to Hip Hop organizations, partners and interested folks to attend in an effort to expand our bases. This year, we want to focus on refining our strengths while addressing our weaknesses. We've been able to survive conditions as an organization that many said shouldn't have allowed us to exist. Our hope is that at this conference we can return to the formula that has allowed is to survive for so long, while troubleshooting issues that could hinder our development . This means refocusing on the mission, streamlining our communication, and redefining our programs. We are also very excited to be in the South, where a lot of Hip Hop Organizations either don't go, are afraid to go, or only go when it's convenient. We're looking to build something lasting here, and connect it to the rest of the practical Hip Hop movement."

Cheri Honkala commented, "I'm honored to be a part of this event. I attended my first HHC conference in 2004 and we've been developing a relationship ever since. This year, our collaborative focus is in Minneapolis at the March for Our Lives where HHC is taking a clear stand on Housing, Health Care, money and programs for the poor and not for this ridiculous war in Iraq. I think that anybody that is serious about utilizing the potential of Hip Hop at a grassroots level should be looking at HHC."

When President of the Southern Progressives, Southern Regional Director, and top flight artist Kamikaze was asked to comment, he replied, "The Mississippi Artists and Producers coalition is proud to be hosting this year's annual conference. I personally lobbied for Hip Hop Congress to be here and connect with the South in an organic way that we hadn't really seen in Mississippi. As the defender and protector of all things Mississippi, I expect nothing but the best results from this conference."

For more information on the conference including performing, presentations, schedule and travel please visit http://www.hiphopcongress.com/Direct Link-- Aaron Berkowitz

2008-06-19T09:53:00.000-07:00

The Problem No Politician Will Tackle--

WHAT IS A LIFE WORTH? HEALTH CARE IS A HUMAN RIGHT!

Today, June 19th, PPEHRC members across the US will participate in the National Day of Protest Against Health Insurance Companies.

We encourage other members, friends and supporters of the PPEHRC across the US to join in your local event and to call your congressperson in support of HR 676, the Single Payer Health Care Legislation by Rep. John Conyers. Join us in the fight to make Health Care a Human Right in the United States!

National Day of Protest Against Health Insurance Corporations

38,000 Health Insurance Executives will be in San Francisco. Health care activists around the country are organizing demonstrations at insurance companies with patients, nurses, doctors, social workers, and Americans of every stripe to protest the National Health Insurance industry to say:

Health Care YES! Health Insurance NO!

See www.healthcare-now.org for a listing of local events across the US today.

2008-05-26T10:50:00.000-07:00

Humanity As A Commodity

As some of you may have noticed, I started another blog simply focused on paraphrasing and reflecting on Karl Marx's Capital. The value of that analysis has only grown more clear to me over the past 15 years since I first grappled with it, but I've also become very concerned with how to reconcile the clarity of Marx's analysis with the rapidly changing world we live in today. In more than one place, both he and Engels described today's world (at the end of Wage, Labor & Capital and Utopian and Scientific Socialism, for instance), and the big picture remains remarkably accurate. But the advances of technology have upped the stakes so high that we need to analyze the specifics that couldn't have been foreseen 150 years ago. Laborless production is foreseen in Marx, but the ability of the market to function with as much as we have was all but unimaginable. Anyway, I found the following article from the People's Tribune to be particularly thought-provoking in terms of this work. --Danny

We’re NOT For Sale!

Protesting plans for water privatization in Detroit.PHOTO/MICHIGAN WELFARE RIGHTS

By Steven Miller

Every time Humanity reaches a critical juncture, the nature of property starts to destabilize and transform. All forms of property are transforming today, including personal, public and private property (1). One form of property—corporate property, the most toxic form of private property—is beginning to devour all the others. Global corporations now dwarf the economies of virtually every country.

Personal property, in the form of homes, for example, is disintegrating in the Mortgage crisis. National wealth, in the form of the vast infrastructures, from ports to public universities to telecommunications that were built in the last 50 years, is being turned over to corporations worldwide. Even the US government has been mostly privatized since 2001. Public space and therefore public access is vanishing, even as income is polarizing faster than ever before in human history.

Up through the 20th Century, most human relationships flowed from our sense of community and culture, our recognition of our common humanity. Now the process of Globalization, under corporate domination, is systematically dissolving all previous social relations and commodifying every aspect of everyday life and what it means to be human.

All the traditional ways that people have used to define themselves are being altered by corporations. These concepts include the ideas of nationality, citizenship, race, class, language, health, human rights, gender, career, family and virtually every relationship between human beings. Every human need is being driven into the marketplace to be bought and sold. Then our humanity is sold back to us at a profit.

Jeremy Rifkin describes the process this way: “Imagine a world where virtually every activity outside the confines of family relations is a paid-for experience, a world where traditional reciprocal obligations and expectations mediated by feelings of faith, empathy, and solidarity are replaced by contractual relations in the form of paid memberships, subscriptions, admission charges, retainers and fees.” (2)The future of global capitalism is that each individual is a lone production unit in a pay-as-you-go global marketplace where everyone is an atomized consumer. Then you get to pay to experience life; the more you pay, the better it is! No more human or inalienable rights here.

However there is a fly in this ointment. When the vast majority is bankrupted and dispossessed, who is left to be a consumer?Corporate power over human affairs flows from the simple fact that they claim technology as their private property. Then they proclaim that no one can have access unless they can pay for it. Demanding the right to exploit and profit from human misery, corporations are now creating billions of sick and miserable humans just as they are creating a planet riddled with escalating environmental disasters.

The technology to produce true human abundance now exists, but it is owned by the wrong class of people. In fact the only guarantee today of personal property is to guarantee public property and abolish corporate private property.The US is putting $2.5 billion a week into privatizing Iraq. Imagine what would happen if we spent $2.5 billion a week on ending hunger and homelessness, creating free health care, providing education so that every single human on earth could realize their true creative potential? This is what a cooperative society means.

The profound world-historic step that confronts humanity today demands, among other things, that human beings once again alter our self-concept beyond all measure! Corporations are certainly working to change it their way. Let’s just finish the job and do it right. Just as people fought for centuries not to be slaves, we can fight not to be commodities. Humans can be so much better than this.

(1)Many observers discuss the current transformations of property as well as the implications for human access and for society:

Mike Davis. Planet of Slums

Naomi Klein. The Shock Doctrine

Jeremy Rifkin. The Age of Access

William I. Robinson, A Theory of Global Capitalism

Dan Schiller. How To Think About Information

Gary Teeple. Globalization and the Decline of Social Reform

(2) Rfikin, p 9

2008-05-19T08:06:00.000-07:00

A Word from My Rock

We live in a world of corrupt radio, concert ticket price-gouging, product placement in songs, Wal-Mart censorship—not to mention war, poverty, and the collapse of our health care system.

Music keeps us going through it all. Music makes us feel good. Music carries us past the stress. Music inspires us. Music makes the connections between people that give us hope for the future. Music insists that a better world is possible and music makes us believe that this can be true.

Rock & Rap Confidential is in the middle of all this, not just reporting but making those connections. We can do this because our musical taste has no boundaries and we have a foot in every camp. We—RRC’s staff and its readers—are on this journey together. Our love for music and our desire for a better world bind us together.

RRC has never accepted advertising. Now we don’t even charge for the publication, which has enabled us to reach a broader and steadily growing audience. Every once in a while, we could use a little help.

Won’t you please contribute what you can to RRC? $25, $50, $100, $250, $1000 (or any amount). You can make your contribution via PayPal.com (send to rockrap@aol.com) or send by regular mail to RRC, P.O. Box 341305, Los Angeles CA 90034.

Thanks for your support. Thanks for our past, our present, our future. We really appreciate it.