April 2008 Archives
Passing Strange and Pulpit Portrayals: Where Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Stew Intersect
Tags: Black, Church, Jeremiah Wright, Passing Strange, Race, Stew, Theatre
The Rock & Roll musical Passing Strange begins in a Baptist church, or rather an implausible abstraction of one. From my first row center mezzanine perch Tuesday night, I leaned forward, brow furrowed as the messy scene unfolded. My best friend, with whom I grew up in the oldest Black congregation in Seattle (a satellite of the oldest Black institution in the USA) and who I was treating to her first Broadway production, pointed at lithe cast member Colman Domingo and whispered in my ear, "I don't think anyone but him has been to a Black church." I nodded and focused on cast member Rebecca Jones attempting church lady ecstasy by executing a stock west African dance move to the unimpressive and overly loud rock fracas.
Soon after, Passing Strange's sharpest actor, de' Adre Aziza, unleashed a squealing, lip-smacking Black middle class archetype of whom I have written before, the bougie broad, maligned in sociology and culture from at least as far back as E. Franklin Frazier's Black Bourgeoisie
There were highlights, namely the second half, although a pre-intermission number titled "Amsterdam" was quite good. The actors, all of color excepting the band, transplanted to Amsterdam and Berlin portrayed hyper friendly white Europeans to Breaker's bright-eyed, low-esteemed artistic Negro. There, Stew and his collaborator and ex-girlfriend Heidi Rodewald articulate better the performative requirements of communicating authentic blackness and their number, "The Black Ones," was hands-up-and-splayed-Jolson-style brilliant. Still the characterizations of his European acquaintances and lovers contrasted with those of his Black friends and family stateside, especially the women. It's as if Stew reserved all the empathy and insight for the thick accented Dutch and German strangers and the ball busting to his earnest but all too conforming mother and materialism to Aziza's rearing relaxed head. Moreover, these one-note Negroes from which would-be-expat Breaker is so isolated, are presented as representative and that's woefully misleading. I left with the impression that I had just witnessed theatre envisioned by a man with an ambivalent relationship to his own race at best, so much so that he couldn't bear to imbue us with any complexity or sufficiently intervene on his protagonist's embittered teenage impressions by musical's end.
Where Stew et al got the Black church wrong, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright in his empowered and colorful historicizing of the Black activist church and gospel traditions has got us Obama supporters worried. No lover of Obama's ballyhooed race speech, "A More Perfect Union," with significant concerns about Obama's knowledge and understanding of the African American experience and endemic racism's past and present circumscription of our lives, I had no qualms with Rev. Wright's defense of his good name and incisive, biblically-informed readings of American politics. None. But even as I listened to his well-received Bill Moyers interview, I noticed a tendency to anecdotalize and overreach: his tendentious comments on the Blues' mediation of Black suicide rates, the most immediate example. But when he stood at the National Press Club in New York and answered the frightened, frizzy haired, passively combative, call and response phobic white girl's question, with, proud Bison Que that he is, a little too much jocularity--throwing up the hooks is not appropriate at a nationally broadcast political/ecumenical press conference--I sighed. By "capisce", I was rolling my eyes and couldn't watch any further although Jay Smooth has posted the full press conference at his site.
With both Rev. Wright and Stew, there was an excess of familiarity, which bred broad-stroked messaging of the Black church's intolerance on the one hand or radical activism on the other. We are a misrepresented people, even by ourselves. Stew and Wright manufactured screw-faced, grand-hatted conservatives and a mammoth media-retaliatory Amen Choir in service of worthy messages that would have been better served by specificity and nuance.
Photo Credit: Michal Daniel captured the cast of Passing Strange at an earlier run at the Public Theater
Summer of Lukewarm
I love the sun. I love music. I love free shit. So it should come as no surprise that I am an avid attender of the manifold free music shows that sprout up in parks and along waterfronts here in New York City every summer. The chief of these is Central Park SummerStage closely followed by Park Slope's Celebrate Brooklyn. This year, like last, both rosters disappoint. They are a little too worldly, Williamsburgy and skew mighty old. I mean, I didn't have one aha moment as I scrolled through the bills, no "wow," no, "I always wanted to hear so and so live, but never had the opportunity." There are some good artists on the bills, but many of them are all too accessible. That said there are a few exceptions. There is no way I'm missing Isaac Hayes or Miriam Makeba take Prospect Park's bandshell. As for SummerStage, Roy Hargrove will drag me out as will Janelle Monae although I wish she was paired with someone other than Jose James, whose music is not bad just a little sleepy. I'd have booked Tiombe Lockhart or Res or both to share the bill with Ms. Monae. Now that would be big fun!
On the subject on festivals, seems the New Orleans Jazz Fest, which is finally back up to pre-Katrina form and runs through next weekend is pricing out the locals.
Dwele's Return
as his debut, Subject, thwarted contemporary R&B convention and didn't move major units. That said Dwele's anti-vocal acrobat approach is refreshing and his live show something serious as I blogged last summer. Some Kinda... was criminally overlooked and worth picking up especially by those with a soft spot for witty R&B and I have always been extra partial to warmth and levity of Subject's, "Find a Way." Check it out below.
Source: Billboard
Baby Mama Drama: Amy Poehler Might Need More People
Tags: Amy Poehler, Baby Mama, Film, Media, SNL
Black culture in all its diversity is exported in distorted form throughout the globe. I get it. I got it many years ago when Hong Kong school children offered me unsolicited high fives--an attempt to greet me in my native tongue, maybe?--and a few years later when me and my friends were groped and mirthfully called "Hip Hop Beetches" by a Parisian youth as we were leaving a local hip hop club. Still, I was unprepared for recent specious claims by SNL's Amy Poehler. You see Poehler, evincing a knowledge of Black folks exclusively informed by early nineties television portrayals, told The Daily News' Ben Widdicombe an improbable story in which crowds of Harlemites rose from their lawn chairs (which they naturally arranged at the film set's periphery), pumped their fists Arsenio Hall style and chanted something akin to "Go Amy" as she enacted a scene from her to be avoided forthcoming flick Baby Mama. Widdicombe doesn't believe her and neither do I,
Apparently, half of Harlem doesn't have to turn out for Wednesday night's premiere of Tina Fey and Amy Poehler's comedy, "Baby Mama" - they've already seen it.
Poehler told us: "We were shooting in Harlem, a scene where I smash the windshield of the car belonging to Tina's ex-boyfriend, who just dissed her in the club. It was 2 a.m., and everyone got their lawn chairs out and were cheering me on. They were screaming, 'You can do it! C'mon, Amy, smash that windshield!' "They all knew who you were?
"I went around and shook hands with everyone and made sure they knew my work. I drew my own head shots and signed them. No one wanted them, but I did it anyway."
Ditto Gatecrasher commenter Mustafa's, "whatever"
Source: Uptown Flavor
First Sir Luscious, then Sean, Now Badu: The Anointing of Janelle Monae
Tags: Janelle Monae, Music
Janelle Monae at the Blender Theater at Gramercy (4.3.2008)
I cross the Brooklyn Bridge on foot each morn on my way to work. It keeps the thighs in check and gets my mind right. It's not easy working 8 unfulfilling hours each day. En route, I listen to a morning mix; some Armand Van Helden to accelerate my stride when I'm running late, some Bobby Caldwell for lovelorn introspection, Tracy Chapman for good music's sake and, yes, Janelle Monae. "Sincerely, Jane" registers as a different shade of genius with each and every listen. It's vernacular and high brow, orchestral and churlish. She writes well and delivers pointedly. It's good music.
So just take a glance at my Idolator Best of 2007 ballot and "In the Mix" write-up for more of my thoughts on Ms. Monae. She's absolutely astounding and cute and original and delightfully brown and kinky headed. I've been back and forth with her manager, Rico, about doing something on her but it never materialized. I'm just as wary as many of her other fans about her Bad Boy signing even though I know it's necessary. Even if she doesn't come out, and I hope her major label dreams don't go down the drain, her profile will be raised such that she will be able to flourish if she decides again to go at it on her own, Wondaland Arts Society style. For evidence, check the post by Erykah Badu on Okayplayer below. (Click to enlarge)
Lacefront, Lacefront!: "Bad Hair", Black Women and Black Pop
Tags: Beyoncé, Black Women, Erykah Badu, Hair, Music
"You need to get you hair long, if you can. If you can get your scalp cut off, and get you a whole 'nother scalp..."
Leave it to Badu to bring scalps into it. From shorn and swaddled in gele to dredloc extensions to shorn again to braided wig of Crystal Gayle proportions to interchangeable afro and Beatle bob wigs, Erykah Badu got some hair stories.
My hair ain't never hung down to my shoulders
And it might not grow
Erykah Badu, "Cleva"
It's an old story. Paper bag and rat tail comb tests drew lands in the sand in segments of Black society. Only some could win. Spike Lee visualized and vocalized it best.
Nan straightening implement had touched my hair since November. I just twisted my abundance of hair or bunned it up. Since I was traveling this past weekend, last Wednesday I went to see my impeccable stylist Eric at Time Salon in Fort Greene. Now thanks to a steam flat iron and a hot comb for the edges my hair is long and straight. Now, all the Negroes love me in New York (well, not all but many more than before). I won't keep it up. I have 4 dust-covered curling irons of varying sizes that I have no intention of using. I'm trying to stay fit and all straightened hair does is hold Black women hostage to low perspiration activities or to our homes if it's rainy or humid outside. And since some of us our brave, there is always the back of a curling iron, an application of grease and water, hard boar bristle bush and circulation haltingly tied silk scarves to keep our edges in check. I inherited just enough of my father's silky hair genes to be beady bee free and length has never been an issue and still I'm anxious. Very much so.
There is an issue of Essence, or maybe one of the many incarnations of Honey, where Beyoncé, she of the 'immensest of weaves' to paraphrase a commenter at the best blog ever, Crunk & Disorderly, expressed affinity for wearing her hair natural. Apparently, she grew out her relaxer for her role in Austin Powers in Goldmember. For the film she fixed an afro piece to her roots and considered staying with the look sans piece but explained that she was met with resistance from fans hence the return of the lacefront, the "getting of a new scalp." That said, I don't think B ever had a problem with buttnekkidness, glitter and I know for a BET rotational a fact that she used to have a beeper (pager if you will).
Do check out Tyra speaking on her weave situation here.
How to Be Good: Ferentz Lafargue on Writing
Tags: Events, Ferentz Lafargue, Writing
A few months ago, writer Ferentz Lafargue blogged a teenage obsession with basketball. The Queens-bred New School Professor described suffering a hot humid summer on unyielding asphalt courts with the hope of getting better, of stepping up his game, of tightening up his handle in order to make his high school's varsity squad. It's not an unfamiliar image; I've seen quite a few young men dribble down sidewalks and onto subway platforms, their devotion to the rock so solid. Lafargue, however, taking cue from writer and lifetime hoopster John Edgar Wideman invoked "toss[ing] around the ol' leather pumpkin" as a metaphor for commitment to craft and, yes, follow through.
I spent the summer before my senior year in high school playing as much as basketball as possible. Having dedicated the previous two summers to shooting, building strength and endurance, and adapting to the nuances of organized basketball, I felt that this was going to be a make or break year for me at school. I was determined to make the varsity team that fall and knew that one of the last stumbling blocks was to improve my handle, or so I thought.You would have been hard pressed to find me without a basketball that summer. I dribble up the hill on Homelawn and along the winding crescents along Highland and 87th avenue that transported my friends and I to the basketball courts behind Thomas A Edison high school in Queens. When my friend Calvin couldn't oblige, I'd marshal my brother Randy out with me in the searing afternoon heat to try stealing the ball from me. At times is was so hot outside that the synthetic leather seemed on the verge of melting. If I had to spend too much time calming him down once Randy became upset at being an involuntary participant in my cruel and unusual game, neither of us was able to pick up the ball that had been idling in the sun without some sort of shield on our hands.
Sitting down to watch Martin or The Wonder Years did not proclude me from doing drills. As the trials and tribulations of Kevin and Winnie unfolded on screen, flicked my basketball from the fingertips of one hand to another, seeking for that transcendent moment that coach Thomson always spoke of when one's hands become one with the rock.
It resonated immediately. I want to be good, better, best at this writing thing and I am not opposed to laying out of public intellectual life on occasion to get there. Sometimes, it is a question of muzzling an impulsive response to a current event. Sometimes, I just don't feel informed enough to comment. But I am always compelled to listen, draft, think, and, gasp, plod through a book or two, to hone my skills and better understand the moment. That so many commentators are undaunted by their unfamiliarity with a subject, with their own pockets of ignorance, with their own lack of dexterity is discouraging and detrimental to our national dialogue but my thoughtfulness can often devolve into tentativeness, a tendency, Lafargue wrote, that once thwarted his hoop dreams.
Sad to say, after all of that work, I ended up never trying out for the team. It's one of the few things in life that I look back on over and over. Not necessarily with regret, in fact, I'd prefer regret, but serious concern over whether there have been other moments in life where I had put in the work, but did not go through with the tryouts?
There are few artists I admire more than Sonny Rollins, the jazz saxophonist who intermittently sequestered himself atop the Williamsburg Bridge to perfect his sound, but it would have been all for naught if he hadn't descended, returned to the city's jazz haunts, dipped his shoulder and blown. Naught. Lafargue understands this and blogged it brightly enough to bring it into focus for me. His memoir, Songs in the Key of My Life, released almost a year ago is just as insightful. Lafargue traverses his unique biography through its soundtrack and allows the reader to eavesdrop even at his most vulnerable moments. It is an excellent read and tonight Lafargue, whose traveled the country engaging readers with his memoir, hits the west side of Manhattan for a reading and discussion. I'll see you there!
For more information on tonight's event, see the Brecht Forum's web site.
To keep abreast of Ferentz Lafargue's writing and appearances, see his web site.
Image source: Sonny Rollins FAQ
Obama, "Bitter" and the Bounce Back
I was disappointed in Barack Obama for slipping, or as a delegate I met this weekend at the King County Democratic Convention put it, for being human. He's got to choose his words carefully but in this slip up, this poor turn of phrase, Obama has proven himself to be everything we've missed in these horrid 8 years and more. Yesterday, Obama addressed the United Steelworkers Union in Steelton, Pennsylvania where he contextualized his controversial comments and clowned Annie Oakley Hillary Clinton. Here is the footage:
(FF to 4:10 for the good stuff)
The King & I: Notes on the Civil Rights Martyr and My Body Politics
Tags: Black Women, Jr., Martin Luther King, Race
So just a few minutes ago, I arrived at my office building on Fifth Avenue in the Union Square Area. I stood in front of the third bank awaiting an elevator. Seconds later, the third bank opened and as I was standing directly in front of it, I stepped in, only to be cut off by a South Asian women to my right, who blithely bumped me hard and entered first.
A few months ago, I washed my hands in the office restroom just after arriving at the office as I had held firmly onto the subway pole on my way in and God knows all the germs nasty Gothamites deposit on them each day. I turned to leave, opened and half stepped through the door when a white Hispanic office mate, a few paces away, blithely strode through the door blocking me out of my own exit.
A few weeks ago in Battery Park I was blithely bowled over by a white guy on the southern sky bridge connecting the World Financial Center to Church Street.
In all instances, no excuses, apologies or acknowledgments of my existence were proffered. I intervened calmly but firmly. I called attention to my corporeality and the incongruity of what had transpired before inviting dialogue. The elevator woman said, "some people have issues," and laughed with the white elevator riders when I exited. The bathroom women giggled nervously, returned to her cubicle and complimented my brightly colored ensembles in each and every future encounter. The sky bridge man bristled and barked, "What's your problem?!" while the mostly white tourists nearby stared at me like I was stone crazy.
I am not a elevator attendant. I am not a door woman. I am not pavement. I am a person.
This morning as I got ready for work, I charged myself to blog the fortieth anniversary of the cowardly assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. but I did not anticipate that my fellow Americans would provide a suitable although sad point of entry. White or Black or Asian or any or all of the above and Hispanic, most of the world's people operate out of a willful blindness to those they imagine to be lower on the totem pole on which whites generally reign supreme and you'll be hard pressed to name folks more precariously positioned than Black women. Ralph Ellison wrote about racial blindness in his opus
Convened by President Lyndon Johnson in the wake of 1967's riots among inner-city blacks in Detroit and dozens of other cities, the Kerner Commission sought to learn what had happened, why the riots had occurred, and what could be done to prevent similar events from happening again. The resulting (and immediately controversial) 1968 Kerner Report concluded that the riots emerged from severe poverty and limited opportunity in America's urban ghettos, for which the Report blamed institutional racism.
Well, as you should watch/listen for yourself. Not much has changed and in many cases communities are more decimated, Black folks are more hopeless. It is a hard row to hoe, some of you know, some of you need to to finally understand. Every day is a challenge to not just be but to maintain enough self-esteem, confidence, presence of mind, dispassion to be assertive in your goals despite those who are too indifferent to spite you and those who care enough to behave the very worst. The struggle continues...
Image credit: Camptown Ladies, Kara Walker, 1998. Cut paper and adhesive on wall. Overall size 9 x 67 feet.
If A Tree Falls in the Woods...
Check this forgotten classic by the artist formerly known as Isis:
