D. Scot Miller: AfroSurreal Generation

Cool: An Introduction - Published by Ishmael Reed's KONCH

2011-10-12T18:01:00.000-07:00

Cool: An Introduction

There’s something to this…
Straight razor sleeping
on the coffee-table.
On the faded blue couch,
in the backseat of the LTD.

Something about this…
mystery ring,
black stone and heavy silver, and talk
of the candy lady above the pool-hall.
And there is, though.

And there’s something about this monkey suit, too.
Red and gold,
like a fire chief on top of a wedding cake.
And the sand,
of course,
fine, spread it out
for The Dance Everybody’s doing now.
Or will be. And that’s
Spats, or The Doughboy, and The Rope too.
There’s something to that, still.

There’s something in this razor,
on the inside pocket of the suit,
Next to a red velvet purse rattling a root
and two new pennies.

Down here at the hotel,
all crying
premium beer from the Vegan Sex Grotto.

Something to,
This straight razor,
on the wedding cake,
red as a fire monkey.

Falling asleep outside again,
like the day don’t matter
like it was tomorrow yesterday
anyway.

Something to this
motherfucking armor
we built
like we ain't truly human
susceptible to violent madness of love and loss,
separated from our babies,
and at war with the women.

There’s something to this.
There is.

Ishmael Reed Publishing Company ©1998–2010

'AMERICA' The Beautiful: An Open Letter To Glenn Ligon

2011-06-01T09:13:00.000-07:00

For San Francisco Bay Guardian

LIT/VISUAL ART

Dear Mr. Ligon,

I'd like to begin this letter with an apology.

For years I've included your work in my personal pantheon. Since my first encounter with your text-based paintings in the pages of Artforum during your early days at the Whitney Museum, to your critiques of Mapplethorpe, to your contributions to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, I have always found your work intriguing, inspiring, and — at times — exasperating. In short, you've never failed to impress me. Even more so when I consider your very vocal status as a gay black man in the high-end art world and as a gay black artist in the world at large. Still, I owe you this apology because, though I've held you in high esteem, I have underestimated you.

AMERICA, the catalog for your 20-year retrospective show held at the Whitney this year, has given me the opportunity to study the breadth and depth of your body of work. Being able sit with this sturdy black book, this 300-page piece of art in itself has — frankly — put me through some changes, brother.

Scott Rothkopf's introductory essay talks about your early days as an Abstract Expressionist seeking your voice and how you found "that there was too much of a gap between what I wanted to say and the means I had to say it." This reminded me of the line, "I'm simply without the means to conduct my own prism" from Will Alexander's poetry collection Compression and Purity — which is what inspired me to write you this letter instead of some critique or some such. If you haven't yet, you should read Alexander's book. You'd like it.

Pulling inspiration from sources like Basquiat, David Hammons, Adrian Piper, Jasper Johns, and Martin Puryear, you began to make literary-based pieces where text is the primary — but not the only — means of communicating your newfound voice. And this, I confess, is where I got all messed up.

Take your dreambook series. As a viewer of painted text, I took it as a given that everyone knew what a dreambook was. That everyone knew what those three stenciled numbers in the middle of each piece meant. I thought everyone knew that you were preserving a magical artifact, and lucky magic at that. Only you knew better. You knew that everyone did not know dreambooks, or magic numbers — and where better to preserve this occult knowledge than in a museum of modern art? You understand curatorial expression, that how and where you say it is just as important as the saying itself. You have created literary-based multimedia narratives. I didn't see this until AMERICA, and for this, I apologize.

I also apologize for what I can say, in hindsight, was a once-over of many of my favorite text pieces. In my defense, I didn't get the opportunity to study your work in such great detail as the lush and plentiful plates in AMERICA have allowed me. Perhaps if I had, I wouldn't be feeling so bad right now. I was so taken by the passages you chose from Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Richard Pryor that I seemingly glossed over the statements the paintings themselves were making.

In one of my favorites, the words, "I'm Turning Into A Specter Before Your Very Eyes and I'm Going to Haunt You," are painted in bold black stencil that starts at the very top of a large white canvas. And as the phrase repeats again and again, the letters begin to merge and darken, so by the bottom of the piece the letters are so thick, smeared, and obscured that all that remains is the intent of words, the feeling behind them. The effect is eerie and liberating at the same time. Okwui Enwezor's essay "Text, Subtext, Intertext: Painting Language and Signifying in the Work of Glenn Ligon" shed much light on that.

I guess because of your dry wit and wry observations, I have not given you your "teeth." Your take on runaway slave posters, placing yourself as described by friends and associates as the runaway, or your tribute to Henry "Box" Brown, the man who mailed himself to freedom, have intrigued me. But it was in the interview with Thelma Golden, where you mention that quoting Richard Pryor was scary, that I found my missing piece. There is something in the way that I laugh when I listen to Pryor that is relieving. His every punch line is like a daredevil outrunning the hell-hounds once again. You're right, Pryor is scary.

For your part as the impetus to the "post-black" movement, for your haunting texts and textures, for deciding that AMERICA is the best theme for your retrospective — you scare me. I wrote this to say you scare me, Glenn Ligon. And I like it.

A Better Tomorrow

2011-05-19T17:19:00.000-07:00

Will Alexander seeks a unified-all-inclusive art theory in Compression & Purity

"'I am the carnivore/ The hounded night walker/ Searching for my wings scattered under glass."

So begins "Blood Penguin," the first poem in Will Alexander's latest collection, Compression & Purity (City Lights, 100 pages, $13.95). Alexander is an honest-and-for-true black surrealist. In 2011, he will have three books of poetry, one novel, one book of essays, and a book of philosophy coming out. Even if you've never heard his name before, you gotta admit that Will Alexander is a bad muthafuckah. "because of my leaning," he writes in the same poem, "I know the stark Egyptian soma/ Much as would the blinded cemetery scribe.'"

Invoking equal parts Homer and Ray Charles, Alexander excavates as only a black surrealist can — by revisiting and resurrecting cults and symbols of the past with new eyes while taking a biographic, confessional tone. Many of the pieces coalesce into declarations/definitions for an ever-shifting identity meeting the limits of contemporary classification.

"I am simply without means to conduct my own prism," Alexander writes in this opening poem. A lament of all artists and creative others who find themselves at this juncture where capability could possibly override access and capital, enabling us to manifest our truest visions.

In "The Deluge in Information," we once again meet this fluid identity. "I am more like a crow from crucial underwater fires," Alexander writes, "a crucial underwater crow/ Neither Chinese or Shinto/ But of the black dimensionality as hidden underwater mass."

Whereas Alexander's Sunrise in Armageddon (2006) was a whop over the head that only the most Joycean among us could dare to hold with a steady grip, Compression & Purity hovers over a series of consistent, graspable subjects throughout. The treatment of identity/biography in "Blood Penguin" and "Deluge" is fully unmasked in "On Anti-Biography," where Alexander makes the succinct, clear statement: "I am only concerned with simultaneity and height, with rays of monomial kindling, guiding the neocortex though ravens, into the ecstasy of x-rays and blackness."

This and the poem that follows, "My Interior Vita," ring like an Afrosurrealist's manifesto. When Alexander writes, "Yet above all, the earth being for me the specificity of Africa, as revealed by Diop, and Jackson, and Van Sertima, and its electrical scent in the writing of Damas. Because of this purview I have never drawn to provincial description, or to quiescent chemistry of condensed domestic horizon," he seems to be speaking for those who have rejected the quiet servitude that characterizes existing roles for African Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos, and queer folk. Even as he's speaking from a universal mind with a universal tongue, he always seems to land on the side of "otherness."

"Yet at a more ancient remove," he continues, "there exists the example of Nubia and Kemet unconcerned with life as secular confiscation, but with the unification of disciplines, such as astronomy, philosophy, law, as paths to the revelations of the self. Knowledge then, as alchemical operation, rather than an isolated expertise." Word.

Though Afrosurreal, Alexander is "Afro futurist" as well. "Alien Personas," the name of yet another strong poem in this collection, could easily be a rubric for the other driving force in this book. Beginning with the personification poem "Water On A New Mars" ("Being water/ I am the voltage of rocks/ Of algid suns in transition/ Flying across a scape/ Of bitter Martian dioxide"), Alexander reaches from the semi-utopian science fiction of Octavia Butler to dystopian Delanyian homage and the expansive cosmology of Sun Ra. What we find is an artist seeking a unified-all-inclusive art theory. A noble, if totally insane, gesture for a better and brighter tomorrow.

Compression and Purity works well as an introduction to Alexander's black surrealist oeuvre while still engaging and challenging his longtime readers. Though emotionally cold and detached, the poems more than make up for it with a genuine love of language and its power to effect change.

Spirit and Soul

2011-03-04T00:27:00.000-08:00

Cody ChesnuTT Moves Past The Headphone Masterpiece To Create Freely In New Ways

D. Scot Miller
arts@sfbg.com

Having uprooted from his native Atlanta to chase his musical dreams in L.A., Cody ChestnuTT and his band, the Crosswalk, landed a deal with Hollywood Records and got as far as recording and mixing a debut album, Venus Loves a Melody, before things went south. In 2002, ChestnuTT took his bass, drum machine, keyboard, guitar, organ, microphone, and headphones into his bedroom and single-handedly crafted his debut album, The Headphone Masterpiece (Ready Set Go). The 99-minute double CD contained 39 songs that ranged from Southern-fried rock to hip-hop, and was laced with enough dastardly and divine deeds to provoke any listener. All of it was written, produced, and performed by ChesnuTT on his four-track cassette recorder.

The success of the album is evident in how it permeated the American fabric. ChestnuTT's fame soared when Grammy Award-winning band the Roots decided to cover his song "The Seed" for its 2002 album Phrenology, with ChestnuTT on guitar and vocals. The video for "The Seed (2.0)" was nominated for an MTV Video Music Award and an MTV 2 Award. The Headphone Masterpiece was nominated for the Shortlist Music Prize in 2003. ChesnuTT's music figured in Miranda July's Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005), and his performance in the Dave Chappelle movie Block Party (2005) was a throwback to the days of Wattstax. Thom Yorke of Radiohead considers ChesnuTT a musical genius, and the opening riff to Headphone Masterpiece's "Look Good In Leather" has become a ubiquitous commercial ditty.

Though ChesnuTT continued to tour and release singles, it wasn't until his 2010 reemergence project, the six-track EP Black Skin No Value (Vibration Vineyard), that he truly returned, brandishing a lyrical approach that had evolved beyond the more "profane" content of Masterpiece. In his words, "the EP was a social commentary rooted in spiritual and soul traditions." Due later this year, his next album, Landing On a Hundred, promises to be as passionate and powerful as the rest of his work. On the eve of a show at Yoshi's, I caught up with him.

DsM: Why did you title your EP Black Skin No Value?

Cody ChesnuTT: I wanted to form something that was ironic. To blend all I think could be a literal application to what I feel is going on. We're facing a low perception of self-worth in the community — from media, the justice system, and so many different things — and at the same time the content of the body of work itself is in stark contrast. We have to recognize that there's value in acknowledging or addressing the issue. Off the top, it was an ironic approach to deal with what I feel is a crisis in the community.

DsM: Although there's community focus in the album, most of the songs seem intimate.

CC: Yeah, it's straightforward. I wanted to take a sound-bite songwriting approach. Straight to the point, to cut through all the noise we're hearing in the media right now. Something that awakens the spirit in some way, or opens chakras that make sure you're really paying attention to what we're facing right now.

DsM: Somewhere between rock, funk, folk, soul, hip-hop, and experimental sounds, The Headphone Masterpiece and its success left you in an interesting position in the world of music. I know you didn't cultivate this crossroad or gray area, so how do you work within it?

CC: I don't think about it. I just create. I do know that the last experience put me in a position where I had some advantages as an artist that gave me room to do what I wanted to do. That's the beauty of my career — it set me up to go either way. Gave me the freedom to create whatever I wanted to create. What's your take on it?

DsM: In The Headphone Masterpiece you're able to show so many sides in an industry that demands two-dimensionality. You go from "Serve This Royalty" to "Smoke and Love," then you write "Bitch, I'm Broke" and throw in a lullaby to your son. You're showing yourself as a fully-formed human being. I feel that kind of complexity confuses the machine.

CC: I think that is to my advantage. I was hoping, and still hope, that it will inspire other people to look at the humanity of it all. To not be so focused on sure-thing in-the-box marketing. I think exposing the range of human emotion makes the landscape much more interesting. Not to get too deep off into the philosophical aspects of creativity, but I'm reading a piece on Nietzsche's self-criticism and The Birth of Tragedy, and [Nietzsche is] saying that after the first three Greek tragedies, there were no more to create — the rest are just copies. That's why we need to expose the range and bring in new content, because, in my opinion, certain subject matter has been exhausted. There's more to explore within the spirit. It's what drives me to do what I do.

DsM: What can we expect from your show?

CC I'm playing all new material with a 10-piece band. I'm really interested into tapping into that root soul music. The kind of music that heals, the kind that touches. It's what I want to feel and hear right now. And there seems to be a consensus that people really want something a little more substantive, closer to that feeling that they had when they were growing up. Right now is an interesting time to bring back that healing vibration, that element. I'm not the only one doing it. I just want to contribute to what I think is a renaissance, a resurgence, a restoration, so to speak, of soul. So much of the soul has been sapped out of our music.

Roscoe Mitchell and Amiri Baraka Unite To Blow Fire and Ice In Your Face

2011-01-12T13:48:00.000-08:00

The New Thing embodied by Roscoe Mitchell's 1966 album Sound is new again

D. Scot Miller for arts@sfbg.com

MUSIC In his 1963 essay "Jazz and the White Critic," Amiri Baraka (then Leroi Jones) writes, "The New Thing, as recent jazz is called, is a reaction to the hard bop-funk-groove-soul camp, which itself came into being in protest against the squelching of most of the blues elements in cool and progressive jazz. Funk (groove, soul) has become as formal and clichéd as cool or swing, and opportunities for imaginative expression have dwindled almost to nothing."

In today's "almost to nothing" post-everything musical wasteland, there is a persistent dwindling yet again. So much musical freedom has given way to downloaded snippets and the time restrictions of YouTube videos. Even our old popular rebel friends, hip-hop and punk rock, have lost their teeth to corporate bling or easy-bake obscurity. Improvisation, experimentation, and innovation are still so hard to come by that I can't help but wonder — don't we need a new thing?

The "New Thing" that Baraka defends in his essay is now the mainstay of a modern, and still thriving, jazz movement that included the likes of Coltrane and Eric Dolphy. Today you can find it in the sounds of musicians such as Ornette Coleman and Roscoe Mitchell.

In 1965, Mitchell helped found the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM). His 1966 album Sound (Delmark) is heralded by many as a milestone that helped usher in "The New Thing." Along with Henry Threadgill, Anthony Braxton, Wadada Leo Smith, and others, Mitchell became a founding member of The Art Ensemble of Chicago in the late 1960s. He's since continued to explore the fringes of avant-garde jazz, noise, classical, folk, and world music to create hybrid compositions that mesmerize and provoke.

This week, on Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday, Yoshi's is inviting Mitchell to join Baraka, the author of more than 40 books, poet icon, revolutionary activist, and father of Afrosurreal Expressionism.

Baraka is renowned as the founder of the Black Arts Movement in Harlem in the 1960s, just as Mitchell is revered as the founder of the AACM in Chicago around the same time. Both men have a reputation for the type of work regimens and standards of excellence that produce results. Baraka is a master performer and reader. Mitchell is a master musician who, along with saxophone, plays clarinet, flute, piccolo, oboe, and many handmade "little instruments" that create ethereal, and eerily familiar, sounds. In short, having these two men on stage doing their thing is like having more than 100 years of the radical avant-garde blowing fire and ice in your face. You'll like it. Trust me.

The idea that American music never fully explored "The New Thing" when it emerged nearly 50 years ago is slowly coming to light, thanks to Soul Jazz's 2004 compilation New Thing! and a recent resurgence of interest in — and reissuing of — works by Sun Ra, Thelonious Monk, and George Lewis. It leaves me to wonder: is the old "New Thing" just the new "New Thing" we've been waiting for?

AMIRI BARAKA AND ROSCOE MITCHELL

Mon./17, 8 and 10 p.m., $12–$18

Yoshi's San Francisco

1330 Fillmore, SF

(415) 655-5600

www.yoshis.com

D. Scot Miller reads from his novel, "Knot Frum Hear", Cafe Amsterdam, SF

2011-01-12T13:26:00.000-08:00

Mirrors and masks

2010-10-22T11:11:00.000-07:00

In praise of the art book during a Kindle era
for San Francisco Bay Guardian Volume 45, Issue 03

LIT/VISUAL ART At a time when everyone is bemoaning the death of the book from either Kindle or just plain old lack of interest, I stand up for our old friend and former conveyance. There's something about it — the smell of fresh ink, the feel of the yellowed-pages of a well-worn paperback, that gentle "crack" of the spine of a new volume — that can never be replaced by some black-matte gadget. As a writer and lover of all things book, I've been impressed by a few this year that may reignite your love for what's laying between the covers, just waiting for your return.

Julian Bell's Mirror of the World: A New History of Art (Thames and Hudson, 496 pages, $34.95) is an unassuming tome. Clocking in at just under 500 pages, this softcover textbook-looking marvel has become a mainstay on my research shelf and bathroom magazine rack. Gathering full-color plates of some of the most lush (Delacroix's Death of Sarandapulus), confrontational (Donatello's David), and demanding (Jane Alexander's Vissershok) images in Western art over the last 500 years, Bell has managed to do what so often seems like the impossible in the art world: he's included damn near everybody. To Bell, Nok terracotta, Chinese Master Guo Xi, and Dogon carvings have as much influence on contemporary art as Warhol, Pollack, and Manet. "I want to believe," he says in the introduction, "that works of art can reveal realities that had otherwise lain unseen, that they can act as frames for truth." Mirror to the World does just that, framing a more-true, inclusive history of art while providing a nifty little timeline in the back to play catch-up.

Speaking of timelines, I'm grateful that Simone Werle's 50 Fashion Designers You Should Know (Prestel, 160 pages, $19.95) has one! As a latecomer to the world of fashion, I know what I like, but sometimes have no idea why, or where it came from. The designers profiled in this book are given full- color spreads featuring their most signature pieces. Armani, Prada, and Dolce and Gabbana are explored at length, while conceptualists such as Yohji Yamamoto and Rei Kubokawa are not overlooked. From early-20th century designers like Coco Chanel and Andre Courreges to contemporaries such as Vivienne Westwood and Tom Ford, this guidebook is handy and dandy.

One of the most beautiful books I've gotten my hands on this year is also one of the most challenging and provocative. Martin Eder's Der Blasse Tanz/The Pale Dance (Prestel, 320 pages, $64.95) is a formidably luscious soft-focus bomb waiting to go off in the reader's psyche. The German painter walks the thin line between fantasy and reality, nightmare and saccharine dream, child-like infatuation and barely-legal obsession. With a technical prowess to rival Renoir and Botticelli, Eder uses watercolors to draw us into this uncomfortable in-between, turning us into admirers and voyeurs at the same time. From the plush feel of the slightly weathered cover-stock, to Isabel Azoulay's introduction and its insights regarding feminism and erotic art, everything works together, making Der Blasse Tanz an artifact that tells our oh-so modern story in a way that only a well-made book can.

But if there is any book out there right now that truly justifies why art and photo books still exist, it's got to be Phyllis Galembo's Maske (Chris Boot, 208 pages, $46). I love this book! In it, ordinary people turn into mythic figures and magicians, tricksters, and gods through fantastic costumes in African and Caribbean rituals and celebrations. Striped bodysuits that cover the entire body, including the face, conjure both Sesame Street and Freddy Kruger. Outfits are made entirely of bunched greenery. A lacquered wooden mask topped with a headdress and a full-body model doubles and then triples a small boy's mass. The images themselves are striking, statements on both fashion and fetish. Knowing that there are 180 of them, and explanations for each one, makes the imagination take off on plywood wings.

After Coltrane On Coltrane at Luggage Store Gallery September 2010

2010-10-12T17:42:00.000-07:00

Fahamu Pecou: Whirl Trade Center

2010-06-13T23:39:00.001-07:00

D. Scot Miller
For San Francisco Bay Guardian

arts@sfbg.com

VISUAL ART In 2005, then-struggling Atlanta artist Fahamu Pecou presented "Arts, Beats and Lyrics" at Atlanta's High Museum of Art. The oversize paintings were blinged-out-mack-daddy-baller self-portraits showing the artist on the covers of well-known and respected magazines. Within two years, his work had been reviewed and featured in numerous publications, including Art In America, Harper's, NY Arts, Mass Appeal, and The Fader. The sheer voodoo of this act makes Pecou a formidable creative force, and coupled with his knack for spectacle, his opening at Shooting Gallery this month is rumored to be the most vainglorious of the season. I caught up with him recently on the phone.

SFBG I'm amazed by your earlier work because it seems to me that you used sympathetic magic to approach fame. You placed yourself within the context of celebrity and became a celebrity. Was that your original intention?

Fahamu Pecou It's funny. It was kind of like the law of attraction. You can write your own narrative by believing in the messages you put out. I started doing this marketing campaign because I was frustrated with the way my career was going at the time. I really just wanted to get my name out there. Just my name. I wanted to make sure that when my name came across the desk of curator or gallery owner, they'd say, "I've seen this name before, maybe I should learn more about this person." It was really sort of a joke. As it started to grow and people began to talk about it, it took on a life of its own.

SFBG Did you anticipate that it would go beyond Atlanta and become international?

FP No. It was just a clever, catchy inside joke among me and my friends. The minute I started putting out stickers and posters that said "Fahamu Pecou Is The Shit," it was a hit. People were jumping on it. It was good that it happened that way because it allowed me to grow with it. Whether I can directly relate it to a specific style, I'll leave that for people to write about.

SFBG Why did you call your latest show "Whirl Trade"?

FP The theme came from the idea of cultural exchanges between Africans on the continent of Africa and the rest of the African diaspora around the world, and how a lot can be lost and misconstrued when taken out of the original cultural context. We look back and forth at each other, and we do what we think is our best impression of "the other." It comes out a twisted up and strange simulation.

I was in South Africa for residency on the Eastern Cape and spent some time in Capetown. I had a friend from Detroit with me, and a few friends from Capetown. We were coming out a restaurant and this homeless guy heard me and my homeboy talking. He said, "You guys are from America? You guys are the real niggas."

We were both like, "Naw man, we aren't niggers, we're brothers." And he said, "No. No, you guys are niggas, and I want to be a nigga too." He was going on and on about how being a nigga was a good thing, not like these guys who come in from Nigeria and other places thinking they're real niggas. We were the real deal. And here we are, trying to explain to him how being a nigga is not a good thing. Nobody wants to be a nigga. My Capetown friends were telling me that being a nigga is not a bad thing anymore. I started wondering, where did this come from? That's what "Whirl Trade" is about: the cultural export of hip-hop culture and the impact it has on the rest of the world. We have this great stage, this platform, where we have the ear of the world. What are we saying? A lot of what's being said and heard is a lot of nothing, especially when taken out of cultural context.

The response has been great and has sparked a lot of conversation around how we view ourselves and each other. What kind of impression we are making of ourselves to other cultures and, deeper still, what kind of impression do I have about African culture through this same context and my own experience? I couldn't ask one question without asking the other. I try to be cautious about this in my work. I'm not trying to accuse or ridicule any group so much as begin to ask questions and start a dialogue between groups who think they know each other but don't.

SFBG You do performances at your gallery shows. Costumes and everything. How does fashion play into your work?

FP In the beginning, it was more about capturing fashion that reflected a whole lifestyle. I patterned it after 50 Cent, who was the catalyst for my whole campaign. I was watching how he was packaged and wondering why a visual artist was never marketed that way. My whole fashion was based on that and Puff Daddy. Then I added my own touches with ascots and blazers and stuff like that.

With "Whirl Trade," I'm looking at contemporary African fashion. Right now, African street fashion is a mashup of textiles and patterns, colors that almost seem disparate but come together beautifully. That and photographs of Malik Sadibe inspired me to bring in many different patterns and contrasts. It wasn't that I was trying to copy a style as much as capture the cultural exchange between what Africans think African Americans dress like, and what African Americans think Africans dress like.

SFBG Though you reference hip-hop, I don't really see you as a hip-hop artist. I sense a cynicism in your approach. Are you disillusioned with hip-hop?

FP I just found myself not so connected to what was being presented in early 2000s. A lot of media-made hip-hop stars came out. It stopped being so much about talent as it was marketing. It became about who was willing to come out and say they sold these drugs or did this killing. At one point that was legitimate, rappers came from the street, but then came these media guys who just said that shit to be famous, just for credibility and that's what started hurting the integrity of the form.

It stopped being how fresh, how clever or how innovative an artist could be. It became how violent, how misogynistic, how violent a person could be. Extremes of everything — people ended being blaxploitation characters.

I'm talking about that in my next work, called "Hard To Death" — about the evolution of black manhood, and how there's a lack of visual representation of that evolution beyond a certain point. Most of the images we see are reflections of hip-hop culture, which captures the black male between the ages of 18-25, just when many young men are working things out. It has become one of the only representations of black masculinity, which is very frustrating. My next piece is devoted to accurately portraying the evolution of black men. I'm seeing more established artists like Common and Jay-Z who have grown beyond that dangerous time.

Since my son was born, I've been really driven to addressing these issues around black masculinity and black manhood. I feel a sense of responsibility there because my work crosses the lines between popular culture and hip-hop culture, and I see that there's a lack of responsible voices. My voice can work as a catalyst to start a conversation. I started a blog (passageofright.wordpress.com) to begin talking about creating systems for some kinds of rites of passage for young black boys. I didn't grow up with a father or a whole lot of role models, so most of what I've learned about being a man is from the school of hard knocks. I want to prevent the continuation of that kind of awakening.

WHIRL TRADE: NEW WORKS BY FAHAMU PECOU

Reception Sat/12, 7–11 p.m.;

Through July 3

Shooting Gallery

839 Larkin, SF

(415) 931-1500

www.shootinggallerysf.com

www.fahamupecouart.com

Oakland Poet: D. Scot Miller

2009-12-18T19:31:00.000-08:00

December 18, 2009

D. Scot Miller is a Bay Area writer, visual artist, teacher and curator. He sits on the board of directors of nocturnes review, and is a regular contributor to The East Bay Express, San Francisco Bay Guardian, Popmatters, and Mosaic Magazine. He is currently completing a book of poems (cool), his Afro-surreal novel, Knot Frum Hear, and has recently published his old fashioned manifesto simply titled: AfroSurreal.

I asked him about how Oakland has influenced his creative process and what he's working on.

"I'd been living in Oakland, talking care of my newborn son, when I finally found the peace and the community I needed to start writing poetry again. At the time, I was neighbors with Marc Bamuthi Joseph, right down the street from giovanni singleton, and would see Victor LaValle or Ishmael Reed walking around The Lake.

There was something about the schedule (Early bedtimes, consistent meals, plenty of fresh air) that seemed anathema to the "poetic process" of my younger days in San Francisco (which was just the opposite). There were actually more places to read my work in Oakland, and more people who "got me" when I did. I began to produce serious, internal works along with "out-loud" pieces.

Right now, I'm looking for more places to read my work and seeking collaborators (co-conspirators?) for public pieces in larger spaces: theaters, studios, galleries...oh, and an agent. man, I need an agent!"

mari mac all drest
in blak
twist dove body
til he neck snap
put bird beak
o’er my teeth
forced to say
just words of peace

All The Copper
Alone or clustered
in gutters
on corners
around payphones.
I pick up pennies
tails or heads up
shining or covered in muck.
Resting in my hand
from forty-five years ago
beginning, becoming
in supple brown
almost like chocolate.
Almost like wood,
but red
rusted
corpuscles passed along
daily in
America’s veins
The penny is the only copper coin here.
I line it up next to a nickel, a dime, a quarter
on my cluttered desk.
Next to the white metals
I recall its names:
brown-back
awaiting an imminent parcel lunged from a truck bed
body braced, buckle-kneed from the weight that is and will be
nigger-head
Spat out of our memory like the gnarled southern drawl
that spat it in
the aftertaste is a disgust and shame
that lingers
leaving forty-nine pennies on a garbage can
Old Abe
Unshaven and thin
Facing east while the others
clean shaven and plump
face west
I rub my chin
copper wire whiskers
beginning, becoming
I brush the coins
into my Bazooka Joe tin
take them to the grocery store
and cash them in.
I buy potato chips
a pack of smokes
a bottle of wine
I sit on the stoop
smoking and drinking
watching the cars go by
like an inventory
of my umber worth.

Afro-surreal Generation

Today,
The energy went to building Tupac and Biggie Smalls
Pez dispensers,
Sun Ra and Henry Dumas facing each other
on a palette of twilight,
Derby hats, burkas and
masks.
And remember its thronged
seduction.
The pressing of face and corpuscular beat. The rush
to connect to
those eyes,
that coat,
those sandals,
tattooed knuckles.
Wonder how much done for
love
How much done for
lack of.

Woodshed

Her father was
her husband. He’d
call before he’d visit.
‘cause I’m a black boy kissing
her pink face, flushed.
I’d
hide in the attic
in my boxers.
I had no idea what damage I was doing
to myself.
His furrowed voice
Sherlockin’,
the smell of our sex
wafting
up,
as walls filled with muffled new moans reverberated
inconclusive evidence.
I did not know who was getting screwed or why.
He’d leave and
she and
her mother and
me would laugh at
the cuckold
daddy.
Once a week,
for years,
I’d fall in love with revenge.
Skewered on the
picket fence.

AfterGraph

Awakened brother catatonic
deified expletive
flayed gargoyle
heathen icon
jack-of-all-trades jaded jalouse jargon
jejune jewelry jiggle joker jockey
jouissance journeyman juvenile joyride
jubilee juke jump juncture juxtapose
karmakennel lefthandedleitmotif
machismomania nabobnarcosis
obtuse patina
quirky razor satyr
tightlipped usher
village wand
Xenophobe Y Zerosumgame

MAGNA-VOX
Align with the single star
boxed in the mighty voice
jackpot spills in orbs and cubes
into black cashmere sacks with glowing
blue brims
we remove the mirrored funnel,
open the beaten and stamped package
wrapped in copper.
smear cobalt across our palms.
snippets of paper crinkles
feet shuffling sand, on wood,
on granite,
a guttural wail
of shuddering light rails with
teeth mashing.
What worlds exist through
the pinhole?
Did you ever place your pupil
flat the screen?
That dot of light,
on the television,
right after you
turn it
off.
It’s just your memory now.

Oakland Poets is our weekly feature highlighting The Town's talented wordsmiths. If you know someone we should feature or would like your work considered, emailKwan@oaklandlocal.com.

Dark Mirrors

2009-11-18T16:00:00.000-08:00

The black dandy beams from past into future -- sharply attired, of course

By D. Scot Miller

Wednesday November 18, 2009

arts@sfbg.com

Recently I was at a meeting with an unnamed arts organization, planning for an AfroSurreal art exhibit. As we were hashing out the details of display, the concept of the black dandy become a bone of contention among my learned colleagues. What was, and is, a black dandy? How does the black dandy differ from the white dandy? What's the difference between a dandy and fop? Aren't those terms interchangeable? Why bother looking at or for a black dandy at all? I'm seldom at a loss for words — it just takes me a minute to arrange them properly sometimes. (Ask my editor.) But this time, I had nothing to say. I just directed all queries to Slaves To Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity (Duke University Press, 408 pages, $24.95).

Monica L. Miller's book is the first of its kind: a lengthy written study of the history of black dandyism and the role that style has played in the politics and aesthetics of African and African American identity. She draws from literature, film, photography, print ads, and music to reveal the black dandy's underground cultural history and generate possibilities for the future.

Slaves to Fashion looks at black dandies of the past, beginning with Mungo Macaroni, a freed slave and well-known force within the London social scene in the 18th century. Miller also studies contemporary manifestations, in the vestments of Andre 3000 and Puff Daddy, showing how black dandies have historically used the signature tools of clothing, gesture, and wit to break down limiting definitions and introduce new, fluid concepts of social and political possibility. Though Slaves to Fashion is über-academic and at times weighed down by post-structrualist jargon, Miller more than makes up for it with uncanny feats of scholarship that illustrate ways in which the figure of the black dandy has been an elephant-in-the-room — albeit a particualrly well-dressed one.

A great example is Miller's citing of the character of Adolph in Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1852 Uncle Tom's Cabin. Almost immediately after the publication of this "great abolitionist work," its characters became some of the first American archetypes: Simon Legree and Uncle Tom are two notable examples. In comparison, Adolph — a black dandy pivotal to the story — was excised from the public imagination. Miller sees this as a reaction to what she calls "crimes of fashion," which take place when Africans and African Americans don the clothing of the oppressed to both emulate and satirize the oppressor. Adolph served as a "dark mirror" to both American materialism and the deep fear of the impending gender and race-mixing that would take place after abolition.

This fear, according to Miller, is the difference between the black dandy and the white dandy or the fop. Unlike a Caucasian counterpart, exemplified by the likes of Oscar Wilde, the black dandy comes from a position of underprivilege and uses flair and style as a way to redefine masculinity to include him. In other words, as opposed to a feminine front, it is the black dandy's fluid masculinity — his "queering" of the term — that threatens to undermine the social order. Adolph is the exact opposite of the static, predictable docility and animalism of "the Big Black Buck" Uncle Tom. When he's in town, you have to lock up your sons, daughters, wives, mother, father, and yourself because his power of seduction is so great. Think Prince during his Dirty Mind (Warner Bros., 1980) phase and you get the general idea.

Fear, according to Miller, continues to generate a serious backlash in reaction to the idea — let alone reality — of true equality for black people in the west. Images of black cork minstelry that lampoon the black dandy's aspirations have been around as long as the black dandy. From Zip Coon and Jim Dandy in the early 19th century to present-day manifestations in popular culture, ambivalence — a tool of the black dandy — has served as a double-edged sword. Exactly when and where does "stylin' out" become "coonin'"? If W.E.B. Du Bois, the quintessential black dandy, couldn't figure it out, I'm not sure that I can find a definitive answer.

Slaves to Fashion rediscovers its footing in exploring the nature of "otherness." Returning from investigations of the black dandy's lineage to note his role in contemporary art and culture, Miller shines a light on filmmaker Isaac Julien, editor and photographer Iké Udé, visual artist Yinka Shonibare, and beyond. In the process, she answers a variety of questions regarding what a black dandy is and does. Ultimately, the black dandy's problem is an AfroSurreal one: by perpetrating these "crimes of fashion," by avoiding and exploding pat definitions of blackness, masculinity, and sexuality, he occupies a realm outside convention, and all too often, recognition. It is from these murky waters of post-postmodernity, I believe, that the black dandy brings a message for us all.

Emory Douglas

2009-11-04T18:50:00.000-08:00

Wednesday November 4, 2009

GOLDIES 2009 LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD:

Bringing the militant chic of the Panther image to the masses

As a teenager, Emory Douglas was sentenced to 15 months at the Youth Training School in Ontario. It may have been the best thing for him — and the worst thing "the Man" could have done. In the prison printing shop, he discovered a gift for print and collage he would later use as the minister of culture for the Black Panther Party. From 1967 until the party disbanded in the 1980s, his iconic graphic art marked most issues of the newspaper The Black Panther.

Douglas brought the militant chic of the Panther image to the masses, using the newspaper to incite the oppressed to action. In the name of expediency and limited resources, he developed collage tricks to maximize his passionate message. His back-page posters emphasized the Panthers' community programs, like free breakfast for children, clinics, schools, and arts events. His works presented the struggle with a mixture of empathy and outrage — sometimes direct, sometimes allegorical — that remains innovative and contemporary amid today's high-tech standards.

In a 1968 salvo called "Position Paper No. 1 on Revolutionary Art," Douglas states: "Revolutionary art is learned in the ghetto from the pig cops on the beat, demagogue politicians, and avaricious businessmen. Not in the schools of fine art. The Revolutionary artist...hears the sounds of footsteps of black people trampling the ghetto streets and translates them into pictures of slow revolts against the slave masters, stomping them in their brains with bullets, that we can have power and freedom to determine the destiny of our community and help to build our world." For 33 years Douglas has stood by these words, working toward a better world for the people.

When Rizzoli published a compendium of Douglas's posters, broadsheets, and fliers in 2007, a new generation became familiar with the causes of solidarity, liberation, and self-determination he holds dear. He has since had large-scale shows at sites such as L.A.'s Museum of Contemporary Art, while his commitment to social change has led to exhibitions and speaking engagements at Oakland's New Black World and the sorely-missed Babylon Falling in San Francisco. His interpretation of Toni Morrison's Bluest Eye for last year's "Banned and Recovered" show at San Francisco Center of the Book was one of the standout pieces of 2008.

Douglas' work captures the tragedy and triumph of the disenfranchised, impoverished, and fed up; an eternal struggle against those blessed with power who choose to abuse it. Much like the works of Goya and the words of Hugo, his contribution to that struggle remains immeasurable — not just for what he has created, but for the people he will empower for generations to come. *

www.itsabouttimebpp.com

By D. Scot Miller

Amiri Baraka Keeps It Real

2009-10-29T09:24:00.001-07:00

Amiri Baraka keeps it real about America in the Obama era

By D. Scot Miller

arts@sfbg.com

LIT/MUSIC With influences ranging from the Cuban Revolution and Malcolm X to musical orishas such as Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Thelonius Monk, and Sun Ra, Amiri Baraka is renowned as the founder of the Black Arts Movement in Harlem in the 1960s that became, though short-lived, the virtual blueprint for a new American theater aesthetic. The movement and his published work — such as 1963's signature study on African American music Blues People and the same year's play Dutchman — practically seeded "the cultural corollary to black nationalism" of that revolutionary American milieu.

Baraka lives in Newark, N.J., with his wife and author Amina Baraka; they have five children and head the word-music ensemble Blue Ark: The Word Ship and co-direct Kimako's Blues People, an art space housed in their theater basement for some 15 years. I spoke with him on the eve of an upcoming visit.

SFBG You coined the term "Afrosurreal Expressionism." Can you share your definition?

AB If you know the African tales or even African writers and African cultures, then you know they understand the concept of having relationships reversed, which exposes new concepts and dimensions. They understood the power of the conscious and unconscious mind to change the dimensions of the world. The various forces of nature that people developed, that people saw as gods, these elemental forces: the wind, the water, the sun, the moon. They understood how human beings interrelate to those forces. Henry Dumas' work dealt with these changing dimensions, and people who do strange things in realistic situations. It was Surrealism that changed the relationship to things. Dumas influenced Toni Morrison, who was his editor at Random House. He was a strong writer and he went out of here in a tragic way, being murdered by the police. His stories and poems are Afrosurreal, with African psychology imposing these dimensions on reality.

SFBG What brings you to the Bay Area this time around?

AMIRI BARAKA We're doing two sets at Yoshi's with Howard Wiley. Those are the kinds of musical things we have a nice time doing. I hope to bring the poetry and music to Oakland, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. And I'm giving a talk at the library.

SFBG What will you be discussing?

AB Obama and his first 10 months, based on an essay I wrote a few months ago called "We're Already in the Future." I support Obama and I think that the people who supported him initially should keep supporting him because they are forgetting the huge difficulty he faces. This society, they don't want any kind of change. They do not want him, first of all. Only 43 percent of the white people even voted for him, and a lot those people resent the fact that white America is now mulatto. That election proved that it's not white America, it's multinational America, so they've set up this roadblock to almost anything he does.

Anytime you can, you see how doofus Americans are, to oppose their own quality of life improvement, their own health care. They'd rather mope along with little health care or none simply because the corporations have convinced them it's bad for them — it shows you that we have a real education gap in America. Not to mention the racism, which is behind a lot of it, big time.

The people who support Obama need to stand together to fight the right wing. It's the right wing that is the enemy. Those huge corporations including those mouthpieces they have. The media is just absurd, with [Sean] Hannity, [Bill] O'Reilly, [Glenn] Beck, Rush Limbaugh. These guys are just too much. If they're not racist, there is no such thing as racism.

SFBG I know that you spent some time in SF. What are your impressions of our city?

AB I was a visiting professor at San Francisco State for about three or four months, that was the extent of my residency. I like San Francisco. I'm drawn to the vibe there. The last time I was in San Francisco, I was reading at Ferlinghetti's bookstore [City Lights]. Most of my stuff is in Oakland, but whenever I'm in Oakland, I stop by San Francisco.

Seems to me that San Francisco is very expensive, like New York. I live in Newark, N.J., which is 12 miles outside of New York City — it's got that Oakland-San Francisco relationship. When you're dealing with New York, you have that high-rent district all the way around. San Francisco is a beautiful city, but going there and being there are two different things.

SFBG Happy birthday. I know you just turned 75. Any wisdom to impart from three-quarters of a century?

AB I've been 75 for about five days. I can say that you really need to take care of yourself. That's the cliché: "If I knew I was going be this old, I would have taken better care of myself," but it's some better wisdom than what you hear generally.

SFBG What is the role of the artist in the current climate, and what are the tools we can use to bring about social change?

AB The way things work: cause and effect, action and reaction. The '60s and the '70s were a period of intense struggle. The Black Arts Movement and the antiimperialist movement laid the foundation to get Obama elected. But then you get a reaction, and it has been quite evident. Imperialist commerce has taken over the arts. Once we were struggling to get black movies made — now we see what kinds of movies are being made by black people, and they are very backward. Act, react. We have to struggle anew to do something about these backwards elements.

Black people have 27 cities: we need 27 theaters, 27 galleries, 27 periodicals. We need to have poets, rappers, painters, actors struggling to raise the consciousness of the people. That is the role of the artist. Black people still live in these ghettos and these 'hoods. There may be more of a black middle-class, but they often are the ones helping to keep us duped and bamboozled. This is a struggle that has to be. This is reality — like they say, "Keep it real." This is a struggle that has to be.

Foxy lady

2009-10-29T09:20:00.000-07:00

Victor Pelevin serves up a sexual odyssey starring russian super werewolves

By D. Scot Miller

www.sfbg.com

Wednesday October 28, 2009

A Hu-Li appears to be your run-of-the-mill lascivious 15-year-old prostitute in modern Russia. She does all the things professionals who cater to the discerning international pedophile do. What are those things? Well, she posts ads on the Internet that read:

"A FAIRY TALE CUM TRUE: Small breasts for big money. A little ginger kitten is waiting for a call from a well-to-do stranger. Classic sex and royal head, anal, petting, bondage, whipping (including the Russian knout), foot fetish, strap-on, sakura branch, lesbo, oral, anal stimulation, cunnilingus (including compulsory), role-swapping, two-way, gold and silver rain, fisting, piercing, catheter, copro, enema, gentle and heavy domination, Mistress and Slave girl services. Face control ... Almost everything. Shag me and forget! If you can ...

In other words, A Hu-Li flagellates the middle-aged intelligentsia who answer her siren's call. She likes riding her bike, loves Nabokov, and is still a bit hung up about being a virgin. Pretty typical right?

How about this? A Hu Li is a 2,000-year-old, shape-shifting werefox from ancient China who uses her bushy tail to hypnotize men and absorb their life force. That grab ya? The title of Victor Pelevin's latest is The Sacred Book of the Werewolf, the increasingly intriguing A-Hu Li is our narrator, and the book has little to do with anything I've just written. A Hu-Li is a member of a race of werefoxes who appear to be 15-year-old girls, when they are in fact neither. They cannot die; do not bathe; and never need to eat food, as long as they can feed on the sexual energy of the "naked apes" they have been doomed to interact with for seemingly all eternity. Their tails enable them to sap the energy of their prey while convincing them that they are fulfilling their greatest sexual fantasies. As such, they gravitate toward sex work, and have since time immemorial. Naturally, thousands of years doing the same thing as civilizations rise and fall can leave an immortal netherworld creature cynical and with a lot of time on her hands. Our narrator fills it by seeking enlightenment. Might as well.

Until she meets Alexander, that is, a Wagner-addicted werewolf who ranks high in the Russian Secret Service. What follows is one of the most hilarious and horrific courtships to come out of the former bloc. But guess what? The Sacred Book of the Werewolf isn't about that, either.

Victor Pelevin may be a literary genius. He is definitely a tricky malcontent. He has written one of the most spiritually satisfying novels ever about wily werefoxes, interspecies sex, kleptocracy, and the joys of methamphetamines. In fewer than 400 pages, he manages touch on the finer points of sages from Nietzsche to Lao Tzu as A-Hu Li and Alexander seek the highest state of their kind ... super werewolf. Sound silly? That's because it is. It's also pretentious, perverse, puerile, and exasperating. Yet none of that stops it from saving your sullied soul. Sticky fur and a dash of satori — what more could you ask for on Halloween ... candy?

D. Scot Miller and giovanni singleton "ascension" & "cool"

2009-10-07T20:32:00.000-07:00

giovanni singleton, a former debutant and native of Richmond, VA, is a fan of figs and Greek-style yogurt, and a collector of bookmarks. She is also founding editor of nocturnes (re)view, a journal dedicated to innovative and experimental work of the African Diaspora and other contested spaces.

D. Scot Miller is a Bay Area writer, visual artist, teacher, curator and a regular contributor to The San Francisco Bay Guardian, Mosaic Magazine and others. He sits on the board of directors of nocturnes (re)view

singleton will read from her recently completed manuscript, ascension, which is informed by the music and life of Alice Coltrane.

D. Scot will read from his manuscript, cool, and selections of his novel, Knot Frum Hear, both of which are very sexy.

Open mic following.

D. Scott Miller: In what ways does truth - however you define it - enter into your work?

giovanni singleton: Not sure if truth of my own making/definition enters into my work. Such has proven to be a rather nasty stumbling block in previous writing endeavors. The work, I feel, brings a certain truth along with it. And it isn't always pleasant, reasonable, recognizable, or even coherent to me. Honesty and trust are perhaps more my domain.

DSM:Reading your work, particularly ascension, I'm struck by the dream-like nature of your imagery. How do dreams play within your work? How do you capture the ethereal quality of a dream or translate it into something accessible to the reader?

gs: Those are good questions. Tough. I often find playing in the back of my mind the lyrics of Row, Row, Row Your Boat, the last line of which is "Life is but a dream." What I am interested in are ways in which it might be possible to give "dream" and "reality" equal weight and measure. Neither is elevated above the other. I'd like to see/think of them as being both plausible and implausible. I am reminded of the Lankavatara Sutra's words "Things are not as they seem nor or they otherwise." This then dismantles the dualistic relationship between dream and reality. I like that open field. Dreams can be useful when not appended to Hope and Fear which again makes for a field that's open. I think an ethereal quality is somewhat necessary in order to deal with struggle and with its cessation. Impermanence as well as a connection/recognition of something greater than the "I" is also in the language of dream or the ethereal. No real in unreal. No real in real either.

DSM: Boundaries (between artist and subject, reader and writer, subject and object, object and other) sometimes seem to disappear in your larger pieces. Is this intentional or just a by-product of your process?

gs: In most instances in a life, good boundaries are important. Mind the fence. However, it is a big relief when the veil drops away and reveals the interconnectedness that holds the universe together. I wasn't aware that working on larger/longer pieces allowed for this to happen but I suppose it does. It's the removal of excess. Spaciousness is amazing canvas, I think. Erasable too.

Tan Khanh Cao Featured at AAWAA show at SOMArts

2009-10-06T15:21:00.000-07:00

As a participating artist in the current AAWAA show at SOMArts, I was asked to write a dedication. The artists were asked to answer "who inspires you? and how"

DEDICATION

My earliest desire to be an artist was wanting to emulate my father. To be like him was to draw him back to me.

I have favorite famous artists- Wifredo Lam, Louise Bourgeois, Picasso, Eric Dolphy, Cecil Taylor-
but the people who inspire me most are the people I know.

I want to live like Paulette Baker, focus like Danny Cao, care like Targol Mesbah, dream like Kaisik Wong, swim like Jade Brooks with the patience of Walter Kitundu, the fire of Ali Dadgar, the thoughtfulness of Peter Maravelis, the tirelessness of Douglas Ewart, the joy of Carei Thomas and the intuition of Paul Yamazaki. I want to paint the music of David Boyce and the poetry of D. Scot Miller.

I am nourished by the brilliance and loving support of my family of friends. Those above, James Earle, Gary Stenger, Julie Lindow, Shashari Kiburi, Elaine Kahn, Juan Fernandez, Tad Coughenour, and of course...my mother.

With Mother (Gayle Morbacher) and Tre' Miller

With Carol of AAWAA

Tre Miller

With Juan Fernandez

With Juan and Tad Coughenour

With Cynthia Tom

See Monsters

2009-09-02T01:26:00.000-07:00

It's a Big Machine, it's a mean machine, it's a big, mean story by Victor LaValle

By D. Scot Miller

Wednesday September 2, 2009

a&eletters@sfbg.com

REVIEW Naomi Ophelia Lamar was my cousin, but my big sister. Six years older than me, she ran away from home at 16. Though we stayed in touch, too many years of no contact had changed us both. We tried but could never close the distance. Last year, they found her body in a Dumpster in Birmingham, Ala. She'd been stabbed over 30 times. Her husband had done it. Afterward, he drove to the nearest bridge and threw himself off. She was the grandmother of three. I sat in the bathroom screaming, "We are not garbage!"

Bizarre and horrible things happen. They just do. They happen to us, around us, and because of us. Sometimes the horrible things only become horrible on reflection. We liked them at the time. Sometimes the bizarre things become so commonplace that they stop being bizarre. Both bizarre and horrible things become badges of distinction and honor when we survive. When we answer the call and stagger to daylight.

This is the general premise of Victor LaValle's Big Machine (Spiegel & Grau, 284 pages, $25), which opens with a look at Ricky Rice, a middle-aged porter in a bus depot in Utica, N.Y. It's 2005, and the world is about to go broke. Ricky's a downtrodden sanitation worker with a shady past. He's never seen better days, and none seem to be forthcoming. That is, until he receives a mysterious note reminding him of The Promise he made: a one-way bus ticket to Vermont's northeast kingdom. On the bus to the frigid north, we hear LaValle's refrain from an alcoholic goblin on a tear to his captive audience: "Human beings are no damn good. We even worse than animals. We like ..."

The ellipsis just dangles, from the book's first section on. As the events of Big Machine unfolded, I realized that that very phrase, and that very ellipsis, had been hanging from my lips since last year. It is the jump-off point for Lavalle's book, and as we travel with Ricky Rice — alongside him, but also inside his mind as it seeks justification and reason — we begin to understand why.

Big Machine is a crafty book. Every page is a precise and illuminating reveal — a large veil playfully lifted from the reader's initial conceptions of black/white, good/evil, and ultimately, salvation. Each chapter is a possible spoiler. A tough job for the reviewer, to be sure. Especially one who has been anticipating such a novel (and working on such a novel) for years.

Behold the invisible! You shall see unknown worlds: Ricky is recruited, along with six other recovering addicts and petty criminals to become a paranormal investigator. All of them have heard The Voice at the deep bottom of their shoddy existences and answered it with The Promise. Like generations of wretched of the earth before them, they are inducted into a secret society of "negros" ("I won't say African Americans," says Rice, "it's too damn long") to find The Voice and figure out what it wants.

From cleaning out bathroom stalls in work boots and T-shirts, Ricky becomes a dandy, wearing the finest clothes that the 1940s and 1950s could provide. Fitted in the best vines, he makes his way to (where else?) the Bay Area to confront a murder-suicide cult, and his own monstrous past.

Far from a standard dry examination of doubt and faith, Lavalle's allegorical approach is sweeping and swashbuckling. Big Machine takes us from Ricky's idyllic childhood — sweet as saccharine, with a black tar of burn — to his romantic nadir, dying in a puddle of piss and shit in the basement of a house owned by a man named Murder.

LaValle has named Shirley Jackson and Ambrose Pierce as influences, along with those he calls "the Black Eccentrics": Ishmael Reed, Gayle Jones, Darth Vader. His approach to gothic horror adds black Black humor and a new element of ferocity to the AfroSurreal aesthetic.

There's a lot of tearing in this book. Flesh is peeled, pried, burned, punctured. Torture plays a prominent role. Children are exploited, souls are gnawed away, and spirits are broken. Bullets fly, bodies are wrenched, mauled, mutilated and discarded — so much so that Lavalle's main refrain takes on greater weight when it reappears, in extended form, from the mouth of one of Big Machine's main characters. "Human beings are no damn good!," the character says. "The despised become the despicable. God Damn! We worse than animals! We're like monsters."

Monsters. Big Machine has those too. Some wear suits, some wear shawls, some move between the shadows with vise-grip hands. The story is neither miserable nor grotesque, and it is proof of LaValle's genius that sympathy and forgiveness extends to the whole pitiful lot.

I've been following LaValle since I read his 1999 short story collection Slapboxing With Jesus (which takes its title from a Ghostface Killah quote), and followed it up by reading 2003's The Ecstatic (which in turn inspired Mos Def to title his latest album the same). Mos Def contributed a blurb to Big Machine, and the book's blurbs are telling: according to them, LaValle is Marquez mixed with Poe, or Marakami mixed with Ellison, or Bosch having a baby with Lenny Bruce. But I feel they all miss the mark — I'm here to tell you that Victor LaValle is a believer in the unseen world. He has been there, and what he has brought back has affirmed my belief too. Yes, there are monsters out there, and what's an AfroSurrealist supposed to do?

"I guess we could lock ourselves in the bathroom and hide. Let someone else face the fight," says Ricky. "But we're not going to do that."

Sweetest Taboo

2009-08-07T11:13:00.000-07:00

Banned and Recovered: Artists Respond to Censorship"

By D. Scot Miller

PREVIEW The taboo has always had a special place in my heart. As a pre-adolescent, I was given a list of banned books from a rogue librarian and I hunted down and read every one of them. It may have seemed odd to find an 11-year-old black boy reading the likes of John Rechy's City of Night (Grove, 1963) and William Burroughs' Naked Lunch (Olympia/Grove, 1959), but these verboten tomes, along with the librarian's free beer and porn, served as an illicit gateway out of my little coal-mining town into the larger, lustier world. If not for the innocence-stealing pederast posing as the coolest adult I knew, I might still be in that town, feeling like I was missing something but never knowing what. In short, banned books saved my life: I never would have read a single one had they not been banned.

That's why it's exciting, even titillating, that the San Francisco Center for the Book, in collaboration with the African American Museum and Library in Oakland, presents "Banned and Recovered: Artists Respond to Censorship." The 63 installation, multimedia, and graphic artists showcased at the two sites don't so much address the issue of banned books as celebrate their favorites, which happened to have been banned somewhere at one time or another — and what great book hasn't? Among those praising the forbidden at the Center for the Book are Enrique Chagoya, who offers a 2000 diptych to Burroughs, and ex–Black Panther propagandist Emory Douglas, who brings Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970) to light.

MIXING IT UP: TAKING ON THE MEDIA BULLIES

2009-08-07T11:08:00.000-07:00

Ishmael Reed

Da Capo Press

320 pages

$15.95

Ishmael Reed is one of the most prolific writers, seers, and pundits of the 20th and 21st centuries. The author of nine novels, six books of poetry, six plays, and four books of political essays has been a constant presence and persistent thorn in the sides of various official experts. What I love about Reed is his refusal to be classified, stereotyped, or labeled. From his first book, 1967's wildly experimental Freelance Pallbearers, through a turbulent and often silly surge of academic quarrels, he has shared his vision with bravado and courage.

His latest book of political essays continues his crusade for mother-wit in the face of a consistently homogenized culture, whether through an insightful interview with saxophonist Sonny Rollins, or writing that tackles America's anti-black lending practices. Reed's take is plainspoken and no-nonsense, yet an element of whimsy seems to permeate even the most uncomfortable subjects.

In an essay about the Michael Jackson and Kobe Bryant trials, for example, his observation about hip-hop "pimp-culture" is that "Blacks are just as incompetent in this area of crime as they are in all others. Nearly four hundred years on this continent and not a single Martha Stewart or Ken Lay."

The only drawback of this book is that I get the impression that Reed is spending too much time in front of the television. It's rumored that he has several sets stacked one on top of another so he can watch them simultaneously.

2009-08-07T11:01:00.001-07:00

De La Soul is alive

Two takes on 3 Feet High and Rising, 20 years later

By D. Scot Miller and Mosi Reeves

CHECK ONE Last night, I played De La Soul's 3 Feet High and Rising (Tommy Boy/Warner Bros., 1989) for the first time in years. I couldn't stop laughing.

It was a surprise, even though I always knew that much of De La Soul's early appeal rested on its humor. Kelvin "Posdnous" Mercer spelled "soundsop" backwards; Dave "Trugoy the Dove" Jolicoeur loved yogurt. (He's pictured eating yogurt in the album's liner notes.) They complained about style biters who dug "Potholes in My Lawn"; and called their loopy, circuitous jams "Plug Tunin'." There were references to soap, water, and Luden's cough drops. In the first of several "game show" skits that bookended the album, Trugoy remarked that his favorite film was the 1976 sex-and-torture spectacle Bloodsucking Freaks. Twenty years later, De La Soul's private language — or, to be accurate, "DA Inner Sound Y'all (D.A.I.S.Y. Age)" — still sounds fresh and crazily absurd.

Mainstream rock critics, suspicious of all that hippity-hop stuff, welcomed 3 Feet with restrained praise at first: Rolling Stone, in one of its historic blunders, only gave the album three stars while acknowledging it as "one of the most original rap albums ever." The yellow-and-turquoise-daisies album art and MTV hype obscured De La Soul's sharply intelligent sendups of go-go ("Do As De La Does") and rap clichés ("Take It Off," which parodied the then-ubiquitous "Funky Drummer" loop). Today, irony is so entrenched in the Generation X-Y-and-Zero lexicon that we forget how pleasurable it is when it's done right.

Unfortunately, the good vibes quickly turned sour. Shortly after the album's release, De La Soul ended an Arsenio Hall appearance with "Ain't Hip to Be Labeled a Hippie," a refrain first voiced on "Me, Myself and I." The 1991 follow-up De La Soul is Dead offered a smashed flowerpot and tales of how the crew nearly got kicked off LL Cool J's tour for fighting, just to prove that, hey, they ain't no punks. Goofy odes to weed-smoking jostled uneasily with cautionary tales of child abuse and murder. The playful spirit of hip-hop's so-called golden age was gone, another casualty in the oncoming storm of street realism and gangster aesthetics. (Mosi Reeves)

CHECK TWO I'd dug "Plug Tunin'" when I chanced across it on a mixtape from somewhere. This flow — this new style of speak — was shrouded in slang, occulted, and backed by a sound collage that seemed conjured from a basement where a rusty Victrola played the memories of an old man nodding off in his Lay-Z-Boy.

My boys hated that song. I loved it, but I didn't "get it." Armed with more fashion-sense than any of us knew what to do with, Marlon looked over at me and said, "You really like these Oklahoma muthafuckas?" Yes I did. Brothers was dope. From Strong Island, and dope. Rakim dope.

One Sunday, I was cleaning up my place to 3 Feet High and Rising and ran across a roach in an ashtray. Sprawled out on the couch watching the sun stream through my dirty windows, I "got" De La Soul. Every word was deciphered. It felt as if I'd learned a new language, or remembered an old one.

Things changed after that.

The 20th anniversary of De La Soul's 3 Feet High and Rising is a cause for celebration. Anyone else feeling vindicated?

Kelvin "Posdnous" Mercer, David "Trugoy the Dove" Jolicoeur, and Vincent "PA Mase" Mason have chronicled the last 20 years through nine studio albums and countless production credits (Camp Lo, Gorillaz and MF DOOM among them). Prince Paul produced them, and in turn their popularity produced Prince Paul. They introduced a sleeping world to the black gale known as Mos Def.

De La is coming back to San Francisco. Witness genius at work. (D. Scot Miller)

Props to p-r-o-p-s

2009-07-08T14:55:00.000-07:00

Behold The Invisible!

Afro-Surreal presupposes that beyond this visible world, there is an invisible world striving to manifest.  It is our job to uncover it.  We strive for rococo: the beautiful, the sensuous, and the whimsical by restoring the cult of the past, revisiting old ways with new eyes.

Excess is the only legitimate means of subversion.

Hybridization is a form of disobedience.

Music Afrosurreal expresses this overflow.

-D. Scot Miller

D. Scot Miller is a Bay Area writer, visual artist, teacher, curator. He sits on the board of directors of nocturnes review, and is a regular contributor to The East Bay Express, San Francisco Bay Guardian, Popmatters, and Mosaic Magazine. He is completing a book of poems, his Afro-surreal novel, Knot Frum Hear, and has recently published his old fashioned manifesto simply titled: AfroSurreal.

Cover Art “Knot Frum Hear” by Tan Khanh Cao

propsRadio • AFRO-SURREAL

The Art Ensemble of Chicago "Nfamoudou-Boudougou" Bap-Tizum (Atlantic)

Erykah Badu "Danger" Worldwide Underground (Motown)

Handsome Boy Modeling School feat. Miho Hatori & Mike D. "Metaphysical" So... How's Your Girl? (Tommy Boy)

Sun Ra "Exotic Forest" Nothing Is... (Free Jazz)

The Broun Fellinis "Q Phlat" Aphrokubist Improvisations Vol. 9 (Moonshine)

Anti-Pop Consortium "Silver Heat" Arrhythmia (Warp)

Ghostface Killah "Apollo Kids" Supreme Clientele (Razor Sharp)

Fishbone "Freddie's Dead" Truth And Soul (Columbia)

Mike Ladd "Sleep Patterns Of Black Expatriots Circa 1960" Negrophilia (Thirsty Ear)

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Eight tracks every week from original vinyl sources for your listening pleasure

2009-07-06T13:14:00.000-07:00

MAGNA-VOX

That dot of light,

on the television,
right after you
turn it
off.

Align with the single star
boxed in the mighty voice

jackpot orbs and cubes
fill black cashmere sacks with glowing
blue brims

we remove the mirrored funnel,
open the beaten and stamped package
wrapped in copper.
smear cobalt across our palms.

snippets of paper crinkles
feet shuffling sand, on wood,
on granite,
a guttural wail
of shuddering light rails with
teeth mashing.

What worlds exist through
the pinhole?

Did you ever place your pupil
flat the screen?

Just your memory now.

Black Water Rising

2009-06-03T20:47:00.000-07:00

A DISTANT MEMORY

In Attica Locke's Black Water Rising, the surprises extend beyond suspense

By D. Scot Miller

For San San Francisco Bay Guardian
Wednesday June 3, 2009

REVIEW I was cautious when I got the galley for Attica Locke's first novel Black Water Rising (Harper, 448 pages, $25.99). I'd been intrigued before by beguiling plots of intrigue and suspense, only to find myself in the middle of a tepid affair with no way out except for closing the damn thing and chalking it up to yet another life lesson. All the warning signs were there.

The book's protagonist, Jay Porter, is an attorney operating out of a Houston strip mall in 1981. His only client is a shady prostitute, who may or may not pay him. His wife, Bernie, is pregnant and he's barely making ends meet to feed them, much less the baby who's on the way. Though not happy with his mediocre existence, he's content enough with his lot to be strong-willed and determined to make it.

Jay has a terrible secret, of course, that threatens to tear the world he has meticulously built asunder. And one fateful night, something happens that sets the unraveling in motion. He saves a mysterious woman's life and places himself in the middle of a plot rife with sex, backroom deals, and dirty cash that will determine his fate and that of Houston, Texas, and eventually, the world!

"Easy, big fella. Easy," I told myself. "You've been hurt before." I saw the signs, as much as any reader would. I saw a Grisham story. I saw a Leonard tale. I knew I was being seduced, but I couldn't put the book down. The first chapters hooked me like classic mid-list pulp — a phenomenon I miss like pay phones — and it took a minute to realize what Attica Locke was doing.

It wouldn't be a spoiler to tell Jay Porter's secret. He did time for running guns during the Black Power movement. This was during the days of J. Edgar Hoover's COINTELPRO program, when black dissidents' phones were tapped, dossiers were amassed, and organizations were infiltrated. Jay Porter the strip mall lawyer has a legitimate cause to be paranoid. This kind of justified paranoia plagues many of the resisters who managed to survive the bloodbaths of the 1960s and 1970s social movements. Lensed through Porter's claustrophobia, grandiosity, and self-deprecation, demons lurk in every dark corner. As the plot unfolds, the first thing that disappears from view is a tangible reality, one free from dark fantasy and delusion. Jay Porter may be nuts. Then again, maybe not.

Locke, a veteran screenwriter, has an almost supernatural understanding of pacing. This aids her well in storytelling, but even more so in figuring out where to work her magic. Her early 1980s Houston is a city on the verge of Texas-sized change. Porter is asked by his preacher father-in-law to work with the dockworkers union that meets in his church. The black dockworkers are being paid less than the white workers who do the same job. A split in the union along race lines is imminent. A battle between the warring workers breaks out after a young man is beaten. A greater impetus is revealed: the arrival of containers. These containers, it is threatened, will be used on barge, train, and truck, nearly rendering dockworkers obsolete. Jay Porter is asked to speak to the mayor — a "friend" from his revolutionary past — on behalf of the workers. Simultaneously he tries to uncover the identity of the mysterious woman he saved.

This is the one drawback in an otherwise stellar debut. Jay Porter has too much going on. So much that suspension of belief is pulled to the breaking point. So much that many characters who are vital to the plot get unbelievably overlooked. When the Porters' home is burglarized, for example, Jay leaves his pregnant wife in the house to pursue a lead on one of his cases. When a tough offers Porter money to not pursue another lead, he does it anyway — out of, what, morbid curiosity? The mayor of Houston and many of the other characters are so full, rich, and singular that it is baffling and frustrating when someone as essential as Bernie becomes a bit player in Jay's solipsistic pursuit. Is Jay Porter crazy, or just an asshole?

Black Water Rising reads like a hard-boiled thriller, but the real trick resides in Locke's ability to personalize an overlooked part of American history and show how far-reaching, how entrenched, it is in today's social, political, and cultural fabric. From running the voodoo down on the Weather Underground to using 1980s Houston as a backdrop, she wraps a People's History of America in a digestible, entertaining package. There are whiffs of Chinatown and White Butterfly, sure, but Locke's attention to the details between the action makes the novel, and turns every reader into an oracle.

As Jay solves this book's mysteries, we see pre-Dubya America getting dubbed. We see the sprawl that is yet to be. We see the unions breaking, the factories shutting down, the diners, bars, and cafes closing. We see the Black Water Rising. I may not want to see too much more of Jay Porter, but I better see more of Attica Locke.

Now you see him

2009-06-02T11:30:00.000-07:00

A last look at "William Kentridge: Five Themes"

By D. Scot Miller

For San Francisco Bay Guardian

It takes a lot to get your head around William Kentridge. His nebulous existence in the world of modern art makes him a slippery figure, able to exist between things we can name. Though he is an internationally known South African artist who works in etches, collages, sculptures, and performance (SFMOMA recently presented his rendition of Monteverdi's opera The Return of Ulysses), he is best known for his "cartoons."

As on view in the current exhibition "William Kentridge: Five Themes," Kentridge's animated drawings are sublime, provocative, and mesmerizing. He films a charcoal drawing, and by making slight changes using erasures for light and depth and then repeating the process, he tells profound stories about oppression, deterioration, and social justice — in less than 10 minutes. He later shows the drawings with the films as finished pieces. His mastery of drawing is magical. It can cloud judgment. We see William Kentridge; we do to not see William Kentridge.

William Kentridge: Five Themes (Yale University Press, 264 pages, $50), the monograph accompanying the current SFMOMA exhibit, suggests the breadth of Kentridge's contributions — from opera set design to printmaking — and the depth of his explorations. Versed in opera, Kentridge centers much of his work on the form's classic themes but updates, twists, and transforms them to speak of his native South Africa and current social conditions. Editor Mark Rosenthal mixes Kentridge's commentary, plates, sketches, and photos with writers' explorations of his process and purpose. Not quite a microscope, the result is more like a pair of tweezers, bringing the reader-viewer closer to someone who loves the word erasure.

Well-Suited

2009-05-21T15:11:00.000-07:00

AFRO-SURREAL: Ronald K. Brown steps into Nick Cave's creations

By Rita Felciano

San Francisco Bay Guardian

Wednesday May 20, 2009

a&eletters@sfbg.com

AFRO-SURREAL Why would you commission a choreographer for a work featuring performers stuck into costumes that hide their bodies? This anomaly didn't deter the 69 dancers who, in late April, auditioned at ODC Commons for a world premiere by Ronald K. Brown. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts wanted a site-specific piece to go with its current exhibition of Nick Cave's wearable sculptures, "Meet Me at the Center of the Earth" — and Bay Area dancers jumped at the chance to work with one of today's most thoughtfully intriguing choreographers.

Brown, who initially had wanted to become a journalist, found his way into dance almost serendipitously. Though he'd been fascinated with researching and writing articles on the way people lived their lives, dance allowed him to do that more indirectly, and also more deeply. He called his company Evidence because of his belief that we are products of the things that have shaped us — our culture, our roots, our families. The dry legal term "evidence" poorly suggests the physically and emotionally rich dances that have earned such a wide following for this modern dance artist, whose choreography is influenced by West African cultures. (Brown brings his company to YBCA Feb. 18-21, 2010)

Amara Tabor-Smith, a former 10-year member of Urban Bush Women, will perform in the Cave project. She doesn't think of Brown as a fusion artist. "The way I see him is that he modernized West African dance," she explained a few days after the tryouts. But her depth of admiration comes from a recognition that Brown's work is "infused with spirit." She made it as one of 13 dancers although she auditioned primarily to "soak up his energy and give energy in return."

Brown, who knew and admired Cave's evocative sculptures from afar, became interested in this project partly because of an experience at the Seattle Art Museum, where he encountered a diorama of African costumes and masks displayed on life-size figures.

"I would talk to the person with me, then slightly turn my head, and there were [the figures]. After a while I almost couldn't tell who was who," he explained. Being aware of a mask's mysterious power to hide as well as to reveal, he nonetheless also told the dancers he wasn't going to turn them into witch doctors or shamans because "we live in America, in a contemporary society."

Brown also insists he did not want to "collaborate" with Cave but wanted to have "his own dream." Since the suits in the actual exhibit are too delicate for performance, he chose a set made from raffia, the natural fiber prevalent in West African dance. Though visually different, they also allow one to sense rather than see the body. Being quite heavy, they may restrict a dancer's movement. During the audition, the choreographer worked with shuffling steps and close-to-the-body arms. He also worked on phrases from Orisha dances and Sabar steps from Senegal ("a kind of social street dance," according to Tabor-Smith.) There may be little or no music, perhaps only the sound of the dancers' feet and the whoosh-whoosh of raffia.

Speaking from Ireland last week, where he was setting work, Brown wouldn't commit himself to the length of the piece but revealed that, though it was originally planned for the galleries only, it would encompass YBCA's lobby area as well. "There will be a guide to take the dancers and the audience on a journey, so that whatever feelings we have, you also have — or it hasn't happened."

RONALD K. BROWN/NICK CAVE

May 28, 7 p.m.; May 30–31, 3 p.m.,

free with gallery admission ($5–$7)

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-2787

www.ybca.org

Wednesday May 20, 2009

The cult of Fanaka

2009-05-21T14:45:00.000-07:00

AFRO-SURREAL: A filmmaker reflects on his groundbreaking career

By Cheryl Eddy

Wednesday May 20, 2009

San Francisco Bay Guardian

cheryl@sfbg.com

AFRO-SURREAL Visitors to filmmaker Jamaa Fanaka's MySpace page are greeted with a clip of Snoop Dogg clutching a pile of Fanaka DVDs — 1975's Welcome Home Brother Charles, a.k.a. Soul Vengeance; 1976's Emma Mae, a.k.a. Black Sister's Revenge; 1979's Penitentiary; and 1982's Penitentiary II. He quotes some choice lines and enthusiastically sings the director's praises: "These movies right here — this is black history."

When I mention Snoop Dogg to Fanaka, he's delighted. "All the rappers love me," he says over the phone from Los Angeles. "Also actors, like Eddie Murphy. The first time I ran into him, he was with his brother, and they recited [a scene from Penitentiary] verbatim. That happens all the time."

The Fanaka library (which also includes 1987's Penitentiary III and 1992's Street Wars) has also earned a following among cult-movie fans. "I love that they're cult films, because of what a 'cult film' means: the film lives because the people want it to live," he explains. He's not a fan of the term "blaxploitation" — though it's commonly applied to his films — due to its connotations.

"There were companies that were very profitable, and all they made were 'exploitation' films, which meant that they made low-budget films on subjects that Hollywood didn't want to take on," he says. "It only became a negative term once they put that prefix 'blax' on it. No black filmmaker ever liked that term, though it was coined by a black publicist. 'Blaxploitation' has evolved into a genre, like a horror film, or an action film. But black filmmakers still resent the term because of its origins."

Born in Mississippi, raised in L.A., Fanaka says was distracted from committing a crime by a pair of UCLA recruiters who made him believe he could realize his childhood dream of becoming a filmmaker. ("They asked me, did I want to go to UCLA? I said, 'Yeah. I'd like to go to the moon, too, but my chances of getting there are pretty minuscule.'") He was eventually accepted into the school's prestigious film program, where he also earned a master's degree; his peers included Charles Burnett, who directed 1977's Killer of Sheep.

"It was an exciting time to be a black filmmaker," Fanaka says. "People like Charles Burnett were part of my film crew, I was part of his film crew. We helped each other, advised each other. Those were the halcyon days of filmmaking at UCLA."

Even more notably, "I'm the only person in the history of filmmaking to write, produce, direct, and get theatrical distribution for three feature films I made as part of my curriculum at the UCLA film school," Fanaka says. He shot his first feature, Welcome Home Brother Charles, on the weekends when he didn't have class.

"I felt like, if I had access to all of this equipment, and the wherewithal to make a 10-minute film, why not make a whole feature?" he recalls. "I wanted to reach the widest audience possible, and no matter how good a short film is, the audience is going to be limited. Then I went on to graduate school and I made Emma Mae and Penitentiary."

This kind of determination also extended to Fanaka's fundraising efforts. His parents invested their life savings into his work (good call — Penitentiary, Fanaka says, was the most successful indie film of 1980), but he wondered why he was rejected for a grant by the American Film Institute. He did some research and learned that only one African American had ever been a part of the grant-awarding committee. "I wanted to give minorities a shot," he says, so he wrote a letter to then-Sen. Alan Cranston suggesting that the committee should be more diverse. The next grant cycle, he got the money to help make Emma Mae; the following cycle, he served on the committee. "That goes to show you how the squeaking wheel gets the oil," he remembers, proudly.

In less-tenacious hands, there'd certainly be no Welcome Home Brother Charles. "White slave owners used to tell white women horror stories about the size of the black males' sexual equipment," Fanaka explains. "But rather than frightening the white females, it intrigued them. I wanted to make a film that took that myth and exaggerated it to show how ridiculous it was, and I chose to do it in a very surreal, powerful scene."

(Note to readers who haven't seen the film: uh, think 1997's Anaconda. The entire Penitentiary series is also a gold mine of surreal moments, particularly part three, which features a prison-dwelling, crack-smoking, snarling killer dwarf. Fanaka sums up that film in one word: "feral.")

Now in his late 60s, Fanaka has been slowed in his efforts to make Penitentiary IV by complications from diabetes. He's also been working for the last decade on a music documentary, Hip Hop Hope. It's an apt title for a film by Fanaka, who calls himself "a very optimistic person." He's enjoyed the resurgence of interest in his work, with screenings at places like San Francisco's Dead Channels Film Festival and Austin's Alamo Drafthouse, and frequent airings of the Penitentiary films on cable.

"My most artistic film, in my estimation, was Welcome Home Brother Charles, because I had no axes to grind but to try and use the medium of cinema to attack that myth, and attack it in a way that was quote-unquote artistic. Of course, very few people took that from it because that one scene kind of colors the whole film," he chuckles. "But I think as time goes by, people are gonna realize the value of these films I've made and begin to understand them."

Black Man in the Cosmos

2009-05-21T14:32:00.000-07:00

AFRO-SURREAL: All hail an interplanetary stream of Sun Ra reissues

By Garrett Caples

San Francisco Bay Guardian

Wednesday May 20, 2009

a&eletters@sfbg.com

AFRO-SURREAL "The Black Man in the Cosmos" wasn't among the course offerings when I attended the University of California-Berkeley. The class was taught once, in 1971, by musician/composer Sun Ra (1914-93), whose lectures might include topics like the outer space origins of ancient Egypt, conceptualized as a black African culture. This cosmic tradition has a long history, particularly in Chicago, where Ra lived from the late 1940s through the early 1960s, and where Elijah Muhammad used it as the founding mythos of the Nation of Islam. Ra claimed to have influenced the NOI, though he rejected its conclusions, much as he would later criticize the Black Power movement he helped foster as too materialist.

Ra's "Black Man" lectures — one of which recently surfaced on The Creator of the Universe (Transparency, 2007) — epitomize why he wasn't taken seriously for so long. Critics who appreciated the severity of Ornette Coleman or the ferocity of Albert Ayler couldn't accommodate the mischievous mysticism of a man who claimed to come from Saturn. Instead of playing the role of brooding artiste, Ra favored extravagant showmanship, cloaking ultimately stern spiritual messages in language as absurd as the science-fictional garb worn by his Arkestra. His strategies included Joycean deformations of words based on false etymologies and sound play. "Arkestra" itself characteristically mixes the spiritual (Ark of the Covenant) with the quotidian. According to John Szwed's definitive 1998 biography, Space is the Place, this was how "orchestra" was pronounced in Ra's native Birmingham, Ala.

Yet the strangeness of Ra's music may have been the biggest stumbling block. His prodigious output is extremely diverse, continually violating unquestioned dichotomies. A product of the 1930s big band scene, when he led an orchestra under his terrestrial name Herman "Sonny" Blount, Ra was at the forefront of free jazz, yet he shocked fans and foes alike when, at its height, he began incorporating tight arrangements of swing classics by Fletcher Henderson, Ellington, and others into his sound.

Ra's lifelong interest in synthesizers — there's a photo of him with a primitive one in 1941(!) — developed into a command of pure sound. He adapted his style to the nuances of a particular keyboard. The 1970 recording Night of the Purple Moon (Atavistic, 2007), for instance, is a quartet disc on which he plays baroque runs on the Rocksichord, a 1960s electric harpsichord. The 1978 recording Disco 3000 (Art Yard, 2008), a live quartet performance, features Ra's organ-like drones on the obscure, loop-enabled Crumar Mainman. Unlike some synth wizards, Ra was a virtuoso pianist, with a lightning-fast right hand and a left hand that seemingly bounced around of its own volition. While unafraid to mash the keys with his forearm, Ra's ambidextrous precision and unorthodox chord voicings — he was unafraid to mash the keys with his forearm — place him among the top players of his time. If he'd worn a suit and stuck to piano, he'd be ranked with the likes of Art Tatum, as is evident from his previously-unreleased recital Solo Piano: Teatro la Fenice Venizia (Golden Years, 2003), possibly the best such recording.

Big bands remained Ra's ideal, though they were giving way to smaller bop combos by the time he formed the Arkestra in the mid-'50s. Yet his insularity resulted in some of his most original works, discs that defy generic categories, like 1963's reverb-drenched, proto-psychedelic Cosmic Tones for Mental Therapy (Evidence, 1992), 1965's percussive, minimalist Heliocentric Worlds of Sun Ra, v. 1 (Esp, 2006), or 1967's Strange Strings (Atavistic, 2007), on which the Arkestra, with no prior experience, plays various non-Western stringed instruments, accompanied by bells, tympani, sheet-metal lightning.

While the atonal Strings may be Ra's least typical album, it embodies two of his main concerns. On the one hand, he was a tone colorist in the Romantic tradition, seeking unusual instrumentation to produce unique shades. But as that album's untutored string section suggests, he was a highly conceptual composer — garnering attention from John Cage and others — known for arranging and conducting collective improvisation. Traditional/avant-garde, inside/outside: such oppositions didn't exist for Ra, who even explored a "low" genre like disco on 1980's tongue-in-cheek On Jupiter (Art Yard, 2008).

The bewildering amount of Sun Ra reissues stems from his habit of self-recording, which also dates from the 1940s. Had he not done so, albums like Strings and Cosmic Tones wouldn't have been recorded. Nor would they have been released without his forming El Saturn Records, among the earliest artist-run labels. Given that his technological futurism seemed to stem from his preoccupation with outer space, Ra's artistic achievements are perhaps inextricably bound to his cosmic consciousness. As with Prince, artistic activity was driven by extramusical concerns, which, if they result in an occasional lapse in "good taste," nonetheless are the ingredients that elevate Ra from artistic excellence to genius. This genius may not have given him more than a subsistence living, but it has made him immortal. Unless, of course, as an inhabitant of Saturn, he already was.

Ding dong, Wicked Witch is alive

2009-05-21T14:15:00.000-07:00

AFRO-SURREAL: The lost sounds of D.C. machine funk are revived

By Mosi Reeves for the

San Francisco Bay Guardian

Wednesday May 20, 2009

AFRO-SURREAL What was black music like before hip-hop took over? On Chaos: 1978-86

(EM), a compilation of private press recordings by the obscure machine funk guitarist Wicked Witch, it resembles squelching synthesizers riffed like rock guitars and deep, rumbling bass stomps. Unevenly tuned fretboard licks mash with splashing, polyphonic drum patterns as a mysterious leading man uncomfortably murmurs lyrics like "I just can't hang out, too much time is lost."

As a young guitarist hooked on Cream, Sun Ra, and Weather Report who mostly played for family and friends in southeast Washington, D.C., Wicked Witch's Richard Simms didn't achieve local fame, much less a national audience. But his subterranean woodshedding reverberates with tremors from an industry in upheaval. Musicians adopted electronic equipment en masse, supplanting the flowery string arrangements of 1970s disco with keyboards and drum programming. It wasn't just black musicians transitioning to the computer age: early-1980s rock offers contrasts between lush new romanticism (Human League, Duran Duran) and crass arena sounds (Foreigner, REO Speedwagon). While the latter is celebrated via redundant VH-1 retrospectives and football stadium soundtracks, early-1980s black music and its heroes (the System, Imagination) remain unexplored.

Nelson George describes the period in 1988's authoritative history The Death of Rhythm & Blues. "Synthesizers of every description, drum machines, and plain old electric keyboards began making MFSB and other human rhythm sections nonessential to the recording process," he writes, somewhat overstating his case. "There were so many ... with all the personality and warmth of a microwave."

George's "microwave music" condemnation still resonates, and this crucial period of black music — just before the hip-hop, R&B and quiet storm era — has largely escaped serious critical attention, save for disco aficionados who cherry-pick proto-house music stars like D-Train and Larry Levan. Meanwhile, Wicked Witch's unintended documentation of the black new wave — meshing machine gun funk with spacey keyboard ambience on "Fancy Dancer," giving a shambolic twist to Mahavishnu Orchestra-style jazz fusion on "Vera's Back" — has reemerged on the collector's market. Simms' private press singles, which include two 7-inches and a 12-inch long player, have been bootlegged. Original copies trade for $100. This probably led EM, a Japanese specialty label, to contact Simms and assemble Chaos.

"It wasn't commercial," Simms said during a recent phone conversation. Forced Exposure, the Boston distributor handling Chaos, had passed on his information, but it took more than two weeks to finally reach him. Though pleasantly surprised by the novelty of an interview, he's somewhat suspicious of the affair. When asked how many copies he pressed up, he shoots back, "Why are you inquiring about that?" as if this writer, armed with a copy of Goldmine magazine, wants to corner the market on Wicked Witch collectibles. And how did Simms come up with the name Wicked Witch anyway? "I'm stumped on that one," he says. "I think I wanted something dramatic, like theater."

Simms remembers forming his first band, Paradiagm with teenage friends "on an original-type kick" from around the area. The group recorded the track "Vera's Back" before going their separate ways. "We were trying to do an original act, but people didn't really accept it," he says. Chuck Brown's ingenious go-go style, an amalgamation of James Brown's call-and-response breaks and N'awlins marching band jazz, reigned as D.C.'s unofficial soundtrack. And since Paradiagm wasn't a go-go band and didn't play covers of radio hits, they couldn't get bookings: "It was too hard to break new material." Simms managed to reach the manager of Return to Forever, Chick Corea's jazz fusion superstar collective. But he says, mysteriously, "We did vocals, and they weren't doing no vocals."

After that came Wicked Witch, which Simms describes as a "studio thing" where he worked out his musical ideas and recorded them. Yet even that was relatively short-lived. "My background is jazz fusion," Simms says. For Wicked Witch, he tried to merge fusion and funk, resulting in tracks with cryptic time signatures and spaced-out melodies. "If it was more funky, I think it would have been it. But it wasn't funky enough. But I still dig it."

By the mid-1980s, the leather-clad hero of "Fancy Dancer" disappeared in the Chocolate City, just as the hip-hop era had begun. "Kids, a job, other things you gotta do ... all of the above got put on top of the music. And then the music became close to nothing," Simms says. Before that happened, however, he pressed up those now-collectible records for himself. "Nobody was doing it for me, so I might as well do something on my own, right?"

Mosi Reeves:
"I've been a music critic for over a decade. I am widely known and respected as a hip-hop journalist, but I have also covered and critiqued indie, electronic (from experimental/classical to dance) music. In regards to music, my specialty is on emerging and progressive/underground culture."

Current project: Plug One (http://www.plugonemag.com), a website focused on underground hip-hop culture.

Ain't I a werewolf?

2009-05-21T13:38:00.000-07:00

AFRO-SURREAL: Diaspora consciousness in the Underworld trilogy

By Kandia Crazy Horse for the

San Francisco Bay Guardian

Wednesday May 20, 2009

AFRO-SURREAL Stylistic rigor and as full an embrace of progressive technologies as budgets allow have made Underworld Trilogy (Sony Pictures DVD, $93.95) a pleasurable extension of epics from fang-face past. Yet perhaps the most significant aspect of Len Wiseman's cycle about immortals warring for supremacy is an updated recognition of the post-1960s liberation strides of blacks and women in our society. It is reflected in the power and intellect of the first film's heroine Selene (Kate Beckinsale) and her fellow vampiric rebels (like Robbie Gee's tech-wizard Kahn) and lycan foes ("Razahir/Raze," played by Underworld concept engineer Kevin Grievoux). The last and best installment, Underworld: Rise of the Lycans, is a virtual remix of my generation's seminal televisual event, Roots. If that ain't Afro-Surreal, then what is?

It was 30 years ago — not long after the historic airing of the adaptation of Alex Haley's Roots fundamentally changed public perceptions of America's "peculiar institution" — that I moved to the Sahel and immediately became obsessed with Dogon lore about the Sirius star system and a family of deities including the trickster Pale Fox. Blood debates about antiquity and provenance continue to rage between disdainful classicists, denizens of the moribund field of Egyptology, and independent scholars of varying stripes devoted to Martin Bernal's Black Athena (1987). My view supports linkages between the overlapping subcultures of the Dogon, Amazigh, "Egyptians," Zulu, and others, resulting in a kozmic fusion wherein the primordial werewolf (some would prefer jackal or werehyena) is a key deity from the dawn of civilization in the Motherland.

Underworld: Rise of the Lycans finds the great Irish actor Michael Sheen's "lycan" leader character Lucian subbing for Kunta Kinte. In the stark, nightmarish Eastern European fiefdom of vampire lord Viktor (Bill Nighy), the decadent, pale vampires are pampered aristocrats guarded and served by their dark, subhuman lycan slaves (hybrids of humans and wolves). Lucian changes from pet house nigger fettered by shackles of the flesh and mind — condescendingly deemed "a credit to his race" by Viktor — into an enlightened, empowered rebel leader who brings deliverance to lycan-kind by forging an alliance with despised animal spawn of William Corvinus in the wooded wilds.

Yet all is not Molotovs and roses — there are sadistic spectacles of whipping at the hands of cruel overseer Kosta, Nubian ally Razahir is forced to submit to lycanthropy, and Lucian suffers the ultimate price for miscegenation with Viktor's daughter Sonja (the underrated Rhona Mitra). Rise of the Lycans may not be Blacula, but it is often a winking mash-up of Roots and the even more hardcore, honest Mandingo (1975). In a time when America has just elected its first (official) black president but open dialogues on slavery — and reparations for same — remain muted at best, it's heartening to witness product straight out of Hollyweird somehow serving as an optic Trojan horse for the oft-forgotten and misrepresented radicalism of antebellum culture heroes like Nat Turner, Cinque, and the O.G. Black Moses herself, Harriet Tubman.

Rise of the Lycans has been roundly panned by fanboys and critics alike, which is hardly shocking considering America's unwillingness to face the major episodes of its bloody past — the enslavement of Africans via the Triangular Trade, and the genocide of the First Nations. Yet to these eyes and ears, the film's a first sign in the Age of Obama that a willingness to finally address the West's hateful legacies can emanate from "low" culture, despite the will to bliss out in the opiated mass of post-racial utopia.

A native of Washington, DC raised on a mix of Afrobeat, jazz, soul, and southern boogie, Kandia Crazy Horse is now a Manhattan-based rock critic. Her work appears in publications including the Village Voice and popmatters.com. Kandia is a contributor to The Blues (HarperCollins, 2003), the companion volume to Martin Scorcese's series on the roots music genre, and has edited a collection on black musicians' rock experiences, Rip It Up, to be published in November 2003 by Palgrave/St.Martin's Press (Macmillan
in the UK).

Afro-Lunacy in Bloom

2009-05-21T12:31:00.001-07:00

AFRO-SURREAL: Fragments from the files of Dr. Snakeskin

By Darius James

Wednesday May 20, 2009

a&eletters@sfbg.com

LOST TELEVISION

"Ticket to Heaven," the last of the series of Our Gang comedies, was produced by Oscar Micheaux in 1944, with music provided by Babs Gonzales and his band, Three Bips and a Bop, on a makeshift sound stage constructed inside of a Harlem tenement building. The plot summary is as follows: With the help of Farina, Pineapple, and Stymie, Buckwee runs amok after reading an early Nation of Islam pamphlet that promises a place in heaven to any Black Muslim who killed a white person for Allah. The throats of the entire gang are slashed with unsheathed straight razors. Alfalfa is forced to sing "Ole Man Ribber" before his throat is slit by a young Robert Blake in blackface. Directed by Spencer Williams, the script was written by Flournoy Miller, who dedicated this final episode to the memory of his late partner, Aubrey Lyles. Miller then moved on to penning scripts for Gosden and Correl's. Amos 'n' Andy television show. The controversial episode aired last Nov. 22, 1963, much to the glee of the N.A.A.C.P.

LOVE SPELL

You can't eat with everybody. You got to have the right vibrations. —

Vera Grosvenor, dancer-vocalist, Sun Ra Arkestra

Menstrual blood, in both the Hoodoo folk traditions of the American South and the Straga traditions of southern Italy, is used to bind one's affection to another. In Sicily, for example, a few drops of blood pricked from a woman's finger is stirred into a man's coffee. In the southern states, a man might get Hoodoo'd with a few drops of menstrual blood mixed into his red beans and rice. This spell is also quite effective when worked in the reverse by men substituting menstrual blood for the obvious. The following is an excellent recipe a lady might serve a gentleman caller for lunch.

Tomato with Basil Dressing

diced tomatoes

1 bunch basil

4 Tbs. balsamic vinegar

5 Tbs. olive oil

2 cloves garlic

3 tsp. of menstrual blood

Salt and pepper

Let stand for 30 minutes. Serve with Toscanini bread, Parma ham, salami, and a carafe of red wine. Bon appetit!

R.J. AT THE CROSSROADS

"What fool coon nonsense is this?" the Devil asked. "You call this a sacrificial offerin'? These ain't nothin' but some greasy, chewed-up chicken bones! What happened to my sammich?"

"Ah' done et' it" R.J. replied. "Ah gots hongry on de way ober 'cheer!"

"Well how in the hell do you expect to play the greatest blues guitar in the history of the world if all you got to show for it is some splintered chicken bones all spit up with some nasty ol' nigger slobber? What's wrong with your head, boy? I'm the devil! You gots to give me somethin' ... !"

In the moonlight, R.J. turned his empty lint-lined pockets inside out. He gave the Devil a helplessly pathetic half-smile. "You is 'bout the most pitiful colored boy I done ever laid these infernal eyes on," the Devil said. "But I'll tell you what I'm gonna do .... "

CRAB CORNER, MI, MAY 19

A report released late last night from the Crab Corner sheriff's department confirmed recent rumors concerning retired physical education instructor, D.T. Ward, 68, who alleged over the weekend that a spectral, feral-eyed black man passed through the walls of his newly-paneled basement Saturday morning, and greeted him with a strange but cheery salutation.

"At first, I thought he was askin' for a plate of 'green eggs 'n' ham,'" D.T. told a disbelieving deputy. "Like in them Dr. Seuss books. But now that I think on it, what he said sounded somethin' more like what them magician fellas say 'fore they pull a rabbit outta their hats — Wham! Bam! Alley Ka Zam! — only this nigra fella was more dicty an' foreign soundin', like he was addressin' royalty or somethin', lookin' at me with them flint-fire eyes. Gave me the Willies!"

According to Ward, whom long-time neighbors suspect is rapidly degenerating into senility, the red-haired apparition floated into the upstairs kitchen, where he took a box of Cap'n Crunch from a kitchen cupboard and prepared a large bowl of the sugar-coated cereal, using close to a full quart of milk. The sepia-tinted spectre then returned to the basement, sat on the sofa, nestling the bowl on his lap, and watched cartoons on the family's new big-screen television with the Wards' three visiting grandchildren — Ralph, Edwina, and Skip. The children chirped that he enjoyed early-vintage Popeye cartoons best.

"Right neighborly fella," D.T. said. "Real nice to the kids. Didn't drink, smoke, or cuss. Helped around the yard. Wore a bowtie".

"MORE FRIGHTENING THAN A CLOWN AT MIDNIGHT" — LON CHANEY SR.

The wretched inherited the earth. And the Man spurt a glorious rain. His underwear was left sticky with seed.

Witches taught naming was power. To name was to know and exert influence over the world of things. The ability to name determined the fuction of a thing. To name was to tame. But we learned otherwise. Real power lay in un-naming.

We refused names, numbers, and codes. We refused stamps, marks. We acted anonymously and moved beyond the Man's mechanisms of global economic and social control. If the Man could not name us, he could not know or tame us. Once he declared us one thing, we become another. We were an invisible and ever changing alphabet.

The Man found our meaning more difficult to grasp than a bead of mercury. He lamented. The cornerstone of the corporate nation-state, the family, had crumbled.

"Errant fathers! Sluttish mothers! Bastard births! Negro music! What is the world to do?" he mourned. "Return to the power of prayer!" So when the robots rolled into the cities, chirping "Automaton Christian Solidiers," we became the robots. The Man did not and could not know. We was them.

Even at the end, in the euphoria of his avarious wet dreams, he thought the tumors raging within were of his own making. But how could he know?

We shifted gender, race, and class. And hopped from one species to the next. We were flora and fauna. We were never what we seemed to be. We were never what he expected. We were random, illogical, varied. He could not predict us.

Then he turned on himself. "To restore order," he said, "we must restore the family. We must attempt to rebuild our moral foundation with the assistance of God."

In his megalomania, the Man resurrected the biblical Abraham from the dust. The ancient patriarch stood before the people and lifted his simple robes. He turned and bent over and exposed the halves of his pimpled ass. His asshole puckered and spoke in gaseous bleats. Throngs of people shuddered in awe. The Savior had come at long last in the mask of Abraham's encrusted asshole.

"The father is the spirtual leader of the househould," it said, "the model of God's love. And he must wash his wife in the waters of that love. He must also instruct his children on matters God's word with diligence. It is his moral obligation, a duty bestowed on him by heaven. It is the responsiblity of men to teach and reaffirm God's word."

A rancid pungency wafted through the crowd in fog-like densities. The people swooned and were overtaken by uncontrollable nausea and diarrhea. Soon, the streets were flooded with the waters of God's love. And the waters clogged the circuitry of the robots under the Man's control.

It was then the Man expired, jacking off in pools of his own shit.

Darius James is the author of the novel Negrophobia and the film survey That's Blaxploitation!: Roots of the Baadasssss 'Tude (Rated X by an All-Whyte Jury).

Born To Be Wildly Visionary

2009-05-21T11:58:00.000-07:00

AFRO-SURREAL: Of black tomorrows, yesterday, today, and antiquity

By Greg Tate

Wednesday May 20, 2009

AFRO-SURREAL Living in black America means you're already living "science fiction" — already born to be wildly visionary and future- bent in form, function, context, and appearance. No choice, really.

History cast your ancestors in the real-world version of the genre's defining, overarching anxiety-ridden trope — the Earthly-and-Earthy- Beings-Overcoming-Enslavement-and-Genocide-by-Evil-Aliens story.

Black America is clearly the result of Africans surviving an evil alien abduction to an evil alien slave planet where our ancestors, nearly transformed into automatons, came to develop sonically-induced counteracting powers of telekinesis, time travel, teleportation, telepathy, and "trickster-knowlogy" to combat invading alien armies who had us beat when it came to more bluntly ballistic technology. To those African spirit combatants we owe the advent of such dark avatars of symbolic, sonic, and psychic African weaponry as Scott Joplin, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, John Coltrane, Sun Ra, Romare Bearden, Aretha Franklin, James Brown, Nina Simone, Jimi Hendrix, De La Soul, Ramm El Zee, Jean Michel Basquiat, and the Art Ensemble of Chicago, whose battle cry "Great Black Music Ancient and to the Future" is as succinct a manifesto for the black SF movement as has ever been written.

But now let's get really real up in this piece: the terms black science fiction, Afro-Futurism, Afro-Punk, post-blackness, Black Surrealism, Black Dada Nihilismus, etc., are all born of attempts to accommodate and simulate the strange reality of being black (and "black being and nothingness") in the not-so New World in ways not seen on BET. Yet all these terms are actually redundant — black in America by itself already signifying the ultimate in Weird Tales.

They're also just a tad elitist and academic — at times intended to suggest that some blacks, usually college miseducated, are more modern, avant-garde, and outside the black box than others. The world that most black working-class people live in here in these United States is already as freaking strange twisted and bizarre as any space opera. The self-taught artists that have come from African American working class communities — Ra, Thornton Dial, Bessie Smith, Thelonious Monk, Simone, Hendrix, David Hammons, George Clinton, Wu-Tang Clan to name a few — are all more "out of this world" than their merely grad school-sanctioned brethren and sistren. No surprise.

After all, who needs to dream bigger than folk trying to escape from America's urban behavioral modification concentration camps? Furthermore, anybody who thinks the extraterrestrial African imagination needs anything but a daily reality check to get fired up needs to come spend a day in Harlem.

From my bedroom window nested high up on uptown's Sugar Hill — blocks from the old cribs of Ellington, Robeson, Hughes, and Basie — I can see a shimmering forest of spring green trees being stalked and hovered over by a four-building complex of high-rise public housing projects known as the Polo Grounds towers. Each is 30 stories; the combined 1,616 units hold an estimated 4,200 residents of primarily African descent on a 15-acre property that defines Harlem's eastern edge. At night these towers are illuminated by an artificial, man-made double moon: one brand new, one still to be demolished — the side-by-side circular monstrosities known to us natives as Yankee Stadiums I and II.

If that's not odd enough, check this out: If you call up Harlem's 155th Street corridor on Google maps, you will not find any evidence of these gargantuan buildings when you zoom in. What you will see instead is a huge empty white space marked "Polo Grounds." The online information readily available about the Polo Grounds says nothing about those four Tolkienesque towers, or the folk who live there.

Instead, it blathers on about the forgotten baseball stadiums, long demolished, that once stood there for the New York Giants, the Yankees, and the Mets. Think about it — 4,200 folk of color vertically stacked in their own Babel but erased from human consideration on the virtual map of the world and replaced by fanboy baseball lore. If that's not black science fiction, I don't know what qualifies.

Greg Tate is a founding member of the Black Rock Coalition and a staff writer at the Village Voice. His writings on art, music and culture have also appeared in the New York Times, Rolling Stone, Washington Post, Premiere, Downbeat and Artforum. His books include; Flyboy In The Buttermilk (Simon and Schuster, 1992) Midnight Lightning: Jimi Hendrix and the Black Experience (Acapella, 2003) and Everything But The Burden: What White People Are Taking From Black Culture. (Broadway, Random House, 2003)

The list in surrealist

2009-05-21T11:26:00.000-07:00

AFRO-SURREAL: A hilarious and disturbing cinematic top 10

By David Boyce for

San Francisco Bay Guardian

Wednesday May 20, 2009

1. Putney Swope (Robert Downey Sr., 1969) The elder Downey's brilliant, completely irreverent send-up of race, politics and the advertising industry. Smoke a big fat joint and watch this one. You will laugh your ass off. Take special note of the "commercials" for the products by Truth and Soul, Inc.

2. Bamboozled (Spike Lee, 2002) Spike Lee's dark, squirm-in-your-seat masterpiece brings minstrelsy into the 21st century. Damon Wayans tries to get himself fired from a racist TV station by producing an extremely offensive prime time minstrel show. The show turns out to be a smash hit.

3. The Watermelon Man (Melvin Van Peebles, 1970) One of the great Afro-Surrealists casts Godfrey Cambridge as a white racist insurance salesman who wakes up as a black man after watching race riots on the late night news. Very, very OUT, especially the scene where Cambridge sits in a tub full of milk trying to reverse the color change.

4. Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (Melvin Van Peebles, 1971) Peebles casts himself as Sweetback, a black stud sex worker who kills a racist cop and has to go on the lam. More allegory than literal narrative, it reminds me of Jodorowsky's El Topo (1970).

5. Black Like Me (Carl Lerner, 1964) Curious writer James Whitmore wants to experience being black so he takes a pill to darken his skin, tests his new identity on his favorite shoe shine man and heads down south. Bad idea. He runs into trouble instantly (near-lynching, bad vibes from every white person) and basically goes insane.

6. Which Way Is Up? (Michael Schultz, 1977) Richard Pryor plays three characters — a jackleg preacher, a dirty old man, and an orange picker who accidentally becomes union hero — in this very funny remake of The Seduction of Mimi (1972).

7. Richard Pryor: Live and Smokin' (Michael Blum, 1971) Pryor's first standup film. He's coming off a coke binge, the film crew is pissing him off, and no one is laughing, but that doesn't stop him. The highlight is the demented "a wino and a junkie" routine.

8. Space is the Place (John Coney, 1974) Sun Ra, black alien jazz musician for Saturn, lands his spaceship in early-1970s Oakland. His mission is to rescue black people, but strangely, no one wants to be saved. He battles the CIA, apathetic black youth (who think he's a hippie from Telegraph Avenue) and a character called the Overseer while finding the time to put on a concert at Laney College. Anything by Sun Ra is Afro-Surrealism at its most potent.

9. Ghost Dog (Jim Jarmusch, 1999) Jim Jarmusch's mystical meditation on the samurai, Brooklyn style.

My man Isaach De Bankolé almost steals the movie.

10. Sankofa (Haile Gerima, 1993) Gerima's off-the-charts take on slavery is disturbing, downright depressing, and utterly psychedelic. A black supermodel on a shoot on Goree Island, the infamous slave trader's fort, steps into a basement and is transported back to a West Indies plantation. Afro-Surrealism at its best.

David Boyce is an exploratory soul who seeks truth/knowledge/enlightenment/love/compassion in the Sound cosmically everlasting....a Boohaab (n.child of the soulogik), making music with BROUN FELLINIS, THE SUPPLICANTS, CROWN CITY ROCKERS, KOSMIC RENAISSANCE, SILA AND THE AFRO FUNK EXPERIENCE, BLACK EDGAR'S MUSIK BOX, MBL and KA.

Devil's poetry

2009-05-21T11:17:00.000-07:00

AFRO-SURREAL: Bob Kaufman's California duende blues

By Nicole Henares for

San Francisco Bay Guardian

AFRO-SURREAL Sadly, the mythology of poet Bob Kaufman almost rivals all we have left of his poetry. However, to place Kaufman within a mere "cult of personality" (along the lines of some of his contemporaries) undermines the innovation of his process and what it brings to the tapestry of American poetics and the complicated and surreal orality of his poems.

Called "the American Rimbaud" by the French, Kaufman lived as a poetic assassin. A frequently arrested union organizer, like Stagger Lee wielding a .44 of devil's poetry, Kaufman assaulted the willing and unwilling (even white police officers) with verse. If you were cool, you knew his assault was meant as a cipher, a juxtaposition of rhythm, image, and sound meant to invite the listener into a dialectical examination of identity, even the identity obtained from syntax: "I went to a masquerade/ Disguised as myself/ Not one of my friends recognized."

Kaufman's poetics were Kerouac's spontaneous prose without the notebook, taken literally. Think an un-choreographed version of "Amethyst Rocks," the prison yard scene in Slam (1998) where Saul Williams stops a would-be beatdown with poetry. Except for Kaufman the beatdown was always real, inevitable, and though sometimes provoked, never for the camera.

Kaufman was the spirit of true North Beach bohemia: the street poet who stood "on yardbird corners of embryonic hopes drowned in a heroin tear," panhandling "with moist prophet eyes" free styles of surrealism, the blues and duende, meant to disturb, disrupt, and ultimately liberate.

Kaufman's "crackling blueness" is distinctly Californian. In poems like "Carl Chaessman Interviews the PTA," Kaufman filters the "west of the west" through absurdist reflections that juxtapose outlaw figures such as Chessman (a 1960s serial killer on San Quentin's Death Row) with figures from California's mythology, all to the rhythms of a radio announcer calling a ballgame: Carl Chessman is in sickly California writing death threats to the Wizard of Oz, his trial is being held in the stomach of Junipero Serra, at last the game starts, Chessman steals all the bases & returns to his tomb to receive the last sacraments from Shirley Temple.

Ultimately, according to poet and scholar Nathaniel Mackey, what Kaufman creates is a cross-cultural poetics difficult to categorize. Though he lived in North Beach and is credited with coining the phrase "beatnik" — and infused his poetry with jazz and Eastern religious influence — Kaufman transcends the singular categorization of "Beat poet." By aligning himself with the pain of "all losers, brown, red, black, and white; the colors from the Master Palette," Kaufman creates a new American poetics — a hybrid poetics of projective California duende blues, an examination of the exhaustion that comes from the persistence of breath.

Nicole Henares, at the age of five, authored her first book about visiting the Monterey Public Library's lop-eared rabbit, Bigfoot. Throughout her childhood she wrote several books about friendless fairies attending monopoly championships in Las Vegas, and elves on the run from chicken vendors. As a student at UC Davis Nicole had the dubious honor of not getting accepted into poetry classes taught by Gary Snyder and Alan Williamson, and flunking altogether Introductory Creative Writing due to her misadventures with Davis' midget cop and other miscreants. Nicole has since studied with Elmaz Abinader, Quincy Troupe, David Mura and Cristina Garcia in the Voices of Our Nation Writing Workshops, and Kim Addonizio.

For your earholes

2009-05-21T10:01:00.000-07:00

AFRO-SURREAL: Chelonis R. Jones designs more psycho audio couture

By Johnny Ray Huston

johnny@sfbg.com

AFRO-SURREAL

Afro-Surreal is a crackling transmission from the tightest tunnels and recesses of inner space, and the furthest, darkest outposts of outer space. Afro-Surreal is androgynous — butch and femme on a whim. Afro-Surreal is a sonic realm that can morph any millisecond. It is a single body with many voices. Afro-Surreal might sound like gospel, but it ain't, or if it is, it's Goth gospel. Afro-Surreal is a Puya-like bloom from the root of a manifesto named "Black Sabrina." Afro-Surreal is a flawed masterstroke from the most unjustly under-known "popular music" recording artist of the 21st century. Afro-Surreal is the sound of Chelonis R. Jones.

Right now, the sound of Chelonis R. Jones is Chatterton (Systematic), his second solo album after the equally deep and fantastic Dislocated Genius (Get Physical, 2005). It's named after a poet, and it's a place where Giorgio Moroder-meets-Donna Summer to soundtrack an eight-minute minimalist epic sung from the perspective of the ungrateful sole survivor of a plane crash. It's a place where rehab is a "recreant blur," and Fleetwood Mac's "Dreams" are buried beneath threatening street wisdom from an ex-.

"'WELL SHUT MY MOUTH WIDE OPEN!'is an old surrealist term of expression that Afro-Americans created when they were emancipated, due to the fact that emancipation wasn't a reality, but a much dreamed of condition that they hoped would become a reality." So writes Ted Joans — as tedjoans — in the liner notes for the recently-reissued 1974 album King of Kings (Pyramid/Ikef) by the Pyramids, Bay Area artist and musician Idris Ackamoor's revelatory group. Joans was referring to the free jazz sounds of the time, but he could just as well have been referring to Death's definition of rock 'n' roll, as demonstrated on ...For All the World to See (Drag City), a previously unreleased true treasure of black Detroit rock that also dates from 1974. Brothers David and Bobby Hackney don't just invent punk — "Freakin Out" is like the Buzzcocks if they were muscular — they create agit-punk on the epic "Politicians in My Eyes."

The arrival of Death couldn't be better timed to match the black rock signs of life within the surreal electronic solar system of Jones' Chatterton. Jones' braiding of word and sound is subliminal, like when Pornography (as in a song that sounds like that particular era of the Cure) arrives in the wake of a track called "Tornogrpahy." In the audio "Che-ography" he has created with dozens of studio collaborators (charted on his MySpace), a cat-lady character from a 12" single (2007's "Helen Cornell") can cameo in a song by another recording endeavor about a girl who suffers when "the pimps and crack dealers hit her...where the good lord split her."

All the lonely people, framed by "Pompadour," Chatterton's penultimate track that pays homage to an idol by stampeding to finality like "Speedway" on Morrissey's Vauxhall and I (Sire, 1994). "'Twas said, 'twas said: Black singers are ... well, so very very ... uh ... cliché," Jones, well, sings — and sings from a bottomless well. "And still, and still you know you'll screw for them ... you'll screw in private anyway!"

Camp-Lo Drizzies Da Gold Sugar

2009-05-20T14:12:00.000-07:00

AFRO-SURREAL: Camp Lo bring the wordplay, elegance, and Bronx bravado

By D. Scot Miller

San Francisco Bay Guardian

AFRO-SURREAL PREVIEW

Fuck all that. Camp Lo's Uptown Saturday Night (Profile, 1997) is one of the most slept-on albums in the history of hip-hop. Period. Innovative well beyond its years, Uptown Saturday Night introduces the Camp Lo aesthetic — a combination of exquisite wordplay, foppish elegance, and Bronx-style bravado mixed in with a fearsome frivolity. They redefined "gangsta," using the oft-quoted Posdnous lyric "Fuck being hard /Posdnous is complicated" as a motto. Because Uptown Saturday Night IS complicated, which makes it hard. It's also pornographic and violent to an extreme and probably bears the uncomfortable distinction of being the first, if not only, hip-hop album to portray coprophilia in nearly positive light.

The album is a complete immersion into a certain brand of street slang that bears a lineage with Iceberg Slim, De La Soul, Digable Planets, Raekwon and Ghostface Killah. Definitely otnay orfay ofeys, the Lo's first outing is the most utterly inaccessible and damn-near indescribable crossover album of the era.

Camp Lo created such a lyrical Gordian knot that even the most versed connoisseur of microphone wizardry could be left looking baffled with a handful of either jewels or cubic zirconia — only an accurate hip-to-square conversion chart could tell which. "In another millenia /Blow the dust off these jewels," says Geechi Suede, and to this day, Googling the lyrics of their one and only "hit," "Luchini," brings page after page of misquoted and half-heard snippets exposing Herbs. An example: "Keep your ears out for our years"? How about keep your ears out for Roy Ayers? He's a jazz musician. "Levitating in da' shiggys"? How about dashikis? They're a kind of shirt, from Africa.

All Afro-Surreal elements are present: a layered rococo style steeped in international travel; a dandy's obsession with "vines" from Paris and Milan; a literary approach with references ranging from Donald Goines to Fragonard; and a frivolous manner that belies a serious intent. After Uptown Saturday Night, hip-hop changed, and not necessarily for the better. Go see Camp Lo. Give these men their due.

CAMP LO With DJ Apollo and Sake 1. Thurs/21, 10 p.m., $10. Mighty, 119 Utah, SF. (415) 762-0151. www.mighty119.com

AFROSURREAL MANIFESTO

2009-05-20T13:26:00.000-07:00

Black is the new black --
a 21st century manifesto

By D. Scot Miller

For San Francisco Bay Guardian

Wednesday May 20, 2009

I'm not a surrealist. I just paint what I see. — Frida Kahlo

THE PAST AND THE PRELUDE

In his introduction to the classic novel Invisible Man (1952), ambiguous black and literary icon Ralph Ellison says the process of creation was "far more disjointed than [it] sounds ... such was the inner-outer subjective-objective process, pied rind and surreal heart."

Ellison's allusion is to his book's most perplexing character, Rinehart the Runner, a dandy, pimp, numbers runner, drug dealer, prophet, and preacher. The protagonist of Invisible Man takes on the persona of Rinehart so that "I may not see myself as others see me not." Wearing a mask of dark shades and large-brimmed hat, he is warned by a man known as the fellow with the gun, "Listen Jack, don't let nobody make you act like Rinehart. You got to have a smooth tongue, a heartless heart, and be ready to do anything."

And Ellison's lead man enters a world of prostitutes, hopheads, cops on the take, and masochistic parishioners. He says of Rinehart, "He was years ahead of me, and I was a fool. The world in which we live is fluidity, and Rine the Rascal was at home." The marquee of Rinehart's store-front church declares:

Behold the Invisible!

Thy will be done O Lord!

I See all, Know all, Tell all, Cure all.

You shall see the unknown wonders.

Ellison and Rinehart had seen it, but had no name for it.

In an introduction to prophet Henry Dumas' 1974 book Ark Of Bones and Other Stories, Amiri Baraka puts forth a term for what he describes as Dumas' "skill at creating an entirely different world organically connected to this one ... the Black aesthetic in its actual contemporary and lived life." The term he puts forth is Afro-Surreal Expressionism.

Dumas had seen it. Baraka had named it.

This is Afro-Surreal!

THIS IS NOT AFRO-SURREAL

A) Surrealism:

Leopold Senghor, poet, first president of Senegal, and African Surrealist, made this distinction: "European Surrealism is empirical. African Surrealism is mystical and metaphorical." Jean-Paul Sartre said that the art of Senghor and the African Surrealist (or Negritude) movement "is revolutionary because it is surrealist, but itself is surrealist because it is black." Afro-Surrealism sees that all "others" who create from their actual, lived experience are surrealist, per Frida Kahlo. The root for "Afro-" can be found in "Afro-Asiatic", meaning a shared language between black, brown and Asian peoples of the world. What was once called the "third world," until the other two collapsed.

B) Afro-Futurism:

Afro-Futurism is a diaspora intellectual and artistic movement that turns to science, technology, and science fiction to speculate on black possibilities in the future. Afro-Surrealism is about the present. There is no need for tomorrow's-tongue speculation about the future. Concentration camps, bombed-out cities, famines, and enforced sterilization have already happened. To the Afro-Surrealist, the Tasers are here. The Four Horsemen rode through too long ago to recall. What is the future? The future has been around so long it is now the past.

Afro-Surrealists expose this from a "future-past" called RIGHT NOW.

RIGHT NOW, Barack Hussein Obama is America's first black president.

RIGHT NOW, Afro-Surreal is the best description to the reactions, the genuflections, the twists, and the unexpected turns this "browning" of White-Straight-Male-Western-Civilization has produced.

THE PRESENT, OR RIGHT NOW

San Francisco, the most liberal and artistic city in the nation, has one of the nation's most rapidly declining black urban populations. This is a sign of a greater illness that is chasing out all artists, renegades, daredevils, and outcasts. No black people means no black artists, and all you yet-untouched freaks are next. Only freaky black art — Afro-Surreal art — in the museums, galleries, concert venues, and streets of this (slightly) fair city can save us!

San Francisco, the land of Afro-Surreal poet laureate Bob Kaufman, can be at the forefront in creating an emerging aesthetic. In this land of buzzwords and catch phrases, Afro-Surreal is necessary to transform how we see things now, how we look at what happened then, and what we can expect to see in the future.

It's no more coincidence that Kool Keith (as Dr. Octagon) recorded the 1996 Afro-Surreal anthem "Blue Flowers" on Hyde Street, or that Samuel R. Delany based much of his 1974 Afro-Surreal urtext Dhalgren on experiences in San Francisco.

An Afro-Surreal aesthetic addresses these lost legacies and reclaims the souls of our cities, from Kehinde Wiley painting the invisible men (and their invisible motives) in NYC to Yinka Shonibare beheading 17th (and 21st) century sexual tourists of Europe. From Nick Cave's soundsuits at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts to the words you are reading right now, the message is clear: San Francisco, the world is ready for an Afro-Surreal art movement.

Afro-Surrealism is drifting into contemporary culture on a rowboat with no oars, entering the city to hunt down clues for the cure to this ancient, incurable disease called "western civilization." Or, as Ishmael Reed states, "We are mystical detectives about to make an arrest."

A MANIFESTO OF AFRO-SURREAL

Behold the invisible! You shall see unknown wonders!

1. We have seen these unknown worlds emerging in the works of Wifredo Lam, whose Afro-Cuban origins inspire works that speak of old gods with new faces, and in the works of Jean-Michel Basquiat, who gives us new gods with old faces. We have heard this world in the ebo-horn of Roscoe Mitchell and the lyrics of DOOM. We've read it through the words of Henry Dumas, Victor Lavalle, and Darius James. This emerging mosaic of radical influence ranges from Frantz Fanon to Jean Genet. Supernatural undertones of Reed and Zora Neale Hurston mix with the hardscrabble stylings of Chester Himes and William S. Burroughs.

2. Afro-Surreal presupposes that beyond this visible world, there is an invisible world striving to manifest, and it is our job to uncover it. Like the African Surrealists, Afro-Surrealists recognize that nature (including human nature) generates more surreal experiences than any other process could hope to produce.

3. Afro-Surrealists restore the cult of the past. We revisit old ways with new eyes. We appropriate 19th century slavery symbols like Kara Walker, and 18th century colonial ones like Yinka Shonibare. We re-introduce "madness" as visitations from the gods, and acknowledge the possibility of magic. We take up the obsessions of the ancients and kindle the dis-ease, clearing the murk of the collective unconsciousness as it manifests in these dreams called culture.

4. Afro-Surrealists use excess as the only legitimate means of subversion, and hybridization as a form of disobedience. The collages of Romare Bearden and Wangechi Mutu, the prose of Reed, and the music of the Art Ensemble of Chicago and Antipop Consortium express this overflow.

Afro-Surrealists distort reality for emotional impact. 50 Cent and his cold monotone and Walter Benjamin and his chilly shock tactics can kiss our ass. Enough! We want to feel something! We want to weep on record.

5. Afro-Surrealists strive for rococo: the beautiful, the sensuous, and the whimsical. We turn to Sun Ra, Toni Morrison, and Ghostface Killa. We look to Kehinde Wiley, whose observation about the black male body applies to all art and culture: "There is no objective image. And there is no way to objectively view the image itself."

6. The Afro-Surrealist life is fluid, filled with aliases and census- defying classifications. It has no address or phone number, no single discipline or calling. Afro-Surrealists are highly-paid short-term commodities (as opposed to poorly-paid long term ones, a.k.a. slaves).

Afro-Surrealists are ambiguous. "Am I black or white? Am I straight, or gay? Controversy!"

Afro-Surrealism rejects the quiet servitude that characterizes existing roles for African Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos, women and queer folk. Only through the mixing, melding, and cross-conversion of these supposed classifications can there be hope for liberation. Afro-Surrealism is intersexed, Afro-Asiatic, Afro-Cuban, mystic, silly, and profound.

7. The Afro-Surrealist wears a mask while reading Leopold Senghor.

8. Ambiguous as Prince, black as Fanon, literary as Reed, dandy as André Leon Tally, the Afro-Surrealist seeks definition in the absurdity of a "post-racial" world.

9. In fashion (John Galliano; Yohji Yamamoto) and the theater (Suzan Lori-Parks), Afro-Surreal excavates the remnants of this post-apocalypse with dandified flair, a smooth tongue and a heartless heart.

10. Afro-Surrealists create sensuous gods to hunt down beautiful collapsed icons.

AFRO-SURREALISM IN ACTION

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of the African Diaspora present the works of Mutu, William Pope L., Trenton Doyle Hancock, Glenn Ligon, Wiley, Shonibare, and Walker en masse, with Lam's Jungle as a center piece. Lorraine Hansbury Theater stages Genet's The Blacks and Baraka's The Dutchman, while San Francisco Opera adapts Aimé Césaire's Caliban and the Fillmore has an Afro-punk retrospective. Afro-Surreal adaptations of Reed's Mumbo Jumbo (1972), Hurston's Tell My Horse (1937), and Marvel's Black Panther will grace the silver-screen.

These are the first steps in an illustrious and fantastic journey. When we finally reach those unknown shores, we will say, with blood beneath our nails and mud on our boots:

This is Afro-Surreal!

Slumberland

2009-04-22T22:34:00.000-07:00

Though he was one of the first stand-out stars of the Nuyorican scene before the term “poetry slam” was a part of the zeitgeist. Though his work has been published consistently, though discretely, for the past twenty-plus years, and though his first book of poems, “Big Bank Take Little Bank”, simultaneously grabbed the attentions of Allen Ginsberg and Ice Cube. Is there an anymore slept on Black male American writer than Paul Beatty? The author of three books of fiction, two of poetry, and one anthology gets so little mention in the annals of contemporary literature. His latest novel, Slumberland, which has gained little notice as it has oozed its way into the collective unconsciousness, may give some clues to how the author has managed to walk the tight-rope between blowing up and going pop and have fun doing it.

DJ Darky is a sub-genius sommelier for a jukebox in a West Berlin Bar, Slumberland, a hot-spot for miscegenation between buxom German frauliens and Black expats shortly before the fall of the wall. He comes seeking his hero and potential co-signer to his perfect beat; an avant garde jazz musician known as “The Schwa”.

Within the first twenty pages, through Darky, Beatty calls all most all Black Male actors over the last two decades Uncle Toms, proclaims the death of Hip-Hop and declares Black people passé and obsolete. Somehow, these polemics do not come across as a pop-culture hodge-podge, but the back-story about one man’s search for perfection, love, and acceptance. And this is where we get our first clue towards Beatty’s warm receptions as a writer and scholar. For over twenty years, many Black American writers have been feeding sacred cows and bringing long-festering wounds to light. What has been woefully missing in the dialogue of Black letters is the power of satire. Beatty’s 2005 anthology, Hokum, shows him to be a studied master of black humor and radical imagination and Slumberland is laugh out loud funny. There are passages here that make me blurt out, like some people laugh at jazz concerts when an impresario pulls out an amazing aural stunt. I’m constantly impressed with this writer who’s not afraid to say NIGGER in all caps.

As the Berlin Wall falls, and secret agents and ragmen emerge, Beatty remains pitch perfect in his critique of Black/White America, Germany, and Western Civilization to date. So much so, that acerbic insight becomes commonplace and the “been there, done that” uber-hip-ness exuded by Darky and his growing cadre never comes off as smarmy or condescending. It’s this lack of self-seriousness that causes many readers to miss the serious intent of Beatty’s work. Since his first novel, White Boy Shuffle, there has been an apocalyptic foreboding, a sinister grin, a lonely ache for connection and validation that has permeated his work. There is a tension in Slumberland that recalls the monologues of Richard Pryor in his heyday; where folly and despair collide with race consciousness and self-destructive impulse causing us to relate to frailties so deeply that only laughter makes sense.

This is a fun book with more truth than most Americans can bear, though, like his previous novel, Tuff, Beatty can get lost in atmospheric description that distracts rather than emphasizes his scenes. In Slumberland, the description of the bar itself and the various characters who frequent it can serve as foils and the urge to skim becomes greatest during these passages, but it’s a small price to pay for the overall impact of Beatty’s wit, emotion and keen observation of human behavior in all of its fragility and pathos.

There is a confirmation in not only Slumberland, but Beatty’s entire body of work that, no, you’re not crazy. There are folks out here who see the same absurd shit you do.

Post-Human Dada Guide

2009-04-22T22:18:00.000-07:00

Andrei Codrescu:
The Post Human Dada Guide

Ever read a book and think, "Well, this is the last book I'll ever need"? No? That's because you haven't picked up The Post Human Dada Guide (Princeton, 248 pages, $16.95). A dictionary, a history of art movements, a manifesto, and a joke book; it traverses high and low, seeking answers to our most persistent confusions about art, culture, and identity. The ever-lucid Andrei Codrescu gets us to witness Dada and communism as a chess game for world domination between Tristan Tzara and V.I. Lenin. As it unfolds, images of Hugo Ball, Newt Gingrich, and William Burroughs and others float in and disappear. By the end, the reader has come to grips with Codrescu's stoic, but darkly hopeful, vision for a future that is no future at all.

Hokum

2009-04-09T10:45:00.000-07:00

Hokum
Edited by Paul Beatty
Bloomsbury, $16.95

D. Scot Miller for East Bay Express

Against a black backdrop, a thin slice of watermelon eaten nearly down to the rind conjures a sinister pink smile on the cover of this African-American humor anthology. Like its contents, the book's cover is both hilarious and haunting. When compiling a collection that is equal parts Afro-surrealist agitprop and talking-book primer, Beatty mined a compendium of the last century's most influential black writers, thinkers, and artists, himself included. From the pathos of Hilton Als to the surprisingly profound musings of Mike Tyson, many of these pieces are funny in spite of themselves. Excerpts from Sam Greenlee's The Spook Who Sat by the Door and Fran Ross' forgotten jewel, Oreo, mix with short stories from Henry Dumas and Darius James and poems from Bob Kaufmann, Harryette Mullen, and more, inspiring the reader to unearth these writers' other, out-of-print treasures. Wary of inside jokes, some readers might be reluctant to dive into the concoction of hip-hop lyrics, speeches, and quotes with which Beatty rounds out the anthology, but since before Brer Rabbit, oral humor has been the occasional vehicle for extreme, radical black thought. As a literary reference tool, it's unmatched. Beatty's selections give Hokum, as Jean-Michel Basquiat might say, teeth.

Mos Def at Yoshi's In Oakland 4/16/09

2009-04-09T10:33:00.000-07:00

Mos Def

Our once and future truth-teller

By D. Scot Miller

Wednesday April 8, 2009

PREVIEW Anyone who heard "Big Brother Beat" on De La Soul's 1996 album Stakes Is High (Tommy Boy) was soon saying, "Who's this kid Mos Def?" Still, it's hard to believe that, 13 years later, the radiant voice on that track would become the ubiquitous scion of that good old Native Tongue can-do.

Mos Def can turn up simultaneously in a movie (his next project is a film version of Iceberg Slim's Mama Black Widow) and on a television show (you catch him on House a few weeks ago?), yet still find time to cameo on other people's albums, win an Obie for his performance in a play (Suzan Lori Parks' Fuckin' A), and come out with a book (Black 2.0, due this summer). It's like, wait a minute, there's got to be more than one Mos Def.

His four albums explore his tortured id and black people's rightful place as the inventors of rock 'n' roll and just about all forms of popular music — all that, and they still maintain the dedication to socially conscious protest we've come to expect from our once and future truth-tellers. His fifth, The Ecstatic, is due later this year. He's coming to Yoshi's in Oakland for a few sets with Robert Glasper on piano, Mark Kelly on bass, Chris "Daddy" Dave on drums, Casey Benjamin on sax, and Keyon Harrold on trumpet. Be a part of history in the making. It's not like you have a choice. His name is Most Definite, not Think So.

MOS DEF Tues/14–April 16, 8 and 10 p.m., $55. Yoshi's Oakland, 510 Embarcadero West, Oakl. (510) 238-9200. www.yoshis.com

Fantastic Planet

2009-04-02T12:49:00.000-07:00

FILM

Fantastic Planet

D. Scot Miller (for San Francisco Bay Guardian)

René Laloux's 1973 Fantastic Planet is an animated masterpiece. Packed to overflow with psychedelic colors and surreal asides, it disturbs and delights. In telling the story of the Draags, a giant blue semi- amphibious master race, and the Oms, their tiny humanoid pets and pests, Laloux charts the battle that ensues when one of the Oms chances across consciousness. See a predatory world of macabre distraction where certain beings are naturally endowed with superior attributes that they use only to further their hold on the weak, small, and less fortunate — then turn off the television and go see Fantastic Planet.

www.sfmoma.org

"Meet Me at the Center of the Earth"

2009-03-30T00:48:00.000-07:00

"Meet Me at the Center of the Earth"

Cave's art is a fusion of fashion, body art, and sculpture so imaginative that it might possess transformational qualities

By Johnny Ray Huston - San Francisco Bay Guardian

Tuesday March 24, 2009

This collection of "soundsuits" by Nick Cave (the Chicago artist, not the Australian musician) is the most anticipated show of the season. If, as this paper's D. Scot Miller has observed, Afro-surrealism is in the air, then Cave's art — a fusion of fashion, body art, and sculpture so imaginative that it might possess transformational qualities — is a prime example. His wearable constructions are eye-boggling counterparts to the Afro-surreal music of figures both present (Chelonis R. Jones) and newly revived-from-the past (Wicked Witch). Cave's art also possesses aural qualities that won't be evident until the show opens. A former dancer with Alvin Ailey and the current chair of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago's fashion program, he's also collaborating with choreographer Ronald K. Brown on some performances in May.

Cave's soundsuits arrive in the Bay Area as a ceremonial contemporary extension from the fabulous but nostalgic European fashion on display in the de Young Museum's Yves Saint Laurent show. In fact, the most bizarre and audacious of that exhibition's pieces — a 1965 bridal gown that resembles an intricate cocoon or sock — might as well be an old colonial relative of Cave's wearable works, which are constructed from a wide variety of natural and artificial material.

These acid-trip Bigfoot creatures and dancing rainbow phallus totems are fun, but they kick. Cave made his first soundsuit in response to the Simi Valley aesthetics of the Rodney King verdict, and in an older project he rescued racist lawn jockeys, turning them into figures of promise and potential.

MEET ME AT THE CENTER OF THE EARTH Sat/28 through July 5, $3-$6 (free first Tues). Opening reception Fri/27, 8-11 p.m., $12-$15. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission, SF. (415) 978-ARTS. www.ybca.org

Ta-Nehisi Coates charts a Beautiful Struggle

2009-03-22T00:41:00.000-07:00

Beyond the nerd herd

Ta-Nehisi Coates charts a Beautiful Struggle
By D. Scot Miller (For SF Bay Guardian)
Wednesday July 9, 2008
› a&eletters@sfbg.com
REVIEW Amid impoverished rural segregation, my parents were part of the first bus boycott in Montgomery, Ala. While my father studied Frantz Fanon and tae kwan do in Okinawa, my mother went on to be a probation officer in Los Angeles during the Watts riots. I was born in a riot-torn Washington, DC, around the time my father helped take over the administration offices of Howard University. I'm a Black Movement baby, and Ta-Nehisi Coates is one of my number.
Coates' The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood (Spiegel and Grau, 240 pages, $22.95) is a memoir about growing up in Baltimore through the Black Power 1970s and crack power '80s as one of the seven children of Paul Coates, owner and founder of Black Classic Press.
Judging from recent books such as Junot Diaz's The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao to Shawn Taylor's Big Black Penis, the black nerd has become the locus of pomo literary style. And why not? Who, besides me, didn't love Urkel? Coates begins his tale as a sensitive black nerd — Beautiful Struggle even has a Dungeon and Dragons–esque map of Old Baltimore on the inside front cover. Swords, dragons, and Monotype Corsiva font chart intersections like Garrison and Liberty, where, as the author relates, "the Orcs cold-played me for my scullie." Ultimately Coates moves beyond the nerd trend, instead playing the vulnerable, reluctant warrior with grace and wit.
Initially unwilling to fight, Coates is sucker-punched, jacked, and tormented on the mean streets. To navigate Baltimore's threats and perils means acquiring what he calls "The Knowledge": street smarts and savvy that is "the sum experience of our ways from the time Plymouth Rock landed on us." This knowledge is built upon the realization that "death was jammed in us all, hell-bent on finding a way out," and that a man shouldn't measure his "life in years but in style."
In Beautiful Struggle, Coates contrasts his older brother Bill and father Paul. Bill is a popular player in a decaying neighborhood, struggling to make it to the outside world. Paul is a former Black Panther and full-time revolutionary attempting to raise seven kids to attend the mecca of Howard University, where he's a janitor, rogue black historian, and would-be publisher.
Watching Bill embrace hip-hop, smoke blunts, chase dimepieces, and pack a biscuit, Coates becomes versed in The Knowledge. He sets it against his father Paul's "Knowledge of Self," as drawn from Kwanzaa, Nkrumah, and the consciousness of being more god than man and more man than animal. In attempting to find a balance between these tropes, Coates invokes the words and experiences of J.A. Rodgers, Rakim, George Jackson, Ishmael Reed, and KRS-ONE with uncanny ease. He embodies both the hope and the bane of the Black Power movement, and his flashbacks capture its tender and toughening moments.
It is this tension that gives The Beautiful Struggle its potency. Coates charts the seemingly boundless optimism of his father's generation and the rising cynicism of his and brother's. He does so with a compassionate, poetic voice that is rooted in a no-bullshit grasp of his personal history and of American history over the past 60 years. To read this book is to catch a glimpse of the profound legacy and letdown of a generation raised to rebel but forced instead to fight disappointment, imprisonment, and despair. As Coates puts it, "The Knowledge Rule 2080: From maggots to men, the world is a corner bully. Better you knuckle up and go for yours than have to bow your head and tuck your chain."

San Francisco Noir 2

2009-03-20T02:14:00.000-07:00

SAN FRANCISCO NOIR 2: THE CLASSICS

Edited by Peter Maravelis

Akashic Books

300 pages

$15.95

D. Scot Miller (For San Francisco Bay Guardian)

San Francisco has many legacies, including the social movements of the 1960s and '70s. But before more recent utopian impulses, SF was the Barbary Coast — and Chinatown, North Beach, and the Financial District were havens for gambling, prostitution, and crime. This gritty, nefarious reputation was enhanced in the '30s by Dashiell Hammett's novel The Maltese Falcon, and in the '40s by John Huston's film version, among other SF-set stories. SF was a noir city, defined by hard drinking and hard living. This is a legacy that the current city perhaps would prefer to forget, much like a blackout during a drunken binge.

In his excellent introduction to the first San Francisco Noir anthology in 2005, editor Peter Maravelis writes, "Crime fiction is the scalpel used to reveal San Francisco's pathological character." With San Francisco Noir 2: The Classics, Maravelis does more than pick up the scalpel once again. Using a timeline, he reprints some of the grainiest SF snapshots by Barbary Coast writers. He starts with Mark Twain's hard-boiled description of the infernal Hall of Justice in the late 19th century — a rogues gallery of vermin, where judges drop like flies from stress-induced heart-attacks. He then traces these noir elements to a doppelganger tale by Jack London, on to Hammett, and to contemporary authors such as William T. Vollmann, who writes what Maravelis calls "splatter-noir, where plutocracy has won and the dispossessed give graphic descriptions of the tears in the social fabric." Through recent stories by Janet Dawson, Oscar Penaranda, and others, Maravelis ups the ante, as if to say: this is the real San Francisco. Always has been, always will be.

Paul Beatty's Slumberland and Interview with Opal Palmer Adisa

2009-03-19T20:03:00.001-07:00

Healing Words
an Interview with Opal Palmer Adisa
by D. Scot Miller

Slumberland By Paul Beatty
Review by D. Scot Miller

Are You Andoumboulou?

2009-03-19T19:53:00.000-07:00

Are You Andoumboulou?

By D. Scot Miller for San Francisco Weekly

Nathaniel Mackey begins his poem "Spectral Escort" with the lines, "Not exactly a boat or/ not only a boat … / Weathervane, boat/ flag rolled into one." Whether as vehicle, compass, or guide, Mackey's book Splay Anthem takes the reader to uncharted poetic spaces, tracing a lost tribe through waking and dreamtime. The winner of the National Book Award for 2006, Splay Anthem is composed of two ongoing serial poems that Mackey has been writing and speaking for more than 20 years: "Mu" and "Song of the Andoumboulou."

"Andoumboulou are a failed, earlier form of human being in the Dogon cosmogony," explains Mackey in the introduction. "The Andoumboulou live underground, inhabiting holes in the earth." Mackey also co-edited the anthology Moment's Notice: Jazz in Poetry and Prose (one of the few books to capture Cecil Taylor's poetry on the page), and has been the editor of the Afro-surrealists' literary journal of note, Hambone, for the past three decades. Tonight, Mackey appears with Hafez Modirzadeh, a saxophonist, teacher, and music theorist who played on Mackey's CD, Strick: Song of Andoumboulou 16-25, and is a longtime member of the avant-garde ensemble Anthony Brown's Asian American Orchestra. They are joined by Canadian poet Wayde Compton and British Poet D. S. Marriott, whose book title, Ingcognegro, is worth the price of admission alone.

2009-03-15T00:02:00.000-07:00

Barry Jenkins

SAN FRANCISCO BAY GUARDIAN GOLDIES 2008 winner:
Viewing the city -- and its displacements -- through the prism of a relationship

By D. Scot Miller
Wednesday November 5, 2008

Barry Jenkins' Medicine for Melancholy was one of the biggest successes of this year's San Francisco International Film Festival, but it almost didn't happen.

"We shot the movie fast and thought maybe we could pass it around to friends," Jenkins says. "I started cutting it and said to myself, 'This is really coming together. Fuck it, let's try to get it into the San Francisco International Film Festival.' I looked on the website and the deadline had already passed. But I'd stopped (San Francisco Film Society Executive Director) Graham Leggat coming out of the bathroom at another film festival — it was rude, you should never stop someone coming out of the bathroom — and he remembered me and gave my film a fair viewing. God bless him."

Medicine For Melancholy, Jenkins' first feature, is a love story about Micah (Wyatt Cinach) and Jo (Tracey Heggins), two black San Franciscans who come together and fall apart over a 24-hour period. Race, displacement, and resentment play into their affair in surprising and subtle ways.

"I had the idea for this movie years ago," Jenkins says, "and I'd placed it in Chicago or New York City, but to me the city had to be a character. That could only be San Francisco. It would be silly for Micah to be so into Jo in New York or Chicago. [Meeting] Jo here makes him like an explorer in the Amazon who has come across an endangered species. He wants to run everything that's happening, to him and the city, by her. If he would shut the fuck up, he could get the girl."

Though framed as a romance, Medicine tackles one of the most pressing — and overlooked — issues in San Francisco: black people, and the city's lack thereof.

"Micah is based on this person I became after my first functional interracial relationship dissolved," Jenkins says. "When I moved to San Francisco, I was viewing the city through the prism of this relationship, living in this great, multi-culti San Francisco. When that relationship ended, San Francisco became a different place. There's a great indie arts scene here, a great indie music scene, but they're predominantly, if not entirely, white. You don't consciously become aware of it until one day you look around and say, 'Oh shit, I'm the Last Black Man on Earth!'

"The question became: Is there a place for me as a black man in San Francisco? Sure, there is. In LA, I couldn't write for two years. I come to San Francisco and over the first eight months, I'd written five screenplays. One of which became my first film. But it seems like nothing can stem the tide of the migration of all people of a certain economic background — people who've had to leave San Francisco, and who are now commuting to keep the city beautiful for people who make tons of money.

"For a time, there was a proliferation of gentrification in San Francisco, but it is shifting to displacement, and not just displacement based on race, but displacement of anyone who cannot afford to live here. And I think the reason it has proliferated is because not enough folks have taken the city to task. There have been folks, like the Guardian, who write about this shit all the time, but a lot of folks have been afraid to speak out."

This writer is here to tell you: it's not too late.

www.strikeanywherefilms.com

2009-03-13T02:34:00.000-07:00

The Arkivest: Chester Himes and Black Futurism

November 2, 2007 by othersidemedia

The Arkivest: Chester Himes
-d. scot miller

When reviewing the prolific life of Chester Himes the first lesson to learn is that as Black artists, we are the world-walkers. The second is as Black writers we are the scribes of the jubilee apocalypse.

With sixteen novels covering thirty-two years of professional writing, it is amazing that so few people know of his established presence in neither American literature nor his contributions to what is now known as Black Futurism.

And how does Chester Himes relate to Black-Futurism? Though he passed away nearly 25 years ago, and many of his writings are set in the time and place he was in, Chester Himes‘ life was, the embodiment of the Black Avant Garde and, dare I say, apocalyptic sage of the Black Futurist literary tradition.

Before the redemption narratives of The Autobiography of Malcolm X and Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul On Ice, Himes began his writing career while serving a three-year prison bid for armed robbery by writing articles for Esquire and Harper’s.

Before Ralph Ellison addressed the perils of Black men struggling with absurd disenfranchisement in Invisible Man and Richard Wright confronted the exploitation of Black people by American Capitalism and Communism through the 40s and 50s in Native Son, Himes had nationally published two separate full-length novels- If He Hollers Let Him Go (Doubleday, 1945), and The Lonely Crusade (Knopf, 1947) – laying the groundwork for these two seminal works.

By the time James Baldwin, John A. Williams and Cecil Brown escaped this Land of the Free; Chester Himes had traveled across Europe several times and was there to greet the expatriate Black writers on Parisian shores. In the 70s, Melvin Vann Peebles stayed in Himes‘ Paris apartment while Chester, then in his late 50s, traveled through Spain in a busted Volvo, writing.

One only has to follow his bibliography to see the evolution of Black Futurist thought as it emerged from the African American subconscious. The Primitive (New American Library, 1955), tells the story of Jesse Robinson, a drunken, guilt-ridden reprobate, holed up in a New York City penthouse with a White socialite and too much booze to go around. The fact that he wove narratives fully exploring miscegenation in a time of overt segregation would be enough to clarify his trajectory as a radical man of letters, but the last scene of the novel – where Robinson sits naked on the living room couch, plays with his Johnson and watches a talking gorilla on a morning news program inform him that the socialite lies dead in the next bedroom, that he is the killer, and will be going to jail for life shortly – places him, again, at the forefront and gives an unnerving, and genre-shattering glimpse into the future of speculative fiction.

In the second book of his double-volume biography, The Quality Of Hurt / My Life Of Absurdity, Himes tells of after a failed marriage and being blacklisted by the American literary establishment, he takes a cruise-ship to Europe. What met Himes there was a whole new level of absurdity. As with nearly all of the great jazz musicians of the era’s Avant Garde, Paris made a home for Chester Himes. The writer was offered a contract with Serie Noire-Gallimard, the most successful detective novel publishers in France. He received the best pay of his career, but Himes wrote and drank all day, everyday, in apartments and chateaus all over Spain, Paris, and Holland, while living in relative obscurity and poverty.

For twelve years, Himes published a book a year. He was honored with le prix du Roman Policier in 1958 for his 1957 novel For The Love Of Imabell/A Rage In Harlem. Cotton Comes To Harlem (1963) was made into a movie directed by Ossie Davis in the 70s, and twenty years later, A Rage In Harlem made it to the big-screen under the direction of George Duke.

Himes, having been away from America for so long, had vivid recollections of the sights and sounds of Black America that gave life to his detective novels. Along with remembering streets and bars throughout Harlem, he also took advantage of fictionalizing the world of cops and robbers through his lens of surreal experience. In the beginning of Real Cool Killers (1959), for example, a man’s arm is chopped off at the elbow by a fireman’s axe as he confronts a patron in a bar.

The publication of Amistad #1, Writings On Black History and Culture (Vintage Periodicals, 1970), marked an important occasion in literature and Black Futurism. In it, John A. Williams, author of The Man Who Cried I Am, traveled to Spain to interview Chester Himes for a piece entitled “My Man Himes.” In it, for the first time, he is asked about his life as a writer and thinker. It is here that Chester Himes, Black Futurist, truly emerges as he discusses the work he is doing on his final novel, a piece of pure speculative fiction, Plan B. Though he hadn’t chosen the title at the time of the interview he explains, “-all dialogue ceases, all forms of petitions and other goddamned things are finished. All you do then is kill as many people as you can, the black people kill as many of the white community as they can kill. That means children, women, grown men, industrialists, street-sweepers, whatever they are, as long as they’re white.”

Chester Himes made a place for himself in the Arkives by stating and living his truth at all costs. Peep him. Now.

For more on Chester Himes:

http://www.math.buffalo.edu/~sww/HIMES/CHESTER.html

http://www.spikemagazine.com/0899lesleyhimes.php

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chester_Himes

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agH85CNC5Lc

Medicine For Melancholy

2009-03-13T02:22:00.000-07:00

Medicine for Melancholy In the aftermath of a party, two 20-something San Franciscans wake up in bed together with no recollection of how they got there. They exchange names at a Noe Valley coffee shop and share a cab in cold silence. She leaves her wallet behind. He hunts her down online to return it. From there, they begin a convincing dance of seduction infused with excitement, disclosure, and tenderness. Micah (Wyatt Cinach) is immature, self-effacing, and strong, while Jo (Tracey Heggins) is confident, grown-up, and intense. What they learn about each other — and what the film reveals — is on par with any postmodern romance.
Writer-director Barry Jenkins has created complex characters trying to negotiate simple feelings in a difficult world; in mixing black and white with color to explore the relationship between setting and dialogue, director of photography James Laxton captures the sublime and gritty sides of San Francisco. Medicine for Melancholy is important because it spotlights the most overlooked aspect of SF's changing face: black people, and the lack thereof. Micah and Jo are black and their race plays into the affair in surprising and subtle ways. Jenkins has said that Medicine for Melancholy is "a simple, straightforward film that illuminates the modern complexities of living as a declining minority in America's major cities." At the time Medicine for Melancholy was filmed, SF's black population was 7 percent and dropping. As one of the remaining black people in SF, I know that black flight is a reality here. The self-evident gentrification and anti-black sentiment of the city play heavily into the dynamic of this movie's couple. "Why is everything that is 'indie' mean 'not black?'" Micah asks at one point. Conversations like these have been going on among my dwindling number in San Francisco for too long. Until now, only we have heard them. Tell people about Medicine for Melancholy. In the face of an impending cultural extinction and the potential loss of SF's soul, this excellent movie is part of a necessary discussion. (1:27) Embarcadero, Shattuck. (D. Scot Miller for SFBG)

Baraka Looks Back

2009-03-12T22:09:00.000-07:00

Tales Of The Out And The Gone (review)

By D. Scot Miller for The San Francisco Weekly

Fans of Afro-surrealism and black futurism have cause to celebrate Amiri Baraka's new book, Tales of the Out and the Gone, a collection of short fiction written between the early 1970s and 2003. The author, essayist, former New Jersey Poet Laureate, and playwright's contribution to avant-garde black art is unparalleled, as is his place at the forefront of the Black Arts Movement. The artist formerly known as LeRoi Jones began as a Beat poet in the 1950s, and he still uses North Beach slang to subvert expectations. "In specific contexts, anything can be Out!" he writes in the book's introduction. "Out of the ordinary. Just as we call some artist, like Thelonious Monk or Vincent Smith, or John Coltrane, Out! Because they were just not where most other people were. So that is aesthetic and social, often both at the same time." Equally well known for his plays (The Dutchman) as he is for his poetry (Somebody Blew Up America, Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note) and his essays on music and culture (Blues People), Baraka is also a profound storyteller whose fiction transcends a single genre, moving among science fiction, protest, surreal polemic, and black chant.
Most of the out-and-gone tales have never been published; they reflect the remarkable progression of one of America's most prolific literary antiheroes and a living master of black radical letters.

Sun Ra: Pathways To Unknown World

2009-03-12T21:49:00.000-07:00

D. Scot Miller for

Signal to Noise Magazine - Summer 2007
http://www.signaltonoisemagazine.org/

"Pathways to Unknown Worlds: Sun Ra El Saturn and Chicago's Afro-Futurist Underground 1954-68

White Walls Inc., 2007

In Space is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra, Afro-futurism is a place "where the material culture of Afro-American folk religions are used as sacred technologies to control virtual realities", this is the most apt definition of this creative movement known as Afro-futurism and its technique for expression Afro-Surrealism. The book Pathways to Unknown Worlds: Sun Ra El Saturn and Chicago's Afro-Futurist Underground 1954-68, illustrates Afro-surrealism in practice.

This book accompanies the exhibition presented October 1, 2006 at the Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago and also serves as a companion piece to Whitewall's The Wisdom of Sun Ra: Sun Ra's Polemical Broadsheets and Street corner Leaflets published in 2006. Together, these volumes give a glimpse into the creative and philosophical processes of the man born Herman Pool "Sonny" Blount as he re-invented himself into the mystic journey-agent Le Sun-Ra.

Editor John Corbett begins the text portion of this photo essay on Chicago's Southside, April 13, 1956, where Sun-Ra, pianist, bandleader, mystic, and businessman and Alton Abraham, his partner in all matters musical, financial and spiritual on the day that they began the first full-length recording for El Saturn Records, one of the first, and most successful artist-owned record labels in Jazz.

Corbett's fluid and succinct biographical introduction shows that the editor has a familiar enough grasp of the Sun Ra mythology to glean how the visual ephemera of the volume illuminates on the development of the Ra persona, the Arkestra, and Thmei Research group, the small, secret fraternal organization that informed Sun-Ra and Abraham's vision.

Glenn Ligon contributes an essay called Greatest Hits (1954-1986) an aphasia inspired collage of Ra's early broadsheets as he presented them in Washington Square Park - amid Christian, Nation of Islam, and Moorish Science street-corner proselytizers - interspersed with snippets from Black stand-up comedians like Richard Pryor and Dick Gregory. The effect is both humorous and profound. Oft-times the comedian becomes the prophet, the prophet shows humor and the whimsical transforms to the lamentable in an afro-surreal twist that traces to the ecstasy of the blues.

First-person accounts from Alton Abraham's son Adam, singer Ricky Murray, trumpet-player Art Hoyle, singer Hattie Randolf, tenor saxophonist Von Freemen, Drummer Robert Barry and a genuinely moving meditation on alienation and other-worldliness by Camille Norment make up the textual narrative, but the essence of the book can be found in the photo-copied notes, notations, and sketches from Ra and his fellow travelers.

Often beginning with rough sketches done in pencil and ink, the subtle album covers from records like Jazz From Tomorrow's World give way to transparencies and tonal separations from the numerous covers designed by Claude Dangerfield including We Travel The Spaceways and Sun Ra Visits the Planet Earth, and on to even greater sophistication in technique with the use of print blocks and cut-outs designed by Sun-Ra, and further to the lurid Jazz in Silhouette cover.

The most telling of this thin volume, however; is the "notes and ephemera" section where the entire cosmos of The Arkestra is distilled to catch phrases on an evolving series of business cards and ticket stubs. "Those Atonites Are At It Again," says an early one. "Beta Music for Beta People", says another. There's even one from El Saturn offering to record the local church sermon which "Enables the pastor's voice to be within reach of every member when spiritual guidance is needed," almost as a reminder that the Afro-futurist visionaries were also shrewd businessmen. As the artist formerly known as Sonny is quoted, "Sun-Ra is not a person, it's a business name," and the business was space.

Roscoe Mitchell & the Art of Experimentation

2009-03-12T21:37:00.000-07:00

Roscoe Mitchell & the Art of Experimentation

D. Scot Miller (for novometro.com)

April, 17 2008

For more than thirty years, saxophonist and composer Roscoe Mitchell created what has come to be known as Great Black Music with Cecil Taylor, Malechai Favors, Joseph Jarmen and Anthony Braxton in the Art Ensemble of Chicago and their non-profit organization, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Music and the Art Ensemble continues its work with new voices, visions, and projects.

The Art Ensemble has been known to wear African-inspired face paint, but seeing Mitchell en masque is rare, or non-existent. His saxophone may be a swashbuckling blade, but his bare face and stoic composure let you know that Roscoe Mitchell is a serious man. Mitchell, 67, is at Mills College in Oakland, California as the Darius Milhaud Chair of Composition. He spoke with NovoMetro about his work, his upcoming recording in June, and why he won’t paint his face.

For more than thirty years, saxophonist and composer Roscoe Mitchell created what has come to be known as Great Black Music with Cecil Taylor, Malechai Favors, Joseph Jarmen and Anthony Braxton in the Art Ensemble of Chicago and their non-profit organization, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Music. Though Favors has since passed on, the Art Ensemble continues its work with new voices, visions, and projects.

The Art Ensemble has been known to wear African-inspired face paint, but seeing Mitchell en masque is rare, or non-existent. His saxophone may be a swashbuckling blade, but his bare face and stoic composure let you know that Roscoe Mitchell is a serious man. Mitchell, 67, is at Mills College in Oakland, California as the Darius Milhaud Chair of Composition. He spoke with NovoMetro about his work, his upcoming recording in June, and why he won’t paint his face.

NM: What is the Association for the Advancement of Creative Music (AACM)?

Mitchell: It’s a group of guys that came together out of their association in the Muhal Richard Abrams Experimental Band and sat down to have a look at the way some musicians’ lives had gone, out there on their own, and who wanted to have more control over their destinies, sponsor each other in concerts of their own original music. They wanted to maintain a training program for young, aspiring musicians in the community. They wanted to set up an exchange program with other musicians in other cities thereby establishing a form of employment for musicians. The AACM is still going strong today with two chapters, one in New York and one in Chicago still following its basic rules it made at the beginning. I see a lot of younger musicians back at the same place when we first had a look at all of these things.

I was lucky to be around people who had the same vision as mine. Nobody ever thought we were in there for the short term. We knew we were in there for the long term. We just stuck to our original ideas and stayed with that. The Art Ensemble was a barn-storming band and we’ve been able to establish a network to bring younger people along so they don’t have to do the things that we had to do.

A long time ago, it took twenty years to be known as a musician. You’d have to go out to go to different places so people could hear you. Before we went to Europe, we’d already come to California twice in 1967-68, traveling in a van. We always did that --connecting, finding younger musicians.

NM: What are you working on now?

Mitchell: I finished work on my Orchestra piece, Noncognitive Aspects of the City, a poem written by Joseph Jarmen in the sixties for orchestra and baritone voice. That’s going to be recorded in the Czech Republic in June. I’ve performed it with him in the context with the Art Ensemble a few times and I became interested in the text, so I decided to set the poem to music. I’ve decided to use the orchestra for that context. That’s a lot right now.

NM: What is your approach to text and music?

Mitchell: I’ve set several texts to music. I’ve worked with poets in live situations also. What I did with Amiri Baraka is that he sent me the poems in advance so I could read them and get a feel for them. If I’m writing a piece that incorporates the text, you have time to consider the text in a compositional form. As an improviser, I’m working to be able to do the forms spontaneously, I work with it from both sides.

NM: Do you work in any other media?

Mitchell: I’ve worked with different people throughout the years. I have a long-standing relationship with David Wessel who does computer music. I’ve been working with him since the late sixties. He’s one of the first people to start the computer music conference in the states. Of course, I’ve worked with George Lewis on several of his computer music programs throughout the years. I’ve done collaborations with artists, inventors, poets, and dancers. There were more interactive collaborations going on a long time ago. It’s starting to come back now. Things change as we go along. I’ve found things go away and come back. It’s just time for those kinds of collaborations again.

NM: Is revolution still possible?

Mitchell: Back in the 60s, if you would have asked me that I would have said, “Oh yeah, definitely.” Now, I think that something will get our attention one way or the other. If we goof up the planet, that’ll get our attention. Try to remain optimistic. Somebody comes along in your life that brings you into focus onto something that you may have missed. Those are the things we appreciate the most in life. Always keep yourself open because you never know who that’s going to be.

NM: Why didn’t you wear the face paint?

Mitchell: I tried that, but I discovered that if you sweat, you couldn’t wipe your face.

NM: Simple as that?

Mitchell: Simple as that.

Hit Picture To Read An Excerpt

2009-03-12T21:19:00.000-07:00

""Knot Frum Hear," by D. Scot Miller, is like Naked Lunch revisited by B-Boys"

- Rachel Smucker for Popmatters.com

Bronx Biannual 2 Reveiw

Bronx Biannual: The Journal of Urbane Urban Literature, Issue 2
by Miles Marshall Lewis [Editor]
Akashic Books
June 2007, 225 pages, $13.95

And Now A Word From Ramelzee

Afro-surrealist writers?

2009-03-12T12:33:00.001-07:00

* Author: anika (Writeblack.com)
* Filed under: check it out, new, paranormal, sci-fi/speculative/fantasy
Wednesday
Jun 4,2008

"An article about Afro-surrealism at the San Francisco Black Film Festival piqued my interest:
Per the article, Afro-surrealism is not Afrofuturism, but:
Afro-surrealism is about the present. In sound it conjures everything from Sun-Ra to Wu-Tang. In speech, it brings you Henry Dumas, Amie [sic] Cesaire, Samuel Delaney [sic], and Darius James. In visual realms, the Afro-surreal ranges from Wifredo Lam to Kara Walker to Trenton Doyle Hancock.

That stumped me for a minute. At first, I thought this would be just another descriptive term that could be applied to something like speculative fiction, but I wasn’t sure. If Afro-surrealism is about the present, does that mean, say, paranormal works wouldn’t be able to be included — even if they are set in the here and now?
Besides Darius James, whose books I’ve never read, and Samuel Delany, I stumbled trying to come up with living authors whose books would be considered Afro-surrealist but not necessarily, or always, Afro-futurist.
The first authors who come to my mind are the brilliant Nalo Hopkinson, Zakes Mda and Minister Faust.
Can you think of other living authors who might fit into this category?"

To answer Anika's question, I would have to say that Afro-surrealist writers are everywhere!
You may be an Afrosurrealist and not even know it!
It happened to me...
The first time I came across the term was in an introduction to Echo Tree: An Anthology of Henry Dumas' short stories and poetry written by Amiri Baraka :

"The Afro-Surreal Expressionism of Dumas and the others mentioned unfolds the Black Aesthetic—form and content—in its actual contemporary and lived life. MUSIC (drum—polyrhythm,percussive—song as laughter or tears), preacher and congregation, call and response, the frenzy! The color is the polyrhythm, refracted light! But this beauty and revelation have always existed in an historically material world. The African masks are shattered and cubed. Things float and fly. Darkness defines more than light. Even in the flow of plot, there are excursions and multi-layered ambiguities. As with Bearden (Romare), Dumas's is a world in which the broken glide by in search of the healing element, or are tragically oblivious to it."
(Hit book for rest of essay)

And I was like, "That's me! I'm AfroSurreal!"
It was like I'd found my kinfolk after wandering a cultural wasteland.

By this definition, there are a lot of writers (and reg'lar folk like you and me) who would call themselves afro-surreal. Upon hearing the term, quite a few of us surely see ourselves in it. Among the writers, for me, Victor LeValle, Colson Whitehead, Ishmael Reed, Paul Beatty, Percival Everett, Jayne Cortez, and Harryette Mullen, are a good start towards an AfroSurreal aesthetic. Working with this definition, are there other writers that you consider Afrosurreal? Artists?

Happy Hunting!

Ten City

2009-03-12T12:21:00.000-07:00

Ten City

On the lookout for Afro-surrealism at the SF Black Film Festival

By D. Scot Miller

Your Superwoman: Women's Work

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

For the last two years I have been trying to plant the term Afro-surreal into the collective unconscious. Unlike Afro-futurism, Afro-surrealism is about the present. In sound it conjures everything from Sun-Ra to Wu-Tang. In speech, it brings you Henry Dumas, Amie Cesaire, Samuel Delaney, and Darius James. In visual realms, the Afro-surreal ranges from Wifredo Lam to Kara Walker to Trenton Doyle Hancock. Afro-surreal stages are set for new productions of Jean Genet's The Blacks (1959), George C. Wolfe's The Colored Museum (1986) and Leroi Jones' The Dutchman and The Slave (1964).

I'm always looking for an Afro-surreal movie. Maybe I'm the last of a dying breed.

The 10th San Francisco Black Film Festival (SFBFF), is billed as a bridge between worlds. But which worlds? Sirius and Earth? Black and other? Local and global? Oakland and San Francisco? San Francisco and itself? Dammit, they all apply.

Most of the SFBFF is taking place in the Fillmore District, and many sites are redevelopment showcases. Opening night at the Sundance Kabuki Cinema presents Nogozi Unwurah's Shoot The Messenger (2006), a UK import about paranoia, self-loathing, love, and redemption. The after-party is at Rassales, so I might get a haircut and brush off the derby.

Yoshi's Fillmore is hosting Donnie Betts' Music Is My Life, Politics My Mistress: The Story of Oscar Brown Jr. (2005). Despite its connection to ongoing gentrification debates, the venue will be an apt and stylish location for a bio on Brown, an overlooked poet-singer-playwright-composer-social activist who penetrated the zeitgeist with his song "Forty Acres and a Mule." Certain other issues also spring to mind: The black derby again? The brown? Pin-striped wool pants and well-shined shoes, or suede boots?

The Melvin Van Peebles Awards Brunch (props to the festival for naming its short film award after the Afro-surreal mastermind behind 1971's Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song) is taking place at 1300 Fillmore, which will also host a screening that includes the 2007 short film Lifted. Directed by Randall Dottin, it's a magical realist piece about a dancer on the edge who finds herself on the wrong side of a subway platform, trapped by a spirit named "High John." The actors are great, which is just one reason why the supernatural story takes simplicity to the brink of facile schmaltziness without tottering over.

A housewife realizes she has superpowers in Chad Benton's Women's Work (2008), a warm, funny sitcom short with animation screening at the African American Art and Culture Complex. Around the same time, Yoshi's is showing Nijla Mumin's Fillmo (2008), a documentary about the gentrification currently taking place in the Fillmore. How's that for mixed signals, homey?

Footsteps in Africa (2007), showing at the Museum of African Diaspora, is about the lives of the beautiful, mysterious, and enduring Taureg/Kai of Mali. These African nomads have survived thousands of years of drought, flood, and famine, and withstood acts of genocide. Director Kathi von Koeber's portrait reveals the wisdom and strength of some of this planet's greatest human survivors.

Considering the documented decline of black people in San Francisco, it's a minor miracle that SFBFF continues to grow. Like MoAD, the festival is a testament to the artists and benefactors who've come to San Francisco, as well as to the aesthetes among SF's native population. This year's festival promises glimpses of vast black realities — the kind that appear to be diminishing locally, yet somehow still manage to thrive.

SAN FRANCISCO BLACK FILM FESTIVAL

Wed/4 through June 15

See Rep Clock for listings

(415) 771-9271

www.sfbff.org

Wednesday June 4, 2008

Fashion: A Philosophy tumbles on the runway

2009-03-12T12:11:00.000-07:00

Speed Reading

Fashion: A Philosophy tumbles on the runway

By D. Scot Miller

for San Francisco Bay Guardian

FASHION: A PHILOSOPHY

By Lars Svendsen

Reaktion Books

188 pages

$24.95

As a once and future dandy, I've noted the growing field of fashion philosophy. In the realm of the academy, the idea of a unified theory of style has become something of a holy grail. The latest knight-errant, Lars Svendsen, associate professor of philosophy at the University of Bergen in Norway, starts his quest by seeking the meaning of fashion.

Relying heavily on Immanuel Kant and Walter Benjamin, Svendsen (as translated by John Irons) creates a concise and comprehensive primer on fashion and clothing as it relates to identity. He then stitches on a virtual CliffsNotes of philosophy on fashion, citing Roland Barthes, Charles Baudelaire, and Michel Foucault, and then appliqués some hep quotes from Bret Easton Ellis, AbFab, and the Pet Shop Boys.

In the end, Svendsen finds that we cultivate surfaces, that we live in an increasingly fictionalized reality, and that our identities are in steady decline. He concludes that fashion is a highly diverse phenomenon that pretends to have meaning, but in reality "has meaning to only a limited extent." That's it? Fashion has no meaning, but some meaning? How weak is that?

If philosophy wishes to find meaning in fashion, it must make room for the power of talisman, totem, and fetish — elements that pure reason cannot abide. Svendsen errs in a manner many fashion philosophers have, by refusing to look away from the runways of Europe toward the magical elements of dress in Africa, Asia, and South America. The eggheads just don't get it.

Wednesday July 2, 2008

Just Dandy

2009-03-11T13:56:00.000-07:00

Just dandy

Modern Menswear outfits the new aesthete's imagination

BY D. SCOT MILLER

Wednesday January 21, 2009

Men dress up. Yes, we do. We dress like animals: peacocks, roosters, cats. We dress like weapons: blades, pistols, and straps. Men dress up. Always have. Always will.

Something has been happening in men's fashion lately, an evolution that's taken place underneath just about everyone's noses. For the longest time it was assumed that men's fashion was about function over style, resulting in an array of boring, drab clothing. Sexy, exotic, or provocative was taboo.

Hywel Davies' Modern Menswear (Laurence King Publishers, 208 pages, $40) is a beautifully illustrated book that challenges this stereotype, introducing the new dandy or aesthete in the process. It also covers a lot of territory — geographically and intellectually — through interviews with the designers. "Menswear is no longer status-led or solely rooted in tradition," Davies writes in the book's introduction. "It is driven by the personality of the consumer. Men will take elements from a range of designers and create a distinct personal style." And that is precisely what Modern Menswear inspires a reader to do.

I would like to take Aitor Throup's military-inspired pants, please, along with his skull accessories and his tagline, "When Football Hooligans Become Hindu Gods." Let's top the ensemble off with one of those baseball-cap masks.

Sadly, Alexander McQueen's men's collection hits at least one disappointing note. Apparently the bad boy can't dress himself with as much verve as he does his models.

I will take the Blaak double-breasted suit.

That label's mix of western, eastern and African influences, its use of natural fabrics, and its fusion of hedonistic street style and subdued anarchy is new. Blaak believes in "The working class hero, The Poet, The Outsider, and Edwardian Pomp and Ceremony with a whispered subversive punch." The label's ideal customer "is a person who understands the riot of

anarchy, the need for the whimsical, and the hidden fine lines bound in society." Damn, these boys speak my Afro-surreal language.

So does John Galliano, whose eclectic mix of nearly every fashion innovation since the fig leaf makes him a patron of the new aesthete.

A derby hat and a kimono can be fly, especially with a sturdy pair of boots. "It's like giving men a bit of what they've seen on women without taking away their masculinity," he says, "allowing them to dream more." Savage refinery — ah, nothing like reconciliation!

The book draws to a close with the rich, opulent colors and decadent accessories of Vivienne Westwood's MAN label...

And Yohji Yamamoto's sublime understanding of the silhouette.

There are some outrageous pieces, but Davies' book isn't geared toward gawkers.

Fashion is an opportunity to expand possibilities — to dream, as Galliano puts it. Do I have $5000 to spend on a Yohji coat? No. But I may be inspired to modify a pea coat or mourning jacket from a secondhand store after seeing one. Will Vivienne Westwood ever see a dollar of my money? Probably not, but I can borrow her sense of adventure and create a little magic of my own. "If you dress up," says Westwood, "it helps your personality emerge — if you choose well." Modern Menswear makes that process a bit more exciting.

Wednesday January 21, 2009

His Royal Highness

2009-03-11T11:59:00.000-07:00

His royal highness

Excess and seduction rule the vainglorious art of Yinka Shonibare

By D. Scot Miller

for The San Francisco Bay Guardian

Shonibare: just dandy

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

REVIEW Yinka Shonibare's 1998 photographic essay Diary of a Victorian Dandy, Member of the Order of the British Empire runs like clockwork.

At 11 a.m., Shonibare the nobleman is shown waking and then donning a nightcap in his gilded bedroom; he's surrounded by four ruddy-cheeked buxom maids and a pale, thin butler, who each cater to his every whim. At 2 p.m., dressed in a three-piece blue-gray suit, he tends to business in his private library. Busts of Greek and Roman conquerors sit atop mahogany bookshelves, observing while high-collared, porcine sycophants with handlebar mustaches congratulate Shonibare on squandering what's left of his father's fortune.

By 3 p.m., Shonibare's nobleman has retired to another bedroom, where — sporting a salmon-pink velvet vest and matching satin tie — he reclines on a chaise lounge with a glass of red wine. An undressed brunette woman on his left caresses the vest, her eyes turned upward as if she's entranced by his wealth and power. A red-haired girl to his right runs her fingers through his hair. In the background, a woman dressed in a hoop skirt fellates one of Shonibare's sycophants, another woman lies at the foot of the bed, and still another looks bored as she's buggered by one of Shonibare's consorts.

Five p.m. brings a rousing game of billiards in the parlor. The day's activities end at seven, with white ties, tails, and candelabras in a plush dining room replete with red velvet curtains and gilded framed oil portraits of aristocrats in powdered wigs.

Shonibare is a heavily bearded, 46-year-old Nigerian. This hairy black man, assuming the role of a dandy, places himself at the center of all his photos, reveling in absurd glory. "Historically, the dandy is usually an outsider whose only way through is his wit and style," Shonibare explains, in a text within the monograph Yinka Shonibare MBE (Prestel USA, 208 pages, $55), edited by Rachel Kent. "His apparent lack of seriousness of course belies an absolute seriousness, and that attracts me to the dandy as a figure of mobility who upsets the social order of things."

Shonibare has upset the British social order and gained mobility — including an exquisitely absurd and very real royal appointment — by creating Victorian costumes from Dutch wax print fabrics, then placing them on headless mannequins that strike leisurely poses. Much like the dandified role that he often assumes, his art seems excessive and frivolous at first glance — high fashion in extremis. But it takes on greater dimensions with consideration. The Dutch wax prints that play a prominent role in Shonibare's work, for example, are usually associated with Africa, though they were first designed in Indonesia, then imported by the Dutch, who brought them to West Africa during the slave trade, making them a symbol of the height of colonization and imperialism.

The actions of Shonibare's figures: skating (in 2005's Reverend On Ice), seducing (in 2007's The Confession) and swinging, both literally (in 2001's The Swing — after Fragonard) and figuratively (in 2002's Gallantry and Criminal Conversation), contain surreal, violent, erotic, and decadent connotations.

Like his contemporary Kehinde Wiley, or like Ghostface and Prince in the realm of music, Shonibare uses the rococo movement of pre-revolutionary France as a point of departure. Figures of excess and tools of subversion, his headless mannequins take on references to the guillotine.

"Excess is the only legitimate means of subversion, " Shonibare has said. "Hybridization is a form of disobedience ... an excessive form of libido, it is joyful sex." An illustration of such ideas, this monograph retrospective of Shonibare's painting, sculpture, photography, and film work is a must-have piece of Afro-surreal ephemera.

Wednesday March 11, 2009

Henry Dumas: Poet, Seer...

2008-08-18T18:33:00.000-07:00

Henry Dumas

Poet, Seer and Short Story Writer

enry Dumas was a brilliant African American poet, seer and short story writer. Henry was born on July 29, 1934, in Sweet Home, Arkansas. During the 1950s, he served in the Air Force and was stationed in Texas and the Middle East. Writing poetry and short stories consumed him during the 1960s. He studied at City College and Rutgers University, and participated in the civil rights and Black Power movements of his time.

He found inspiration in the African and African American experiences. Some of his fiction employs a style of magic realism, innovative for tis time but quite common nowadays. In 1976, James Baldwin selected his story "Thalia" for the Black Scholar literary prize. Dumas was closely associated with the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s, which championed an aesthetic grounded in the black cultural nationalism. But, in the words of Amiri Baraka, Dumas produced a "a true art form, not twenty 'hate whiteys' and a benediction of sweaty artificial flame, but actual art, real, man, and stunning." All that ended when he was killed in April 1968, at the age of 33, at Manhattan's 125th street station by a New York Transit Authority policeman in a case of "mistaken" identity. Dumas had already completed several manuscripts of poetry and prose, the quality and quantity of which are seldom achieved in one short lifetime.

Henry Dumas the Storyteller

Excerpts from his Ark of Bones and Other Stories
Hale Chatfield and Eugene Redmond. (1970).
Southern Illinois University Press

STRIKE AND FADE

he word was out. Cool it. We on the street, see. Me and Big Skin. We watch the cops. They watch us. People going and coming. That fire truck still wrecked up side the buildin. Papers say we riot, but we didnt riot. We like the VC, the Viet Cong. We strike and fade. Me and Big Skin, we scoutin the street the next day to see how much we put down on them. Big Skin, he walkin ahead of me. He walkin light, easy, pawin. It daylight but you still got to walk easy on the street. Anytime the Mowhites might hit the block on rubber, then what we do? We be up tight for space, so we all eyes, all feet and easy. You got to do it.

We make it to Bone's place. Bone, he the only blood on the block got a business. Mowhite own the cleaners, the supermarket, the laundry, the tavern, the drugstore, and all the rest. Yeah. But after we burn out half them places, Mowhite he close down his stores for a week.

Our block occupied with cops and National Guard, but the Guard left yesterday. Man, they more cops on the street now than rats. We figure the best thing to do is to kill the cops first so we can get back to killin rats. They watch us. But they got nothin on Big Skin and me. Naw. We clean. They got Sammy, Momo, Walter and his sister too, Doris, Edie, and they even got Mr. Tomkins. He a school teacher. I had him once. He was a nice stud. Me and Big Skin make it to Bone's place. There a lot of guys inside.

We hang around. Listen to talk. I buy a coke. Big Skin take half. I hold my coke. Police cars pass outside. They like wolves, cruisin. We inside. Nobody mess with us. A cat name Duke, he talkin.

"You cats got to get more together with this thang. Look at the cats in Brooklyn, Chicago. Birmingham and Cleveland. Look at the cats in Oakland!"

A cat named Mace, he talkin. Mace just got out the Army. "Don't worry, man. It's comin." He point out the window. "This is raw oppression, baby. Look at them mf's. Raw oppression." Mace, he like to use them two words so he sayin them over and over again. He say them words all the time. It aint funny cause they true. We all look out the window at the cops.

Bone, he behind the counter makin hamburgers. When he get too many orders he can't handle, then one of the cats come behind the counter and give him a hand. Me and Big Skin light up cigarettes. Big Skin pass them around. I take the last one. I squeeze the pack up so tight, my fingernails cut my hand. I like to make it tight. I throw that pack at the trash can. It bounce in and bounce back. But Duke, he catch it. He throw it in. Not too hard. It stay. He talkin.

"I mean, if every black man in this goddamn country would dedicate one half of a day next week to a boycott. Just don't go to work! Not a black pushin a thing for Charley. Hell, man we tie it up. We still the backbone, man. We still got this white mf on our backs. What the hell we totin him around for?"

Mace, he talkie.

"Wait. No sooner we make another move, whitey be down on us like rats on warm cheese. It be raw oppression double over. Gestapo. Man, they forget about Hitler after the man come down on us."

Big Skin he talkin.

"They say that the cats in Harlem is gettin together so tight that the Muslims and Martin Luther King got their heads together."

Nobody say nothin. Couple cats laugh. We heard it before. Word been spreadin for all black men to get ready for war. Nobody believe it. But everybody want to. But it the same in Harlem as anywhere else. Duke he talkin.

"An organized revolution is what the man can't stand. They say it's comin? Man, when it do I be the first to join. If I got to go I take some Chalk Whitey with me and mark him all over hell."

We listen a while. The cats all talkin. We just want to get what's happenin. We split the scene. Duke, he split too.

We move down the block. It gettin evenin. We meet some cats comin. We stop and talk. We meet them later on 33rd Street. They pawin like us.

Duke talkin. "You cats see Tyro yet?"

We say naw. We heard he back in town, but we aint seen him yet. Tyro was a Green Beret in Viet Nam. But he back. He got no legs and one arm. All the cats been makin it to his pad. They say he got a message for all the cats on the block.

Duke say he makin it to Tyro's now. We walk on. I kick some glass. We see a store that is burnt out. A cop is watchin us. We stalkin easy, all eyes, all feet. A patrol car stop along side us. The gestapo's leap out. I see a shotgun. We all freeze.

The Man is talkin.

"You niggers got one hour to get off the street." Then he change his mind. "Against the wall!" There is three of them. Down the street is more. They frisk us. We all clean. One jab the butt of the gun hard on my leg. It give me a cramp in the ball.

They cuss us and tell us to get off the street. We move on. Around the block. Down the street.

I'm limpin. I dont say nothin. I dont curse or nothin. Duke and Big Skin, they mad, cursin and sayin what they gonna do. Me, I'm hurtin too much. I'm lettin my heat go down into my soul. When it come up again, I wont be limpin.
We see some more cats pawin along the block. About fifty. We join. They headin to 33rd. Some cats got heats, some got molotov's. One cat got a sword.

Tyro on 30th Street. We go up. Three other cats come with us. We run up the steps. We pass an old man goin up. He grunt out our way. We say excuse. I'm the last up. The old man scared. We hear a siren outside. The shit done started already.

Tyro's sister open the door. I know her before I dropped out of school. She know me, but she iggin. All the cats move in. I close the door. "We come to see Tyro," I say. She chewin some food, and she wave with her hand. It mean, go on up front. I watch her walk. "You Tina?" She swallow her food. "Yeah. You come to see Tyro, he in there." She turned and went into a door and closed it. I followed the other cats up front. My ball still hurt.

There were six cats already in the room. Six more come in. Somebody pass around a butt. I scoot in a corner. So I am meetin Tyro. He known on the block for years. He used to be the leader of the old Black Unicorns. They broke up by the cops and social workers.

I look at Tyro. He a black stud with a long beard. He sittin in a wheel chair. He wearin fatigues like Fidel Castro. When we paw into the pad, Tyro he talkin.

". . . the Cong are masters at ambush. Learn this about them. When we fell back under fire, we fell into a pincher. They cross-fired us so fast that we didn't know what hit us. Out of sixty men, I was left. I believe they spared me so that I could come back and tell you. The cat that found me was hit himself, but he didn't seem to care. He looked me in my eye . . . for a long time. My legs were busted up from a grenade. This VC stood over my blood. I could tell he was thinkin about somethin. He raised the rifle. I kept lookin him in the eye. It was one of the few times my prayers been answered. The cat suddenly turned and ran off. He had shot several of my buddies already, but he let me go.

"All I can figure is that one day the chips are all comin down. America is gonna have to face the yellow race. Black and yellow might have to put their hands together and bring this thang off: You cats out in the street, learn to fade fast. Learn to strike hard, but dont be around in the explosion. If you dont organize you aint nothin but a rioter, a looter. These jigs wont hesitate to shoot you.

"Naw. I aint tellin you to get off the streets. I know like you know. Uncle means you no ultimate good, brothers. Take it for what it is worth. I'm layin it down like it is. I got it from the eagle's beak. That's the way he speak. Play thangs careful. Strike and fade, then strike again, quick. Get whitey outa our neighborhood. Keep women and children off the streets. Dont riot. Rebel. You cats got this message. Do what you got to do. Stick together and listen for the word to come down. Obey it."

When Tyro finish talkin, some cats get up and shake his hand. Others leave. Out in the street sirens are going. The doorbell rings. Everybody freeze. It some more cats. We all leave.

Down on the street, it like a battlefield. A fire in a store down the block. Cops see us. We fade. I hear shots. Then I know somethin.

The word is out. Burn, baby, burn. We on the scene. The brothers. Together. Cops and people goin and comin. Some people got good loot, some just hoofin it. A police cordon comin. We shadows on the wall. Lights comin towards us. We fade. Somebody struck them. The lights go out. I hear shots. I fall. Glass get my hands. The street on fire now. We yell. 33rd Street here we come! Got to get together!

We move out. Strikin. All feet. All soul. We the VC. You got to be. You got to be.

Hardboiled to Hardcore: An Interview With Walter Mosely

2008-06-06T19:09:00.000-07:00

Hardboiled to Hardcore: Interview with Walter Mosley

[30 January 2007]

"It's amazing how we strain to maintain our dignity and end up like Colin Powell, the only one who knows what the f**k is going on, but is unable to tell it." PopMatters talks to Walter Mosley.

By D. Scot Miller

Writer Walter Mosley calls his new book a sexistential noir. Seeing that Killing Johnny Fry mixes incest with loneliness, golden showers with ennui, and strap-ons with a longing for connection, the description fits like a latex glove.

“I think of this book as being in the tradition of Camus’ The Stranger,” Mosley tells PopMatters. “I’m talking about loneliness, the moment when existentialism and mid-life come into contact with each other, the aloneness of people in America, the deep melancholy of America and the deep feelings of sexuality in all of our lives.”

Walter Mosely

Killing Johnny Fry

(Bloomsbury)

When the book was released on 2 January, readers who have followed his Easy Rawlins and Fearless Jones crime novels met a new kind of hero and, once again, a new side of Walter Mosley.

Killing Johnny Fry is the story of 45-year-old black translator Cordell Carmel who walks in on his longtime, non-live-in girlfriend Joelle being sodomized by Johnny Fry, a white man wearing a red condom. A disquieted and turned-on Cordell walks out without being seen, and begins an erotic journey of self-discovery that takes him beyond himself and the world he thought he knew.

Like Meursault in Camus’ book, Cordell has been numbed by the post-modern condition. “He’s been living in this apartment with this weird paranoia,” says Mosley. “He’s a translator and not even an interesting translator. He’s with this woman, but it’s not like he loves her. There’s a desperation he doesn’t recognize. The pain locates him like a light in the dark and that’s the thing that brings him through.”

Killing Johnny Fry is in the noir tradition; only where there would be violence in a hard-boiled novel, there is hardcore instead. After Cordell walks out on Joelle and Johnny Fry, his mind simmering over with thoughts of revenge, instead of going to the local pawnshop for a .38, he goes to the local porn shop for a DVD, The Myth of Sisypha (An homage to Camus). Instead of confronting his girlfriend and their mutual acquaintance, he keeps mum and uses the betrayal to stoke his passion and transform his life.

“All of these terrible things that we feel, that have happened to us, that we do and there’s no way out of it,” says Mosley. “Joelle has that experience. How she was so severely molested that she needed it in some way, and Cordell is even worse because he isn’t connected to anything. He sees her on the weekend, they have sex once or twice, and she says, ‘You can’t come over on weekdays,’ and he just accepts that. He accepts the life that he has and it’s a completely interchangeable life. The truth is that most of us have to live that way. It’s a hard thing to get out of in our own minds, we might not be able to get out of it at all in our own lives, in our own culture, but in our minds; to see ourselves as something special, something different, someone who has an idea which is itself original.”

Mosley is no stranger to re-invention. The once computer programmer turned best-selling, award-winning novelist and essayist has written over 25 books over the last 15 years in genres ranging from science fiction to social commentary. “If you’re a writer in America,” says Mosley, “you write one book, about one guy, again and again and again, until people get tired of it and then you retire. I write a lot of different things and a lot of those things have become real. Like I’ve become a political activist through my writing. This book reflects a part of my life. I wanted to know more about my own sexuality, especially for men.”

His subtle prolific rise has made him more than a crime novelist in the tradition of Dashiell Hammet and more an international man of letters, in the tradition of Chester Himes. And like his character, Mosley knows what it’s like to be trapped in a world of expectations. As he speaks of Cordell, the lines blur between sex and writing, writer and written.

“Everything is based on capitalism and capitalism is based on specialization. And that’s based on ending freedoms for individuals instead of making it possible. You have to struggle with that. As I’m writing the book, I realize that Cordell is not going back to work,” a still astonished Mosley says. “I keep trying to fit it in, but he’s just not going back. He never went again. This is a moment of realization. Something has to change.”

During his week-long journey into the soul, Cordell rekindles passionate and public sex with pathological Joelle, sodomizes a young photographer, has strap-on and then phone-sex-three-way with his upstairs neighbor, Sasha Bennett, who is also having an incestuous affair with her brother, seduces young Monica Wells a single mother he meets on the subway, meets Sisypha, the star of the porno he purchased and goes with her to the underground Sex Games, where he is fucked senseless and sodomized in an aria of depravity before his confrontation with Johnny Fry.

Whether or not readers will grasp the philosophical implications of Cordell rimming the photographer or lapping up a prostitute’s mother’s milk in a sex club is open for speculation, but it’s clear that the author’s motives are far more than writing a good one-handed novel.

“A lot of people who’ve read this book just see sex, sex, sex. I have to ask, what book are you reading? Even though all of the elements that are in my other books are there, maybe even more blatantly, the reviews say sex, sex, and sex. I’m writing this book to say this is the modern world. This lonely, melancholy, alienated, middle-aged man represents a great deal of America and a lot of where America is going.”

In spite of being the drab and frumpish milquetoast initially drawn by Mosley, Cordell Carmel is a classic hero, while being one of the first of his kind.

“I write about black male heroes. Black men have been forced into silence by American culture. We don’t exist. We don’t fucking exist.” Mosley said. “I realized as I was writing this book that there are very few first person, black heterosexual sex books written, a man actually talking about how sex feels. “

From Jim in Huckleberry Finn to Mister in The Color Purple, the heterosexual black male is more sidekick, prop, or foil than hero. In an age when black male sexuality is most often a secondary character as seen through the eyes and bodies of non-black-males, Cordell Carmel is given the one element that is most denied heroes of his class, vulnerability.

“Here was Cordell with Joelle, a woman he didn’t truly know, and then here comes Johnny Fry who just meets her at a party and gets all the way to the depths of her that day. Something that Cordell was incapable of reaching. And he feels bad about himself because of it.”

“It was as if I was set adrift, but not yet dying, on a lone raft in the middle of tranquil and treacherous sea,” Cordell says at the beginning of his journey, and it is from this feeling of inadequacy, raw and untainted with ego or bluster, which Cordell Carmel shines. As he encounters these people and situations, he approaches each with a greater lust for understanding and connection.

“When I went to Karen Rinaldi (Bloomsbury Publisher/Editor) with this book, she said, ‘This character Cordell is really sweet.’ And that’s exactly what I wanted. I don’t want readers to be all upset, or to think the sex is too much or it’s all so intense. Cordell Carmel is sweet. He doesn’t quite get it. He lost. He’s confused. He’s trying to make it and he needs people, especially women, to give him some kind of support in the world.”

Cordell’s heroic battle is with malaise, or Sartre’s nausea, and the void created by post-modern existence. His antagonist, more than Johnny Fry or Joelle, is the machine that has allowed his disconnection from the world, and the world from him, to flourish.

“This book is not about love, it’s about obsession and compulsion and the need to connect. Cordell is adrift and there’s nothing he can do.” Mosley says. “He can’t find himself, he’s trying to and this compulsion is helping him. With Sasha we have a person who can’t remove herself from this relationship with her mother. She can’t talk to her mother, but she fucks her brother as a way to connect. Sasha teaches Cordell about pain. I love their sex, but the primary scene is when she’s squeezing his bandaged hand, she knows she’s hurting him and she asks him, ‘Why don’t you ask me to stop?’ There’s a real connection there. You see the connection between them. He’s unable to say stop. It’s a form of understanding that he is a victim of life. He hasn’t been aware of it. She intuits that. She takes his hand, at first it’s a generous gesture, but then she squeezes to see how he reacts. The moment of connection becomes deeper”.

As with all great heroes, his journey begins at the tip of his sword, but does not end there.

“Part of the problem with modern culture is that people don’t want you to change,” Mosley says, again blurring the lines. “They don’t want you to wander out one day, forgetting to go to work and never going back. They need you to work everyday and in order for that to happen they need to regularize the world. So you have a television with all kinds of channels: sports, music, food, and you’re supposed to look at that and go to sleep and go back to work. Your world is reinforced that way so you’ll live that life. So when someone asks you about the world you’ll say the world is like this and like that. Racism comes out of that. Sexism comes out of that. What I’m doing is trying to create a whole new world that exists underneath the world we’re living in. In doing that, I’m saying there’s all kind of options for you. You don’t have to stay where you are. You can be somewhere else. You can be someone else. That’s especially true for black men, because we’re actually nowhere. It’s amazing what happens to us. It’s amazing how we strain to maintain our dignity and end up like Colin Powell, the only one who knows what the fuck is going on, but is unable to tell it.”

Killing Johnny Fry is Mosley’s most daring book to date. At a time in his career where he could churn out box-office ready mysteries, he writes a pornographic meditation on mid-life and rebellion. The only drawback is that the plot meanders at times, losing itself in its many turgid prods and thrusts. This can be explained by Mosley’s writing technique, which he will be outlining in This Year You Write Your Novel, due out in April 2007, where he likens writing to steering a rudderless rowboat:

“Writing a novel is not like you’re riding on highway to a destination, it’s like a journey by boat. You have to continually check your course so don’t miss your destination. What matters to me as a writer writing a book is the destination.”

At the end of The Stranger, Meursault realizes that life is worth living, and even though he’s in a prison condemned to death, he will fight until the last minute to enjoy, and feel, and embrace life itself. Killing Johnny Fry ends with the same open-ended uncertainty of Cordell’s fate, and the same ambiguous challenge to the reader.

“Our potential in this country as a people and as a nation is almost limitless and our vision is just a few degrees short of 360. We’re the most locked-down and locked-up people in history with the most potential in history. That’s the contradiction. The book is about that.” Mosley says. “You can find out amazing things if you’re willing to open your eyes and look out in the world. Cordell sees that getting sex is not all that difficult, a lot of people are willing, desiring it, but he changes his career and learns to trust. He becomes able to have new experiences and realizes that he can change his direction.

That’s the notion of mid-life. It feels like you’re falling, but you’re not. Find out who you are and take that path. Address your own pain. Like they ask at the doctor’s office, “what hurts?”