Lou Myers

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/20/lou-myers-dies-different-world-actor_n_2729536.html

A Different World, yes. Most definitely. But people shouldn't forget his masterful turns as Wining Boy( The Piano Lesson) and Stool Pigeon ( King Hedley the II). On TV he was so charismatic as a comic griot, but on stage he reminded me of what Sisqueros said of Hart Crane, that he " could not paint his eyes open, for that there was too much suffering in them"

Wining Boy is one of the great ensemble characters in the history of theater. He is an faded recording star, a boozer, and a soul overwhelmed by all the stories in his head, and the way it pours out on stage (in inference and not exposition )makes it all the more palpable to watch. But he also survives. There is blues in his life, but there is humanity, kindness, and the way that he shows it points to two of the most powerful themes in Wilson's work: that black men suffered in this century, and that if we wallow in it, we will die. What an actor. What a life. Far thee well, sir

The Broken Tower

I think that no jaundiced and hesitant Hart Crane Fan( LOVE White Buildings, DETEST The Bridge) would be more hesitant to like The Broken Tower, the bio pic in which James Franco plays the doomed lyric poet in his rise and fall as a literary celebrity, than moi. I will say, however, that the movie is a bloodless train wreck. 

Crane had one of the first celebrity poet careers: he shot to a staggering stardom at a staggeringly young age with Buildings, lived the life of a poet-celebrity, crashed and burned with Bridge, a staggeringly pretentious failure of an epic poem, and committed suicide shortly afterwords. The sadness for me lies in how close the sketches of Key West were, how Crane the artist knew he had to reign it in, get back to basics, and focus on his gifts as a imagistic lyric poet. The Crane of White Buildings, and a good deal of the Key west had discipline, an ear, a eye for narrative, and sense of lyric that served a poem rather than drawing attention to itself.

That Crane was no where to be seen in The Broken Tower. The Crane of this movie, and the Crane of The Bridge was a fucking mess. Windy, grandiose, and a bit beyond ridiculous at times, the Bridge is an epic poem that tries to capture America line by grandiose pseudo shakespearean line. And though I was impressed by the relative professionalism of Franco, I got tired of the rote tortured artist scenes in Tower, and how they fed into the myth of The Bridge. Franco doesn't introduce crane to the modern world as much as he repackages and sells the archetype of the tortured artist to another generation that doesn't need it. A gay man who created his own lyrical idiom in poetry, who went against so many currents that he became a wave in himself, Crane suffered tremendously, and I do not discount that. But putting it on parade without giving any context to his work, the thing he did to mitigate that suffering, does no one any favors.

But it wasn't an unintentionally funny celebrity train wreck. I'll give Franco that.

On Inez Andrews.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5UDBf9Q2bc

My Grandmother had over two thousand records, eight tracks and cassette tapes. Though a fan of the Allman brothers, and the occasional Hall And Oates single, her record collection ran as a history of black music in America before hip hop, ranging from Louis Armstrong’s singles with the Hot Five to Prince’s Sign Of The Times. She collected them between 1942, when she started making decent money working for the army and running a pool hall, and 1990, when her health started to go bad and my father relapsed for the final time. Industrious enough with cash, she bought a house in 1961 that had  a remarkably decked out basement:  A bedroom, bathroom, and a living room space that accommodated two beds, a card table, a stocked bar, and more than enough room for her records.

If you asked her on the right day who her favorite artist was, her answer would have been a myriad of people. On a great deal of those days, her answer would have been Inez Andrews. I remember early Sunday afternoons, when my dad would leave my brother and I at her house to roam the streets, and she would sit in the basement, draw in the windows, turn on a little light beige lamp and listen to this record. She would sit with my uncle Moe, smoke a pack of Kool's, have me pour her two shots of gin and stare out into the brown and black of the room. She would not say a word, just listen and look the light and dark of a space that had so much history to her.

The thing that Christians so easily forget is how Andrews, like almost all of the great gospel women , faced vicious opposition from the church until people realized her talent could turn a profit. Her contralto, with its intensity and power, was considered improper for church ears, but if you listen to this, you can hear many of the things that made the patriarchy of the black church nervous. Like all the great gospel artists, Andrews’s art was almost exclusively in inference and metaphor. Her Mary, instead of a stock character in a bible narrative about Jesus, is placed at the center of the story. In Andrews’ hands, she is someone who is sick and tired of being sick and tired, who, in her shattering grief over her loss, is teetering between belief and heresy.

She doesn’t call on god, the stern god of the Old Testament who demands her endless sacrifice. She doesn’t even call on god in generalities. No, Andrews’ Mary calls on Jesus, the son, the one that offers a progressive vision of faith, and she demands that he fix her brother’s death Now. And the man she imagine in that poetic hook (“ Mary don’t you weep/ Martha don’t you moan/Pharaoh’s army is drowned in the red sea”) is a comforter directly in the black church’s sense of the word, a healer, someone interested in her humanity. In other words, someone completely divorced from modern church patriarchy.  There is so much here, in both form and content; so much in relation to power, faith, and expressing oneself as an artist in a medium that doesn’t want you to, and I thoroughly recommend that all of the smart people I know check her out.

She passed away in December. I didn't know she was from my grandmother's hometown.

On Listening To Amy Winehouse again.

Like her cross cultural ancestors ( Dusty Springfield, Laura Nyro) Amy Winehouse was an R&B wonk; a diligent stylist whose cognitive appreciation for the genre endeared her to many a misanthropic soul fan. Unlike them, however, she danced on some dark cultural fault lines. Where as Springfield and Nyro intimated ( In Dusty In Memphis and Gonna Take A Miracle respectively) that solace from the blues could be had by immersing and intermixing musical ideas; Winehouse took her blues and drenched them on every fiber of her being. More than any R&B record of recent memory, Back to Black was consumed with loss, darkness, depression and sorrow; so much so that, for all her virtuosity, one got tired of it by a fraction. When I first heard it in 2007, I thought " She’s got a case of the twenties, and she’s a financially backed star. She’ll quit dope, find a new man and make a record better than this one by half. Life isn’t this terrible for her. She’s a tremendous talent, but It cant be this terrible"

I was wrong. For in listening to Black again, I hear a subtext of “ I’m sick, I don’t want to be here anymore, and I mean business” hanging over nearly every word. Now, the backdrop of stardom sounds less like her suffering in style and more like the background for her tragically public mental breakdown. More than anything, however, Black showed that she understood deep blues, and that sometimes the drive to transcended it( the cornerstone of black music) sometimes isn’t honest. Winehouse couldn’t be as resilient as Springfield or as authentically joyful as Nyro, because she wasn’t Springfield or Nyro. She was herself: messy, complicated, dark, and not beholden to neat narratives cultural critics try to box in artists with.

In the end, however, Winehouse’s best songs show a will to transform her sorrow into something that mattered on a record. In this, she is tied to not just Springfield and Nyro, but Gaye, Holliday, Hyman, Charles and the “Mr Hathaway” she so coyly name checked in the song “rehab”. For all her deep and public demons, she was a genuine artist of tremendous quality, and her sensitivity toward and understanding of soul music will be sorely, sorely missed.

Rereading: Vice, New And Selected Poems, by Ai

The early poems here-the ones in Cruelty ( 1973) and Killing Floor (1979)-are intricate and forceful. The best ones are learned, ambitious, drawing on such diverse traditions as Pound, the Oral Tradition, Browning’s Monologues and Post Second Wave Feminism. Obsessed with trauma and agonizingly internal, they can raise powerful questions about race, gender, identity and the human capacity to digest an enormous amount of grief. Even when the message or structure of the poems don’t necessarily jibe, they are consciously crafted enough to always be the readers time.

She loses me In the later poems, where she stops telling human personal stories and starts to ruminate on pop culture events and figures. Ai's  early work interpolated the motif of the early Cantos- that poetry didn’t have the language to encapsulate the grief and horror of modern life-more effectively than Pound ever did, but they worked when she wrote close to the vest of real life, what she knew, what she could see, what she could invent.  When she started writing about OJ, Monica Lewinsky, Koresh, and the Okalahoma city bombing, the animating aesthetics of her work fall flat. Still, the book is worth it: there is much here that needs to be read if you want to understand the history of poetry, chew on some literary theorizing,  or just read some good poems.  If you can get a good copy of Cruelty on Amazon, however, I would go with that first.

My Thoughts On The Year In Music

If, on December 31st, 1951, I wrote these descriptive sentences about

1: A moderate talent hampered by his sociopathic obsession with white women; who consciously crafted his work free from any cultural signifers to black people

2: A middle class kid with a skeevy interest in sex, who is so obsessed with black people not understanding his story, that he often forgets to develop his own one.

You would assume, in an era before Ellison and Baldwin, that I was talking about 1:Chester Himes( before the Cotton series) 2: Richard Gibson and Frank Yerby.
So why, when on December 31st 2011, they describe Frank Ocean, Childish Gambino and Drake, do I have to pretend that the cultural discussions about them that we are having now? In these agonizing, retrograde, backlash fueled discussions defending the thrown crumbs of black male privildge and the brothers who will grovel on the floor to eat them, why are we pretending that any of it is "futuristic"; that a new generation is "telling their story", that we are doing anything except what we are actually doing, which is ignore 60 years of intellectual struggles that actually happened?

I dont consider myself a nostalgist. There have been plenty of  terrible acts and  years that black culture critics wont care to admit were so. That said, so much of what came out in 2011 can just burn in hell.

Just Where Was The Love?

http://www.cnn.com/2011/12/02/showbiz/music/love-songs/index.html

( trigger warning)

What's wrong with Soul Music? I have a theory, and it doesn't have anything to do with how stupid and evil young black people are.

Fifteen years ago, Bill Clinton signed The 1996 Telecommunications Act; a bill which deregulated the media and allowed for companies to acquire consolidated empires. It is the evidentiary framework that allowed Clear Channel to get over 1200 stations, the reason Comcast bought NBC/Universal, and the reason that Black radio has been brutally cut to it’s knees. Under the Portable People Meter System installed because of the bill, radio ratings were attuned to the exposure an area has to a signal. Because of this, almost every local mom and pop soul radio station-the lifeblood for black music and black audiences for over a half a century-had to close down because of an erroneous ratings system.

Also, because of the abolition of regulatory restrictions in the air waves, Black stations that were profitable under the PPM system were bought out and replaced by companies that replaced their black radio formats with the most popular, failsafe black radio format in the past 25 years: gangster rap/ sex music geared to white teenagers from the suburbs. When black people stopped buying/listening to rap music, smaller, niche markets came up that bred artists that had no crossover support whatsoever. The result was that Rashaan Patterson couldn’t develop an audience the same way that The Ohio Players could, Joi Gilliam couldn’t build a following in a similar form as Betty Wright, and Phenomenally talented artists like Anthony David, Van Hunt, Donnie, Res,  and Janelle Monae get absolutely nowhere in the modern market. It is also the reason that Mary J Blige, Maxwell, Jill Scott, and Anthony Hamilton can go gold and platinum with almost no support outside of Black America.

All of this is far harder than to comprehend and talk about than articles about "The Narcissistic Black Youth". I revile Chris Brown’s work, wrote as such( http://open.salon.com/blog/robert_lashley_1/2011/04/18/review_fame_chris_brown

) and am the last person to offer any excuse for his behavior. His success is a prime example of  how young black men take advantage of the privileges the R&B/Hip hop market affords them, and how it damages the community. It is dishonest, however, to ignore the economic structure built to make a song like “3 am” profitable and ignore a song like this one. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQDcJBrLcNQ . ( Brown should be criticized to the high heavens, but by god when are cultural critics going to recognize that artists like David exist and face near impossible odds to get their great music heard.)

What is also dishonest is Blake’s romantic subtext: that Black male sexism began with the first Schooly D record, and has stayed only in the territory and ballpark of rap ever since. Reading his glory years timeline-the late 60’s to the early 80’s-I couldn’t help but recall that during them:

-Eldridge cleaver wrote a best selling book that espoused the belief that black women should be raped for practice by black men, who then should rape white women as a political statement.

-Amiri Baraka and Iceberg Slim were writing horror works that were as frightening in content as Odd Future at their worst

-Baraka and Ron Karenga were espousing the idea that black men should beat black women as a form of therapy.

-Writers like Ntosake Shange and Alice Walker were being subjected to cultural witch hunts by black men because they had “unfavorable” male characters in their work

-and, in this glorious era of black music Blake describes, Joe Tex went platinum with a record "Uh Huh-Huh ( You Never Should A Promised Me)" that was an ode to a violent rape.

Of course this shouldn't be used as an excuse for the modern generation of vile love men:  Karenga being a Sociopath in 1971 does not wash away Brown being one in 2011.  There are discussions that need to be had in regards to the decline of the soul love song in America, and hard questions that young men need to ask ourselves about patriarchy in regard to soul music. In this article, Blake asks none of them(and his quoted implication-that black music will get right when Black women take off their high heels- is a more subtle form of the sexism he is railing against). Blake knows this; but like a lot of writers he knows a popular song to sing to an audience. The Black Pathology song he's singing here-one that relies on the same airy, singular cliched tropes of black failure without a whit of subtext or analysis-will get him the gratitude and recognition of many people. Forgive me if I want to turn off the dial