Marlon James

Interview with Maud Newton

2009-04-19T16:39:00.005-05:00

Many of your reviews have emphasized the brutality and deprivation of the characters’ lives, and rightly so, but what is even more extraordinary about The Book of Night Women, to me at least, is the tormented romance that drives the last third of the story. Two characters fall into a twisted and passionate affair that sometimes seems like love, but never really can be. The relationship is at least as gripping as what happens between Mr. Rochester and Jane Eyre but fundamentally doomed. Was it difficult to write?

Oh my god it was the hardest thing I’ve ever written in my life. I remember calling friends shouting, “I just wrote a love scene! All they do is kiss!” to which they would respond, “. . . and are they then dismembered?” and I’d go, “No, after that they dance!” It was hard. I resisted it for as long as I could because I didn’t believe in it at first, and even when I did, I couldn’t figure out how to write it. Not until Irish novelist Colum McCann gave me permission by giving me the best writing advice I’ve ever gotten from a writer: Risk Sentimentality.

There’s a belief that sex is the hardest thing for a literary novelist but I disagree: love is. We’re so scared of descending into mush that I think we end up with a just-as-bad opposite, love stories devoid of any emotional quality. But love can work in so many ways without having to resort to that word. Someone once scared me by saying that love isn’t saying “I love you” but calling to say “did you eat?” (And then proceeded to ask me this for the next 6 months). My point being that, in this novel at least, relationships come not through words, but gestures like the overseer wanting to cuddle. Or rubbing his belly and hollering about her cooking, or teaching her how to dance or ride a horse — things reserved for white women.

Read the rest here: http://maudnewton.com/blog/?p=9295.

On Joss

2009-03-31T08:04:00.002-05:00

My film snob friends hate when in any their given flights of utter film snobbery I point out that TV had been whipping celluloid’s ass for years, at least from 1995-2005. And while they get testy enough when I deploy my argument, they are outraged when I present my evidence. That would be one TV show in particular, the only show I can remember that often left me breathless and in wonder, or put another way, the only show that without fail had at least once instant each episode that had me saying I wish I wrote that. Not The Sopranos, or Six Feet Under, or Law and Order, or even The West Wing, but Buffy the Vampire Slayer. By Joss Whedon.

Joss Whedon. I’m still trying to figure out how he does it. While misguided telesnobs who gushed at mopeshows like Felicity or watched The West Wing because it made them feel intelligent for watching it, snickered at a show named Buffy, I was witness to the finest tale spinner in America do his work. I initially resisted the show myself; half remembering the vapid movie it came from, but gave it a chance because, like everybody else who watched the WB, I loved watching pretty people go through all kinds of distress. I even stayed around as the show floundered a bit until it hit upon its breathless stride (that would be the third season, people).
There’s nothing I can say about Buffy The Vampire Slayer that Time Magazine hasn't said already, except that I’m sure that its mix of fun and fright, camp and tragedy, butt kicking fun and overwhelming sadness, probably affected each fan in its own individual way. Add to that an overall dread that was damn near existential for what many still dismissed as a filmed comic.

Buffy was about a super-powered blonde babe that killed vampires and kicked major ass. You could have watched it on those terms alone and still be watching one of the smartest shows on TV. But Whedon wouldn’t be Whedon had he not defied his own stereotype. He never uses bloodsuckers or life drainers to show that, The Matrix would have like, so rocked if it had like vampires and stuff (Blade, Underworld), nor does he use them because he really wants to write about man-man love (Lestat), nor does he wants teenage girls to slip a chastity belt under that skirt from TJ Maxx (Twilight). Whedon uses the fantastical almost as a trick, a ruse to get to the emotional core of the lonely American teenager, whose life is neither Theo Huxtable good nor Holden Caulfield bad, but better and worse at once. More often then not, they are force-fed maturity, not from parents that either over or under raise them but from life forces that our seemingly invincible parents cannot control, whether it’s the Goddess Glorificus or something more shocking, like a sudden same sex crush. Buffy’s boldness came from suggesting that they were one and the same thing or at least troubling allegories standing in place for each other. And unlike My So Called life, but like many teenagers in the real world, Buffy didn’t have time to make an epic tragedy out of her whining and moping because whether it was her choice or not, she had shit to do.

Because of it fantastical premise, Buffy had no choice but to get to gut truths. When her mother died, not through Vampire bite or demon life force drainage, but a massive brain hemorrhage the shock came from the thoroughly plausible. The show yanked itself into reality before the audience did, showing us that we were the ones in a fantasyland, thinking death worked on our terms. It was a hard lesson for Buffy but it felt like a harder lesson for us, a reminder that death was an indiscriminate monster that struck anybody at will and any time. It took those you love at random and there was not a single thing you could do about it. Here was a TV show that locked in an hour what we’d prefer to never do in life. Witness the shock and dismay over Natasha Richardson’s sudden death.

But I mention death because, weirdly enough it’s not the monsters and demons or gamma rays, or his characters’ tendency to slip into song that makes Whedon great but death, or rather grief. Even his lightest moments seem to hint at shades of grey on the horizon. I’m talking about Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog the most fun I’ve had in years on a TV show not named Burn Notice. If you still watch an actual TV set, you’ve probably missed it, so you’re missing the several things that Whedon does very well.

Dr. Horrible, like The Brain (in Pinky and the Brain) is a monomaniac mad scientist hell bent on taking over the world. But wait! He’s not mad around the edges, just a horribly lonely fan boy wishing somebody would love him back for once, that girl at the Laundromat in particular. Horrible is an archetype to be sure, and not an original one, but Whedon has a way with the sociopathic loser, a way with engendering them with so much pathos, that you almost root for them even if they are, well despicable. He’s had practice: perhaps Buffy’s greatest creation was eurotrash vampire Spike, a villain in the first few seasons, a hero in the last few, a brutal bloodsucker who feared he had a heart long before cosmic forces gave him one. But I digress. Once you get past Dr. Horrible’s near constant sing-alongs, all as inexplicable as they are irresistible, (And why should you get past them anyway? It boggles the mind that Broadway hasn’t snapped him up yet), just as you are about to dismiss them as another deployment of kitsch, the show slays with heart. Just as you're about to be overwhelmed by sentiment the scene punctures itself with ribald humour or more often overwhelming tragedy. He may be the best Dickensian that we’ve got.

Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog is clearly ridiculous, if for no other reason than the real world is right there sharing the same screen space. People are getting on with their lives and Dr. Horrible and Captain Hammer may be inhabiting a world purely of their own deluded making. It’s also clearly buoyed by the web’s lack of restrictions. Even the buff (in his mind) Captain Hammer, knows his name is a penis joke; except it’s about his penis and he’s sure he has the last laugh. Dr. Horrible turns out to be one that truly loves the damsel in laundry distress, while Captain Horrible is the horrible poon hound. But wait! Captain Hammer is just a dick. Dr. Horrible is a genuine sociopath. Credit Whedon for not making even simple characters simplistic. Whedon knew what he was doing casting the impossible not to love, Neil Patrick Harris in the title role. He can sing too.

Dr. Horrible VS. Captain Hammer. It’s a showdown of minor proportions, fated from the get-go. Whedon laces the torment with the best show tunes not in Spring Awakening. But Whedon cut his teeth writing about young American erotic torment— with apropos soundtrack, so this is almost hackwork for the likes of him. Then the damsel dies. From Dr. Horrible’s stun-now-set-to-kill ray gun. Fired not by him of course but by Captain Hammer trying to kill the Horrible one. Either way the damage is done and we’re led to another Whedon specialty: taking the basically innocent person down his or her own heart of darkness. You’re horrified and choked up at the same time, especially when you realize as I do often, that Whedon is really the only writer that can do this. How does he bring such affecting tenderness out of sometimes despicable people? How exactly does he counter balance comedy and sadness and why does he trust us to go along with both at the same time in the same show? And why can’t Judd Apatow or whoever writes Supernatural get better at this?

Granted I am a fanboy and a nerd. So much of a nerd that I can still tell you what happened in issue 339 of Thor (Beta-Ray Bill, bitches!). If Freaks and Geeks turned you off or you’re not wetting yourself over the Star Trek trailer, then this may not be the TV show for you. Even if you are ready for the best show tunes that you don’t have to be gay to love, you might still watch it the way everybody in New York listened to Scissor Sister’s debut: in secret, on headphones. Or you may shut it out altogether. Your loss. The most wondrous show on television is happening and your life is so much the poorer if it’s happening without you. I still wish I wrote books the way Whedon writes TV. If for nothing else, then for this: Everything you hate about yourself before you see an episode of any Whedon show (thought the jury’s still out on The Dollhouse) turns into everything you love about yourself after.

The Bigots On My Bookshelf

2009-03-07T09:24:00.001-05:00

“Her racial attitudes were uncharitable at best, and they showed up in her work.” It’s just a sentence but nothing has disturbed me more all week. It was in the Janet Maslin’s review of Flannery, Brad Gooch’s biography of Southern storyteller, Flannery O’Connor (NY Times, February 22, 2009). Even before I read her short stories or Wiseblood, I loved the idea of O’Connor; another writer from the south who even though writing about a specific region of America unfamiliar to most Americans, nailed a universal condition that the post colonial West Indian, The post Stalin Russian and the post (if you were lucky) dictatorship Latin American could all identify with. Had any other 20th century author so flirted with 19th century Gothic and still managed such a profoundly contemporary worldview? And yet here I was, seriously considering getting rid of her books.

It’s an old argument but not a tired one. What should a black reader do if he finds out that one of his favourite authors was racist? I made that question specific, because it’s too easy to weaken the idea by broadening it with something like, “what if an author/poet/artist/ musician turned out to have done something or believe in something that was anti you? What if he hated Jews? Indians? What if he used to hit women? Do we forget the artist and look at the art? After all, isn’t the reverse just another way that we read writers and not books? These questions are all valid, but who feels it knows it and it’s easy to dismiss a writer’s bigotry (alleged or no) when you’re not the one being bigoted against. It’s easy to look past a homophobic genius like Dylan Thomas if you’re not a homosexual.

It was easy to erase any trace of Jack London from my house after I heard his remarks about Jack Johnson. I had my doubts about Faulkner until I came upon him addressing those very doubts, in Ebony Magazine no less. O’Connor would be hard to ditch, but the world of literature is just too vast, too top heavy with brilliance for me not to find another heroine, and Nadine Gordimer is better any way. But as I said before, who feels it knows it. I wonder if I’m a hypocrite. Sure my shelves are free of Jack London because he might have hated blacks, but I have 7 novels from Knut Hamsun, a Norwegian writer so in love with the Nazi Party that he gave Joseph Goebbels his own Nobel medal. By ditching O’Connor and keeping Hamsun I become a hypocrite. Or at the very least I render near everything in the previous two paragraphs moot.

How do I justify Hamsun? Is prejudice only prejudice when it affects people like me? What do I tell my Jewish friends when/if they find Hamsun in my house? Turns out that it’s not so easy hating haters after all, especially when another NY Times review of Brad Gooch’s biography leads right into a review of my book, a factor that may have contributed to heightened interest in my own work. I wish this were easier. And I wish people would stop bandying about the love the art, hate the artist mantra and if such a thing weren’t intellectually dishonest. Sure we can appreciate the work of the despicable as long as their despicable acts do not affect us. My being expected to tolerate or even like Flannery O’Connor, or any other racist on the grounds of aesthetic excellence may be admirable in theory but it’s as ludicrous in practice as a Jewish person writing about the structural brilliance of Albert Speer. The problem with this of course is that if you start exhuming the dead and brilliant for their grievous character flaws, you’re going to find yourself neck deep in a lot of bones. Should I stop wearing Allure Homme because Coco Chanel was a Nazi Collaborator? It’s not long before you become appointed judge and jury of all, even if the court is in your own mind. We also end up cheating art. Once an artist, or writer or even dancer creates something it’s not really theirs anymore. I don’t have to stop reading O’Connor, because Wiseblood is no longer her book, nor can she control who reads and how he chooses to read it. Bruce Springsteen can’t control right wing nuts who fist-pump to Born in the USA anymore than Jack London could stop me from casting a black child in white fang. Art is ours even when we do not want it and it that sense it almost doesn’t matter who made it.

A black woman loving Wiseblood in spite of Flannery O’Connor is a better person than O’Connor ever was. In some ways the art lover is more crucial than the artist. The lover of art or literature by embracing art embraces the very best of that person, something that more often than not, the artist doesn’t deserve. It’s doesn’t mean that we should rewrite Leni Riefenstahl as Isak Denisen, but it does mean giving her books on Africa the acclaim they deserve. Besides, a world without A Good Man is Hard To Find is one I’d rather not live in.

Penguin Guest Blog: From Tuesday

2009-02-27T08:24:00.001-05:00

On Writing about Atrocity.
I don’t always agree with Michiko Kakutani, but I think she nails exactly what goes wrong when writers tackle the unthinkable, in today’s review of Jonathan Littel’s The Kindly Ones, the Nazi novel that was a sensation in France, given its first person narrative of an unrepentant Officer:

Indeed, the nearly 1,000-page-long novel reads as if the memoirs of the Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss had been rewritten by a bad imitator of Genet and de Sade, or by the warped narrator of Bret Easton Ellis’s “American Psycho,” after repeated viewings of “The Night Porter” and “The Damned.”

Whereas the philosopher Theodor Adorno warned, not long after the war, of the dangers of making art out of the Holocaust (“through aesthetic principles or stylization,” he contended, “the unimaginable ordeal” is “transfigured and stripped of some of its horror and with this, injustice is already done to the victims”), whereas George Steiner once wrote of Auschwitz that “in the presence of certain realities art is trivial or impertinent,” we have now reached the point where a 900-plus page portrait of a psychopathic Nazi, dwelling in histrionic detail on the barbarities of the camps, should be acclaimed by Le Monde as “a staggering triumph.”

The biggest problem faced by the writer of atrocity is his own talent, that his highest aesthetic value becomes his lowest weakness. By transforming atrocity into art, atrocity is no longer atrocious. There are two ways this can happen: by not dwelling enough on the horror, or dwelling way too much. The former allows the reader either through the beauty (or vagueness) of the prose to sidestep any punishment for being a voyeur. The latter runs the risk of turning into pornography, atrocity smut that numbs instead of outrages.

Of course having just published a novel about an atrocity, I worry about mixing art and horror myself; not just how successful I was but was exactly does that success mean. Does even calling a novel about the holocaust a success result in a kind of glibness? Art taking the place of fact, so much so that people run the risk of looking at the holocaust through Stephen Spielberg’s incredibly artful lenses, and not the actual event? Life is Beautiful has aged horribly because of this very thing, Roberto Benigni turning a concentration camp into a world of wonder, despite having a slight justification for it (in the story, at least).

What happens when a beautiful technique captures horror? VS Naipaul, in his perceptive and damning Middle Passage, once said that a Jamaican slum was a place of such unremitting ugliness that one could never take a photograph of it because the beauty of the photographic process lies to you about how ugly everything is. I saw this in my former job as a location scout: foreign photographers jumping at the chance to shoot in the ghetto, not because they wanted to capture poverty, but because rusted zinc gave such a wonderful brick red colour.

I’m in a reading group about violence and one of the crucial issues we have to tackle is the very existence of such a group. If this study has no plan for concrete action, some form of sacrificial giving to a cause that betters us all, aren’t we just making our own torture porn? We run the risk of reducing violence to a mere aesthetic or intellectual experience, that way a Photograph’s beauty can rob a tragedy of its horror. The only artist I know who may have fully figured this out, balancing beauty and tragedy in a way the highlights the tragedy of the subject, while saving beauty for the dignity of the victim was the gifted photographer Dan Eldon. Of course he paid for his commitment to truth in art with his life.

I'm Penguin's Guest Blogger for the Week!

2009-02-24T09:58:00.001-05:00

Monday's Blog:

I’m thinking about getting into some trouble tonight. The fate of all authors might hang in the balance. I’m reading “Revenge of the Nerds” a funny and bittersweet article in the March/April Issue of Poets and Writers; about how today’s (meaning my) generation of writers can be such wusses sometimes. How we lack the sturm und drang of the mighty men and women of the past; writers that doth bestride the world like colossuses or Colossi, if we want to get technical. Or at least get trashed and laid an awful lot. Writers seemed even more fascinating since they were rarely as Dorian grey hot as rock stars but were even more drunken and disorderly.

But Amy Shearn, who wrote the article, has a point. I think. Most of the writers interviewed said that they were simply too busy writing to get on with any debauchery. Others said that unlike their forebears, they couldn’t depend on writing alone for a living so had to teach in places where scandals weren’t looked upon with “you remember when” nostalgia (No this doesn’t mean you, Bennington). Are we just wimpier? When Norman Mailer traded barbs with Gore Vidal, you knew that sooner or later somebody was going to punch somebody. Compare that to our own recent feuds, like Dale Peck Vs Rick Moody, which came across like two nerds trying to pull out their battered copy of Hitchhiker’s Guide to slap each other with it.

Maybe Byron wasn’t so Byroneqsue, but you’ve got to wonder if on seeing what my generation of writers looked like, that he wouldn’t have become a rock star or wrestler instead. When did we get so nerdy? I have an excuse I think, me being a nerd of some sort since childhood, but so was James Joyce, whose glasses were far thicker than mine. Is it just that we are dweebs or that we write dweeby books as well? I'd be the first to say that we’re pretty awful navel gazers, with the added problem of not having a life to gaze at. I’d like to agree that we may be too busy writing, but here I am writing this blog so clearly I have some spare time. But I’m saddened when Charles Baxter says “writer are no longer gods; everybody knows that.”

Sometimes I think I was born two generations too late. Granted had I been born then I would not have been a writer. I’m also not convinced that the lionizing of writers is such a good thing since it created the culture where we know the writer but not the book, sort of like George Clooney being famous, but nobody being able to name five of his works. I wonder if other writers do what I do: look at how the literary badasses of the media age sacrificed their own work in the bargain. I wonder if they take that as a lesson. But there are times that I wonder if I should go have some illicit sex, say something outrageous or just reach for something a little more banal, like a raging coke habit. Or maybe I should get a wife just to shoot or stab her. Or drink myself to death. I try to say that all this would mean I write less, but I write lees than I want to now, and these reprobates of literary past also got an enormous amount of great work done.

Granted the media eventually chewed up Mailer and spat him out, no matter how much he refused to be a tasty dish. And I’m not sure writers ever wanted to be celebrities, certainly not Updike or Roth. As for the badasses of yore, I’m not sure they were being bad for the camera or the newspaper column, even back in their heyday. But something about me misses that era as if I lived through it. Maybe it’s because that when the writers seemed bigger than life the books seemed bigger than life as well.

On Erotica, or Lo and Behold, The Virginal Ho

2009-02-13T21:41:00.004-05:00

Strange things happen when people write in the dark, stranger still when they, without being asked shed light on it. Couple years ago I wrote a blog on Spacebreak Sex, on the curious absence of sex scenes from literary fiction and the overall consensus that maybe that was because we sucked at it. Of course I now hesitate to claim such a thing now that I’ve actually written a couple of them, involving two consenting humans at that, and I wouldn’t have even thought about it enough to write a blog, but recently it came to my attention that somebody was looking for me, with the hope of me writing an erotic story for a collection.

Of course I have no problem with writing about sex (my apologies if you thought this was a PG13 blog). The more whams, bam and slams in fiction the better quite frankly. I don’t see why G. Carbrera Infante and Roberto Bolano should have all the fun; after all they are both quite dead. So no, I have no problem whatsoever with sex in fiction. But I do have a problem with erotica.
Erotica’s purpose cannot help but be dubious: for one, it sets out to spark desire on a mass level; something as fraught with disaster as trying the same seduction on two different people. The idea of one kind of story, or one kind of set up or even one or two kinds of sex that would turn on millions is not only ludicrous, but also kind of creepy. But I’m not one to turn down honest paying work, and besides, this is what pseudonyms are for. And some of that stuff is actually good, well the gay stuff anyway. The straight stuff that I “researched” came across as oddly unsexual, even anti-sex, and they all had a sort of artistic line that was disturbingly similar. It took my awhile to figure out what was wrong with erotic fiction.

None of these writers are having sex.

It’s a curious phenomenon, the virginal ho. The literary smut hound that somehow never comes across as ever having sex. Not satisfied with my suspicion I dug deeper and came upon a site that shall remain nameless. I’ve spent some time in a newsroom so I knew what to do: checked the bio before I read the story. Here was one:

…Bald, old guy writes erotic tales when he's not building his model railway.

I don’t know about you, but that got me hot. A typical paragraph went like this:

"Damn you John, you're being cruel."
"And you're loving it." His hand went to his cock again; he wouldn't have to wait much longer surely.
He bent and kissed her pretty ass, nipped the soft flesh and thought how much he loved this sweet creature.

"Oh no!" she whispered and he heard the trickling sound.

What preceded was a rather disturbing sadomasochistic fantasy, but disturbing only in the sense that it read like the work of someone who had not had sex before. And probably should not since he may cause grievous damage to another human. In another story by a different but male author, the male character, with one hand in the Bangkok whore’s (is there any other?) cunt (his word not mine) and the other in her anus, she still manages to have a pretty lucid discussion about countries of origin, national identity and nostalgia. Worse was the in-between sex narration, where the writer got into quasi-metaphysical mumbo jumbo just to prove to the reader that he’s read wikipedia and was not some hairy palm redneck typing with his free hand.

The thing about erotica for the most part is that for all the action, it betrays very little understanding of female and male bodies. The man’s penis is always hard and dripping pre-cum, the woman’s vagina is always throbbing and dripping whatever, and it’s never a vagina, but a cunt or twat. One becomes nostalgic for a simple pussy. I wonder how these women think, what with their twats throbbing at the mere sight of a male bicep. So we have dicks dripping, twats throbbing, breasts heaving, clitorises undulating (!), lips licking, tongues flicking, cocks straining in their pants. The cock is always super long so that it needs two tongues to lick it and the vagina manages to be super tight yet super deep at the same time. And if the evocative passages are horrible, the evaluative ones, where the writer gets into the character’s mind are much worse. Step into the remains of an exploded orgasm and you slip on lines like these:

“It's all fake, of course. All this. A construction. A replica of love. Play-acting on an exotic stage. A Hollywood movie. And like all movies, we pay our fare, and for a short while we allow ourselves to be subsumed by another reality. In the warm comforting cinematic darkness, we become part of a world more vivid than the one we live in.”

And here I was cussing creative writing students because they’re far too in love with Raymond Carver. For a genre of such transgression, erotica can be frustratingly conservative, or at least lock step. There’s no new territory being opened or any clever retelling of the old. Maybe cleverness is asking too much, but whom, after reading these stories goes on to actual sex? With another person? Consensual? Not only are these writer not fucking, worse, they’re not reading. Susanna Moore’s In The Cut, Nic Kelman’s Girls, Adam Thirwell’s Politics, Allan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming Pool Library and Andre Aciman’s Call Me By Your Name all manage scenes both hot and brilliant, scenes that could teach these writers what happens when one body touches another. But the tragic flaw of this fiction is what grips all mediocre fiction; a lack of reading, a basic unintelligence about literature that perhaps they felt they had no need for since their thrills were below the belt.

Except that it isn’t. Erotica isn’t actual sex, so it has to seduce the brain first. Instead I kept coming across writing like the kind I sometimes see in workshops, by writers trying to shock or titillate but with no experience of either. Other times it’s the taking on of a transgression that they have neither the intelligence nor daring to handle. This leads more often than not to fiction that’s accidentally disturbing, or at least bothersome enough to make you wonder just where did that last missing child end up.

Mr. President...

2009-02-01T11:14:00.008-05:00

I know I should be over it by now, but it blows my mind that HE is our new president.

Webism

2009-01-30T10:21:00.002-05:00

My favourite living author thinks my life would be so much better if only I do two things: Take that bloodclaat out of my voicemail greeting, and stop blogging. Turns out his creative writing students, while admiring my book seem to hate my blog. I’m not sure why they hate it, fine maybe I could be less opinionated about things, but his remark came right in the middle of unrelated but nonetheless similar expressions of blog/internet distrust, dismissal, and ignorance that I’d been hearing all that week.

I know that your reading this means I’m preaching to the converted, but I was so taken aback by the pointless webism of the people I spoke to that I thought I had to write about it. Webism, a clumsily created term to be sure, but it’s mine for misguided luddites who think they score points for authenticity or old-fashionedness by being luddites, but are actually elitists, reacting to a movement that moves laterally rather than through some top-down hierarchy. They’ve become the very kind of smug people that reach for a value of a past generation that never had such a value in the first place, people simply unaware that their elders grabbed for the innovations of their own time, knowing instantly what we do not; that these things are supposed to make our lives better.
But elitists are just ignoramuses with pedigree, a slightly exalted version of the people Chris Rock talked about whose greatest pleasure is to not know. I’m not amazed that in 2009 some people don’t have a cell phone, but I’m stunned that they think it’s a good thing. It only takes one child in an emergency and them unable to reach you for you to regret the error of such a position. And another thing, stop begging calls.

My friend will of course kick my ass for the previous paragraph but at least he has a website, so he knows what time it is. But even those among us who’ve given in to dreaded e-communication, blanch at Facebook, Myspace, and blogs for all sorts of reasons, none of them sensible. My good friend, an African poet recently snared at the very thought of a facebook page, and even now when I whip out a phone to update my status I get labeled everything from an attention seeking hound to a loser with no real friends. So while my friend was happy to boast of having no “space” page, I politely pointed out that the new wave of African literature was happening without him. Only last year, Binjavana Wainana mentioned that it was the Internet that allowed African writers to build community. Many of these writers, some still in repressive regimes have seen the means of communications co-opted by their governments. But the Internet has been one of the few things those governments could not fully control. So Wainana in Kenya can become friends with Chimamanda Adichie in Nigeria, and a new network, a support system arises that can speak truth to power or at the very least let the world know.

What would we have thought of the last flare-ups in Lebanon, had young Lebanese kids not grabbed their digital cameras, and uploaded to their blogs or cut and pasted to Youtube? Would you have known the real story and would you have been left warm and cuddly all over, the way we were after Desert Storm? Because if you’re not one for blogs and websites then you’re a sucker for spin. And while we’re on spin what about the stories that the traditional media refuse carry? If you’re a webist, you probably didn’t hear about Alberto Gonzales until the mass media started covering him. Congratulations, those of us in the blogosphere knew about this a year before you did. For almost two years Albert Gonzales was getting away with astounding corruption and only one source, Joshua Marshall’s blog, Talking Points Memo, was reporting it. In fact, the story would have died, and Gonzales still in office had TPM not stuck with the story, at risk to itself, until the mainstream media finally woke up. And if you think that was just a one off, you’re again, missing the point. One of the nastier stories of the Iraq War has been the military’s allegedly occasional practice of demanding that wounded and maimed veterans return their signing bonuses because they did not complete active service. Again, a story that would have caused national outrage had a single major newspaper been interested in it.

This anti-internet luddism came as a particular shock to me because I was at a low residency degree program, something that would have been unthinkable pre-internet. Without it I would still be degree-less and miserable in Jamaica, writing ads telling people how good we are at making them better. I wished I had a community of writers back when I started writing, somebody to tell me I wasn’t crazy for trying to do this.

I know them’s fighting words. But anti-internet snobbery is a blank and ignorant dismissal of something that has clearly empowered others. It makes me recall Kiran Desai’s brilliant takedown of Naipaul in The Inheritance of Loss, when a character said (I’m paraphrasing) that Naipaul was so up his own colonial ass that he may the only person to not realize that the most popular dish in the UK was Chicken Tikka Masala. Again ignorance with pedigree, a refusal to believe that anything good can come out of anything new. A refusal to see that his people have moved beyond his own tired stereotype of them. The truth is that people like Naipaul know, but may never admit, that the world has simply moved on without them. I can bet he’s never even heard of M.I.A.

Rocking My World: The Best Records of 2008

2009-01-11T20:20:00.013-05:00

1. Erykah Badu: New Amerykah: Part One (4th World War)

That’s the problem with a promise, even an American one: change the tone and it turns into a warning. Enter (or rather re-enter) Erykah Badu, with the bastard that finally spru

ng from Funkadelic’s three times knocked up earth. This is New Amerykah: Mama’s hopped up on cocaine, daddy’s on spaceships with no brain, meaning that his ass may be in flight, but negro never emancipated himself from mental slavery. Badu’s new agenda feels like an old one, from praising a male ideal that men can’t or wont match, to breaking down ghetto politics of the present, which only sounds like the past because we still haven’t learned the lesson. Even the mistakes are fascinating: Master Teacher’s two halves never connect, but there’s more going on here than in Neo-Soul’s entire catalog. My People never builds on its initial chant but hypnotizes nonetheless, and Honey is exactly the kind of faux retro that screams bonus track. Far better is Telephone, neo soul to be sure, but at 8 minutes it has the slow burn of a hard fought, well earned climax (and the best use of sirens since Public Enemy). New Amerykah is a call to arms for those who distrust arms callers. The Healer is the hip-hop remedy the music doesn’t deserve, much like Common’s I Used to Love H.E.R. but without that track’s tedious art as Madonna-whore sexism. The Cell is so funky it nearly collapses under its own weight, dissolving into an accapella chorus of post-gospel urban blues. And then there’s Twinkie. A shootout gets cut up in beat so old school it’s retrofuturist while bass and blips duel and duet at once. Badu, disembodied takes us into an urban nightmare that maybe only Obama can rectify. All together now: Started with a rhyme from old ancient times/ Descendents of warlocks/ Witches with ill glitches/ Children of the matrix be hittin' them car switches/ Seen some Virgin Virgos hanging out with Venus Bitches.

2. Deerhunter: Microcastle/ Weird Era Continued

It happened like this in 2008: At a Wolf Parade concert I fell allergic to all things indie. This is why it took me months to listen to Deerhunter, probably the biggest mistake I’ve made all year. Only a truly great band could release their most coherent and mature album yet, then top it with a bonus disc. Microcastle, the first half, can sometimes sound like alternative 101, name checking all the requisite influences; Pixies, Jesus and Mary Chain, lots and lots of My Bloody Valentine. But Weird Era is something else: a consummate gorging on those same influences to spit out something at once beautiful, monstrous and new—a threat to the very music that helped spawn it. Dare I call it a pop album? But pop in the gloriously wasted way of REM’s Out Of Time; pop of a band trying on ideas for size and seemingly unaware that the toss-offs are the gems. Credit Deerhunter for not being afraid of big sound and for not confusing epic with grandiose (See: Chinese Democracy). Microcastle is the first fully realized indie double album since Husker Du’s Zen Arcade.

3. Earth: The Bees Made Honey In The Lion’s Skull

Only 5 seconds into Earth’s latest and I already knew the planet was doomed. It’s the boom of course; equal parts drum kick, bass bludgeon and pure malevolence. A real boom that sounded like the echo of one, like Armageddon had already happened and we’re rocking out to the fallout. Makes sense then that Bees starts at a crawl and stays there. Odds things happen when one of the heaviest ever bands goes slow. For one all that droning turns into a hypnotic kind of beauty, still doom metal’s best-kept secret. Jazz guitarist Bill Frisell knows. A surprise guest on several tracks, he functions the way Nico did on the Velvet’s first: as finder of light in the midst of all that gloom. But this is post metal, post doom, post stoner, just heavy. I can’t remember the last time I’ve not missed vocals on a rock record.

4. Portishead: Third

Don’t call it a comeback. After we had consigned Dummy to epitaph status, who’d have guessed that 1. Portishead would return and 2. In a shape that we would have scratched our heads to recognize were it not that Beth Gibbons was as magnificently melancholic as ever? Third wasn’t so much a left turn as a back-the-hell-up-and-dash-down-a–new-road altogether. So instead of Wu-Tang beats and urban gothic, we got a psychedelic rock n’ roll death trip, as if all the bad will lurking in Dummy’s Glory Box suddenly came on full tilt. It says much that all the right people hated it. You know who you are, you cocktail party having, Buddha bar foreplaying, wedding reception planning, hairdo cutting, ‘I listen to all kinds of music’ loser. I saw you, turning down Machine Gun and wondering what the hell is this all about? If it makes you feel any better, Morcheeba haven’t changed a bit.

5. Q-Tip: The Renaissance

Does music make the times, or times make the music? Different question: Did Q-tip know something we didn’t? Released on Election Day, would The Renaissance have packed the same delirious punch had the other guy won? Instead we had the hopeful counterpoint to Badu’s dread with a 40 plus veteran not looking a day over 25 showing idiots half his age how it’s done. There hasn’t been a hip-hop record this inviting since, well, Tribe Called Quest’s Midnight Marauders. This is adult boom-bap, big people music. So Manwomanboogie samples Can and comes up with a better song, You revisits a fractured relationship with a maturity and wisdom that the music can sometimes seem incapable of. He even made Norah Jones cool, slipping her into the role rappers usually reserved for Badu. That’s only fitting: Badu was busy burning down the old so that Q-tip could ring in the new.

6. Aterciopelados: Rio

There isn’t much that this Argentinean band can’t do, but eclectism is an old trick, a lazy way to make one seem multidimensional without being actually talented. So credit this band then, for mastering everything including making motherhood seem like the sexiest state of existence. Andrea Echeverri’s husband must be the luckiest man in Latin rock.

7. Dungen 4

A dense, ambitious, crazy psych-rock masterpiece that reveals more than anything, that lead singer Gustav Estes probably still thinks he’s making rap music.

8. Robyn

What does it say for the state of pop music that the year’s finest pop album came out four years ago? Listen to Anytime You Like where an already broken Robyn helps her own boyfriend break her heart twice.

9. Hercules and Love Affair: Blind

Arthur Russell’s ghost hasn’t been this happy in years. An honest to goodness DISCO record, unabashedly gay in every sense of the term. Blind is fighting it out with Machine Gun and Single Ladies for single of the year.

10. Grace Jones Hurricane

Not a comeback so much as a reminder, Jones may be the youngest, craziest 60 year old on the planet. Judging by her recent buck nekkid layout for Dazed and Confused, she’s lost none of her ability to shock. But the real shock here is heart, especially for someone usually praised and damned for being robotic.

January 1, 2009

2009-01-01T12:49:00.005-05:00

So my new year begins with friends at midnight. But I call days by when I see the sun, so the real New Year began at 8am with me listening to The Pixie’s Doolittle and Queen’s A Night at the Opera. The last record I heard in 2007 was Deerhunter’s Microcastle. I can still map my life to records if I try hard enough, but I’m 38 and it’s a new year and perhaps the first which I’ve entered with neither anticipation nor dread; not Zen like either just calm. Or maybe it’s because I was just downstairs in my friend Alex’s apartment, talking about sexual misadventure (his not mine), smoking cloves and digging Pixie’s Bossanova; and I realized that I would much rather be here with someone I’m always happy to see, than in New York for another Jan 1, wondering if I’m so very entertaining why am I alone tonight? Sorry, it doesn’t take much for me to slip into the Smiths.

It’s barely 12 hours old, but I love 2009 already. That might be because I have a new book coming out in a month and a half. It not that I’ve piled on this year with expectation or that I expect some fulfillment of promise. It’s not even that I made a resolution. It’s just that after so much building, and changing and growing in 2008, I can enter this year saying whatever happens— lottery or car crash, it’s all good. Maybe I am Zen. I don’t pray much anymore. Okay I don’t pray at all, nor am I sure that I still believe in the or a God, but I do believe there is a fundamental rhythm to the universe. Rhythm that is, not order; the universe has to allow for out of sync shit, wonderful or horrendous to happen, with the only reassurance being that it absorbs both with equal nonchalance.

Several years ago I used to spend my New Year’s Eves in church. It’s not that I believed so much that I was desperate for something to believe in. Now I’d like to think that I’ve outgrown belief. That I’m perfectly fine with reason and do not need faith. Who needs the evidence of things unseen when what is plainly visible is enough to make you gasp in wonder sometimes? What will happen will happen, but we also make our own fates and play the key role in our redemption or destruction. I’d just rather have mine right now instead of in some afterlife. Something about the Christian definition of eternal life— the idea of eternity being nothing more than unending reward and punishment for how you spent your first 70 years—always seemed stupid or at the least not very eternal at all. I like the idea of eternity meaning not living forever but living beyond whatever forever means. Maybe I’m just realizing that I was born quite fine the first time, thank you very much.

In 2008 I killed myself six times. It just hit me one day, that there were so many versions of me around the place, a new one to suit the different kind of friends that I’ve always surrounded myself with. I used to think that this was to ensure that I’m always around different kinds of people, but see now that it was merely to make sure that I never got close to any of them, or rather that any of them got close to me. There is a version of me that still likes Graphic design, another that used to counsel Christian kids, and one that expected to get married one day. Then there’s another version that wrote things like these, fearing somebody would read them, but hoping just one person would. And hopefully that person would realize that I do not have my shit together and would just help me without me having to ask. I gave that version a titanic kick in the ass, but took a lot from him. The version I’m sticking with is everything in the last sentence, but is also the person who read Sula, and cried when the dying Sula, is response to Nel’s asking what did she have to show for herself, said, “Show? To who?”

It’s the last year of the first decade of the second millennium. I’m still waiting for the 21st century to start. For me that would begin with our ditching ridiculous attitudes from the 20th — hell, 18th century. I’m thinking about this because my good friends Chad and Jude have been married for four years and now have the most beautiful baby I’ve ever seen and the friends of mine who have a problem with this sentence are exactly the friends that I probably wont be friends with anymore. I’m sorry if that means you, but it’s not that I’ve changed but that I realized that my eyes are in front of me and the only thing behind me is my ass, so I don’t even know anymore how to look backward, or carry on a backward attitude. Turns out George Clinton was right: free your mind first and your ass will follow. I think I’m going to put on Funkadelic's Maggot Brain right now, or maybe John Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band; a new year’s kiss-off if there ever was one.

I leave you with this, a slightly changed Nirvana line: Forget your enemies, save your friends, find your place, speak the truth. And Oh yeah, buy my book.

Happy 2009.

Too busy to Write, But Not Too Busy To Bet

2008-10-07T08:02:00.002-05:00

I know, I know, I haven't written in a while, but you try teaching 47 students. I'll be back soon, but you know I could not let the Nobels pass without adding my wildly way-off predictions (Even though I did predict Pamuk and Pinter). My money is on Adonis, largely because a poet is overdue. Don't rule out Roth or Updike, or Doctorow or Oates—That prick's comments may just be him bitching because he didn't get his way. They are overdue a poet, an African and an obscure European novelist.

Final picks:

Ismail Kadare
Ngugi Wa Thiongo
Yusuf Komunyaaka
Adonis
E L Doctorow
Milan Kundera

And of course, some obscure European that we've never heard of.

Is We Stoopid?

2008-08-07T20:21:00.001-05:00

Brilliant black musician, once promising disappears in a vortex of drugs alcohol, public expectation and the dark side of his or her own genius. I thought of my first sentence not because of Sly Stone, Albert Ayler, Rick James, Sam Cooke, Jimi Hendrix, Johnny Hartman, and Billie Holiday, but because of D’Angelo. In an uncharacteristically poignant article in the August issue of Spin, the magazine tried to track down the artist, a man who all but disappeared from the pop universe only years after he and his abs pretty much dominated it with his “Untitled” video, that song from his masterpiece, Voodoo (for my money, the only album in league with Radiohead’s Kid A for album of the decade). The article was depressing enough not only in its depiction of D’Angelo’s tragic fall and halfhearted attempts at rise, but also of the other casualties of 90’s hard to classify black music: Lauryn Hill and Maxwell. But what really depressed me was this:

“When I create things I almost have to dumb it down a little, because low record sales for me is seen like a failure. The new minstrel movement in hip-hop doesn’t allow the audience to believe the artist is smart. I love Kid A, but I don’t think D’Angelo would be allowed to sing ‘Cut the kids in half’ over and over and be taken seriously. It’d be like, ‘What’s wrong with that boy?’”

That was a quote from Questlove, drummer and creative force behind the Roots, one of the most respected bands in rock. I cannot imagine a quote that depressed me more this year. Fine, somebody out there must be buying Steppin fetch—er, Soulja Boy, but are we really still doing this? Have we really gone such a short distance that intelligence is still snubbed or looked upon with suspicion, if not outright hostility? It’s easy to lay the blame at hip-hop but rap made bands like A Tribe Called Quest, Outkast, Fugees and the Roots. But why in 2008 do people who transcend any form of formula still have to play dumb?

I remember talking to friend back in Jamaica who was appalled when I told her that back in school I played dumb to keep friends. It didn’t work of course but that didn’t stop me from setting my mind on dim when I entered the workplace, even when I went to church, never the most welcoming the place for any sort of brain. But can we talk about this? Until I read this article I thought I was one of few people hit with the pressure of dimming myself so that my “people’ can get it. Of all the interviews I’ve had the most stupid was from a fellow Jamaican who couldn’t think of something more profound than “did you write the book to get girls?” I complained and was told that it was all about publicity and fun and sometimes one had to play the game. What game was that actually, pin the tail on the dumb-ass-sex-mad Negro? I was offended by the question. I’m as irreverent as anybody and pride myself on a perverted sense of humour, but I bristle at stupidity and go apeshit at dumbness commoditized and thrust upon me. I can’t even think of a musician who wouldn’t find that question ridiculous. But it took me back to an earlier time when the slighter you were, the more normal you were because in black communities all over there’s still nothing more freaky than intelligence. This probably explains the colossal failure of that whole generation of smart, spunky black female musicians who rose up in the early 90’s. Even Joi, whose story is more frustrating than most gave up after trying everything, including remaking herself into the pop bimbo she was probably pressured to be.

Are we really still allergic to intelligence? Are we so stuck on formula that anyone who breaks it must suffer? How did Prince and Andre 3000 get away with it, by imitating rockers? I’ve been to readings where I push up the more scandalous parts of my novels largely because I’m dealing with an audience that does not know nor will ever care what existential struggle means. Chris Rock nailed this generation in his landmark routine known funnily enough as “The Routine” where he went where nobody did since Richard Pryor, distinguishing between black people and niggers. Rock squashed nerve after nerve after nerve but he left his masterstroke for last. “If there was one thing niggers love the most and were proud of the most, it was to NOT KNOW.” True blackness was measured by how little you knew and how less you cared. People like myself and most of my friends could only nod and laugh because we’ve all been there, accused of playing white because we knew the capital of Zaire and that Titus may be the most misunderstood of Shakespeare’s plays. We see it whenever we criticize a sentimentalist panderer like Tyler Perry and receive the onslaught of attack right afterwards.

My problem is that this ultimately infects both ways. I’m always disappointed when I have to dumb myself down, but it also creates in me my own prejudice where when I run into black audiences or groups or people and immediately set myself on dim and try to keep the TS Elliot and Chuck D quotes to a minimum. I went to dinner with authors Mat Johnson, Victor Lavalle and some others last January and almost hit the floor when discussion immediately turned to favourite tracks on the new Radiohead album. I had to confront my own prejudice right there and then, surprised that I still had them. But then I realized these writers were in the same boat I’m in, writing out on a limb with challenging literary fiction (Lavalle’s The Ecstatic, Johnson’s recent Incognegro) despite knowing how easy it is to shut up, shut down and write Blacka Da Berry, Chocolate Desire Part 3. We all know how it feels, reading at a black bookstore and being told by the owner what a difficult sell you are. We all know the feeling of doing a good reading, answering good questions and still watching the audience going off to buy Omar Tyree or whichever rapper’s mom just put out a book.

Don’t get me wrong, stupidity doesn’t discriminate. People buy US, Star and Globe, magazines of such dubious worth that a typical article would use, “but we believe” or “One can only assume” as declarative statements. In other words white people can be pretty damn stupid too. But it’s the glorification of ignorance, the association of dimness with your degree of blackness that troubles me. It bothers me that Questlove has to dumb things down because we won’t get it. It saddens me that D’Angelo will face a horde of people who only care if he still has his abs. I’m worried about the masterpieces I will never get to listen to because we’re not ready. And I’m, horrified that maybe, just maybe, the people out there don’t care anyway.

No I haven't gone anywhere...

2008-07-27T06:48:00.001-05:00

But I have been moving house, and doing a whole bunch of little things that seem to take a big time. I'll be back to causing trouble next, I mean THIS week.

Spin The Black Circle

2008-05-26T16:58:00.002-05:00

So there I was at Casey’s house, staring as if it were some bulking but bashful animal. I hadn’t seen or touched one in years and my interest was purely forensic— surely it didn’t even work. A turntable, outside the context of a DJ in a nightclub, standing by the side of the living room, waiting for somebody to pull sound from it. I didn’t even remember how to turn thing on, but on it came with a boom and the record, already spinning stunned me with sound. Rich, deep, and ridiculously warm. After years of astringent CD’s and faceless Mp3’s I forgot just how completely I could be pulled under by sheer rock action. There I was, all but batshit at being submerged in guitars, drums and keyboards. I looked at my friend. Holy shit, this is Tears For Fears? I said.

I had been so trained to believe all the things I supposedly gained from CD’s that I all but forgot what I lost. For all its digital precision, there was always something cold and thin about a CD, fine if your interest is only melody (classical, new age) but disastrous if you’re ruled by rhythm. A CD, being a digital medium is governed by a number, and like the nerds that invented it, a CD could only process what’s quantitative, something that could be reduced to a zero or one. That’s why some audiophiles remain perplexed when told that LP’s are warmer —as well they should be since warmth cannot be measured by a number. In a hilarious aside, once Mariah Carey had tape hiss inserted into her songs, presumably to recapture something that even she knew had been lost. The thing about LP warmth is that it doesn’t come from the music so much as the listener. For me it works this way: I’ll forgive things on an LP that I would never let slide on a CD. So much so that I could be astounded by Tears For Fear’s Songs for the Big Chair, a personal favourite, but hardly a great record. There I was rocking and shaking and dancing (OK maybe not) to Shout, Everybody wants to rule the world and my personal favourite, The Working Hour.

Maybe it’s nostalgia. Memory has a way coming with a sugarcoat already built in, and maybe the record really wasn’t as good as my memory of it. A while there is some merit to that point, it’s not enough; after all I could have just whipped out the CD. It was the hiss before the music started, the feel of that big jacket in my hands, the feeling that I needed to stay put and hear all of it. The way in which sound seemed to travel around the room, spinning, twirling and bursting. And something else that I cannot describe but I know is there. I had not experienced it since my last LP, bought in 1989, Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation.

Among its many atrocities, the single worst crime of the CD was that it made albums longer. Nowadays perfectly fine 35 minute LPs, have become bloated and tedious 70 minute CD’s. The CD has actually taken us back to a pre Beatles era where an album was nothing more than a few hit singles padded with filler. Today’s generation certainly think so and they have the choice to just buy the songs they like on I-Tunes. The double album has fared worse, ruined by the double CD. There was a time when the double album was a major statement. Either the artist was taking stock of all that he had accomplished before (Sign O’ The Times) or he needed a canvas wide enough to blast into new territory (1999), or both. But the double CD is nothing more than a clearing house for the artist’s appalling hubris. Look no further than the Smashing Pumpkins, Notorious BIG and Wu Tang Clan to see records that should have been one third their lengths. Even Prince, once a master of the extra long player, blew his load with the triple CD, Emancipation, a record distinguishable only by its lack of a single good song. And yet people still wonder why downloads killed the album.

Back at Casey’s house this record player was reminding me of what an album sounded like. I found myself missing the smell of vinyl. Wearing out and replacing needles. I found myself even missing the simple act of turning a record over. Some lazy listeners quite like never having to get up once the music starts playing, but I missed playing a part in the hearing of my own sound. What’s more, in the past, musicians used to construct albums for the pause, with the record gaining gravitas between flips. That silence was important as well. You’d be surprised at how much difference it makes; one to ten minutes of silence between Led Zep’s Stairway to Heaven and Misty Mountain Hop. Or Purple Rain’s Darlin Niki and When Doves Cry. Last week I listened to Bruce Springsteen’s Darkness on the Edge of Town and waited a full half hour between sides, just drunk on all that side one meant and allowing this most storytelling of lyricists to construct novellas in my head. No it’s not the same as putting a cd on pause. I remember waiting 20 minutes between side one and side two of Sergeant Pepper just because I was amazed and bewildered (in a good way) by side one. I wasn’t just savouring the sound that went, but also the absence of it. It’s a lost art, the construction of a good record side, and rock and roll has been the all the worse for it. You’re supposed to pause after True Blue’s Live to Tell or Woodface’s Four Seasons In One Day or even, Caught Can I Get A Witness, the side one closer on It Takes A Nation of Million To Hold Us Back, a record that gains in power by being split in half.

So in the past weeks I’ve bought records that I would never have tolerated on CD but now worship on LP. Rolling Stone’s Tattoo You. Duran Duran’s Rio. I’ve also bought records that simply never sounded and will never sound good on CD; Led Zep’s IV, The Band’s eponymous second album, Springsteen’s The River, and Wild Innocent and E-Street Shuffle, Black Sabbath’s Volume 4, but also recent stuff like the new Portishead, which seems engineered for the LP format. Maybe the real reason I went to back to LP’s is that I missed active sound. I miss the fetish of a large LP jacket and walking around with it. I miss music being foreground with activity surrounding it, rather than vice versa. And I miss the crackle and pop, the slight hiss, before sound explodes and all heaven breaks loose.

I'm Too Old To Rock And Roll

2008-04-25T05:27:00.006-05:00

What’s really weird is that nobody thinks I’m old but me. Or maybe that’s wishful thinking and I’ve become one of those people that young people feel the need to reassure with “but that’s not old,” either out of pity or terror that one day they too shall become me. Maybe they think I’m pretty cool for 37, and while its great that some people think I’m still cool, I’m not one of them. And I couldn’t be happier.

In the middle of celebrating my 32nd birthday I realized that I was actually 31. This was devastating in a way that perplexed pretty much everybody I knew, who would have thanked whatever they prayed to for an extra year. Well maybe if I told them, that is. The truth is, I was always in a rush to get old, largely of course because I thought that when I got older things simply had to get better than this. It did, but it also got worse too, now that I was responsible for everything. I’ve never understood this obsession with youth, this denial of aging, the most inevitable thing that can happen to you. Youth may be wasted on the young, but fear and nostalgia is wasted on the old. I’ve never understood men and women who lie about their age, as if anybody believes they are 27 when they say it. For one, no woman who is 27 feels the need to declare her age. When someone says so, we already know she is lying.

I’m 37 and have begun to relish in my uncoolness. I love that I was the last generation to dial a phone number. To use the word “irony” properly. Just minute ago I was on Facebook looking at the 667 strong “Petition for a Real Rock Band to Come to Jamaica” Group and realized that I do not want to become a member. One of the reasons of course was that they were bringing some group called Paramore, a band I’ve never heard of nor wish to know. I couldn’t relate and far from being depressed, I was relieved. My friend Brian goes batshit over Breaking Benjamin, Seether, Incubus and all these bands that I once called the sensitive side of asshole rock, but I couldn’t care less if a plane crash brought them down. And I even know the lead singer of Breaking Benjamin’s Dad. I knew I was leaving the rock scene when I realized that Jamaican rockers would rather take cues from Bush taking cues from Nirvana taking cues from The Pixies and when Gas Money, one of Jamaican rock’s brightest hopes played Alterbridge in concert, a move tantamount to playing Journey then calling yourself a bad motherfucker.

I’ve become the very curmudgeon I dreaded becoming when I was their age. Just as how my brother rued the day when Gangsta and Native tongues, usurped B-Boy era hip-hop, I find myself becoming a sarcastic Rolling Stone critic, who in my day bitched that Duran Duran was no Roxy Music. Nowadays I say the Maroon Five is no Duran Duran. It’s not just that I feel my music is better, but I’m at the age where I not only know, but also no longer have to prove it. If you grew up in the eighties than you’re the last for whom rock and roll was an active experience. Maybe it was because we got so little of it back then, but rock and roll was a dirty secret especially after high schools made us watch that Rock and Roll is devil music documentary, “Highway to Hell,” a program that rather casually suggested that every black created music form was actually hatched by the devil. Kids today may bristle at me saying that they are passive, but I’m not sure they know how to listen to an album anymore that I’m sure that only Radiohead knows how to make one. Nick Drake's Things Behind the Sun, reduces me to tears nearly every time I hear it but I don't know if music ever does that to young people. Everything I hated about myself before I heard David Bowie, the Smiths and The Cure became everything I loved after, but I don't know even though I really hope that a legion of misfit teenagers are having mini-epihanies in their bedrooms as I write this. But who are they listening to? I realize that this paragraph confirms that I’ve become exactly the person I hated talking to when I was young but that’s cool with me. I’ve even gone back to vinyl, but that’s another blog.

Two years back, the records I was most excited about where the Stooges and Funkadelic Reissues. This year it’s The Replacements and Mission of Burma. Only two weeks ago I saw X in concert and nearly wet myself. Love’s Forever Changes just came out (again) and both Madonna and Duran Duran recently dipped into the Timberland/Timberlake pool only to come out smelling funny. And old. Madonna is now old enough to have given birth to Justin Timberlake.

I saw this coming a mile off, way back when I was 19 and my friend Damon lent me Sergeant Pepper. I pretty much confirmed it when I realized that not only had I fallen out of love with hip-hop but that I was supposed to. Hip-hop is a music of perpetual adolescence and pretty much everybody I know who still swear by it are people who for want of a nicer term, refuse to grow up. Russell Simmons showing up at a formal dinner in trainers doesn’t say badass, it says immature. Even Dr. Dre knows that there are certain things that he simply cannot do anymore.

That’s not to say I don’t listen to contemporary music. I think Mastodon is the greatest band on the planet. The new Earth album can move both planets and bowels at the same time (a good thing). MIA and Santogold have made the world’s streets far more interesting and as soon as Beth Ditto gets her shit together, she will out-madge, Madonna without losing a single pound to do so. And Robyn’s back. But I’d rather think about 1984 when I first bought Purple Rain and played it so much that my parents could recite the lyrics. Or the first time I heard Pixies screaming Wave of Mutilation and started screaming too. Or the first time I heard Sweet Chile O’ Mine, part of it anyway, right after Hurricane Gilbert pulled a Hiroshima on us, with the band muttering Where do we go? Where do we go now? Or the first time I heard The Cult’s Love Removal Machine in a dance club. Or when the Cure pulled me under deep blue with Disintegration. Or when Steve got that shitty video of Ministry playing So What. Or the time that same Steve gave me a cassette of Fishbone on one side, Bad Brains on the other and changed my life. Or driving to The Wanderer with Steve (again? WTF!) in October 1991 when he first played me this little band that we loved instantly but didn’t think would go very far. Nirvana they were called. Or remembering where I was when Kurt died. Yeah, I’d rather look backwards than forward, but I’m now at the age where I’d rather gaze at what I never left behind than hold out for what’s coming. Some would like to wait and see, but I'd much rather see and wait. Otherwise I’d be the post 35 year old either playing or screaming at a rock concert, willfully ignoring that some of the people in the audience are my friend’s kids. I always thought that the 40 year old at the nightclub was the most pathetic person in the room. I’m just glad that I checked out before I became him. Youth is for the young after all, and Tom Waits is for me. Just look at him. Was there ever a time when he wasn’t old?

Abbot and Costello, Tom and Jerry, Sport and Politics

2008-04-09T08:35:00.011-05:00

If nothing else, this year’s Olympics will not be boring. The torch relay has been both triumph and disaster in equal measure—but its in answering whose triumph and whose disaster that the question itself gets muddled. So as I write this, Gavin Newsom, perhaps America’s most liberal mayor has organized a security detail that would make a pre-unification East Berlin envious. This must be the first torch relay to have state and federal agencies patrolling the route, with an FBI agent specifically to guard Natalie Coughlin, the five-time Olympic medal swimmer. Visually at least, it will be exactly what it is, a Chinese Olympics: creativity in the midst of a harsh security wall to keep the people out, yet acting as if it’s for the people. Those who fear that the world is being remade in China’s image need look no further than of all places, San Francisco.

I hope the freaks come out in numbers. It’s been a curious time for the Chinese government, stunned and often hit off guard when protesters not only become vocal, but vocal without consequence. If you know nothing about the lives of writers, you may not think anybody is paying for this Olympics with their freedom, but take a look at PEN America’s website and you’ll see the parade of writers who have been detained and imprisoned since this Olympic campaign began in earnest, a crackdown that may not be a literary kristallnact, but is certainly as close to that allusion as one could expect. Many of these writers have not been locked up for any actual writing (yes, some people are still imprisoned for their words) but what they might write. It’s the Philip K. Dick present that the film, Minority Report mistakenly grasped as future. Future murderers may still have it free, but writers have been imprisoned what they might write for centuries now.

That’s because Science fiction has always been about the present. What has also always been with us is the marriage of sports and politics. The repeated calls on both sides of the Chinese political wall to keep politics out of sport smells of both moral hypocrisy and an ignorance of history. There has never been a time when sports have not been political. Anyone who thinks the 1936 Olympics wasn’t a political gesture has no grasp of politics or the Olympics. What about USA’s boycott of 1980? Mexico 68? The USSR’s boycott of 1984? Romania’s decision to ignore the 1984 boycott? Humanitarianism is itself an act of enormous political significance. What’s especially galling about the keep politics out of sport brigade is that they have no problem attaching political significance to an event post Olympics, such as taking some credit for Jesse Owens’ dazzling Olympics run, as if that played some part in the struggle for civil rights. Of far greater significance is that Owens had to race against horses to put food on the table and was charged with tax evasion.

Maybe you can afford to keep politics out of sport but we can’t. Too much is at stake, too many people are watching and too often, people do not change unless the world begins to see. A child abuser is less likely to abuse if nobody leaves him or her alone with child. So far, the Chinese government has tried the usual tactics—hide everybody from view before people start to miss their absence, but that did not work this time. Then there is the potential bloodbath of Tibet, carried about by a government not used to dissent and bewildered by being thrust on an international stage that they cannot control and having to justify their actions— even as they claim that they do not have to justify themselves to anybody. Suddenly, the idea of being true to the sport at the expense of politics has become as ridiculous as it always was, the last retort of politicians and businessmen with a stake in the outcome. By attending the opening and closing ceremonies, Gordon Brown and others are agreeing in public to go along with a sham, admiring the view from the ship’s deck and ignoring the horror of slaves below. They insult us all by remind us that this is ultimately about money and power, not the human spirit or the Olympic Ideal. That is as political an act as any protest.

What does it say about us that we are willing to put human rights on hold just so we can have something to watch on TV for two weeks? What do athletes say by deliberately blinkering themselves, ignoring what they are going into, as if it’s somehow nobler to represent some athletic ideal in a regime dedicated to crushing the human spirit? If you ignore what China is doing in Tibet aren’t you in some way responsible? Some people will support human rights in ‘spirit’ and yet see no moral dilemma in spending money at these games, money that may very well buy better weapons to do a better job on Tibet. When good people do nothing blood is on their hands.

I support these protests, I support free speech, I support Mia Farrow’s campaign and I support embarrassing people into change when nothing else will. You may think humiliating people into change does the opposite, but if you're reading this, chances are you're not the one suffering. You can stay on the sidelines or tell yourself that politics should not be in sports until it becomes a mantra, but if people die while we do nothing it’s partially our fault. I won’t be joining you for beers on your couch, thanks for asking. Because when the oppressors come for me, and one day they might, you’ll be the same person saying sorry man, I just want to watch the game.

The Miss Jamaica Mulatto Factory

2008-03-21T17:42:00.001-05:00

I’ll be the first to admit that a beauty contest is a pretty easy target. The bane of feminists, scholars, spunky girls, intelligent girls, hard achieving women, unpretty women and just about anybody aware that this is the 21st century, beauty contests have been around longer than them all and will be around presumably long after. That doesn’t grant them respect, but one does come away with a certain grudging admiration. It seems even foolish now to be appalled when a beauty queen conforms to stereotype—who expects a contestant to have a view on Marcus Garvey or Michel Foucault when the whole world needs to adopt a puppy? What beauty contests say about women is still an open and now tired debate, but what it says about race, particularly in a country like Jamaica is still up for grabs.

This is Facebook’s fault. Only this week somebody who shall remain nameless sent me a message, recruiting me on a campaign for (I can’t remember her name) to win Miss Jamaica. The winning Miss Jamaica would then represent the country at Miss World, where as you may not know ‘beauty’ comes ‘with a purpose.’ I took one look at the girl and remembered a remark I made in a review of Thomas Glave’s last book where I brought up the oh no he di-int specter of what I like to call Consensual Eugenics.

Consensual Eugenics. Post WW2, Nazis flocked incognito to the tropics; for anonymity to be sure, but you have to wonder if they had not marveled at what we’ve been doing for centuries in the Caribbean, without the help of a good old kristalnacht to spur us. The transmogrification from one race to another. Many white Jamaicans would be stunned, for instance to discover that they are actually black. This is neither new nor unique to Jamaica. Mr. Black man has sex with lighter black woman (or white woman if he hits a bonanza!) to produce brown child, or mulatto. Said brown child has sex with slightly browner woman (or whitey) to produce Quadroon. Said Quadroon has sex with other Quadroon (or whitey) to produce Octoroon. Said Octoroon, who can now pass, has sex with white woman to produce full free—er, white. This sounds like ancient history but black men and women are doing it right now or making plans in an office cubicle near you. I’ll never forget my shock when a former co-worker came back from the hospital blushing with pride that his bred a child that looked like his brown wife and not him. This from a graduate of a tertiary institution.

Consensual Eugenics however should not be mistaken for jungle fever. That is a matter of the heart or loins, both of which demand some form of heat. Nor is to be mistaken for genuine blind love. The least interesting thing about interracial couples is their race and they would be the first to tell you. But its the others, the ones who know what they are doing that bowl you over, mostly because sometimes I wonder if they have a point. We haven’t had a dark skin Miss Jamaica for some time now.

But aren’t light-skinned Negroes people too? Even a white Jamaican has a right to enter a beauty contest, even to win it, but the endless parade of different models of the same insipid mulatto female archetype has me wondering if these women are born at all, but engineered on some breeder assembly line hiding out in Vernam Field. Some may think my objection is racial. Some of these very women will quite proudly tell you that they are black, and our doubting them says far more about us that it does about them. The very distinction of “brown” says more about the person using the term than the person whom the term is being used. It’s not the race of these women that makes them so objectionable, but the blandness of them, the monolithic sameness of the brood that trots of 18 versions of the same model year after year. Lisa Hanna, a beauty queen of rare intelligence was a striking break from the norm (well sorta, being Indian...ish) but she has quickly become the exception that proves the rule, despite her being the last to actually win the Miss World crown. The very next year all contests went back to normal, popping another generic mulatta out the beauty poop chute, as if uptown high schools sold them by the bushel. It says something, though I’m not sure what, that the type of woman that won a beauty contest in 1979, looks absolutely no different from the type that won in 2007.

Then again, dumb beauty queens are one the great guilty pleasures of civilization. And the dim ones are far more preferable to the driven ones, frightening in their self-determination to win contests, dust out rivals, snag a politician as husband or breeder, and go to work in the biblical sense. Beauty contests even provide sorely needed temporary employment, after all, there are only so many flight attendants, receptionists and entertainment coordinator positions available in one small island and not every woman knows how to be a good beard. One wonders what happens to these women afterwards. Some go on to enter contest after contest, making hay while the jaw lines hold. But what about the others? I think the beauty queen mulatto factory rounds them all up at gunpoint, takes them to a ‘camp’ run by a leading cosmetics company and then shred them to pieces in a Garbage disposal. Then, ever environmentally conscious these women are recycled and reshaped into a brand new model. A new model same as the old model, mind you.

Five Songs I Must Have On My I-Pod

2008-03-13T08:12:00.006-05:00

Geoffrey tagged me with this one. Strangely enough, it’s easier to write a 1500 word screed against homophobia. This would be the perfect time to get on my soapbox on how I-tunes and the I-pod have ruined the album experience. I just went back to vinyl—pretentious, I know, but you won't think so when you remember how accommodating vinyl could be. Just last month I listened to Tears for Fear's Song From the Big Chair, amazed at the stuff I forgave on LP that I would never tolerate on CD. But back to the topic. As I said this stumped me for a good while (OK 10 Minutes) until I realized that maybe the I-pod should tell her own story. I plugged the thing into I-tunes, searched under 'play count' and stumbled upon these, the five songs I play the most. Right now anyway. I eliminated those played under special circumstances, like jogging or the gym in favour of those played simply because I cannot bear to be apart from them too long (Sorry Justice, whose "Stress" I've played 33 times.)

1. "No, No, No," by Yeah Yeah Yeahs. (42 times)

I swear to God that I did not make this up. This must be one of those stylistic coincidences that makes even God go all goosepimply. Or maybe my I-pod has a wickeder sense of irony than I do. Coming from Yeah Yeah Yeah's bananas debut Fever To Tell, No No No attacked quiet-loud as if Smells like Teen Spirit's chorus was just a semi-forgotten after thought. And the dub coda at the end sent this most earthy of punk songs into the stratosphere of white-people ganja haze. I would quote lyrics, but when the chorus for one song goes uh huh/uh huh/ uh huh/uh huh-ow! and the other goes uh-uh/ awooowooo! lyrics are beside the point.

2."All I Need," by Radiohead (38 Times)

I'm into schadenfreud as much as the next person. So half of the joy of this song is knowing that Coldplay are right now stupefied with the task of trying to rip it off. All I Need must have them at a strange impasse —a band that more than any other, benefited from Radiohead's curious season of not wanting to be Radiohead anymore. But enough about them. I've remarked on this before, of Radiohead's stunning descent/rise into sheer loveliness, but this is a luminous wonder, startling even by their own stiff standards. It's even sexy, which is perhaps the greatest surprise of all. Like No No No, All I need shoots up in the end, but for them it's a not a dubwise no mans land but a glorious crescendo, like a carnival of bursting lights.

3."Emily," by Joanna Newsom (32 Times)

Let me tell you a story about Nick Drake. Years ago, Mystic Urchin, back when he was pretending to work at Island (ha!) gave me Nick Drake's compilation, Way To Blue. I had no idea who he was except for a review in an old issue of Spin and was expecting at the least something like Paul Weller. Way To Blue went into CD in my changer in 1993 and stayed there until 1997—and only because the laser went bad. I say this because Newsom is a similar spellbinder, whose acoustic beginnings hint barely at the universe of sound yet to come. Lazy critics call her medieval Bjork and there is some merit to that. But there is so much more as well. Emily is a 12-minute masterpiece that starts with gentle harp but ends in the thunderous full tilt of an orchestra. The lyrics itself are similarly arcane, expansive and not a little comic book geeky: "The meteoroid/is a stone that's devoid/of the fire/that brought it to thee/" Yes she said thee. It's that kind of song. And If you're stuck on a desert island you'll be glad for such flights of fancy.

4. “Spanish Joint,” by D’Angelo (28 Times)

What can I say—I’m as surprised as you are. This is not even my favourite D’Angelo song. But I remember skipping to it on the subway, thinking perhaps that a gentle latin-esque showstopper with horns was as far away from subway grit as one could get on 45th street. Or maybe it’s the aural equivalent of sunshine. I’m not sure. Either way, I play this an awful lot.

5. “Like Cockatoos,” by The Cure. (20 times—so far)

Had you asked me ten years ago which song do I play the most on my Walkman, Like Cockatoos would come out on top, despite fierce competition from Prince’s Crystal Ball (Which come to think of it makes more sense on a desert island since it takes near forever). Happily or sadly, technology hasn’t change my habits much still I still listen to this song way too much. I’m not sure why either. I would never call it the finest Cure song or even the finest song on that album (Kiss Me Kiss me Kiss Me), but Like cockatoos has this strange transfixing power over me, swirly, even psychedelic as if I had taken the very best drugs. Or maybe it’s the woozy bass. Or maybe it’s the way the strings come in at the end —I seem to have a thing for orchestral crescendos. Maybe some things should stay a mystery. Maybe If I find out why I listen to it so much I just might stop.

The Invention of Homophobia.

2008-03-07T13:16:00.010-05:00

Two days ago I was in the men’s locker room at this gym in St. Paul. Americans have totally different ideas when it comes to locker room exposure and being a quick adapter to change, I had no problem doing as the Romans do. In the shower amid several buck naked white men were two black guys laughing, joking and showering with bar soap. That they were the only ones showering in boxer shorts should have been a dead giveaway that they were Jamaican. There was also the accent of course, but in a city like St. Paul one gets so hungry for a Jamaican accent that an Antiguan could just as easily pass. But I knew beyond any doubt that they were Jamaican because they were doing one of the Jamdown man’s favourite pastimes: Convincing the world that he’s straight.

Yeah man when me fuck 'ar she jus' awwww and ohhhh and eeeeeh and IEEE-I-I-I-! said stud number one. Not to be outdone, stud number two went on about how even as he was knee deep in pussy, felt a burning sensation and had to go to the doctor because the girl gave him the clap. Of course he punished her with another good and proper screwing. Leave it to people like us to assume that the only way to get rid of a sexually transmitted disease is to fuck it out. With showers spraying, other men talking and loud music playing over the speakers it would have been hard to hear anybody, but those two came out loud and clear. As was something else not said but made plain. WE fuck pussy you faggots, so stay away from us.

Jamaica’s homophobia is so acute, so unlike gay-hate anywhere else that it would have been funny were it not for the odd murder or lynching. It seethes in the rumours of the powerless about the powerful, but it also explodes far too frequently with a brutality that begs for the reintroduction of terms not seen since before political correctness: blood lust and savagery; with murder gangs operating like a Klu Klux Klan fighting for the right to preserve the unfucked anus. If you were to look for corresponding models one would have to go to the most repressive of Middle Eastern states to find a parallel. Last week, after Jamaica cop Michael Hayden’s very brave and very public coming out, death threats started flying and Hayden, who at one point seemed ready to take the hit that the rest of the community dodged, finally realized that he was no match for countrywide hatred and the blind eye of authority.

What’s at the crux of such bigotry? Homophobia’s most frequent victims aren’t necessarily homosexuals either, but anyone who in voice, manner or even profession deviates from a relentless maintained masculine archetype. Our homophobia can be so extreme that a man who has only one woman is suspect. And there in lies the subtext, that our Homophobia is not really homophobia at all but a crisis in manliness.

Truth be told, we produce many males but our country hasn’t really produced a man yet. How can we, with so many still fatherless? In an environment consistently robbed of a father figure, we allow manliness to be defined by other things, music for one, where heterosexuality is dragged to such ridiculous extremes that one wonder how these men’s penises don’t fall off from overuse. Our homophobia, chauvinism and promiscuity all come from the same place, that puzzling unanswered question of what it means to be male. We don’t have fathers to answer our questions so we take lessons from Bounty Killer.

It’s not gayness that's in crisis but straightness. Heterosexuality is relentlessly policed day after day because what was straight today may be gay tomorrow. The straight identity perceives itself as so under threat that it needs to be reinforced every day by chauvinism and promiscuity. So infamous Don-Man, Zeeks, in response to assertions that he was gay, provided his many bastard children as proof that he only bangs the ladies. Not long ago, Bounty Killer, never one to hide his hate, found himself on the defensive for appearing in a No Doubt video where the frequently naked drummer got naked again. This of course took homophobia into the realm of the ridiculous, but nonetheless it was a controversy that raged on for weeks. Only a few years back Beenie Man nearly had his hetero pass revoked because of poor grammar. “How can I make love to a fella/ In a rush? Pass me the keys…” was looked upon by some as a confession of love sessions with the dudes until English teachers everywhere reminded everyone the difference between a comma and a fullstop. All this despite the song having a roll call of conquests matched only by the most virile rabbit.

In this heterosexual crisis women are as much a threat. So even now despite the fact that women are more educated than men, most men (and quite a few women) work towards the day when the woman doesn’t “have” to work, because as we all know women couldn’t possibly enjoy a career. But more than that, the capable woman challenges the identity and place of the man, leaving him with nothing more than phallic certainty. So right along with the kill batty-boy tune, is the Gal in a bungle tune. Boasts of sexual prowess is nothing new to music and is certainly not endemic to any one culture, but it’s the nature of ours, the depersonalizing, the grouping of women like cattle or spare parts, the violent ‘tear it out wide and kill it with stab’ imagery that makes ours special. With it lies implicit the fight to be the man that nobody has defined the Jamaican male to be. The homosexual, or rather the effeminate man of course confounds this.

Homophobia also rages because good people do nothing. The church, never shy to fan a homophobia flame when it needs to get fornicators to go to church, nonetheless turns a blind eye to acts of violence, fearing one supposes that support would mean consent. This is understandable of course, but it is also backward logic which has no place in the 21st century. One cannot turn a blind eye when people who aren’t the least bit religious, trot out the bible excuse; fornicators calling sodomites sinners as if they aren’t all going to the same hell—if you believe in such a thing. Homosexuality is a sin, according the wildly corrupted King James Bible that I read, but then it also calls for the death of all who eat shellfish, which raises some interesting questions about Crab Night.

Such hatred in unacceptable in any place that claims to be a member of western civilization. Annie Paul is right about foreigners coming into a country to condemn their atrocities when they are in truth redefining cultural superiority in another effort to show how better than us they are. But she is also right that this does not let hatred off the hook. Nor does it hide that we are on the verge of becoming an international concern and a genuine human rights crisis. I for one have very little tolerance for homophobes. If that person is you, feel free to stay away from my blog. Come to think of it, you can fuck right off.

The Obama Question We're Afraid to Ask

2008-02-24T09:57:00.009-05:00

It took the media long enough. Last friday I was looking at my screen saver, a program that flashes recent news headlines and there it appeared: a headline that made me almost fall out of my chair. Time magazine had finally gone there—asked the unaskable. Or rather they raised the fact that the question was being asked. The often thought but never uttered question. We asked it of Jesse Jackson and Colin Powell, we've even enteratained it about Condoleeza Rice. The one question about Obama that dares not speak its name in polite public discourse. If you're black you know what I'm talking about, even if you wouldn't write a blog about it. If you're white, you probably know that we're asking the question, but what you don't know is that we've been asking it from two years ago. And not just about Obama, but Harold Ford as well.

How long will it be before they try to kill him?

There. I've said it. It's been said.

And if you're black and have never thought of this question you're lying. Martin Luther King was to many Americans too much of an Icarus waiting to happen. In hindsight, the only thing shocking about his assassination was how inevitable it now seems; how likely—as if the American extremist element, like the Taliban or Al Qaeda would stomach much longer a black man impacting popular consciousness. Obama, on paper at least stands for something even more outrageous, a possibility, and a real one that someday is today and we may have really overcome. If that's a fairy tale for many blacks, it's downright heresy for some whites, white who are so happy that they can remedy that situation with a steady aim and quick trip to Walmart.

Can we discuss this in the open? Our very real fear that Obama, even if he wins will certainly not be permitted to win, unless he already has a full body kevlar suit? Not insignificant is the fact that Obama was given full secret service security since May 3, the earliest ever given to a presidential candidate. In fact the size of his security comes close to that of an actual president. That notwithstanding, haven't we been here before? Swayed by the hope of change or at least newness only to have it shot in the head from a Texas roof or in the middle of a hotel ballroom, a one note act that leads back to the Status Quo. Ask someone who was a teenager when Kennedy was shot and listen for the silences in his answer; the sigh that never stops, the sense that something truly immense was lost that day and lost in an instant, even if they cannot articulate what it was.

I think it was hope in its purest form. Hope at its best makes no sense. Like faith, it is evidence of things unseen, which is why it can be fearful and exhilarating at once. Hope is not quantifiable, which is why a Hilary Clinton neither understands it nor takes it seriously. Will the type of person who still thinks Bush was right about Iraq sit by while America votes for a candidate named Barrack Hussein Obama?

It's not that Obama threatens to be another MLK. That tactic didn't work for Jesse Jackson. It far worse than that. It's that he threatens to be another JFK. It's stunning to hear people talk about a man in a way that you can only see in newsreels of 1962. Barrack Obama is without question the finest public speaker running for office since Kennedy. Barrack and Michelle are certainly the most glamorous couple since Jack and Jackie, and Michelle has made it quite clear that she's nobody's fool. An Obama white house would be an era not seen since the early sixties when daring to dream must have felt like embracing a secret taboo, something that you had to take on with a poker face, not to reveal how much you heart was dancing at the sheer prospect of newness. Freshness.

Clinton, the poor man's Jack saw this of course and patronized the man for 'giving a good speech.' That's cute-speak for, 'he certainly knows how to inspire,' something that Hilary Clinton could never do, even with written instructions. Are we ready for this? A president who with one speech can make you work harder, go farther and do more? A president that encourages you to own yourself and take charge of your own future? A president so new in spirit at least that he'll most like piss off republicans and democrats? A president who might just think twice before taking the easy road of partisan politics?

Nope, I didn't think so either. Every RFK gets the Sirhan Sirhan he doesn't deserve. And even if you've never said it, you've thought about it. We'd like to think this is a new America and things like that will never happen again, but I remember not long ago seeing a photo of a lynching on display at America's Black Holocaust Museum in Wisconsin. Same as usual— the black human body desecrated and transfigured into something animal, like a goat being strung up to be butchered. Lynching photos have an awful uniformity, the neck squeezed like a tied balloon and the shoulders sunk low as if both blades were broken. But as horrifying as the picture was, it was also reassuring because of our association of lynching with the past.

Reassuring at least until you looked at his feet and saw brand new Converse sneakers.

Book Number 2: Pride and Prejudice

2008-02-19T21:26:00.005-05:00

I have not yet seen the film version of Atonement. I don’t really plan to, largely because of what the director did with Pride and Prejudice a few years back. Granted, after a TV miniseries so brilliant that there were moments that stood neck and neck with the original novel, one could argue that the only way left to go was down. The film wasn’t a nadir exactly, but it left one wondering why the director killed plausibility by turning Elizabeth into a babe, and Darcy into Heathcliff. But it made me read the novel again and I’m always looking for reasons to re-read Pride and Prejudice. Fine, I will give that Emma is her most perfectly realized novel, Mansfield Park her most public, Sense and Sensibility, her wittiest and Northanger Abbey her kinkiest. But Pride and Prejudice still resonates the most with me because each time I open the book, it’s a different novel.

This time I found myself coming into a new understanding, if not total affection for the least likeable characters, largely because of something that was always present in the novel but that I had not noticed before. Whatever your opinion of the shrieking harpy, Mrs. Bennett, the money hungry yet intellectually bankrupt, Mr. Collins, the sadly cynical best friend Charlotte or the imperial Lady Catherine de Bourgh, they all possess one thing lost on the far more appealing characters. They are the only characters thoroughly aware of the era in which they are living. The closest any main character comes to such wisdom is rude-phase not romantic-phase Darcy.

It turns that even those of us who praise Jane Austen profusely still have loads to learn. For a novel so steadfast in the belief in having it all, great love and loads of money (hello, chick flick) The novel is also blessed with a deep understanding of the real machinations of society, and the economics of love, marriage and sex, so much so that these characters serve to remind us that for the rest of the world things are not so simple, if ever they were.

Take for instance Mrs. Bennett. Very early on in the novel, Austen makes a striking character assessment of her, a technique that would have been condemned in 20th century fiction as “telling.”

Mr. Bennett was so odd a mixture of quick parts, sarcastic humour, reserve, and caprice, that the experience of three and twenty years had been insufficient to make his wife understand his character. Her mind was less difficult to develop. She was a woman of mean understanding, little information, and uncertain temper. When she was discontented, she fancied herself nervous. The business of her life was to get her daughters married; its solace was visiting and news.

No reader in the 19th century would have dismissed Mrs. Bennett as shallow and callous from that sentence, in fact they would have congratulated her for being the only Bennett with her head on straight. The fact is this was a woman saddled with five daughters. Think about that for a second; the paragraph will still be here when you get back. Five daughters, two of which were nigh passing the age of desirability. What’s more, Mr. Collins, the sanctimonious kiss-ass who stood to inherit their estate had made no bones about leaving them to starve should none of the sisters marry him. You can congratulate your smug self that Mr. Bennett so wittily told Elizabeth not to marry Collins, but he had also condemned five women to a life of the destitute and seemed to be quite pleased with himself about the matter. Mrs. Bennett has every right to shriek and scream; the man had in a way destroyed his own children. Mrs. Bennett is not dead set on a wedding because he enjoys wedding cake. She’s thinking about the survival of her children, something Mr. Bennett doesn’t pay much attention to until his loosely run house allows one of his daughters to cut loose.

The same is true for Mr. Collins, reptilian as he may be. A man lucky enough to be blessed with inheritance is not about to squander it taking care of five spinsters, none of whom plans to give him any hand in marriage (or sex if you want to get post modern) in the bargain. Charlotte disappoints Elizabeth when she marries Collins and seems to get her punishment with a life of unhappiness, but again credit Austen with some sense and sensibility. She neither condemns nor condones the marriage, but does make it clear that for a plain, poor woman like Charlotte a fate like hers was an extremely lucky one. Had Austen written a novel that had put forth the Elizabeth-Darcy model as the only legitimate male female relationship, it would have joined all the other bodice rippers of the time that have been forgotten. But Austen has always been keenly up to date on her own society. Something she shared, not in the romantic ideals of her great characters but in the cold practicality of her minor ones, the ones who served to remind us that while love sure is grand, even in the 19th century, it’s all about the bling.

Whatever Happened to Dionne Farris?

2008-02-13T23:31:00.007-05:00

Maybe it was only a feeding frenzy after all. It wouldn’t have been the first time. Anytime an artist sidesteps formula and hits upon a winner along comes the deluge, the signing shitstorm that starts off promising but ends up with diminished returns, Shabba Ranks leading to Snow, Pearl Jam leading to effluvia like Creed. But this movement was something else. I didn’t believe it myself. Back in the mid nineties you couldn’t throw a stone without hitting a brilliant black female musician.

The sheer number was staggering: Ambersunshower, Carleen Anderson, Jhelisa, Davina, Amil Larrieux, Sha-Key, 99, Meshell NdegeOcello, DK Dyson, Nicole Renee, Cherokee, Julie Dexter, Erykah Badu, Ndambi, Angel, Joi, Joi Cardwell, Janice Robinson, Skin, Res, Sandra St.Victor, N’Dea Davenport, Jazzyfatnastees, Kira, Des’Ree, D-Influence and Caron Wheeler. Neneh Cherry had just released Homebrew, a stunning new direction for hip-hop that showed you could be a blues-heavy world-wise funky mother of two and still wear no panties if you wish. This was the glory days of Vibe magazine under Jonathan Van Meter, where every week they seemed to dig up brand new funky thing. Like the so-called black wave of film directors (remember that NY times cover?) this wave of unclassifiable black women talked like a revolution, artists who were neither divas nor garden tools and who weren’t afraid of taking their minds to the dance floor. Dionne Farris in particular was championed by the magazine. Late of critical darlings Arrested Development and ready to take on the planet, she had even a better album than her former group.

But ten years later, Beyonce and dark-side-of-the-force clone Rihanna is as good a R&B gets. Missy Elliot, our last dependable funk-freak has become predictable, Meshell has left R&B for jazz wankery, and everybody has all but disappeared. Worse the standard for intelligent black pop has lowered considerably, excusing the hippy-dippiness of Jill Scott, the abysmal lyrics of Alicia Keys and the overbearing sentimentality of India. Arie, a woman whose lifetime channel wisdom is unleavened only by her considerable hubris.

But back then, when Dionne Farris slayed us with her first single I Know, we knew not only that revolution was coming but that it was going to start in the bedroom first. Her album, Wild Seed, Wild Flower was The Love Below of its time, with a little Prince, a little Betty Davis and a little Bill withers thrown in for good measure. Hot Southern soul that wasn’t afraid to rock out, as she did on Passion. Hell, she became the second woman (Neneh was the first) to take a Lenny Kravitz sample and come up with a better song, her blistering Stop To Think. And if that wasn’t enough she snatched her own hit single back, stripped I Know to its acoustic core and let it loose in the Mississippi Delta. Wild Seed, Wildflower was a near perfect album, inexplicable as it was irresistible. Farris and black female artists in general seemed on the verge of making a major statement. Then she disappeared. Fourteen years later “I’m not my hair” is as profound as some black women get. What happened?

And attack of the black, that’s what.

Not long after Wild Seed, Wild Flower, Farris, along with co-writer Van Hunt (criminally underrated, but that’s another blog) contributed a song to the Love Jones soundtrack, Hopeless, a single whose fortune was anything but. The record became an R&B smash. Still warm and gorgeous now nearly ten years since it first came out Hopeless also sealed Dionne Farris’s fate. Suddenly the powers that were sought to make an R&B diva out of her. Give us more of this they “asked.” And throw in some ghetto love, baby mama drama, some tracks we can play on BET Midnight Love, and something with a big ole space so we put Biggie Smalls smack in the middle of it. By the way, ditch the guitar, only lesbians play guitar. Okay maybe they didn’t say any of that. Instead they did much worse. Farris refused to compromise and asked to be let out of her contract. She went home, raised her kids, picked up carpentry and vanished. Some of her fans even believed she was dead.

Synchronicity can be a bitch, of course, for it seems a similar fate happened to the whole wave of black women who rose up around the same time. Nicole Renee is still MIA, presumably without a record deal, a shame for a woman who sounded like Prince and looked like Sheila E. Joi got picked up and ditched again, despite committing no sin other than making the female Stankonia. Twice. Meshell traded pop for jazz, but confused elliptical with boring. Sandra St. Victor took so long to rise that her music suffered from datedness. The list goes on and it only gets more depressing. Then you have the tragic case of diminished returns. Women like Alicia Keys, Arie and Scott being praised not for what they are (clichéd musicians and terrible lyricists) but what they're not, another round of producer controlled bimbos. Ironically, Janet Jackson for all her flaws has still delivered more gut truths than all these "artistes" combined. Not one of these women or anybody else in neo-soul for that matter has contributed a single new idea to music. Erykah Badu has, but she's a hip-hop artist who's been fooling herself.

Thankfully that’s not the final story. Erykah Badu’s “Healer” has sparked an online sensation not seen since, well “On and On” and word is her new album, New Amerykah, is the masterpiece she almost made with Worldwide Underground (criminally underrated, but that’s another blog). Best of all, Dionne Farris is finally back with a new album this year. The title? Signs of Life.

Book Number 1: The Brief Life Of Oscar Wao

2008-02-03T21:35:00.000-05:00

Junot Diaz should hire me as his publicist. People left my forum at AWP either convinced or not a little disturbed by my proclaiming that the Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao may very well be the first true twenty-first century novel. It's not the first novel to celebrate its own post modern geekiness or to revel in its polyglot intensity ( Gautam Malkani's Londonstani achieved pretty much the same thing), but it is certainly the first novel in decades to point to a direction that fiction from the diaspora can and maybe should go. I wrote a humongous article on this already for the Caribbean Review of books and have no desire to repeat myself, but I really think that Diaz found a way to back flip to the past, leap frog into the future with only passing references to the present. And whenever that happened the present in usually what's being said on the street right now, not a liberal pseudo-hip re-imagining of ghetto speak, but real urban language.

And when the novel isn't talking loudly (which is 80% of the time) it literally sings. Or raps. Or beatboxes. Or toasts. Or spits wicked Spanglish without translation. It took twenty two years for English speaking people to give us the first true twentieth century novel, but now that we have a candidate a mere eight years in, could literature's prospects be finally looking up?

Send in Negro Number Two

2008-01-14T19:33:00.000-05:00

Whether you support Hilary Clinton or not (and I’m not a citizen so ultimately, my opinion doesn’t count) you have to hand it to her for not yet pulling from the Clinton Bag of dirty campaign tricks. I’ve been watching them from the late 80’s when I minored in American politics and even from then, the Clintons (and they are team, not one) always had a knack for ruthlessness that would floor the late Lee Atwater. One reason why they could win races that other democrats could not was they knew how to out-fox Republicans. None of this would make them bad presidents of course; Johnson who’s been much bandied about this week was, until Vietnam one of the most effective presidents in history, in spite and because of his very callousness. But the Clintons have been abnormally reticent with this campaign, quick to clarify themselves whenever a comment gets out of hand, like lawyers who lobby a comment only to withdraw it later after the damage has been done.

But the Clintons are in no position to act dirty. Because everybody expects them to make one, a dirty play would stink of inevitability. The muck on them, from Whitewater to Mark Rich is just too well known to risk being brought up now, especially with the Republicans all but guaranteed to do so later. So with her hands tied, Hilary does the next best thing: let other people do the nasty for her. The first was Bill Clinton, still curiously popular among black voters even though nobody I asked can tell me exactly what he’s done for them other than to launch his book at a Harlem bookstore. You may not like the quality of the people he chose or their morality, but even Dubya had a more racially and ethnically diverse cabinet than any democrat in history. Bill Clinton, who now finds himself backpedaling from his “fairy tale” remark about Obama still chooses to reference only half of Obama’s comments to Meet the Press despite the full comment being a matter of public record. Then Hilary makes the statement about it taking a president to make civil rights happen. There is no question that the president signs papers to make laws, but that’s like saying the Allies didn’t win World War Two until Churchill and FDR signed the treaty. It was such a curious thing to say. Regardless of her motives, surely someone should have told her that black people bristle whenever white people fall into the habit of taking the credit for making black lives better. You’d think it was white people who marched in the Montgomery bus boycott.

Yet the worst was her “Nigger Number two: Electric Boogaloo” act on Sunday, with Robert L. Johnson, the founder of Black Entertainment Television (BET) coming out to support her. We’ve seen this before of course. When you can’t attack Negro number one, because you’re well, white, send in Negro number two to do the job. This is nothing new; Fox news does it every week. Clarence Thomas can always be counted on for the Uncle Tom Perspective, and Johnson who never met a black community he couldn’t exploit is now the latest. Hilary can’t refer to Obama’s past drug use, but Johnson can so of course he did, in a ridiculous attempt to be subtle—this from the man behind the network that made the malevolent 50 Cent a star and is partly the reason why your 9 year old daughter dances like a slut. And what was with him comparing the Obama campaign to “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” saying “this is not the movies Sidney, this is real?”

Far as I know Poitier has always been a man of dignity and grace that has never said a mean thing about Johnson. Poitier, was an exemplary fighter for civil rights on and off-screen who took the hit for people like Johnson. Poitier has never made a cent off the materialistic, self-destructive patterns of black youth but Johnson is counting his cash as we speak. And whatever you may think of the movie now, Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner was a groundbreaker of seismic proportions when it came out. The strangest thing about this is that Johnson is lashing out at a comment that was never made. Obama is just about the only person who has NOT said anything about Hilary’s civil rights statement, yet Johnson is attacking him as if he had, and the Clintons seem to not be in a rush to correct him. This is what’s truly offensive. The Clintons letting their pet coon yap, yap, yap about all the underhanded things they cannot say themselves.

And there is something far more insidious at work here. There are many black americans who simply cannot and will not get over their "blackness"—black as oppressed minority; victim spoiling for a fight. Many who are so obsessed with overcoming that they refuse to believe that we've already overcome much. Black warriors who spent so much time in the trenches that even if the war were over they'd never know. Call it Negro Shell-Shock. It takes little to spark it (the killing of any black male will do, good or evil makes no difference)and once it flames up, in comes his best friend, not the progressive black but the white liberal ally who learned all the lines to "We shall overcome." This is the topic that dares not speak its name in politics. The fact that Obama, by moving beyond race has become dangerous to both white and black politicians. By distancing himself from the ghetto of racial politics, Obama becomes something unprecedented: a black candidate with genuine presidential potential (Harold Ford tried something similar but was shot down by a very effective "nigger messin around with pure white flesh" ad campaign). It makes sense that the Clintons, in their underhanded way would drag him back into the race argument, because if they can turn him back into a "black" politician then he becomes exactly the kind of politician that undecided whites do not trust, and well meaning whites can then say "we like him but he's unelectable." The terrible precision of the Clinton masterstroke is that she does not have to get in the fray herself: there are scores of black leaders perfectly willing to take him on for her. Blacks who define blackness by how loud you can scream victim. Blacks who realize that if the struggle really is nearly over, they will have nothing to do. Blacks who make you wonder if Joe Biden didn't have a point after all. Because if it's one thing people like Johnson and Former Mayor Andrew Young hate more than whites who stand in the way of the black dream are blacks who are already living it.

I’m not sure if Johnson has the right to speak of anything concerning the uplifting of black people. Maybe I should just chill out and watch some late night TV on BET or take a trip to the Caribbean where I can watch the natives being fleeced out of their money by one Johnson’s many gambling schemes. Where I stand on Obama doesn’t matter because I don’t have a vote. But he seems more and more presidential every day. The man gets attacked for making people dream because supposedly it takes bureaucrats to make government work. This is a typically stupid comment from people who are clearly not leaders. If you really believe that experience as a bureaucrat (or a first lady) really makes you a better leader, you’re probably not a very good one. And if you really believe Hilary is in a better position to win over a republican opponent than Obama, you’re underestimating the intensity of Hilary-Hate. Some people, like Johnson (and Bill Clinton) chastise Obama on his ability to give a good speech. And here I thought leaders were supposed to inspire people, but then again, maybe Johnson and Clinton were the ones shouting “Get to the point,” when Martin Luther King was telling us about this wonderful dream he had. The Clintons definitely need to pick better a class of negro (Andrew Young's comments were appalling and backward). They made a blunder seeking Johnson’s endorsement and the blunder happened even before that Negro put his foot in his mouth.

Rocking My World, Working My Nerves Part 2

2008-01-08T22:47:00.000-05:00

The Most Disappointing records of 2007.

I was all set to write about the year’s worst music. And while that would have been a lot of fun (what’s a Daughtry anyway, some fetish club apparatus?), it would also have necessitated actually buying these records and I’d rather corrupt minors than spend money on anybody connected to American Idol. Then there are artists like Smashing Pumpkins who make writing a “worst of” list way too easy. We should have known when he titled his solo album TheFutureEmbrace, but how could we have anticipated such jaw dropping hubris as to name one’s album Zeitgeist? Why that’s like calling an album Number One Record (which went so swimmingly for Big Star), or giving your baby Cool Muthafucka as a middle name. Too, too easy. Instead here are 2007’s most disappointing albums. None of them are outright bad, a few even occasionally good, but all are from artists that we expect better.

Interpol: Our Love To Admire
With Our Love to Admire, Interpol joins a club diverse enough to include by Sting, Sizzla, Cypress Hill, Culture Club and nearly ever rapper since 1994 not named Outkast. People you only need one album from. Needless to say, that album was not Our Love to Admire. It’s near impossible to gauge the impact of Interpol’s first album, Turn Out The Bright Lights, one of few records of the period whose majesty, unlike the Strokes’ existed more than on paper. Sure there was the grand doom of Joy Division, but there was also a twitchy nervousness all their own, a bizarre lyrical grace and a sound that wasn’t post-punk so much as post-nu-metal/hip-hop. But they lost it by their second album, one of those records that nobody admits to disliking but nobody has played more than twice. Three albums in, Interpol had become as much a formula as a hit hatched from the Matrix (Avril Lavigne) and you’re not so much dismayed as tired, like a woman realizing that her lover is nothing but a missionary man after all.

Common: Finding Forever
Given that Common has flaked on us before, I thought Kanye West would have had better instincts than to leave him with too much to do. Give a “conscious” rapper a free hand and he’ll lay another Electric Circus on you, but Common, for all his hippie tendencies is no Ritchie Havens. And yet that he would flake out into a directionless freak surprises no one. The real disappointment here is West, who we had counted on to reign things in, not only by forcing lyrical discipline but with a sharper sense of beats and hits, unlike the tired Soulquarian excesses that stopped albums such as Like Water For Chocolate dead after four songs. Common once called himself Chi-town’s Nas as a boast, but the title is more apt that he could have hoped. Several albums in neither has delivered the mature masterpiece we’ve been waiting on. Or put another way, while both have given us a War, (Resurrection, Illmatic) neither is going to give us a Joshua Tree any time soon. Also, Common, buddy, you really need to get some white friends before you judge a whole social group again. You used to do that with gays and that wasn’t very intelligent either.

Zap Mama: Supermoon
With MIA running all over the world, crashing into beats and rhymes and gunshots while trying to catch back episodes of lost, and Tinariwen spinning stunningly electric webs of guitar riffs across the deserts to the streets of Manhattan and Paris, who needs Zap Mama? Marie Dauline had been at the forefront of a rather curious experiment for some time now (not alone, Angelique Kidjo and Baaba Maal have been making the same trip). A seemingly deliberate attempt to get more and more generic with each record, to dissolve into pop sounds so increasingly light and fluffy that one day she would simply vanish. Zap mama was never very deep, but with Supermoon, the tired mysticism and stale neosoul makes one reach nostalgic for the days of Seven, when Dauline seemed ready to drop the masterpiece that Neneh Cherry never got to make. If you want your mind blown get The Very Best of Ethiopiques. If you have carpet to clean, however and need some mood music, you could do worse.

RJD2: The Third Hand
Time now for a pact between us. The next time a DJ shadow shows up in our midst, let us all, for his sake ignore him. Stunned by the deification he got in the late 90’s for Endtroducing, Shadow imploded on himself, releasing records that polarized his audience as if he was trying anything to ditch them fast. Or maybe he simply got tired of being saddled with the job of reinventing hip-hop. Either way, missing Shadow got a lot easier when RJD2 dropped the immortal Deadringer on us in 2002, perhaps the definitive post 9/11 hip-hop record. Here was a mostly instrumental album that had all the power and soul of 88 hip-hop and yet was no nostalgia trip. And "The Horror" remains the most thrilling four minutes of the past seven years. But alas RJD2 crumbled under the weight of expectation too; making the Moby mistake of thinking he was as interesting as his music. Part of the problem may be that he thinks he’s too smart for this (he’ll never live down the “hip-hop is moron music” line even if he’s...er...right), but a bigger problem may be that now that he’s ditched sampled voices for his own, he has not yet realized (and neither has Moby) that he has nothing interesting to say.

Patti Smith: Twelve
When Patti Smith took on Van Morrison’s Gloria, one of the pinnacle moments of straight male lust, in 1975, she slashed and burned it with guitar and piano, changed none of the gender pronouns and bookended it with the devastating, “Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine.” Smith didn’t just steal the song; she kidnapped and corrupted it, regressed it to a fetus then engineered it back into her own poetic proto-punk image. Given her awesome powers for reinterpretation one would have expected Twelve to be a slam-dunk, or merely a masterpiece. Instead Twelve is one of the most boring covers album in years, a record so leaden it makes one reconsider Bowie’s Pin-Ups as an underrated masterpiece. Why did it all go so wrong? For one Smith, who once had no problem violating a song to save it, is now too respectful of the material to add anything new. So Gimme Shelter, where she ditched the Merry Clayton back-up but put nothing in its place sounded an awful lot like karaoke. Also, for such a punk goddess, when did Smith get so frustratingly classic rock? Check out Siouzie’s Mantaray or Debbie Harry’s Necessary Evil instead.

Bjork: Volta
It’s too easy to bring MIA into a Bjork conversation these days so let me say it all by inference. But even without any queen is the dead, long live the queen rhetoric, Volta was a hugely problematic and frustrating record, stunning precisely because the failure seemed so inevitable. Bjork, for all her elfiness never lost touch with the club or the street before, but somewhere between going from Matthew Barney’s lover to his muse she became alternative’s Stevie Nicks, insulated by rock and roll celebrity and privilege and losing her pop-touch. Volta is a series of over-ambitious misfires—a mess that actually sounds messy—as if finally caught in her own sonic barrage, Bjork herself got shot down. This was the album where Bjork became a Bjork imitator and in that crowded field, way to many (Ellen Alien, The Knife, Roisin Murphy, Goldfrapp) do it better.

Prince: Planet Earth
I know some of you are still hoping that his royal midgetness would go back to the days when he listened to Joni Mitchell and Led Zeppelin, because like Bowie, Prince does his best when he listens to the best (or at least somebody other than himself or who he’s producing). Get over it, people. Prince is the now the kind of guy that listens to Sheryl Crow and Gwen Stefani and appears on American Idol. Planet Earth was hailed by some, dissed by others, and while the album is neither his worst nor best, it is a brand new thing for Prince: The best that he can do.

Question Of The Day

2008-01-05T08:51:00.000-05:00

Why is it that non-white prose is always called lyrical? (Unless it's from the Irish, but they are black people in denial anyway.) Am I the only person who feels dismissed by a word whenever his work is described as such?

Rocking My World, Working My Nerves

2008-01-02T21:17:00.000-05:00

The best and worst of 2007 Music

1. MIA
Kala

If Rappers and Dancehall deejays were bemused by MIA’s Arular, they were downright bewildered by Kala. As well they should be: the future of street beats has announced herself, and that street isn’t in the Bronx or West Kingston, but Sao Paulo and Bangalore. Not for nothing did some point to the Timbaland track as their favourite—the worst and the safest song on the album. But nothing else was safe on Kala, musically or lyrically. Sure the kids are playing some didge “Mango Pickle Down River,” but by “Paper Planes” They’ve already riddled you with bullets and are now taking your money. With its increasingly proggy ambitions, hip-hop has been itching for a punk rock for some time now, so you know it has arrived when the two warring movements both hate it. Backpackers will never get past her lack of flow and chart watchers will never get past her lack of hits. But “Bird Flu”, with its massive talking drums, quasi 808’s, ostrich squawks and chirpy little girls mispronouncing her name is a hit. The transmogrified beat of Global kids who “watch Lost on cable” and answer hip-hop without giving a shit if the parent just doesn’t understand. This is the sound of the world right now and if you’re still bitching about her sing-songy voice, dirty beats or even the Bam-ba-ba-lam-ba-ba-lam-ba-ba- lam-bam chorus of “Come Around”, then you’re probably not aware that music has moved on without you.

2. Radiohead
In/Rainbows

Three months after I downloaded this I’m still clutching my headphones, out of breath and gasping in wonder. Of course Radiohead can do beautiful, that’s a surprise to no one, but who could have guessed at In/Rainbow’s unabashed loveliness? It’s shocking to hear them reclaim their humanity after three brilliant albums that nonetheless left us cold. Coming after Hail to the Thief, the first 10 seconds of “15 Step” hurts. But the keyboard glitches fade as soon as you realize that that’s Colin Greenwood on bass and good old Phil Selway (surely rock’s most underrated drummer) on the kit and they have never sounded better. In/Rainbows is unquestionably Radiohead’s warmest album even if lyrically Yorke is still hedging his bets on “All I Need.” And “Bodysnatchers” is the kind of blistering hard rock blast that the band tosses off every now and then to remind all comers that while they can do you, you could never do them. I haven’t been left so staggered by a record since REM’s Out Of Time. Bands like Coldplay existed solely because of the void Radiohead left, but now that the band has come back, with the natural ease of a conqueror I might add, maybe Chris Martin should focus on being a househusband from now on.

3. Justice
✝

Not since Armand Van Helden dropped the pum-pum crazy “Koochi” on gay clubs back in ‘99 has a record been so devisive as Justice’s Cross. Maybe because, their massive sound, all Van Halen drums, mid range madness and actual riffs had many screaming rockism, and not in a good way. But Justice is not afraid of biting the hands that feed them beats, showing major love for Michael Jackson on the year’s best single (D.A.N.C.E) but also slipping “neither black nor white” in the chorus which could be taken several ways, none flattering to our favourite plastic surgery disaster. Like sonic daddies Daft Punk, and Cassius, Justice knows that all rock and roll is essentially dance music. And Disco set to eleven can out-stomp Metallica.

4. Feist
The Reminder

It always sucks when your one and only starts seeing other people, worse when it was the other people that made the first move. So I’m torn between joy at Feist’s deserved success and dismay that the idiot who bought Sheryl Crow at Starbucks now hums 1234 whenever he’s bitching for a caffeine hit. I feel it all too, my secret slipping away, destined to the same fate of former best private crush Nick Drake. Maybe it will do me good to remember that what draws the buckster also drew the hipster: stellar melodies, a refreshing genuineness and sincerity, a knack for interpretation not seen since Dusty Springfield, and that sometimes trebly, sometimes soaring, always astonishing voice.

5. Spoon
Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga

I’ve been convinced that Spoon was America’s finest band for some time now, but now I have gone from surety to religious mania. Never before has a band made such a huge sound from such few ingredients. On Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, you can literally feel the empty spaces between the words and notes. “The Ghost of You Lingers” bursts in with an insistent piano melody but at the very moment when every other band would have broken into a hard rock stomp, Spoon keeps banging away at the keyboards, withholding the climax you’ve been itching for until the terseness through repetition becomes almost unbearable. And when the drums do come, in the super slinky soul strut, “Don’t You Evah,” these four white boys lay down a groove that will make Smokey either very jealous or very proud.

6. Of Montreal
Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer?

What’s this? Prince is alive and fallen in love with the Beatles? Fronted by the least convincing straight man in rock, Of Montreal’s fey-one-second- fiery-the-next pop was almost defiantly queer, in both senses of the word. There was truly nothing like it, the funkiest beats since Controversy, and the most wide-eyed cutesy singing since the Wizard of Oz. That is until you listen to the lyrics, some of the most savage post breakup ditties since some girl bawled You Oughta Know. Is this what the 21st century man sounds like? Are women now the strong silent type while men vent on wax? Who cares, stay for the melodies, stay for the funk and remember that for every blast of cruel wit (“You’re just some faggy girl”) comes something so silly it’s joyous (“I need a lover with soul power.”) Yeah right.

7. The Besnard Lakes
The Besnard Lakes Are The Dark Horse.

The brilliant Canucks not named Feist, Arcade Fire or Broken Social Scene, Besnard Lakes would have risked pretentiousness with that album title were it not so apt. Then there are the songs themselves, some of the most darkly beautiful since the third album from those guys at number two. The Besnard Lakes don’t have choruses so much as climaxes and they swing from muddle to crescendo, peak to peak like those orgasms that men don’t get to have—most times in the same song. The term adult alternative went as quickly as it came, which is a shame because we’ve finally found a band that deserves it.

8. The White Stripes: Icky Thump

9. Tinariwen: Aman Iman

10. LCD Soundsystem: Sound Of Silver

11. Panda Bear: Person Pitch

12. The National: Boxer

Next Up: The worst!

Down and Out at a Westin Beach

2007-12-08T12:51:00.000-05:00

Is blogging well the best revenge? I’m wondering if my thoughts are pure enough to write this article as I lie by the pool at the Sunshine Suites Resort in Grand Cayman, having just come back from a supposedly public beach. Come back being a euphemism for being run off, asked to leave if you rather.

There I was, or rather here I am, at a wonderful hotel that promised unrestricted access to the beach, and after 3 months of Minneapolis’ 10,000 lakes I could do with a real sea. So with beach chair and stolen towel in hand I made for the sand. It’s tempting to think of all beaches, especially in the Caribbean as the same but they’re really quite different. A Jamaican beach spits out from the mountain, as if a reward for a mad dash or a tumble from a high peak. A Cayman beach—because the land is so flat— is downright indivisible from the land. A walk from land to sea is so effortless that you only notice that you’ve gone from dry to wet as an afterthought. Maybe that’s why I didn’t notice where I was.

Under a tree, I took off my shirt, sunk into warm white sand and granted myself one cliché (this is the life—groan, I know). With my glasses off, everything became a haze, so I thought nothing of the black and white blur coming towards me. By the time I got my glasses on, the security guard was hovering overhead. I thought finally, somebody is impressed that I'm reading Borges! but instead he apologized for bothering me (Caymanians are nothing if not unfailingly polite) and then asked if I knew that this was private property. Not only that, but that anyone who wasn’t a guest of the Westin Resort was only allowed within 10 feet of the water. Like any animal stunned I was immobile and for a long time, speechless.

But that doesn’t make any sense, I said. I’m a guest of Sunshine Suites, not a local. Anybody who lives in the Caribbean knows of Tourism’s tricky racial dynamics. If a black woman is at a tourist resort she’s either the chambermaid or she works in the office. If a black man is at a resort, he’s either cleaning something, hustling something or banging a late 50’s white woman for cash. This was extremely awkward for both of us and we knew it. He apologized again and said how much he hated this part of his job. It was one of those scenarios both in and out of body at once. We both knew that were seeing ourselves and how others were seeing us at the same time. A black man lying down on a beach. Less than 10 minutes later, another black man, in uniform, approaches. He says some words to the lying black man who then gets up, folds his chair and leaves, to go to the ‘public’ section of the beach. We know what we looked like, even as I explained to him that going down to the beach made no sense since a suntan was rather redundant on a black man. He laughed, I think because he didn’t want what might had been his umpteenth scene from a black person screaming racism. I've seen it countless times, but never ever thought I would find myself being either of those men.

But I had to ask myself? Did he make sure that all the white people here were from the Westin and not some other hotel? Does whiteness immediately grant one the privilege of going wherever he pleases?—a rhetorical question, I know. Or could it be that in a tourist location white skin immediately legitimizes one presence? That’s the case in Jamaica, Barbados, and Antigua, so why should it be any different in the Cayman Islands, a country for the most part given over to tourism and banking? There was just no way to play this situation correctly and we both knew it. Even playing for time was painful, since we both knew how this was going to end and I was getting angry. I have nothing against tourism or private property but as a citizen of the Caribbean I sometimes like to assume that I have some natural right to its mountains and beaches and yes, it stings, it downright offends when foreigners, interlopers tell me where I can and cannot go in my own territory. It reminded me of the Godfather's Nightclub in Kingston that used to turn away Jamaicans for flouting the dress code but allowed white tourists who did the same thing. Then I ran into my friend Lisa who reminded me that as a light skinned person she never has any incidents like this. But I've had quite a few. I remember after a business meeting at The Pegasus Hotel in Kingston, a waiter came up to us and said that he noticed our habit of congregating at this hotel and that we need to cease doing so. Immediately. People can say that this isn’t about race all they want, but they’re not on the black end of the stick.

So instead of walking down to the free, meaning local end of the beach where I can presumably disappear in the vagueness of black skin, I went back to my hotel’s poolside where I’m writing this blog. Who knows, maybe the waiters think I’m here for a 1:00 sex appointment with some 54 year old woman who saved all year and wants to ball a blackie. Or maybe that’s just Negril. Lord knows that when I’m at a Jamaican hotel and get ribald thumbs up from all the locals who work there, it’s not because they heard about the rave review in the New York Times.

I thought of going back to the beach the next day with a tape measure to make sure I’m within my ten feet. Best to prevent any incident, International or otherwise. Make no mistake— I don't confuse Cayman with the Westin and the reader shouldn't either. I had a fantastic time : the people were wonderful, I made great new friends, the food is some of the best I've had in the Caribbean and Books and Books is easily the finest Caribbean bookstore I've ever been too. Besides, it turns out that the manager, Sally Machado and I are old friends going back from 1988 ! I don't define my time there by this barely 10 minute episode, but given all that we've have been through in the Caribbean, and all that we may still go through, I can't ignore it either.

ED: The heading said Caymanian before, but I've realised that I would never have like d someone to put "Jamaican" after an experience of one beach. Hey, I'm learning here.

The Problem With Reading

2007-12-01T19:28:00.000-05:00

Books rarely upset me, but readers appall me all the time. I remember the first. Way back in 1989 in the late legendary Professor John Ingledew's class, a student in reply to his question about a novel said she couldn’t identify with it. Back then I thought the response smacked of horseshit, and I think so even more now. I could not get past the arrogance of it, as if all the stories of the world had some duty to conform to her worldview—as if the only legitimate way to enter a literary world was to recognize oneself in it. And here I though the whole point to literature (certainly the literature I read) was to get as far way from myself as possible. It turned out that I was in the minority.

I’ve always believed that since I have a fully functional mirror, 300 pages spent reading about one would be a waste of time. One of the great joys of reading was encountering The Other, but here I was in the midst of my own generation that saved The Other for the News and wanted fiction that spoke to them about themselves. Not surprisingly these people soon went from memoir (not to be confused with biography or autobiography) to the ultimate in narcissism: The self improvement book. Many are presumably writing their wretched memoirs as we speak.

This is just one of the preposterous outgrowths of Post-whatever literature. And, as if seeing ourselves in books is not enough, we also want to see the writer. There may be some truth to all writing being autobiography, but it is also an irrelevance made relevant that has resulted in a slew of bad books and bad readers; people who have no idea what to expect or what to get from a book. The point to a fictional world is a suspension of disbelief, but too often— certainly with several readers I have spoken to, they read a book to see the writer. So a novel with an unsympathetic German had a friend of mine asking if the writer was Jewish. We do this with film as well, watching Angelina Jolie, not Grendel's mother. Even in fiction we want to be surrounded by fact. We want to see the strings, not the puppet, the “making of” instead of the video. The writer, not the novel.

This is not only lazy thinking (hearing people try to guess at the purity of the Bronte sisters’ from the content of their prose seems to be tedious only to me) but it ultimately causes a divorce from literature. We become preoccupied with a writer’s catalog, his life, and his letters, even his back-story at the expense of his book. Of course there is nothing wrong with reading several books from one writer. There’s nothing wrong with being so impressed by an author’s novel that you immediately buy the all others (we need to eat after all). The problem is that too often literature moves from an artistic and critical experience to a forensic one. A friend of mine did that with one of my stories and we were both surprised by how upset I became. He them compounded my displeasure by mistaking it for a fuse; going through my novel to tell me about myself, quite fascinated by his detective work. He thought I was upset that he had read me like a book when I was upset by how easily he tossed the book aside. The novel had become evidence of my mental state and ceased being anything else.

And here’s the nasty outgrowth: if you have absorbed enough of the writer then you do not have to read the book. As soon as the writer re-enters the literary equation the book forfeits its space. There is a myth that one enriches the other but that’s similar to saying a play is better if the playwright is sidestage commenting on his life as the performance goes on. Even before his disgrace, I've had arguments about James Frey and have never read a page in his book. I have had long and illuminating discussions on EM Forster and DH Lawrence, two authors I have never read. I have taught The Great Gatsby in Literature and Creative Writing courses and have never read it. I can even give you a one-hour lecture on the proto-postmodern fiction of John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces, and still cannot name a single character without checking Wikipedia first. I know enough about these writers and even more about people who read writers and not books to bullcrit a novel without even being found out. Hell, I was paid for a review of Don Delillo’s Underworld even though the first Delillo novel I ever read was Falling Man.

But is this the best we can do? And even when we do read several books by the author, literature still loses. BR Myers in his Reader’s Manifesto noted that the reading of writers, not books have resulted in less, not more books being read. In that sense book clubs may have had it right all along. Because we read writers and not books, we become busy with finding the writer, seeing him in marginalia and forgetting the rest of the story. Because we read writers, not books, everybody has an opinion of V S Naipaul, few about his books. Ditto Norman Mailer. Because we read writers, not books too many mediocre works from writers get read—dulling the overall joy of reading. When put in the trajectory of the writer, any book becomes redeemable. While looking for veiled biography the reader loses the joy of entering the fictional world. It is far more likely for someone to have read Faulkner’s Sanctuary than John O’hara’s Appointment in Samara, despite the latter being by far the superior book. But O’Hara’s life doesn’t lend itself to biography the way Faulkner’s does. It doesn’t matter that Faulkner really only wrote 5 truly great books. It also doesn’t matter that you can beat pretty much any literature exam set on Faulkner without reading a book—I did it twice.

Maybe this is just the manifestation of our tabloid culture. We no longer want the myths of Hollywood but the warts. Forget Oz; show us the wizard, preferably in flagrante delicto. So Brad Pitt can become one of the world’s most famous celebrities even though nobody watches his films. In fact you don’t even need the pretense of being attached to any creative work anymore, just ask Paris Hilton. So I wonder if people are really reading the Jonathans or are they watching how each brand will develop. Maybe James Frey really is the prototype for the future of reading and writing. Should I start working out and try to get my body fluids inside one of Lindsay Lohan’s orifices? Because right now I’m thinking of bringing up War and Peace in my next class and I haven’t read the book. But I do know Tolstoy.

Men Whom Men Hate.

2007-11-20T21:22:00.000-05:00

I stunned a friend of mine once, when I told her that she was not a woman’s woman. Meaning despite the love and lust she inspired in men, women simply couldn’t stand her. You know these women. You might even be one of them. Women whom other women think betray their sex, set a bad example, not just a trollop or a slut, but also Ann Coulter. Women who are sometimes given a raw deal for simply being too damn fearless. Or selfish. Is that you? Well fret not thy despised personage for there are men for whom other men go sick at the mention of their names. Men who let the side down. Men we’d gladly mow down with a moving vehicle or crush with a stationary one. Men who betray their brothers, piss on their fathers and make us wonder why God didn’t make Adam a lesbian. Men whom men hate.

1. Hostus Pompousassholinuss
If worthless, unemployable men spend their days watching TV, then worthless unemployable women spend their days in the audience of TV shows. Talk shows in particular. Talk shows hosted by men to be specific. This is the lair of Hostus Pompousassholinuss, the male talk show host. The TV talking ass that reassures women that yes, all men are jerks...except me. Morning TV is littered with them: Maury Povich, Geraldo, Montell (whose name sounds like a bad hair product from Dixie Peach)—men who trap deadbeat dads, bad breeders, child abusers, gay-sex-having house husbands and their ilk. Maury and Co. constantly parade the absolute worst examples of manliness within airspace to show soccer moms that yes, men are dogs, liars, killers, thieves, and freeloaders and they will leave you pregnant. All men of course, except them. So caring are these guys, so concerned, so loving that when they start to love other women instead of their wives, guess who forgives them first?

2. The Reality TV Troglodyte
Reality TV has had no shortage of despicable men, but even in that treacly bunch there once stood an asshole plus ultra, a man of such louché loutishness that one wondered why God himself didn’t come down to kick him in the nuts. That man would be Rocco Dispirito, the Chef of the deservedly flopped The Restaurant. While Anthony Bourdain and Marco Pierre White were classic bad boys who justified their behavior with legendary food, Dispirito was just a pretty-boy prick that thought the loudest man in the room was the one that got results. A whiner and a brat with an entitlement complex a mile wide, his gift for faking talent was matched only by his initial success at pulling it off. Men like him are not self-styled geniuses, but self-styled marketers, who can swing from hostile to ho in a (filmed) New York minute. But what really gets under our skin is another talent that men whom men hate seem to have in abundance. The gift to make beautiful women want them. For reasons unknown to the rest of us, some women mistake assholiness for attitude, belligerence for brashness, and tired pick up lines for poetry. Because when this man moves in for the kill, he can make a woman feel like she’s the only one in the room. Not a hard trick for a man who thinks everybody else is only scenery anyway.

3. Dr. Let Me Tell You What’s Wrong With You
Ah, Dr. Phil. Amazing what TV can do. A graduate of the tough love school of therapy, Phil is of the belief that nothing beats a good cussing to pull up one’s bootstraps. With men he frequently begins at the ending, writing them off before the first commercial break and cussing the [insert abused term here] woman to get some backbone. In Dr. Phil’s world men are simply irredeemable, so the woman if she has sense would just move on. Dr LMTYWWWU’s feel it’s their god given mission to always tell you what to do. By insisting that he knows you more than you know yourself, Phil gets to reduce your entire life to a sound bite, and just in time too. He needs all that extra airtime to hawk his next diet book.

4. The Creative Type
Let me tread carefully since I consider myself to be possessing of some talent. But here is the real trick of the Creative Type. He has no talent whatsoever. He shouts bad poetry because well, that’s how he reclaims his blackness y’all, or he swings it around jazz because, well swing is the only jazz word he knows even though he’s rapping to hard-bop or a diluted hip-hop. Or he paints big abstracts and the sells them for bigger prices or worst of all, serenades women off-key. You know this guy. Sometimes he’s not even attractive but there he is with booty he doesn’t deserve. Your only hope with this one is the fact the eventually everybody realizes they can do better.

5. The Dad Who Won’t Die
Some have it that young men admire old farts like Jack Nicholson for their seemingly unquenchable libido, even in their twilight years. Some people have it wrong. We despise these pot bellied cradle robbers. Give or take a few years and they would be statutory rapists. We can’t stand them because even with their colostomy bags in tow they will still make moves on their future daughters in law. In the past all men had an unwritten agreement with the generation that came after: marriage, parenthood, college bills, retirement, impotence, shuffleboard, adult diapers and death. But thanks to Viagra, Jurassic jerks have been showing up on the dance floor, stinking of aqua Velva and gunning for what should have been you future bedmate. But there’s a fine line between a screaming orgasm and a massive coronary once you’re past 60, and if there’s any luck lines get crossed.

6. The Reporter
Remember that unwritten rule between boys, that if an adult caught you in a fight neither should reveal who started it no matter what? Many a best friend came out of that scenario, but no such luck happens if one of you is a dipstick that tattles. As for that little piece of wretched effluvia? He grew up, didn’t you know, and now sits in the cubicle beside you. He feels he simply must share everything with the boss, especially if it’s about you. This creature works best with an audience so he waits until a board meeting to give you tips on how to come to work on time, or how to stick to the lunch break, or how to download at home instead of on company time. And while I’m all for going postal on a sucker, homicide might not be your wisest move for career advancement, unless your ambition is to get knee pads for prison life. Reporters, massive talkers that they are, tend not to be blessed with wit, so one good comeback (Man, you spend an awful lot of time watching me, Carson, I mean I’m gay friendly but is that appropriate behavior for the office?) will silence him for good.

7. Mr. Sensitive
The most despicable of the bunch. He’s the mullet haired, cattle prodded weenie that butchered Otis Redding, and told women that he’s their Soul Provider. He's that shitty twerp from Creed, a band that even Jesus hated with an ego so huge it literally screamed small penis. Or he’s that writer of The Notebook and ....okay I really don’t know any other book Nicholas Sparks wrote, but it’s the kind of book where a woman’s bosom is always heaving. Or worse, he’s that idiot in the snow looking like a wet rat whelping You’re Beautiful for so long that you’d slash your face just to get the slime bag to move on. Who are these men? How did they get one X-chromosome too many? Mr. Sensitive knows that sentimentality is merely a term for sentiment that some people (like me) don’t like. And people like me, don’t buy records at Walmart. But their fans do.

8. Mr. Real Man
Such an exact opposite of Mr. sensitive that we'd guess he's merely the former's Mr. Hyde. Mr. Real Man is so convinced of his real manliness that his big ambition is to do absolutely nothing but wallow in his masculine glow, flattening his butt out on a lazy boy. Mr. Real Man doesn't cook because well, he's straight. In fact we get it Mr. Uber Hetero. Don't read? We get it, you're straight. Never pluck monobrow? We get it, you're straight. Not into fashion—you only care that it's comfortable? We get it, you're straight. Don't know if another man is good looking or not? We get it, you're straight. Don't plan on going to an art gallery ever? We get it, you're straight. Don't care about dance unless it's in your lap? We get it, you're straight. Don't listen to anything but rap? Yup straight as an arrow, buddy. Look at the term bitch as one of endearment? We get it, Mr. I only dig tha chicks. Women who still want to sleep with you? That we don't get.

9, 10 and beyond. Dishonorable Mentions:

Clay Aitken (although some men love him dearly indeed). The bad breath guy who STILL has a girl friend. Super Christians who should just come out of the closet already. Men who don't know the difference between having some pride and having no shame. Maxwell. Tom Cruise. Robin Williams in everything after Mrs. Doubtfire (except Good Will Hunting). Men in touch with their feelings. Men who have to work at being real men. Men who want credit for what they're supposed to do. Kobe Bryant. All living male country singers not named Nelson, Ely, Hancock, Earle, Haggard, Lovett or Yoakam. Mike Tyson. 50 Cent. Barney.

Justice (Finally?) For the Memphis Three?

2007-10-30T08:45:00.000-05:00

Coming from where I come from, I know a thing or two about injustice. In one of Jamaica's most notorious cases, a man was convicted and sentenced to death for a crime that happened after he was arrested.

I also know a thing or two about Heavy Metal. To this day I tell anybody who would listen that Guns and Roses saved my life. After Hurricane Gilbert pulled a Hiroshima on Jamaica, light went, water seemingly evaporated, food quintupled in price and the radio stations played Don't Worry, Be Happy all day long. I was nearly going postal and my mom was a cop who probably had a gun in the house.

I still remember the night I came home, turned on the radio and heard, not Sweet Chile O Mine, but the end of it. There I was hapless and hopeless and the first thing I heard in the dark was Where do we go? Where do we go now? I didn't know where I was going. I felt as if I'd never go anywhere, ever. I was trapped and stuck and losing my mind. I think I fell to my knees. I know I cried. A year later my school, in order to make sure we grew into morally upstanding young men, showed us the documentary Highway to Hell —you know the one—the one that backmasked Led Zeppelin and told you that even Madonna was a servant of Satan. Some people found Jesus after that documentary. I found ACDC, Led Zeppelin, Judas Priest, Black Sabbath and 999.

Also, coming from a country whose churches are out numbered only by bars I also know a thing or two about satanic panic. Hell, I wrote my first novel about it. Christanity whipped into a frenzy of justified bigotry and distrust of the other. So when the West Memphis Three, Jason Baldwin, Jessie Misskelley, Damien W. Echols, [picture] were convicted on a grisly triple murder that even third world detective work could have proven false, I knew it was heavy metal that was being convicted. Satanic panic given free reign to fill in the awfully wide gaps in a preposterously implausible story. I could go on about the details of the case, but the New York times, in a story that broke today about new DNA evidence does it much better.

Granted, Heavy Metal has never exactly been a banner music for racial equality. Some branches like a lot of European Black Metal seem to not like negroes very much and think Hitler was a right smashing fellow. Ultimately my allegiance is with Punk because it tore down racial and sexual boundaries as quickly as you could say 1234! (well it used to). The racial and sexual boundaries that some heavy metal still adheres to.

But something about being an outcast even among outcasts makes the story of the West Memphis Three resonate. It's not the first time Heavy metal and youth was put on trial. It's not the the first time nor will it be the last the church will launch a jihad on people who do not fit in. And it's not the first nor will it be the last time that people profit from the lingering miseries and petty fears of others.

On Slave Mentality

2007-10-26T20:50:00.001-05:00

Sometimes I wonder if to be black in this world is to be absolutely unaccountable. For anything. We love windows but have never been very keen on mirrors, but then that probably goes for all human nature. Criticism is too often looked upon as attack and blind defense of black people simply because they are black can make for curious bedfellows, thugs, thieves, murderers and cop killers suddenly elevated to victim-martyr-saint status by Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton even though the latter has gotten far more judicious lately.

People complain, privately of course of the black person’s eagerness to deploy the race card and maybe they do in the US but in countries like Jamaica where pulling a race card is tantamount to mixing chocolate in coffee, it’s the slavery card that gets pulled once too often. A female friend of a friend of mine, a woman from the Dutch colonies tried to break down how it was the English slavery cum colonial system that resulted in the Jamaican mentality. Our almost communal refusal to be decision makers, our eternal patience for their mediocrity to be rewarded (hello, Long Service award), and our basic lack of ambition, revealed in everything from a 30 year sojourn as a file clerk, to a five month sojourn on the street corner waiting for handouts, guns, and the visa that was revoked mere weeks ago, though not necessarily in that order.

And while the argument that we are still carrying the ill effects of slavery nearly 200 years later has many merits, it’s also old and barely applies to any current living situation. Tribal politics, Brain Drain, importation at the expense of production, political shortsightedness, poor emphasis on education, drugs and turf wars and just plain laziness have far more to do with the so-called slavery mentality than slavery itself, but those factors lack the one thing that makes the slavery excuse so tantalizing: Blamelessness.

As long as it’s slavery, it never our fault. The whole point to an excuse is to excuse oneself from accountability and in that regard the slave mentality is manna from self-delusion heaven. It’s the one size fits all justification, the ultimate go to for explaining everything from post colonial theory to post colonial architecture. It is so universal, so easily said and so easily grasped for that “slave mentality” can silence any fruitful discussion, leaving all the black people in room warm and cuddly all over for getting to the core of what’s wrong with them. It is also tired bullshit.

As I said before, the truly rewarding thing about the slave mentality card is that it absolves entire nations of responsibility. It gives black people a 500 year get out of jail free card, where everything that has happened or will happen can simply claim slavery as the reason why. Terrell Owens makes a mess of his career? Slavery. Jayson Blair invents stories for the New York Times? He’s burning down his master’s house—Didn’t you get the memo? Mike Tyson beating the living daylights out of one woman and raping another? He’s had 400 years of the white man on his back, so of course he’s a monster. Black men breeding kids all over the place? It’s slavery dontcha know? From those days when the black man’s job was to be Mandingo-cock while the Massa sold off the kids so that he didn’t have to deal with baby-mama drama. Failing in school? Don’t you know that it’s the legacy of the white devil education that taught us to be inferior? Sho nuff it is. And you can’t help but be downtrodden because even after 1838, the white man simply got craftier with his enslavement of us.

Of course faced with such logic, white people often feel powerless and unfairly treated, as well they should be. They were dealt a nasty card, an unimpeachable one, similar to a Zionist screaming ‘NEVER AGAIN!” to silence even the slightest possible debate about Israel’s political policies. After a man shows his Bergen Belsen tattoo or his great grand father’s lynching photo what comeback can a white person possibly have?

None perhaps except this. Some blacks have a ridiculous capacity for mythmaking, a rewriting of the grayer parts of history that nobody wants to confront, the story of ex-slaves who owned slaves, blacks who collaborated with whites in slave rebellions and the Civil War, and blacks who could rob, rape, kill and steal just as terribly as any white Jack the ripper. The slave mentality as excuse for the black person’s inability to prosper is the all encompassing, unimpeachable argument and it’s also false. Maybe Brother A can’t get a job because the world is racist, but maybe he didn’t study hard enough in school. Maybe sister B can’t progress because she’s just too damn worthless to try. Maybe Father Q didn’t want success badly enough and was never put in a situation where he had to. Maybe the poorest of us Jamaicans have gotten so used to free food near Election time that we have no need to earn anything. Maybe it was gang violence the de-motivated the ghetto. Maybe it is a rural people drifting into an unforgiving urban reality that led to extreme poverty. And maybe that has nothing at all to do with slavery.

What’s truly offensive about the slave mentality excuse is that it insults the memory of slaves. How dare we wallow in our present victim fetish by casting our ancestors as the ultimate victims, ignoring what they went through but assuming that whatever it was, gave them an internal sense of defeat that they passed on to us. This patronizes their oppression and ignores their triumph. Jamaican slaves were victimized for over 400 years, but they were never victims once, not even for a day. They were one of the most rebellious in the western hemisphere. And this was more often than not the product of genuine planning, preparation, and thought, not some wild savages trying to pillage and plunder. At the core of Tacky’s revolt was in ingenious idea, not just destruction but rebuilding the county if not the nation in a series of city states based on the fruitful African model. Rebellion was more than an act of violence; it was an act of self-determination, independence by any other name. Even the Paul Bogle led protest of 1865 was again, a race of people demanding to be social and political players in their own socio-political system, not a bunch of dumb niggers blocking their own roads and burning down their own stores—cutting off noses to spit their faces. Were a slave to come to a ghetto street corner right now, he’d be horrified to know that these are the people for whom he gave his life. The true slave mentality was one of constant ingenuity, constant, active rebellion against an oppressive society, and a constant struggle for equality and humanity. The maroon town is a product of slavery mentality. The ghetto is not.

So maybe the reason why you have no drive, ambition, intelligence or future is that you’re too damn worthless to begin with. Maybe the reason you don’t have a good job is that you’ve never tried to find one or thought those subjects you took in school never came in handy. Maybe the reason you are looking to the Don for a handout is that you’re trapped in your own urban prison shaped by greedy modern politics and a dependence on handouts to begin with, instead of bearing the legacy of ex-slaves who knew how to grow their own damn food. Maybe it’s the drug and weapons trade and not the post slavery economic dispensation why your sister will be shot and killed tomorrow because she’s just one foot beyond her garrison boundary. Maybe the education system failed because teachers have become bureaucrats who care about meeting the requirements of the syllabus and not educating kids, just like every other bad education system in the world. Maybe fathers don’t raise their kids because everybody lets them off the hook and nobody puts forth legislation for deadbeat dads the way white people did in America (turns out that worthless fathers can be white too).

Maybe Tacky, Nanny, Sam Sharpe, Boukman, Accompong, Kunta Kinte, Frederick Douglas, Mary Prince, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Paul Bogle, Marcus Garvey and W.E.B. Dubois are all turning in their graves wondering if we were worth their lives. I have a feeling they might be thinking that we aren’t worth a damn, but who knows, maybe that’s just their slave mentality.

Methinks I Shall Read 100 Books

2007-10-18T18:23:00.000-05:00

The easiest thing about choosing to read 100 books is picking the first one. I know that flies in the face of all logic, but logic was not one of the things I brought to the table when I decided, rather calmly I might add, that I was going to read 100 books before I write my next one. It just felt like the thing to do. Maybe I was looking at Jane Smiley’s 13 Ways of Looking At The Novel, a little too closely, but as far as I know I’m not suffering from writer’s block. I am concerned that to write now would be to bring the same old things to a new book, whether that be style or world view or philosophy or even structure. I need to read more. Maybe my next book will be a forward step instead of the sideways move that it feels like right now. Maybe I’m just envying these Camus and Saramago novels that I’ve been reading.

In the middle of all that I’ve been considering two seemingly diametrically opposed thoughts: how to write books that mean something more than what fiction can be on the surface (not metafiction which I cannot stand) but also how to capture that old sense of what a story could be, not necessarily Victorian, but maybe Dickensian in scope and in scale. I’ve been thinking about Dickens a lot lately, not just him but writers, extremely talented writers who nonetheless never forfeited that unwritten contract with the reader. The reason why my headline says Books instead of Novels is that several of the books I plan to read will be Non-Fiction, certainly biography. In fact, between biographies of Young Stalin and classics like the new translation of War and Peace, I might not find much space for contemporary novels.

This is not just because I want to connect with the past or the factual. But maybe you have noticed that if the reader today wants a story on a epic scale, something larger and more sweeping in narrative, he has to read old novels or non-fiction. The novel does not provide these pleasures anymore —certainly none I’ve read recently save for Absurdistan —and I’m not sure why. Michael Cunningham once lauded the era of the smaller novel, narrow in scope and focused on the minutiae of human life. Many writers seemed to agree with him. My problem with this is that it seems to be a decision that writers made among writers for writers without ever asking what the reader thought.

Faced with countless books about nothing the reader goes to where he can find a story: old books, non-fiction, even a videogame like Metal Gear Solid. It says volumes that the most engrossing recent novel was not recent at all, but a rescued work from Irene Nemirovsky, who died in a Nazi Concentration camp in World War 2. The main drawback to teaching a course on 9/11 Novels is the fact that the truly great narratives are not fiction. There has not yet been a novel of the sheer epic span of Steve Coll’s Ghost Wars, or the wide Tolstoyan scope of Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower, or the bark and bite of Fiasco, the funky feminist insight of The Terror Dream, the downright surreal Imperial Life in the Emerald City, or even The 9/11 Report, so devastating in its very plainness.

There’s no question that novels change, that the purpose of fiction should change. I’m just not sure anymore what was the point to any change in the past 40 years. In the late sixties John Barth declared the end of narrative, but I’m not sure who that to applied to other than him. Novelists in their desire to break free from imagined boundaries found many exciting ways to express, but not many to communicate. In some arenas that is still called by its first name: masturbation. There is a point to be made for experimental fiction, but fiction has been experimenting since Tristram Shandy and nobody has ever accused that book of being dull. I think I’m trying to find a midway between a novelist’s desire to innovate and a writer’s desire to connect. And maybe after reading 100 books I’ll get a clue.

The first book? Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. Saw it fall off a shelf in Borders and just knew. As for the rest, I'm all for people telling me what to do. What book do you think I should read?

People, Places and Things We Can Now Give Up On.

2007-10-15T14:18:00.000-05:00

Are you carrying around a dead weight? Hoping that sooner or later he or she will be into you? Hoping that Hip-Hop will make another classic album? That the third world will one day make dollars? That Bush will make sense? Are you waiting on Clay Aitken to get naked with a female? Let me introduce you to the so thrilling it’s sinful pleasures of giving up on people. My favourite preacher once said he enters everything situation with a hypodermic and a gun. If the situation can be fixed, inject some medicine. If it’s a dying horse, shoot the sucker. Point your guns at the following.

1. MySpace

Ludicrously ugly and un-navigable from the get go, MySpace’s success was a stunner from day one especially since Facebook, which came out at roughly the same time (and his since surpassed it) was far more viewer friendly. The MySpace page was such a colossal eyesore that you could almost judge people by whether they had one or not. It was also responsible for some of the most laughable acts of hubris in years, with barely talented musicians all proclaiming themselves stars of a sort because they suddenly had 500 friends, none of whom would buy their records. With frustrating loading time, and a dogged refusal to innovate in any way that normal people would appreciate, the space soon became as much a dinosaur as friendster. And that long promised radical upgrade is only a boo.com away.

2. Ryan Adams

It was once our favourite pastime: waiting on Ryan Adams to make that country rock masterpiece. Lord knows we needed one— Sweetheart of The Rodeo, Honky Tonk Masquerade and Guitar Town were getting mighty lonely. But instead, caught up as he is in sleeping with famous women and having more hissy fits than the baldy from Smashing Pumpkins, Adams hasn’t found the time to deliver on that admittedly tall order. Instead we get the Ryan Adams record or rather, one every week; a CD of mostly tepid, country rock, with two or three all out stompers to help keep the faith. And they keep coming. If this were sex you’d begin to wonder if consistent quasi pleasure beats never having the orgasm that always seems around the corner. For some, that’s enough. For others it’s easier to believe that the bang did come, and the problem was us. Or maybe, like Terence Trent D’Arby and Lenny Kravitz, Adams was over praised from the start.

3. The End of the Cold War

People who believed that the US won the cold war made the crucial mistake of confusing war with battle. It was a curious 20 years, with some Americans taking credit for the fall of Soviet Communism, as if a suicide counts as murder if somebody else wanted to pull the gun. But some things were meant to come back to life. And Putin, sick of hearing how China’s greatest debtor somehow won a war against his country has been letting his horns show. Communism may have been a bad thing overall but it was the one thing Russia did well. And some people prefer the politburo to the Russian Mafia. So as journalists end up shot, former spies end up poisoned and dissidents end up disappeared, we can count down the years until the hammer and sickle comes back. And just in time too. My CCCP t-shirt still looks cool. Quite frankly I missed the cold war. Mutually Assured Destruction was the one thing not preventable with a condom. Many thought the right country won at the time (OK, maybe Americans and Pinochet), but the rest of us knew it was only a matter of time before the bear, rumoured dead would wake up from hibernation. Meeting with Iran? Yup, I think that he just growled.

4. Cable Series

The Sopranos are gone and they have taken with them the world. The world of the cable drama anyway. So after running out of hairs to scratch from watching John from Cincinnati and laughing at the future drag show that was Rome, the sad realization came upon me that the era of the genre and gut busting cable series is over. The mix of powerful writing, unrestrained acting, violence and real time sex was powerful indeed but it also smacked of the forbidden—as if we were watching something that we really should not be, biding time in illicit pleasure until somebody pulled the plug. So now instead of the brilliant, daring or merely shocking, we now have the good, pleasing, “edgy” but unbrilliant cable show, Dexter, Weeds, Tell Me You Love Me, and the Tudors. Ironically enough the better are shows are now on network TV. Or maybe I’m just saying that because I cannot get enough of Burn Notice.

5. Michael Jackson

If you still had hopes, you’re even more wacko than he is. And step away from those little boys while you’re at it.

6. Peace in the Middle East

Should we blame this one on Abraham? It’s the biblical thing to do. Atheists may want to, but to do so would mean to believe in God in the first place.

7. The Great Reggae Record

Sure it was overstuffed, overblown, self-indulgent and at least five songs too long, but Ziggy Marley and the Melody Makers’ Jahmekya was also the last reggae masterpiece. Well the second to last, before Til Shiloh. But Jahmekya, was by any standard a stunning record, the sound of a band recognizing a world bigger than their own and responding without a second thought and sometimes without first one. So there was disco, funk, rock, but also a return to drum and bass basics that showcased the seminal talents of Stephen Marley. Pity that they released the crappy Kozmik as the first single and the crappier Small People as the second. To this day, most people judge the album by those tracks, a shame because roots Reggae will never make a record as brilliant again.

8. The Great American Novel

Was any thought more ludicrous to begin with? The concept has always smacked of self-consciousness and identity crisis, as if one could ever come across a singular work of fiction that speaks to the 8 million Americas that reside in New York alone. The very idea of a novel to end all novels is preposterous for it supposes things that could never be quantified: a universal definition of singular greatness, and the idea that one book could speak to such a heterogeneous and conflicting population. And should that goal happen, what would be left of American Literature? What would be the point for any American to continue writing? Where would the American novel go but down? Notice nobody is out there beating themselves trying to write the great British, Russian or Swedish novel.

Doris Lessing!!!!

2007-10-13T11:49:00.000-05:00

Again, another of those writers you never think about for a Nobel because you just assumed she had won it already. I really need to check that Laureate's list. Way off was I. Consider me humbled.

Going [Away] To Teach

2007-09-10T14:23:00.001-05:00

The great Jamaican novelist Anthony Winkler, no stranger to strangeness, chose 1975 to leave the US for Jamaica, a return to teach at a country school. At the time this flew in the face of conventional wisdom and even basic good sense—the rest of Jamaica was too busy trying to leave— and he must have noticed how empty the arrivals section was compared to the chaos in departures. But he did get a good book out of it. So who knows, maybe I’ll get a good book out my colonization in reverse. It’s September 10, 2007 and I have been in St. Paul, Minnesota for nearly a month now. While I fully understand Winkler’s reasons for going back, it’s worth noting that he did not stay. If you are a writer in Jamaica, maybe even in the Caribbean there comes a point when you just have to go.

I remember last year talking to a friend of mine, an artist. His work had once blazed with a fierce inventiveness, the kind of brief flashes of brilliance that Jamaicans can give you sometimes that makes you hope, wish that it would lead to something not just revolutionary but consistently groundbreaking. But like many before him, his brilliance was just a flash, and while he is still good, his work reflects a curious stasis, an unconscious failure of nerve, and a lack of hunger that has infected everything he has done. In Jamaica it is simply too easy to make good by not being good enough. I told him that he simply had to leave. It was time. His talent or more importantly his search had come to the point where Jamaica could no longer provide answers or even good questions. His choice was to either stay and contract (though make money doing it) or leave for somewhere, anywhere that would explode his point of view and challenge his thinking on what was good, normal, or even right. He needed a new space; somewhere he was not entitled to and had everything to prove. His art depended on it.

I know because that was my case as well. I find it hard explaining to people that I had grown tired of graphic design by 2000. By late 2000 I knew I had outgrown my life but could not think of what would come next, whether mediocrity or death. So I chose both. Or rather I decided to make mediocrity kill me. Nobody understood that the supposedly great design that I was doing took few minutes to create, few hours to execute and nothing to accomplish. I was doing substandard work and knew it. I also knew that nobody else in Jamaica knew I was doing it. I was not interested in getting better nor did I need to. It took me five more years to realize how wrong this was.

Years ago I asked a friend in UWI’s English Department what would it take to lecture on campus. Over the phone she said one of two things needed to happen: either one of [them] died or I became too big a writer to ignore. I’m not scared of burning bridges but that’s not why I left. Writing was the first activity I ever did that scared the daylights out of me. Many Jamaicans —and this is no disrespect to them— thought my work was good, but I did not quite believe it. I knew how easy it was to be lauded for merely doing something as opposed to doing it well. What’s more I was stuck here, while my friend Kwesi left to make films. This was a friend I looked up to because he was worldly and intelligent, had the most books I’ve ever seen, took what I said seriously and had high standards for himself. But when he left I knew why. Had he stayed he would have become a lot like some of the people he left behind. Sure he might have been able to buy a range rover but he would have lost his soul and by that I’m not trying to be dippy or metaphysical: By soul I mean the inner motivation to do something purely for the sake of doing it rather than for something external. Like good money.

That probably isn’t very clear. Let me put it this way. George Clinton once said funk is its own reward, meaning the greatest return, the deepest thrill in what he did was in the very act of doing it. I think and he’ll probably say I’m dead wrong (but it’s my impression and my blog), that Kwesi needed to be doing something where the very act of doing it was it’s own reward. I think that’s why he left and I know that’s why I had to.

So I finally left in August, even though just about everybody would tell you that I left from 2005. Just because some place is your home doesn’t mean you can live there. Jamaica became a base, a place to fly out from. I was in New York so much that customs started to suspect me of living there illegally. There was nothing more depressing than coming back to Jamaica and to be immediately thrust back into a life of trying to make money doing something I had no wish to. I did not start writing to find a new way to make money (boy would that have been a mistake —even though I’m not doing bad, thanks for asking) but I did get a degree in creative writing so that I could teach. And earn some money. I love my country but I’ve never missed it, perhaps because I have never forgotten the reasons I left.

When I told Kwesi what I was about to do, I simply recited the bottom line that I was in it for steady income. I think it disappointed him in some way, that way in which your friends sound polite and supportive but really think you can do better. What I wanted to say and should have said is that I love teaching and think I was kinda born to do it. I don’t know if that makes me a teacher, but I have to tell you, two days ago when a student came up to me and said he wasn’t supposed to be in my class, but liked it so much that he was going to drop his other class to take mine, well, that felt like something a better writer than me could have described. It’s not because I love the idea of “shaping young minds,” quite frankly I think that’s bullshit. I think I love it because like what Clinton said about funk, teaching is its own reward. I’m a writer first, but this is not a stopgap until Oprah returns my calls. If I leave this world with some people thinking I was a good teacher that wrote some books, that’s fine too.

Just In Case People Think I Only Have it Out for White People...

2007-08-22T21:29:00.000-05:00

1. How many of the Rutgers Women were Ludacris Fans?
2. How many black women know the lyrics to Bitchez Ain't Shit? Big Pimpin'?
3. How many blacks with victim complexes does it take to cash a welfare check?
4. Why is it that every time a Black athlete falls from grace the reason must be in some way because of something The Man did back in Slavery? (Thanks for that one, Matt)
5. When is Public Enemy going to apologise to Elvis? (Pat Boone now, there's somebody who needs a public enema)
6. When is John Ridley's The Manifesto of Ascendancy for the Modern American Nigger going to become required reading for all black people?
7. Do we still need the word Nigger?
8. When are people going to realise that Michael Eric Dyson is the Geraldo Riviera of Black Opinion?
10. And Al Sharpton may be smarter than you think?
12. Isn't calling yourself a black queen or king just a deluded as calling yourself a nigga or bitch? My foremothers fought and died for the right to be called woman so how dare we tell them that it's not good enough?
13. For all the supposed blackness of hip-hop when did we choose to forget that the white media gave it props first?
14. Why is it that any black person who does not speak in ebonics is assumed to be acting white? Nobody accuses a redneck of not keeping it real if he goes to English Class.
15. Why are decorum, class, deportment, taste, and openmindedness considered white values?
16. What does it say about the black people who think so?
17. Who would have listened had he said, I'm a tell y'all. I has a dream in the heah house tonite! Sho Nuff! Sho nuff, daggumit. Free at last mah homeys! Free at last, mah Niggers and Niggettes!

18. Why are there still more black men in prison than in college?
19. How much of this is our fault? And when are we going to hold ourselves accountable?
20. Would Martin Luther King be proud of us or disappointed?
21. (Question inspired by Mar) How come I'm acting WHITE if I listen to white acts like Pig Destroyer, Feist, Kings of Leon and Mastodon, but BLACK if I listen to whitebread acts like John Mayer and Maroon 5?

On Hateration

2007-08-07T21:36:00.000-05:00

It took me quite a while to realize that my list of friends who hate Jack Kerouac’s On The Road far outstripped my list of friends who actually read the book. I don’t think this means that I love a pack of liars so much as a posse of amateur but enthusiastic debunkers, people still young enough to stick to the contrasting opinion even if none is necessary, especially if the prevailing opinion was once the transgressive one. Put a simpler way, they hate shit that is cool just because everybody keeps saying it’s cool. Like my friend who hates Nirvana because everybody loves them but loves the album Nirvana fans dislike (MTV Unplugged), the consensus record for people who don’t really like Nirvana. One would be quick to call such people contrarians but they are something far more simplistic and far less tolerable: Haters.

Or Haytas. You are forgiven if unaware that Hip-hop has irrevocably altered the word, just as surely as Jamaicans changed the meaning of ignorant. Haters no longer hate, they hate on. They pile on disapproval for transparently selfish purposes. Hateration is mean spiritedness with a personal agenda. Sometimes it’s dislike for no other reason than there being a season for disliking. Other times it’s dislike for someone or something because they have become too ubiquitous, popular, correct, cool, or sometimes because they have been around too long. When Notorious BIG rapped about mo’ money, mo’ problems, the chief problem was the hater, the miserable (and less successful) who sought companions in their misery. People who can’t stand success in any shape or form not their own and to tear down such success even in their meager sphere of influence.

It’s always been cool to hate any book called a literary masterpiece. In one belligerent bout of hateration, Nabokov tore Dostoevsky to pieces, perhaps because he was sick of seeing Crime and Punishment being placed ahead of Lolita in Best Of... lists. For years the beats have been easy targets, first for the literati, then the threatened establishment, and then for every lit brat short of pubic hair but long on attitude, trying to make a name for himself by openly despising someone else. The more canonized the better. So many people view On the Road as an overrated novel that it might shock people to know how few people have actually read it. And that’s another thing about Hateration. Scratch off a hater and you’ll find its incestuous little cousin, the bullcritter.

Bullcrit. Most of us have done it and some of us will do it today. Bullcrit is the critical praise or damnation of a work one has never seen, or read or heard. More often than not we can pull it off because the average person is, without putting a fine point on it, knowledgeable of little and critical of even less. I was a bright and shining bullcritic until I embarrassed myself with the Great Gatsby, a book I have faked-read for years. “Just read the first chapter,” I said. “A pitch perfect example of the reliable narrator. How about that tone? Isn’t Gatsby the first truly modern novel? The first 20th century American novel of its own age? Isn’t it informed by post world war one weariness and melancholy?” I could go on and frequently did until I used the novel in my argument for the return of melodrama to fiction, saying, “that scene where Gatsby dies in the car crash is pure melodrama.”

We bullcrit novels we haven’t read, turned on I guess by the act of hating the loved. But hateration isn’t limited to dead novelists. In pop music, where the term came from, hateration is de rigueur. Missy Elliot’s sly single ‘Gossip Folks’ opens with samples of haters who can’t stand the bitch for eating two crackers a day and wonder if she’s having Michael Jackson’s baby. It’s funny as hell to be sure, but also serious. Missy knows that she’s at the stage where people will hate simply because it’s her time to be hated. Jamaicans can haterate with the best of them. Every time I start a discussion about Jamaican musician Sean Paul, the typical Jamaican’s typical response is “but he sucks live.” Now given that Sean performs 99.9% of the time to faraway audiences in faraway lands, such a judgment is downright impossible for a Jamaican to make. So I usually call them out on it. “And when did you see him perform?” I ask, “because I saw him at a club on Puerto Rican day and he blew everybody away.” The Jamaican will then trot out some irrelevant example, a concert from five or even ten years ago, or some award show with dozens of reasons for a bad performance, not one being the performer.

Even the seemingly highbrow sometimes go for the down and dirty. Rolling Stone Magazine, clueless as ever, lionized The White Stripes’ most overrated records, Elephant and Get Behind Me Satan, one guessed because they have never paid attention to them before and did not want to seem behind the curve. In fact Rolling Stone has mastered the art of loveration, loving a band simply because it’s now their time to be loved. And since they are usually off by a couple years, they frequently champion the major label debut and waste column inches explaining why it is better than their obscure indie records. But now that the love-in with White Stripes is over, not only have they given Icky Thump—a stunning return to form— the dreaded 3 ½ star review, the recently did a story on new guitar heroes and ignored Jack White. They did however feature John Mayer.

Hateration is hypocrisy, envy and covetousness all mixed into one despicable package and taken to extreme levels. It results in the death of Biggie Smalls and the debasing of the same idols that were created last week. It’s also ignorance (pre-not post Jamaican definition of the word) made into an art and a science; a dimwitted dismissal of something one has never heard seen or felt, in essence something we have always had with us but used to call by another name:

Prejudice.

What’s the Matter with my Web 2.0?

2007-07-23T08:21:00.000-05:00

Maybe I should call this blog, Am I a book snob 2.0. Or, the hidden benefits of elitism. One of the crucial facts forgotten about American democracy is that a power elite shaped its fundamental principles. Had the process of forming a democracy been itself democratic many would have preferred the safety (or cowardice) of sticking it out with mad King George. I’m thinking about this because of Andrew Keen’s book, The Cult Of The Amateur, a lightning rod of a book that has sparked an onslaught of criticism mostly from people who haven’t read it.

The problem is that the nature of the attacks all but proves Keen’s point and he knows it. His all out assault on web 2.0, particularly it’s user generated content has provoked vicious responses from that very same group and the first thing that’s noticeable is how amateurish most of the criticism is. Simple, grade 2 mistakes like attacking the man instead of his argument. Attacking the man because one had not bothered to read his book, and not seeing how obvious the ignorance. Calling him a motherfucker, for example. This book has provoked constructive debate but that is lost on people who because of the very nature of their sites or blogs have never applied genuine, informed critical thinking. They have never fact checked a blog to make sure there is truth to back up an argument, and have never been in a situation where simply saying that he is a dumb motherfucker is not enough. This of course proves his point even though one cannot escape Keen’s own personal stake in the matter—perhaps his own bitterness at having launched an Internet company that quickly went bust.

He may also be ignoring though he claims not to, that the same Internet is responsible for breaking truths that the mainstream media did not or would not. Would anybody have been the wiser about James Frey were it not for Smoking gun? I tread lightly because this is after all a blog and not only has it facilitated my own expression but also my communication with you, something that would not, has not and will not happen in the mainstream media where my voice simply does not count. And the stakes are not even as high for myself as it is for a Lebanese teenager who has nothing but a modem. That said there are things that I have written in my blog that would not have passed the first round of fact checking that I left untouched because I knew nobody would call me out on it. This is dangerous, something I have started to call Wikipedia wisdom. I come across Wikipedia wits all the time and the danger is not that they are unaware that Wikipedia is to a huge percent incorrect if not outright false, but that they do not care. Truth has become as flexible a commodity as trendiness and not half as necessary.

Perhaps the biggest myth about web 2.0 is it being a universal equalizer. A tool that has made the ordinary person, as powerful as any pundit. But not only is this untrue but the deception is perilous. The new boss is really no different from the old boss except that the slave doesn’t think he has a master. Aintitcool.com may have seemed like the voice of the people but it is really the voice of a few steering many, sometimes to bad movies that merely fit in with kinks of 34 year old virgins, movies like Me Myself and Irene. Watch how the web shaped the look of Transformers, where overgrown boys, still terrified of icky girls were responsible for eliminating a female transformer.

And then there is Wikipedia. The end result of Wikipedia being accepted as fact is not that truth becomes irrelevant (that’s the beginning), but that truth become easily manipulated. Contrary to what you may think, the internet shrinks opinion as much as it expands it. You may think that your gmail account is safe and easily accessible, and it is. But g-mail is also two gigs of your life that can be wiped out in a second by somebody you have never met. And there’s nothing you can do about it. A book in my hand, in my closet or hidden in my cellar means that when the oppressors come I can hide my knowledge, instead of watching it being destroyed by the whim and fancy of whoever is the programmer. Web 2.0 is power but it means nothing if the light goes. That’s an entire universe erased by a power switch. Youtube is ultimately controlled and the controller is not you.

Another big problem with web freedom so far is that is has not come with web responsibility, a fact reassuring to pedopliles and rumourmongers everywhere. So a biography of Anderson Cooper can make a huge detour into his sexuality, plunging into hearsay and hear-think and departing from fact and decorum, as if whom he is sleeping with is as important as how many died in Hurricane Katrina. I have seen in my own case how web reading has hurt my ability to read and teach books. Even now I have to force myself to not ‘web read’ novels— to not scan the first four or so lines, then ‘scroll’ to the bottom and turn the page.

Andrew keen is keen on pointing out how much the new web world has destroyed the old, better establishment, but nobody had to murder someone so dead set on suicide. A better point to be made is that the world that web 2.0 is creating is far inferior to the one that came before it. The Blind leading the blind hoping they’ll all eventually see—or, more likely conclude that seeing is way overrated anyway. A bigger problem is the new boss destroying a world it is not equipped to supplant. Or at least not yet. You may think that a voice from the street means more that a Walter Cronkite, but should a Hurricane Katrina happen or a President gets assassinated you need a Cronkite to hold 250 million people together. You need Britannica and its researched facts because should you need to save a life, a Wikipedia tip could just as likely kill. You need an amazon.com where people who hate this blog cannot then go on my page, write a barrage on disgusting reviews despite not having read the book, and drive my rating down to one star, knowing that the American reading public trusts other readers more than critics.

But as I said before Andrew keen makes the same mistake that traditional media makes, screaming bloody murder while pointing the gun at himself. By trying to stretch his mouth wide open to include pornography, pedophiles and Youtube he exposes himself instead as a luddite in Bill O'Riley drag. You Tube may be a world where "Nothing seems too prosaic or narcissistic for these videographer monkeys," but it is also the only place where you’ll find James Brown on the TAMI show, or Lebanese kids showing their side of the whole bombing last year, because the mainstream media will show neither. Stephen Colbert knows that had he fought Youtube instead of left it alone, many of his present viewers would have ignored him. Keen attacks the wisdom of the crowd and the lack on an information central but fails to remember how easily manipulated information was even up to recently, which is why people still have a pleasing sense of nostalgia about Operation Desert Storm and trust anything Fox News channel tells them.

He also has to face the fact that web 2.0 is not going away, in fact a web 3.0 is on the horizon already. He may also be ignoring that many blogs have gone on to genuine intelligent content whether that be the range of opinion on The Huffington Post, or the simple elegance and grace of The Sartorialist. Unlike Keen, I see intelligence in an upward not downward curve. Human beings inevitably want more and that greed for information—not more, but better information— is always good. That greed has sparked everything from the creation of the wheel to outer space exploration to the discovery that the world is round. We are curious and hungry creatures and while we feel safety in the wisdom of the crowd, that crowd still needs that one kid who realizes that the Emperor is naked. What Keen does not realize is that this lone seeing eye —The web 2.0 Galileo or Dorothy Parker will come from the same crowd that is right now flying blind.

Rock and Roll, Black and White

2007-07-10T22:26:00.000-05:00

So lately everybody has gotten into the argument as to where rock and roll was born. According to The New York Times, New Jersey has now gotten into the act, with two cities declaring that rock began when Bill Haley and his band played there. The argument has devolved into semantics with one city claiming he played there with the Comets, his rock and roll band and the other that he played with the Saddlemen, a country band that was sort of rockish anyway. New Jersey is but one of several places all laying claim to the sound, including Memphis, the Mississippi Delta, Cleveland and Philadelphia. But these warring places have one troubling and tiresome thing in common, a dogged, insistence that wherever rock and roll came from or whoever came up with it, that person simply MUST BE WHITE.

For if the person was black then it was merely R&B or race music. Or sped up 12 bar blues. One wonders where that leaves Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats’ ‘Rocket 88,’ a record held up by no less than Sam Phillips as the first rock and roll record. Doesn’t matter that Phillips thought it was Rock and Roll, most white critics consider it R&B, a bridesmaid of rock, not the Bride. Even the Bill Haley version of Rocket 88—which has no real difference from the original—is held up by some as the first rock and roll record. Rolling Stone, in one if its most inexplicable and disappointing articles came on the side of the Elvis kiss-ass and declared that ‘That’s Alright Mama’ was the first rock and roll record, something that Elvis disputed almost twenty years before and the magazine proved wrong in its very own 50’s issue from April 1990.

This begs the question of just what a black artist has to do to be considered rock. Any black rock song made too early (Rocket 88 was released in 1951) gets classified as R&B with patronizing rock critics declaring it to be important to the formation of rock and roll, but not rock itself. What does Rocket 88 have to do to be called a rock and roll song? Sure it’s ragged 12 bar blues but so is The Beatles’ Day Tripper. If anything Rocket 88 had a kid brother’s relationship to R&B, eschewing the dirty old man double-talk of the blues for a brand new lyrical concept that was all youth, all id and as blatantly sexual as it was witty: The car metaphor. Rocket 88 did more than that. It also introduced fuzz guitar almost 20 years before it became popular and pushed the drum way to the front where the whole song seemed submissive to the beat. Even listening to it now the blatant, sexually ferocious youth of the thing says rock and roll far more than anything by Bill Haley and The Comets.

But Jackie and the Delta Cats were not white, so Rocket 88 is R&B. After all Rolling Stone says so. For rock and roll to be rock and roll it simply must have some country in it. Never mind that all these black kids came from the south, grew up on country as much as blues and some, like Ray Charles actually played in country band. Critics use country merely as a ruse so they do not have to say that for rock to be rock it must have some white in it. White meaning people, not influence. Whatever black people did was proto-rock, proto being another word for prehistoric.

This slur disguised as compliment is nothing new of course. Jazz’s greatest fans have been insulting it for decades. David Hadju once wrote that in lionizing jazz the beats popularized the myth of black creative primitivism, allowing the most open-minded white listeners to use words such as ‘effortless’ and ‘instinctual’ to define black genius. Black art was an inexplicable mystery, like voodoo or black magic. So Prince is an instinctual genius despite playing 90 instruments and composing for the Joffrey ballet, but Elvis Costello is a craftsman. Duke Ellington is a natural talent but Stravinsky is a master of “multiple compositional styles, who revolutionized orchestration.” Black art is never about craft, education, technique, or intelligence. Not even jazz. Not even Free Jazz. Not even Be-bop.

Rhapsodizing about be-bop, Allen Ginsberg gushed that the music gave him such a wild, sense of freedom that he felt that all he had to do was ‘grab a horn and blow.’ Charlie Parker could only snigger at the statement, but other jazzmen took this to considerable offence. The idea that music was of such uncultured simplicity, such accidental genius that anybody could be inspired to just do it was simply preposterous, even if Ginsberg meant no harm by saying it. The truth is nobody can just grab a horn and play be-bop. One of the most complex music forms ever created, ever single person who played be-bop in its golden era was a genius, from Charlie Parker to Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Cannonball Aderley, and Milt Jackson, among others. For all the wild abandon that Bolero inspires, nobody ever says Ravel makes one feel like grabbing a piccolo.

There is still this sense that something is not quite believable about black brilliance; that it happens by either chance or something inexplicable. And that the talent is never a matter of intellect, but ‘baffling brilliance,’ as Kurt Loder once said about Prince. Black brilliance is either off the cuff, or accidental or so couched in primitivism that one needs only to be wild and primitive as well to tap into it. Iggy Pop certainly thought so when he did the ridiculous Africa Man, where he simply growled and screamed like an idiot because well idiocy and inspiration go hand in hand with black people. Critics seem to want to believe that rock and roll emerged fully formed from the start, but not if that means black people did it. Not if that song is Rocket 88.

This isn’t racist so much as willfully ignorant. That rock and roll could be so well developed and explosive from as far back as 1951 (if not earlier) makes the music more phenomenal not less. Perhaps critics are worried that if Rocket 88 is credited for giving rock and roll everything it needed for the subsequent 40 years that would mean that white people contributed very little. This is of course ludicrous. Subtract Elvis or Carl Perkins from rock and roll and there would be no Beatles and certainly no Led Zeppelin. It’s crucial to remember that 50’s rock and rollers boxed themselves into a corner that they could not get out of and nearly took the music with them, until the Brits and the Beach Boys found a way out. Bill Haley, Elvis, Ike Turner, Little Richard; All these artists were critical to the creation, vitality and legacy of the music. But it all began with Rocket 88, and it’s high time people stop acting like it didn’t.

Whatever Happened To Spin Magazine?

2007-07-02T15:34:00.000-05:00

Like all rock and roll stories this starts with a band. Even in the balls and bluster world of Metal lines are drawn very deep, separating one from the other. And like every genre these days metal has its mainstream bands none of which I know or listen to and its alternative bands such as Isis, Jesu, Pelican, Converge, The Fucking Champs and Mastodon. Last year Spin magazine stunned readers when they gave Blood Mountain, the band’s new album two out of five stars and dismissed it as bad prog. The review was as brief as it was surprising given that both the mainstream and alternative press went rapturous over the record, culture tastemakers Pitchfork Media in particular giving it 8.5 out of ten. Not many issues down faux punkers Fall out Boy and Brand New both got a four star reviews and in June 2006 Beyoncé made the cover of “The Sexiest Under 25” issue. Something was changing and it wasn’t just the focus on cleavage. Was Spin turning into Blender?

Blender is the successful Maxim spin-off that caters to all the pre-hormonal boys who wished Maxim had more music. It’s very good for what it is and saying that it is cheapening the culture is not only pointless but also wrong. Trash and cash has always been newsworthy and when music gets worse Blender only gets better. The problem is that Spin magazine had made a mistake in thinking that rule also applies to them. Whatever happened to Spin Magazine? That weird post punk, post reggae, pre hip-hop, pre grunge magazine that put people like Nick Cave on their cover and called him the last rock star? That was from a time when Spin, like underground rock and roll was still a scary and sexy force, governed by no rules except its own and taking the hits (putting a free condom in an issue nearly drove them out of Business) that such fearlessness was bound to receive.

In the mid to late 80’s the sheer fearlessness of Spin was almost impossible to categorize or appreciate, and not just the pioneering AIDS Column. Spin was also the first magazine to truly dig black culture as it was happening, not after the fact—which has always been the story with the white media and rock and roll. That meant not only articles about hip-hop but stuff written in hip-hop language, with Bonz Malone’s pioneering articles, as crucial in establishing the music as Yo! MTV Raps. Like The Face in the UK, Spin covered House before Technotronic took it to the charts, Trip-hop before hairdressers bought Sneaker Pimps and even this little thing called grunge before Nirvana had a hit. In fact back when Rolling Stone dismissed Nevermind with a patronizing 3 star review Spin downright ordered its audience to buy the damn record and helped start a movement.

Around the same time Rolling Stone gave Nevermind three stars it gave new albums from U2 and Michael Jackson four and a half. By dismissing the former and lionizing the latter Rolling Stone declared allegiance to the establishment. Or had been so fat on corporate rock that it could no longer see where the music was going. Earlier in the year, their New Music issue produced such vanguard acts as Chris Isaak and Extreme. Alternative was about to explode and Rolling Stone would have none of it. The magazine even trashed crucial precursors like Jane’s Addiction’s Ritual De Lo Habitual. Maybe they didn’t see it coming, but Spin did. And maybe Jane’s was right and we do become the thing we hate because Spin is now doing the same thing, praising industry-approved bands like Fall Out Boy and routinely dismissing indie obsessions like Mastodon and Isis. When a rave review of a genuine talent happened as it did with their appraisal of Joanna Newsom’s YS, it felt left field, like and exercise in coolness, like a Rolling Stone review. There was a sense that the magazine was out of its depth, reporting about a topic on which it no longer had authority.

I remember in 1987 when Spin said Guns and Roses ‘looks like all that rock has left,’ and being thrilled and appalled by the sentence. I remember being perplexed and annoyed by their first Greatest Albums of All Time list because a James Brown live album was number one, Tom Waits’ Swordfishtrombones was either 2 or 3, Echo and the Bunnymen was in there somewhere as were Depeche Mode’s Black Celebration and George Michael’s Faith. It wasn’t only the choices that made my head spin but the writing, the reasoning why they demanded that these records be listened to. On Faith they said that Michael swung from faux prince to faux pop balladry and was so obsessed with giving pop pleasures that on ‘Hard Day,’ he warps his voice to play his own lover. Note that I can quote the article almost verbatim. I stole this issue from my friend and poured over it for months trying to figure out what kind of psychos would make a list like this and what did it mean. Then I listened to the records and the person in my mirror changed. Spin did not get me to listen to different rock and roll—it got me to listen to rock and roll differently. Rock and roll became a dark and sexy mystery where yes, George Michael’s desperate and sexually confused attempt to fake Prince was more rock and roll and real than Prince himself. Where James Brown screaming ‘take it to the bridge’ had more menace and noise than the breakdown in Whole Lotta Love played twice. Where Black Celebration and Ocean Rain played back to back summed up my eighties better than any book I could possibly write. And more than anything else where music could be mine and mine alone even as I shared it with millions and there was not a damn thing wrong with that.

Alternative music, that is. Before it became a nation and a punch line, alternative was an aberration. A subculture that was thought to exist only on college radio, but not quite a movement or a commercial force. Spin was not the first to respond to college rock but it may have been the first to find the common streak in wildly divergent styles from then obscure acts such as REM to a ubiquitous artist like Prince to something totally unpalatable like Ministry. It was the first to treat all music as baroque instead of focusing on only adolescent male virgins with big glasses and jangly guitars. By giving as much ink to Salt and Pepa as they did Slayer they dared to declare that they were one and the same thing, unified not only in their statement of purpose and their DIY creativity but also in mainstream ignorance or confusion. More than that Spin had a particular genius for pin-pointing what made these artists alternative—The propulsively gay and disco subtext of Madonna for example, or the rise of irony as the dominant aesthetic device as deployed in the film Heathers—in ways that other mags like Alternative Press simply could not understand.

Spin was also a common ground under which all the disparate strains of alternative could congregate. In that it echoed the progress of seminal bands in the late 80’s that did the same thing: Public Enemy, Pixies, Sonic Youth, NWA, Ice-T/Body Count, Jane’s Addiction, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Nine Inch Nails, Soul II Soul and Nirvana.

Gradually to some, suddenly to most, Spin and the artists they covered became things that everybody had in common, an alternative nation before MTV co-opted and killed the term. As alternative grew, Spin grew into the tastemaker and 1990 to 1994 were the best years to be alive. But it would not last, and you didn’t need to see what was left of Kurt Cobain’s splattered head to know. The genre that never was spawned too many heads, too many compromises, too many marketing efforts disguised as bands that found the look, feel and sound too easy to co-opt. By 1996 alternative was also used to describe Matchbox Twenty and Better Than Ezra. The center could no longer hold and many of alternative’s unifying elements, Jane’s Addiction, Public Enemy, Raygun magazine, Nirvana and Lollapalooza fell apart.

Today’s Spin is not Spin magazine, but Pitchfork media, the website and alternative kingmaker responsible for making it’s own stars like LCD Soundsystem, Tapes n’ Tapes and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. Thanks to Pitchfork the young listener can see brilliance in both Dizzee Rascal and Kelly Clarkson and their reviews stand in striking, wonderful defiance of the conventional wisdom that internet age kids will never read anything long. But something is missing: the grand statement, an attempt to make rock a national, cultural discourse the way Spin did in the late 80’s and Rolling Stone did in the 70’s. An attempt to unify disparate elements without every saying that’s exactly what they are trying to do.

Counter culture and Music culture has never been more fractious, never been more in need of something with the ballsiness and insanity to bear witness and give testimony to it all. The last time this happened was the late eighties when songs like Just Got Paid went to number one and nobody knew what the hell was up with Prince who no longer seemed interested in saving us. In that universe Spin as if nobody told them not to, packed Morrissey, Metallica, Run DMC, AIDS, Rai and free condoms in one package and had the gall to stamp the whole thing, “ THIS IS ROCK AND ROLL.” Rock and roll heard differently and correctly. Without ever claiming so, Spin became the voice of the generation that would not be spoken for and it said strange things, like claiming rap was art (in hip-hop voice) that disco was as crucial as punk and that if you put Morrissey and Sinead together you might get Madonna. And yet they were never so up their alternative ass that they wouldn’t put Jon Bon Jovi on the cover.

Maybe every magazine is granted only one decade of brilliance. Esquire for the 60’s Rolling Stone for the 70’s, Sassy for the 80’s. And much of this is not Spin’s fault but rock and roll itself, which has become a passive experience, not different from watching the credits roll on a videogame. Maybe Spin should pull an Apple move and ask Bob Guccione Jr to come back. Musical chairs for the editor slot is never a good sign and there is still the magazine's continued attempts to become Blender. In trying times one can either take stock or take risks and Spin seems content on doing the former even though it remains leagues below its early 90’s heyday. Maybe Spin will realize that the mid 2G’s are not that far removed from the mid 80’s and needs somebody to make sense of it. Maybe they will see that they need Joanna Newsom and Justin Timberlake on the cover, not the Killers and that they need to stop trying to figure out what people want and have the guts to give people what they need. To stop following culture and create one. Maybe they will realize that we need 80’s Spin now more than ever.

This Business of Books

2007-06-27T09:11:00.000-05:00

The great thing about having an acclaimed first book is that the quality of your rejection letters gets so much better. Having gotten used to models of politeness like that yellow “NOT FOR US” card that Soho Press took the time to mass print and send to me, it did come as a rather pleasant shock how nice some of the letters were. These were some of the most heartfelt, personable and downright gripping no thank you’s I’ve received ever since I was sixteen and thought telling this girl she could sit in my lap instead of the bus seat was hot. One publisher wrote “ I know, I know, I know that I’m making a mistake turning this down but I have to,” contradicting my belief that Publishers never had to do anything. Another could rhapsodize about her favourite major and minor characters (some of who I had never given a second thought) but still decided that her publisher would not know what to do with it. And so on it went the torrent of nice let me downs, letters that let me know that I was a very good, but ultimately too risky proposition to publish.

And here I was thinking I was a Victorian. I’m not sure what being a risky writer means. Granted my new book is almost 500 pages of Slave dialect from the nineteenth century, but does that make a book risky? Hasn’t everybody seen Roots? My let’s call it affinity for sexual and scatological explicitness is well documented but I don’t know if it’s any worse than Ulysses or The Bluest Eye or Sabbath’s Theater for that matter (not that my work is anywhere near as good). I’m beginning to think that rejection letters say more about the publisher than the book being rejected. In some cases it’s simply a matter of the wrong publishing house. And granted I’m not so stuck up my own ass that I thought I was writing the great masterpiece to end all literature, but it’s puzzling to me just how cowardly the industry can be. Puzzling because too often this cowardice is written off as good business sense.

Contrary to what others may think, I have no problem with publishers being all about the money. Publishing is after all a business, not a charity. My problem with publishing is not that these guys are too mercenary but that they are nor mercenary enough. For an industry that all about the dollars very little done makes business sense. Take for instance the dependence on blockbusters, something the industry picked up from music and movies. Given how bad the state of publishing is, the dependence on mega cash cows couldn’t make less sense. And yet every publisher does it, waiting for the breakout book that will save the industry. So 8 million is spent on Charles Frazier’s new book before anybody even read what is truly a bad novel. Here was an industry setting up expectations that nobody could have matched anyway. And yet that hasn’t stopped the hunger for the next blockbuster novel.

At the Frankfurt and London Book Fair a malaise descended on the proceedings because there was no major breakout book. None except The Raw Shark Texts that was not only hyped the year before but has yet to justify it’s enormous push (Some say it has—see comments—, but I'm not seeing Cold Mountain/Corrections/Everything is Illuminated ubiquity yet). This makes no business sense. It doesn’t surprise me that so many roads lead to BMG because this is exactly the BMG/JIVE way of doing things. Comedy rocker Mojo Nixon said almost two decades ago that instead of giving Aerosmith 80 million dollars, why not give 40 bands two million dollars, that way if three or four or ten of that 40 amount to nothing there is still a wide playground of opportunity. Or put another way were Steven Tyler to croak he wouldn’t be taking your company down with him. The publishing equivalent of that would be the midlist, but there is no such thing as that in publishing anymore, despite whatever somebody might tell you. Again in the search for the next blockbuster, basic rules of business, taken for granted in every other industry are ignored. Things like building brand loyalty, nurturing the audience, exploring untapped markets, growing with the artist and the audience—nobody does that sort of thing anymore, well next to nobody anyway. Publishers have always said that this is an unquantifiable industry and I’m inclined to agree, but some things don’t need analysis, only common sense.

Some people may say that the publishing industry has always been this way. Forty-eight houses passed on Catch 22 and the biggest novel of the 50’s was Peyton Place. But the nature of the business, the character of the business has changed. Somebody has tried to make the business quantifiable, a matter of scientific numbers and nerdy analysis and I think I know whom that is. People old enough in the music industry moan that they don’t make stars like they used to and they are right. Prince broke through with his fifth album, Bruce Springsteen his third, Madonna her second. As everybody scrambles for the next big hit, nobody nurtures talent anymore and as a result there is no artist with a solid, successful career. Publishing is not much different. And yet if you take that business model to any other enterprise; no we don’t care about nurturing talent because this one thing right here, it’s gonna be the bomb, you would have been laughed to scorn. I can’t imagine the videogame industry one of those blamed for taking away music and publishing’s money running like that. To have everything riding on one videogame to be the blockbuster that sells billions instead of nurturing ten or twenty titles so that they can all eventually make a billion each would be a ridiculously stupid idea.

And in all the publishing industry's bawling about the shrinking size of their reading audience nobody seems to be paying attention to a rather unexpected bonus. Say what you want about the Harry Potter phenomenon but the fact that it created a kid (millions rather) who would rather read an 800 page book than watch TV or play a videogame is an astounding phenomenon that should not be taken lightly. Here is an audience that's massive, young, loyal and malleable. And starting next year they will be without the one thing that pulled them together. The industry has a unique opportunity to build on an already existing audience, to do the long haul thing, to respond to the wide gaping hole left by Harry Potter's absence by keeping these readers hooked to other stories and growing as they grow. Or they can just sit by and let the audience—the first massive loyal reading audience in nearly century— splinter and ultimately disappear. My money is on the latter.

Down and Out in Fort Lauderdale Airport

2007-06-06T09:52:00.000-05:00

It’s June 4, 2007 and I’m in terminal F of the Fort Lauderdale airport wondering which preposition to use. ‘At’ sounds right, but ‘in’ sounds more apt. I feel not just in but locked inside the Airport, delayed and trapped for several shitty reasons. And when at 7:35PM, Spirit Airlines tells me that the flight is delayed for perhaps an hour, perhaps more it’s the culmination of an evening of delays that makes me want to sob and laugh at once. I do neither, but curse under my breath while not trying to picture what my Pastor best friend would think. Instead I sit on the floor, whip out my pen and book and write this blog.

Spirit Airways left Kingston at 3:30 and landed in Fort Lauderdale at 5:30. Being one of the few Jamaicans who understand the convoluted and confused FLA customs system I went to the empty ‘Visitors’ line and was in front of a Customs Officer in seconds. I would have given my backside the proverbial pat but then the Customs Officer said, “Come with me sir,” and my heart sank. Disappointed, of course but not surprised. My trips to the local police department in every American Airport had become standard ever since I had the sparkling wisdom to study for a Creative Writing Degree in the United States. After some inexplicable bureaucratic snafu, the school forgot that I had enrolled, the INS terminated my visa and I went on the F1 warning list, sharing company with Mohammed Atta and countless other Muslim terrorists, drug dealers, and illegal aliens who were all in the country on student visas, but not in school. Since 2005 I have been through so many Airport security departments (NYPD in New York) that the officers have begun to recognize me. This never-ending third degree becomes annoying after the thirteenth time but I had long decided to roll with it, nostalgic for the days when I was merely mistaken for a drug dealer.

The first customs officer, let’s call him Alpha, told me to sit in the same room that exists in a hundred airports. The same room that makes me wonder why am I in this place with Jamaicans who look like they were deported a week ago. Jamaicans, whose only flaw may have been unsophistication and others people, usually men whose only flaw might have been that they look Arabic. I’m already bored by the procedure until I realize that this C.O., let’s call him Beta, means business.
“Marlon James?”
“That’s me.”
“You’re here quite a lot.”
“I sorta have to be. I’m a writer, New York is the center of the publishing world.”
“You’re a writer. How do you support yourself, Mr. James?”
“I have a Graphic Design Company in Jamaica.”
“Can I see your business card?”
“I only have my writer’s card. I don’t exactly search for design business here.”
“When were you last here, sir?”
“Ahhh...a week ago? I was here for six weeks. Teaching a course for Gotham Writer’s workshop.”
He then left his desk came around to search my carry-on. He flipped through my laptop, my Jamaican house keys, the Peter Godwin book I was still reading and the homework my students sent in.
“Is this a register?” he said, looking at my roll call sheet.
“You know I spoke to the State Department about this. They said if I was invited and I’m working for an honorarium it was fine. I don’t need a workers permit for that.”
“Your trip to Toronto, what was that about?”
“Which one?”
“June.”
“My brother’s wife’s funeral.... oh wait no, that was a book tour. I’ve been to Toronto twice and Vancouver once.”
“Miami in November?”
“Miami book fair.”
“You’re here an awful lot. How long are you staying this time?”
“Two weeks.”
“Can you remove your...oh you’re wearing slippers, never mind.”
“Honestly, am I going to get this every time?”
“Well sir you’re F1 visa raised a red flag and looking at this you’ve been stopped several times.”
You think? I said, but not to him.
“You’re here an awful lot and usually that means you’re not visiting, but living here, and then, you are from Jamaica.”

He finally said it. So clear from the get-go that he did not even need to finish his paragraph. A sentence with a subject that includes “Jamaica” needs no predicate—we know the rest of it by heart. Now that airports have gone back to pre 9/11 laxness my grace period was officially up. I looked up at the reflective glass and suddenly realized that were I a customs officer I’d think I was a drug dealer too. Before 9/11 customs detained me all the time. Ever since I stopped combing my hair everybody asks what band am I in, even as they pull my belt buckle to watch my jeans drop to reveal skivvies. Thank god I stopped going commando to airports. I thought wearing slippers would make things easier but that made it worse. With low-rise jeans, dreadlocks, loose shirt and hippy slippers I had molded myself in the perfect Rastafarian, Ganga smoker/dealer cliché, a patsy who needed only a “Pick Me” sign to stick out more. I had gotten lax myself. Back in my suspected drug dealer days I had always made sure to dress extra yuppie for international flights. A suit when everybody else wore jeans, something to over-compensate for streaky locks and three earrings.

So C.O. Beta began to type and did so for a very long time. I wondered what he was typing and why did he have to type this whole shit over again. I wondered if I should switch from Creative Writing to teaching American police personnel how to operate the SAVE key. I wasn’t afraid or even angry, but annoyed. And Beta was really only doing his job and he was quite nice despite the three score and 10 questions.
“Is this going to happen on my next trip, because I’ll be back in July and early August,” I say but like all the other times with all the other C.O’s, Beta had no answer. He continued typing and the asked if I’ve ever committed a crime or transported drugs. Then he asked, “What’s your religion, sir?”

“Christian...I guess,” I said, not doubting my answer but absolutely stunned by the question. By now all the passengers on the Spirit flight and a couple hundred more from other flights were gone and I was alone in customs. Even the ‘Arabs’ were gone. Beta continued to type.
“I’m here all the time on book business,” I say. “I’m coming back in July for the Harlem Book Fair.”
Beta tried to look interested. An hour passed. I thought of the Pennsylvania University that got me into this mess and the countless customs officers who kept stopping me for the same damn reason and wondered when will this supposedly first world country get to the point where local, regional and federal authorities share information so that Beta doesn’t have to type the same shit over and over. I looked at him and remembered crime scenes botched in the Bronx because the three authorities were too busy fighting over whose dick was the biggest. Why was I treated like this every time I came to the States? There’s not a single thing I have ever gotten from the United States that I’m not paying for, whether that be an education, food or Levis Jeans. I called my friend Bill and got his voicemail, knowing he would not call back. I thought of teaching another course: Accessing Voicemail 101 for Americans who do not know or cannot be bothered. Or maybe an opening a voicemail reply service since nobody ever returns messages in the US.

Then Beta stamped me. But unlike every other time I had traveled to the USA, he stamped me for one month, not six. I knew already that when (now if) I came back in July, my one month stamp would raise a brand new set of red flags and I would spend an hour or three, in an office just like this one, explaining all of this to an officer who will pretend to buy it as he types all this data over again. Beta explained that my student visa plus my frequent comings and goings had set off red flags and I agreed with him. After all, the world is brimming with fantastic nations and cities so why did I fly to New York so often? Why did I subject myself to this time and again for the nation that voted for George Bush twice? Far from disagreeing with him, Customs Office Beta gave me a mini epiphany. Maybe I do come to the States too much. I have never been to Europe, or Africa, or South America or even most of the Caribbean. Why was I coming to spend quality time with customs officers when I could be hiking through Europe or teaching English in Shanghai? I’m so going to blog this, I thought, blog being my new favourite threat, and would have whipped out my notebook had C.O. Kappa not been waiting on me.

Kappa told me good evening, too one look and sent me to the B line. The oh no Mr. suspect drug dealing illegal alien terrorist, we’re gonna check every crevice or crack including your ass crack if we feel like it line. But customs officer Kappa, who searched my bags, was actually kinda sweet. Maybe she just felt sorry for me after I told her that I was about to miss my connecting flight. Maybe she thought I was cute. Maybe she mistook me for Wyclef Jean from the Fugees. She searched quickly, smiled and sent me away but I could not move. Across the room C.O. Epsilon had a mango and things were about to get ugly. Seized from a Jamaican passenger, the mango had no choice but to be undressed and raped by the C.O. With blue gloves on he eviscerated the thing, stripping every piece of flesh until he was left with the seed. Then he snapped it open and swabbed inside. I didn’t know if I should have been insulted that he thought we’re so desperate to sell drugs or impressed that he thought we had such superior intelligence that we had already figured how to genetically engineer a mango fruit to bear a Ganga bud. Or a bomb. Thoughts of bombs led to thoughts of planes and I remembered that I have a flight to catch.

As I rushed to the gate I glanced a newspaper and saw why the Beta had asked about my religion. Three men from Trinidad and one from Guyana were arrested for hatching a plot to blow up JFK Airport. One of the Trinidadians was a sun and sea-born Muslim fundamentalist who had tried to overthrow the government before. Turned out that I had hit the trifecta after all. I was a suspected drug dealing, illegal alien terrorist. At the gate Spirit announces that the flight to New York is delayed. I feel like dropping an F-Bomb but can only laugh and the 7.25 price tag for a Pastrami sandwich in Vito’s Restaurant makes me laugh more. The plane arrives earlier than expected and as it lifts off I look around for something wooden to tap. There’s nothing but the paper on which I’m writing this blog. It will have to do. I do not reach Harlem until 2 in the morning forgetting to pay the bus fare and not giving much of a fuck. I am tired, fantastically pissed off and sporting a massive headache that I can do nothing about since only in Harlem is there no such thing as a 24 hour pharmacy. I do the best I can under the circumstances: drink super-drowsy cough syrup, put on Leonard Cohen’s Songs of Love and Hate and go to bed.

A Good Man In Africa, Part One

2007-05-27T11:28:00.000-05:00

Any discussion that puts Africa and money in the same sentence must eventually lead to white people. A couple days ago an African friend and I were talking about Jay Z’s recent trip to Angola. I still cannot pinpoint when it happened, but the discussion led to white people in Africa. Put an occasionally angry black man from the Diaspora in the same room as an occasionally angry black man from the continent and something is bound to explode. And exploded it did, an argument whose increasing viciousness stunned me even as I spoke. I railed on against the insult of Europeans who dismiss reparation (and I don’t mean money— England couldn’t afford it anyway), he cursed that for all their supposed humanity, DeBeers still doesn’t care about where a diamond comes from once the blood is washed off. I mentioned that I’m still waiting for DeBeers’ black board member and an African nation on UN’s Security Council. He mentioned the Belgians in the Congo and made a furious moment even more furious. I riffed on about the ludicrous comparison of Romans enslaving Britain a thousand years ago— the last time I checked, Luigi wasn’t getting any money from a Roman settlement in Sheffield, but Liverpudlians were still working in buildings built from the death and dislocation of millions of Africans. I told him how incensed I get when white and black people tell me to get over slavery even though people are still benefiting from it, 174 years later.

This led to the white man in Africa. There’s a philosophy that if you’ve lived somewhere long enough eventually it won’t matter how you got there in the first place. Funnily enough no Native American or Aborigine I know shares that universal logic. After the discussion with my African friend, which ended right before we got into the incendiary (but not very well written) Confessions of an Economic Hitman, I went home surprised and a little ashamed of myself. Maybe I should get a black hood and call myself a reverse Klansman. Then I remembered Peter Godwin’s When the Crocodile Eats The Sun and how much I did not want to buy it. Godwin is of course a fine writer and journalist, whose work I have read before. It’s a perilous task for a white man to write about Africa and writing non-fiction or even the expectedly biased memoir is still a dangerous move, fraught with causing offence at the slightest insensitivity. As a recent review in the New York Times pointed out, the age of Graham Greene may be over now that we have Zakes Mda and Moses Iwegawa, to point out his bullshit. But that’s not why I hesitated buying Peter’s book.

It’s not that I didn’t want to know him. I didn’t want to like him. We love to demonize our humans but are not too keen on humanizing our demons. Hating white people comes easy when you pull a page from their forefathers’ books. Reduce them to an archetype or caricature, Joseph Conradize them if you will and then your stereotypes can remain intact. This is not far removed from the early days of my friendship with Bill where I often dismissed him as an American®, worse a white, redneck, meathead American who simply did not get world politics. But that all changed when I got to know him or rather when he challenged me in a series of not quite civil arguments. The fact is Bill demanded and deserved to be considered a person, praised and damned on his own merits. I’m just not sure if I wanted to extend the same privilege to Peter Godwin.

I still have mixed feelings about the white man in Africa. My African friend asked me what I thought about Mugabe and even on this topic I was ambivalent. On one hand the man is clearly insane and even Bob Marley on his tour to celebrate their independence knew (long before everybody else) that something was not quite right. But on the other hand, even as Mugabe plunders white owned farms, seizes the land and drives them into disuse so that he can fatten his corrupt soldiers and civil servants and starve his own people I still find myself asking what were white people doing on the land in the first place. Where’s the deed that says they bought it? Haven’t they taken enough from Africa and aren’t they taking still? When Afrikaaners, Brits and Belgians build monsters like Mugabe, Amin, Mobutu and a couple million hutus what should they expect but the monstrous? After all these years are they white Africans or merely white people in Africa?

That depends on whom you ask. Slavery and Colonialism are incendiary topics that have not and will not lose steam because at the heart of both, whites and blacks have a profoundly different sense of time and space. White people in Africa probably consider themselves citizens of the countries of the continent; Africans of the present who should not be held to the sins of the past. Men like Godwin were born in Africa, which gives him an immediate right to call himself African, but more than that he did not commit the atrocities in the past and should not be held accountable. This is a common argument, held not only in the continent but also throughout the Diaspora. But blacks, some of us anyway see things a little differently.

The Go Between’s sensational opening sentence, “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there,” is nevertheless the kind of sentence that could have only come from a certain kind of white man. In several African and Native American languages, there are no words for past or future. Time is liberated from its linear construct. So any point made to me by my white friend about forgetting the past is lost when he does so in the large, slavery built house that he still lives in. Where some may see past, present and future, others see continuum, where something done in 1806 has as much resonance as something done in 2007. I cannot separate myself from the past because I’m still living in it. I see it all around me. Less then twenty years ago a prominent high school in uptown Kingston had an organization called Delta that only white kids could join. The country is swarming with British, American a lately Irish people some of whom move in to jobs that seem to spring up hundredfold every week. In the Irish case, they have (allegedly) been hiring themselves, promoting themselves, and giving themselves better cars than the senior Jamaican managers working in the same company. And with these new Massas have come new house niggers, professional Jamaicans with little experience that they have hired and inculcated into their office culture before they could learn any other. And then there are the not so professional house niggers, women mostly who pretend they always loved U2 as they are getting fucked, pun intended by Irish men. Jamaican frogs swimming in a tub put to boil, with no idea that they are being cooked to death.

I find the idea of Godwin’s memoir strange because I have always thought the most convenient trait of the white man in Africa and the Diaspora is his short memory. We however, cannot forget: slavery, Liverpool, the Gold Coast, how the Maroons betrayed us, Toussaint, colonialism, blood diamonds, Sharpeville, the Congo Free State, King Leopold, King Solomon’s Mines, Sam Sharpe, Tacky and Boukman, Tarzan, Heart of Darkness, Mau Mau, Kwame Nkruma, Patrice Lumumba, the Mississippi three, the Little Rock nine, the four little black girls of Birmingham, Caribbean immigrants and black Americans who fought for the allies in two world wars only to be treated worse than people that lost, Percy Julian in heaven waiting on his Nobel Prize, Walter Rodney, Angela Davis and CIA station chief Larry Devlin. All these events have all happened, are happening and will happen again. They are like dead parents and unborn children, as real to us as the living.

I thought that maybe my anger would blind me to Peter’s humanity. The Godwins may have been after all, good people trying to live, making a home where they had hung their hat. But a part of me will always see them as interlopers and if they did not risk anything to make Africans’ lives better then they were silent participants in making it worse. Why should I care about another story that tries to make the white experience in Africa compelling? What kind of sons of bitches simply take over a country and then renames it Rhodesia? The idea of asking blacks to simply forget the past is as ludicrous as buying a Native American a beer, slapping him on the back and saying ‘no hard feelings, buddy.’

But that doesn’t make him racist of course. After all, back in Jamaica many of these newly arrived whites have black friends. It’s hard not to notice these Negroes at their parties and weddings, since there are only four of them. Well, two— the other two are merely dustbins for expatriate cock, whether that be the new commissioner of police or the latest dispatch to Digicel. I gaze out my window and my window to Africa and though I’m looking at 2007 I’m seeing 1807. So you can imagine the anger I carried with me when I bought Peter Godwin’s When A Crocodile Eats the Sun.

But then I read the book.

Bedside Books

2007-05-10T11:51:00.001-05:00

I’m beginning to understand what life must be like for people involved with writers. Readers may not be so bad because a book by the bedside may simply mean a chapter or two before sleep, sex or slex. But bedside books are a warning if your lover is a writer. Not only is he cheating on you with Collette, Miguel Cervantes and a pervert like Henry Miller, but he’s taking them to bed for an ink-stained orgy. He has already found the love of his life and she’s older than sin (or younger than a preteen), smells like dust and may have a horrible case of the bookworms.

Well rest easy potential future bedmates, for it turns out I can’t commit to books either. The problem is that ever since my first novel came out I’m rarely home more than five months a year so bed is wherever I’m crashing at the moment. Right now it’s in Harlem’s historic district, right across from the Morris Jumel Mansion, where George Washington lived, in a brownstone that Louis Armstrong or/and Malcolm X used to live in. With ghosts like these sharing my space I had to raise the standard of the books nearby.

At this bedside most of the books are new because well, I buy books like some people buy meth and even on this trip, an “I’m only here to teach, not buy” trip I’ve already racked up 27 books. Nearest to my bedside (shall I describe the bed?) is Zbigniew Herbert’s Collected Poems 1956-1998. I have never in my life heard of Zbigniew Herbert, nor have I ever in my life bought a book of poetry. But Herbert’s book was one of the most stunning covers I’ve seen in a long time and as an occasional practicing Graphic Designer, I do buy books based on the cover. Worse than that, I redesign covers I don’t like (Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Orham Pamuk’s Istanbul come to mind). I had no intention of actually reading the thing until I came upon this:

People ran to the shelters
He said his wife had hair
In whose depths one could hide

Now I can neither go to bed nor leave it without reading Herbert first.

Below Herbert and suffering from my unfair attention span is Michael Chabon’s new novel, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. Michiko Kakutani loves it and she usually hates everything, so now I’m wondering if there’s something wrong with the novel. I believe that if you spend too much time looking for bad, you forget what’s good, but that’s just me. Below that, Andrew Hussey’s Paris the Secret History, the latest in my rather recent but still quite overpowering non-fiction fetish. My big dream literary project is, funnily enough a non-fiction book about the first 500 years of Kingston. Who knows when that’s going to happen. Below that, fire breathing novelist Daniel Alarcon’s Lost City Radio. Alarcon, easily the star of the recent PEN Conference has penned a novel that would have made Roberto Bolaño very jealous or very proud.

Speaking of Bolaño, that’s him at the foot of the bed with three of his best: By Night in Chile, A Distant Star, and his masterpiece, The Savage Detectives. I think I’ve finally cured my addiction to magical realism. No surprise, Bolano was a sworn enemy of M.R. to the point of eviscerating Marquez in the press, and combating Isabel Allénde to the point where she cursed his corpse. He and his friends also had the habit of interrupting establishment poets by screaming poetry of their own. Of course he’s near my bed, hell if it weren’t for potentially unsightly paper cuts, I’d sleep with the book.

As for the rest:

Rolling Stone’s 40th Anniversary issue. Interesting set of interviews about rock and roll past, present and future. And an uncanny past and present and future it is given that not a single interviewee is black. Granted this is the same magazine that recently joined the tired and easily unproven “Rock and Roll started with Elvis” bandwagon a few years back so this oversight, while unsurprising still sucks major ass.

A stack of New Yorkers, some of which I’ve read cover to cover! I’m proud of myself.

—Robertson Davies’, Deptford Trilogy, which my friend Bill raved about so much that I bought six of his books. Turns out the bastard never even finished one.

—Junot Diaz’s The Brief Life of Oscar Wao (Galley). Some people have been waiting for this novel like the second coming of Christ. I know, I know, it helps having really good friends, so don’t hate, haters.

—Don Delillo’s Falling Man, Ian McEwan’s Saturday, Helen Schulman’s A Day At The Beach, Ken Kalfus’ A Disorder Peculiar To The Country, Jess Walter’s The Zero, Frédéric Beigbeder’s Windows On The World, Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children, Moshin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly close. This fall I’m teaching a lit course on 9/11 And The Novel so I’m surrounded by books on or inspired by this still surreal event. I have a feeling that Richard Flanagan’s The Unknown Terrorist might be the best (Kakutani calls it “stunning”). Lord knows John Updike’s Terrorist is the worst. If you have a suggestion please leave a comment.

— Andre Aciman’s Call me by Your Name and Allan Hollinghurst’s The line of Beauty. I’m now convinced that unless the guy or girl is Latino, only gay guys can write sex that’s actually sexy. I don’t care who’s getting busy, as long as I never have to read another sex scene from Updike.

—Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaids Tale (!!!) in hardcover (!!!!!!!). Don’t hate, haters.

—Robert Fagles’ translation of The Aenid, which I might never actually read, but it does look rather fetching beside my translation of The Odyssey, which I have read.

—Don Delillo’s Libra, because I’m finishing an ‘interim’ novel about Jamaican politics and need to find a better way to structure it. This may be the most cleverly plotted novel about an actual event that I have ever read.

—Phillip Roth’s The Human Stain and The Professor of Desire. I’ve been hating on Roth for no other reason than the unconditional love he gets from critics. I dismissed him as one of those American artists, like Bruce Springsteen that only Americans understood. Or rather I’ve hated him for the sole reason that he’s loved and now I’d like to think that at 36 I’m finally shedding that last remnant of artistic immaturity that young people mistake for irony. You should see how many Roth novels are in my Strandbook.com shopping cart. Maybe it’s time to give Darkness On The Edge Of Town a good listen.

—Richard Hawkins’ The God Delusion, as funny as the hell he’s clearly on his way to.

—Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, just because.

—Daniel Mendelsohn’s The Lost: A Search for Six of the Six Million, a book about one man’s search for his family that perished in the holocaust that wins your heart then breaks it, over and over again.

—Mary Gaitskill’s Veronica. I’ll confess it, I don’t read many women novelists and those women tend to be Gaitskill, Susannah Moore, Zadie Smith, Edwidge Danticat, Jeanette Winterson, Francine Prose or dead. I like novels on a grand scale and have very little use for books with a small, intimate focus. That means neither of the Annes, Tyler or Beattie. Ever. Gaitskill is fearless in a way the writers are just simply not, not anymore.

—Jeanette Winterson’s The Weight, Alexander McCall Smith’s Dream Angus and Victor Pelevin’s The Helmet of Horror. I’m fascinated by Canongates’s Myth’s Series. I’d love to write one but Canongate thought my first novel was slow and boring so I doubt that I’m on their wish list.

—Tony Judt’s remarkable Post War and Roger Osborne’s Civilization, which chronicles the history of the west in a remarkable 500 pages. Such a good read that I overlooked that this was yet another book insisting that western civilization was all the mattered, despite the fact that for a good 2000 years ‘western civilization’ was an oxymoron.

And yet this is only about half of the books I have strewn on, beside or within the periphery of my bed. This might also explain why there’s no other human sleeping in it.

On Meeting Salman Rushdie

2007-04-30T09:53:00.001-05:00

For most of last week I was at the PEN conference in New York. I missed last year’s because I was in Los Angeles losing the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Best First Work of Fiction to Uzodimna Iweala’s Beasts Of No Nation. This year’s theme was Home and Away and I made sure to go for many reasons, not the least being that ‘home and away’ defines my very existence. At home my wish to be away comes down on me like a sickness. Away, where I can convert home into a concept instead of a place, I miss the idea of Jamaica only to go home and be confronted with the reality of Jamaican life and pine yet again for being away.

Anyway I’m at this PEN Conference and the one set of people you cannot get away from are writers. Around writers I cease being a writer and I hate it. I become a speechless, awkward fan and try to stay as far away from them as possible. Especially if I idolize the writer. In some alternative universe I’m being dismissed by some of those writers as the aloof snob with dreadlocks who hovers in and out of readings and never talks to people, when I truth I’m just a fan who has gotten drunk on their work in the past and fear that in meeting them I will blow it and come across as the same gushing, guffawing nerd that nobody likes.

On 12th Street I literally ran into the always nice and graceful Francine Prose who gave me a big hug to which my response was to re-introduce myself again, “Hi I’m Marlon James, we met at Miami Book Fair,” which was a pretty stupid thing to say to a person hugging me. She was trying to find Nadine Gordimer who was going hog wild over New York City in a taxi and I tried not be wowed by the remark as if, of course, that crazy South African, you know how our Nadine is. But there, right in front of NYU’s Tishman Auditorium I saw Salman Rushdie for the second time.

I had seen him that Friday evening waiting outside for a panel discussion between Vikram Chandra and Kiran Desai and it was as if some deity had come in the room to deign us with his brief presence. Mark from The Elegant Variation then told me how he had met him not long after 9/11 (at a restaurant or museum I think) and Rushdie and his wife invited him over. Or rather how he was too chickenshit to introduce himself and his girlfriend bellowed, as girlfriends sometimes do, that Mark was his biggest fan but was too shy to come over and introduce himself. In that split second, sitting in that theatre with Rushdie ten or so rows ahead of me, I realized what girlfriends are for: to be the man that men sometimes aren’t man enough to be. But then I met Maud Newton, writer of the best literary blog in America and the woman behind at least 50% of the new traffic to my blog and was kinda starstruck again. I looked down ten rows for that bushy balding head and he was gone.

Most of the writers I’ve met have been very nice. At the “Granta’s Best Young American Novelists,” panel I met a few. Gary Shteyngart, author of 2006’s best novel, Absurdistan, was a riot. He was every bit as funny as his book and me, unable to stop the torrent of fanboy mania once I started told him that I wrote a blog about him and that his was the kind of book that makes me want to write books. He asked if I was a writer and I told him that I was nominated for an award along with Uzodimna and Olga Grushin who were both on the panel. He wrote down the name of my book, which I thought was really nice and even if it wasn’t sincere it doesn’t matter in the least. I think authors, even the greatest and finest are still genuinely happy to meet people who get their work and most seemed to be impressed if not stunned by somebody in a Jamaican accent talking to them about their book. Alas Rushdie was clear across town at another panel.

But there he was again on Saturday afternoon, in front of Tishman’s Auditorium and by himself. By himself, he is by himself, I thought. People were talking to him but he was mostly alone, lingering outside the theatre like everybody else, a fan of literature waiting for an event to start. He was literally in my way; to get inside I would have had to either give him a wide berth and say excuse me. Of course nobody says excuse me to Salman Rushdie. I have no idea how this works when you encounter famous people. If you make a big deal then you might give them the exact public awkwardness they probably despise, but if you act as if they don’t matter then it seems almost like reverse snobbery or colossal ignorance, as if the person is irrelevant even if you are at an event where he is clearly the focus. Not that the event was about him, but as the Chairman of PEN, an organization of which I am a member, to act as if I don’t know who he is would have been disingenuous, not mentioned awfully unsubtle.

Them Mark hailed me from down the street and I felt both relief at being called out of this dilemma and saddened that I’m really not going to meet this guy. If you’re never read this blog then you don’t know that Salman Rushdie is by and large the writer who made me want to write the books. In 1999, I had finished my first novel, all 400 pages of it when I read Rushdie’s Shame and promptly destroyed my manuscript. That wasn’t a book, is said pointing at my manuscript. This is a book! I said clutching his. I remember reading it in church and people being so disturbed by my outbursts of laughter that they thought I was possessed (I had the book hidden in a bible). Rushdie exploded my conception of what a novelist could write, how he should write and what he could say. And who knows, maybe this is all stuff that he might have enjoyed hearing, even though lord knows Rushdie does not need affirmation from some indie novelist who has only written one book.

There’s something else. Like any other big fan of an artist’s work, I dread meeting Rushdie because it might ruin my image of him. Most of the writers I’ve met are nice and some have become really good friends but there is still this crushing fear that maybe my hero is an asshole, which will all but ruin my hero worship or worse turn me into those emotionally removed but still pathetic former fans who demur that “ I still think he’s a great writer,” to mask genuine hurt. Like any fan I think I need my heroes to be heroic and not real people, and instead of knowing him to be a jerk I’d rather not know him at all. As Mark and I took our seats, I looked around for the balding head or the glasses shielding those eyes that always look as if he knows something you don’t. But he was gone.

Am I A Book Snob?

2007-04-17T16:33:00.000-05:00

This is Miss Leyow’s fault. 1985, way back in our first lit class, she warned me that if I were to really get a hold of literature, get into the magic and wonder of books, it would change everything about how I see the world—for better or worse. That was both promise and warning, something exciting yet ominous. Twenty-two years later, somewhere between stealing from Borges and shouting in envy at Bolano I realized that I just might be a book snob. This terrible secret I had long suspected and kept to myself, fearing the repercussions of being seen as an elitist, which can be a double curse for a black man; worse a Black Man in America ®. Recent debates in black American fiction have made it even worse, with clear battle lines being drawn between commercial and literary fiction as the former fights for inclusion and the latter for higher standards. It means much when self-published author Shamontiel’s most withering criticism of Mat Johnson (Author of The Great Negro Plot) was that he was ‘elitist.’ So many writers, black and white respond to this with insincere pluralism as if, of course War and Peace and Peyton place belong on the shelf together, right beside Danielle Steele and Toni Morrison. I knew because I used to be in their number. Then I reached 36.

Nothing sharpens your focus like age. I’m now at the age where I’m neither cool nor dead and am four years from my first prostate exam. This does many things to man including reducing his tolerance for bullshit. This is a roundabout way of saying that far from hiding my book snobbery I am quite proud of it. Snob, like nigger and bitch are words that were once bestowed on others as an insult. I feel like becoming a rapper and claim the insult for myself, except snob just does not have the poetic ring or the exciting sense of the forbidden. But that’s the word that I have been given.

The irony about us book snobs is that our tastes are far more inclusive than those of the people who criticize us. I have been calling Buffy the Vampire Slayer the last great work of the 20th century for years now, but people who watch the Lifetime Movie Network tell me to grow up. And put away my X-Men comics while I’m at it. And yet for all our supposed hatred of mainstream and genre fiction, it is us, not them who have been championing Walter Moseley and George Pellecanos for years. It is us who have kept Ice Berg Slim and Zora Neale Hurston alive. It’s us that realized that Georges Simenon was onto something and Mickey Spillane was not, despite the former selling far more than the latter. The only thing we hate is literature that insults our intelligence, whether that is Omar Tyree or Elfriede Jenilek. For some people (who have never heard of Jenilek), that’s enough to call one a snob.

This calls to mind my previous blog about highbrow and lowbrow lit. In that blog I was more diplomatic, trying on terms for size and refusing to claim any. This blog is different. I just don’t see why I should apologise for reading Stendhal and wanting to talk about it. This coming September I might even teach a class on The Charterhouse of Parma. I don’t see why I should hide that reading Steppenwolf scared the daylights out of me because I came across an irrefutable argument for suicide. Or that I know my Faulkner from my Welty. And that yes, the new translation of Roberto Bolano’s the Savage detectives has me going from one delirious peak to the next, like those orgasms that men don’t get to have. The difference is that I don’t hide it anymore to defend Eric Jerome Dickey.

There are reasons against snobbery of course, but it wasn’t until my 36th birthday that I realized that they were bullshit. To defend a black writer merely because he was black was and is still ludicrous, something that our forbears Richard Wright and James Baldwin never stood for even when there weren’t many black writers around and any writing was better than nothing. There must be something deeper at work. Something else perhaps, not in necessarily in all book elitists but in myself that forced me into the book snob closet. Then I remembered. Like most screwed up things in my life I got that from school.

I remember once, talking to a neighbour about dimming myself down in school. She was appalled to hear this, but my good friend Danielle backed me up because she had done the same. Dimming down works like this: in order to win more school friends and influence people, I set my brain on dim, acted less intelligent than I was. This saved me from the wretched nerd category, which in high school was the worst kind of loser. But I found myself dimming even when I got to work, where displays of intelligence were simply uncool, unmanly, and just plain wrong. I came across people who were quite proud of never reading a book. And never planning to. I went to a church that lauded the barely literate believer, proclaiming that it’s better to have a G.O.D. than and Ph.D. I came across college educated men who thought a lack of cooking skills made them straight and women who saw no problem with acting stupid to get a man. In short I came see that using one’s brain and appearing to do so was simply not done. And it made no difference if you were a writer.

This is compounded in the black community where criticism of another writer is seen as not just an attack, but also a declaration that the critic is calling himself better than the writer. Not a better writer mind you, but a better human being, a more valuable one, a snob. It makes no sense trying to get these writers to see otherwise. They will go to their graves not understanding the difference between critique and attack and will in turn attack you personally. But who is being the snob? My criticism of commercial fiction never extends to the writer, but their criticism of people like me often does. Am I a snob because I know that Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude proved that John Barth’s 1966 essay on The Death of Narrative was hogwash? Should I have kept that to myself? How about my annoying habit of sticking to the Pevear-Volokhonsky translations of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky because Brits tend to treat those guys like Victorians? Is this snobbish enough yet? How about me going four paragraphs without mentioning a black writer?

I’m just not sure what literary pandering achieves. I was reading Flaubert at seventeen, so why would I read Tom Clancy at 36? Why regress? No pianist goes from Schubert to Chopsticks. Nobody grows from adult to infant. Why is this regression cool? Why is a discriminating taste uncool? Literature is the only art form where the mere attempt to do it is supposed to confer legitimacy, not whether it is done well. New York City ballet is not hiring baton twirlers and the twirlers are remarkably non-plussed about it. So what’s so bad about having a summit of writers and not inviting Tyler Perry?

Maybe Snob, like nerd or fag is a way of quickly dismissing someone we do not understand. People still think I read these mountains of boring books for no reason than to appear smarter than everybody else. They cannot imagine that maybe I read Beckett’s novels because I actually enjoy them. Because they cannot enjoy or will never try reading these books they assume that no normal person would either and anybody who claims otherwise is either faking it or elitist. They think we wear black turtlenecks in summer, sip chamomile tea with our pinkies stuck out, speak of metaphysics then talk down to all commercial and self published lit. And yet the last time I ran into a fellow book snob we were gushing over some old issues of X-Men, which many commercial fiction writers consider beneath them. This is bullshit of the worst smelling order.

And what’s the opposite of a book snob, a book ho? Do you really see no difference between Erica Kennedy’s Bling and Zadie Smith’s On Beauty? Do you really think calling Smith a superior writer is an attempt to be snobbish? Well then so be it. If you are a book snob it’s time to come out of the closet. You might not think you are, but if you bought Pete Dexter instead of Tom Clancy, Junot Diaz instead of Jackie Collins, then you are a lit snob my friend. It makes no sense denying it anymore. You might as well take off those shades as you buy The New York Review of Books, or try to slip the Paris Review underneath that In Touch. I’m starting to like my book snobbery. I like not having my time wasted by people asking my opinion of books I will never read but used to praise because the writer is black. I like going on about the difference between Gaddis and Gass and why Camus is smarter the Sartre. Snob-haytas think that us snobs think we’re special and you know what, maybe we are. After all, if everybody is special, then nobody is. That’s from the Incredibles, a cartoon movie. Some snob I turned out to be.

In My Time Of Burying

2007-04-02T15:24:00.000-05:00

Last year my friend’s mother woke up to a clatter in the kitchen. She ran in to see her husband hitting pots and pans as he stumbled to the floor. He was clutching his chest and gasping for breath. The hospital had released him only a few days before and he was supposed to be resting after major heart surgery. The rest of the house had woken up and the family scrambled to rush him to the hospital. But there, on the floor in the arms of his wife he looked at her said, I don’t think I’m coming home again.

At the funeral, his wife who I call my Kingston Mother asked me to read her remembrance. It was both touching and awkward; a memory of her husband that had an intimacy that I felt I had intruded on, even though she asked me to read it. I read of his virtues and flaws and I tried to make the congregation understand the secret language of long married couples, that I did not understand myself. More than anything I read her words and I understood that a major part of her died with him. My friend and his brothers all tried to roll with the inevitability of death and the ritual of funeral but they were clearly stunned by both, unsure sometimes what was the correct or meaningful thing to do, how much emotion to show, how much charge to take and what people meant when they told them be strong, as if strength was something as easily mustered as bravado. Not long after that another of my very best friends lost his father after watching his mind wither from Alzheimer’s.

I think of these deaths and look at my own parents, both in their 70’s. I remember that I’m 36. Am I about to enter The Burying Years? My mother buried her mother the same year she gave birth to my sister. She was forty-one years old (A spunky broad, that woman). But that year triggered off a sequence of years punctuated by deaths, reunions and funerals that went unbroken until 1984. I never though about it then but I did start to notice that people around me, 10 or more years older all went though a period of years underscored by black clothes, trips to the cemetery, barely seen relatives coming out of the woodwork, and squabbles over burials when the deceased wanted to be cremated. Nothing turns a normal family into Ewings like a death. It took one death to find out who was adopted, who was illegitimate or who wasn’t family at all. It took another for family members to unleash knives and claws, back stabbing and fighting dirty over the contents of a will.

But as the ages of friends with dead parents reach closer to my own I feel a growing sense of dread that I will soon go through the burying years. Maybe I’m in denial of something that has already begun, after all how many more deaths do I need before I invest in a durable black suit? I’m not ready to bury parents or aunts and uncles yet because I’m not ready to see them go or live in a world with them gone. But more than that is something that may be a manifestation of a fear of aging and it’s this. What comes after the burying years? The dying years?

My mother reads the obituaries the way my brother reads sports. Or maybe the way my niece reads the comics. It’s strange sometimes. I watch her and try to figure out what she gets from these pages: satisfaction, regret, humour or fear. Her comments can be glib and dispassionate as if the deceased had taken a trip to a place she cannot pronounce, or they are tinged with faint nostalgia, like coming across a forgotten friend through gossip. Maybe this is her way of coming to terms with mortality as a concept if not a reality. I’m not sure and I’m too afraid to ask. I can’t remember even reading an obituary other than The New York Times’ “The Lives They Led.”

So to paraphrase that fantastic Led Zeppelin song I’m bracing myself for my time of burying. I’m telling myself that there’s no fact of life more factual than death. Maybe I’ll take a page from the dying of whom I assume death becomes matter of fact. That’s easier written than done. I consider myself lucky to having not yet experienced the death of a close loved one but that fills me with a ridiculous paranoia. Death takes on the character of an alien abductor, some sort of interdimensional thief.

Maybe there is a strength to one’s forties that nobody has in their thirties. Or maybe a forty year old has already resigned himself to anything with a whiff of the inevitable. I’m sensing an awareness of how life works that I did not have at 20 or 31 for that matter. I find myself being cool about things I never thought I would ever be cool about, like knowing that some friendships weren’t meant to last, that money is good servant but terrible master, and that being correct is not as important as being right and being good trumps both. I guess I’m saying that maybe I am getting older and wiser. I’m just not ready to be wise about death, mine or anybody’s.

High Art, Low Art and Critical Thought.

2007-03-13T09:30:00.000-05:00

My friend Mat Johnson has really done it this time. By insisting that there is a clear difference between highbrow and lowbrow literature he has stepped on number of corns, mostly the lowbrows who feel they are being stepped on and the highbrows who feel any form of stepping is counter productive. I’ve never been a fan either term anymore than I was of Stephen Koch’s “high,” “middle,” and “low” style even though I understand all three. One could say serious literature vs. casual literature but while that’s closer it’s still a powder keg of a definition guaranteed to start arguments.

For one, who gets to decide what’s highbrow or lowbrow? Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison dismissed Zora Neale Hurston’s writing as deliberately lowbrow but both were wrong. On the other hand, I have just read a book by a black author that begins with a young man trying not to ‘nut’ on himself for the second time before he has sex for the first. It’s too early to say but I’m wagering that until global warming affects the brain, nobody is going to call this book a misjudged masterpiece. But it is hard to draw a line between high and low because too much of the very best writing straddles both. If Sci-fi and Crime are low, where does that put Ursula LeGuin, Phillip K. Dick, Octavia Butler or Walter Moseley and George Pellecanos? If Terry Macmillan is lowbrow where does that leave Mama and Disappearing Acts? If Toni Morrison is highbrow was Tar Baby her slumming phase? What about Iceberg Slim?

But all this defense of so-called lowbrow lit ignores a crucial point. Whether black fiction is classified as high or low there is no question that the standard has fallen. And for that both reader and writer is to be blamed. I remember being told by the owner of a black book store that he was expecting a poor turnout for my reading because his customers don’t read literary fiction. It was only because I was being compared to Toni Morrison why some would show up. Too many black readers set such a low bar for the fiction they read, even those, like a college educated relative of mine (you know who you are) who should know better. These writers, crass as they may be are merely meeting a need that they didn’t even create. This may stem from how we are taught.

At my old high school the teachers recently took a vote to decide if literature should remain a compulsory subject. It was the literature teachers who voted no. The tragedy of this development cannot be understated. With the exception of one other subject that is not taught until the children are past 15, English Literature is the only forum for true critical thinking that a child is exposed to. The only subject guided by lucid interpretation, not cold fact. This is lacking in Jamaica and I will venture a guess that that it’s not too prevalent in black America as well. We do not recognize or appreciate critical thinking nor do we think critically. Not surprisingly, criticism is frequently mistaken for attack and the response is most always dirty, out of line or just plain wrong. Or put another way, nobody attacks the criticism; they attack the critic. This cuts across all levels, from black writers who are livid when they do not get the respect that Ralph Ellison got, to rappers like the Wu Tang Clan who used to hunt down critics that gave them bad reviews in the Source.

I’ve mentioned Jamaica’s Louise Bennet before. Louise Bennet is a legendary performer and folklorist but the woman is not a poet, no matter what revisionist intellectuals say. But even if one were to agree that she was, then her work must be left open to serious, even harsh criticism as with any other poet. This is where several Jamaican literary minds cry foul. Where do you get off criticizing Louise Bennet? Who are you anyway? Who I am is irrelevant but what I have to say is not. We are not accustomed to critique in any form and look at criticism of Bennet as an uncalled for attack on the dead. What the blind praisers do not realize is that they are the ones killing her, not me.

The New York Times has now reviewed three novels from Nigerian Chris Abani. The last, for The Virgin of the Flames could be called positive if you’re an optimist, mixed if you’re a pessimist. Some may even regard that review as some sort of attack. Yet it’s the best thing that could have happened to the author. Those who focus on the possible negatives miss the point. A third review in the New York Times is a monumental thing; it’s the establishment’s way of serving notice that this is a serious writer whose life they intend to follow. From now on Abani’s work will always be noticed and will always be taken seriously. By being hostile to criticism you are letting it be known that you do not consider you work worthy of critical appraisal or put another way, you do not wish that you work be taken seriously. Or maybe you are confusing appraisal with praise. This is why a mixed review in the NY times can mean more than a rave in Jet.

There is still this feeling in black communities (including my own) that criticism is the hurting of one’s own. A betrayal in the face of our enemies whoever that may be. This is why Omar Tyree thinks he deserves to be sitting at the same table as Edwidge Danticat. Nobody has ever told him otherwise, even though not even Stephen King expects to be sitting in the same forum as Milan Kundera and neither bitches about it. There is also this feeling that sales justifies everything, but interspecies pornography sells and nobody is arguing for that medium’s intelligence. Nothing is wrong with writers being in it for the money but don’t bitch and moan because nobody thinks you should be taught in Lit class.

Maybe it’s the term lowbrow that does more harm than good. Personally, I prefer LOW BLOW lit. Low-blow is jacking up rather unoriginal sex because you think all black people like do to do is get freeeeekay. Despite our sexual reputation, blacks can be a curiously puritan people where even today a story about oral sex or multiple partners can be read as provocative. Yes, that means Zane. Low-blow is cheap sentimentality passing itself off as real feeling. It’s about Grandma Beulah who makes that fried chicken and candy yams just the way you like it but you gotta go because there’s nothing for you in this lazy town with nosy relatives and you don’t care about your damn family you just want to succeed in the white man’s world and then Grandma dies calling your name and you realize at the graveside that all you ever really needed to know about life you learnt from grandma back in the old house Nana I miss you! Speak to me Nana! Tell me what to do!

Low-blow is thinking that because you’ve touched on an issue you should be rewarded for consciousness as if rattling off the issues is a sign of emotional intelligence. We still think we should be rewarded, not for doing something well but for doing it at all. Low-blow is thinking that anything avant-garde or (paradoxically) classicist is merely trying to be white. Low-blow Lit thinks that a refusal to invite Tyler Perry to the National Black Theater Festival is a refusal of the Negro race itself. Low-blow lit is thinking that quality never existed in commercial fiction. Low-blow lit is finally, literature for people who don’t read. People for whom a book has as much importance as a passable movie, four songs on an I-pod or unexceptional sex. This is not an audience you can trust. Low-blow lit thinks it gives the readers what they want but perhaps, 1. The audience really doesn’t know what he or she wants and 2. They should also be getting what they need.

I think I know what the opposite of low-blow lit is but I’ll leave the creation of that term to somebody else. What I do hope is that people come to realise that the unabashed, uncritical love given to some writers and filmmakers does nobody any good, neither artist nor reader. In Man Gone Down, Michael Thomas has just written what may be the first great novel by a black writer in the 21st century. Read it. Love it. Hate it. But for God’s sake, have an opinion about it.

19 Movie questions (sorry but it’s 11:18pm, I can’t sleep and El Topo is even more inexplicable than usual.)

2007-03-07T23:26:00.000-05:00

1. Is Hollywood done with trying to convince us that Toni Collette is ugly? Because we’re still not buying it. I will argue that that Ellen Pompeo is not even remotely cute though.

2. Will people now think that because Jennifer Hudson won the Oscar for Dreamgirls that the academy really isn’t blind to films with several non-white women in them? Or do the rest of the women have to be mediocre? How the women in Joy Luck Club or Ray managed to slip by the academy is beyond me. And while we’re on the subject of ignored women, what does Regina King have to do to get an Oscar nomination?

3. Am I the only person who cannot stand to watch Sean Penn act? Why does anybody think the look-people-acting-is-hard-work-just-watch- me-grimace school of acting is impressive? These are the same people who will go to their graves thinking that Mystic River was a better movie than Fast Times at Ridgemont High. And now, as GQ’s Tom Carson points out (rather brilliantly) every American actor from Dicaprio to Matt Damon is doing it. This is the Pearl Jam school of acting: Show absolutely no pleasure in the creation of the art itself. Thank God not everybody feels like taking acting into the well meaning toilet. Just look at Ryan Gosling in Half Nelson. On paper the role, drug addict victim and well meaning white liberal teacher seems concocted from PC hell. But watch how Gosling imbues deadly part with soul, grit, and humour, that last quality making the performance all the more devastating. Gosling, Terence Howard, Don Cheadle and Jake Gyllenhaal are all they got, folks.

4. Comedy and noir are the two genres that America does better than everybody else. So are the members of the Academy Swedish?

5. Does film get any better than The Godfather Part 2? Rhetorical question people.

6. Did that dimwitted twerp from Life is Beautiful really make another atrocity! It’s a comedy for everyone! flick about Iraq?

7. Am I the only person who thought Miami Vice was a great movie?

8. Or that Manhunter is still the best of the Hannibal Lecter flicks?

9. Or that the usage of a bad childhood to explain [insert perversion/sociopathic tendency here] is really played out?

10. Why can’t I write a book like Short Bus?

11. Why does the Academy keep giving the right actors Oscars for the wrong performances? Scent of a Woman? Gladiator? My Cousin Vinny?

12. Can you name the last 3 winners of the best picture Oscar?

13. Who has ever seen Out of Africa?

14. Where has Rififi been all my life?

15. Or Yojimbo?

16. Who in their right mind thinks The Departed can hold a candle to Infernal Affairs?

17. If Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung are not the finest actors in the world then when did God started acting in films?

18. How many Bond movies will Daniel Craig have to make before people realize that he was the best Bond ever on just Casino Royale alone?

19. Who is McG?

On Mastodon

2007-03-03T15:39:00.000-05:00

For the longest time I had Mastodon’s Blood Mountain as my favourite record of 2006. But I also had several reasons why they could not top the list, none of them musical. TV On The Radio makes a newer sound, I thought. I played The Knife and Joanna Newsom just as much, I thought. Boris does the same thing and they have a female axe shredder named Wata (!!!), I thought. Enough people think I'm acting white as it is, so don’t make things worse, I thought. Mastodon who? My friends thought. And yet I still can’t think of a more exhilarating listening experience I've had all year than Blood Mountain, except perhaps the album that preceded it.

But my very attempt to review or contextualize Mastodon ruins them. Because writing what makes them tick will only result in prose that leaves the potential fan thinking they are pompous, worrisomely complex and downright unlistenable. Either that or they'll mistake them for Rush. So to prevent this from happening I’ve decided to present my ten awesome, freakin,’ kick-ass, bomboclaat reasons why Mastodon are the greatest, baddest, bestest band on the planet.

1. The drummer. Want to know why REM sucks? Because when they lost the drummer they had the bed frame ripped out from under them. Take that analogy any way you wish, because not only does the drummer hold a band’s shit together, but also a band moves best when the drummer moves first, as James Brown would have gladly told you. Led Zeppelin knew that once Bonham was over they were too. Like all the great rock drummers, Brann Dailor is still under the impression that he’s in a JAZZ band, a delusion shared by Ginger Baker, Charlie Watts and Clyde Stubblefield. Only none of those guys have ever played like this before. Dailor doesn’t so much fill space as he tears it a new one and leaves the dregs for the rest of the band. Part of the fun with Mastodon is to hear them scramble to catch up.

2. Dynamics, kids. No Mastodon song ends the way it begins. I could go on about how fantastic and pre-pro-toolsy they are, but that would be rockist and irrelevant. They record music like any great band does; drums today, bass tomorrow, vocals the next day and the result is a friendly game of one-upmanship where each member pushes the other to go harder, faster or just plain better. This means that girls can now come to their concerts. I know this is a horrendous development for some of the boys but guys, you're in your late twenties. It's time to stop thinking girls are icky.

3. They’re Southern Gentlemen (even if one is originally from NY). There is just something from the American South that clicks with somebody from the Caribbean. Maybe it’s the bad liquor, plantation ghosts or the different ways to cook crayfish. Or maybe Mastodon, as southern boys have something all to rare in rock or pop music: Charm. Mastodon are some of the nicest guys in rock, a fact that does not diminish their ferocity one bit.

4. They rock so hard that once I found myself envying groupies because they get rock and rolled for real. I know, I know, I’ve already barfed enough for both of us.

5. Somebody in the band has read Moby Dick.

6. And Conan, the Barbarian

7. Crystal Skull. Colony of Birchmen. Sleeping Giant. Yes, my fellow Dungeons and Dragons geeks, you too can one day bestride the earth like a Colossus. Okay maybe not.

8. They have voices and are not afraid to use them. Who’d ever guess that the secret weapon of one of America’s heaviest bands would be harmony? Between crooning Brent and wailing Troy, Mastodon at their best sound like Queens of the Stone Age crossed with Slayer except that unlike the former they rock harder and faster and unlike the latter they have actual songs.

9. Bladecatcher almost gives the rock instrumental a good name. Rock performance of the year. Comedy performance of the year too.

10. Because any band that can rhyme brontotherium with vermillion is by any definition one with enormous stylistic certitude or in possession of a very old dictionary. Granted this in no way tops Joanna Newsom's The meteoroid/ is a stone that's devoid/ of the fire that brought it to thee, but what could?

My Top Ten Books

2007-02-28T10:04:00.000-05:00

I love memes. They save me the trouble of having to come up with new blog ideas every week, because all this thinking sometimes leaves me with brain fever. What's more I've given up sarcasm and chicken for lent and you can only guess which has been harder. I mentioned in my "books that made me want to write books" blog that those books weren't even for the most part my favourites. But these are:

1. One Hundred Years Of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
2. Song Of Solomon, Toni Morrison
3. The Obscene Bird of Night, Jose Donoso
4. Dubliners, James Joyce
5. Guerillas, V.S. Naipaul
6. Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
7. The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov
8. Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys
9. My Name is Red, Orham Pamuk
10.Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen

Satan is Real, You Nigger Lovers

2007-02-20T08:27:00.000-05:00

I could explain to you why the core of Jamaica Reggae is country music but that's another blog, which I promise I will write soon. If you want to see the roots of reggae and gospel forget Aretha Franklin and the Staple Singers and reach for the Waylon Jennings, Jim Reeves, Tennessee Ernie Ford, Marty Robbins' Gunfighter ballads and The Louvin Brothers. The Louvin Brothers especially managed to mesmerize and influence reggae and gospel artists, who still sing "Satan is Real" in church.

This must be one of those ironies that gives God a good chuckle because the Louvin Brothers were two of the virulent racists ever to strum a guitar and they would have been horrified to know that just near the equator hundreds of negroes were loving their music. Ira Louvin died in a car crash and Charlie has kept on going, becoming something of a mini-legend, to country artists and alternative artists who still struggle for authenticity because well, rock and roll is just a little too plastic. Mind you, Charlie is so authentic that up
to a few years ago he was still giving the coons, jigaboos and niggers lots of hate.

So Elvis Costello, Jeff Tweedy, Will Oldham, Tom T. Hall, Tift Merritt, Marty Stuart, David Kilgour, members of Bright Eyes, Lambchop, Clem Snide, Superchunk and more have all guested on Charlie's new album. No doubt they wetted themselves on being in the same room as a man who walked they way they talked. But I wonder. Would the sessions have gone so smoothly had Cowboy Troy showed up? What about Charlie Pride? Did any of these guests care that had they brought their black friends along that would have caused problems? Or maybe these artists don't have black friends. I could take a cheap shot at Elvis Costello, who should have known better given his past, but I'll leave that for somebody else. The irony about this is that there are Jamaicans who will sing along to "Satan is Real" and in the same breath call Elvis Presley racist.

But this I know. Elvis never said "The only thing Negroes can do for me is shine my shoes and buy my records." Some claim he said it in Boston but Elvis had never been to Boston. Some claim to have heard him say it behind the scenes of CBS's Person to Person. But Elvis never appeared on the show because CBS wouldn't pay a fee. Elvis has always given credit to black musicians, never deluded himself about where rock and roll came from and went to a black church for most of his life. Hell, the man wasn't even homophobic.

This I also know. Elvis worshipped the Louvin Brothers. Elvis worshiped them so much that he asked them to tour with him in the fifties. The Louvin Brothers with typical Louvin class turned him down. As they eloquently put it, they would never tour with a 'niggerlover.' But hey, if George Wallace can change, so can Charlie Louvin, right?

Right?

Five Note Mojo

2007-02-11T23:59:00.000-05:00

Nicholas tagged me with this, where bloggers say five things about themselves to various degrees of revelation. So in the interest of perpetuating this stream of Revelations here goes.

1. I had an exorcism at age 33. I just felt that there were things I needed to get rid of and a spiritual make or break was the only way to do it. Deliverances as evangelicals call them are as frightening as you think but also not what you think at all. My head didn’t do a 360 but I did speak in voices not my own and vomit up two buckets of I-know-not-what since I made sure not to eat or drink anything that day. The thing is, since my deliverance I’ve been more apart from God than ever before. I still believe he exists, but I’ve just lost faith in his ability to do anything. Last year I drove past an accident where a woman was crushed by a truck. If God thinks that something good has come out of that because all things work together for good, then one of the two of us is nuts.

2. I buy black music because I don’t want to seem like the Oreo I’m frequently accused of being. Lil’ Wayne made my list of best albums this year and to tell the truth I have never listened to his mix tape. Race as a concept bewilders me and because of that I feel that other people feel I’m not black enough. I listen to less rap than white people. I don’t buy R&B records. If I’m near a reggae artist I’m probably producing his video and I’m the token black guy at a Dungen Concert. The band’s Swedish. I went to a Toshi Reagon concert because I was going with black friends but spent all night kicking myself for not catching Deerhoof. I bought Mary J’s last album but have never listened to it. Yet I can sing along to every Peter Bjorn and John song even though I’ve never seen a lyric sheet and my favourite records last year were Joanna Newsom's "YS," Boris' "Pink," Mastodon's "Blood Mountain," and Gnarls Barkley, which for some downright confirms Oreo status.

3. To quote somebody from History Boys, I’m not happy, but I’m not unhappy about it. I have a journal that I write in everyday. I’m terrified of anyone reading it, but I wish somebody would.

4. I throw away Patti Smith’s albums every year. Every time she scowls “Kid can’t you show me nothing but surrender,” I feel she’s talking to me, cussing me for failing to live up to my potential. It’s like she’s saying look at me, I’m at 10 and you’re still at 4 so step up or step off. So I step off. I throw her records away because I can’t imagine living my life with such honesty. Then I buy them back and go look, I’m doing this now, and I’ve thrown away that now. Maybe one day it will be enough.

5. I hate meeting famous writers. I met Derek Walcott last year and got the name of his dear departed friend’s wife wrong. He promptly corrected me and I felt like a fool. I never have anything to say when I meet these people. I like to think that maybe all that needs to be said is in their work but there may be more to it than that. I just feel like an awkward fan and not a writer and I hate feeling awkward. It's better when we immediately think of a neutral subject, or if somebody introduces me, but otherwise I feel like a leech taking up people’s time. I still sweat over what dumb shit I might have said when I met Russell Banks. Strangely enough him remembering me for saying something stupid stings less than him not remembering me at all.

On Privacy

2007-02-11T23:02:00.000-05:00

Nearly a decade ago in Wired Magazine, the futurist Esther Dyson, proclaimed that privacy was dead. The concept died years ago she said, we just haven’t yet realized it. In privacy’s place would or should come mutual responsibility and accountability. Now that secrets were over we had no choice but to hold each other in check since we all knew what the other was up to. The striking thing about such a worldview is that like Marshall Macluhan or even Phillip K Dick, Dyson ended up being both right and wrong.

I’m thinking of Dyson because of a rather revealing issue of TIME OUT NY that focused on New Yorkers living with their neighbors; an issue I found both inspiring and depressing. If privacy is over, nobody told New York City where eight million nations of one all live together apart. What was striking about the neighbors being ‘introduced’ to each other was not that they needed to be introduced or that they live apart by design but rather how adamant there were about keeping it that way. At the end of two of the matchmaking interviews it was clear that even though the neighbors were happy to be more familiar they were also clearly not going to reach out to each other again. There is this effort to deny the natural human tendency to socialize, to relegate it to work and neutral areas in order to protect the sanctuary of home. Home as a refuge from people as opposed to a place to welcome and entertain.

Sitting in my apartment in New York I tried to calculate how long it would take for me to be found if I had a stroke. I would die of course but how near would I have to be to the door before my corpse stinks up the hallway and how stink would it have be before the neighbors raise an alarm? I think of Vincenzo Ricardo, the man who sat dead in his Hamptons Bay house for a full year because not one neighbours thought to check on this old, blind man who had not been seen in months and whose letters were falling out of his mailbox. It’s incredible to me how far we will go to protect our right to not have anyone be a part of our lives. I think that at this very moment somewhere in this oh so developed state another Kitty Genovese (pic 1) is learning the hard way that she is on her own. There is a price to be paid for this of course. Privacy comes with a curse. While it may shield the hard working yuppies from nosy neighbors it also shields a Jeffery Dahmer from being found out, even when the stench of his pile of bodies becomes unbearable.

Privacy allows secretive people to hide on plain sight. One reason why Michael Devlin could get away with kidnapping Shawn Hornbeck (pic 2) and holding him hostage for four years is that whether consciously or not he counted on his neighbors to not give a damn what he did. He counted on his neighbors to be as self centered and selfish as he was. My roommate in NYC is from California and I’m from Jamaica and both of us found the willful anonymity of New Yorkers bracing and disturbing. The idea that I could take the train every day and not tell a single person good morning is foreign to me. I remember last year when I was stranded at JFK and called every person I considered a friend to help out. The response I got from all was “well, let me know how it turns out.” Now it could have been that maybe I was overestimating my closeness to these people, but I think it goes deeper than that. I think people in big cities think privacy; the right to exclude any and everybody from their lives is the only measure of true power that they have left. Selfishness then becomes survival mechanism and personal expression at once.

The only time that New Yorkers broke this rule was 9/11. Not surprisingly the only place now that bears little trace of 9/11 is New York. A question like “how much do you know about your neighbors?” immediately takes on an ominous tone. We are so obsessed with shielding ourselves from potential bogeymen that our very mode of self-protection breeds them by the truckload. Going as I do from one country to the next it has been interesting to see the concept of privacy versus community bend, shape and shift. In America, a new form of human contact has exploded with no need for actual human contact or at least person-to-person or flesh-to-flesh. My Space and You Tube are communities as large as any neighborhood. My best buddy Bill is somebody I see at the most twice a year and our friendship developed totally on MSN. In Jamaica we are coming apart and settling into mini-communities of one. The irony is that the American achievement of new community and the Jamaican devolution into isolation is fueled by the same source: the Internet.

Through the internet Americans have found a new way to interact while Jamaicans have found a new way to cut off from community, perhaps to build what they have always wanted instead of the what they have always been subjected to. This is not necessarily a bad thing. It means for example that gay Jamaicans won’t feel so alone again and teenage Jamaicans can mature without the crushing sense that they have already outgrown the country at 15. But is this a real community? We can interact with each other on the web but I’m not sure we can hold each other accountable. Unlike real life (for the most part) we control what of us people see and hear on the web. I’m sure the web me is more articulate that than the real me. He certainly is better looking, since I used a photoshopped pic from five years and 20 pounds ago (not the one on this blog, I promise, ladies). In a curious way we have managed to be online yet still out of sight and out of mind.

But while I not ready to call an online community a real one yet, that may be just me. I realize that maybe anonymity and community can co-exist. That’s the whole point behind blogs such as this one, for instance. The Internet as a forum for gut truth also blows me away. On postsecret.com, people confess things they would never reveal in church, or to loved ones. There’s rarely any interaction but the onslaught of honest expression results in a community of sorts. It’s the best of ironies, a website for secrets that proves that we are all dying to lose them. My friend knows of a preacher who has an online church and strangely enough because his congregation can be more honest online than in real life he scores more breakthroughs than real churches. But here is why it can never be as good or better than real contact, at least not for me. Even with so many online friends, colleagues and contacts I still spend a Saturday night alone and feeling loneliness so heavy that it’s almost a sickness. And there has to be more to a community than lonely souls being lonely together. Sometimes privacy is just another way of choosing loneliness and sometimes loneliness is as sad as the Beatles told us in Eleanor Rigby.

Still not convinced that privacy is loneliness by choice? Try this experiment. Think or make a list of all your friends. First subtract all that you have met through work. And yes if you’re an artist or musician your fellow artists and musicians count. Now subtract all who are actual family members. Subtract all you met in college. Subtract all who are not really friends, just drinking buddies. Subtract your significant other’s friends. Now subtract all friends you have known more than six years. Still have friends left? Good for you. At least that’s not one of the things you’re keeping private.

Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me

2007-01-18T13:42:00.000-05:00

I have four friends in four countries. Our lives could not have been any more different save for one striking blast of synchronicity that still leaves us spellbound when we think about it. In the spring of 1987, almost 20 years before we became friends, we were a stoned mullethead in Chicago, an ex-punk picking up photography in London, a future lit major in Australia, a willfully mute artsy type in Kingston and a quasi bohemian in Paris. But for one magical summer in 1987 (magic being black of course) all five of us with no knowledge of each other’s existence, were doing the same thing at the same time: Marooning ourselves in our bedrooms to listen to The Cure’s Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me.

I don’t remember 1987 by any sequence of days and dates; I remember it by breaths I lost, gasping at “Just Like Heaven.” I can’t recall any major events but I do remember the sad drum clatter of “Like Cockatoos,” fighting against the thunder strings and the titanic, looping bass. I know at precisely which bar of “The Kiss” the vocals come in and I remember experiencing something between epiphany and euphoria when I screamed “Get that FUCKING voice out of my head” along with Robert Smith. I remember trying not to lose it in the middle of “If Only Tonight We Could Sleep,” because I thought right then that I would never experience love. I was in U.S. for the summer after the roughest school year of my life. To paraphrase what Oprah once said about books, great music, hearing great records was the first time I felt loved, ever. Records like Kiss me Kiss me Kiss me, and Sign O’ The Times, (another double album masterpiece released that year) were so loaded with riches that they felt like gifts I didn’t deserve.

All I know is that when I listened to The Cure everything that I hated about myself at the beginning became everything I loved about myself at the end. This was my mute season, the summer I stopped talking because I had grown tired of being one of the most hated kids in high school. I spent that Easter trying to devise painless ways to kill myself because I just did not belong. I wanted to be one of the normal, cool kids so badly that I decided that the only way to make my life better was to end it. People always mocked me when I spoke so I stopped speaking, leaving it up to others to decide whether I was sick or rude. Drowning seemed too violent and slashing my wrists meant, well, the slashing part. I heard that falling from a building was like diving into water. I was dead set on dying but instead I went to Chicago. I stayed with my uncle, aunt and cousins who were all wonderful people, but fundamentalist Christians who didn’t take too kindly to popular music. I remember waiting until everybody was asleep and tiptoeing downstairs to watch Friday night videos on Superstation TBS.

One day we were driving home from Wednesday church service when we stopped at a gas station. Somebody was switching stations on the radio. Out of nowhere the strangest, high-pitched voice burst through the little car stereo. “Everything you do is so ingeeeeeeeeeeeeeniousssssss! He-she-it said. Five seconds later that same voice was howling “Why, why why why why can’t I be yoooooouuuuuuu?” The radio was quickly switched off. “You like that?” somebody asked me. “No,” I said, the first but not the last time I lied about music. I didn’t know who the band was or the name of the song, but I bought Billboard the next day hoping that the name of the song was Why Can’t I Be You. There it was on both the college rock and dance charts. I bought the record in secret, and spent nights staring at the huge lip-sticked cover, dying to go back home so that I could play it loud with the headphones on.

As a writer what interests me most is the commonality of experience, how we co-exist even as we choose not to coexist. Or put another way, how all of us are living the same lives even as we choose not to share them. In 1987 my future friends and me spent summer being alone together. 1987 was a particularly lonely summer and back then Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me and Sign on the times were the only friends I had. But Sign O’ the Times was drama on an international scale. Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me was a private thing, an underground back when the word meant something. The Cure were a band whose exaggerated freakiness and geekiness underscored my own. A band that taught me to celebrate the very things about me that others disliked. I was a Jamaican kid in love with Love and Rockets and Echo and the Bunnymen and couldn’t understand why I was being crucified for not liking dancehall reggae. Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me was one of the first true epics of the alternative nation, back when we were all swimming in our own innerspace, unaware that we had become a movement. That was something we would not realize until all of us; goths, nerds, punks, hardcore kids, straight edgers, artfags, grunge boys, Riot Grrrls, hip-hoppers, new wavers and no-wavers all showed up at Pixies Concerts.

I recently bought the re-mastered double CD and found myself doing what I always do: skipping to “Like Cockatoos,” then playing the rest in entirety. I think of Robert Smith’s puppy dog whelp and how everyone around me hated it. I remember that being the exact point when loving something everybody else hates became the greatest pleasure in the world. I extended this to loving other things, among them the Pixies, Shakespeare and myself. Maybe it’s a stretch to say that loving the Cure helped me to love myself but in my mind it makes perfect sense. Don’t get me wrong, Disintegration is their masterpiece. In fact my favourite song of the 1989 might be Love Song. Or Lullaby. Or Fascination Street. But Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me is MY record. The one where I got to know and love not only this great band, but myself as well.

Pat Boone, the penguin

2007-01-09T09:29:00.000-05:00

Fine, if Jack Nicholson can go unbilled in Broadcast News or Edward Norton in Kingdom of Heaven, then there is nothing particularly bad about such a thing. It may even work for the movie, Jack's appearance give a great film a greater jolt, and Edward Norton perhaps knew that his sheer grace in such a graceless movie would have caused critics to focus only on him, which they did anyway.

So maybe I'm making too big a deal out of Savion Glover not receiving any credit for his dancing in Happy Feet. I've heard even Glover's wimp-ass explanation, resorting to the "it's all good for the artform" excuse. I've even heard the lamer excuse that billing would have taken some of the magic away from the illusion of character. Funny, nobody was worried about Tom Hanks voicing a cartoon cowboy and Robin Williams doing a genie. But that's just a voice and nobody recognises voices right? My apologies if I just killed the illusion for you.

Savion Glover is not just any tap dancer, he's the world acknowledged Genius of the form, even if he doesn't seem to know it. I'm not surprised that he would be Pat Booned, but I am surprised that he has been done so by a cartoon penguin and nobody, not even Glover thinks anything is wrong with it.

On Tolerance

2007-01-06T11:12:00.000-05:00

The irony isn’t lost on me that New York was once called New Amsterdam. The evidence is everywhere that NY has more in common with a European city than the rest of America. That is why I could write months ago that even though I’m not an American citizen, nor do I live in the states permanently that I am a New Yorker. Even by European standards the New York Metropolis is quite striking for its tolerance. In fact I’ll go out on a shaky limb and say that New York is even more tolerant than European cities, where the absence of overt racism and disenfranchisement causes far more insidious and subtle versions to endure. My Brit friends raise unholy hell when I mention this (and there is the fact that I’ve never been to London), but they are always struck dumb when I mention that New York’s terrorists were at least imported, not born and raised natives of their own city. Instead New York flies all freak flags at full mast, glorifying her melting pot magnificence, patting herself on the back for tolerating all manner of kinds on the subway, including the less than sane. There is really no place on earth like it.

This is also a problem that New Yorkers in their sometime blindness don’t recognize. When tolerance is elevated to the highest moral value it creates as many problems as solutions. Lord knows tolerance is better than bigotry, but this is also the laziest of solutions, a beginning treated too often like an ending; a way of doing nothing that reassures us that we have done something. Diversity is of course a wonderful starting point but tolerant societies mistake this for a goal. This creates a whole slew of problems, nowhere better seen than in New York.

Enter gentrification. But not in the way you might think. Concerned citizens watching New York’s boroughs becoming split between only the very rich and the very poor have demanded housing that reflects greater economic diversity. But this move not only fails to solve the problem but also fools us into thinking that we have solved it. Housing may be set aside for the poor but where are the good, affordable schools to educate their children? Where is solid childcare, health and wealth benefits, and job security—anything that would usher the poor into the middle class? A maid may find an apartment near Central Park South but if she can never afford NYU then she and her daughter will remain maids. And let’s look at the plight of the incredible shrinking middle class for a second. Nothing proves the healthy mobility of a society more than a vibrant middle, the existence of which means the poor are getting richer and the teachers, civil servants, police and firemen are finding opportunities for economic and social stability. But the middle class is going the way of the mastodon in New York, a move that will have its backlash as soon as the state remembers that this is the class that pays all the taxes. In the absence of a vibrant middle there is the stagnant poor. Tolerance, far from a force of social change has become instead, a tool of human resource development departments, two or three lines at the bottom of a recruitment ad, nothing more. This is not progress.

The fact is liberals are to a commanding extent well educated, if not always well paid (and that’s relative, people). Liberals are also and have always been afflicted with a case of blind snobbery that would be offensive were it not well meaning. Take for example the film Borat. Liberals had more problems with it than conservatives. Critics, while lauding the dark humour also expressed concern that Borat’s flagrant anti-Semitism, homophobia and sexism may have been misinterpreted as endorsements by “Middle America”. Here again a well-meaning concern betrays the damning cultural snobbery that liberals are frequently (and correctly) accused of, the type of that led Chuck D to exclaim in 1988, “Better a Klansman than a liberal.” Where is this American who is so backward that he would not get this type of joke? I’m not saying that he does not exist, but what about the many Americans, millions who are not New York liberals, who consider themselves open-minded, but was just slotted into an unsavory geographical stereotype without their consent? Again, without realizing it, the liberal has declared himself more intelligent than so-called Middle America and offends the very populace he thinks he’s defending. The “I am smart enough to get it, but my backward brothers will not,” logic. The Dixie Chicks were so lionized as victims that nobody noticed when they turned into antagonists, alienating potentially supportive women such as Reba McIntire and dismissing many of their devout fans as backward rednecks that they never wanted in the first place.

And what is a Middle American anyway? I’ve met farmers if Ashland, Oregon and they are nothing at all like the farmers I met in Florida. Most people I’ve met have no problem with a man willing his property to another man even they don’t like the idea of gay marriage. Most of them believe in God but not religion and most have no problem with abortion. And even if some are conservative or even racist as we often believe, isn’t it a greater offence to simply write the whole territory off as one kind of creature? And yet the more tolerant breed of American does this all the time. Nobody in Middle America calls himself a Middle American, at least nobody I met.

Tolerance is a cop-out, a positive value with no emotional quality. It is hence quite easy, so easy that what most of us think is tolerance is not even that. Case in point. Go back to the beginning of this blog; replace tolerance with Apathy and you will notice that the tone of the article has not changed one bit. Tolerance is a quick way to reach for diversity without ever admitting that diversity is not equality. Racial equality is wonderful but when only 3 percent of that race can afford a good education, it means nothing more than a guaranteed seat on the subway. Because tolerance is a first move mistaken for a final step it reinforces far more serious problems than the ones it fixes.

The poor don’t need you to hold their hand and sing kumbaya. They need opportunities to become less poor and more rich. By the way society moves two things might happen: The poor become wealthier, a restored middle class that will need a new set of economic opportunities that the city has yet to provide. Or the poor are given nothing and the lack of opportunities despite social diversity will create societal fissures that explode, sometimes on a national scale. London’s terrorists were homegrown after all and the Rodney king beating, trial and riots happened in LA, not Alabama.

Reading, Writing and Absurdistan

2006-12-29T10:50:00.000-05:00

I don’t quite get it. On a very basic level, I can’t figure out why people would want to write unless they like to read. I mean, what would be the point? For the incredibly glamorous fast track lifestyle? I don’t think so. —Francine Prose, Atlantic, July 18 2006

I don’t get it either. That writing programs are increasing by the ten-fold while actual reading is plummeting does not surprise me. Perplexes me yes, but surprise? No. What does surprise me is how many of these non-readers are writers themselves, or people who want to write. This is what I do not understand. Why in heaven’s name, if you do not like books would you want to write one? And if you really don't care much for books, why, why, why should anybody read yours? But this is more common than I thought. James Frey made no secret of his rather lean library which seemed apropos for his rather massive hubris. In her wretched book, The Right to Write, Julia Cameron speaks about everybody being a writer merely because they write. She got particularly defensive at what she thought was writerly elitism. I can’t remember her mentioning a single book, other than the ones she wrote.

My belief is this: Writers who do not read have no right to write. How do you get the right to write? You need to be given permission first. In a blog I posted on Amazon several months ago I wrote about being given permission to write. It went like this:

“Gabriel Garcia Marquez talks about being given permission to write by Kafka. He read the following: "When Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from a night of troubled sleep he found himself transformed into a monstrous insect,” and was stunned out of his mind. “I didn’t know anyone was allowed to write things like that,” he said. “If I had known, I would have started writing a long time ago. So immediately I started writing.”

I have always been a writer, but wasn't given permission to write until I read Salman Rushdie’s Shame, about the sisters Chunnee, Munnee and Bunny. Among its many preposterous bits was a narrator who kept inserting himself in the narrative, even telling beforehand which character he was going to kill off. Then there was Omar Khayyam (no relation to the poet) who may have been born from all three sisters at once. I was appalled. Who told him he could do this? Who told him he could ruin the element of surprise and wag it in front of my face? But in asking the question he freed my answer. I trashed my first book and wrote another, the one I published.

I’m not going to blow my own horn about what I accomplished with my first book, but none of this could have happened were I not a reader. It just makes sense. How can anyone hope to blow somebody away with prose if they have not been blown away by prose? One of the many remarkable things about Gary Shteyngart’s magnificent Absurdistan is how much of writer’s novel it is. Absurdistan celebrates the very idea of the larger than life literary hero, something we have not seen in at least a century. More than that the book dares to suppose that fictional heroes are the only true models for real humanity. Shteyngart takes an audacious line; supposing, as his main character Misha Vainberg does that fictional heroes are realer and more instructive than real heroes. He also takes for granted that the reader is as well read as the narrator. I wasn’t in fact. But I did end up with a brand new copy of Oblomov as a result.

Absurdistan is the type of book that makes me want to write books. This is the type of magic that can happen with a novel, when it frees your mind and your pen. The book opens up new ways of seeing things, reading things by putting words together that excite me like never before. Can I do something like that? Not to copy him but to write in a way that I grab words together, throw them against a wall and watch them bounce? Because, to tell the truth I was bored with skinny prose. Okay that’s a lie. I dislike skinny prose. I dislike it profoundly. I dislike when people wave Hemmingway in my face as if he wrote with a scalpel instead of a pen, claiming that he fixed literature, as if anything was wrong with it. Joyce, Fitzgerald, Anderson, Woolf, Lawrence, and Svevo were all doing quite fine, thank you very much. The reductionism school of literature has been lauded too long as some sort of panacea. The very idea that smaller prose must be better prose has been neutering too much fiction. The result is horribly efficient and meticulously unadorned writing with as much pulse as a gnat.

Don’t get me wrong.
I’m all for Hemingway.
I think Carver is an absolute genius.
But writing like this.
Because I want to.
Because the night is cold.
And I’m alone.
Is just bad.
No to mention lazy.
Really.

There is nothing lazy about Shetyngart’s prose. Like the main character, Absurdistan is a huge lumbering beast of a novel, rattling off literary Molotov cocktails with such abandon that it doesn’t care who gets hit. Maybe Shteyngart needed an Eastern European with spotty English to pull this off. Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated certainly echoes this point. But whereas Foer’s “English” revealed the desperate heart of a wanna-be, Shetyngart’s English is the global village that language has been threatening to become; equal parts Bronx Jive, literary overheatedness, Russian Rhythm and gruff Hebrew all set to NYC hip-hop. I’ll go further to say that Absurdistan is the first true Hip-hop novel: Bold in its ambition to associate itself with the Gogols, Dostoeyskies and Goncharovs, but borrowing, sampling and stealing words, then slamming together to see what sticks. A trick to be sure but if this what we have to do to set fire to prose, then bring on the tricks. It’s such a thrill to read a novel that takes chances, consumes itself and downright gluts on a feast of words, without announcing that that is exactly what it is doing. And managing to do so while being a crazy and hilarious road movie disguised as a fiction. I’m so anxious to finish this blog just so I can write again.

And that dear reader is what reading can do for a writer. There are other reasons of course. Under-read writers also betray a certain narcissism evident not just in the preponderance of first person narrators who sound like the author but also in the assumption that one's prose is already so perfect that one cannot risk being “influenced” by someone else. Figures. Only an troglodyte would not want to be influenced by others. That's why there are no Mona Lisas on cave walls. If you have not read enough, you may be a writer, but you have not yet been given permission to write. And you will never write great fiction until you have been given permission. This comes from reading and reading widely. It comes from reading outside of your race, gender, age group, sexuality and era. It comes from reading the very book you wouldn’t touch in a million years, or maybe it simply means taking down Moby Dick and reading past page 2. If you are one of these non-readers, do me a favour. Grab a few books including Francine Prose’s Reading Like A Writer and don’t stop reading until you get that feeling—You’ll know it when you feel it. The feeling where you say, damn! this book makes me want to write. What comes next will be better than anything you ever written before. Trust me, I know what I’m talking about.

God Save Prince Harry

2006-12-29T08:58:00.000-05:00

Seems my favourite worthless royal isn't so worthless after all. Whatever you may think of the British Monarchy (and I think very little) or the Iraq war, surely it speaks to something that this is the first country where someone of privilege, a royal at that, has decided himself to be no better that the "ordinary" people who have been sent to die. It doesn't matter that his royal heinie may never see combat. It doesn't even matter that this may be a publicity stunt to redeem our favourite swastika wearer. The fact is here is a prince putting his considerable money where his mouth is and having the balls to bear arms in the war his country helped start. What would Audie Murphy think about a Brit of all people, showing Americans up? Last time I checked none of the following have signed up for duty:Jenna Bush, Barbara Bush JR, George P. Bush, Noelle Bush, John Ellis Bush Jr, Neil Bush, Lauren Bush, Pierce Bush, Marshall Bush, Samuel LeBlond, Ellie LeBlond.

Of course these worthless rich brats are merely following the example of uncle Dubya, uncle Dick (good show! knocking up the wife exactly two days AFTER the draft was expanded to include childless married men), Cousin Rummy, et al, who used their trust funds to dodge vietnam. How did the so called greatest generation (George Bush senior) produce such cowardly kids and grandkids? Fine, having been in a war, George senior would undoubtably know the truth about conflict. Certainly a good father would never subject his own children to such a thing. So he sent poorer children instead? I can't imagine the type of cynicism that breeds the mind set that believes that the only constuctive thing a poor kid can do for his country is die for the politcians that run it. Who'd ever guess that person coming looking the best in this civil war would have been Sadam?

New York Notes #1: The Cortez Principle

2006-12-21T08:37:00.000-05:00

Sure he was a sadistic, opportunistic, money grubbing, glory hungry, genocide inciting murderer, but Cortez still had a winning attitude to succcess. I know what you are thinking. Do you mean the attitude where in order to get wealth one must slaughter all who stand in one's way even if they are millions of Indians standing on top of gold or millions of Africans setting up huts beside diamonds? No, not that one. I much prefer the lesson where Cortez guarantees success by eliminating failure as an option. Because failure is neither a situation nor an outcome but a choice. Or rather an attitude. Failure is its own forgone conclusion. Circumstances are what they are and sometimes they obey no one, but too often we have failed ten times before we even started.

As soon as Cortez landed in the Americas he burnt all his ships. Whatever would happen to the conqistadores, returning to Spain was no longer on the table. My best friend, Che and his wife eliminated divorce as an option in their marriage. As a result they have survived things that have destroyed couples around them. As soon as they realised that option E, the escape clause, the eject button, the net below was gone, not only did they have to go back into the murk they just left, but they also had to find what worked, discard what didn't and beat a problem into a new shape, because there could be no failure. There is always a way, but you'll never know if one of your ways is the way out. Okay if I keep this up I will look in the mirror and see Deepak Chopra.

Here is my point. After writing the big, well read blog 'On Mediocrity', I found myself, or rather three friends found me to be one of the very mediocre people I was writing about. So 2006, the year I should have spent getting deeper into the art and business of being a writer, I spent selling beer. Placed in a situation where I could either take stock or take risks, I ended up hedging my own bets, willfully sticking myself in a job that I did not despise, but did not love either. It was a life that was behind me but I held on to it because it was safer. My justification was that look, I had debts to pay. I wasn't being a coward, I was honoring my obligations. I said that so often that I convinced myself that I meant it. So I've been living with a net. Figures that people who love nets hate risk, I just had not figured on one of these people being me. But playing it safe still means that you lose. In my case I watched my writing career grind to a slow crawl even as I was making money as an advertiser in a small country, in a career of no real consequence.

Playing it safe is just a three worded term for a more brutal, two worded one: Tunnel Vision. My friend Bill asked me how much I charged for my last advertising campaign, because that was what I was telling the world that I am worth. Whatever I earned that year, that was what I was telling people that I could be had for. After dividing that Jamaican sum into American dollars it turns out that I was worth 66 times less than I thought. This wouldn't have hit so hard were it a new lesson, but I had been there before. I knew this rut. It me six years to get out of it the last time.

I'm not into making resolutions but I will say this. I'm 36. Way too old to be cool and way too young to be dead. And way too far gone to be playing it safe now. A turning point is a point of choice where you can either take stock or take risks. And sometimes decisions that initially look like risks turn out to be things that we simply have to do. Because even inaction has a reaction and I don't want to be one of those "If only" people. So I have become one of those millions in New York striving for a dream that I can't define, on a mission that makes no real sense. It's not that I'm giving up Jamaica or that I'm going to live in the States, but as I left the airport I could smell my ships burning.

Just Found This One As Well: His Royal Badness

2006-12-19T23:04:00.001-05:00

Thank God for You Tube. Now I can delude myself that I'm living in the past for as long as I like! Except for Patti Smith circa 1975-6 nobody has ever been as fearless and outrageously original as Prince was in 1980, not even Prince.

Question of The Week

2006-12-14T09:48:00.001-05:00

"What has our society come to when Prince is the guy you can trust not to sexually offend 120 million middle Americans?" —James Poniewozik, Time Magazine.

Amen, brother James, Amen.

Have you seen this guy? Does anybody know where he went. There were unconfirmed reports that he briefly surface in some thing called Black sweat then quickly went back to making pop for soccer moms whose children are gone for the weekend and they want to get freekay!

Could somebody find him please and shoot the twerp that has been taking his place?

How to Make a Jamaican Music Video

2006-12-12T08:36:00.000-05:00

First there must be children. But take heed: all children are not the same. There are some who touch strange things like books and remain indoors. These children may be white, red, yellow, mulatto or black in a white kind of way. Please refrain from employing that sort of animal. Many other children are available, far more pleasing to the video camera. Dark like Marassa and Midnight, with big bellies, still growing teeth, blue school uniforms (with blue tie-the-pig ribbons!). If possible, please make sure they are barefooted and this is crucial people, they must always be smiling. This is essential for the behind the scenes special where the star can grab his chest and remark how with all these hardships surrounding them these children are always smiling, always happy. That way you can be like Anderson Cooper in Africa! Please rehearse this line, for if references to inexplicably happy Negro children are not made, said video will seem exploitative. Your audience will never believe that you have been transformed as a person until you break down at the sight of smiling blackies.

Your local crew must come from a smattering of variably coloured well-spoken semi-Negroes who are quick to point out their Italian, French, Scottish, or Cherokee blood. Not Irish for everybody knows Irish people are just Negroes turned inside out. They should have traveled widely, listen to groundbreaking acts like James Taylor and Creed and should be able to reassure you that they know every hoodlum in the ghetto and go there all the time. Please bear in mind that these men and women only go to the ghetto with a film crew and 1000 US dollars in hand, but don’t let that trouble you. Ghetto people are just people, except that they are from the ghetto.

Now comes your cast. School girls in dark blue uniforms are a must but so too are children who do not seem to go to school, especially if you are shooting on what is clearly a school day. Their purpose is the run behind your vehicle screaming and laughing. Nobody scowls in the ghetto. The sidewalk must be taken up with five to ten men, preferable old and playing dominoes. You must get the action right. Make sure you zoom in to a medium shot just as the winning Negro rises and slams the winning domino on the table, breaking the table in two. Next pan upwards to the cute ghetto girls looking out their window, pan back down to catch more ghetto kids running and smiling then scoot the dolly over to catch the Granny, whose toothy grin belies a lack of actual teeth. Make sure she smiles for two teeth are better than too many. Her hair should be in two pigtails like a Native American and she must be selling something, preferably fruits, vegetables and cigarettes. Under no circumstances should an adult man be shot beside a child. That would imply that he is the father and everybody knows that ghetto kids ain’t got no daddy.

Come to think of it, forget, the ghetto; you must shoot in the uberghetto. Remember that poor Jamaica is the real Jamaica. Forget high-rise buildings, Taino tribal grounds, the second oldest railroad track in the world, and the most fascinating network of underground caves in the Caribbean. You need bad roads, shit running down the side walks, zinc fences, tenements and gunmen, because this is the real Jamaica. Please have the locals stack 12 speakers together, 3 in a row and have the natives come out to wind their waists and slam dominoes on the table or your viewers will think that it’s Haiti. You must shoot in district of Waterhouse. This will be in your contract for Waterhouse is the music video ghetto of choice, probably because the quick to be violent blackies aren’t so violent there. But be sure to buy the men in mesh merinos a hot Guinness or you might not make it out of there alive. Remind yourself that if Alicia Keys can shoot there, you can too.

Should you meet a gunman make sure to genuflect in the usual fashion. But feel free to pass off an offensive comment so that the Jamaican crew can never shoot in that place again. The nature of that comment is up to you but forgo the racial for Jamaican Negroes are not black. Make sure you have extra film left for the midnight dance so you can remark how bestial and sexual the natives can be while dancing. Listen as the Jamaican producer remarks that this is in keeping with our African culture, even though he or she will not do such things until after the wrap when they take you to Quad Nightclub where uptown people grind each other. Try a dance yourself but restrict it to hands, you don’t need to remind us that white people cannot dance for us to remember that we’re still safe. Because once you take our dances we’ll have nothing left! Don’t forget the smiling children.

Make sure there is at least one Rasta, Rastafarian to you. Please try your hardest to find one that is old and almost toothless as the young ones might make a play for your women folk. The Rastaman capacity for seduction is legendary, just ask a certain vogue editor about her Bob Marley lost weekend. One must have at least one Rasta to show the world that yes; Bob Marley’s spirit approves this video. Try to get somebody to wear a Bob Marley T-Shirt while at it. While you cast for Rastas makes sure that wardrobe drapes the video in red, green and gold as these are the only colours that Jamaicans wear. Except the dark blue uniforms of the school children. Extra points if the Rasta is a coconut vendor for you can include a shot of him decapitating said nut and drinking the juice to reassure your women that a big black man with a machete is not a creature of violence but quaint beauty.

All women must be fat. Your video babe will be imported so there is no need to search for Jamaican women that American men find attractive. Your women must have big, big, big breasts. Mount Everbreasts. She must sport two wheelbarrows to carry each tit. And with big breasts must come wide hips and monstrous thighs that could squash a penis into a flounder. She must always have a basket of fruits on her head, even though this is the ghetto. She must blush when called for, wind her waist on cue and disappear as soon as a white woman enters the shot.

When you have wrapped up the ghetto scenes, then it’s time for the other real Jamaica. The deep blue seas, the wide expansive sunrises and the Rastas on the beach. Under no circumstances should you shoot a building that is more than two stories high or was built in the 20th century. In fact, make sure your structure or edifice is not taller than 12 speakers placed together in rows of three. This is to remind American viewers that Jamaicans party all the time and have no need for houses or workplaces. Never ever let on that any Jamaican works for a living in any other profession but selling fruit and cigarettes on the street corner. Have you gotten the sun rising over the mountains shot? The sun rising over the sea? The sun rising over the ghetto? Good. Now shoot your sunsets. When that’s done go to a market and shoot some more market women selling fruit. And running children.

Make sure all of this is done before you shoot your star or he or she may have to wait among poor people. This your star may find extremely unpleasant because then he or she will have to take pictures with babies who have never heard of her. And while no criminal lives in the ghetto you might still want to spring for extra security because it’s not their fault that they may want to take stuff that is not theirs. Private property? Bah!

Please also remember not to pay the extras. You will only create monsters that will then expect to be paid for actually working on your production. Believe the Jamaican producer when he tells you that the locals will be so happy to be in your video that they won’t even take your money, after all, what use is money to poor people? Make sure you thank the Jamaica Tourist Board for allowing you to film Jamaica in the way they like Jamaica to be filmed. Granted, nobody at the tourist board had ever seen or will ever see the ghetto (except in music videos), but they trust that you had found lots of smiling black children and a red green and gold color scheme to play with. And even if you did not, throw in two or three sunsets and they will call it even. And when you finally wrap up your shoot and fly back to where you came from, please come back again soon. Without you, there’s no work for the country to do.

PS: If you think I'm joking, google "Jamaican children," click images and see what comes up.

My Blues Aren’t Blue Enough

2006-12-11T17:55:00.001-05:00

Poor Darby Crash. If the late Germs singer thought that his life was so insignificant that death was the only way to improve it, he might have changed his mind had he seen how less significant his death turned out to be. Darby Crash had the extreme misfortune of taking his life the day before Mark Chapman took John Lennon’s. And as poetically catastrophic and sickly epic suicide can be (see: Kurt Cobain) it’s nowhere near the ticket to instant martyrdom that murder is. Or a noble fight with a terminal disease. Crash didn’t even OD in the rock & roll way. Drug overdoses are supposed to be accidental, not deliberate. Gun deaths are far more glorious. For instance, you get Dave Grohl to immortalize you in perhaps the best lyric of his career: “One shot...nothing.” Crash was doubly cursed when months before, Ian Curtis of Joy Division, took his life by a far more poetic hanging, inadvertently spawning the best dance band of all time and creating about five or six genres at last count. Crash was just a loser punk who offed himself before he could record a decent version of Sex Bomb.

I mentioned Darby because it’s a hell of a thing when your own misfortune pales beside others. Not that I’m proud of misfortune or think it’s something to boast about, but in this new culture that celebrates victimhood and uses it to justify any behaviour, you can be declared irrelevant if your blues just aren’t blue enough. This must be why I sympathise with the straight white American male so much. Ever since political correctness declared him the villain of the story he has had no choice to but rush to the sidelines because all the people he kept down must now have their moment. Sure you’re an A student, but are you an A student from the ghetto? Sure you’re the top in your class but did you have to sell meth today just to buy a decent shirt to come to school? Your mom may be dean of studies but is she a crack-ho? Yeah you’re cool, but are you a poor black lesbian feminist who has been given a hard time by people just like you? Of course not. White boy, your blues just aren’t blue enough. I feel your pain. You’d be surprised how many black people do.

I could have traded on third world guilt if I wanted to, but that becomes less and less convincing when I type stories on a Mac Book pro or dine at Asia de Cuba. But that’s not even the point. Earlier this year I applied for a fellowship to a writer’s conference that shall remain nameless. I wasn’t expecting to win, because well, I’m a pessimist but thought I stood a chance, coming from a third world country still shaking off colonialism, political tribalism, globalism and every other ism I could think of. Of course I didn’t win but when I read the biography of who did I had this weird mix of guilt and envy. “My leaders are corrupt,” is just not as engrossing as “when the warlord torched our village, we could not find food to eat,” not even to me. I found myself asking how can I compete with that? I found myself asking myself why am I asking myself these questions? This was beyond politically incorrect. I was envying somebody his or her catastrophic misfortune because it made her resume look so much better.

Of course I had no right to such thoughts, but I know enough to realize that these setbacks also work in persuading who they need to persuade. Of course she could have won because she was simply better than me. After all, I’m not so stuck up my own butt to think I’m the be-all and end-all of fiction, but I kept finding myself asking questions that only my white male friends could understand. Is my suffering, suffering enough? I think my childhood was as crappy as the next misunderstood geek, but how can it compare to “last year they took our children, now our boys have come back to kill us”? My parents may have died from cancer but how does that compare to when they are massacred in their sleep? In a world that celebrates the victim, scars become stars. It’s even worse when the victim has genuine intellectual merit because you simply know that it then boils down to who suffered the most. And if you’re a white male it means that people think you’ve had things too easy. If you’re from the Caribbean middle class it means that you were one of the luckier blacks even if you don’t feel lucky at all.

This doesn’t mean that I think affirmative action or refugee programs are not necessary. It’s a myth to think the we will always do the right thing and measures such as these step in when we inevitably fail to be the nobler creatures we claim to be. But sometimes it does seem as if the playing field isn’t so much level as re-skewed, and if yours is the sinking side then you have no right to say as such. It means that I might never win an award if I go up against a Haitian or African and I should be damn ashamed for writing such a sentence. But I know better. At the end of the day we love storytellers and some people’s stories are simply better...especially if they are worse.

The Only Good Dictator is a Dead Dictator

2006-12-10T14:27:00.000-05:00

God must have a really messed up sense of humour to continue allowing the worst killers to die of old Age. Mobutu, Papa Doc, Milosevic and now Latin America's favourite CIA creation, and good friend of Margaret Thatcher, Augusto Pinochet. Whatever happened to the Good old days when Mussolini got his just desserts? It takes some skill to wash the blood of some 3000 people off one's hands, so perhaps he was already at peace before he finally croaked. So rest in peace Augusto, you corrupt, murdering, klepto son of a sniveling mongrel bitch. If I ever find your stinking ass in heaven when I get there, God's going to have to answer to me.

Get Thee To A Creative Writing Class!

2006-12-07T11:32:00.000-05:00

The first time I came to New York with aspirations (ok pretensions) of being a writer I immediately went to Brooklyn. I had read (ok bought) tons of books and without fail the blurb at the back would say that _____________ resides in Brooklyn. Paula Fox...Brooklyn. Colson Whitehead...Brooklyn. Colin Channer...Brooklyn. Chris Claremont (OMG!!!) ...Brooklyn. That was enough to make a postcolonial writer go batshit. I flew into a delusion close to psychosis. I jumped off the G train and thought, this is my Paris 1927! I would swoop down on Clinton Hill and run into Jonathans Lethem, Franzen and Safran Foer, arguing about whether prose is really just the freest of free verse. I would stop for coffee and Paula Fox would run up and warn me to stop distracting readers with smut. Jhumpa Lahiri would explain that the reason her agent didn’t like my book was him not me. I would spend lunches drinking coffee and smoking Craven A’s, nights poisoning myself with absinthe and the rest of the time banging out the great Caribbean novel while my life fell apart. Spectacularly of course. Instead I couldn’t even get myself mugged, and realized that the last person to ask for directions in Brooklyn was a Brookliner.

Because New York is 8 million nations of one and in Brooklyn the nations are islands. Maybe there is a community of writers there, but as I’m not yet the type of writer that the New Yorker needs to talk about, I probably won’t see it. But there was a reason I was searching. Simply put, a writer needs community. There has to be something to offset the essential loneliness of being a writer. Something had to balance out the truth that we are at our most productive alone.

Maybe this is why so many writers spend a great amount of time knocking Creative Writing programs. “Can writing by taught?” goes the question, as if anybody in a creative writing program has ever been so stupid as to mistake it for composition class. For a genre so confident in its intellectual certitude, literature can be downright bonehead in its theories of how one becomes better at it. Julia Cameron, in the Right to sums it up as this: I have pen, I have paper, I write so I’m a writer. Like Ginsburg rhapsodizing about Bebop, the point was that if you were inspired enough anybody could do it.

Funnily enough nobody spins on their toes twice and gets called a ballerina. Now that I can strum a guitar a little bit, it’s been 6 months and yet Bob Dylan hasn’t gotten the memo that I’m his next band member. And Scorsese, what’s up with you not casting me in the Departed? Don’t you know that I was the star of my high school nativity play? You’d think of all the people who would know that inspired amateurishness is a myth it would be writers, but they are the ones shoveling this stuff. Make no mistake several writing programs are awful. There are also far too many of them and sooner or later they will have to ask why writing programs attendance is up while actual reading is down. But back to the point. I’ve heard and read too many writers, many of them graduates speak nothing but ill of programs, patting themselves on the back with the knowledge that writing can’t be taught and none of the real greats went to writing class anyway.

This is of course mythmaking of the highest order or rather, bullshit. I joined a creative writing program (Wilkes! Big up you'self!) after I published my first novel. And yet I was not the person in the class bitching about how unnecessary the classes were. This man thought everybody had a right to his opinion; boasting that his good buddies Mailer, Wolfe, Hemmingway, Baldwin and Jones never went to Creative writing class. Alas, pity the poor fool who takes a class with Kaylie Jones, who called Baldwin uncle Jimmy and James Jones, Papa. The fact is the boys did go to creative writing class. The class of Maxwell Perkins, the legendary editor from a bygone, awfully missed era. When Jones first submitted From Here to Eternity, Perkins told him to keep 100 pages, ditch the other four hundred and write the book over. He also gave Jones 100 bucks so that he wouldn’t starve to death doing so. Mailer, Thomas Wolfe both entered the Perkins classroom and all literature is the better for it. Hemmingway went to the class Gertrude Stein and Sherwood Anderson. Edith Wharton was pretty much schooled by Henry James. Even Flannery O’Connor went to an actual writing program, Iowa. Even Brooklyn was a school for writers once.

But that Brooklyn doesn’t exist anymore. Nor that Paris or London or Berlin though there was a Prague for a while. A writer searching for community is not going to find it at some smoky café in Park Slope or Rue St. Honoré. And maybe editors like Perkins still exist but I have my doubts after a junior editor at one of the three most powerful publishers in the world told me that his boss is not a “book person.” If you want the atmosphere of creativity and critique that can make a difference in a manuscript the only place you’re going to find that is a Creative Writing program. It took me 4 years to write my first book, largely because I did not know what I was doing. I could have used a trained ear, somebody who knew when storylines weren’t tied up, when words like ‘it’ were being overused, when characters were flat when they should be round and when using ignominy in a sentence impresses no one. I’m sure Zadie Smith can get Ian McEwan to read her next manuscript but the rest of us have to go to school. Sometimes if you’re lucky you get to build your own community. More than that, you come to realise that it does take more than one person to write a good book. If you have Jonathan Franzen on speed dial to do this for you then congratulations, but the rest of us have to go to school.

Creative Writing programs aren’t perfect. I’m still not sold on the idea of beginners giving pointers to beginners since nine out of ten don’t read nor have a clue about reading like a writer. There is also the tendency to confuse critique with simply telling what you would have done had YOU written the story. Workshop fiction can be devoid of real feeling (sentiment is the enemy!) and bad workshop fiction obeys rules so close that the end result is more of a thesis than a story. That said chances are that editor will not be able to tell you that your tone slipped on page 150, busy as he is, signing the next plagiarizer of chick lit. And neither Joyce Carol Oates nor Andrew Wiley can read your nine pager so you’ll have to take a number for a very long wait. But maybe Peter Carey or Colum McCann over at Hunter can help you turn your care bears story into Watership Down. Or maybe Francine Prose would pick up where others haven’t that your masterpiece in one less character away. And maybe you will realize that the best writers are students and Creative Writing programs serve to teach us that the essence of good writing is learning itself.

Spacebreak Sex

2006-12-04T02:21:00.000-05:00

For something that we do all the time, obsess about when we’re not doing it, think about, worry over, take pills to enhance, and even define one’s identity by, sex seems curiously absent from literary fiction. Oh sure we have bad sex, unrewarding sex, adulterous sex, paid for sex, deviant sex, even interspecies sex (Ok, guilty) but no real sex. We’re particularly good at exploring the implications of post-sex but never in medias res, in the thick of it so to speak. The human body goes through all sorts of wonderful and scary stuff during sex yet nobody writes about it. What gives?

Instead what we have what Barbara Kingsolver called spacebreak sex. You know what I’m talking about. It goes like this:

He touched her hair, she looked in his eyes, they both headed for the bedroom.

[SPACE BREAK]

The next morning the woke up in each other’s arms...

So what the hell happened? Were they lost in pleasure? Did one of them in the act of sex realize that they were making a horrible mistake? Did somebody fake it and why? Did they think sex was a blanket panacea for everything else and realize that it wasn’t (or it was)? What happened? Who was dominant and why? If a writer loses nothing by describing how a bullet enters a person why does he lose point for describing the entry of genitalia?

I think literary fiction writers are scared of sex. It was so weird in creative writing class when I would submit something explicit and I would be counseled by well meaning adults how to write with more subtlety so that I could get the feeling across, you know, so that I wouldn’t HAVE TO go into the act. Why not? And why use the phrase HAVE TO? Maybe we fear that we would suck at it. Maybe that demon of sentimentality that hovers over all writers would run amok and ruin our stories with lines unfit for even Cinemax After Dark. Maybe we would just end up writing porn. That’s not an unreasonable fear, The Bad Sex in Fiction Award is usually given to otherwise fine novels that stumbled spectacularly in this area. How about this one from literary luminary and 2005 bad sex nominee John Updike:

“..his prick stared back at him with its one eye clouded by a single drop of pure seminal yearning. He felt suspended at the top of an arc. Faye leaned back on the blanket, arranging her legs in an M of receptivity, and he knelt between them like the most abject and craven supplicant who ever exposed his bare ass to the eagle eyes of a bunch of crows.

Faye took him in hand. He slipped in. He became an adulterer. He went for the last inch. She grunted, at her own revelation. His was that her cunt did not feel like Phyllis's. Smoother, somehow simpler, its wetness less thick, less of a sauce, more of a glaze. It was soon over. He could not help himself, he was so excited, proud, and nervous. When he was done, he opened his eyes, and saw this stranger's face an inch from his, seemingly asleep, the closed eyelids showing a thin pulse, her long lips curved self-lullingly.”

Notwithstanding that no good sex scene could start with the word prick (Is this a white male writer thing?) it’s no surprise then that most times we resort to the good old space break.

Maybe great writers, unlike great poets are simply not having good sex. Or maybe it’s only the straight ones. When it comes to good explicit action the gays guys seem to have it locked even if the straight audiences may not want to read it. Alan Hollinghurst can get into literary raptures when writing about man-man action. His Booker Prize winning novel, The Line of Beauty is filled with them, but they work for the novel precisely because the main character was trying for this rapture, with a certain erotic desperation to lock into a 70’s style hedonism in the AIDS encroaching 80’s and failing miserably, especially when class, no respecter of persons or sexualities got in the way. Next to the gay guys are the dirty old men of the Latin boom, such as the late Guillermo Cabrera Infante, who’s Infante’s Inferno would probably never have been attempted by an American or a Brit. Whenever I mention that only the gay guys and Latin Americans got it, Henry Miller is frequently trotted out. But Henry Miller died way back in 1980 and his last books were the words of somebody trading in his own detritus and not even aware that he had become just another Henry Miller imitator.

Maybe we are just aware that other art forms, pardon the pun, do it better. A particular accomplishment is the new movie Short Bus, which opens with a man satisfying himself in a way that few men can and then goes on to a sex therapist who’s never had an orgasm and a couple playing way out of their league by bringing a third person to the party. That this film is buoyed by explicit sex scenes (we have a go for penetration, folks!) underscores rather than undercuts it. I was incredibly pissed off and envious that I hadn’t written a novel like this first. In music Prince nailed the knife-edge between pleasure and perversion way back 1980 with Dirty Mind and Patti Smith rode through with Horses even further back in 1975. Even photography boasts of Mapplethorpe, Helmut Newton, Nan Goldin and Andres Serrano.

I think we literary fiction writers need to take our pencils, or laptops back into the bedroom. Something pretty fascinating is happening in there. Everybody seems to know this but us.

Where I'm Coming From

2006-11-27T10:08:00.000-05:00

I’ll never forget my first day of Primary School and second day of High School. Primary is probably what Americans call Elementary but I’m not sure. Primary school was the first time I realized I was different from everybody else. High school was the first time I was reminded of that difference. Neither was a happy experience, in fact both fucked me up royally in wildly different ways. The first time I was ridiculed for being different was in spelling class when I said “Yes Miss”(we call all female teachers Miss, even the married ones) and the whole class shouted Yesssshhhh Misssssh. I don’t know, maybe I spent my earliest years in some parent made cocoon but I hadn’t the slightest idea that I spoke funny. But they turned funny into a double whammy—the best of puns, where how I spoke was both funny-ha-ha and funny-strange. It was something to ridicule in the innocently merciless way that children always ridicule. Like Jason Taylor in David Mitchell’s Black Swan Green I also studied words, dictionaries and my own way of speaking, anything to avoid a word with S in it. I guess that increased my vocabulary a thousand fold but it also made me sound like an idiot, an eight year old stumbling over words so as not to roll the dreaded S off my tongue. I even tried pronouncing it as a Z.

They called me Sissy and other names as well that my subconscious has mercifully kept to himself, but here is the great thing about kids. I was a sissy, but I was their sissy. Once something happened, I can’t remember what, but my school uniform was ruined (might have been a fight, man did I love to fight) and the entire class marched to my home to explain to my mom that it wasn’t my fault. In some way, being the resident strange kid made me a weird kind of popular. I had no reason to believe that this would not continue. But then came High School. And all boys’ High School. Wolmers Boys School.

If Primary school made me different, High School made me so sorry I was ever born that I spent five years thinking of ways to fix that mistake. September 1981. It seemed that I couldn’t open my mouth for two seconds without somebody calling a girl’s name or an animal’s name or just simply battyman or faggot. All because my S sounded like SH (I did not get over this complex until I heard Sean Connery speak the same way). My second day of school I was going home with my brother, the coolest kid in Second Form (Grade 8) and his just as cool friends. They were only 11 and 12 but I thought I was in the company of men, the coolest men I’ve ever seen, and they were even talking about girls and sex already! Christopher M________ saw me leaving and shouted “Angela!” Like an idiot I said, “I wonder who he’s talking to?” to which my brother said “It’s you he’s talking to,” in a tone I heard from my father once talking to my mother because I said I liked disco (that was back in 1977, people) and she seemed to think I was headed for ballet class.

In less than three days I was rejected by my own class and had embarrassed my brother. But I was a good student and needed to learn my lesson only once. I stopped acknowledging my brother as such and never did it again for the rest of our school lives. To this day most of the boys who know us or of us have no idea that we are related. I volunteered to step out of his cool life. I decided, perhaps without knowing that the only way to stop fucking up my brother’s reputation was to disappear, so that’s what I did. I left for school at a different time. I went to a different bus stop. I took a bus that went in a different direction. We had no interests in common, no sports, no school clubs, no arts, no friends. We maintained our distance so well that even when my brother had to repeat a year and we ended up in the same class, people still had no idea that we were related. Some of his own friends made it their duty to humiliate me on a daily basis. I just figured that since leaving high school was not an option that maybe enduring this shit was just something I was supposed to do.

I love my high school and I still support it, but with the exception of two remarkable years in 1982 and 83, it was the most colossally dismal experience of my life. I think the only reason I’m still here was my cowardice about suicide. Back when the first wave of misinformation came out about Columbine, I remember hearing that these two boys were picked on mercilessly in high school because they were not cool or liked (This is totally untrue by the way, they were not nerds or geeks), there was a part of me that felt the way Eminem felt in the verse he cut from the Marshall Mathers LP. I too have been that angry and that hurt. There were days when I don’t know what would have happened if I had a gun. And my mom was a cop. I know there are people who think, “So you had it rough in high school and nobody liked you, nyah-nyah-nya-nyah-nyah,” (I think that’s what my friend, Bill said). I know there are people who think that people like me should just grow up and put the past in the past. But if you have never been through what we’ve been through, rejected at the exact age when you crave acceptance then you really don’t know what being a boy or a girl interrupted feels like. Ten years later you will channel that void into restless ambition and you will do well, just as I did. And it will mean nothing because you’re using success as revenge. I sometimes wonder if I were to walk up to Bill Gates and whisper, “those kids in school STILL hate you,” what would happen. All I know is that to be rejected by your peers at that point when affirmation means everything leaves a void in you that is replaced by something, maybe a chip on one’s shoulder, maybe the emotional life of a 12 year old, maybe a lifelong obsession with Science Fiction, comics and porn. Who knows.

Kurt H__________, one of my brother’s friends started coming to this church I joined a few years ago. He was clearly going through some very heavy shit and as a church brother, moreover a church brother who knew him maybe it was my duty to encourage the man. But here is something funny about nerdhood. To be tormented by people is not half as bad as to be forgotten by them. Because there really is a link between abuser and abused, a relationship in its own weird way that leaves you thinking that considering all the shit this son of a bitch put me through he could have at least the common decency to remember my name. Because I will never forget his. It weird being a nerd because you find so few reasons to feel special that you’ll settle for being special in torment and when you find out that you were a mere run-on sentence in your tormentor’s life it feels worse than the abuse. Anyway, this guy was clearly going through some heavy stuff or he wouldn’t have been in church. I’m not going to speculate what the heavy stuff was, but maybe he needed somebody to talk to. That was not my thought but the friend beside me, who also went to the same school. He kept prodding me to talk to him, to remind him who I was as if that were an icebreaker. All I could think of was him humiliating me again and it would hurt like I was fourteen. You have to understand Kurt H_________. Loads of boys humiliated me during high school but Kurt H________ went one step further, by befriending me enough to help him cheat on his art exam then publicly humiliating me right afterwards. I looked at this guy in church and felt such a monstrous hatred for him that I was pissed off at Jesus for letting him in here. I thought that if this was the kind of asshole who was going to make it to heaven then I wanted nothing to do with that goddamned place.

Maybe it was the thought of never hearing Purple Rain again or reading another issue of X-men that kept me from killing myself. Maybe it was that we had a rather loud car and somebody would have heard the engine before the carbon monoxide got to me. Or maybe I was just too chickenshit to do anything. The truth is something else. Something Todd Solondz nailed in that movie, Welcome to the Dollhouse. Like the brutalized heroine in that movie I think what kept me alive was the stubborn determination that some way, somehow, somewhere, sometime things just had to get better than this. It just had to.

In 1986 I decided that I had to do something. By the end of 1985 I was so unpopular that I even earned a sort of respect because nobody could understand how I could stomach so much relentless abuse, to even laugh along with it. It seemed that I was one of the top four targets of ridicule in my year; something had reached critical mass. There was just no way I could continue like this, hated because I like art and lit and history, didn’t like football (soccer) and walked and talked funny. I realized that more than everything, it must have been my screwed up way of speaking that made people hate me.

So in the summer of 1987 I stopped speaking.

Losing My Religion

2006-11-14T18:56:00.000-05:00

It’s far easier to be a dogmatic Christian than you may think. You don’t need the ability to read, or a secondary education, or a sense of reason or even reality. You need believe only two things, Creationism and Armageddon. Once you have alpha and omega nailed then everything in the middle is just gravy. Doesn’t even matter if your dogma is slightly different than mine. It’s a disturbing Irony that Jesus never wrote down a single sermon, perhaps because he knew exactly what was going to happen, that by writing something down his words would have become exactly what it is today: Dogma, especially for those who prefer to be read to.

Because reading, as the always-brilliant Jeanette Winterson said recently, is an act of free will, and it is a private act. This is why when the oppressors come, whether they are culture warriors or Armageddon-horny church sisters, they destroy the books first. An educated mind is a liberated one and a liberated mind is a dangerous thing, especially when it becomes sensitive to injustice. This is why Religion is still the opiate of the masses and for it to remain so; the masses cannot be too intelligent. Who’d ever guess that an ignorant, uneducated populace would serve both a religious and political agenda in one shot? An uneducated believer can be told that hardship is his lot and accepts such as God’s will without even once realizing that his slave ancestor was told the same thing. Or he is told the opposite, that MONEY SHALL COMETH TO HIM NOW, and he will believe that instant, unearned money is God’s will as opposed to the whole “by the sweat of your brow you shall eat bread" business. A friend of mine bought this hook line and sinker several years ago and thought it was the Lord speaking to him when an old, childless woman willed him the contents of her safety deposit box in England. He had only to pay the overdue bank charges and the contents of several boxes would be his. He flew to England, paid the charges to her attorney at his six storey, busy office and was handed the keys. He soon found out that while the bank certainly existed the account did not. By the time he got back to the attorney’s office, less than two hours later the people, the furniture and the phones on all six floors were gone.

I’m not convinced the faith is supposed to trump reason. Ever. I’m not sure God thought so either. For every “Faith can move mountains” one can also find in the bible a “test me in this.” There is something essentially backward and pagan about blind faith, something unintelligent in such thinking that runs contrary to a God who seemed intent on establishing a kingdom of reason and justice on Earth. Yeah you read me right, don’t let all this faith mumbo-jumbo fool you. God also said faith without works is dead.

Because if religion without question becomes dogma, then faith without reason become mysticism, a holy witchcraft. We’ve seen this before. Not just in Jim Jones’s Guyana or Waco or the Moonies or Mormon polygamists. We see it also in Jamaican churches that insist on their pastors being a final authority. That nutcase preacher who condemned her congregation for exposing the filmed gang rape of a young girl wasn’t pissed that the rape occurred, but that by taking the case to the authorities, the congregation members challenged her God given authority. I wrote a novel about this, set in the past because I refused to believe that I was telling a contemporary story. Boy was I wrong.

I still consider myself a believer, but I’m not sure if I’m a Christian anymore. One reason for this is that to this day I have never been able to take my mind to church. It always seemed unwelcome in a place that lionized the once illiterate Smith Wigglesworth while ignoring that the man did eventually learn to read and write. The church has the archetype of the holy idiot who takes things on faith, sings choruses for two thirds of the service and pays attention to the sermon only if it condemns everybody else for being sinful and praises him for being saved, sanctified and spirit filled while promising him that while bullshit happens in the night, joy cometh in the morning.

I cannot think of a more satanic existence. As long as religion never engages the mind it never engages reason. The by-products of reason, ethics for instance then become fluid to the point of meaningless. A case in point, some of the kids I counseled could speak in tongues at the drop of a hat. They could also sleep around with no remorse whatsoever. They would drag praise and worship for hours so that the “spirit” is given free reign but tune out once a pastor starts to challenge them. They would condemn everything and every one outside their window but never look at the monster in the mirror. Because open-mindedness, fairness even is an act of reason as well.

A lack of this creates moral hypocrisy. More porn in consumed in Utah than in New York. Adult friend finder.com has 21,000 Jamaican members, even though, as we will sooner or later tell you, we have more churches per square mile than anywhere else in the world. You can always tell when a Christian convention is staying at a hotel, for the adult cable viewership quadruples. A woman I know who sold adult toys and videos when asked said she hadn’t sold a sex video to Jamaicans in years, instead they preferred scat, amputees, S&M and all manner of kink.

Christianity began as a renewing of the mind. That is what made it so liberating and so dangerous. Maybe it is the curse of all movements that they become the very thing that they were supposed to be a reaction against. The crux of the New Testament are letters from Paul that impressed people through reasoning, not dogma, condemnation or cheap spirituality. The first manifestation of Jesus’ uniqueness was him dazzling the Sanhedrin with his intelligence and wit at such a young age. This Jesus and the adult he became flipped the script on dogma with intellect, not by creating new absolutes of his own. And if you don't think the sermon on the mount is a profoundly intellectual discussion then you're reading the wrong bible. I rarely find this intelligence in church and even when I do, I still feel as if I have to set my mind on dim.

What so great about being proud that the Bible is the only big book you’ve ever read? Jesus never even read it. Why do people rejoice when they hear that sister so and so doesn’t have a PhD but a G O D? How come all these evangelical anti-Catholics all praised that orgy of gore and violence called The Passion of the Christ? Why did they use the film to recruit new Christians? I told some church people that I felt like I had seen a snuff film or some really kinky porn with children in the audience. I thought the film was nothing more than the director’s bloodlust passing off as art and it played into the belief that people should still be scared into faith—something that Jesus couldn’t have been more opposed to. I also said that Jesus would have been appalled that anybody would stoop so low as to show his suffering in order to get people to follow him. I think he would have been appalled in the utter refusal to engage the mind as opposed to the heart or in this case, the stomach.

Two of my favourite writers are Jack Miles and Gary Wills. Both are Catholics and both are part of the few who believe that Faith and Reason are by no means mutually exclusive. I read their books like how others take drugs. Both agree that by not trying to explain God, by resorting to “he works in mysterious ways” you reduce his supernatural power to magic and Jesus becomes hocus-pocus. I love the Jesus of the bible. He was actually quite scandalous, fraternizing with whores and tax collectors, cursing trees, praising lowlifes, hanging out with women, staying homeless, remaining single, calling himself the fulfillment of prophecy, educating leaders in the dark, giving over to rash emotions like fury and mirth, sometimes at the drop of a hat. There is simply no way to understand a mind such as his without using your own . That is what I plan to do. I just don’t know if I can do this in the church.

Live TV and Dead Children, Take 2

2006-11-08T20:55:00.000-05:00

I LOVE this. So right after I post my blog about what I think about today's children, along comes a kid to set me straight with this:

I agree that children can be like this, but not all. Some children have the right mind not to do any of those things. You may think this is foolish, since this is coming from a kid, but it's true.

I agree that children want to be a singer or an actor so they don't have to learn anything, because I used to. Now that I am growing up, I want to be a writer, but being a singer or an actor is still in mind. I say this because children can imagine to be what they want to be. After all, we are just kids.

The real world will come to kids soon, just don't judge all kids and say that all kids want to be super stars and that they would do anything to be famous because, like I said before, not all kids are like that.

"The Real world will come to kids soon." It sounds like both a promise and a warning. Perhaps it's both. I have only one question. If kids are reading my blog do I now have to behave myself?

Live TV and Dead Children

2006-11-07T18:47:00.001-05:00

I love kids. Especially today’s kids. They are smarter than we (I mean we old people in our mid 30’s) were at their age. They are more aware, speak more languages, know more people and thanks to the internet they talk to friends all over the world every day, all day. They live on a planet that even my generation passed off as science fiction; cutting room stuff best left for a Blade Runner sequel. This is the exciting world children live in. But they are not children.

Enter Trishelle. I was always fascinated with this Real World cast member and it was not because she was a white trash redneck slut who always seemed to trip and fall smack on top of a penis. More than that, Trishelle and her costars were the first Real World cast to grow up watching Real world; (she was twelve when the show started) probably the first not to remember a world before the show began. There was a price paid for that awareness and you could tell from the very first episode of that season. As soon as the cameras rolled they were performing. Sure everybody faked it on some level from the first season, but this was different. This was Courtney Love’s lyrics come to life—“my fake is so real/ It is beyond fake.” Not only could you see the disingenuousness, but you knew that were you to scratch the fakeness off what you would find was not the real Trishelle, but nothing at all. Since then I’ve run into dozens of kids all waiting for their close up. All wanting fame for fame’s sake. All wise beyond their years, and most of them underdeveloped zombies masquerading as kids.

If you think that fourteen year old girl on the receiving end of R. Kelly’s golden shower didn’t know what she was doing then you don’t know today’s kids. Not that she really knew, but she THOUGHT she knew and that is the problem. These kids are not wise, they are merely precocious and world weary. Adults confuse the two and think they have miniature adults in their midst. They trade in real world terms that they have no maturity to process. I’m not sure a thirteen year old really knows what a being a ho means, nor do I think a 12 year old can truly be a playa. But they think do and adults assume that they do, which could not be further from the truth. Years ago, many were stunned by the film Kids, because here were children that were not children at all. They were young people with a nonchalance about sex, drugs and aids that stunned audiences. But that kid has been threatening to show up for some time now. And maybe it’s the parent’s fault.

Or maybe it was Britney. I remember an article in a mens’s magazine, probably GQ about this man who had his little girl’s friends over for a slumber party. “_______ dances suggestively,” his wife said. The man thought the remark absolutely ludicrous since the girl was not yet seven. Two Britney songs later he was on the phone demanding that somebody remove little slut from of his house. I’m not a prude, but I’m not blind either. These children have watched Britney, Justin and Christina grow up on camera but for all three growing up merely meant getting more and more sexual as if that was the only sign of maturity. Should we have been outraged that the man who ushered Britney into video womanhood was controversial porn director Gregory Dark? Does it mean anything that it was a porn director that shaped the archetype that your nine year old is presently following? I’m all for bringing sexy back but I wonder if Justin has anything else to bring.

We like to congratulate ourselves that we are not in Dickensian times, that children are no longer chattel, dregs or slaves. But they are now the opposite: pandered, patronized and ignored. The ironic end result is a 21st century child not much different from the Victorian: one whose circumstances have forced him to grow up too fast. The first evidence of this is an entitlement complex that would floor a Hilton sister. Some of the kids I’ve met expect to be paid millions even though they are at a loss as to why they should actually work for it. There are children in Jamaica waiting for American Idol or some other reality show, a recreational career that would save them from having to learn to do anything. They are dead set on a music career because being able to sing is beside the point and they want to be in movies not to act but to appear on the MTV special about the movie. They have friends with benefits but may never know young love. They may be smart about the world and know as much as adults, but they have never experienced what being a child is like. And they don’t have a clue.

One Book Meme

2006-10-29T21:15:00.000-05:00

Stolen from Chekov’s mistress who got it from James Marcus. Oscar Wilde said that talent borrows but genius steals. I don’t know about feeling like a genius but I do know a thing or two about feeling like a thief. So here are my answers:

1. One book that changed your life?

I think the best books change your life in ways that maybe you cannot recognise, but others recognise in you and think that it's just growth. With that as a yardstick, X-men becomes as important as The Color Purple. But if I had to pick only one book it would be James Joyce’s Dubliners. The irony is that I’m such a prude that I didn’t realize what was happening in “The Encounter” until I was 31 years old! The very first thing I ever wrote was a story-by-story response to Dubliners. The Sisters became Disintegration (yep also based on The Cure), A Painful Case became Wallpaper Faces and Two Gallants became Two Gentlemen United for Northside. All awful, trust me. But after that I realized that I was never going to whup this writing thingy. Mind you it would be another seven years before I wrote something else.

2. One book that you have read more than once?

My Name is Red, by Orham Pamuk. Possibly the only book influenced by One Hundred Years of Solitude to pose a serious threat to that book’s much deified place in fiction. Yes it is that good, and yes I knew he was going to win the Nobel this year. Joining Red in lit syndication however are Pride and Prejudice, Song of Solomon, One Hundred Years of Solitude and Lolita.

3. One book you would want on a desert island?

A desert island would probably be the perfect place to get into a writer I feel I should know intimately but don’t have a clue about. That would be Philip Roth. So hopefully I would crash land with the new library of congress editions of his books. Given his rep for misanthropy and my future without company, maybe we would be a perfect match

4. One book that made you cry?

Richard Powers's The Time of Our Singing. Call it the anti-Corrections. You root so much for this way-before-their-time interracial family that when they ultimately, inevitably fail, you feel all humanity failed with it. I haven’t been so upset over fictional characters since Bill Sykes scared me for seven years.

5. One book that made you laugh?

Shame, by Salman Rushdie. I didn’t even think I was allowed to laugh with serious literature until this book.

6. One book you wish had been written?
I can't stand memoirs but I would have given anything if one of the four: Mary Shelley, Percy Bycce, Lord Byron and that other woman who I keep forgetting, had written a memoir of that summer they all spent together.

7. One book you wish had never been written?

I could do without Nicholas Sparks and Mitch Alborn, but maybe more Oklahoma kids wouldn't be missing their parents and vice versa had their been no Turner Diaries.

8. One book you are reading currently?

Francine Prose’s Reading like a Writer and Patrick White’s Riders in the Chariot.

9. One book you have been meaning to read?

Oh lord where do I start? Maybe I should just say Ulysses and be done with it. And horrifying as it is to believe, I still haven’t read The Great Gatsby.

10. Pass it on