Various Authors

“You’ve Got to Have Freedom” (Pharoah Sanders, Rest in Power)

by

Per Eric Lott: “A favorite instance of what Baraka describes in ‘The Screamers’ (1967), a ‘social tract of love,’ ‘the honked note that would be his personal evaluation of the world,’ watching us while he fixed his sky, no head and all head, no predicate, ‘the repeated rhythmic figure, a screamed riff, pushed in its insistence past music . . . hatred and frustration, secrecy and despair,’ spurting ‘out of the diphthong culture, and reinforced the black cults of emotion’ — ‘no compromise, no dreary sophistication, only the elegance of something that is too ugly to be described, and is diluted only at the agent’s peril.'”

May Pharoah wail again soon with John Hicks and Idris M. on the night shift!! B.D.

Before the War [& After Friday’s Murderous Assault on Rushdie]

by

In the spring of 2006, when Ellen Willis was battling the cancer that would take her life later that year, she emailed approval of  First’s pieces on the Danish Cartoon terror attacks. Struck by how much those pieces “echoed themes” in what she’d written at the start of the Rushdie affair, she wondered if we “might be interested in reprinting the editorial I wrote in the Voice as a historical affirmation of the bad road we are going down…” As Rushdie begins a tortuous comeback from the maiming that had him on a ventilator and seems likely to leave him blind in one eye, the piece of the past Ellen thought belonged in First remains horrifically prophetic.

Below “Before the War” is a passage from another First protest against Fatwas that’s still on time.

Read more

Democracy and Education (Bill Russell on Film)

by

Despite the stiff narrator (Liev Schreiber) and stock footage from the 60s, Bill Russell: My Life, My Way is mind-full. You might start around 10:30 with Russell’s nicely calibrated recollection of how he felt when another (white) center was chosen as the best player in Northern California after Russell’s USF college team had won 28 of 29 games and a national championship.

Read more

Mama Prestinary R.I.P.

by

My late brother Tom’s second mother (in law) died on Monday in D.R. Teresa Prestinary, of Monte Cristi and New York City, made 105. She had five children of her own but she raised plenty more on both islands. Per her grandson Jamie who told me that on vacays in D.R. he ran into hombre after hombre who thought of her as his own matriarch. I lived up the block from Mama Pres (when she was in New York rather than D.R.) and was often underfoot in her apartment or at my brother’s and sister (in law) Maria’s place across the street. In all that time I never heard Mama Pres say a cross word to anyone ever.  The last of 20 children she seems to have been treated as a late gift from God by her family in D.R. So she grew up to grace everyone she met. She had a special connection with my wife (who is the first of 20 children).  I can see them now shucking corn on my parents’ porch in the Berkshires, taking the breeze, and laughing together. Maybe they were talking about the odd DeMott fam they’d somehow got mixed up with. Or maybe they were recalling rites they’d performed to ward off witchcraft by Santerian drug-dealers who’d made my wife’s life hell when she opened a $10 clothing store on 140th and Bway back in the ’00s. (The two of them had tested my two year old son’s pee to see if it had prophylactic powers after my wife found chicken blood spattered on her store’s door.)

Read more

P.A. Way Gone

by

A good friend lost his brother this week. They grew up in P.A. If only they could still go local together and hear Kurt Vile’s latest. While the video may be too twee even if my buddy wasn’t grieving hard right now, I’m hoping he might find some peace in Vile’s piece someday (soonish)…

Read more

Yesterday at the NRA Convention

by

When Beto invokes Alithia Ramirez above, his repetition of the phrase “gifted and talented” seems slightly class-bound, yet his attentiveness to the murdered girl’s picture-making and the familial scene where he took in her images is deeply humane. As is his readiness to talk to those on the other side of the debate about gun laws.  Quash noise from ideologues who lack Beto’s feel for the American people’s fluidity. Don’t conflate his democratic temper with a sell-out’s disposition. Beto aims to work with and for us. His purer-than-thou critics are dancing with the Donald…

Read more

Mobile Soul

by

Jordan Poole is impossibly fast on the court where his athleticism goes with a sweet touch (he’s the best free throw shooter in the world), genius passes, and stop-start gambits as flashy as his eye-moves above.

Read more

Blade

by

Hunter Harris and the rest of us who laugh along with her may need help at the Pearly Gates. Until then, though, bless Ms. H. for failures to forbear such as the following…

Normalize Being Hot And Not A Poet

Kacey Musgraves’ boyfriend, Cole Schafer, is a poet (derogatory). The poetry is not what I would describe as “good.” He appears to be releasing more of it:

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Cole Schafer (@cole_schafer)

Hoping this is a promise!

Bad Actors

by

Hunter Harris notes there’s something “sexy” about not having a take on the Oscars’ slap heard round the world. (Though she goes into the gory in her gossip column.) FWIW, C. Liegh McInnes, who’s often posted in these pages, had the best analysis of what went down: “Public buffoonery is embarrassing, especially when the buffoon makes a mess at a place where, just a few years ago, folks were begging to be invited.” He was firmly in Camp Rock, pointing out how Smith’s act will make him a “respected person, a real n-word” among the benighted in black communities.

Smith wasn’t the only bad actor on parade that night in L.A. per this report from In These Times:

Read more