Nation

I wish they would show the pictures of the dead

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This is the news photo used to illustrate the mass killing of five in Texas. AP photo.

Yet another mass killing happened yesterday in Cleveland, Texas, when Francisco Oropeza, age 39, took his AR-15 style semiautomatic rifle and killed five people, including an 8-year-old child, after parents had complained Oropeza was keeping their baby awake at 11 p.m. shooting his rifle in his front yard. There have been more than 160 mass shootings in the U.S. this year, and this is the 19th shooting that killed more than four people, not including the shooter.

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Stormy Weather

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I Love You, Stormy Daniels
(a tanka)

Sweet the cuffs will close
due to a porn star he said
looks like his daughter.

Cops got Capone for taxes,
too. Who’s grabbed by the crotch now?

Wound Up Wrong

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“What do you do?” asks the Russell Brandish/hipster-adman at a deadly L.A. party (full of workmates from a non-union shop). It’s this twit with a top hat’s follow-up question to the antihero of Emily the Criminal—played hard by Aubrey Plaza—who’d deflected his first prompt about her art-life. Emily/Aubrey gives it to him straight: “Credit-card fraud.” No doubt she’d’ve been better off quoting Jesus (the basis for my own once-and-future response to what-do-you-doers?): “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin…” But Aubrey/Emily is no Lilly. (She’s no shrinking Violet either.)

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January 6, 2021

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Someone told me you were seen
running behind that beast you’d bred,
Its hide bristling in flashes ahead,
and you, in the wake of stench,
didn’t mind the slaps of slaver.
Then you saw steps, the police.

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He Could Sing, But He Couldn’t Fly

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We heard about the memo: Legal Aid lawyers had to ask for papers,
a green card, policing what the law called illegal aliens, as if they
had antennae sprouting from their heads and searching the air,
sputtering in tongues from another planet, choking on oxygen.
This would account for their coughing, not the oil tanks empty of oil.

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A Woman of No Rank (Casey Hayden’s Legacy)

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The late Casey Hayden, who died last month, would roll her eyes if she was remembered as a hero of the Civil Rights Movement or an initiator of Second Wave feminism, but truth is truth. Here’s something Casey wrote for First a few years ago. It seems timeless now. No surprise given who wrote it…

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Dr. Hrabowski’s Higher Ed

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Freeman Hrabowski III grew up in Birmingham when it was known as the most segregated city in America, but he realized early he was born free to learn. (“Heaven for me was eating my grandmother’s blueberry pie and doing math problems.”) Hrabowski’s parents and grandparents passed down the idea that education might be an end-in-itself even if black people in the South didn’t have the luxury to conceive of “pure” learning at odds with economism. Hrabowski remains a realist when it comes to schooling. He knows culture don’t butter no bread. So, he’s become the foremost proponent of STEM education for black college students by building a scholarly vehicle for upward mobility—a research university that feels homey to kids in black communities who love learning math as much he did.

Hrabowski retired in 2022 after thirty years as president of the University of Maryland of Baltimore Country (UMBC)—a school with a less than toney pedigree that under his aegis has been the “baccalaureate-origin” institution for hundreds of black Ph.D.’s in natural sciences, math, and engineering. Scores more than have been formed by Ivies—or any other elite, predominantly white institution—in recent decades.

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Action Painting (Redux)

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Originally posted here in 2016.

Micro-aggressions have been on my mind lately. Easy for us white guys to dismiss, but when a cab doesn’t pick us up or someone confuses us with some other white guy they once met at a party, it doesn’t trigger an identification with the victims of 500 years of violence and oppression. We rarely take it personally. The key is identification, not identity, though it arises from identity.

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No Way Up

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CNN headline: “Mike Pence sits alone in a corner of sadness.”

I defy anyone to read that headline and not click on the article. Nice work whoever came up with that.

It was a short article simply reporting on polls that show that, while Republicans are well acquainted with ol’ Mike, they really don’t like him. The moment Mike merely nodded toward reality and truth, he lost any chance of ever being the Republican nominee.

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Cara Mia

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Irene Cara was the first Latina I saw in movies and television that not only looked like my family & friends but was also in my age range. (A pretty peer?  Who could act, sing and dance? The crush was instantaneous.) I well remember going with my younger male cousins to a screening of Aaron Loves Angela in da city. The movie was about the tensions between Black and Latin folk in El Barrio which became exacerbated by the budding romance between Kevin Hooks and Cara. The on screen friction quickly spread to my primarily Black & Latin — what else? — audience with racial insults being hurled back and forth with increasing ferocity throughout the theatre. I quickly informed my cousins that when — not if but when — the shit went down whatever side was winning the fight, that’s the side we’re fighting for until we reached the exit doors.

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Dealing With Dave Chappelle

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Saturday Night Live isn’t having a great season. A largely new cast lineup turned out to be a limp imitation of the golden years, and the ratings have plummeted. If SNL is to survive, it must recover its edginess, and one way of doing that is to prick liberal pieties. No comic has a better aim when it comes to this mission than the host of last week’s show, Dave Chappelle.

In the annals of black transgressive comedy, Chappelle is distinct. His best work is profoundly insightful, in keeping with the masters of this tradition, such as Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy, Chris Rock, and Jerrod Carmichael. What makes Chappelle stand out in this storied company is his sadism.

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“Folk Music” (Amplified)

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Greil Marcus’s new book on Bob Dylan opens with a Dylan quote—“I can see myself in others.”—from a loose press conference with journalists in Rome in 2001. I recall listening to audio of that same rap session on YouTube and noticing another line that’s not at odds with the one that jumped out at Marcus. Dylan responded to a convoluted question with his own humorous query: “Am I an idiot?” he asked. This wasn’t a mid-60s prickly (Neuwirthy?) tease. While Dylan was playing to the crowd and encouraging them to laugh with him, he wasn’t coming hard at his questioner (who seemed to take his soft goof well). What struck me was that Dylan, even though he was only acting as if he was clueless, seemed entirely alive to how it might feel to be hopelessly at sea mentally. After all, he’s known what it was to be an unworldly Midwesterner at a Village party with an older generation of haute-bohos. (“I was hungry and it was your world.”) And that, in turn, puts him a thousand thought-miles away from heads who act like they’ve been tenured since they were ten.

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