Nation

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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But Ugly (& Durham at the Bar)

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And so Paul Pelosi is attacked by a hammer-wielding right-winger looking for Nancy.

The governor of Virginia “jokes” about it. “Speaker Pelosi’s husband, they had a break-in last night in their house and he was assaulted. There’s no room for violence anywhere, but… ”

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The War on Drugs: The Early Years

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(Based upon actual events,)

In the spring of 1964, even a BrandX University senior as hip as me, who had been one of six students not to walk out on Cecil Taylor’s first set in Grubb Hall, did not know anyone who smoked marijuana. So it was a shock when several undergraduates, – primarily Fine and Theater Arts majors, to be sure – were swept up in raids which extended to Cambridge.

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Venturing Forth

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Fantasy #1

Maskless. Finally. Now I look like everyone else on the street, because only old people wear masks around here. Lunch with friends I haven’t seen since the day the earth stood still. They’ve aged—but not me. The cautions and coverings haven’t changed my face at all. Like Broadway, I’m back.

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Aftermath

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A few years back Lucian Truscott tried on a writer’s experiment, posting chapters (as he composed them) from his non-fiction novel/memoir, Dying of a Broken Heart, at a word press website (here). Your editor was doing due delving since I’d always enjoyed Truscott’s stuff when I bumped into the following piece of felt history in Heart‘s second chapter. I should probably wait for some Iraq War anniversary but reposting Truscott’s memory of “Mission Accomplished” boosterism feels urgent. I’ll allow his report seems like it belongs in First as a warning to be permanently wary of consensual wisdom. Not that I’ll cop to having been a lap-top general around the time of W.’s wargasm. Still, to the extent First countenanced power of powers-that-be back then – even as this mag busted anti-anti-Islamism – me and all y’all need to suck on Truscott’s truths (all over again). He won’t stop saying it plain, btw. After you read him below, try his substack newsletter here. B.D.

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Having a Ball on Tiemann Place (the Tom DeMott Way)

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Pallie Greene – the kid from our hood who dunked at our block party (above) – began playing ball late just like my late brother Tom, who didn’t get into the game until Jr. High school. Might be a life-changer for Pallie though. It sure made a difference to Tom. When I think about how he came to make his life on Tiemann Place (as he worked at the 125th St. Post Office), aesthetics and politics of b-ball – along with people’s soul musics – are keys to his story.  Tom was out there with Pallie – a spirit, not a ghost! – as our hood re-upped on the tradition he invented (with the West Harlem Coalition). The 34th Annual Anti-Gentrification Street Fair jumped off on a proud Saturday in September.

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Arlo in Memphis (& Brooklyn)

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Arlo McKinley (AKA Timothy Dairl Carr) made his great new CD, This Mess We’re In, in Memphis and you sense the lights up the river even as he gives it to you straight about the state of the white working class in Ohiopioid. The sound of This Mess is Memphis’s. Perfect weaves of country/soul/gospel with an inner power. Organ-and-fiddle melting into one another with the beat behind it as Arlo rolls on, strong as death, sweet as love.

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One Eyed Monsters (An Excerpt from “The Ledger and the Chain”)

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Per Timothy Tyson (in his review above): “Martha Sweart, Martha Sweart, I will never forget her.” Neither will you if you read the following excerpt from Joshua D. Rothman’s The Ledger and the Chain: How Domestic Slave Traders Shaped America. 

A purchasing agent working for Rice Ballard passed through the central Virginia town of Charlottesville and bought sixteen-year-old Martha Sweart for $350. That was between $50 and $100 more than slave traders were typically spending for young women early in 1832, but Ballard’s agent believed a buyer in the lower South might pay a premium for her.

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Trumping a Country of Laws

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It is estimated that 15 to 20 million Americans think violence would be justified to return Trump to office.

Set aside for the moment that anybody, let alone 20 million anybodies, is willing to commit violence, go to jail, die, for that guy. That is something most of us will never understand. Folks going to the mattresses for the most self-centered guy on the planet.

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For Uncle Claude: Clarksdale to the World

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My mother’s maiden name was Claudette Winfield. Her twin brother was named Claude Winfield. She left home for college to attend Jackson State University and met a young man named Claude McInnis who was named after his uncle Claude Brown. That’s a whole lotta damn Claudes, which is why my Pops never intended for me to be a junior. My mother’s twin was her best friend until the day she died. As siblings, they argued and disagreed often. As siblings, no one else could say anything bad about the other one. So, when I learned Wednesday that my mother’s twin, my Uncle Claude, had passed, I realized that is the end of the Claudes. But, more importantly, that is the end of one of the most important people in my life.

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

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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.

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