1. Being Black. We are just so damn beautiful, unruly, passionate, and strong. I look in the mirror everyday and thank the universe for melanin.
2. M.I.A.'s new album Kala. Flawed, messy, but still more interesting than 90% of what passes for music. Paper Planes is the standout cut.
3. Hereoes Season 1 on DVD. The show is dope--but is it just me, or didn't they allow Nikki and Dl to kiss? Mohinder and that lightweight Betty Boop looking white girl kissed, but no salt and pepper loving.
4. Celebrity meltdowns. Maybe every overrated star will pull a successful Owen Wilson and get back to the business of making art. I don't give two shits about "celebrity's" personal lives. Entertain me, cotdammit!
5. The impending marriage of Black Canary and Green Arrow. Call me sentimental.
6. Live action role-playing games (LARPS). I met this brother who was kind of square by day, but turned into this fierce Kemetic vampire at night. More on him in a later post.
7. Love. I'm in love and the shit is so dope.
8. International Travel. The idea of nation-states is about as outdated as What's Happening. We live in a global city--let's hack that mutha!
9. Writing. I've found my spark again. It's not so much about inspiration as it is about just doing the damn thing. Don't talk about it, be about it.
10. Chocolate. It is just so damn good. I've been contacted to do some reviews of local chocolates. I'm getting free chocolate and I'm getting paid to write about it. The world is such a beautiful place.
The internets is a funny thing-Black Emo Part Deux
Ok, so last year, June to be exact, I made one of my oh so famous rant post (totally orphaned by the spell check I'm realizing) decrying the absence of Black Emo. I wanted to know where it was. I quote (myself) "I’m asking about a cultural space of black emoticons that don’t worry about being savvy."
Here's the line to the original post. Man I swear that post has generated more consistent comments than anything else n this damn blog. And more confusion for me as well. It's like some people knew where I was coming from and other black kids just got straight defensive. So just to make myself clear: I think Black Emo is the cutest little thing in the world. I want to kiss and hug all the little black emo kids and tell them to whine and cry their little hearts out. Emote all your passions until there's nothing left but the spent drained viscous fluid that was your soul left in your malnourished frail frames. Do you! Because in doing you, you extricate the 21st century Negro from the frame of "authenticity", you liberate the descendants of African slaves from the chains of "Keeping it real", you promote po-mo afro negro counter-"hood" hegemony. So dance your depressive dance of mourning for all those souls not yet dead,. Fling your emaciated tatto covered frames upon the altar of designer pharmaceuticals and discount clothing. Bow to the deities of disinterest and delirium. And know that this afrogeek affirms your right to not only exist, but thrive... as much as your kind tends to do.
What's up, A-Geeks? I hope all is well. I kow that my postings have been a bit sporadic, but I have been trying to complete a few differnt projects as well as working on a sci-fi, afrocentric puppert show--it's going to be nuts.
But enough of the excuses. If you are in the Bay. come check out the 331/3 reading at Pegasus Books, in downtown Berkely.
Mention that you read AfroGeeks and get a special surprise.
Hope to see you there.
Peace,
Shawn
33 & 1/3 reading
Sunday, August 19th, 7:30 pm 33 1/3 is a series of books written about important and/or seminal music albums. Reading from their books will be Kate Schatz, author of Rid of Me, Douglas Wolk, author of James Brown Live at the Apollo, and Shawn Taylor, author of People's Instinctive Travels and Paths of Rhythm. Join us for this dynamic event. Pegasus Books Downtown, 2349 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley, (510) 649-1320.
I'm just saying, imagine if we fought for all of our youngsters this hard, negritos? What would happen if we stop saying things like "He made 16" like it wasn't supposed to happen. That's all I'm saying. I'm in Oakland, where eight african-american males were killed this past weekend. It's easy to blame the youth, but I wonder sometimes, if we all grew up under the protection of momma Water buffalo.
Man, I just watched Pathfinder, aka Indians versus Vikings. Why, you may ask? Because I am a connoisseur of the craptastic. Man, I would hate to be a movie or T.V. Indian. I mean they can’t do shit without some white dude who thinks he’s like them. I’m not really sure why they made this movie, wasn’t last of the Mohicans enough? Here you’ve got these Indians living in these lands for generation upon generation in synch wit the land and everything in sets look like they were designed by the Elfquest people. Then all of a sudden hairy biker dudes with fat bellies and thick ass flavor savor beards come barreling thorough and the Indians are like “Nob! What are we going to do Brain?” Only instead of Brain, they got some pale faced skinny white boy who was left behind from the last visit from the Hell’s angels, I mean Vikings. Naturally the kid saves the day. In the end its some very thinly veiled “white worship/mixed raced folks are so cool” hot propaganda mess. I was hoping for some serious violence but all I got was that damn digital blood shit. Hollywood and independent film makers, enough with the digital blood ok? I like the “squees’ filled with real blood packets. The digital splash shows you’ve got more money than talent. Hire a good sfx person and stop leaning on the digital monkey boy back at the labs.
Ok, so after Pathfinder, to avoid doing work I read Scalped. I been trying to mess with the individual issues, but I knew it was a white cat writing it and I have problems with Caucasoids writing primarily non Caucasoid characters. But I decided to put my initial bias aside for the sake of a potentially good book., besides I used to read Scout It’s a really good book! The problem with the book is not that its written by a white dude, that’s just funny. No the problem is that it doesn’t need to have Indians in it. The thing reads more like a Western than anything else, a dirty, shit kicking, fuck ya in the eye type Western. And its good for that, so I’ll probably keep reading it, but damn, I’m so happy I’m not an Indian.
I am the child of field negroes. I say this with little pride. Not because of anything those people did; they survived off of the left over scrapes of grub and built half of this country. They chopped wood and carried water not to find their spiritual centers but to avoid the bite of the whip. What little respite from their labors were found in joyful communion with each other. Still, I am not proud to be the child of field negroes, because I ma left with their legacy. I worked as a field negro almost a decade ago. There was no whip, no dogs on me if I ran, but I labored in the fields from dawn to dusk thirty planting, hoeing, weeding, and picking. I threw 40lb bails of alfalfa,, straw, and hay twice a day every day, because hungry animals don’t know its Sunday, as my old boss used to say. I shoed animals and milked them. I shaved sheep and castrated piglets (keeps their weight down, so you can hold on to them long enough to sell them). Yes, my friends, before I was an Afrogeek, I was a Nature Negro. They called it an internship so they could pay me $80 a month. I lived off of beans and rice and whatever I could pick from the fields. I read my books, did my writing and cried when my favorite goat died. I weighed 190 lbs and had not an ounce of fat on me. I say once again, I worked as a field negro. Ok, I’m 5 foot 11 inches. At 190 lbs, according to the Body mass index I was overweight. Now while that work as a field negro was hard it also had the benefit of sculpting my body. Along with my “no fat cause I got no money” diet I can honestly say that I was in the best shape of my life. I ran up mountains, man! Mountains! With backpacks on. But according to the health council of America, or whoever came up with the BMI, I was overweight. Last month I went to the doctor for something totally unrelated and I was told I have high cholesterol. I’m thirty one years old. I don’t eat fast food. I’m at the gym at least three times a week. I run four miles every other day, and I have high cholesterol. I am not proud to be the child of field negroes. My people were never allowed anywhere near any kind of Big house. We didn’t get table scraps, we got the scraps of the table scraps. If you see my cousins, you’d understand. Not one of them is under 6’2. All of them are big people. Not necessarily fat, in my eyes at least, just big black folks. I’m the runt of the litter at 5’11. We have a history of high blood pressure, diabetes, the whole nine. It’d easy to blame diet, and yeah to some extent its true, but there’s also the legacy; The legacy of the slave trade that made it such that those African Americans with high blood pressure were able to survive the months at sea in sub-human conditions, the legacy of sub-standard nutrition that allowed those African slaves who retained all types of cholesterol to be better suited for abuse than those that were accustomed to healthy foods. The legacy of maladaptive bodies. I’ve understood for a long time that African-Americans were not meant to survive in the United states in a socio-political context, but its coming to me now as a embodied concept. I’ve always laughed at the notion of reparations. America’s not giving shit up and black people need to do for self, case closed. But in my dreamy sci-fi mind, I imagine a world where a people are killed, bred, and fed to need corporate only chemicals to keep them alive. In this dream, the chemical in the form of the whitest pill on the planet is called reparations. Then I wake up and find a doctor telling me to take a pill for the rest of my life that will lower my cholesterol. I’m just saying, is this the world we really live in? Is this the racially harmonized future the positivist preach about? Understand that this is not distress, this is confusion.
So I am not proud to be the descendant of field negroes. I am not embarrassed by them, nor ashamed. But I cannot be proud. It’s an ambiguous place to be at, but I believe that ambiguity to be the most genuine state of truly aware African-Americans today.
Imagine if we could harness this power for something good?
We got criminals in other countries doing our dances from like twenty years ago. Can you imagine the state of black america if we were strategic about our influence? And the tranny criminal playing the girl is killing me with the eye movements.
Jesus christ had dreads...and so did I. But that's another story. Big story, maybe not story but just something that makes me proud to embrace my negritude with both arms, the boondocks are coming back! Hear that haters? Fuck your rumors, fuck your bullshit lies about how Aaron mcgruder had gone the way of Dave Chappelle, who is not crazy either by the way( Just cause a black man gives up some money you all think he's smoking crack and getting therapy in South Africa). I love the boondocks. Shit it's the reason I can't get behind the no "nigger" movement. Some people need to be called niggers. Not white people, not asian people, just some ignant ass negroes with no common sense. It should be said not in a loving way, not in a proud way, but in a "Have you lost what precious little sense god gave you?" type way. And that's what Boondocks gives, along with biting social commentary, hilarious characters, and the cutest little Riley on the planet. I still laugh when I think of him chasing santa claus with a paint gun screaming "Pay what you owe, Santa!" That's a sentiment that strikes at the heart of every ghetto kid on the planet! One caveat to my joy, as a recent detractor from the uni-mind that is cable, I'm hoping those cartoon Network cats have the common sense to put the shows on Itunes on the regular. I'm just saying, some cats can disguise their Ip addresses and be downloading stuff with impunity. Not that I'm such an individual. I find such people reprehensible...Who the hell am I lying to, HACK THE MOTHER FUCKING PLANET, BBEYYYTTCCHEESSS!
