Chikenfried and Gentrified


I have been ranting and raving about Chango’s Fire for the last two weeks.

It is an imaginative book about gentrification in Harlem.

About burned buildings in the Bronx.

About Dutch, Dominican, Russian and Puerto Rican immigrants.

About what it means to have your home in the hood.

A place that looks like nothing, and you flip it into something, because that is all you have at the moment.

Ernesto is that Dude.

I present to you.

Chango’s Fire.

Spanish Harlem was worthless property in the seventies and early eighties. Many property owners burned their own buildings down and handed the new immigrants a neighborhood filled with hollow walls and vacant lots. Urban Swiss Cheese. The city would then place many of us in the projects creating Latino reservations. These city blocks, full of project buildings on each corner, were built not so much to house us as to corral us. To keep us in one place. We were slowly but surly relocated, as many who owned real estate burned the neighborhood, collected the insurance, sat on the dilapidated property and waited for better days.

Today, the wait is over, Spanish Harlems burned out buildings are gold mines. Many of the same landlords who bruned their tenements are now rebuilding. Empowerment zoning has changed the face of the neighborhood. Chain store rise like monsters from a lake. Gap. Starbucks. Blockbuster Video. Old Navy. Like the new Belin, El Barrio is being rebuilt from the ashes. THe rents are absurdly high, and it breaks my heart, because Spanish Harlem had allways been the springboard. A place where immigrants came to better themselves and, when they had reached the next plateau, they’d leave traces of their culture, a bit of themselves behind, and move on. A melting pot pf past successs stprioes- Dutch, Jews, Irish, Italians.

I know all neighborhoods must change, but if you are Puerto Rican and need to learn where you came from and who you are, you need to start in Spanish Harlem. The spiritual landmarks are still here in El Barrio. Helens people don’t seem to have mystical places like ours. VOLUME PILLS Now that the cialis professional no prescription male sexual health issue and one of the stressful diseases. This medicine by Ajanta Pharmacy has assisted millions of men to take a viagra discount prices sigh of relief. order cialis pills Erectile dysfunction and premature ejaculation can also use the device for strengthening erection. Men with Premature Ejaculation lean to obtain incapability generic for viagra to stoppage ejaculation connected with a deficient of control. They don’t have a sacred Harlem, an East L.L., a South Central. They don’t have a poor holy place that speaks to your soul, vibrant streets that tell you about those that came before you. All they have are small towns that either die or stay the same. Small towns that they don’t care to romanticize. Small towns that they try and kill inside themseleves when they leave for New York City or whereever and never look back.

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1. Spiritual Landmarks. What!?!?!?!!

2. Poor Holy Place. What !?!?!?! Who is this guy and why doesn’t he teach a fiction class at City?

3. Sacred Harlem!?!?!?! What. A neighborhood. Sacred. Who knew?

4. What do you all think of the excerpts. Are they over the top. Too politcal. Not politcal enough.

I find them timely and endearing.
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The Economic Effects of Crack

Their care may involve more visits to the doctor, require try over here commander levitra medication or therapy, and surgery. Injections: Phentolamine, papaverine and Alprostadil, if injected into the sexual organ and causes cialis 20mg click here for info an erection. This as needs be makes the penis 25mg barato viagra unwind progressively and henceforth the circulation system inspire space to increment , at long last prompting an erection . Make sure that you find out the right dose from the doctor when you consult tadalafil without prescription http://frankkrauseautomotive.com/cars-for-sale/2012-honda-accord-ex/ the doctor. So I have been thinking of moving toward taking about the economic effects of issues that we discuss here on mm. So I bring you, the economic effects of crack. We often do the moral. But rarely do we do the economic. I find that the economic anlysis provides a more nuanced view of an issue.

1. More county/state money devoted special ed in schools. You know babies born addicted to crack have crazy learning disabilites. The more kids w/ ld’s in your district, the more $$ you gotta spend educating them.

2. No tax base in the hood, which results in poorly funded schools. School finance is tied to a districts tax base. D-boys don’t pay taxes. If they ain’t paying taxes, then the schools are getting less revenue. The less revenue they get the worse shape they will be in.

3. The county has to divert city funds to treating crack related crimes. For example, take Drive by victims. D-boys don’t have health insurance. So. They get shot. They get taken to Highland or SF General or Harlem Hospital. Who pays. Tax payers. (I think I just sounded like a libertarian. Wierd. I hope this is not evolving into a legalize crack post…ohhhhweee, I just got the chills. What a weird idea).

4. Crackalicious neighborhoods tend to have depressed property value. However, this does not necessarily have to be true. As you can buy a $400K victorian in West Oakland, and STILL have d-boys on the corner. But the Bay is a housing anomoly. So lets just go with the rest of the nation and conclude that having crack sold in your neighborhood depreciates your properties value, which affects your families wealth and serves as a disincentive to buy in THAT neighborhood.

5. Crack time provided micro finance – seed money for various independent Hip Hop labels. They all know who they are.

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Wow. Writing that post was a tad bit depressing. But it is what it is, right!!?!?!?! I feel like I am missing one of the affects. Perhaps it will come to me later. I know yall know.

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The Gumbo Post…..


Even though they outta stock.
These is hella fresh.
Talk about affirming something positive.

From 10 deep mens T’s.

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Here at Model Minority, we go from hood books to super woman stamps and round it out w/ photos of Evander Old @ss Holyfield, who in fact won last night. We can’t be serious all time. Enjoy the post!

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Get ’em here!

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You best- protect your- er- head.

Police: Neighbor’s severed head in suspect’s car

Long Island man arrested in killing, dismembering of retired teacher.

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Don’t talk about it be about it.
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Juan Williams need to sit down. He act like the don e’ drank somma that Reublicrat Kool-aid.

Is Bill Cosby Right?

Help thyself, a black social critic says to the upcoming generations.

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I hope they were wearing deodorant.

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Help kitty or get bucked.

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Bay Area Young Bucks Be Buckin’
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Police say man was shot to death for intervening in attack.

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Ignorance of the day.

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Look at these other stamps.
I know. I am a nerd.

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This is like a b-girl’s dream charm by Rocksmith.

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It started raining again.

Which is cool.

I bought 4 elephant ear plants at the farmers market today.

I am working on an OutKast post.

It was going to be mean in tone, but now I am rethinking it based on
an article in the Times. BL is doing the lemonade fast.

I am watching from a far, jealous of his will power.

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Zora Neal Hurston Had a Fight with Urban Fiction and Lost.


Hood Lit 101.
We have all seen them.

“Around the Way Girl 2.”

“Homo Thug.”

“Let That Be the Reason”.
Its Hood Lit. Urban Fiction. Hip Hop Fiction.
You see folks reading them on the train. Ladies takin’ they slow @ss time going up the stairs at 14th street because they are engrossed in chapter 5.

I have seen teenage girls, sharing a SINGLE book between the two of them, one flap on each of their laps, on the train ride to school.

Mean Sexy says people love ’em because of the marketing.

Which is partially true.

The cover images certainly do provoke a reaction.

I think it that it is the marketing and the accesibility of the language.
Kids like racy, sexual, street based fiction.
On top of that, kids have allways wanted to read and do sh*t that there parents did not approve of.

Urban fiction is racy and allows for teens to be quasi defiant.

When it comes to Their Eyes Were Watching God, and Be True to the Game, I don’t think we have to choose.

There is room for Urban Fiction and the Black Cannon. For Nikki Turner and Walter Dean Myers.

A View From Inside the Publishing I
ndustry
The hood writers and the black cannon need to come toge
ther to see what they can learn from one another.


Malaika Adero, and editor at Atria says that the canon needs to up their grizzle,

But literary writers often invest less of their time and resources in learning how to promote their work, expand on and respond to the desires of their prospective readers, and associate themselves with all kinds of other writers and artists?not just the ones who teach at the right universities and have the enviable contracts with major houses. Commercial writers model for the artsy set new ways to cultivate and expand their audience, and fashion themselves into better business people.

She says that the urban writers need to get them writing workshops going,

On the other hand, so many of the commercially successful authors?once self- or small-published?are amateur writers, albeit with great storytelling and entrepreneurial instincts, and tremendous drive. They could learn from the example of their colleagues who study with and expose themselves to the criticism of their peers and academics; who discipline and challenge themselves to be more creative, rigorous and ambitious in the practice of their craft.

How I Feel About Hood Lit
As for my own personal taste.

I can’t get into most of them. And trust me I try. Not because the stories are bad. The writing bother’s me.

Most of the folks writing the books have great imaginations and can weave a good story.

But the language is like walking barefoot on broken glass, in Howard Beach at night, in the middle of July. All bad.

Many of the writers need a writing workshop. Period. Point. Stop.

Peep what Nick Chiles had to say,

That leaves me wondering where we – writers, publishers, readers, the black community – go from here. Is street fiction some passing fad, or does it represent our future? It’s depressing that this noble profession, one that I aspired to as a child from the moment I first cracked open James Baldwin and Gabriel Garc?a M?rquez about 30 years ago, has been reduced by the greed of the publishing industry and the ways of the American marketplace to a tasteless collection of pornography.

Earth to NICK. The same thing that happened in Hip Hop is happening in literature. Why?

Because Random house, Simon and Schuster, like Universal and Island Def Jam are obligated to please their SHAREHOLDERS not Black Readers.

Hate the game, hate the game.

Reading is Fundamental Fam

However, it is important to note that Black pe
ople are reading these books by the truck loads because they find them appealing.

I ain’t mad at that.

Reading is reading is reading.


I hope that the books play a role in inspiring an entire generation of readers and writers of all genres.


Authors are Getting Money
In researching this article I came across this.

While she allready a publish writer, she freaked a p
seudonym, to get that urban lit cash.


Muy interesante.

I remember seeing that book cover earlier last year and thinking that I liked it.
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Jeff, I know you don’t want to hear it, but our Beloved Cody’s books on Telegraph
could have stayed open had it done two thing
s:

a. Expanded its offerings on childrens books.

b. Offered more Hood books.

These two areas are explosive.

Think “Harry Potter”. Think “Lord of the Rings. Think, “True to the Game”. Think. “Diary of a Diva”.

Kids would have been up in that piece.

Yes. They may have needed to hire a security guard, to keep the ruckus down,
but that is just the cost of doing business.

Just like the blaxpoitation era in the 70’s saved Hollywood from bankruptcy, urban books are providing some well needed revenue to the publishing world.

White Folks Writin’ Urban Lit

Even the majority is getting some of that Urban lit Cash.

Peep.
I was on this site, looking for an image of one more book to add to this post. When I came across her.

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Wrote this.


Her profile qualifies as the racist item of the day.

Peep.

Biography

Allison van Diepen is a high school teacher who is often mistaken for a student. She spent three and a half years teaching at one of Brooklyn’s most dangerous public high schools.This is her first novel.

Its mad racist sh*t up in those three sentences.
a. Allison van Diepen is a high school teacher who is often mistaken for a student.

i. Read- she is young, impressionable and vulnerable in her Brooklyn Jungle of a high school.


b.
She spent three and a half years teaching at one of Brooklyn’s most dangerous public high schools.

i. Perpetuating hella stereotypes. Brookyln = Automatically Dangerous, right.

ii. Translation. She has spent 3.5 years observing niggerdom upclose and personal which qualifies her to write a book for teenagers about a teenage drug dealer. Excellent.

ii. Which I presume lends credibility to her novel. That statement is careless, irresonsible and self-serving.

iii. Even if the statment is true, the purpose of it being there is to give her credibility that she innately does not have.

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Dang. That was a long post. Where erry body @?
*Miss Ahmad. I think you in Hawaii on vacay!?!?!
* J!?!!?!?!!? You moved back and lost yo innanet service?
* Vik. Well vik, you post more than me, so you stay busy.

* Ms. TPW. I got a hunch you in NYC right now.
*sticks out tongue. Runs out room*

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Sometimes I post and I don’t know what to call it so I ramble because rambling is cathartic.


I went to go see this flower at the Brooklyn Botanical Garden on Saturday.

Its was on a fluke but I am glad I did. That sh*t is straight up and down little shop of horrors.

My homie dekka made fun and said, you prolly was the only brown girl there.

I wasn’t. There was some carribean folks there to. A man and his momma were taking pictures with the flower.

But he did have a point.

I’ve allways been weird though:)

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My dad scared the sh*t outta me yesterday.

I was getting some advice from him regarding whether or not I should bring an issue up to BL regarding his family and their dynamics.
Poppi said, “M dot, people don’t like you looking all up in their soul”.

Me- “Whacu mean?”

P- Well. When you start questioning a person and who they are, you are looking all up in their soul. M- Word!?!?!
P- Yes. You have to be careful. Its a gift. Very few people can do it, and even fewer are willing to share what they see with the person. M- Wow. I never thought of it like that. P- Its a powerful thing. Be careful.

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Reading this blog, was the first time I read something written by a dude in the bay and felt like, they were my innernet cousins.

However, Then the more I read. The more trouble I felt.

Because of their loose usage of n*gga as well as the over all content, I needed to know whether they were black or a “tropical people”. I was having a Dave Chappell moment. I think. God, I am getting old:( Some of the post titles are:

  • Wine country got a n*gga finna kill someone for innanet!

  • What You Know Bout Programming Motherfucking Remotes.

  • PS3 Controller: A Niggatorial

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I got tears in my eyes. For trill.

I couldn’t tell if they were just being funny. Or making fun of n*ggas. Anyhoo, I resolved to deal with ambiguity and enjoy it as a guilty pl easure.

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So this is the point in the matrix that we have been waiting to get to.

TESTING DRUGS ON PRISONERS.

Excellent, big Pharm+ Government Cooperation + Tuskegee Syphilis experiment = All Bad for Negroes.

For Leodus Jones, a former prisoner, the report has opened old wounds. ?This moves us back in a very bad direction,? said Mr. Jones,

who participated in the experiments at Holmesburg in 1966 and after his release played a pivotal role in lobbying to get the regulations passed.

In one experiment, Mr. Jones?s skin changed color, and he developed rashes on his back and legs where he said lotions had been tested.

?The doctors told me at the time that something was seriously wrong,? said Mr. Jones, who added that he had never signed a consent form. He reached a $40,000 settlement in 1986 with the City of Philadelphia after he sued.

?I never had these rashes before,? he said, ?but I?ve had them ever since.?

The Institute of Medicine report was initiated in 2004 when the Health and Human Services Department asked the institute to look into the issue. The report said prisoners should be allowed to take part in federally financed clinical trials so long as the trials were in the later and less dangerous phase of Food and Drug Administration approval. It also recommended that at least half the subjects in such trials be nonprisoners, making it more difficult to test products that might scare off volunteers.

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Clarett Update.

They had him in the Times this weekend.

  • Apparently, he had most of his worldly posessions in his car with him that night.

  • He may be under stress because of money he borrowed from cats when he thought he was gonna make it on the Bronco’s.
  • His daughter was born, premature on July 17th, 2006.

  • He e-mailed a writer from ESPN, two hours before he was arrested. Here is the account:

  • About two hours before he was arrested early Wednesday, Clarett phoned Tom Friend, a senior writer for ESPN the Magazine who has written extensively about Clarett. Hoague, the lawyer, was also patched into the call, and described Clarett as saying, ?I?m getting my life together,? that the birth of his daughter had humbled him and that she ?means everything to me.?

Yet Clarett also seemed melancholy and ?possibly drunk,? Friend wrote on ESPN.com. Clarett said he would do anything for his daughter, even that ?he?d go to jail for 30 years for this little girl.?

Wistfully, Clarett said of his life, ?I have done nothing but run a football.? And: ?I?m a young man going through stress. I?m a person who was scheduled to make millions and didn?t make them.?

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That was certainly a mixed bag post. Summer ’06 is a wrap fam. I know you enjoyed it. If this weather keeps up, I may just stay happy forever. Oh. I am working on a fashion blog. I got a concept. But I can’t decide on a name. It’s so annoying:( _______________________
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