2008 June

M.Dot Presents: Fly Analyticals, The Podcast

June 4, 2008 by Renina

Click on the above text to open the podcast.

Why didn’t you all tell me that I would need to find
a webhost for the podcast?

Arrrg. I just had to give myself a tutorial on
converting wav’s to mp3’s.

I wasn’t going to publish it, then I heard Tiggalo’s
and was like wait, I gotta do it.

His is all crispy, mine is all gutter and am sounding.

Yet, and still I like it. My rationale is that there is always
room for improvement in life.

Now I just need to figure out how to get my itunes ping
going and I will be cooking with fish grease.

I think in the next one, I will actually address some
of the things he mentioned in his cast.

I look forward to your feedback.
I feel vulnerable.

And thats AG.

I Been Around the Web & Aye, yai, yai

June 4, 2008 by Renina

The first thing on the menu today is a video on the
Un-Told Story of Oakland’s Music Game.

“Im from the East, the hunned black”~ Richie Rich

Richie Rich is very clear about the distinction from being
from The Bay versus from East Oakland. I shrank a little when he
said, unequivocally its all good with me “because they glorifying
that hood sh-t”.

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City Parks Foundation Announces Summer Schedule.

CityParks Concerts include Hip-Hop Hall of Fame inductees, Whodini, performing in their hometown of Brooklyn, as well as KRS-1, Big Daddy Kane, Slick Rick, Naughty By Nature, Jungle Brothers, Bahamadia and Brand Nubians performing at various locations across the city. For those who enjoy the sounds of smooth soul, CityParks Concerts includes The Chi-Lites and Delfonics performing in Queens, Staten Island and Manhattan parks. The season would not be complete without some tropical sounds to dance to, and we are proud to present salsa icon Willie Colon as well as Michael Stuart in this summer?s line-up.

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Weiss has written a rather thorough analysis of both the importance of the
cohesive mix tape and why offers why Wale may be added to the cannon
of the 50 top emcees.

From ?The Opening Title Sequence,? where Wale flows over the gurgling Seinfeld bass line, to ?The End Credits,? Wale?s songs burst with ideas. The guy?s got an opinion on everything from the myriad problems facing the rap world to the press to illegal downloading, to the DMV and how its possible that Eddie Murphy could get a wife, ex-wife and baby mother all in the same year. Whereas it could easily come off as sub-emo whining, Wale succeeds because of his ability to reconcile contradictions.

Despite repeatedly boasting that the tape is about ?nothing,? like Seinfeld itself, Wale?s intentions are subtly subversive and filled with self-deprecating satire. Songs like the erstwhile ?Nike Boots,? are now re-titled ?The Cliched Lil Wayne Feature.? ?Back in the Go-Go? has morphed into the ?The Feature Heavy Song.? Whereas 100 Miles & Running marked the emergence of Wale, the rapper, a complex, lyrical dude who could kill a Camp Lo beat then run in place to ?D.A.N.C.E;? The Mixtape About Nothing heralds the triumph of Wale, the artist, an off-kilter but cool MC with an encyclopedic knowledge of pop culture flotsam and jetsam, ranging from Seinfeld minutiae, to riffs on Narml from Garfield and the Game Genie.

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WARNING. Some are INCREDIBLY graphic.
I came across a series of photos on “Old New York” from
the book American Pictures, by Jacob Holdt. Bankrupt,
crime riddled, graffiti beautiful New York. Not only does
Jacob have the eye of a historian, he also has the heart of a poet.
The book is no longer in print. However you can buy an
online version. Support this man.

This funeral home next to a drug rehabilitation center illustrates clearly the unremitting choice you have in Harlem – the choice between an instant death or an enslaved life under The Man. Thousands of addicts choose the door on the left.

Since the penalty for being an addict and the criminal existence it leads to – or in other words a victim – is the same as for being a murderer, they have no real choice.

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Birkhold has written has written an interesting about Father Pfleger.
Pfleger is the radical white Priest who criticized Hillary at Obama’s
old church a couple of weekends ago.

Just a week ago I had never heard of Father Michael Pfleger. Today, a week after he said Hillary Clinton’s televised tears were a symptom of the way white entitlement works, he’s a household name. Pfleger has been a well-known activist in Chicago’s black community because he’s led and participated in several community struggles for better gun laws and stricter liquor advertising laws. To the rest of the country, Pfleger is the crazy white friend of Jeremiah Wright and Louis Farrakhan.

In 2007, Pfleger told The Chicago Tribune that Martin Luther King provided “the greatest and best blueprint for ministry,” and that King inspired him to become a priest because he saw that religion had transformative power. While in seminary school, Pfleger lived and worked in the same West Side of Chicago parish that the Black Panther Party used for meeting space. He has butted heads with the Chicago archdiocese since his seminary days and is admired by other Chicago ministers for putting his commitment to the gospel before his career.

Like King, Pfleger is committed to taking the gospel seriously. Consequently, his statement about Clinton doesn’t surprise me. Malcolm X attributed the lack of racial arrogance he found among white Muslims to their belief in Allah while W.E.B. Du Bois attributed John Brown’s willingness to die for black freedom to a passion for Hebrew religion.

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Ta-Nehisi wrote recently wrote about Obama’s blackness.
There is really nothing like reading a writer who has given
thoughtful consideration to issues that you think about all
the time. That is how I felt while reading T’s piece. He writes,

To say that Barack Obama is our first serious black presidential candidate drastically understates the matter. When Obama greets his political allies, he does not give a simple, firm, businesslike handshake. Instead he offers the sort of dap–a little English in the wrist and a one-armed hug–that black males spend much of their adolescence perfecting.

While we’re at it, forget the man himself: the clearest evidence of Obama’s blackness is his utter invisibility as a black man to the thinking class. The idea that took root as soon as Obama hit the national stage was that the junior senator from Illinois was not really black because he was raised in Hawaii by a white mother and does not scream about race every five minutes……

Since its conception in the guilt-wracked minds of slave traders, blackness has repeatedly sucked the light from otherwise intelligent folks, rendering them empty, dim vessels in its presence. But pundits did not simply stop at noting Obama’s lack of soul; they went on to charge that their measure was somehow universal, that their pronouncements could be trusted as the Doppler radar of electoral breezes and gusts in the black community.

I like the idea of a Black Doppler Radar. I WANT TO BE
the Black Doppler Radar.

In fact, the notion that Barack Obama would be banished because of his ancestry is the sort of unlettered theorizing that presumes black people are just a mirror image of whites. But unlike white Americans, blacks have centuries of experience dealing (sometimes not so kindly) with biracial people in their midst. For African-Americans, the blessing of the one-drop rule is blackness as a big tent. Indeed, the first Barack Obama was Frederick Douglass, a biracial slave and autodidact who throttled his slave breaker….

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www.Spotcrime.com

Oakland

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I Like Links.

I Didn’t Want the Police

June 1, 2008 by Renina

Yesterday I was in the train station not feeling too hot.
The outfit was fly, but I just was not in the mood for the
juvenile attention that the outfit seemed to provoke.
As if clothes provoke behavior. These young men all
have home training, whether they choose to use it is
something completely different.

As I stood on the platform, alone, as I just gotten off the
express to get the local a young buck, approximately
17 years old Black male, grazed my book and said
“Why you touch me?”

I responded. “What? You touched me”. Then he walked up on me.
Typically, I would be all for the teaching moment. Or even
challenging him on some “Fall back ock.”

But.

I had had a long day. Mercury is clearly in retrograde, as I
attempted to go to a meeting, but it that was actually on
Friday night, not Saturday morning. Then I went to brunch
and I realized I left my wallet home. The wallet was in another
bag and I failed to transfer it back over. I tried to put together
a little “Welcome back M.dot” get-together for Saturday night,
but I had to cancel it because of conflicts with schedules.

I was bummed out.

So yeah. I had had it and it wasn’t even 2pm yet.

But the day had improved because I got a few books from the library,
one of which was. “Shadowboxing, Black Feminist Representations“
by Joy James, which is what I was reading when the young man
bumped into me. In fact, at the time of the incident, I was reading a
sentence where Angela Y. Davis, was speaking on the need
to eradicate the prison system as it exists today.

So back to the young man. He walked up on me, and
both I paid it mind, but then paid it no mind. I had been
getting harassed all day. Sad to say, but I was partially
desensitized.

He mumbled something, and I did my, “Why are you enraged, whats
the problem?” Looking back at that moment, he was slightly
pacing like a lion.

There was no one else in our area of the platform.

Then it changed. He walked up on me again, and said, cocked his head,
and said “Don’t touch me, I will do something to you.”

My inner M.dot said, word?

Hood training stipulates that, at that moment I needed to have agency.

Run or Knuckle up.

I immediately thought I am over here, by myself, with two bags and
a four books in my hand.

No one else is on this part of the platform.

I turned and ran up the stairs, I looked back. He was following me.

I proceeded to the police station, looked back and he was
still following me.

I walked into the police station. He followed me in.

I didn’t want to do it ya’ll. Right now I am working on a position paper
to address the Preschool to Prison Pipeline and one of the major things
that I am advocating for is for support and intervention for young men
that doesn’t involve the police as the primary method of intervention.

The idea is for the young men to interact with two or three people
before the police gets involved with the notion that once they are
involved in the courts, the dehumanization process has started
and that there is very difficult to recover from that.

So, I walked into the police station and said, this young man
is harassing me.

Get this, as soon as I said that, he started speaking over me
saying that, I was harassing him.

I kid you not.

It was like it was a game for him. Like we were both high schoolers
and going to the prinipals office to tattle.

NYPD is not a game.

The burley white officer says, “One of you’se wait outside”.
I sat down on the bench in the station.

The young man waited outside.

Popo comes over to me asks what happened. He is all business.
Its odd because I am both emotional and rationale.
I hesitate because I can’t believe I am sitting there,
as the words come out, I realize emotionally what just happened
and it f*cks me up a little bit. I am sitting on the bench
and the officer is standing over me, and another Latina
officer, in plain clothes joins him, as an observer. She is quiet.

He first asks me if I know him. I tell him what happened. The
whole time I am thinking, I don’t want to be here, I don’t want
to be talking to him, I just want to go the coffee shop and
work on my blog post and short stories.

The officers asks if I want to him to be held. I am thinking,
“Man, I live over here, I might see this kid again”. But then,
the young man is wild enough and presumably unstable enough
to follow me into a police station, him being held is irrelevant.
Potentially seeing him again is something I have no control over.

I tell the police, that I am just going to remove myself from the situation
and go take a bus on the street. They tell me that they are going to
hold and question him anyways, “Just so that, you know, he can tell his
side” and I think to myself, why did they asked me if thats what their
procedure was in the first place? I got up. Walked out. The young man
walked in. I proceed to the bus stop, noticed Filth called and
called him back.

Ironically, when that crane fell on Thursday, my momma called me to see
if I was okay. I was like “Momma, there is more of a chance of something
happening to me in Oakland than here” as Oakland
had been experiencing a series of BRAZEN daylight robberies
by teenagers. I now eat my words.

I am okay. I am grateful for my intuition, my god given intuition
which told me to have agency when the young man said “he would do
something to me”.

*I checked Mercury’s status while editing this piece.
It’s comforting that I was accurate.