I met playwright, hip-hop artist, and performer Idris Goodwin in Chicago in 2002. Our friendship and his finesse as a teacher brought him to teach at the high school I started in the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago.
A prolific artist whose talents have won him a National Endowment for the Arts grant, Goodwin now lives in Iowa City with his wife, a graduate student in the Department of English at University of Iowa, .
Here Goodwin discusses the problem with Black History Month, teaching, performing, and why he loves his mama.
PERSONAL ISH
My mama is the coolest. . . She's the first one on the dance floor.
LA: What do you like to be called?
IG: Do you mean "professionally"? A break beat poet, playwright, hip hop performer, teacher and video artist
LA: Where are you from?
IG: I spent the early part of my youth in Detroit, MI and my adolescent and teen years in a nearby suburb.
LA:Why do you love your mama?
IG: I love my mama because she's both a mentor and a best friend. She's the first one on the dance floor. She cries in church and laughs at all my jokes. My mama is the coolest. My dad is pretty dope as well. Smartest, hardest working guy I know. The second one on the dance floor. I learned to have a diverse breadth of experience from him.
CHI-TOWN POLITICS
At Steppenwolf theater, one of the more prominent companies in Chicago, the only time you'll see black and brown people on stage is when it's an adaptation of some sort of slave narrative or some story that takes place in the early 1900's, down south somewhere. Meanwhile, there are a slew of new works by middle-aged white, mostly male playwrights. It limits the imagination.
LA: You left Chicago a while ago. You lived there for a minute, no? Why did you move to Chi-Town in the first place?
IG: I lived in Chicago from fall '96 to March 2008 - so just under 12 years. Damn! I came to Chicago because I was 18 going on 19 and desperately wanted to be in a thriving urban setting. Though the proximity to the city of Detroit was only about 40 minutes, there wasn't much going on there. God bless it. It's the place where my grandparents migrated and where my parents and uncles and cousins and we were born and where my church family worships. But whenever we would go there to visit family and friends, all I could focus on was the neglect, vacant houses, crumbling neighborhoods. 
I knew I wanted to be in a place where there was some energy and life, a creative environment. I wanted to experience real diversity, ethnically, economically, and culturally. New York and L.A. were a little too intimidating for a suburban kid from Michigan by himself, so I picked Chicago. The catalyst was an arts school in the downtown called Columbia College. I enrolled in their film/video and screenwriting program.
LA: Tell me about Chi. Those of us who have lived there know it's a hard place to live with integrity. The City always seems to be pushing folks to step over people. Did the context of Chi's quid pro quo political system and the way it does "bidness" influence the content of your music and plays? If so, in what ways and through which media?
]]> IG: There's a ton of theater and performance opportunities in Chicago. A lot of storefronts and a major "fringe" scene that the city supports financially. I've received support from the city's Department of Cultural Affairs and arts councils and I've been featured in Chicago publications. However, there is still a struggle when it comes to how the art itself takes shape and who is commonly lauded and supported.There is a certain type of art that is given larger priority than others. Chicago's legacy of patronage and privilege extends to the art world as well. The male, the wealthy, the white that make white art about white issues and white concerns get the big major slots. If you want major support from the City and you're brown, typically what you make must coincide with the goals of its outreach and education programs. For example, all of Chicago's schools are full of brown kids that the white administration can't reach and they think performing arts will reach them. They think that hip hop and spoken word culture is only valid to the kids.
At Steppenwolf theater, one of the more prominent companies in Chicago, the only time you'll see black and brown people on stage is when it's an adaptation of some sort of slave narrative or some story that takes place in the early 1900's, down south somewhere. Meanwhile, there are a slew of new works by middle aged white, mostly male playwrights. It limits the imagination.
One of the reasons I left Chicago is because I found that I had hit a ceiling in terms of my available venues. I was used to working on a low budget in a small space or constrained to the stipulations of an outreach program, so the work had to speak to a particular community. I couldn't just wander the garden and write whatever came to me. I mean, I could have, but the producer in me realizes it's a long term often losing fight to get work produced that doesn't appear to appeal to a mainstream theater-going sensibility, which is predominantly white, middle aged, older, and upper middle class.
ON TEACHING
No matter if I'm at an under-served school in a war zone neighborhood or an affluent school, I notice that teens don't speak up. They sit quiet. They are terrified to think for themselves or declare their feelings.
IG: Apathetic and cynical adults collectively make an apathetic petty society that produces apathetic kids. I'm more frustrated with the school systems and the society that tells kids one thing and then shows them something opposite.
LA: Why is it that every performance poet in Chi and elsewhere in the U.S. works as a teacher at some point in their career? I remember when I first met you, several years ago, you told me that you didn't really like teaching because you didn't like dealing with any "knuckle-heads." For you, knuckle heads could be students or the adults working with them. So, you were teaching because you had to. The writing and performing wasn't bringing in enough income so you were, in large part, forced to work within the context of public schools.
Later, something changed in you. I remember you writing me and telling me that you loved teaching. At that time, you were working with kids at Roberto Clemente High School under a contract with the not-for-profit After School Matters. I remember the tone of your words back then; a significant change had been made and you had found your passion inside the voices of those kids. That's when you wrote "Wake Up Day" which is on your Kings for the Night CD.
[Click title to listen.]Wake up Day.mp3
(for the creative writing crew @ Roberto Clemente High School 2006)
The grind can turn the mind into unused playground
These drab lights can dim yours so in class you put ya facedown
The hands that search ya pockets lookin' for objects that could break crowns
But royalty is in ya bones and blood
not supposed to run from love
you are not strange to us
you are not the dangerous
you are the poorly taught and reared
often and fought and often feared
on the court so loved and cheered
off the court you get the sneers
in the fields and in the cell
behind the bars/ and sentinels
must dispel/ you're so much more
you represent what was was before
and whats to come and what will be
but also how we think and teach
but when we reach our hand to you
take whats in itinfinite/ the energy/
power/ the sentiments
toss the rock to you
now you must run with it
inherited/ we do the messes of previous
cracks in the wall for the slimy and devious
they work for you
so tell em what to do
your community
is not a drug filled zoo
and you are not a victim
or in need of penicillin
you are not some liberal fantasy
for grad students to exhibitThe whole city is a library
A whole gallery
A variety of occupations
Uniforms and salaries
And you got a spine
You can travel through
Colored lines to take you through
Every street and avenuelife is guaranteed to challenge you
Unravel and saddle you
Send you in nervous fits
Folks is gonna wanna battle you
Take control/ distract you
Back you into corners
Turn you to solders
Takin orderssleepin and blind
draggin feet lethargicsuspended in time
saggin
inanimate objectsin dew rags on porches with poison
kids in each arm that you're raisin alone
chasing shiny bobbles to the bottom of the ocean
but the brightest bling is shinin at the top of your dome
IG: I think making a decent living as a writer is a slow process for most people. Even a lot of famous writers you've heard of take teaching positions at colleges and universities because the money is consistent and they get health insurance.
A ton of writers supplement their income between books, plays, etc., by doing the lecture circuit which is a form of education. The life of a writer/performer is that of patience and persistence. To make the work, then submit the work, then get the work published and/or produced; it takes a long time and there is no guarantee that much money will be there for you.
LA: It seems that back in the day, young African American artists like you, particularly those spitting the kinds of lyrical critiques of education, money (or lack of . . .), race, the war against youth in the U.S. would never have been allowed in schools as they are now in such great numbers, especially in a racially and economically segregated city like Chi.
So, I guess what I'm asking is, why has the school, the educational apparatus become the income savior of performance poets, or rather artists over the last decade? Has the quantity of school always been a source of income for artists or did you think something shifted economically and politically in the U.S. to cause this to be the case?
IG: There is a demand for professional creative writers and performers in the schools. Across the country the Old English poetry and plays are still being drilled into kid's heads mostly to no avail. What better than to have a loud hip-hoppin performer come in and help dispel the notion that poetry is old and confusing and doesn't address the issues of the day.
I think also teachers are younger. They are from a cable TV, internet generation. Teachers are aware of the artistic, educational and social value hip hop, spoken word and other subcultures that appeal to youth. However, what they don't realize is that subcultures like hip hop blossom outside of institutional settings and not all kids respond in the same way.
I still see a lot of same problems and detachment. No matter if I'm at an under-served school in a war zone neighborhood or an affluent school, I notice that teens don't speak up. They sit quiet. They are terrified to think for themselves or declare their feelings.
That's a larger issue that won't be solved by a million poems.
There have always been many day-to-day-put-food-on-the-table-jobs for me and other artists to pursue: bartending, waiting tables, administrative work--there's always work at the post office--but teaching, at least teaching creative writing is a good challenge for me as a writer/performer because it's the ultimate performance for an audience that would rather be elsewhere. I find it to be a healthier environment in which to work than a bar or an office, and I feel I can be of real use.
I never thought of myself as the "dreamy artist needing his space and his hard drugs looking to the stars for inspiration" type. I want to be of some real use because I feel that my skill set has value. The best part is that youth aren't youth forever and if you make a strong impression on them at 16 in a high-school where all day they get the same boring stuff, they'll remember you. You might make life long fans.
I think my initial frustration with teaching came from that fact that it's hard. It can be a real challenge, especially in public schools. I used to get frustrated with kids who were less than enthused with the creative arts. But now I realize that's not their fault. That is the fault of the communities they come from.
American society has a strange shallow love hate relationship with the arts. We are some hard core music-buying, TV-watching, big-summer-movie-going people, but yet when a kid says he or she wants to act or write or draw or make movies, parents say, "pick something more sensible." Who do they think makes all the shows and songs and plays and websites and paintings? There is no knowledge or respect for the vast and various artistic fields and strata. Not every artist will be famous and fame doesn't equate to success or quality. The playing field is much wider than most people think.
Apathetic and cynical adults collectively make an apathetic petty society that produces apathetic kids. I'm more frustrated with the school systems and the society that tells kids one thing and then shows them something opposite.
So I feel that my purpose is to try and get kids excited about anything. To care about something so much that they'd be willing to pursue it with passion. I want them to know they don't have to do and be what people around them are or aren't. I just want them to give a shit about something. So much so that they are willing to sweat and bleed and put themselves in potentially embarrassing and challenging situations. I want them to know that good grades and a college degree don't equal a fruitful life. A letter on a paper doesn't equal real knowledge. Real knowledge is work for everyone and everyone gains it differently.
HBO Def Poetry Jam (Season 6, 2007) | "What is They Feedin Our Kids? " (1:44)
LA: There is a poem you performed on HBO's Def Poetry Jam that you actually wrote for T, a student in the school I started in Chi. Remember her? She was about 14 going on to be a gum-smacking, fast-talking, hand-on-hip woman who would always be smarter than those around her--that girl had street smarts and intellectual smarts, remember?
IG: When I was working at City (City as Classroom School) I noticed the food that the kids were buying and bringing in to the school and I began to think about the correlation between poor lifestyles and poor scholastic performance. And so I wrote this poem:
What is They Feedin Our KidsWhat manner of meat
is mechanically separated lipsentrails between pieces of plastic bread
binded by orange luke warm cheeseWhat is they feedin our kids?
Venessa is 15 years old
Venessa is eating red hot cheetoes
at 10 o'clock in the morning
snapping her bright red fingersWhat is they feedin' our kids?
Big white gas station bags
Partially hydrogenated oil
Polluting the coiled intestines
like a scourgeWhat is a funyon?
Drugs hanging like strange fruit
the vending machine
whispering like a drug dealer"Real affordable - 65 cents get your mouth hot"
Martisha forgets her lunch
We tell her to have some fruitShe says "I aint no vegetarian"
As if she's ever seen oneAt Evanston township high school
they serve veggie burgers in the cafeteria
at Kelvyn park on the northwest side, they get the no child left behind
special tater tots staining their
white t-shirt uniformWhat is they feedin our kids?
by noon they're easily riled like hornets
totally unfocused pores
clogged wheelsDeep fried arteries
Short term batteriesTell me, What is they feedin our kids?
LA: If you could talk back to a teacher from where you are in your life right now, what would you say and to whom would you say it?
IG: Mr. Judge was a history teacher and he was the first one in any school to ever inspire me. He was so good at relating information. He was almost like a performer and I don't mean the corny teacher with the goofy tie and goofy raps about the US presidents. He was just very casual and clever. I equated his ease with relating information with deep knowledge. I think I started thinking: Its cool to be smart. Smart people can be funny, clever, unique and interesting, not lame and old and cranky.
The same could be said for a physics teacher I had named Mrs. Dayo. Like Judge, she was just mad cool. Very casual, very clever, very smart.
I would go back and tell both of those teachers that they stood out because they didn't use fear tactics to get us to care. They just worked at all aspects of their teaching. They were creative and non-traditional.
PRODUCTION, PRODUCING, PRODUCTIONS
With every rejection letter I am reminded of why the do-it-yourself approach appealed to me in the first place.
LA: You know Suzan-Lori Parks's 365 Days / 365 Plays? Well, I think you could have written that before she did because you are a prolific artist. Why? Why produce so much all the time? How does such a productive capacity feed you and the public who experiences your work?
Suzan Lori Parks is the bomb. I want to someday be at the place where I can say, "Take my scraps world, produce them, publish them, you don't understand them? So what? You adore me. Gotta go write a script for Oprah, tah tah." She's a G.
In my 20's I had so much to prove and needed to fulfill all these deep-seeded personal insecurities. I was trying to build a rep. I co-founded Hermit Arts theater company because I wanted to help create not only new theater but new theater-goers and to some degree we did, but it took so much out of us. We were working under such limited constraints; we became disillusioned after a while.
Today, I have slowed down a bit. Since I left Chicago and stepped back from hardcore fringe production, my way of making work has changed. I try to relax and let ideas develop and change in my mind. I'm more focused on making great original written and performance work, though with every rejection letter I am reminded of why the do-it-yourself approach appealed to me in the first place.
BLACK HISTORY MONTH
February Black History Month. Give me a smile and a Coke let me do what I want. Let me spit my little verse and celebrate. Spit my little verse and celebrate."
LA: I want to discuss a particular reading I have of your song "Black History Month." I want you to tell me if I'm finding critiques in the song that just don't exist or exist minimally. As well, I want you to share your own ideas about monthly and one-day "celebrations" like Women's History Month or Latin@ History Month, or National Coming Out Day, and of course, Black History Month.
I see this song as a challenge to traditional, essentialist notions of race and culture. All those monthly or one-day "celebrations, which I call food and feather attempts to avoid the complexities and contradictions inherent in liberal notions of universality, heteronormativity, or rather whiteness.
At my daughter's current independent school, a Montessori elementary school, they completely skipped, avoided, in fact, her teacher "forgot" Black History Month. Yes, that was problematic, but not for the reasons most people think. In fact, I was almost glad her school neglected it because then I didn't have to deal with all of the misguided ways in which they would actually do the Month.
At our daughter's former elementary school in St. Paul, also a Montessori, but a public school, I was embarrassed and horrified by the Black History Month memorial the principal allowed to be displayed. I use the term "memorial" on purpose. Like many of the other public elementary schools my partner and I visited during the month of February (the infamous short month set aside for "us"), the temporary monuments the school's constructed to represent the history of black folks were something intended to remind viewers of mostly dead people--as though the history of African Americans is an event, a flickering moment in which people died.
On display at my daughter's school was the well-known photograph of an enslaved African (I believe his name is "Peter") whose lashed back faces the camera; he has been beaten, the welts in relief on his back. Then there was the famous slave ship photo with the hundreds of black bodies squished together in neat rows and the litany of black (stereo)typicality went on. This is my daughter's first year in school and my eighteenth as an educator, but it wasn't until February of 2008 that I decided to respond to what has been irking me for years in the one-day/one-month memorials.
By accepting the dictum that separate months shall encompass a nation's history as it pertains to one social group or one area of difference, whiteness again remains unmarked, fades into the normative background, its boundaries protected. Blackness and otherness become foregrounded, highlighted against this supposedly normative backdrop.
By participating in this economy of difference, my daughter's school never had to confront the complex questions whose responses can only antagonize liberal notions of the universal human: Who or what is the "different"? Different from whom or what?
What contradictions do "celebrations" of race or gender or sexuality or disability pose that the very celebrations help us to avoid deconstructing? Black History Month displays solely serve to continue the myth that we are at the end of history, that imbrications of race and capital with gender and sexuality are a part of a dead past. These displays help to construct a memorial mythology.
Later in February 2008, the school changed the display (why, I don't know)--and it got worse. Up went black and white and sepia-toned photographs of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century US legislators who were supposedly fortunate enough to be elected. I suppose the point was to show parents See! Some of them, the well-behaved ones, were elected into state office. Underneath the breath of that proclamation is another statement: So they should stop complaining! The end of this "new" display brought us into the present. There were photos of Carol Mosley Braun, Clarence Thomas, Condoleeza Rice, et al, all with bright colored American flags waving in the background behind them.
My discussion of these displays inspired me and an undergraduate student of mine named Katie Ernst to begin working on a project we aptly called the "Anti-Black History Month" project. Katie has since produced a 9-minute film where she asks white people in a small town in South Dakota what they know about Black History Month and whether they think it's important. The point is that we wanted to ask the questions that these iconographic displays avoid.
I guess this is all a long way of getting at and hoping (asking) that your song "Black History Month," (especially the refrain which appears to deride through lyrical critique the notion of these months as celebrations of blackness) is a song that speaks back to these displays and the institutions that create them.
By demanding in the song that we give you "a smile and a Coke," Coke being a commodified material product with a past in exploitative labor practices, and the "smile," which seems to allude to a sort of Stepin Fetchit minstrelsy, one cannot help but think that you are underscoring for the listener the absurdity of Black History Month, those who rejoice in its false celebratory displays, and the concept of having a month to celebrate something we know ain't dead or past. You seem to be saying, perhaps this Month is really just for white folks, for those wedded to ideas of liberal universality, and salvation in trite tropes of honor, forgiveness, and forgetfulness. Is this what the song is doing?
Stepin Fetchit | "Lazy Richard" (5:01)
IG: The chorus you quoted is my fave too. Whenever I'm having a rough time, I go to my friend/collaborator Saint Pete's studio and we bang out music. So one February I was just grumpy. It was freezing. I was running around the city [Chicago] teaching all over, submitting my plays all over only to get rejection after rejection. I was tired. All my friends were telling me I was crazy for moving out of the Chi.
So amidst all my frustration, there's the usual black history month stuff. All the ads for Coke, McDonald's, and Best Western Hotels that usually have white families then had black families. All the usual documentaries on MLK and Harriet Tubman were on PBS, the TV production of Raisin in the Sun starring P. Diddy was on. And I was like, "You know what, this is not all we are. This ain't who I am. Where are the movies about a teaching-hip-hop-cat stomping through the snow in 2008!"
Sean P. Diddy Combs | Raisin in the Sun (2:40)
So I went to Saint Pete's crib and I was just feeling fed up. The refrain is a reference to Bill Cosby's Coke slogan from the '80's and the whole idea of black history as a product, a pre-packaged idea of black America, its heroes, its themes, and ideals all limited and constrained. And "let me spit my little verse and celebrate" was how I was feeling. I wanted relief from this weight, this constraint, this pressure I was feeling at the time. I don't want to write a million plays about slavery, or a million raps about saving the ghetto or any of the themes, topics, ideas that everyone expects you to write about when you are an artist of color.
The Toni Morrisons, Alice Walkers, Harriet Jacobs, etc., etc., wrote all those stories already. This we need to have people of color continue to "write stories that reflect their experience" is for white people. White people are the biggest consumers of black art, especially theater and hip hop and they want their image, their idea, their notions of a black reality confirmed. It's why the show The Wire is so successful. It confirms their notions.
Black History Month and all the other "celebrations" are a big smoke screen, a paltry, paltry sum in comparison to what's been done. What marginalized groups need are systems set in place to offset the years and years and years and years of unfair treatment, subjugation and humiliation. It's typical American schizophrenia to have a month celebrating people that it assassinated, squashed and silenced and won't even apologize for. So yes, the song is my way of making light of the month and also giving it a new context in some ways.
If people play my song every year in February, then perhaps the month could mean something different to them. It's my way of spitting water on convention and expectation. That's pretty much what I'm trying to do with all my work now. Convention and expectation are the death of imagination.
~~
You can check out Goodwin's latest release, Break Beat Poems, here.
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"Conceptual Writing [verb, repeat] and Silence"
From Harriet: A Blog from the Poetry Foundation
BY Mark Nowak
I think I'm finally beginning to understand Conceptual Writing thanks to Kenneth Goldsmith, who, in his consecutive posts on 4.27 and 4.28, drives home his point by employing the sentence "Conceptual writing [verb]" something like twenty-five times. As conceptual writing's (oops, sorry, Conceptual Writing's) spokesperson, Goldsmith uses very direct, clear sentences (though imperatives might have been yet more forceful) to convince readers that Conceptual Writing is [blank] (there are 20-some variations in these two posts, from populist to a-ethical). Like the best pitch-persons--think Brooke Shields for Calvin Klein or William Shatner for Priceline.com--Goldsmith identifies himself with his brand and tries to convince his audience that they should, no, need to, no, must buy into the spokesperson's product.
]]>In addition to writing voluminous letters during my second MFA year, I participated in a poets-in-the-schools program in that small Ohio town, teaching creative and uncreative writing to third and fourth graders who otherwise had little exposure to poetry. We did exercises from Kenneth Koch's Rose, Where Did You Get That Red and Conceptual Writing (oops, conceptual writing) projects based on the work of Jackson Mac Low. We made elementary school versions of Emily Dickinson and Langston Hughes and Gwendolyn Brooks poems. And ever since then, subgenres of poetry (be they Conceptual, documentary, new or neo-formalist, whatever) have been significantly less important to me than poetry's social function, i.e., what role poetry plays, or might play, in this world.
Just this week I was fortunate to host a visit from fellow Harrieteer Patricia Smith here on Maryland's Eastern Shore. I invited her to read at the Rose O'Neill Literary House where I now work as well as to lead the final session in the inaugural writers-in-the-schools program that I initiated my first year here (in collaboration with the local public school system). Patricia magnificently drew words and rhymes from about 50 high schoolers for whom contemporary poetry--any poetry, to be honest--is something to which, in the words of the school's principal and teachers, they have had almost zero exposure.
If we believe even half of what we've all been saying about poetry (and yes, Conceptual Writing, too, a-ethical as it claims to be) here at Harriet during National Poetry Month, there seems to me an urgent need--made more urgent by the politics of massive cuts to governments arts funding during the current economic crisis and the Draconian policies of NCLB (No Child Left Behind)--for everything that poetry claims for itself to be leveraged more fully and more regularly as a social form and in a social process. More of us in schools. More of us in elementary and middle and pre-college classrooms. More of us in after school programs. More of us in public libraries. More of us collaborating with social institutions. More of us, maybe, like Craig Santos Perez in Guahan; more of us, maybe, like Kevin Coval in "Louder than a Bomb".
In the end, I worry what poetry sans the larger social might eventually lead to (i.e., if a poem falls in a forest and there's only poets in the audience to hear it, does it make a sound)? And I urge everyone to listen to the masterpieces of no one talking--if you're a Conceptual Writer, it can be John Cage's 4′33″, if you're not, listen to section 18 of Patricia Smith's "34" (which comes in at about the thirty-six minute mark in the link/podcast). Inside those silences is everything we need, poets.
Inside those silences is need.
*
And thanks to the plural you, silenced commentators, for listening to us all month, too. We await your revolutionary and vocal return on May Day (i.e., International Workers Day), a fitting shout-out to the termination of National Poetry Month.
~~
Social Etymologies' conceptual writing example: Adrian Piper, Untitled 1968 work
Permalink to article on Harriet blog.
]]>| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
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26 April 2010Miners from Utah to sub-Saharan Africa to China's Shanxi province die, in part, for us.
Anderson Cooper is talking to coal-mining families and politicians in West Virginia again. Ever since that explosion ripped through an underground mine in Montcoal, it seems people all across America are discussing the dangers of mining.
If you watched the news during the recent disaster, you may have heard television anchors and reporters speaking about an "exceptional" tragedy, a once-in-40-years catastrophe that took the lives of 29 coal miners in southern West Virginia. Yet if we look at this tragedy from a global perspective, the tragedy in Montcoal looks, unfortunately, all too typical.
Since the Sago, West Virginia disaster over three years ago, I've been tracking deaths in the global mining sector on my blog, Coal Mountain. Rarely does a day go by when I don't have to add more names and stories to this death roll. Mine collapse kills 16 in northwest Tanzania. Six bodies found in Xinjiang mine collapse. Worker dies in Australian nickel mine. And these are just a few of the headlines from the days since the Montcoal disaster.
What happened earlier this month happens almost every day somewhere in the world: Miners are killed at work. And why do they die--or for whom? Miners from Utah to sub-Saharan Africa to China's Shanxi province die, in part, for us. As consumers who walk the aisles at WalMarts, dollar stores, and suburban shopping malls, we fuel the extraction of coal and other minerals every time we purchase items that are intimately connected to miners around the world.
Every time you purchase something made in China, your item more than likely was made not only in a factory with its own horrific labor conditions, but a factory powered by electricity produced from coal. And each year in China, several thousand miners are killed as they extract that "black gold" from deep inside the earth.
Similar stories can be told about objects in almost every room in your house. To extract precious minerals like diamonds and gold in South Africa, for example, miners risk their lives every day--including 76 miners whose bodies were found in an abandoned Harmony Goldmining Co. mineshaft in Free State last year. And tin? From the precarious and brief lives of Indonesian "tin divers," to the five child miners killed in a collapse in southeast Congo earlier this year, tin extraction is likewise written in blood.
One of the many lessons we must learn from the 29 miners who lost their lives in Montcoal, West Virginia is that our patterns of energy use, as well as how we shop, are intimately tied to those who risk their lives each and every day deep beneath the Earth's surface. As we begin to discuss the changing economy and our spending habits in the post-boom period, it's also time to think more about where the products that clutter our bedrooms and basements and boardrooms come from. And who is risking and losing their lives so that we can have them.
Distributed by OtherWords
Mark Nowak is a documentary poet, social critic, and labor activist. Nowak is a 2010 Guggenheim poetry fellow and serves as the Director of the Rose O'Neill Literary House at Washington College. His writings include Shut Up Shut Down (afterword by Amiri Baraka; Coffee House Press, 2004), a New York Times "Editor's Choice," and the recently published book on coal mining disasters in the US and China, Coal Mountain Elementary (Coffee House Press, 2009), which Howard Zinn called "a stunning educational tool. Nowak was featured at the Split This Rock Poetry Festival in March.
The New York TimesDorothy Height, a leader of the African-American and women's rights movements who was considered both the grande dame of the civil rights era and its unsung heroine, died on Tuesday in Washington. She was 98.
The death, at Howard University Hospital, was announced jointly by the hospital and the National Council of Negro Women, which Ms. Height had led for four decades. A longtime Washington resident, Ms. Height was the council's president emerita at her death.
]]> One of the last living links to the social activism of the New Deal era, Ms. Height had a career in civil rights that spanned nearly 80 years, from anti-lynching protests in the early 1930s to the inauguration of President Obama in 2009. That the American social landscape looks as it does today owes in no small part to her work.Originally trained as a social worker, Ms. Height was president of the National Council of Negro Women from 1957 to 1997, overseeing a range of programs on issues like voting rights, poverty and in later years AIDS. A longtime executive of the Y.W.C.A., she presided over the integration of its facilities nationwide in the 1940s.
With Gloria Steinem, Shirley Chisholm, Betty Friedan and others, she helped found the National Women's Political Caucus in 1971. Over the decades, she advised a string of American presidents on civil rights.
If Ms. Height was less well known than her contemporaries in either the civil rights or women's movement, it was perhaps because she was doubly marginalized, pushed offstage by women's groups because of her race and by black groups because of her sex. Throughout her career, she responded quietly but firmly, working with a characteristic mix of limitless energy and steely gentility to ally the two movements in the fight for social justice.
As a result, Ms. Height is widely credited as the first person in the modern civil rights era to treat the problems of equality for women and equality for African-Americans as a seamless whole, merging concerns that had been largely historically separate.
The recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom and other prestigious awards, Ms. Height was accorded a place of honor on the dais on Jan. 20, 2009, when Mr. Obama took the oath of office as the nation's 44th president. In a statement on Tuesday, he called Ms. Height "the godmother of the civil rights movement and a hero to so many Americans."
Over the years, historians have made much of the so-called "Big Six" who led the civil rights movement: the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., James Farmer, John Lewis, A. Philip Randolph, Roy Wilkins and Whitney M. Young Jr. Ms. Height, the only woman to work regularly alongside them on projects of national significance, was very much the unheralded seventh, the leader who was cropped out, figuratively and often literally, of images of the era.
In 1963, for instance, Ms. Height sat on the platform an arm's length from Dr. King as he delivered his epochal "I Have a Dream" speech at the March on Washington. She was one of the march's chief organizers and a prize-winning orator herself. Yet she was not asked to speak, although many other black leaders -- all men -- addressed the crowd that day.
Ms. Height recounted the incident in her memoir, "Open Wide the Freedom Gates" (PublicAffairs, 2003; with a foreword by Maya Angelou). Reviewing the memoir, The New York Times Book Review called it "a poignant short course in a century of African-American history."
Dorothy Irene Height was born on March 24, 1912, in Richmond, Va. Her father, James, was a building contractor; her mother, the former Fannie Burroughs, was a nurse. A severe asthmatic as a child, Dorothy was not expected to live, she later wrote, past the age of 16.
When Dorothy was small, the family moved north to Rankin, Pa., near Pittsburgh, where she attended integrated public schools. She began her civil rights work as a teenager, volunteering on voting rights and anti-lynching campaigns.
In high school, Ms. Height entered an oratory contest, sponsored by the Elks, on the subject of the United States Constitution. An eloquent speaker even in her youth, she soon advanced to the national finals, where she was the only black contestant. She delivered a talk on the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments -- the Reconstruction Amendments --intended to extend constitutional protections to former slaves and their descendants. The jury, all white, awarded her first prize: a four-year college scholarship.
As Ms. Height told The Detroit Free Press in 2008, "I'm still working today to make the promise of the 14th Amendment of equal justice under law a reality."
A star student, the young Ms. Height applied to Barnard College and was accepted. Then, in the summer of 1929, shortly before classes began, she was summoned to New York by a Barnard dean.
There was a problem, the dean said. That Ms. Height had been admitted to Barnard was certain. But she could not enroll -- not then, anyway. Barnard had already met its quota for Negro students that year.
Too distraught to call home, as she later wrote, Ms. Height did the only thing possible. Clutching her Barnard acceptance letter, she took the subway downtown to New York University. She was admitted at once, earning a bachelor's degree in education there in 1933 and a master's in psychology two years later.
Ms. Height was a caseworker with the New York City Welfare Department before becoming the assistant executive director of the Harlem Y.W.C.A. in the late 1930s. One of her first public acts at the Y was to call attention to the exploitation of black women working as domestic day laborers. The women, who congregated on street corners in Brooklyn and the Bronx known locally as "slave markets," were picked up and hired, for about 15 cents an hour, by white suburban housewives who cruised the corners in their cars.
Ms. Height's testimony before the New York City Council about the "slave markets" attracted the attention of the national and international news media. For a time, the publicity was enough to drive the markets underground, though they later re-emerged.
In 1946, as a member of the Y's national leadership, Ms. Height oversaw the desegregation of its facilities nationwide. In 1965, she founded the Y's Center for Racial Justice, which she led until 1977.
While working for the Y in the late '30s, Ms. Height was chosen to escort the first lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, to a meeting of the National Council of Negro Women. There, Ms. Height caught the eye of Mary McLeod Bethune, the council's founder, who became her mentor.
As the council's president during the most urgent years of the civil rights movement, Ms. Height instituted a variety of social programs in the Deep South, including the pig bank, in which poor black families were given a pig, a prize commodity. In the mid-'60s, she helped institute "Wednesdays in Mississippi," a program that flew interracial teams of Northern women to the state to meet with black and white women there.
Ms. Height, who long maintained that strong communities were at the heart of social welfare, inaugurated a series of "Black Family Reunions" in the mid-1980s. Sponsored by the National Council of Negro Women and held in cities across the United States, the reunions were large, celebratory gatherings devoted to the history, culture and traditions of African-Americans. Hundreds of thousands of people attended the first one, in Washington in 1986.
From 1947 to 1956, Ms. Height was also the president of Delta Sigma Theta, an international sorority of black women.
Besides the Presidential Medal of Freedom, awarded by President Bill Clinton in 1994, Ms. Height's many honors include the Congressional Gold Medal, awarded by President George W. Bush in 2004. The two medals are the country's highest civilian awards.
Ms. Height, who never married, is survived by a sister, Anthanette Aldridge, of New York City.
If despite her laurels Ms. Height remained in the shadow of her male contemporaries, she rarely objected. After all, as she often said in interviews, the task at hand was far less about personal limelight than it was about collective struggle.
"I was there, and I felt at home in the group," she told The Sacramento Bee in 2003 "But I didn't feel I should elbow myself to the front when the press focused on the male leaders."
Ms. Height received three dozen honorary doctorates, from institutions including Tuskegee, Harvard and Princeton Universities. But there was one academic honor -- the equivalent of a bachelor's degree -- that resonated more strongly than all the rest: In 2004, 75 years after turning her away, Barnard College designated Ms. Height an honorary graduate.
Photo: Height presenting the Mary McLeod Bethune Human Rights Award to Eleanor Roosevelt in New York in 1960 (United Press International).
I remember McLaren's music providing a way out of disco and into a collaboration between hip-hop and what one might call early techno. Somehow, across the sea, this bloke merged NY's uptown with downtown. With the release of Buffalo Gals and especially Madame Butterfly, I could finally see some of the white rich kids with whom I attended high school and later college bopping their heads ever so slightly (in hiding, perhaps) to a beat other than Zeppelin or the Sex Pistols (who, don't get me wrong, were both the extremely dope of a different ilk).
Oddly, just two days ago, I was reading "Sale of the Century" by Greil Marcus in ArtForum (April 2010). The piece discusses McLaren's recent video, Paris: Capital of the XXIst Century. McLaren's "Buffalo Gals" video, an excerpt from the Marcus article, as well as chapter 13, "Le Peintre" (The Painter), from Paris are below. Enjoy and remember. . . .
Buffalo Gals
IN 1991, THE SEX PISTOLS and the galvanic remakes of Madame Butterfly on McLaren's album Fans were in the past. Few had noticed McLaren's paltry album Waltz Darling in 1989 or his deeply felt BBC film The Ghosts of Oxford Street in
Chapter 13: "Le Peintre"
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Activist and Cherokee leader Wilma Mankiller died of pancreatic cancer on 6 April 2010 at the age of 64 and after a long life of political action on behalf of indigenous people and women. Though Mankiller, as Principal Chief, actively opposed the inclusion of Cherokee freedmen in the Nation (the descendants of Cherokee slaves of African descent) (1), she was responsible for an important legacy of Indian advocacy from health care to Indian women's rights.
Note
1. David Cornsilk (editor, Cherokee Observer), Afrigeneas (22 October 2007): "In 1987 Wilma Mankiller, as Principal Chief, presented a resolution before the Cherokee Nation tribal council endorsing the rules of the enrollment office requiring "Indian blood" as proven by a CDIB card. In so doing she took the Freedmen's expulsion by her predecessor Ross O. Swimmer one step further"; "Cherokee Freedmen Caught in High-level Dispute," Indianz.com (20 August 2003): "The Bureau of Indian Affairs was prepared to reject the results of the Cherokee Nation's recent election in which African descendants weren't allowed to vote until a high-level delegation of tribal dignitaries, including former chief Wilma Mankiller, requested to meet with Bush administration officials to protest, documents filed in federal court show."
The poet Ai (Florence Anthony), who was winner of the 1999 National Book Award for poetry and Professor of English at Oklahoma State University, died 19 March 2010 at the age of 63. Below Ai's poem on death.
Conversation
By Ai
We smile at each other
and I lean back against the wicker couch.
How does it feel to be dead? I say.
You touch my knees with your blue fingers.
And when you open your mouth,
a ball of yellow light falls to the floor
and burns a hole through it.
Don't tell me, I say. I don't want to hear.
Did you ever, you start,
wear a certain kind of dress
and just by accident,
so inconsequential you barely notice it,
your fingers graze that dress
and you hear the sound of a knife cutting paper,
you see it too
and you realize how that image
is simply the extension of another image,
that your own life
is a chain of words
that one day will snap.
Words, you say, young girls in a circle, holding hands,
and beginning to rise heavenward
in their confirmation dresses,
like white helium balloons,
the wreathes of flowers on their heads spinning,
and above all that,
that's where I'm floating,
and that's what it's like
only ten times clearer,
ten times more horrible.
Could anyone alive survive it?
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The Insight Center for Community Economic Development released a report on the gender wealth gap to mark International Women's Day. The report found nearly half of all single black and Latina women have zero or negative wealth, meaning their debts exceed all of their assets. The median wealth for single black women is only $100; for single Latina women, $120. This compares to just over $41,000 for single white women.
Democracy Now spoke with "the chief author of the report, Mariko Lin Chang and C. Nicole Mason, Executive Director of the Women of Color Policy Network." Click here to read or watch the interview.
]]>The public gets so caught up in how celebrities and politicians, or media-deemed and commodified "American heroes" "cheat" or "commit adultery." Who cares what they do to themselves or their family as long as they don't murder or abuse self or family (like OJ), as long as they hit their golf balls or shoot their free-throws, or can lead a nation fairly, compassionately, and without lying, stealing, or cheating people out of their retirements, homes, and futures?
I have never read or quoted from an ESPN reporter before today, but Bill Simmons's article on the Tiger Woods's apology is absolutely hilarious and straight on. See below.
19 February 2010
"Tiger Still Playing by His Own Rules"
BY Bill Simmons
ESPN.com
Say this much about Tiger: People give a crap. I don't know anyone who didn't watch this morning's speech. There isn't another athlete -- not one -- who could have made the world stop from 11 to 11:15 like Tiger Woods did.
And with that, we're done with the positives. I thought it was a borderline train wreck. It amazes me that Tiger learned little to nothing from the past two months. The control freak whose life slipped out of control dipped right back into control-freak mode, reading a prepared speech in front of a hand-selected audience of people, taking no questions, talking in clichés and only occasionally seeming human. Everything about it seemed staged. Everything. When the main camera broke down at the nine-minute mark and Tiger had to be shown from the side, I half-expected to see that he was plugged in to the wall.
]]> Whatever. I was going to leave it alone. After all, that had to have been a humiliating experience for the guy. But listening to talking heads praise that ludicrous speech pushed me over the edge. Someone actually said, "It came from the heart." It did? Was it C3PO's heart? I thought it seemed like an automated response from Microsoft's new "Cheater's Confession" program.Let's look at the facts. Tiger cheats on his wife relentlessly and brazenly. She finds out somehow. This leads to him crashing his car in the wee hours of Thanksgiving night. Scandal. Cover-up. More women come out. And more. And more. Tiger disappears like Jimmy Hoffa. Elin stops wearing her ring. Tiger stays hidden. Rumors swirl. By hiding, by not saying anything, Tiger enables every rumor and negative story to gain steam. When he sneaks away to a sex rehab clinic for 45 days, neither Tiger or his representatives acknowledge rumors that he's there. He emerges with a staged jogging photo op; one day later, three other photos of Tiger hitting golf balls, even seeming jovial in one of them, hit the wires. And then, today's prepared remarks. That came from the heart. Just as long as you didn't ask a follow-up question.
When we first saw the room in Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla., it looked like the set of a "Saturday Night Live" episode: small podium, blue curtain, some heads. The camera panned the crowd, revealing that there apparently had been an emergency casting call for somber white people in blazers. (Why didn't I get an invite? I own a blazer! I could have looked somber!) At 11:01 a.m. ET, Tiger emerged from the back, and I remember thinking that it would have been awesome if he were naked from the waist down.
He spoke for the next 13 and a half minutes. He spoke ... like this. There was ... no emotion ... in his words. His face ... was blank ... and empty. Part of me ... felt bad ... for him. There were ... a couple of moments ... when it seemed ... like ... he was trying ... to shed a tear ... or have his voice catch ... just for effect. You get ... the idea.
People wondered why Tiger opted for a prepared speech instead of the traditional move for disgraced celebrities: sitting down for an interview with "20/20" or "Primetime." You saw why as he was reading his statement. Tiger isn't capable of discussing this stuff with depth or emotion. He can't ad-lib about his feelings and never could. It would have been awful. Like so many other mega-celebrities who became famous too early, it's as though they never properly develop the part of their brain that controls this question: "How can I win over the person I'm talking to right now?" When you become famous too early, you don't have to win over anyone. You just have to exist. You become constantly wary. You start watching what you say around people you don't know. You measure any potential friend or business partner by one question: "What do they want from me?"
That's one reason he ended up in this mess. The other was simpler: Normal rules don't apply to celebrities. This is what bothered me so much about Tiger entering sex rehab. Look, if he really does have a problem, fine. But if Tiger needs rehab, then so does half of the professional sports world. In Miami for the Super Bowl two weekends ago, I saw one famous athlete creeping on more girls than Ronnie, Pauly D and The Situation combined. In the era of cell phones and texts, post-Tiger scandal, you would have thought he'd be more careful. It became the running joke of the weekend. Uh-oh, there he is again! Still creeping! But that's what these guys do. If we learned anything from the Tiger scandal, it's that the celebrity debauchery circuit was much more complex than we ever imagined.
In "A Few Good Men," one of my favorite scenes is when Kevin Bacon is cross-examining the guy from "ER" and asks him why "Code Red" isn't in the rulebook, then Tom Cruise redirects and points out that the mess hall isn't in there, either. Remember that? So how do you know how to get to the mess hall? You just follow the crowd. That's the answer. And that's what Tiger did this decade. He followed the crowd. He just got caught.
Should he have been contrite? Of course. But just be honest about it. My least favorite part of the speech: "But still, I know I have bitterly disappointed all of you. I have made you question who I am and how I could have done the things I did. I'm embarrassed that I have put you in this position. For all that I have done, I am so sorry. I have a lot to atone for."
Big mistake. And plastic. I would have played the "I became a celebrity too soon, I had too many people kissing my butt too soon, I had everything handed to me, I began to think I was invincible and that my behavior had no consequences" card right here. Hell, I even would have compared myself to a child actor or a musician who becomes too famous too young. If the goal of the speech was to make people realize why he did what he did and seem contrite, why not try to connect with us instead of impersonating the little girl from "Small Wonder"? Arrrrrgh.
Tiger was properly hard on himself at times. He said "I'm deeply sorry" and "I'm sorry." He called his behavior "irresponsible and selfish." He called himself "selfish" and "foolish." There was a weird moment when he said that "Elin and I have started the process of discussing the damage caused by my behavior. As Elin pointed out to me, my real apology to her will not come in the form of words. It will come from my behavior over time." Then he said, "However, what we say to each other will remain between the two of us." Well, except for that part about behavior over time.
The best part of the speech: "My behavior has caused considerable worry to my business partners, to everyone involved in my foundation, including my staff, board of directors, sponsors and, most importantly, the young students we reach. Our work is more important than ever. Thirteen years ago, my dad and I envisioned helping young people achieve their dreams through education. This work remains unchanged and will continue to grow. From the Learning Center students in Southern California to the Earl Woods scholars in Washington, D.C., millions of kids have changed their lives and I am dedicated to making sure that continues."
Had I written the speech for him, I would have started there, and actually, I would have started with an anecdote about Tiger's father and the man's expectations for his son. We found out about Tiger through Earl. We grew attached to Tiger through Earl. They had one of the best father/son relationships in sports. Earl was the one person who made Tiger seem like anything other than a golf-ball-cracking cyborg. Like so many others, I wondered if Tiger lost his way after Earl's death, no different than Jordan riding a Double-A bus in 1994. If the goal of this news conference was to get people to feel sorry for him and give him another chance, then Tiger should have gone there. It wouldn't have been disingenuous. It would have been true. And it would have made him seem more human.
Letting down a foundation that he started with his late father ... wasn't that a bigger deal than letting down Nike or Notah Begay III? Wasn't that the underrated collateral damage here? Only a few athletes have a chance to make a real difference in the community; Tiger has the chance, but his behavior made it more difficult. Anyone can get married, anyone can have kids, anyone can be good at their job. Not everyone can change the lives of tens of thousands of people.
When will Tiger be back on the PGA Tour? He didn't announce a return date.
That wasn't the only tactical mistake Tiger made. He went on attack about Thanksgiving night, saying, "Some people have speculated that Elin somehow hurt or attacked me on Thanksgiving night. It angers me that people would fabricate a story like that."
To be fair, Tiger, you crashed your car while leaving your house at 2:30 a.m., you weren't wearing shoes, your neighbors found you asleep on the sidewalk and your wife holding a golf club, the back windows of your cars were smashed in, the accident wasn't reported for 12 hours and then you disappeared for 10 weeks. You never told us what happened. You got terrible advice from your advisors and opened the door for people to imagine crazy scenarios for what happened that night. Don't blame us.
He followed with this: "Elin never hit me that night or any other night. There has never been an episode of domestic violence in our marriage, ever. Elin has shown enormous grace and poise throughout this ordeal. Elin deserves praise, not blame." Let's hope this is true, because if it's not, then nobody will ever be able to trust anything Tiger Woods says again.
The worst part of the speech: "I was unfaithful. I had affairs, I cheated. What I did is not acceptable. And I am the only person to blame. I stopped living by the core values that I was taught to believe in. I knew my actions were wrong, but I convinced myself that normal rules didn't apply. I never thought about who I was hurting. Instead, I thought only about myself. I ran straight through the boundaries that a married couple should live by. I thought I could get away with whatever I wanted to. I felt that I had worked hard my entire life and deserved to enjoy all the temptations around me. I felt I was entitled. Thanks to money and fame, I didn't have far -- I didn't have to go far to find them. I was wrong, I was foolish. I don't get to play by different rules."
It's hard to explain how insufferable this was live, because on paper, it doesn't seem so bad. But I had a number of problems with it, including ...
• He came off like Schwarzenegger in "Terminator 2."• His premise was false. Really famous people DO get to play by different rules. Sorry. We enable them.
• I felt that I had worked hard my entire life and deserved to enjoy all the temptations around me has to rank among the worst excuses in the history of mankind. Christ, Tiger, you're pretending that you put real thought into this? You thought you DESERVED to enjoy all the temptations around you? That's your explanation? Trust me, you should have gone with "I got married too soon, I should have sowed my oats first, I didn't, I'm an ass." Much better. We could relate to that. Instead, you came off like a horny robot. Again, I think you should fire everyone at IMG and start over. They are doing you damage.
Back to the speech. I really liked this part: "It's not what you achieve in life that matters, it's what you overcome. Achievements on the golf course are only part of setting an example. Character and decency are what really count. Parents used to point at me as a role model for their kids. I owe all those families a special apology. I want to say to them that I am truly sorry."
Fantastic. That should have been the second point in his speech, right after he talked about how he felt bad about ruining his charity foundation and letting down his late father, and just before he talked about the damage to his wife and kids. I thought it was fascinating that he apologized to his business partners well before he apologized to those families. Whatever.
Another part I liked: When he begged the paparazzi to leave his wife and kids alone. Sorry, they're always going to bug your wife, Tiger. She married a public figure. But the kids ... yes. Agreed. Kids should always be off-limits. You could have gone further here. Anyone with kids would have felt bad for you.
Things tailed off near the end when he mentioned being "raised a Buddhist" and "actively practiced my faith from childhood until I drifted away from it in recent years." I would say so. As Tiger said, "Buddhism teaches that a creation of things outside ourselves causes an unhappy and pointless search for security. It teaches me to stop following every impulse and to learn restraint. Obviously, I lost track of what I was taught." That's an understatement. If this is true, he's one of the worst Buddhists of all time.
He talked about needing more treatment, and about "the importance of looking at my spiritual life and keeping in balance with my professional life." (This sounded like it was written through one of those Russian-to-English translators.) He thought he needed "to regain my balance and be centered, so I can save the things that are most important to me: My marriage and my children." (Better late than never.) He said he planned to return to golf one day, but "I just don't know when that day will be." (That groan you heard came from everyone who couldn't have been more excited about the 2010 Masters, including me.)
By this point, I was making the same face that an airplane passenger makes in the first few seconds after an unclaimed fart. Tiger mercifully ended the proceedings by saying, "Finally ... there are many people in this room ... and there are many people at home ... who believed in me. Today ... I want to ask for your help. I ask you ... to find room in your heart ... to one day ... believe in me again. Thank you."
He seemed to get choked up, but we couldn't tell because the main camera broke and he had been shot from the left side for about four minutes. The conspiracy theorist in me wondered if the broken camera was part of the plan. Either way, I left the speech angry -- not at the speech itself, but by the fact that someone who said, "I was wrong, I was foolish. I don't get to play by different rules" continued to think he could play by different rules.
I want to come clean. Just under my terms. And you can't ask me anything.
In a few weeks, or a few months, Tiger will start hitting golf balls and everything will be fine again. I just want to get there. For now, we apparently have to put up with a few more weeks (and possibly months) of the Tiger Woods Rehabilitation Tour. There will be more rehab, more staged photos, more secrecy and eventually a carefully planned interview with the right person who won't be a threat to ask him anything interesting. Wake me up when he plays a tournament. And if you want to watch a clip of the speech, just watch the first 10 seconds that started with the curtain. It's still there.
Bill Simmons is a columnist for ESPN.com and the author of the recent New York Times best-seller, "The Book of Basketball." For every Simmons column and podcast, check out Sports Guy's World. Follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/sportsguy33.
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If you're in the Twin Cities, I highly recommend that prospective and current adoptive families go - with an open mind - to hear Jane Trenka. What she has to say about adoption is extremely important to consider before adopting and after.
Author and activist Jane Jeong Trenka is presenting a lecture titled "A Million Living Ghosts: Truth and Reconciliation for the Adoption Community of Korea" tomorrow
Date: Thursday 11 February 2010
Time: 1:00 - 3:00 p.m.
Location: @ University of Minnesota, 100 Smith Hall
Cost: Free
Description: Since the end of the Korean War, South Korea has sent away more of its citizens to be adopted than any other country in the world. If we count
]]> not just the 200,000 children who been sent to foreign countries, but also their parents, grandparents, and siblings, we can roughly estimate that 1 million South Koreans are directly affected by the international adoption program. Yet these people are rarely acknowledged in Korean society, as they have been rendered socially dead. Meanwhile, the Korean government has yet to fully address the factors that have caused this program to flourish even in a time of economic prosperity, 57 years after the end of the Korean War.Author Jane Jeong Trenka will talk about her writing as a path to activism and the work of her activist group TRACK (Truth and Reconciliation for the Adoption Community of Korea), a group based in Seoul that advocates for full knowledge of past and present Korean adoption practices to protect the human rights of adult adoptees, children, and families.
Contact:
* Name: Hilal Isler
* E-mail: isler010@umn.edu
* Sponsored by: Asian American Studies, Zabel Lecture Series in the English Department, Consortium for the Study of the Asias
More information: http://aas.umn.edu/
Disability Options:
To request disability accommodations, please contact Asian American Studies Program.
The lecture is sponsored by the Asian American Studies Program, Zabel Lecture Series in the English Department, and the Consortium for the Study of the Asia.
9 February 2010
Flavorwire
"The RZA's New Solo Project: Historical Art"
Wu-Tang fans might be surprised to hear that the RZA's latest work of art isn't a piece of music. Victory or Death is a limited-edition set of canvas prints that samples and remixes Emanuel Leutze's 1851 painting Washington Crossing the Delaware. In his version, the RZA replaces George Washington, and he's proudly flying the flag of Wu.
"It didn't begin 20 years ago... more like 200 years ago. And when you see the piece we're making right here, you're going to know what I'm talking about," RZA has explained. "We're about to rewrite and change history."
]]> After the jump we talk to the RZA (and his buddy King Tech) about the meaning behind the project.The crossing of the Delaware by Washington, how does it relate to you leading the Wu-Tang?
King Tech: [The American revolutionaries] were going to the last fight. It was like, this is it. We're on the boat, there's no more bridges to come back to. We gotta either win, or America's gonna go down. And I felt like it was a great decision for [RZA], because that's how I felt like Wu-Tang was for me, as a hip-hop dude. There was a point when everyone was wearing the super-baggy suits and doing the typewriter dance, and it just getting out of control. And then to see these guys come so gritty, grimy, with cassette tape-sounding stuff, it was like "wait a minute, did we just go backward? Or are they onto something new?" And it was a matter of time before we started figuring out that these guys were on to some new stuff.
Why are you willing to stake everything to get across it?
RZA: At a certain point, Wu-Tang Clan was so desperate in the street world that we had to become successful artists, or go to jail, or become your local criminals, which we probably were anyway. Before Wu-Tang Clan became popular we were living in the streets. People were shooting at me, I was shooting at them. We was doing everything we could to just survive and eat and pay our rent. One of my buddies would call me from jail and it would be like 'collect call from jail'. I was like 'fuck it, you can call all you want because I'm getting kicked out of this place next month anyway'. Just up and move to the next place. Life was tough. Sometimes when life is tough you gotta break through, come up for water, come up for air. And I felt like that's what I did. I had to take my crew and lead us through rough waters and bring us to the top.
If the crossing can be summed up in one moment, what is your intention in that moment?
RZA: The changing of the world. America became the most powerful country in the world, starting from that date. And for me, I always remember when Wu-Tang came out, Hammer was a year or two ahead of us and he had sold ten million records, and people were like "you think you can sell ten million records like MC Hammer?" and I always said "even though MC Hammer sold ten million records, that's still ten million people that remain asleep. If Wu-Tang sells one million records we still did much better than Hammer because that's one million people that's being woken up.
Have you crossed the river yet?
RZA: Yeah, I think I've crossed the river. Crossing the river is very metaphoric to Christian, Buddhist and Hindu philosophy. When you go to nirvana you cross to the other side to find spiritual enlightenment and freedom. And I feel like I've crossed it because I'm way far from the man that was on the other side of the river. It's a different guy that was over there, even though it's the same guy in the vessel. When you go somewhere that you've never been before and you fall in love with it and it changes you, it's the same person, but something new is now inside that vessel. A new spirit is in that vessel.
"Victory or Death" was the pass phrase for Washington's men to identify themselves. What's yours?
RZA: "Wu-Tang Forever." Meaning, the decision I made to be this, and what it represents and what it means. Wu-Tang means "man who deserves God." And we should always be in that position. So "Wu-Tang Forever" is my phrase.
~~
You can find "Victory or Death" at When Art Imitates Life. Turn down your volume just a bit and don't skip the intro!