A woman in Virginia placed an extra stone on the 32 stones gathered to symbolize those lost in the mass killing at Virginia Tech. She said 33 people were lost that day. She was right. The life of the shooter counts.
People are outraged that his “video manifesto” was made public via the airwaves. Even in death, we silence him. We do not want his reasons and will not allow his reasoning to be the reason. Even those who acknowledge the tortured nature of his existence are careful to preface it with: “I am not excusing his actions.” We are afraid to see the reasons afraid of the weight of another stone.
We live in the most violent of cultures. We kill each other at a rate not seen elsewhere in the so-called “civilized” world. We are not as good as we would like to think about caring for those less fortunate. Look on the sidewalks downtown anywhere at those living between the cracks. How can we be asked to shoulder the burden of not just the one extra stone but of all of them?
What does it take for us to see and appreciate the inter-relatedness of our well being in a way that makes our awareness translate into action? If we ignore those who suffer not so much in silence but in the wake of our blindness, we continue to run the risk of having them get our attention in fatal ways. Is the answer more paperwork, reporting, exclusion, confinement, drug treatment or is it more effective and humane to look at the cause of mental dis-ease?
Why do children bully other children? Why don’t we pay more attention? Every time we teach a child to fight fire with fire, we signal our acceptance of violence as an appropriate resolution to conflict. Yet, we shudder when we meet young Johnny with a gun. What is the source of the anger, pain, insecurity and conflict? Where is the currency for bullies? Excluding others often predicates one’s own acceptance. Picking on another child hides the bullies own insecurity and need for inclusion, he creates an out-group to be in the resultant in-group. Children learn to respect difference or to fear it and they learn it at home. However, the adult at home was once a child learning what they now teach. So if we are all practicing what we have learned who is the teacher?
All the cultures that inhabit the melting pot of America rest in the bosom of American Popular culture which is the harbinger of the current paradigm. We compete. There are losers and winners. Winners have more. Losing hurts. Lack hurts. Those who got want to keep. Elbows and turned backs. Gated communities. Consumption. Want. Consumption. Need. Consumption. Greed. Consumption. Lack. There are walls between the have and the have not. Those who don’t have are trying by any means to get. No vacations in America. Two jobs. We buy. We buy. We buy. We work to buy more. Because those who have are good competitors, they are winners. Those who do not have are losers, poor competitors. They did not do enough. They should have pulled themselves up by their bootstraps even if they have no feet. We have no time. Time is a commodity. We are commodities. Life as a commodity, do I blame it all on material capitalism? Pretty much.
We live in a culture of the individual. In this equation, it is me against you, my kids against your kids. All of us locked in competition for the things that we have come to value. No time to hug your son but he has the nicest clothes and the latest Js. No time to throw the ball with him but he has a widescreen TV to watch the game on alone while Daddy gets the money for more things to show you how winners live. We schedule children because we have no time. We must become the best by any means, because there are winners and losers. Education in this paradigm is to facilitate acquiring more as opposed to knowing more, it is a competition. We grade the children and the institutions and the degrees they award come in levels supposedly the higher you go the more you can buy. In America even leisure is a competition in terrorist confused airports, in two week bites, in crowded theme parks, in noisy dance clubs, we move frantically, herded to spend quickly and return to work so we can buy things. We exist in a materially oriented society with a perception of time scarcity. This both consumes and distracts us from the fabric of lived reality, the reality of us living here on a ball spinning in space breathing the same air. The reality of we live we die. The reality of right now being all we can touch, taste and move. The reality where quiet frantic crazy builds character in seemingly normal people almost forces us to move with limited compassion. None of us wants to be losers. There are things we must have in order to be winners. And the list gets longer every day. How can we afford the time to pay attention? We cannot easily conceive of suffering with the losers. We cannot easily approach the extra stone.
We pay for our choices. We pay for our blindness by being occasionally jarred to attention by the unfathomable. We pay for our short memories by the same type of things happening again. We must find the time to pay attention. We must be in life, the day to day-ness of it. We must find not the quick but the true resolution to our small conflicts to teach it matters, we all matter. We must hear people when they speak the story of their being. If it differs from your perception of it, does it make it less real for the liver of the reality? If we listen better, we may learn to care better, if we care better there will be fewer cracks to fall between. Caring implies awareness. We must pay attention, not just to the horrific but the fabric of it, the everyday.
The small scars that become huge wounds grow unattended. Who attends us in the small fears that become the dark spots where we avoid shining light? Who tells we are more important than the things we spend our time and attention struggling to acquire? The things that we eventually throw out on the sidewalk to populate the landfills have become more important than the us-ness of life. We are consumers who are consumed with the material, the temporary, and the trash of life to the exclusion of being in life.
It is not enough to plant a tree once a year, or donate to an orphanage in some far place, or to feed the poor on holidays. It is a start but it should not be a temporary focus. It should be a part of our being. Adlai Stevenson said, “In a democracy you get the government you deserve.” I am saying we build the culture we have. Stone by stone.
Monday, April 30, 2007
Tuesday, April 24, 2007
Is Rap the Reason?
It was only a matter of time it seems before the source of our outrage became our own fault. Imus has been fired and another public good old boy will have to reinvent himself, no doubt the money and infamy, will help. Satellite radio and book deals wait just off stage. Imus will have a few more profitable years in a long and very profitable career. He just won’t slang his type of hype on mainstream radio stations anymore. Perhaps he will find time for his more altruistic pursuits like raising millions for health issues that plague America’s children.
We live in a culture where we often blame the victim. Raped women should not have been attractive. The profiled man should not have been where he was. The mothers of molested children should have watched them better. Most Rappers have a lifetime of a few summers. Most don’t catch on to the pimpish nature of this new wave master slave game until its too late and they find themselves absent even the silver Judas got.
I am reminded of boxing in the colonial era of America. Slaves were pitted against one another for the enjoyment of white audiences. The boxing slaves received preferential treatment and thus often the envy of their less favored brothers and sisters even though matches were often to the death. It would seem that any possibility for a life of security no matter how fleeting was preferable to a life with no hope of escape from the meanness of bondage.
There was a time when a young black man thought his only redemption from ghetto streets inside the law was to run faster, jump higher, or hit harder. Now he will also look to see if his skills at signifying can purchase the ticket up and out of the hood. If he is good enough perhaps he can transcend to the silver screen and become a legitimate icon. If not, then perhaps, a reality side show, or a comedic drive by can secure the means to be above the mean streets. Where and when do we weigh the cost of it all?
We can continue to examine language. It is a powerful builder of reality but it is far from the only battlefield in this war for identity free of coercive mirroring and stereotypical boundaries. When will we address the core of how we are imaged publicly? When will North American Africans and other marginalized groups negotiate the conversation around coercive mirroring tactics employed in media and educational facilities to push us in to one mega culture indivisible? Who owns the airwaves? Where do the millions of dollars in production and marketing money originate? Who finances the rap industry? Who benefits in majority form the money generated by rap sales? Who puts together the play list for corporate sponsored radio? For that matter who picks the TV shows and signs the movie deals, who picks the images to accompany the nightly news, who decides which stories lead and which are consigned to a line of text at the bottom of the screen? How much power have we invested in the talking heads of all stripe that are the shills of corporate owned media? Whose agenda does corporate owned media serve? Follow the money and you find the real power, the real enabler, and the real culprit.
Sir Too $hort says there is money in the ghetto; and apparently there is money in the act of “acting ghetto”, great entertainment value, and perhaps something systemically darker. Corporate media as a whole creates a master image, of what “black life” consist of, an image with international currency in multiple layers. These images serve as markers of how to and how not to fit into a system. The very commercial romance imbued in rebels who reside outside the image of normal in a malfeasant state of perpetual otherness help to make the image more palatable to those who take their exits and their heroes where they find them. The stereotypical images created tar us all with an “ever-otherness” despite levels or lack of assimilation while it serves also to create “normal by serving as the aberrant counter to what dominant society proffers as proper. It also serves to image what rebellion and disenfranchisement from the system looks like and thus makes suspect all who color outside the lines.
I feel it unnecessary to elaborate on the ills of the American inner city and why one would find oneself desperate enough to be unwise about the measures employed to escape its pitfalls. I won’t even offer my concerns about black flight and the resultant effect on those who are forced by circumstance to continue to try to raise families in conditions as far from optimal as imaginable. I will ask us to consider who creates the readymade personas the disenfranchised seem ready for a price to inhabit. How did we learn to be minstrels? Does someone want to argue it as a natural state of being for us or is it rather as I suspect learned behavior that pays?
If there are large numbers of us who have been infected by the hook of capitalist materialism and still think enough money in America equals equality or at least security I find little wonder or wisdom in it. But when we consider the affect it’s negative impact is immeasurable. It seems what we won’t do for love we will do for money, and perhaps at the end of the day that for many really equals inclusion or at least it’s illusion.
The words in rap music like the words Imus used are American words. It is the American cultural system that gave rise and definition to them. It is this system that has normalized the use of this language and continues to give meaning to it. Language is an agreement. We knew and used this language before corporations brought rap. America has given us the room to agree that we are less, marginal, fatally exotic, “other” than those who structure the images that dominate the airwaves. We have also continued to practice inversion within our practice of the American language and artistic culture so I argue that certain phrases are beyond standard American understanding or appreciation in their use while overstanding that self hatred is most often the baseline motivation in self bashing. Now ask yourselves what makes us hate ourselves so?
End part One.
Ayodele Nzinga
We live in a culture where we often blame the victim. Raped women should not have been attractive. The profiled man should not have been where he was. The mothers of molested children should have watched them better. Most Rappers have a lifetime of a few summers. Most don’t catch on to the pimpish nature of this new wave master slave game until its too late and they find themselves absent even the silver Judas got.
I am reminded of boxing in the colonial era of America. Slaves were pitted against one another for the enjoyment of white audiences. The boxing slaves received preferential treatment and thus often the envy of their less favored brothers and sisters even though matches were often to the death. It would seem that any possibility for a life of security no matter how fleeting was preferable to a life with no hope of escape from the meanness of bondage.
There was a time when a young black man thought his only redemption from ghetto streets inside the law was to run faster, jump higher, or hit harder. Now he will also look to see if his skills at signifying can purchase the ticket up and out of the hood. If he is good enough perhaps he can transcend to the silver screen and become a legitimate icon. If not, then perhaps, a reality side show, or a comedic drive by can secure the means to be above the mean streets. Where and when do we weigh the cost of it all?
We can continue to examine language. It is a powerful builder of reality but it is far from the only battlefield in this war for identity free of coercive mirroring and stereotypical boundaries. When will we address the core of how we are imaged publicly? When will North American Africans and other marginalized groups negotiate the conversation around coercive mirroring tactics employed in media and educational facilities to push us in to one mega culture indivisible? Who owns the airwaves? Where do the millions of dollars in production and marketing money originate? Who finances the rap industry? Who benefits in majority form the money generated by rap sales? Who puts together the play list for corporate sponsored radio? For that matter who picks the TV shows and signs the movie deals, who picks the images to accompany the nightly news, who decides which stories lead and which are consigned to a line of text at the bottom of the screen? How much power have we invested in the talking heads of all stripe that are the shills of corporate owned media? Whose agenda does corporate owned media serve? Follow the money and you find the real power, the real enabler, and the real culprit.
Sir Too $hort says there is money in the ghetto; and apparently there is money in the act of “acting ghetto”, great entertainment value, and perhaps something systemically darker. Corporate media as a whole creates a master image, of what “black life” consist of, an image with international currency in multiple layers. These images serve as markers of how to and how not to fit into a system. The very commercial romance imbued in rebels who reside outside the image of normal in a malfeasant state of perpetual otherness help to make the image more palatable to those who take their exits and their heroes where they find them. The stereotypical images created tar us all with an “ever-otherness” despite levels or lack of assimilation while it serves also to create “normal by serving as the aberrant counter to what dominant society proffers as proper. It also serves to image what rebellion and disenfranchisement from the system looks like and thus makes suspect all who color outside the lines.
I feel it unnecessary to elaborate on the ills of the American inner city and why one would find oneself desperate enough to be unwise about the measures employed to escape its pitfalls. I won’t even offer my concerns about black flight and the resultant effect on those who are forced by circumstance to continue to try to raise families in conditions as far from optimal as imaginable. I will ask us to consider who creates the readymade personas the disenfranchised seem ready for a price to inhabit. How did we learn to be minstrels? Does someone want to argue it as a natural state of being for us or is it rather as I suspect learned behavior that pays?
If there are large numbers of us who have been infected by the hook of capitalist materialism and still think enough money in America equals equality or at least security I find little wonder or wisdom in it. But when we consider the affect it’s negative impact is immeasurable. It seems what we won’t do for love we will do for money, and perhaps at the end of the day that for many really equals inclusion or at least it’s illusion.
The words in rap music like the words Imus used are American words. It is the American cultural system that gave rise and definition to them. It is this system that has normalized the use of this language and continues to give meaning to it. Language is an agreement. We knew and used this language before corporations brought rap. America has given us the room to agree that we are less, marginal, fatally exotic, “other” than those who structure the images that dominate the airwaves. We have also continued to practice inversion within our practice of the American language and artistic culture so I argue that certain phrases are beyond standard American understanding or appreciation in their use while overstanding that self hatred is most often the baseline motivation in self bashing. Now ask yourselves what makes us hate ourselves so?
End part One.
Ayodele Nzinga
Friday, April 20, 2007
Raising Children in a Broken Paradigm
I do pop culture workshops for youth interested in performing arts. I point out the immense influence the media has over our daily lives. I point out that anything that has a corporate sponsor serves that sponsors agenda. I point out how much it encourages us to consume and to compete. I point out how we become either driven or disenfranchised by the countless measures of what we have and what we think that means or what we think we lack and what that says about us. In these workshops I often start this particular conversation with a query to the young ladies. I ask what pressures they feel to dress, behave, and think in certain ways because of what they have seen in the media. For the purpose of this conversation I use music videos as the text for our examination. I of course am trying to help them be able to see and voice the exploitive nature of women measured in hips and ass for entertainment purposes. The workshops get even more heated when I suggest that the videos also exploit men.
We are given markers for normality and markers for disenfranchised behavior. A friend from another country on observing some North American African youth hanging out at a bus stop was moved to hysteria in fear of passing them. They were just being young, bantering, shoving, swearing and being in their reality, which by course negates anything or one over 25 years old. They at no point posed a real threat. My friend shared with me the source of his fear and his certainty they were all armed and ready to gank him at any minute. His source of information was videos broadcast internationally that portray black thugs and Gangsta’s with dope and guns.
Even youth of the dominant culture suffer because of these markers. Often snapping under the pressure of recreating “is” as is. They flirt with quasi-disenfranchisement in their youth with the ability to stop dying their hair green, covering their tats, letting their piercings close and joining the family firm. Yet many suffer in the translation and suffer as much from coercive mirroring as do their counterparts at the margins. We all suffer when they take the stereotype they were trying to be back into their reality as experienced gospel.
In a paradigm that encourages generational splits and has no rites of passage. We allow our children to stumble into adult hood bludgeoned by angst generating pop culture being led mostly by each other. Our youth suffer double time as they make mistakes already made and learn only in time to teach their own youth who of course will not listen and thus we are locked into perpetually inventing the wheel.
In a country that has in many ways removed parents from parenting and now flirt with novel ideas like parenting classes because children don’t come with manuals, in our modernity we forget basic human fundamentals. The job of a parent is to raise well-adjusted adults who contribute to humanity and are capable of raising children who can do the same. We must realize and break cycles even those imposed by society in the cases where society’s method does not serve to make strong families. The family is and has been the cornerstone and mirror for society. If families are strong; we all benefit. If they are not; we all suffer.
Perhaps we should invent this societies rites of passage anew. Consider children who do not look to leave the family and recreate the wheel but who take their place within family systems that nurture the young and provide for the old. What if we make extended family in vogue again and learn to do well together instead of struggling apart? What if we respected the contributions of all, young and old, and became invincible in our shinning beauty? What if perfected humanism was the goal we taught our youth to strive for instead of amassing silver and gold that ultimately weighs the soul down? What if we believed that was the most valuable thing to pass on to them? What if old age was revered and we taught the youth that by honoring our own elders? What if children were considered gifts instead of possessions? What if we weren’t afraid of change and could embrace it? What if we thought our love was the best gift to give a child? What if children thought so too? What if we all remembered being 11, 14, 17? What if we told the truth even when that meant we were wrong or we did not know? What if…
Ayodele Nzinga
We are given markers for normality and markers for disenfranchised behavior. A friend from another country on observing some North American African youth hanging out at a bus stop was moved to hysteria in fear of passing them. They were just being young, bantering, shoving, swearing and being in their reality, which by course negates anything or one over 25 years old. They at no point posed a real threat. My friend shared with me the source of his fear and his certainty they were all armed and ready to gank him at any minute. His source of information was videos broadcast internationally that portray black thugs and Gangsta’s with dope and guns.
Even youth of the dominant culture suffer because of these markers. Often snapping under the pressure of recreating “is” as is. They flirt with quasi-disenfranchisement in their youth with the ability to stop dying their hair green, covering their tats, letting their piercings close and joining the family firm. Yet many suffer in the translation and suffer as much from coercive mirroring as do their counterparts at the margins. We all suffer when they take the stereotype they were trying to be back into their reality as experienced gospel.
In a paradigm that encourages generational splits and has no rites of passage. We allow our children to stumble into adult hood bludgeoned by angst generating pop culture being led mostly by each other. Our youth suffer double time as they make mistakes already made and learn only in time to teach their own youth who of course will not listen and thus we are locked into perpetually inventing the wheel.
In a country that has in many ways removed parents from parenting and now flirt with novel ideas like parenting classes because children don’t come with manuals, in our modernity we forget basic human fundamentals. The job of a parent is to raise well-adjusted adults who contribute to humanity and are capable of raising children who can do the same. We must realize and break cycles even those imposed by society in the cases where society’s method does not serve to make strong families. The family is and has been the cornerstone and mirror for society. If families are strong; we all benefit. If they are not; we all suffer.
Perhaps we should invent this societies rites of passage anew. Consider children who do not look to leave the family and recreate the wheel but who take their place within family systems that nurture the young and provide for the old. What if we make extended family in vogue again and learn to do well together instead of struggling apart? What if we respected the contributions of all, young and old, and became invincible in our shinning beauty? What if perfected humanism was the goal we taught our youth to strive for instead of amassing silver and gold that ultimately weighs the soul down? What if we believed that was the most valuable thing to pass on to them? What if old age was revered and we taught the youth that by honoring our own elders? What if children were considered gifts instead of possessions? What if we weren’t afraid of change and could embrace it? What if we thought our love was the best gift to give a child? What if children thought so too? What if we all remembered being 11, 14, 17? What if we told the truth even when that meant we were wrong or we did not know? What if…
Ayodele Nzinga
Thursday, April 19, 2007
Mental Illness
We got crazy folk in my family. To a greater or lesser degree we all show signs of dysfunction. Some of us are more functional in our dysfunction that others. I think we mirror the world.
To some degree sanity is a matter of perception and experiences. What seems logical to you seems crazy to me given my set of experiences and vice versa.
Who is the arbiter of crazy? Who sets the standards? Are there agendas in the normalization of perceptions, behavior, reasoning? Are there cultural implications at play in the processes of determination? Are mental health workers mentally healthy enough to be the judges of the mental state of others?
Ronald Regan changed the crazy game in California. His most memorable act during his tenure, as Governor of the sunshine state, was to revamp the mental health system. His shake up removed thousands of people from care and placed the majority of them on the streets of California. The Regan legacy still feeds the number amongst the hardcore homeless many wary of being sheltered.
I have noticed is that help is available in abundance after you enter the system. Not so much if you are not in a crisis that annoys others. Things like mass killings, suicides, and other disasters get attention. Silent suffering does not. I spent a day looking for a female intervention group for a young female sex addict in the San Francisco Bay Area to find nothing exists for girls with out criminal referrals. I tried to get police intervention and a referral for a girl working the street to be told there were just too many of them, we help them after we get a number on them. I have heard the stories of colleagues who try to help troubled youth in academic settings and encounter parents or most times the parent (mom) with hands in the air and a look of bitter resignation who “say take them.” These parents have done all they can with no resources and find relief for themselves and their children only after these children break the law. Often with other children in the home the only way some people can continue to parent is to give up the needy child to a system that won’t see them until it’s too late. The system attempts to fix broken things but is not good at helping fragile things become stronger, whole. It enters the picture too late, does too little, and does not serve the subject with the best intentions of normalized relations in the world. The system once engaged now filters existence and creates a dependence situation for the client for better or worst.
What produces all this un–sane-ness? Are some born wired differently? Is insanity genetic, environmental, or local to specific psyches? Is it a reaction to perception, toxic stimuli, contextual mismanagement, or a permanent “normal” state for those who suffer what we call mental health problems?
What do you do if your therapist jumps off the bridge on Thanksgiving Day? My sons did. Then there’s the woman who murdered her husband and defended herself counseled by fairies, the husband was a mental health professional who slept with the murderous wife when she was his teenage patient. Then there is the mental health professional who is currently under arrest for molesting his young male patients. Then there is the system in which all this exist.
I have heard a lot about “teaching moments” of late. Is anyone learning? I submit Mental Health in America is unhealthy. I would have us look to Einstein and realize maybe we in doing the same thing over and over exemplify insanity in our care of the mentally ill. I consider the skewed paradigm in which we attempt to function here in the belly and wonder along with James Baldwin in closing, “It’s a wonder we aren’t all stark raving mad.”
Ayodele Nzinga
To some degree sanity is a matter of perception and experiences. What seems logical to you seems crazy to me given my set of experiences and vice versa.
Who is the arbiter of crazy? Who sets the standards? Are there agendas in the normalization of perceptions, behavior, reasoning? Are there cultural implications at play in the processes of determination? Are mental health workers mentally healthy enough to be the judges of the mental state of others?
Ronald Regan changed the crazy game in California. His most memorable act during his tenure, as Governor of the sunshine state, was to revamp the mental health system. His shake up removed thousands of people from care and placed the majority of them on the streets of California. The Regan legacy still feeds the number amongst the hardcore homeless many wary of being sheltered.
I have noticed is that help is available in abundance after you enter the system. Not so much if you are not in a crisis that annoys others. Things like mass killings, suicides, and other disasters get attention. Silent suffering does not. I spent a day looking for a female intervention group for a young female sex addict in the San Francisco Bay Area to find nothing exists for girls with out criminal referrals. I tried to get police intervention and a referral for a girl working the street to be told there were just too many of them, we help them after we get a number on them. I have heard the stories of colleagues who try to help troubled youth in academic settings and encounter parents or most times the parent (mom) with hands in the air and a look of bitter resignation who “say take them.” These parents have done all they can with no resources and find relief for themselves and their children only after these children break the law. Often with other children in the home the only way some people can continue to parent is to give up the needy child to a system that won’t see them until it’s too late. The system attempts to fix broken things but is not good at helping fragile things become stronger, whole. It enters the picture too late, does too little, and does not serve the subject with the best intentions of normalized relations in the world. The system once engaged now filters existence and creates a dependence situation for the client for better or worst.
What produces all this un–sane-ness? Are some born wired differently? Is insanity genetic, environmental, or local to specific psyches? Is it a reaction to perception, toxic stimuli, contextual mismanagement, or a permanent “normal” state for those who suffer what we call mental health problems?
What do you do if your therapist jumps off the bridge on Thanksgiving Day? My sons did. Then there’s the woman who murdered her husband and defended herself counseled by fairies, the husband was a mental health professional who slept with the murderous wife when she was his teenage patient. Then there is the mental health professional who is currently under arrest for molesting his young male patients. Then there is the system in which all this exist.
I have heard a lot about “teaching moments” of late. Is anyone learning? I submit Mental Health in America is unhealthy. I would have us look to Einstein and realize maybe we in doing the same thing over and over exemplify insanity in our care of the mentally ill. I consider the skewed paradigm in which we attempt to function here in the belly and wonder along with James Baldwin in closing, “It’s a wonder we aren’t all stark raving mad.”
Ayodele Nzinga
Monday, April 16, 2007
My Brother Marvin, A Review
By Ayodele Nzinga, MA, MFA
Off the top, this black woman had a hard time with standing for the national anthem at the opening of a theater curtain. My Brother Marvin at the Paramount Theater on April 15, 2007 began that way. The audience was asked to stand through an at least 2 minute rendition of the Star Spangled Banner replete with a light show to a backdrop of a flag fluttering on the movie screen used at various points in this production of the life and times of Mr. Marvin Gaye.
It helps to know that Marvin’s 1983 NBA All Star Basketball game rendition of the oft-debated anthem was a bootleg hit for The Prince of Motown. But the fact slips between one of the many cracks in this presentation. This questionable beginning was underscored by the annoying fact that The Paramount continued to seat audience well into the first half. The rather unsettling beginning gives way to an uneven performance of a weak script that borrows lines from other plays and even owes it’s name to flipping the title of Frankie Gaye’s (another younger sibling), badly received autobiography of his brother.
As the show proper opens we find the first of a trio of Marvins and the rest of the immediate family introduced in it’s dysfunction. The mother played by, Allyson Williams, with the voice of a gospel angel, Ms. Williams delivered stellar vocals, if her acting was a bit stiff, and her character seemed as old as 9 yr. Old Marvin’s mother as she did as the adult Marvin’s mom. She was the first bearer of a string of oddly placed asides to the audience by way of narration. These chronological markers for the most part detracted in their telling rather than showing and did an incomplete job of supplying a few needed clues to decipher the lived life of Marvin Gaye if you weren’t a fan of a certain age.
Havier Hill Roller introduces us to the hyperbolic acting style that permeates the production which has the pace and volume of a concert. And indeed is most alive, and impressive during the recreations of Gaye’s performance history. The performance chronology is sufficient to anchor us in time and is one of the plays strengths.
The Motown, story in the story, history was a bright piece of flash and dazzle that drew unintended laughs as a retirement weight group of conked Temps blew the hell out of a Temptations medley, after some lack-luster Supremes scandalized Ms. Ross. Appearances by a scary David Ruffin and a boisterously gregarious Barry Gordy (who also blesses us with odd and ill placed asides), and a tempting Tammy Terrell, fill out the Motown scenario.
After what hat seemed a long hour and a half a twenty-minute intermission was announced, the lengthy intermission culminated in audience trailing back in for twenty minutes after the curtain went up again. This is a long production starting at 7:30 and ending well after 10:00PM.
The second half moved better than the first borne by longer performance vignettes from Keith Washington as a mature Marvin Gaye between some very Gaye like performances with the aforementioned movie screen as a backdrop. The movie segments were somewhat distracting competing with some of the shows better moments. The footage offered was at times baffling in conjunction with the lyrics being performed and the repeating of images was in effective and inconceivable in the portrayal of someone who must be the subject of considerable footage.
Keith Washington does a lot to make you forget about some of the problems with the script and staging by offering up some amazing musical moments that allow you to suspend belief and fall into the illusion of Marvin alive before you.
The reviewer admits that, the overacting that made me cringe at the scene transitions seemed to enliven the audience, which talked back to the stage in their enthusiasm at several points in the production. In fact a quick survey of the audience, which included The Honorable Ronald Dellums and wife, as well as Marvin Gaye’s niece, pronounced the offering thoroughly entertaining, putting this reviewer’s criticisms in the minority opinion column.
It becomes apparent that My Brother Marvin belongs to a particular genre of theater popular at the Paramount in Oakland. The plays always musical have sloppy storylines but they provide a type of theater not available to its faithful audiences elsewhere. These plays reflect the life situations, the struggles and joys, tinged by faith and optimism, of the life and times of black folk.
When viewed through the prism of black traditional theater a lot of what irks is non important and what works is appreciated much more. We have a raw rendering of reality, unspoken parts of the script, audience participation out of total immersion, an artistic documentation of our times with its luminaries tied together and spiced with music that speaks volumes. This is an insider addendum to a story we already know with a, anti-hero, hero we already love. In that respect it’s a peep into a time capsule, a dramatizing of a legendary life, with a view of black religiosity in its many faces, a critique of the music industry and a view of the artistic struggles of the one and only Marvin Gaye, The Prince of Motown.
Off the top, this black woman had a hard time with standing for the national anthem at the opening of a theater curtain. My Brother Marvin at the Paramount Theater on April 15, 2007 began that way. The audience was asked to stand through an at least 2 minute rendition of the Star Spangled Banner replete with a light show to a backdrop of a flag fluttering on the movie screen used at various points in this production of the life and times of Mr. Marvin Gaye.
It helps to know that Marvin’s 1983 NBA All Star Basketball game rendition of the oft-debated anthem was a bootleg hit for The Prince of Motown. But the fact slips between one of the many cracks in this presentation. This questionable beginning was underscored by the annoying fact that The Paramount continued to seat audience well into the first half. The rather unsettling beginning gives way to an uneven performance of a weak script that borrows lines from other plays and even owes it’s name to flipping the title of Frankie Gaye’s (another younger sibling), badly received autobiography of his brother.
As the show proper opens we find the first of a trio of Marvins and the rest of the immediate family introduced in it’s dysfunction. The mother played by, Allyson Williams, with the voice of a gospel angel, Ms. Williams delivered stellar vocals, if her acting was a bit stiff, and her character seemed as old as 9 yr. Old Marvin’s mother as she did as the adult Marvin’s mom. She was the first bearer of a string of oddly placed asides to the audience by way of narration. These chronological markers for the most part detracted in their telling rather than showing and did an incomplete job of supplying a few needed clues to decipher the lived life of Marvin Gaye if you weren’t a fan of a certain age.
Havier Hill Roller introduces us to the hyperbolic acting style that permeates the production which has the pace and volume of a concert. And indeed is most alive, and impressive during the recreations of Gaye’s performance history. The performance chronology is sufficient to anchor us in time and is one of the plays strengths.
The Motown, story in the story, history was a bright piece of flash and dazzle that drew unintended laughs as a retirement weight group of conked Temps blew the hell out of a Temptations medley, after some lack-luster Supremes scandalized Ms. Ross. Appearances by a scary David Ruffin and a boisterously gregarious Barry Gordy (who also blesses us with odd and ill placed asides), and a tempting Tammy Terrell, fill out the Motown scenario.
After what hat seemed a long hour and a half a twenty-minute intermission was announced, the lengthy intermission culminated in audience trailing back in for twenty minutes after the curtain went up again. This is a long production starting at 7:30 and ending well after 10:00PM.
The second half moved better than the first borne by longer performance vignettes from Keith Washington as a mature Marvin Gaye between some very Gaye like performances with the aforementioned movie screen as a backdrop. The movie segments were somewhat distracting competing with some of the shows better moments. The footage offered was at times baffling in conjunction with the lyrics being performed and the repeating of images was in effective and inconceivable in the portrayal of someone who must be the subject of considerable footage.
Keith Washington does a lot to make you forget about some of the problems with the script and staging by offering up some amazing musical moments that allow you to suspend belief and fall into the illusion of Marvin alive before you.
The reviewer admits that, the overacting that made me cringe at the scene transitions seemed to enliven the audience, which talked back to the stage in their enthusiasm at several points in the production. In fact a quick survey of the audience, which included The Honorable Ronald Dellums and wife, as well as Marvin Gaye’s niece, pronounced the offering thoroughly entertaining, putting this reviewer’s criticisms in the minority opinion column.
It becomes apparent that My Brother Marvin belongs to a particular genre of theater popular at the Paramount in Oakland. The plays always musical have sloppy storylines but they provide a type of theater not available to its faithful audiences elsewhere. These plays reflect the life situations, the struggles and joys, tinged by faith and optimism, of the life and times of black folk.
When viewed through the prism of black traditional theater a lot of what irks is non important and what works is appreciated much more. We have a raw rendering of reality, unspoken parts of the script, audience participation out of total immersion, an artistic documentation of our times with its luminaries tied together and spiced with music that speaks volumes. This is an insider addendum to a story we already know with a, anti-hero, hero we already love. In that respect it’s a peep into a time capsule, a dramatizing of a legendary life, with a view of black religiosity in its many faces, a critique of the music industry and a view of the artistic struggles of the one and only Marvin Gaye, The Prince of Motown.
Friday, April 13, 2007
Hear some Word
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listen to the player
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One,
Word
read the blog
listen to the player
leave us a comment
One,
Word
Tuesday, April 10, 2007
To my Lost Boyz
(For Koran & Stanley and all my chocolate boy/men dancing on the wire)
I would pour out my own blood like libation
string my every dream in life and burn them
if I could gift to you the lessons of my life
and have you spared from having to earn
these scars that crisscross my soul
I will to you visions of my darkness
to save you from your own dark holes
I will unmask each and every mistake
false belief and misstep
to help you come correct
Horses have been drug to water
yet many have died of thirst
drink you here from the book
of my life so your own may bloom
with flowers I never dared conceive
Show to me the future with you in it
writ large enough for me to see clearly
even though I am balancing you on my shoulders
as I balance on the shoulders of those come before me
Sing to me of a future with grandchildren who look like we
looked in the time of wild seeds just being sown
You and I shall lift them to your shoulders
Schooling them as a payment of debt owed
to those who schooled us, held us,
made mistakes and learned for and from us
Ashe
WordSlanger © 3/2007
I would pour out my own blood like libation
string my every dream in life and burn them
if I could gift to you the lessons of my life
and have you spared from having to earn
these scars that crisscross my soul
I will to you visions of my darkness
to save you from your own dark holes
I will unmask each and every mistake
false belief and misstep
to help you come correct
Horses have been drug to water
yet many have died of thirst
drink you here from the book
of my life so your own may bloom
with flowers I never dared conceive
Show to me the future with you in it
writ large enough for me to see clearly
even though I am balancing you on my shoulders
as I balance on the shoulders of those come before me
Sing to me of a future with grandchildren who look like we
looked in the time of wild seeds just being sown
You and I shall lift them to your shoulders
Schooling them as a payment of debt owed
to those who schooled us, held us,
made mistakes and learned for and from us
Ashe
WordSlanger © 3/2007
Sunday, April 1, 2007
Television
In Memorial to the dead in war, in hope we find a better way of seeing, some higher way of knowing.
One,
Word
TV's even 50 inches
reduce reality
tiny freeways
dropped
in between
trees
(aerial views)
do not convey
the inside of
the car whose
windows don..t open
in 85 degrees
not moving
stuck
like a
fly on paper
gulping air like a guppy
but
on
TV
they wind along surreal
like thread thru a needle
as you think 15 mins
early out the door is the thang
TV
is too small
2 removed
too sterile
they oughta paint war on yo wallz
in smell-a-vision, horror, bleeding and gasping,
reeking of desperation and death. Peopled w/ dying /dead/ dying
patriots/terrorist/peace-keepers/killers murdering in the name of
peace
which is off stage somewhere impatiently waiting for
justice, who is somewhere on vacation
The TV screen is too small to show me how to send my sons to
kill their sons so
their sons will have no more sons, while the mothers mourn the murdered ones
they gather together again in the womb of earth
to dust from dust
to study war no mo
truly, TV is too small
to tell me this
disconnected stills that move
pieces of a picture
cut off edges gobbled by lying mouths
edges running with blood that won't come off
we offer blood instead of rice pouring it into hungry mouths crying
never again, then rising to kill again, they fear more, so they kill more
so more fear walks in the night thinking of killing to ease fear so
sleep can come again, their nightmares are not in prime time
no lines of coffins or grotesque piles of appendages no faces for
the dead on tv, we watch in glade scented rooms removed unable to smell the copper and
sulfur lingering in the air, we blindly wait for depleted uranium death
to be left in our bathrooms and bedrooms but never on tv
the truth is asleep
somewhere off the screen
which is too small
WordSlanger
7/25/03
One,
Word
TV's even 50 inches
reduce reality
tiny freeways
dropped
in between
trees
(aerial views)
do not convey
the inside of
the car whose
windows don..t open
in 85 degrees
not moving
stuck
like a
fly on paper
gulping air like a guppy
but
on
TV
they wind along surreal
like thread thru a needle
as you think 15 mins
early out the door is the thang
TV
is too small
2 removed
too sterile
they oughta paint war on yo wallz
in smell-a-vision, horror, bleeding and gasping,
reeking of desperation and death. Peopled w/ dying /dead/ dying
patriots/terrorist/peace-keepers/killers murdering in the name of
peace
which is off stage somewhere impatiently waiting for
justice, who is somewhere on vacation
The TV screen is too small to show me how to send my sons to
kill their sons so
their sons will have no more sons, while the mothers mourn the murdered ones
they gather together again in the womb of earth
to dust from dust
to study war no mo
truly, TV is too small
to tell me this
disconnected stills that move
pieces of a picture
cut off edges gobbled by lying mouths
edges running with blood that won't come off
we offer blood instead of rice pouring it into hungry mouths crying
never again, then rising to kill again, they fear more, so they kill more
so more fear walks in the night thinking of killing to ease fear so
sleep can come again, their nightmares are not in prime time
no lines of coffins or grotesque piles of appendages no faces for
the dead on tv, we watch in glade scented rooms removed unable to smell the copper and
sulfur lingering in the air, we blindly wait for depleted uranium death
to be left in our bathrooms and bedrooms but never on tv
the truth is asleep
somewhere off the screen
which is too small
WordSlanger
7/25/03
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