I judge choices, not the people who make them.
Kids Are Kinda Similar to Drunks
“You think bartending is hard try teaching kindergarten. Those fuckers stagger around barelyy able to walk, spewing incoherent rhyming nonsense, and all they do is drink milk before they pass out. I knew a bartender once that had a stroke at work on a busy friday night. He died on the way to the hospital, and a waitress stole his tip glass. You guys should probably wear a helmet to avoid the possibility of further damage.” - Anonymous Commentator at www.philadelphiaweekly.com
Strong Bad Email: Alternate Universe
Dennis Bergkamp: Best Striker Ever
Colorfully Vulgar in Las Vegas
1.
This is the film actor Sidney Poitier. You may have heard of him.
He strikes the most beautiful profile in the 1967 flick Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner but plays the least interesting character of all, Dr. John Prentice, a very well-composed Negro—that word always makes me chuckle—who enters into an interracial romance with Joanna Drayton (Katharine Houghton), the idealistic daughter of a fair-minded San Franciscan couple. Agonizingly thoughtful without revealing very many thoughts, Prentice is not so much a person as he is a prop—an enchanted ebony mirror that stalks about the screen, bearing the kaleidoscopic moods of those around him. He is the new old Negro Problem, a mindjob, a writing prompt. And in most cases, he is the least colorful character ever on screen.
Prentice’s foil is the feisty cook Tillie Binks, played by the electric Isabel Sanford of All in the Family and The Jeffersons. Off-screen most of the movie—no doubt attending to various chores—she materializes no more than a moment after she’s called. It’s almost as if she’s of the house and has the ability to travel through its walls. Easily the most conservative character in the film, to the surprise of young Joanna, Binks flips out when she stumbles upon Prentice tip-toeing through the Drayton residence in his handsome suit. Having internalized destabilizing levels of the country’s madness and lived the life of servitude for at least as long as Joanna’s been alive, she sees the good doctor as an abomination and never misses the opportunity to let him or anyone else know so.
Her psychology is much more interesting to me than Prentice’s but it, too, is left largely unexplored. Nevertheless, a tête-à-tête between Prentice and his unlikely tormentor produces one of the more revealing moments in the movie. The outspoken mammy figure manages to coax something like pettiness from the magical mirror.
2.
I have to admit, the Dominican girl was striking. Slender and curvy, she stood apart from the other ladies twirling about the Coyote Ugly stage in that she could dance with a few degrees of grace. But from the beginning the math was bad.
When my cousin Shareef and I found her seated, she was flanked by three good looking female companions, all of whom possessed decidedly more Indio features than their outgoing friend—brown skin, dark eyes, wonderfully angular cheekbones. A day or two earlier, I would have hollered, happily. I prompted Shareef to keep it moving, though. While I had no doubts about the force of our collective charm, I knew the odds of us prying two girls away from the group in the limited time we had left in our stay were slim. Besides, we were already in good with a pair of Harlemites staying off-strip at The Palm. Undissuadable as ever, Shareef went for the digits anyway.
We met the girls at a restaurant later that evening. They had already finished their meal but needed help polishing off a colossal ice cream sundae. I saw that Shareef had The Adequate Dancer pretty open and turned my attention to the angel-faced Brazilian whom I presumed to be the resident hater of the group by the way she turned her nose as conversation drifted farther and farther away from her. My logic: The girl who felt she had the least at stake in the goings-on would be the one to pull the plug on everything. I reintroduced myself and asked how she was enjoying Vegas. Embarrassed, she mimed a response. The girl had no voice—it was lost sometime during their stay. Fuck.
I looked at The Mute for a moment, her face so adorably round, and told her that I had come up with a solution. She smiled shyly, as I began to pull out my pockets looking for the Muji notepad I usually carry. Fuck. I left it at the hotel. Not to worry, I said, and walked over to the bar to grab a pen and a stack of napkins.
I imagined that my next move would go down in history in The Postmodern Pick-Up Artist’s Guidebook, somewhere in the middle section: A play-by-play of how The Mute and I created a mess of coy notes, a private text if you will, pieces of which she would take home to Boston and, remembering our affair fondly, occasionally revisit, trying to reconstruct the whole from the fragments in her possession. The chapter would be called “Analog Instant Messages: Fast Strategies for Creating a Private World in a Public Space.” Frank T.J. Mackey would consider tweeting about me, before determining that attaching a single Post-it note with my name on it to his computer monitor would be truer to the spirit of the tactic.
The bartender passed me some napkins. They were black as ink. Fuck.
3.
Katharine Houghton’s Joanna brilliantly captures the curious lightness of an impossibly open-minded white girl. When she says, “It never occurred to me that I might fall in love with a Negro,” it’s almost endearing. Fresh-faced with a matter-of-fact manner, she goes about things as if she has never known disappointment or impediment—even if she has. She acts without pause, embodying a kind of unreflective progress. Groomed in an integrity chamber—a futuristic vacuum containing only righteousness and florescent lights—she suffers from a perversion of the senses different from that which the rest of us here in America are subject. Her true form is a moderate to possibly very strong shower of politically correct platitude arrows. She is a principle bearing down on you, unselfconscious and suffocating like someone else’s terrible aftershave.
4.
No Mas Presents: “Dock Ellis & The LSD No-No” by James Blagden
(via @livefromphilly)
Barcelona and the Idea of the Beautiful Game
“Barça—though winning the game was surely uppermost in the minds of the players—were playing in a style that was haunted by an ideal, and they weren’t prepared to surrender the ideal even if it might have meant winning the match. Like a few other teams blessed with extraordinary technical ability, especially Wenger’s Arsenal, they seem to train with the assumption that if they realize the ideal, the wins will come. But implicitly, maybe even unconsciously in Barcelona’s case, it’s the ideal, and not the wins, that they’re primarily striving for.” - Brian Phillips (via: runofplay)
I know I’m not stressing out cuz my mood ring didn’t even change.
D.J.T.
Not sure whether to mourn Lévi-Strauss or throw dance party at my place. Please advise.
“A writer’s personality is his manner of being in the world: his writing style is the unavoidable trace of that manner. When you understand style in these terms, you don’t think of it as merely a matter of fanciful syntax, or as the flamboyant icing atop a plain literary cake, nor as the uncontrollable result of some mysterious velocity coiled within language itself. Rather, you see style as a personal necessity, as the only possible expression of a particular human consciousness. Style is a writer’s way of telling the truth. Literary success or failure, by this measure, depends not only on the refinement of words on a page, but in the refinement of a consciousness, what Aristotle called the education of the emotions.” - Zadie Smith (“Fail Better”)
Saul Williams will be in Philly tomorrow performing at the Theatre of Living Arts. This gives Your Humble Curator an excuse to resurrect and slightly redress an old piece from one of his defunct blogs.
The Multifarious Awesomeness
of NiggyTardust
For all its swag talk, the present hip-hop scene is woefully tame. Most raps are soft with no substance–idle threats from dudes who’d rather be designing jeans or accumulating overly dramatic body art. Instead of aiming to be ice cold in the booth, a lot of rhymers aim simply to be cool. But the cool they aspire to is calculated status quo. Enter: Saul Williams. Around this time last year, I nearly lost my mind listening to “Black History Month,” the rumbling, punk-infused burner that kicks off Williams’ latest album, The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of NiggyTardust! .
You may already know the talented Mr. Williams from the spoken word circuit, his MTV-published books, movies (Slam! or K-PAX–yes, he acted opposite Kevin Spacey, playing the eccentric-black-dude role to a tee) or the recently defunct sitcom-you-wish-was-a-porno Girlfriends. He has a couple other albums, too: Amethyst Rock Star, produced by Def Jam legend Rick Rubin, and a self-titled joint featuring a couple certifiable heat-rocks (“Telegraph” and “Black Stacey”). But back to NiggyTardust!–a hip-hop stew brimming with the gritty candor, intelligence and intensity lacking in most of today’s black music. To put it briefly: NiggyTardust! is the most elegant wrecking ball to swing between my ears in some time.
Piecing together what the album means, the inscription on Frank O’Hara’s tombstone comes to mind: “Grace / to be born and live as variously as possible.” Of course, O’Hara’s words harken back to another great American bard, Walt Whitman, who wrote: “Do I contradict myself? / Very well, then I contradict myself / (I am large, I contain multitudes.)” The thing is, the sense of entitlement and possibility these guys speak of is still something frequently denied to too many people. Frantz Fanon’s words still hold true: we are “overdetermined from without.” So, WTF is NiggyTardust!? It’s Williams’ assorted elocutions on the possibility of self-actualization–of vastness–in a society in which a kid can be beaten to death by a mob of other teens simply for being present.
Production by Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor, Thavius Beck and CX KiDTRONiK provides the backdrop for Williams’ restless thoughts. The tracks blend rock, industrial and electro with various hip-hop styles. That may sound wild and unwieldy, but Williams’ consistently strong vocals unify the record. Besides juggling flows, the poet-actor-emcee employs a rolodex of striking deliveries as he wrestles with the thought of being “overdetermined,” ill-fated, fixed. He’s ferociously ripping lyrics one minute, lunging into NIN-tinged rockiness the next, before uttering Prince-like monologues and faux-slowed and throwed Zen braggadocio. Even with the occasional glitch, Williams puts on a fantastic performance.
After the knock-you-on-your-ass tremors of “Black History Month,” the agitation continues with the synth-rock track “Convict Colony,” a song that’s especially relevant in light of America’s terrifying incarceration stats. By now Williams’ improved vocals are evident. He has always had a decent handle on melody, but he hasn’t always displayed the pipes to effectively pull off his ventures into rock territory. A diehard Public Enemy fan, Williams pays homage to the politically-minded group and its collage-like production aesthetic with “Tr(n)igger,” which samples the classic song “Welcome to the Terror Dome.” “Tr(n)igger” is followed by another nod to music royalty, a percussive cover of U2’s “Sunday Bloody Sunday.” Once again Williams comes through on the vocal tip.
With its base drum booms, “Break” is like a muscular, low end-heavy companion to the DJ Krust collabo “Coded Language” off Williams’ debut album. The native New Yorker deftly depicts the atmosphere of fear pervading the country and performs a sonic exorcism of the language of division, fear-mongering and rage that keeps people predictably at odds and in check, calling on listeners to “Break the cycle, break the chain / Break the hurt and break the pain.”
Williams gets his lean on with “DNA,” borrowing a few production tricks from his country cousins, as he continues to point out modes of social conditioning and oppression: “Son, we got you programmed like a beat”–or beatings. He suggests that music can help keep the masses under a spell or open “doorways into other worlds.”
Williams skips syllables across the staggered Afro-beat of “Scared Money,” a funky call to arms that I envision being performed with a gang of costumed dancers on a colorful float-like hovercraft cruising the streets of Brooklyn, Lagos, Nairobi, Kingston, Rio De Janiero and New Orleans. The flagrant stunting stops on the next track, however, as Williams sensually croons vocals on “Raw,” a reverential revision of stripped-down tunes such as “Wait (The Whisper Song)” and “Drop It Like It’s Hot.” The track’s also got the most stunning opening line of the last couple years.
“WTF” contains the uplifting refrain “Bring yourself to be yourself tonight,” but it’s followed by a suite of songs that reveal a man divided, broken, desiring change but overcome with a sense of melancholic fate, pre-figured failure. On “Skin of a Drum,” “No One Ever Does” and “Banged and Blown Through,” Williams swaps some of the performative levity of previous tracks for a more somber, introspective tone. The switchero is signaled by a morphing musical backdrop, as well. Industrial strength drums remain, but the tracks trade hip-hip rhythms for a rockier texture. In other words, things take a turn for The Emo.
The viola, which featured heavily on Amethyst Rock Star, turns up again on “Banged and Blown Through,” in which Williams likens himself and other urban block-huggers to instruments “burst wide open, smashed and bent.” Calling on an external conductor for care and protection, he asks, “Can you bring out the song in me?”
Williams returns to bellicose form on “Raised to Be Lowered,” bouncing between gravelly shouts of affirmation and self-doubt on a piano-driven beat that would have Dr. Dre nodding himself silly. RTBL could have sufficed as a final track. But Williams goes Spike Lee on us, ending with a bang on the album’s lurching closer, “The Ritual,” a song exploring life and death, violence and sex.
He gruffly chants familiar invectives over the stuttering beat, before thumbing through his library of American classics to pluck an image from Richard Wright’s claustrophobic novel Native Son: “Bigger Thomas, I promise / Leave a corpse in the furnace.” Once again Fanon comes to mind. In his frantic essay “The Fact of Blackness,” the Antillean psychologist and philosopher describes his condition as a man “woven out of a thousand details, anecdotes, stories” and battered by a confluence of real and imagined cultural baggage: “tom-toms, cannibalism, intellectual deficiency, fetishism, racial defects [and] slave-ships.” Despite the swirling nausea he feels, he finds that he is shunned, preyed upon and even feared.
After the chorus Williams adopts the swagger of a gun-toting thug. But he imbues the all-too-familiar figure with cosmic grace and stature and a keen sense of irony: “Nigga what? I’m complicated down to my strut / Like the way I hold my gat, flat on its side, like a pug.”
If the first half of the song is about the specter of violent death, the second half is about making love and life, as Williams drops the gangster guise to talk “God and pussy.” Blips and whirls worthy of your neighborhood shake club liven the mix, while the wordsmith ruminates: “Objects of desire and ill repute / Some rather seek up high than dig and grind that inner truth / The angel of my eye a bit too fly to substitute / With any other form than the messiah’s / Black Mariahs.” Williams hones in on his theme with a pun on Black Mariah, a hearse, and the Black Madonna, a symbol of life thought by some to derive from the Egyptian goddess Isis. Legend has it, Isis brought her dismembered husband, Osiris, back from the dead and, in the same moment, conceived Horus.
Williams is spellbound by the slinky celestial temptress, who can “move it slow enough for [him] to question everything.” Desperate violence and spiritual ecstasy merge into T-Pain-and-Flo-Rida fantasy. And why not? Ultimately the album represents an artist’s attempt to bridge worlds (“male and female, human and divine, older and younger generations, the living and the dead, the sacred and the secular, the universe and its origin”) and embrace life’s contradictions.
David Bowie - “Soul Love”
The Poetics of Football: Gimme
Room to Roam
Tuesday night changed it all. Co-ed pick-up soccer at Starfinder jumped shark, much to the chagrin of Your Humble Curator.
Nearly 50 people, only a fraction of whom I recognized from Philly’s adult league circuit, showed up to ball at the indoor facility in Manayunk. As I laced up on the crowded turf field, I borrowed the look of baffled indignance Peter wears in that episode of Family Guy once he finds out that his favorite watering hole, The Drunken Clam, has been transmogrified into a stuffy English pub full of smarmy, snaggle-toothed Brits.
While not totally refashioned, my happy place was overrun with strangers wearing clunky shin guards and tacky, five-year-old cleats. I got uptight—the exact opposite of how I like to be before doing what I love.
Discreetly located on the calm side of Main Street—a five-minute walk from my old home and any number of bars good for post-game drinks—Starfinder is one of my favorite places in the city. The Starfinder Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to exposing urban youth to the beautiful game, is headquartered there. The poorly insulated blue building also acts as a kind of dojo-cum-monastic refuge to an older contingent of football fanatics. An hour spent there is an hour of relative peace: relief from the daily grind via friendly combat and creative expression.
Soccer is, after all, sport with lofty designs. Observing a match from Starfinder’s second-floor balcony, the trained eye sees something like an improvised kinetic painting in progress: a quiet field gradually overtaken by layers of line and color varying in rhythm and intensity, as players loop and weave across its surface, converging and dispersing in well-rehearsed patterns and sequences of movement inspired by the moment. Of course, there has to be enough physical space for all this action to occur.
People who know the game will point out that players distinguish themselves by how skillfully they function in restricted spaces: The ones with the most creative minds, precise touches, and well-timed movements on and off the ball will solve the spatial puzzles opposing teams present, finding or creating gaps to exploit on the way to goal.
On a normal night this is true. On a normal night, fewer than 30 people show up to play pick-up, splitting into three teams of eight or nine players. These are reasonable numbers for a 70-yard field; they are numbers that allow for quality, free flowing games, in which skillful players don’t have to worry about clattering into opposition with every half-touch. With any more people, however, the field becomes overcrowded and play gets very choppy.
This was the case last Tuesday, when attendance boomed and teams ballooned to 11 or 12 players. The organizers enjoyed a boon in fees, but no one really enjoyed the rhythmless matches.
I blog, therefore I am.
