AFROGEEKS

Recently arrived in the mailbox is this massive, and lavishly illustrated (my own favorites are the shots of Keith & Mendi Obadike, and of George Lewis in performance) book from the Center for Black Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. This volume, edited by Anna Everett and Amber J. Wallace, grows out of two amazing conferences hosted at the Santa Barbara campus, but this is no collection of "proceedings." Rather, the book is a carefully assembled and assiduously critical collection of essays on race and technology.

Contributors include Elisa Joy White, Raiford Gaines, Daphine Washington, Guy Berger and the aforementioned George Lewis (whose essay is a great thing to read while listening to his trombone playing), along with a critical introduction by Anna Everett.

The book comes with a remarkable DVD that offers highlights from the conference presentations. The DVD alone is a powerful resource that many of us will be citing from in conferences to come.

For information about the book, email the Center at: ctr4blst@cbs.ucsb.edu .

OH, BALTIMORE

Audience members explaining Baltimore's unusual system for judging poetry performances.

Earlier this month I traveled to Baltimore to read in the i.e. series with poets and old friends Beth Joselow and Phyllis Rosenzweig. Beth has a new book from Chax Press, BEGIN AT ONCE. We hadn't seen each other for more than six years, so it was a delight to read on a program together.

The reading was held at THE CARRIAGE HOUSE, a building off an alley that has been converted into a performance space with a beautiful, wooden, elevated stage sporting a grand piano and a xylophone-looking device featuring bells in chromatic arrangement.

P. Inman, profiling ----

Tina Darragh was also there, seen here with Beth Joselow. She and Pete were to read in the same series another date. I was just thinking of her because I'd gotten the new release of THE COMPLETE MILES DAVIS ON THE CORNER SESSIONS -- a great package that made me go to my book shelf and pull down my copy of Tina's FROM ON THE CORNER TO OFF --

Phyllis --

Tom Mandel, piano in background!


For more photos, with a good view of the converted space and stage (and those shots I wasn't able to take of myself) click here.

SANTA BARBARA BOOK FESTIVAL 2007

Dawn broke with the strong scent of freshly cut pages in the air Saturday, so I headed off for the 9th annual Santa Barbara Book and Author Festival.


I'm not entirely sure what this guy's connection to Santa Barbara is, but there he was.











Al Young, California's current Poet Laureate, was also on hand. This was the first time we've seen each other since the American Literature Association in May of 2006.

























































I spent most of the time when I wasn't on stage out at the poets' table, visiting with local poet and activist Sojourner Kincaid Rolle, who has a new CD of her poetry, BLACK STREETS. Here she is with Catherine Daly, who was displaying her beautiful book PAPER CRAFT.











Catherine Daly organized the SERIOUS PLAY panel that I read on. Here she is with our fellow poets Yunte Huang and Michelle Detorie.


Professor Luis Leal was celebrating his 100th birthday that day. I hope I can spend my 100th birthday at a book fair. Leal has also endowed an annual book award. This year's winner was Alejandro Morales, author of THE RAG DOLL PLAGUES. It was heartening to see a long line of young students waiting to speak with him and to collect autographs on their copies of his novel.




This was also my first opportunity to hear a reading by Shirley Geok-Lin Lim, who I've known for years, and whose anthology THE FORBIDDEN STITCH I have often used in my courses.

POETRY READINGS ON TWO COASTS

Two poetry readings coming up for any of you who might be on either coast!

Saturday, Sept. 29 -- SERIOUS PLAY
Featuring Catherine Daly, A.L. Nielsen, Yunte Huang, Michelle Detorie & Bruna Mori. Santa Barbara Museum of Art -- 2:15 PM

This reading is part of the Santa Barbara Book Festival. There will be other readings throughout the day.

















Saturday, October 6 - Baltimore, MD
A poetry reading featuring A.L. Nielsen and Beth Joselow
8:00 PM
Carriage House
2225 Hargrove Street








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Now playing: "05 Dr. Honouris Cousa" by Cannonball Adderley
via FoxyTunes

LIBBY REFLUX SYNDROME

The air is still filled with apologetics for the Scooter Libby commutation, and many defenders of the Bush administration continue to insist that there was no "underlying crime" in the Libby case.

Yes, these are all too often the same people who insisted loudly that Bill Clinton should be removed from office for perjury, what with his being, as they insisted on putting it, "the chief law enforcement officer" of our nation. Now, during the Bush administration it seems these same people have reverted to recognizing that the Attorney General is the top law enforcement officer in the land, hence the appellation "general," no? But Congress has already discovered how difficult it can be to get the top law enforcement officer of the United States to enforce the law.

Still, here's the kicker -- the reason Libby's defenders insist that no crime was committed is that, according to them, Valerie Plame was not covered by the law in question because she was not covert. Never mind the fact that the CIA administration has repeatedly offered their opinion that Plame's status was indeed classified. If you go back to Patrick Fitzgerald's news conference announcing the Libby indictment, you will see that he carefully went over the elements of the crime under the statute and found that Ms. Plame's identity as a CIA operative was encompassed by the protections of that law.

SO, how do we explain the fact that the Bush administration went before a judge and got a ruling that Valerie Plame is not permitted to divulge the dates of her employment by the agency in her forthcoming book because, as the Bush CIA argues in their court filings, "such information is classified and should not be made public."

"Ain't they got no shame?" Nikki Giovanni used to ask in a poem . . .

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Now playing: "Evidence" by David Murray
via FoxyTunes

MY WEEK IN THE MUSIC

One of the things that makes my peripatetic life bearable is the huge collection of music I carry with me on my travels. As much as I may dread the hours I have to spend cramping my legs in airline seating, I have a briefcase full of MP3s of every describable (and some indescribable) mode of music to ease the day and keep me going. Still, it was with some modicum of dread that I looked forward to flying back from Santa Barbara to State College, PA, for a round of meetings and chores.

Until, that is, I ran into Stevie Wonder in the Los Angeles airport. While wrestling my bags through the terminal, I found my path blocked by a large man having his photo taken with a smaller man. It was only as I was squeezing past them in the crowd that I realized I was squeezing past Stevie Wonder. At LAX, our usual procedure is to act as if we don't see celebrities (I have, for example, ignored Salma Hayek [well, sort of ignored her while still staring at her] under similar circumstances), but I had to say hello at least. So I did. Stevie is just a few months older than me, and has been, ever since he had a hit record and I didn't when we were both 12 years old, in some small way responsible for my feeling that I was already an underachiever and had to hurry up and produce something significant to make up for it. Mr. Morris, to use his given surname, found that thought amusing and graciously spent a few minutes talking with me about music. Turned out he was on his way north for a concert that evening in Saratoga. From what I hear on the recording of that concert I acquired a few days later, Stevie is still at the top of his form during his first tour in ten years.

Afterwards, while I was sitting in the terminal waiting for my flight, a young woman in a blue blouse and carrying a violin case came and sat beside me. She was shortly joined by two other women in blue blouses, also carrying violin cases. When yet another woman in blue appeared carrying a guitar case, I had to ask. Turns out this was an all-women Mariachi group on their way to Washington, D.C. We had a nice conversation about the San Jose Mariachi Festival which I used to attend, and which they were scheduled to play at this year. As we were boarding the plane, I learned that they were performing that night at the Smithsonian Institution. I told them I knew they'd find a welcoming audience in D.C.

This all made my own business seem just a bit on the banal side. But then I got to State College only to discover that Mavis Staples was scheduled to appear at the renovated State Theater the very next night. I got on the phone and, sure enough, there were still tickets available. (Most in State College that weekend were occupied with the upcoming Notre Dame game.) I was able to get an excellent seat (second row right), and was there in my place when Mavis, who I have been listening to since I was about 12 years old (notice a theme here?) took to the stage. Back in the day of my first listening, and not all that long after Stevie's first great hits, I bought a Staples Singers LP, took it home, and dropped the needle of our pitiful Silvertone stereo on the record. The first thing that I heard was the scorching "ARE YOU SURE?" I've been listening to that song (you can hear it again on the recently restored SOUL TO SOUL film and soundtrack) and to the voice of Mavis Staples ever since.

The concert began with DOWN IN MISSISSIPPI, a J.B. Lenoir tune that Mavis used to sing with her father. The Staples were from Chicago, not Mississippi, but it was in Chicago that they got to know J.B., and it was partly in tribute to their blues neighbors that this song became part of the repertoire. Then Staples moved through a series of the earlier staple masterpieces, including FREEDOM HIGHWAY and KEEP YOUR EYES ON THE PRIZE. There was also a sweet reprise of THE WEIGHT, which you can see the Staple Singers perform with The Band in the film THE LAST WALTZ. It was only as the show came to a close that Mavis launched into the two most recognizable hits from the period of the Staples Singers pop breakthrough, RESPECT YOURSELF and I'LL TAKE YOU THERE. By this point the small audience was on their feet and multiplying like loaves and fishes.

All through the night the band had been paying small tributes to Mavis's past with her family. The guitarist started out several songs with a note perfect impression of Pop Staples' signature tremolo guitar, and the male backup singer took Pops's singing parts with a pretty fair impression of Staples's voice as it had been in its prime. Even though Mavis has always been the lead voice of THE STAPLES SINGERS, and even though this tour was clearly her vehicle, there was never any doubt of the legacy she was keeping alive. Her sister Yvonne, as she pointed out, was on stage singing with her, keeping up a tradition of gospel and pop performance stretching over 57 years. For an encore, the ensemble reassembled to perform what Mavis announced was the first song Pops had ever taught his young family, WILL THE CIRCLE BE UNBROKEN? It wasn't hard to imagine Pops with his kids gathered in their Chicago living room almost six decades earlier, a smiling Mavis surprising them all with the strength of her child's voice, bringing them all home on a chorus of By and by, lord, by and by.

So, it wasn't such a bad journey after all. I walked out, thinking of my flight home, and humming: there's a better home a-waiting / in the sky, lord, in the sky.

RADIO FREE NIELSEN

Last Friday I had the great pleasure of being the guest on the KCSB radio program, The Friday Riff, hosted by Rob Wallace and Bryan Brown. Their program explores different aspects of jazz and improvisation each week. For our episode, which you can hear by clicking here (give it a minute to donwload!), we were revisiting the topic of jazz and poetry by auditioning a recording of the William Parker group with Amiri Baraka performing INSIDE SONGS OF CURTIS MAYFIELD. The particualr performance you will hear on this recording is from Rome radio, 2004, but the group has repeated the work at several venues over the years. Then, in closing, we played a recording of Amina Baraka's moving tribute to Charles Mingus.

This program includes excerpts from the Parker group's explorations of FREDDIE'S DEAD, THE MAKINGS OF YOU and WE THE PEOPLE WHO ARE DARKER THAN BLUE. Also included are Curtis Mayfield's own recording of WE THE PEOPLE WHO ARE DARKER THAN BLUE and a short comment by Mayfiled on his song writing.

SUMMERTIME BLUES

Santa Barbara is a region of delightfully strange juxtapositions. Witness the recent wine tasting at the beach. While it's true there is often a great deal of wine drinking going on when the blues is played anywhere, we don't always think of the Chardonnay crowd as blues aficionados.

The legions of BMWs and Jaguars may have come down to the beach that Sunday for the California Wine Festival -- But I was there because of the advertised musical guests, Tom Ball and Kenny Sultan.

Keeping up the Blues traditions of Taj Mahal, Koerner, Ray & Glover and so many others, Ball and Sultan have achieved international recognition for their artistry and are regulars on the festival circuit. They also make their home base here in Southern Califronia, so we get to see them often. You may want to check out their web site and order some of their CDs. Along with recordings of their own performances, the web site offers instructional books and videos as well.

That Sunday they were at the top of their form, playing such old favorites as their song about the perfect woman (she owns a liquor store, you see), and working out on stunning solos, including a harmonica-only rendition of Duke Ellington's "Don't Get Around Much Anymore" that had all of us harp players in the audience slack-jawed with wonder.

This may not have been the sort of setting for the Blues I grew up with in DC, but the skies were clear, the mountains were near, the ocean was crashing in just the right rhythm -- even the sea birds were rocking --

and oh . . . as you can probably guess from these photos, the Chardonnay was pretty good, too.

BILLY WOODBERRY - BLESS THEIR LITTLE HEARTS

One recent visitor to Santa Barbara was filmmaker Billy Woodberry, who was here to screen his great movie BLESS THEIR LITTLE HEARTS and to participate in panel discussions on the cinema arts. This event was sponsored by UCSB's Black Studies department along with the Center for Black Studies, the Film and Media Studies department and others.

Woodberry was part of that remarkable group of young, African American directors who streamed through UCLA's film school from the late 60s through the early 80s, often known as the Los Angeles School or simply as the L.A. Rebellion. The group included Charles Burnett (TO SLEEP WITH ANGER, KILLER OF SHEEP), Larry Clark (PASSING THROUGH), Julie Dash (DAUGHTERS OF THE DUST) and Haile Gerima (SANKOFA), with whom I had the pleasure of appearing at the Black Archipelagoes Symposium at Georgetown a couple years back.

Woodberry's BLESS THEIR LITTLE HEARTS is characteristic of the movement -- a low budget (in parts a guerilla) production marked by deeply felt acting, shots influenced by neo-realism and portraits of everyday black life in America entirely unlike what Hollywood was giving us at the time -- for that matter, totally unlike the preponderance of portrayals of black life in American media today.

It was a summery gathering, a mix of students earning credit and non-students enriching a few well-earned vacation hours. I took special note of the reactions of the young students to Woodberry's film. None of them was old enough to have known previously of the L.A. group, and clearly none of them had seen films like this about black American life before -- In the era of HUSTLE AND FLOW and CRASH, these films appeared before the students like . . . well, like what they are -- quiet works of art that tell us something about ourselves and leave us with images that will never go away -- BLESS THEIR LITTLE HEARTS was made from a script initially written by Burnett, and so the film is also a testament to the collaborative life of art that these directors created among themselves as UCLA's first black graudate students in film. One of the first black students at UCLA's film school was Teshome Gabriel, from Ethiopia, who went on to teach at UCLA as he worked through his crucial theories of Third Cinema. Teshome, by the way, phoned me out of the blue after reading my first book, establishing a friendship that continues to this day.

As it happens, Burnett's KILLER OF SHEEP is being readied at long last for video release. One can only hope that this will bring wider attention to the worthy work of these film artists.