'Y'all ain't none a my kids'

A MAN, WOMAN, AND three little kids -- two boys and a girl -- enter the 57th St. Metra shelter where I'm waiting for a southbound train. Here are some snippets I overheard: 
  

Man: Sit yall asses down. Sit y'all mothafuckin' asses down. (He repeats this several times throughout the next few minutes, then switches to bemoaning the cost of taking his family to "the show.") I sho' didn't plan on spendin' no forty dollars.


Woman (to kids): Yeah, y'all fuckin' whores, that's comin outta your asses. Y'all gon hafta pay us!


Man: I need a blunt ... I sure as hell would fire up right here. (To kids) Don't piss in here. You gonna piss on tha elevator.


Woman: Don't piss on the elevator. They got cameras in there.


Woman: Y'all are some crazy-ass kids. Y'all ain't none a my kids. Y'all act like y'all come from the mothafuckin' projects. I didn't come from no projects. These mothafuckin' kids ... (Turns to three teenagers sitting nearby) Don'tch'all have no kids!


Boy: Mama, I love you.


Woman: You made me spend forty fuckin' dollars at the show and you didn't even watch it. You don't love me. I coulda got some mothafuckin' weed. When we get home you bet' not say shit to me. Y'all ain't my kids no mo'.

Cuts like a knife, but it feels so right.

"EVERYBODY'S INSANE with loneliness, but that’s OK. After a while you realize that’s part of the edge.”

(One Chicago-to-NYC transplant to another, as related at gapingvoid) 

Life in the suburbs: it exists

THE CHICAGO READER's Steve Bogira comments on a New Yorker essay, "In Defense of the Suburbs." (Reminding me of a similar essay I was writing -- but put on the back burner a while ago.)

Anyway, as I'm a product of the burbs, and currently back in the burbs -- and, furthermore, have traveled and worked far and wide across Chicagoland, from Hipster Central to boonie trailer parks -- I have a lot of insights about the pros and cons. So here (with minor edits) is what I posted in reply to Steve.

     I'm a suburbanite -- raised out here, returned to the burbs, maybe to stay -- and I really feel no need to defend it, as if it were a crime. 

     Cities are part substance, and also in part, hype. The quintessential example, of course, is NYC. I rolled through last summer with a friend, hanging out in Manhattan and Brooklyn. Several young single folks I met (one a former Winnetka-ite) implicitly or explicitly expressed that part of the virtue of living there is the feeling of being strengthened and purified by the struggle. It's that old "make it here/make it anywhere" thing. My thought is, the world is full of opportunities to fight for something. Who said you should have to spend all your energy just fighting to pay rent, and maybe have a couple bucks left over for beer? (Forget the hipster diet of coffee and cigarettes -- $13 a pack for organic American Spirits? Forget it.)

There is definitely something of the masochist in the whole mindset. The myth becomes self-fulfilling prophecy: at some point you're just going to NYC because, essentially, you responded to the advertising. "They" (i.e., media and tastemakers, many of whom, coincidentally, reside in New York) say it's the place to be. So, you conform.  

Rants about hipsters never get old

WHET MOSER ON THE H-WORD ("hipster") in Chicago magazine. 

My response: 

First: Wow. That Harry Raab/Gibson video is a treat. 

But now here's a news flash for the kids. Hip is just a body part. Best (for me) when female, very round, and very squeezable.

When you get around 30 or so, you stop caring about being a hipster, or hating on them. Best, though, to stop caring about it long before 30. Get concerned about something real instead. Let them do them, and you do you. Or like Hall and Oates said: Do what you want, be what you are.  

I've probably been taken for a hipster a few times, but if you asked me, I'd call myself an eclectic creative guy who's always been into ideas and music and art rather than, say, cars and watching other people play sports. 

However, I don't wear it all on my sleeve since I'm an introvert, not a peacock, and also I just don't like shopping enough to spend countless hours gathering up fancy feathers and achieving that studiously-thrown-together hipster look. (Occasionally, I hit upon it by accident; or when I have a woman around to dress me.) I'd rather be reading a book or hiking in the woods or making music or something. But I don't hold it against people who do rock all the wacky getup. It makes the world a more interesting place. 

But as a black dude, here's my rant. The fact that white folks have always dug black music is great.* The fact that so many white people came to feel so empty and alienated and deracinated that they decided they'd rather be black is a dubious blessing. 

In particular, a lot of the pioneers of Hip -- like Raab -- seemed to be Jewish, perhaps not only because Jews  predominated in the culture business anyway, but also because it seems a lot of them in the mid-twentieth century desperately wanted to be anything but Jewish: in light of history, totally understandable, yet still unfortunate for them and for those whom they were trying to be. 

Since Raab and his jazz cohorts are now mostly mouldering in their graves, I'll move on to the group I find even more obnoxious – the ones whose cultural hegemony I grew up under: that is, the post-Sixties white hipsters who borrowed black music and created this orthodoxy and installed themselves as some sort of  official Keepers of the Flame. The folks who latched onto blues as some kind of signifier of authenticity, and then became rock music critics and then basically invented rockism.  

Yeah, Boomers: I'm talkin' 'bout your  generation.

“Holy” Greil Marcus comes to mind – the guy who said that because Anita Baker makes sophisticated music, she's therefore not really black.  

What? STFU. 

Rockist types also were always sneering at white artists who borrowed from more sophisticated black genres, such as jazz, soul, or post-sixties R&B, rather than from blues. I.e., yacht rockers Hall and Oates, Carole King, Steely Dan, the Doobies, Loggins, Rundgren, Toto, Ambrosia, Player, etc. -- phenomenal artists all. They were labeled “soft rock”  -- although "blue-eyed soul" is closer, since they weren't really trying to do rock; and it was always stated or implied that they weren't “real,” etc. 

Therefore, for a good long while, the hipster kids of the late '90s and '00s, who recognized the inherent goodness of the music, were forced to enjoy it through the screen of irony. Screw that. I like Zeppelin and Toto at the same time, sorry.

I'm glad the pendulum has swung back in recent years, and the indie generation has largely left that nonsense behind, embracing classic soul the same way the Boomer generation embraced blues and the beat generation embraced jazz. I think Amy Winehouse (where is she, anyway? Rehab? ** ) is a great talent, if not wise about her lifestyle choices. I'm loving Fritz and the Tantrums, though maybe they crib a lot from H&O and ABC. ***  

Middle-class or affluent white Boomers could afford to entertain primitivist fantasies about barefoot guitar-strumming sharecroppers in Delta shacks. Most black folks, post-Civil Rights, didn't find that lifestyle romantic, perhaps because many had only recently escaped that poverty.  My dad grew up poor (though not quite dirt-floor-shack poor) in Arkansas, went to college on a basketball scholarship, came to U of C to get his first Master's in 1965, and became happily middle-class. Mom's folks are from Alabama (a step up from Mississippi and Arkansas, they like to think). Lots of folks down south -- and up here -- are still living in the sort of rural poverty that the rockist cultural gatekeepers idealized. Those illiterate folks living in tin-roof shacks have no idea how "hip" they are.  

The point is not that you're bad if you are poor, or that a simple life does not have simple joys, or that I don't like blues (of course I do; I just don't fetishize it). The point is I'm rejecting the sort of cultural-Marxist notion of the inherent nobility of poverty and inevitable crassness of bourgeois life, and the somewhat connected notion that sophistication, education and craft are somehow less than "authentic." 

The punk purist version of rebellion-against-the-man could get kind of obnoxious too, but they don't strike me as ever having been as culturally dominant. I like punk rawk! I hate punk snobbery -- because, well, the whole point was you were  rebelling against snobbery, right?

There's a reason why one of the pioneers of the easy-listening revival (I forget his name) called rockism "rock 'n' roll fascism." Unfortunately, the totalitarian urge permeates the human psyche. Rebels depose despots, then become despots in their own right. The whole rock generation mistook aesthetic preference for ideology, even religion. Kids are still doing, that, although I think, much less in this generation than the punks and the hippies. It's just music and fashion, kids – really.  If you want to fill the hole in your soul, go find God.

* Related: My take on the Great Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings Hipster Fans Controversy.

** RIP. Shoulda gone to rehab.
*** One of my other favorite white soul-influenced acts is now old school, but they just don't get the play they should: Swing Out Sister, a bird and bloke from Manchester, who have a lot of Motown/Sixties pop influence, particularly their two early-oughts albums.)

I caught a falling star

AND NOW I'VE GOT nothing but smoking, bloody stumps where my hands used to be. 

Thanks, Perry Como. 

An actual personal ad

From the Chicago Reader:

FEMALE BARNEY RUBBLE WANTED
I am looking for someone who is just like Barney Rubble, with female body parts. Sweet, kind, respectful, and most of all funny! Looks aren't important to me. I'm looking for someone who can see the humor in life and enjoy themselves. I am also looking for someone with half a brain. You needn't be college educated, but please watch and read the news. Ignorance is one of my deal breakers. I can deal with almost any thing as long as we laugh together. If you think you are a female Barney Rubble then we might be soul mates. ratpackfan2, 42, #135737

Does she have to have a Barney Rubble laugh, too? 


In any case, the above advertiser just might be interested in this blogger's co-worker.
 

Church of nude protest

THE DOUKHOBORS, OR “spirit wrestlers,” were a semi-mystical Christian sect founded in the late 18^th century in Russia. (They later emigrated to Canada.) According to “Man, Myth & Magic: the Illustrated Encyclopedia of Mythology, Religion and the Unknown,” one of the Doukhobors’ favorite means of political protest against military conscription was “stripping off their clothes” at political meetings.

At least I didn't nickname them "Adolf" and "Eva"

These were my sister's kittens.

I'll never go back to Georgia

IT JUST OCCURRED to me that despite the recent passage of the ten-year anniversary, I have never shared the story in writing. That is, the story of my adventures in the City of Dublin, County of Laurens, State of Georgia, on the way home to Chicago from a religious convocation, no less. Including: being jailed, having to scare up bail, fearing I'd never get my car back, wondering how I'd get home, being served pancakes at Denny's by a convicted manslaughterer, praying like the dickens, setting up a temporary operations center in a Motel Six, making dozens of phone calls via calling card, getting my lawyer sister to intervene, hiking several miles to the pound in hopes of getting the vehicle (with scant time left for plan B -- catching a Greyhound bus), hitching a ride on a farmer's tractor, securing return of my vehicle (and thanking God), feeling like the Dukes of Hazzard hightailing it out of the county, getting unmistakable winks from up above just to let me know Who had my back, desperately borrowing gas money from my Atlanta cousin, losing precious gas money somewhere around Nashville, running out of gas in southern IL, and having to beg at eating establishments until a kindly trucker supplied me with enough to get home because I reminded him of his little brother.

Fun three days.

BTW, I'm being tongue-in-cheek about never going back. Everybody I met -- including police, jail staff, the manslaughterer, and indeed most of my fellow detainees -- were in fact very kind to me. I just really like this song.

Bambi McMillion will make you rich

I RECENTLY SAW "Prophetess" Bambi McMillion's evango-mercial for the first time on local cable TV and was--well, the only word for it is astonished.

My first thought: McMillion?  Is that real? Or is she trying to one-up Creflo Dollar in having a gospel-of-wealth-worthy name?

My second thought: Bambi?  That's not right, unless you are a deer, or an adult  entertainer.

My third thought was to search this woman and find out about her background. Turns out it's -- surprise! -- kinda trashy.

But she's entertaining. Check out Bambi McMillion, the Speak'n' Spell remix, done by the brilliant -- and prosperously named -- Steven Buck.



Not Found (Bambi McMillion Extended Remix) from (steven) Buck on Vimeo.

What I don't get about NYC

IS WHY THE OTHER four cities cities under its grip (Brooklyn, Bronx, Queens & Staten) consent to being satellites/colonies of Manhattan. After rolling through Manhattan and then Brooklyn last month (got some good street art pics, but sorry no USB cable for my phone right now, so can't upload) I searched  the term “Brooklyn Hipster” just for fun, and dialed up this Myspace with its presumably tongue-in-cheek nod to “Brooklyn Secession Movement.” (Which, when you look it up, apparently is just the name of an edgy art space -- not an actualy movement.)

But why not? Think about it, Brooklyn. Manhattan needs you more than you need it.

News from Tennabama

THE LOCAL SHOPPER I picked up somewhere near the Tennessee-Alabama border covers towns or "places" including:

Bible Hill, Black Cat, Bobo, Cash Point, Coffee Pot, Coldwater, Delrose AND Dellrose (typo maybe??), Gobblers Knob, Goodsprings, Hollands Gin, Lick Skillet, Locks Crossroads, Minor Hill, Pisgah, Toney, and U-Take-It. 

News from the region: 

• Chad Farmer engaged to Misty Sorrow. Farmer is self-employed at Farmer Construction. Sorrow is employed by Hunstville Hospital Emergency Room.

• Entries now being accepted for the Ardmore (TN) annual Rodeo Queen and Cowboy Contest. Also don't miss the Ardmore Tractor/Truck Pull.

• Addison Claire Tiemann, daughter of Kendall and Holly Tiemann, turned two years old on May 30. She is the granddaughter of Wayne and Sherry Browning and Chuck and Terri Tiemann. Addison celebrated with a Bumble Bee Party (sic) and (sic) her Meme (sic) and Papa's house. 

• Obituaries: Barbara Ann Martin (nee Caudle).

Did Barbara Ann Caudle have a sister named Molly Caudle? 

Ad:

Ain't Charlie 

Nifty?

On June 26th,

She was Fifty! 

Happy Birthday,

You Old Doll!

The laughing woman in the photo appears to be dressed up like a man and wearning a fake mustache.

Celebronicity

SO THE OTHER NIGHT I was watching "The Soup" with Joel McHale, who kinda reminded me of Craig Kilborn. So I sez "hey where the HELL is Craiggers, anyway? Is he ever coming back to TV?" So I hop on the Nets and find that, lo and behold, he is coming back, with a new show on Fox -- in less than one week. Sweet!

"The Daily Show" was way better in the Kilborn days. I've heard people say he was "smug" and "smarmy," but they don't get that it's a shtick, a joke. He's playing a character. Unlike Jon Stewart, whose smugness is deadly serious (and totally unfunny IMO). His audience are the type who think they're the smartest people in the room. Ehh...

And I find that other Craig, the Scottish dude, about as funny as a steaming bowl of haggis. You do know what haggis is, right? I have never managed to get through a full episode of that guy. Kilborn should've stayed. 

AND THEN TODAY, when I get on line, something -- I dunno what -- says: I wonder what’s up with my girl Samantha James? 

So I go to SammyJ's Myspace. Whaddya know! Her new album just came out. 

 Today!

 Now if only I can just put these psychic skills to more lucrative use. 

SOME FOLKS HAVE A PROBLEM, apparently, with the fact that young white hipsters are such a large portion of retro soul act Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings' audience. 

My reply to the Chicago Reader piece went like this: 

White people, it is OKAY to be white and like black musicians. It really is! It is even okay to be young and white and like older black musicians. Whether enjoyed as a "hipster" or not, by age 30 none of that will matter yet they will likely have a lasting respect for the music, and that's all that matters.

I'm sure SJATDK appreciate people of all ages and ethnicities who buy their records and come to their shows, as long as they're paying customers.

By the way, I am a black dude who grew up in the late '70s and '80s and I hated Motown music. It was my parents’ music. The records sounded ancient and tinny, and they weren’t even in stereo.

But I was a huge fan of Hall & Oates. I started building a Hall & Oates record collection in high school. Little did I know I was listening to two white guys channeling doo-wop and Philly and Motown through New Wave. So now, I can appreciate Motown music. (I never really disliked Philly, I guess because the style was still in during my formative years and I heard it often: see Spinners, O’Jays, Frankie Valli in Theme from Grease…)

In similar fashion, I got into the British group Swing Out Sister, who do jazzy loungy pop. They in turn got me into -- or reintroduced me to -- SOS influences such as Fifth Dimension, Laura Nyro, Astrud Gilberto, Ennio Morricone, Burt Bacharach, etc. *

And how many soul or funk or jazz records would people have never heard if it wasn't for hip-hop samples?

People like Sharon & the Daps deserve to get this kind of love, finally. If they can't get it from black kids because they're too busy listening to Young Money or Trey Songz or whatever, let them get it from white kids.

 

 

* Ed. note 2/5/11: Add to that illustrious list the great John Barry, who died just this week.  

still peeved at this r & b

IN AN OLDER POST I shared why I was peeved with contemporary rhythm and snooze. In that post I blamed Sean P. "Puffy Pops/Diddly Squat" Combs for helping kill off hip hop. I have now received confirmation of this fact, from no less an authority than Pu$$ycow.

Slop culture update

IF YOU HAVEN'T HEARD, there's this fascinating new nature show called "Jersey Shore." It's quite educational.

I have watched several episodes so far. Fascinating! Watch the little round one right there. See it constantly displaying its hindparts? That must be a female in heat, looking for a mate. And look, there's a male showing off its mating colors, puffing up its chest, and utilizing "product" to make its fur stand on end in a bid to attract and penetrate more females. Wow! There go two of them, fighting for supremacy!

The best thing about these critters is, they look just like people and they're really quite clever. They even have rudimentary speech skills.

TOO BAD LADY GAGA's actual songs are as boring as her video concepts, costumery, choreogaphy and set design are creative. But wait -- that describes 95% of major-label music.

New Flash: J.D. Salinger Has Died

Again?

How companies are going green

GREEN IS ALL THE RAGE. With mounting fears of global warming and the heightened popularity of planet-friendly products, even the biggest companies are racing to jump on the bandwagon. Here's how some businesses are "greening up" their products and images. 


STARBUCKS: coffee now grown with solar energy

MOTOROLA: : Employing only Third World workers, who consume vastly fewer resources than Americans

CHARMIN: Toilet paper 100% recycled

COCA-COLA: Now with real, natural cocaine

YOUR LOCAL USED CAR DEALER: Selling 100% used vehicles

PROCTER & GAMBLE: Removing up to 10% of the toxic, caustic chemicals from its personal-care products

POTBELLY SANDWICH WORKS: All employees crazy baked

Introducing the "New Urbanist" shopping mall

JUST FOUND THIS while Ixquicking (that's my new term for Googling) "Faux New Urbanism."

In a misguided attempt to inject some classical urban charm into the North Conway, New Hampshire location of Lowe’s, someone thought is would be a good idea to build-in a pretty hilarious row of fake second-story windows on their otherwise completely suburban box-store.

But how about the "New Urbanist" suburban shopping mall? This one in Burr Ridge, Ill. (not far from where I live) is the reason I was Ixquicking "Faux New Urbanism" to begin with.

The nostalgically named Burr Ridge Village Center boasts a "vibrant main-street setting." (They don't mention it's built right next to an interstate highway.) And yes, the buildings do attempt to mimic the homes-over-storefront look of real classic town centers. But instead of the variety of a real town (like Homewood, IL* , a rail-centered south suburb of Chicago), where on a typical block you might have a gas station, a corner grocery store, local mom-and-pop coffee shops, taverns, pizzerias and ice cream parlors, local banks, civic buildings, and locally owned hardware stores, every store in these fake company towns is a shiny clone of a national chain.

Rather than living quarters for shopkeepers and other normal people, the "apartments" above the Banana Republic and Starbucks in the Burr Ridge Village Center are high-end condos. In short, it's a mall disguised as a small town.

No doubt a candidate for "localwashing": "Shop Local! All your favorite hometown shops here — from Starbucks to The Gap!"


*I couldn't find any good photos of downtown Homewood, but thanks to Google and the U.S. government's scary satellite technology, you can just go to Google Maps  punch in "Ridge and Dixie, Homewood, IL" into the address bar, zoom all the way in, and you'll get the street view in downtown Homewood. You can zip up and down the streets to your heart''s delight.

Or try Hinsdale, Burr Ridge's neighbor to the south, also with the advantage of commuter rail. For Hinsdale, punch in "Garfield and Chicago, Hinsdale, IL."

Michael Jackson died for our sins

WAS I A FAN of Michael Jackson? For a child of the late '70s and '80s -- and an African-American to boot -- that's like asking: "Are you a fan of the sun?" "Are you a fan of the earth's rotation?" C'mon. But some distinctions are in order.


There was Michael Jackson the man: flawed, weak, vulnerable -- the one who danced with death, and stumbled.


Then there was Michael Jackson the natural talent, the consummate professional, the phenomenal songwriter, singer, dancer and all-round flawless perfomer.


And there was Michael Jackson the public persona, the mystery, the symbol, the "icon" -- the idol.


I felt for the first MJ and I hugely respected and enjoyed the work of the second. I don't care much for the third MJ since, as a believer in God, I don't really do idols.


Folks who don't worship a higher power, find lower powers to venerate instead. It's unavoidable, part of our makeup. In practical reality this makes for messy situations. A god here, a god there, a god everywhere. Thousands of gods, endless ladders and hierarchies and taxonomies of deities, often in conflict -- is it any wonder their worshipers are forever in conflict, with each other, with themselves? For example, people whose God or ultimate authority is the state are have maimed and killed others in the hundreds of millions in the last century, simply because their respective state-gods commanded them to do so. It's the same mechanism that leads people to believe Michael Jackson was superhuman. 


But it's evident that like many idols, Jackson himself had a complex, tortured relationship with his status. Arguably, it's the idolatry that killed him.


The ancient Incas had a tradition of taking a servant and elevating him to deity for one day.


Then they sacrificed him.


In exchange for his a brief time as a god, Michael Jackson went to his Maker long before his proper time. Yet like the slave-king -- or perhaps, like most kings down through history -- he wasn't really in charge. His status as god-for-a-day was cynically milked by those who surrounded him: the industry, white-coated drug pushers and other assorted hangers-on and enablers who profited from him as long as they were able. They rode him until finally the ride was over.


What a tragedy for the man sacrificed to provide others not only with entertainment, but for meaning for their otherwise hollow existences. What a tragedy for a family. And what a trauma for a culture. Will this serve to jar us awake, close a chapter in American history, break the spell of celebrity silliness and allow us to be grown-ups again? Will it help us shut down this out-of-control star machine that chews people up and spits them out -- often, into a waiting grave? 

Will it help nail shut the coffin of celebrolatry, at least for a few of us-- allow us to go back to letting God do his job, and entertainers theirs? 


Or will we remain a Michael Jackson nation, alternately stroked and traumatized, so at the mercy of forces beyond our control we feel the need to retreat into a cocoon of magic kingdom make-believe?



LEFTOVER THOUGHTS: About the pedophilia rap, I still don't know what to think. We know the guy was warped. We know he had an interesting porn collection but porn -- or, let's say, a nude and partially-nude art collection -- but contrary to popular rumor, it was not kiddie porn, according to the evidence released by police.* We know he loved children, but it's not clear that he loved children that way. Part of me wants to believe that his thing about children owed to the fact he was in a very real way a child inside -- for better and for worse -- and in that sense, was only preferring the company of his peers.

I HOPE ALL aspiring and working young singers will avail themselves of the selection of live Jackson footage going back to the Jackson Five, and watch their flawless, professional performances. That's what performers are supposed to do.

* Update Aug. 2010: This site runs down all the "porn" found in Jackson's collection that police bothered to make public. The general finding was that none of the images constituted child pornography or anything else illegal.