Don't Let will.i.am Destroyed America!

Remember this video?



And how we were all so inspired and fired up and ready to go two years ago?

I may have mentioned this in a previous blog post, but it's worth repeating:

I had a dream back in February of 2009, about month after the inauguration. In the dream, I was at Camp David during a snow-covered winter night, interviewing President Obama for this very blog.

I kid you not.

And after he'd given me the walking tour of the place and introduced me to the First Lady (where, I'm sure, if it had been in real life, I would have traded a few stories with her about the old Third World Center at Princeton), I stopped him and asked him if there was anything he wanted to say directly to my readers. And the President's words were, and I quote:

"Keep dreaming. But be ready to do the work."

I'm reminded of John F. Kennedy's speech about the moon landing.

"We choose to do these things not because they are easy, but because they are hard."

The easy part, my friends, was electing Obama.

When it was all a wonderful silly dream about how amazing we could make this country.

But the fact of the matter is, it's a lot of freakin' work. And I don't have to tell you that work, frankly, sucks. It's tiring and time consuming and it takes away from all the games you want to play and all the movies you want to watch.

But laziness has a very high cost.

My point is, things are very hard in the country right now. And we keep hearing about this so-called enthusiasm gap, where all of the energy appears to be with the people who are so mad that Obama's not a magician and can just make 30 million jobs and trillions of dollars in debt to China and a crappy infrastructure and political corruption disappear by wiggling his nose like Samantha on "Bewitched".

And THESE fools would rather that Obama stop, so we can keep on losing 700,000 jobs a month, like we were back when I had that dream.

I'm not talking to them. I'm talking to all of you who watched that will.i.am song and decided that I should vote for Obama because it would be kewl.

To Hell with Kewl. This country still needs your help. We're moving, very slowly, in the right direction, but we need to continue to have a supportive congress and local government to make it happen.

Obama's not officially on the ballot next month, but everything that he and his supporters have bled to put into law is. And all of the positive things that have been done and could be done are in jeopardy.

Are you really telling me that just because will.i.am didn't call up all of his celebrity buddies to make a new video for this midterm election, you don't have a beat you can dance to that can take your butt into a voting booth next month?

Do we really have to have theme music before we can get to work and save the country?

Just because the Black Eyed Peas aren't inspired to make this election entertaining, that's not an excuse, people!

Click the link in the title of this blog, find out who's on the ballot locally, and VOTE!

And email 20 other people you know and make sure they vote! And tell them to do the same.

Our country is literally dancing on the precipice.

For Michael Jackson, or "walking on air"

When I was on the student council in elementary school, I'd somehow convinced the faculty advisor, Mrs. Wilson, that we should have a dance for the students.

Yes, I was probably 9 or 10 years old at the time. And, yes, that's crazy. Moving on.

I'm not even sure what BS story I made up to convince Mrs. Wilson to let a bunch of 3rd, 4th, and 5th graders have a party in the gym on the school's dime. It's not like she was the cool teacher that everybody liked. People hated and feared that woman, and rightly so. She was pretty doggone scary. But she bought it. There were some heavy restrictions put on the dancing, and, in her mind, the big pay off was the unveiling of this god awful paper mache giraffe that was supposed to be the school mascot, but we still pulled it off.

But the REAL highlight of the party was the dance contest.

Or, more specifically, the Michael Jackson dance-alike contest.

One of my best buddies at the time, David, won, even though he had some pretty stiff competition, including a kid who made the bold choice of not dancing like Michael but dancing like one of the slow-motion pop-locking zombies from "Thriller".

David was an active participant in the "Michael Jackson jacket" arms race.

Because, even in elementary school in the early 80's, every kid could tell you the difference between the "Beat It" jacket versus the "Thriller" jacket. And God help you if your mother bought you one made out of "pleather" (i.e. plastic leather). EVERY kid was desperate to get one or all of these jackets.

I remember going to a cookout at my aunt's house after my brother & I had gone to see "Ghostbusters", and my younger cousin was debuting his own take on Michael's moves. My dad dubbed it "The Pain Face".

I remember when my best friend Tito had a birthday party at his house, and the centerpiece of the entire thing was that his family had a video tape of the entire "Thriller" music video, and we'd all sit around and watch it again, and again, and again.

I could do this all day long.

As I said in a previous blog, Michael was magic. Pure and simple.

And magic matters.

It really, really does. Magic is there to remind us that there is MORE.

That WE, as human beings on this planet in this moment in time, are all MORE. MORE than any of us can ever possibly imagine.

That a child in a poor, hard-driving family in a dying industrial city could reach out across four decades and literally touch the souls of hundreds of millions of people in a way that each and every one of them are personally mourning him today as if he was a member of their family.....

Magic.

People crave magic.

The World? Not so much.

(OK, this is where I'm going to get in trouble).

I can't help but think about Jesus.

Because here was a man who didn't just heal through entertainment, but someone who, if we believe the stories, made the lame walk, made the blind see, feed thousands with next to nothing. But he, too, was still dragged through the streets, tortured, and murdered by the state as crowds cheered and soldiers gambled over his clothes.

I'm not saying Michael was, somehow, the 2nd Coming, or that he was executed.

But The World, or those in power, cannot allow people to believe in magic. If you know that you're MORE, you can't be convinced to bow down and genuflect to the political or financial or military prowess of another man.

Power hates magic.

Which is why, even on this day of mourning, we have people calling him names and spitting on his legacy.

Which is so sad. Because, if those people could actually open their hearts enough to hear the music, maybe they'd remember that they, themselves, are also MORE than a title or a weapon or a dollar bill.

I'm grateful for living at a time where I could witness magic.

Michael Jackson has stepped back into eternity.

Thanks for the visit, MJ. And bless you.

YES WE CAN

I'd be lying if I said I wasn't going to tell you who to vote for. But don't just take my word for it.



Wouldn't it be just poetic for Obama to become the first African-American presidential nominee of a major American political party during Black History Month?

Lists

Because it's the beginning of a new year, I suppose it's only appropriate to talk about the things I loved in the 365 days past. So, without further ado, and in no particular order:

Favorite films released theatrically in 2007

• Talk To Me
• No Country For Old Men
• Sunshine
• Hot Fuzz
• Grindhouse
• Lust, Caution
• Superbad
• 3:10 To Yuma
• The Bourne Ultimatum
  

Favorite films I saw in my living room in 2007

• Equilibrium
• Deja Vu
• The Dreamers
• Silent Hill
• Idiocracy
• Dirty Pretty Things

Favorite comic series published in 2007

• Green Lantern
• 52
• New Avengers
• Thor
• Eternals
• League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier
• World War Hulk
• New Avengers: The Illuminati

Favorite musical discoveries of 2007

• "Frequency" by Naked Rhythm
  
• "Singles" by Vikter Duplaix
• "Belle Et Fou" by Jazzanova
• "International Affairs" by Vikter Duplaix
• "Bebel Gilberto Remixed"
• "A Night At The Playboy Mansion" by Dimtri From Paris
• "After The Playboy Mansion" by Dimitri From Paris
• "The Street Experience" by Raheem Devaughn
• "Danger Doom" by Danger Mouse & MF Doom
  

Favorite TV shows airing new episodes in 2007

• The Wire
• The Shield
• Battlestar Galactica
• Lost
• Heroes
• Chuck
• The 4400
• John From Cincinnati
• Entourage

Biggest Disappointments of 2007

• Bionic Woman
• Flash Gordon
• John From Cincinnati (and no, this is not a mistake)
• American Gangster
• Spider-Man 3
• Countdown to Final Crisis
• Justice League of America (the comic)
• Baltimore Ravens
• Democratic Congressional Majority
  

Best weekly parties in L.A. in 2007

• Sweeterlife
• Room Service
• Mingle and Plei
• The Do-Over
• Reflection
• Pause
• whatever the Hell Garth Trinidad was calling that party he used to through in the Purple Room in the Standard Sunset Hotel

Best Books I read in 2007

• Dune Messiah
• Children of Dune
• The Law of Attraction
• Exceptional Selling

Oprah, Imus, and Hip-Hop

OK, so, I think I watched just about the whole Oprah/Hip-Hop thing...

honestly, I want to see two things:

1. It doesn't really address the issue to have someone like Common, who's the quintessential consciousness rapper, talking about the misogyny problems in hip-hop. I want to see a conference that includes people like Lil' Kim, Trina, Lil' Jon, the Ying Yang Twins...you know, the people who are the actual promoters of these images. I want to see THEM in a room with the likes of those girls from Spelman and Oprah and such.

2. The other thing that was clear to me was that the people from the first panel on Monday and the guys repping the hip-hop community come from completely different realities - they're simply not speaking the same language and it raises the point: It is totally within Russell Simmons or Kevin Liles' power to not put out an album by an artist that they find personally offensive, but SHOULD they not put out a record like, say, "Wait" or "My Neck"? Because that IS a reflection of an aspect of what's happening in the community. It's almost like an alarm bell ringing - if you're house is on fire, do you get mad at the blaring smoke detector?

On the other hand, Oprah raised the ultimate point - do we have to solve poverty to get them to stop calling women hos?

"I come from a world made of love....."
Brace yourselves. This is a long one.

I haven't bought music in a very long time.

Not that I haven't tasted new sounds in a long time. As long as I have Rhapsody and music-loving friends with CD burners, I manage to keep growing my collection.

It's just that, like so many other things in my life (books, comics, movies, etc.), my music tastes have become much more selective and specific than they were in the past. There was a time that I bought anything that made me move. Which explains such unfortunate additions to my rack as NORE's "Superthug". Of course, that was back when I was perpetually planning for some mythic house party in the ill-defined future, when having 6 different versions of Luke's "Work It Out" actually made plausible sense.

Now, I'm older and my living room entertaining has become much more, shall we say, personalized. Isaac Hayes and other 70's artists my father can't stand have slowly but surely replaced any and all club anthems and left them for, well, the club.

Interestingly enough, my mother loves Isaac Hayes. They also disagree over Muhammad Ali. Mom loves him from when he was pretty and talked trash, while Dad, missing the obvious similarities between The Greatest of All Time and his good-looking, trash-talking self, merely respects him. But I digress.

Moreover, as a writer and a resident of Los Angeles, my regular habits play a much bigger place in my musical appetites, and, unfortunately, Nelly rarely makes music I want to drive to and never makes music I want to write to.

I look for music that inspires.

Frank Sinatra for the magic of New York City.

Godsmack for the horror that hides in your bedroom closet.

New Wave Top 40 from my teenage years for unrequited love.

Roy Ayers for the agelessness of the Motherland.

The point, of course, is that I already own or can access most of these at my leisure, some from other discs and others over the web.

So the fact that I heard an album online, then felt strong enough to buy it here in the real world means a number of things to me.

The album in question is the latest from Meshell Ndegeocello, entitled "Comfort Woman".

If memory serves, comfort women were the daughters of Japan who were pressed into service as sex slaves for the army of the Rising Sun during World War II. And my sense of the album is that the title is oddly poetic and totally appropriate. It seems to both acknowledge and still revel in the shackles that love seems to place on us - our willingness to plunge into the deep end of another human soul and let it mingle with our own, sometimes even at the risk of drowning.

Because the world is hot and the water is just so very, very cool.

I'm especially fond of "Love Song #2", where she says:


So happy I'm here
Born on a black star
I've come so far
To give you love
Beautiful, beautiful love
Beyond the stars
Is where I'm from
Come with me
We can live in love

I come from a world made of love
I want to take you there
I come from a world made of love
I want to take you there
We can fly butterflies

Don't leave
Stay
Stay with me
Say you love me
Look in my eyes
I love you
I just want to love you
With beautiful, beautiful love



Which brings me to the real issue at hand, namely love.

A new friend recently told me that she didn't like Male R&B, because she thought most of it was bullshit. "Let's Get It On" she could handle, because she felt like it just cut to the chase. Anything beyond that, to her, was simply a lie that men tell to lasso ass.

Which is interesting to me on two levels. On the first level, in my opinion, most contemporary Male R&B, populated with the likes of Justin Timberlake, Genuwine, R. Kelly, and the rest of their cohorts, seem to be pretty crude and direct about their intentions ("I wanna rock your body", "You owe me", "You remind me of my jeep...I wanna ride it."). On the second level, it sounds like she's presuming that no man is ever actually sincere when he professes to love a woman.

I wouldn't go so far as to say I'm a fan of Male R&B. But, as my good buddy in Harvard Square likes to say, I am a "'sucka for love".

Maybe because I was raised by two people who can't seem to agree on music or old-school fighters or what movies to watch or how much they love church or any number of things they don't have in common, but still manage to stay silly and lovey-dovey after 43 years of marriage.

Maybe because the sight of a 70 year old widow, beaming as she walking down the aisle in a no-frills burgundy dress to marry a 70 year old widower was, without a doubt, the single most beautiful thing I have ever seen in my entire life.

Maybe because I'm an obsessive movie fan and I've internalized the Hollywood notion of the happy ending.

Whatever the reason, the fact of the matter is I believe in love. Love in all its forms.

My aunt once told me that she didn't know what unconditional love was until the day that she became a grandmother. A very good friend of mine said that he really considered the full ramifications of the idea that God loves him, no matter what he's done, and that it nearly brought him to tears.

But if we don't ever think to question the love between a parent and a child, or of a worshipper for their God, or of a patriot for his country, or among old friends, how did romance become so farfetched?

I'm sure it begins with sex. After all, our bodies are very much like a recording device. And no matter how much you love mama's home cooking, it doesn't quite leave the same mark in your memory as looking into someone else's eyes as you both share a moment of ecstasy. Even the most delicate kiss is looped on our lips and our hearts a thousand times more than any dap you receive from your boys. Someone once told me how she once got it so good that she actually shed tears of joy amidst her screams of passion. We never forget the things that make us cry.

And yet, offering our bodies is far easier than our hearts. In fact, I suspect there are many people who'd sooner have sex with someone to distract them from actually looking at who they really are (or who they THINK they really are) on the inside. As if helping someone achieve an orgasm will make them stop asking all those annoying questions about your interior life.

Romantic love is the only kind of love that operates in two dimensions.

And sometimes, even more than that, because beyond our hearts and bodies, there's also history. How many relationships have had the seeds of their destruction sown years before when a child couldn't escape the unspeakable appetites of a fiendish adult, or the rubberstamping of violence in their parents' relationships, or the hard choices forced upon them through their responsibilities to their own children, or the complication of an STD, and so on, and so on, and so on...

But does the fact that the equations are more complex mean that they're simply unsolvable? No, but they are harder, and I think many simply give up. They just ignore one variable in the equation and stick with the easy one, because it's simply not that hard to sleep with someone (or someones) you don't love.

Of course, I personally don't believe you can ever completely ignore the other half of the equation. Your body is still recording the experiences. They still have more meaning than last night's steak. Those who delude themselves into thinking it's just an endurance sport do so at their peril.

And let's be honest for a moment. For each and every person who talks about how cynical they are, about how much they don't believe love exists, and that all men are dogs, and that they don't love these hoes, and all the other crap we tell ourselves to make it OK that we aren't getting the love we really want, there was probably someone, somewhere, sometime, who made them float on air. Someone who made them want to call every single person they've ever known in their entire lives to tell them just how absolutely grand they've made them feel, body and soul. Every last one of them has had at least a taste of love. They're just mad that they were only given the sampler before they were kicked out of the restaurant.

And this applies to both men and women. Every dog was once just a precocious little boy who had his heart broken and then decided he'd have to teach every other girl a lesson for what the first one did to him. Does it excuse his behavior? Of course not.

But when the Dramatics say they want to go outside in the rain so she can't see them cry, or Teddy Pendegrass says he's been thinkin'-thinkin'-thinkin', and then started drinkin'-drinkin'-drinkin' because he missed her, or Earth Wind and Fire asked if she minded if they touched, if they kissed, if they held her tight 'til the morning light, I know for a fact that they are speaking SOMEONE'S truth, even if it's not their own.

On the other hand, I'm saddened that I have to reach back at least 15 years to find a preponderance of songs by men talking about more than just "I'm really glad I get to bone you on a regular basis." I'm sickened by all these stupid falsetto Romeos who have nothing to offer women on wax but a ride in an overpriced car, a good lay, and maybe some really nice jewelry for their troubles. And that fact forces me to at least acknowledge the reality that spawned my friend's lack of faith in love.

I miss the days when more brothers had the stones to actually love women.

At least I'd have some company. :-)

And I really miss the days when more women knew what to do with love when they actually got it.

I guess we're all out of practice. Maybe we need some lessons from the old folks. Hey, if Mom & Dad can do it for four decades, they might be on to something.

Anyway, I love this album, so here's my first truly shameless Amazon.com plug. Buy it. You won't regret it.



And, while I'm on the subject, I'd also like recommend "Salvation: Black People and Love", by bell hooks. I'm sure you can guess it's relevance to the topic of the day.





Click on this freaky green text to speak your own mind on affairs of the heart

Collateral Damage
While I was passing time today, someone on Micah Wright's forum reminded me of "Johnny Got His Gun", which, right now, ought to be required reading for anyone who is even thinking about joining the army and serving his country. Micah Wright, incidentally, is the guy who writes "Stormwatch: Team Achilles", the comic book about a team of United Nations peacekeepers specifically designed to thwart superhuman violence around the world. Great stuff.

Anyway, Johnny Got His Gun is about a kid named Joe who's recruited to join the U.S. Army during the 1st World War. He gets hit by a mortar and, as a result, loses both arms, both legs, both ears, both eyes, his nose, and his mouth as far back as his neck in the explosion, but does not die. He doesn't have identification so, instead of being sent home, he's kept alive in a military hospital in France up until the 2nd World War. Needless to say, he can't talk. He has no way to speak to the outside world except by nodding his head in Morse code, and he can only receive messages from the outside world when people trace letters on his chest. Needless to say, he only learns this over the course of years, where he winks in and out of consciousness and sanity, remembering his past life, his dream life, the life he could have had, and how he ended up in this place ("serving his country"). In the end, he asks the generals who finally figure out who he is 30 years later to please kill him as a mercy. They reject that idea, keeping him on life support and restricting access to him so that none of the nurses who treat him ever communicate with him. It ends with him nodding his head, over and over again "S.O.S......S.O.S........S.O.S........"

It's written by Dalton Trumbo, who was, I believe, blacklisted from Hollywood during the HUAC hearings for being a communist. I saw the movie about 4 years ago and it really left a mark on me. Metallica has a song called "One" which is inspired by the movie and actually contains clips from the film in the video. It's also EXTREMELY heavy. The song ends with these verses:

Darkness Imprisoning me
All that I see
Absolute horror
I cannot live
I cannot die
Trapped in myself
Body my holding cell

Landmine Has taken my sight
Taken my speech
Taken my hearing
Taken my arms
Taken my legs
Taken my soul
Left me with a life in Hell


Anyway, it's a great, dark song. I started reading the book years ago and I had to stop. It put me right there inside what was left of that man's body. It was too much. Too horrifying.

Like I said: Should be REQUIRED high school reading.

Now, this is not to say that no one should join the Armed Forces. Clearly, these are the people that help create a world where people like me can criticize leaders who senselessly waste the sacrifices they're willing to make. And we are all eternally in their debt.

But, by the same token, EVERYONE should understand what, at a very human level, "going to war" really means. It's not just the coolness of smart bombs and stealth fighters. It's broken bones. Shattered bodies. Torn flesh. Eternally shattered lives.

And lots and lots of blood.

My point is, clearly there are things worth losing a leg or your capacity for speech over. But "freedom" and "liberty" have become such overused terms that they've almost lost meaning in the public discourse, especially when they're used to justify atrocities that fly directly in the face of their meaning. This entire country is so collectively distanced from the juicy side of war that it's almost anticeptic for everyone except the poor bastards on the "tip of the spear". We're only a few steps away from Eminiar VII in the Star Trek episode "A Taste of Armaggedon", where they let computers do the fighting and the people who are selected as casualties just step into a disintegration chamber so they can be neatly filed away as a confirmed kill. Without the horror of war, we have no incentive against war.

After all, why do you think the French and the Germans are so opposed to this war? Yes, the British suffered under the Blitzkrieg, but being bombed is a far cry from having you entire country overrun and enslaved, or, in the case of German towns like Dresden, completely reduced to a pile of cinders. Horror is a palpable, vivid, living memory in the minds of "Old Europe". We should learn from them rather than scorn them for not being as "bold" as we are. After all, "fools rush in...."