AND SO ....

..... for reasons I don't want to understand, it still amazes me how the action of one black woman (J.J.) can spur so much debate and discussion and un-needed analysis; how the hard core reality never hits the so called "intelligensia" until we of color do something that they've been doing for years. enough about janet jackson. enough. she is no more guilty than the execs on madison avenue that all but spread a woman's crotch in my face to sell victoria secret bras and hanes underwear; the same ones who use the same shock value by having a white girl and a white guy in a sinking boat, only to have the white girl grab a tampon and stick it in the hole to stop the leak. disgusting. janet is no more lewd than madonna and i don't want to even engage in the semantics about whether it was cable or network. kids were watching. period. and People magazine did their part in reprinting the whole thing.

so the bottom line is this: don't use America's Sacred and Holy Hour (SuperBowl) to sell your album or your message. that is not the time for that. that is the time for booty-shaking, titty-thrusting cheerleaders. it's a time for men to knock each other's brains out for your entertainment. it's a time for hard working ad execs who work all year, using their valuable brain power to come up with the greatest "shock and awe" ad they can -- horses farting, men with erectile dysfunction sneaking off from the bar stool to get some ass. you know, the American Way.

and another thing to add to that bottom line: if you are a person of color, don't ever forget your address --- U.S.A.

--angel

Untitled

I read this over at
Nalo's spot and like her, I cry.

An excerpt, published in MOTHER JONES:

Picture the world as it existed in 1787. Well over three-quarters of the people on earth are in bondage of one land or another. In parts of the Americas, slaves far outnumber free people. African slaves are also scattered widely through much of the Islamic world. Slavery is routine in most of Africa itself. In India and other parts of Asia, some people are outright slaves, others in debt bondage that ties them to a particular landlord as harshly as any slave to a Southern plantation owner. In Russia the majority of the population are serfs. Nowhere is slavery more firmly rooted than in Britain's overseas empire, where some half-million slaves are being systematically worked to an early death growing West Indian sugar. Caribbean slave-plantation fortunes underlie many a powerful dynasty, from the ancestors of Elizabeth Barrett Browning to the family of the fabulously wealthy William Beckford, lord mayor of London, who hired Mozart to give his son piano lessons. One of the most prosperous sugar plantations on Barbados is owned by the Church of England. Furthermore, Britain's ships dominate the slave trade, delivering tens of thousands of chained captives each year to French, Dutch, Spanish, and Portuguese colonies as well as to its own.
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Examinations

What frustrates me with writing is not the What but the How .... the How to say it, how to arrange the words just so .... to give meaning and passion .... to be fair to the charachters .... to be judicious .... to be economical in one's approach .... to find just the right words, the right sentiment. How will it come? How?

I find that I am at my best when I turn my attention away to solitary activities .... washing dishes, driving without music or NPR; when I am attuned to the musicality of words, the importance of syntax, the play of verbs. What I am examining in this novel is the time of mid-life, when one realizes that life is passing, that youth is ephemeral and I am looking through the eyes of a man. So much has been said by and about women --- how we are and are not coping through the years of adolescence, then to marriage and family, through menopause and retirement, through the years of death and loss of loved ones. We have and are still saying it. But what of the men? What are they feeling and how are they dealing with the stages of life? What are their emotions and how do those emotions impact their decisions? How do they change and what tools do they use to go through these changes? Why do they resist change and moreover, why do people in general resist change? Mid life, I realize, is a strange and, I'm sure, very tenuous time in one's life. Either the Oprah approach (yea! I'm fifty. I'm smarter, wiser, more self-assured) or the crisis. And what of the crisis? How does one get past it? What are the tasks? The lessons? At the start of this story I didn't know what I was searching for. I simply knew that a man in mid life was desperate for something, had committed adultery, and learned very deep and profound lessons in life. I knew that it was much deeper than the story of a man having an affair -- rather, it was the view of a man having been changed at some very deep, visceral level because of various choices he'd made in life and the affair only being the vehicle by which the change takes place. It is a challenge to think outside of your own sphere but this is what it is most exciting for me, what keeps my axe sharpened and perhaps what draws me write -- my passion for understanding human behavior, my love of being a casual observer of people and their actions and interactions. Perhaps this is what I disagree with most about the ridiculous axiom that one write "what they know." Why write what you know? Where is the pleasure in spilling out what you've already experienced? The challenge of life and the beauty of life is in the questions, the not knowing of the answers, the finding of tools to excavate the answers and the truth as it applies to your own life. And then the discovery, the settling into that truth, that understanding. This is what pleases me most about writing --- the discovery, the finding of the words and the emotions that are indeed universal.

Stream of consciousness.

---A.

GEE'S BEND

Can't wait to hop down to D.C. to see this, this, this!

Let me forevermore stop complaining about this East Coast.

---a.