So, one day you look down and see your feet in shoes you don't recognize. Maybe you like them, maybe you don't. This is where life begins. Welcome to WSATA, where the Goddess returns.
O.K. This is the kid, Brian Bradley, who was on The X Factor USA Thursday night rapping his song "Stop Looking at My Mom!" or to be more accurate "my momz." Apparently he had an "official video" already on YouTube with more than 80,000 hits. It was posted in October 2010 and it's cute, showing other kids protecting their moms from lusting eyes. You can buy the mp3 at Amazon.com.
The video below is his audition from the show itself and includes his pretense of challenging Simon Cowell before he starts his rap. Bradley says he wants to be bigger than Jay-Z, but based on what L.A.Reid told him, I think at least that talent scout was thinking more along the lines of Bradley being like Will Smith. He told the kid, age 14, that he can do TV, film, and records. When Bradley left the stage, Reid said to Cowell that the kid is a triple threat, which means he can act, sing, and dance.
It seems that on Australia's X Factor show, the judges perform the way the judges perform on NBC's The Voice in America. But that's not likely to happen on America's version of The X Factor given that the show's judges here includes two men who are more producers than performers, Simon Cowell and L.A. Reid.
I will be shocked if we get to see all four judges (if any) perform here in the states, but it might make for some entertaining television given that Cowell and Reid appear to be vying for who can be the meanest on Fox's new mid-week singing competition.
In The X Factor Australia video above, the judges performing are Guy Sebastian, Ronan Keating, Natalie Bassingthwaighte, and Mel B. I know nothing about these people.
Here is a poem that I wrote in 2006, but I decided to record and translate it to video over this weekend. It uses royalty free music from Incompetech.com. The piece playing behind the spoken word vocal is Acralate, a selection with African influences.
"Stuck in a Blackbird's Groove" is a blues poem about one level of unrequited love.
I'm on Oprah's mailing list. There. I've confessed. I keep an eye on Oprah. Anyway, today, the subject line of one of her emails intrigued me: "Fat that makes you thin." So, I opened it. I think I was hoping to discover some new oil that tasted like butter but worked in the body like fiber. I can dream, can't I?
Instead, at Oprah.com, I found this tidbit:
Fat to Make You Thin After Johns Hopkins researchers genetically reprogrammed a small part of the DNA in the brains of rats, some of the animals' lumpy white fat transformed into brown fat, the type that actually burns calories. The scientists hypothesize that messages from the altered hypothalamus woke dormant brown-fat stem cells and prompted them to make new tissue. Afterward the mice gained little weight, even when fed fattening chow.
How Soon: The goal is to make these kinds of tweaks to human DNA within a decade.
As anyone who's read my BlogHer post, "The Cylons Cometh," may gather, I am leery of this coming age of changing the human body via high tech. I've read and seen too much science fiction about bad outcomes after scientists interfere in nature, I guess. However, what's scarier is that the bad outcomes are not all fiction, a fact which becomes clear when you look at the negative side effects that have sometimes resulted from scientific interference in the food industry.
And yet, I have told family and friends often that if science comes up with a way to change human DNA so that we don't gain weight so easily, I might be the first in line for that injection. I'm one of those people who can smell cake and gain weight.
Unfortunately, by the time science figures out how to turn bad, white, lumpy fat into the good brown stuff, I'll be too old to be a good candidate for genetic alteration. Sigh. Sucks for me, but it still may be good news for the folks under 30 right now.
I first wrote about the Troy Davis case in 2009 when the "I Am Troy Davis" campaign was relatively young. Unfortunately for Troy, his family, and his supporters, America is hearing his name today because, as CNN reports, he has been denied clemency. The decision of the Georgia Board of Pardons and Parole means that Troy will be executed tomorrow.
Davis was convicted of the 1989 killing of Savannah, Georgia, police officer Mark MacPhail.
Davis is scheduled to be executed by lethal injection at 7 p.m. Wednesday at a state prison in Jackson, Georgia.
I do not have much more to say at this time except according to Color of Change, the only thing that could stop the State of Georgia from killing Troy now is a plea from the District Attorney to stop his execution:
Chatham County District Attorney Larry Chisolm, who asked a judge to issue Troy's death warrant, can also ask the judge to take it back.
This move would be a game-changer -- but it'll only happen if he feels more pressure from us to do the right thing outweighs than he feels from all those in Savannah calling for Troy's death.
For a thorough account of the history of this case, I recommend you read Aberjhani's series at Examiner.com. The CNN video at the top of this post discusses why his clemency was denied. Despite the many eye witnesses who have come forward to recant their testimony, some saying that they were pressured to name Davis as the killer in this case, the MacPhail family and Georgia officials have had blinders on and have been determined to commit a murder of their own, which they, of course, call "justice."
The story is being reported by numerous mainstream media networks and across the Internet through small outlets and big ones, such as on the Huffington Post's front page. I think many people are shocked; they had believed that the American justice system would not execute a man under such circumstances, that it could be flexible when new information casts old testimony into shadows of doubt. What we're seeing today, as we saw not long ago in Texas, is that the system is broken in many places.
This video, "Planking in Motion - New Orleans," had me laughing out loud. I think it may be funnier to me because I live here and the people's reactions and characters caught on film feel so familiar.
As I said on Twitter yesterday, "I was in New Jersey when [the] towers came down. I've written about it before. I don't know if I want to again just b/c of [this] 10 year anniversary." I grappled with whether or not to write anything about September 11 a decade later because it took me until 2004, a whole three years after September 11, 2001, to write anything at all about what I felt on that tragic day. For me, the words I wrote then, "Emotional Land Mines (Remembering 9/11)," still stand.
In the last paragraph of that piece, I said in that essay the following:
The seconds we take to reflect humanizes us, sensitizing us again to the incomprehensible, inoculating us against the incredulous so that we will not be a people at risk like those Santayana spoke of saying, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” We are stronger because we remember.
I did not start watching any of the memorial specials and documentaries in honor of the 10th anniversary until last night, and as I watched, I meditated on why it's still important, a decade later, to commemorate something so horrific as well as other moments of tragedy that draw sorrow to the surface. I meditate on our need to recall catastrophe each year when the annual Hurricane Katrina ceremonies begin here in New Orleans.
Why humans memorialize death and tragedy is a question studied frequently in Anthropology. For instance, this month the journal Anthropology Newshas published an entire issue on memorials and memorialization about not only how and why we are remembering September 11 and the destruction of The Towers and the 3067 lives lost but also how people in other parts of the world memorialize tragic events in their nations' history. It's a human thing to remember how death visits our lives.
The bombing of The Towers gave us a host of psychic demons to wrestle, and as I look back now, I see that just when I, an American, began to come to terms in 2004 with what I felt and experienced on September 11, 2001--a world-changing event that preceded a personal life-changing event, my divorce, which nearly killed me--my life was shaken again less than one year later with the flooding of New Orleans, my hometown. I have family members who lost their homes, left the city, and still have not returned. I live in a house that carries the quirks of reconstruction--missing light switches, different color schemes, the absence of heirlooms and old black and white photos, and sometimes sounds that make the head turn with expectations of seeing a loved one who is no longer here.
A writer, who is not from New Orleans and not African-American but wonders whether the nation and media have gone overboard with the 10th Anniversary of 9/11, sent me an email a few days ago with a provocative question:
Do you share my slightly sick feeling that we are being manipulated into this orgy of national mourning for an event that yes, was horrible, but the body count--a no less horrible phrase--was nearly identical to that of Katrina, and that's not counting the diaspora that followed and / or those who died of stress-related maladies, including suicide, thereafter?
I will not put her on the spot by mentioning her by name, but she asks a valid question. She is further troubled by the near-absence of black faces in the media flashbacks, the expert interviews, and various documentaries. I confess that I have made similar observations watching the memorial programs, not the official program from today with the family members at Ground Zero, but the retrospectives and documentaries that were run before today's official ceremony aired; however, I don't want to analyze such matters of absence at the moment.
Observations about the media coverage notwithstanding, I will be sending an email to my fellow writer later in which I will say:
"I do not consider the two events, 9/11 or the flooding of New Orleans, comparable historic events in any way that should cause us to examine how much attention one event gets over another in terms of equity. Both memories throttle my soul because I am an American as well as a daughter of New Orleans. But I do think that 9/11 was a bigger event psychically for the nation as a whole. Our fear of terrorism following that attack sucked us into two wars that touched families coast to coast."
And then there is that word "attack." Hurricane Katrina was not an entity endowed with consciousness and so was not capable of intending to attack anyone or anything. Even if we address the manmade failure of the levee system, we cannot impart to that failure a human desire to destroy someone. I think being the victim of intentional violence, knowing that someone hates you enough to kill you and your family, carries with it a different set of emotions.
The bombing of The Towers and the Pentagon on September 11 as well as learning through the crash of United 93 in Pennsylvania that a greater destruction was intended revealed to us Americans our vulnerability in this shrinking world. The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, however, showed us our vulnerability inside this relatively young nation boasting of equality for all: the clash of race and class in creeping degrees of hostility and ugliness.
And yet, both incidents also showed us the breadth and depth of our compassion and generosity toward each other as Americans, as humans.
None of these thoughts, however, explains why we feel compelled to mark the 10th anniversary of 9/11 or why each year down here in Louisiana we continue to mark the day Katrina nearly destroyed New Orleans and its surrounding parishes. But an idea of why we do what we do comes to me now perhaps more clearly than it did when I wrote "Emotional Land Mines."
Perhaps the reason for our compulsion to mark dates of great tragedy and recall them with the laying of wreaths, the unveiling of memorials, with art and payers is the need to remember how we as a people almost died, how we collectively faced near physical and emotional destruction. When we single out these dates, we reflect, we pause and recall not only loss and death but also that we are still here, that we are survivors, and with that recognition comes a sense of empowerment: We can survive tragedy. Knowing that we survived, we are better able to walk through dark tunnels into the unknown and face that light in the distance that could be a brilliant future or the damning headlights of a speeding train. Either way, we go on.
In addition to locating my old essay, while going through my files, I discovered a poem that I also wrote in 2004 with which I end this post, satisfied that I have given the 10th Anniversary of 9/11 the attention it deserves.
Whittle an "S" on our chest: Supernation! … Charging all lights a brigade, eclipsing amber waves of obfuscation. Boots and cape, red, white, and blue, zealous to leap 110 stories of visceral weeping for glory and honor of our due justice.
Liberty, lift up your skirt! Rinse blood from its hem into the Hudson. O! What is the cleanser that brings closure to our pain?
After contemplating speculation that the game was a hoax, possible protest, or some kind of publicity stunt, I have learned that the video on YouTube and the associated website are part of a promotion for a Dutch documentary series about slavery:
The trailer was first shown on Dutch website GameKings TV at the start of September, and was picked up by games and entertainment sites the world over.
GameKings host Brian van de Ven returned to the subject on September 8, accompained by documentary researcher Lyangelo Vasquez.
The campaign was "controversial, but very important to focus the attention on the subject of slavery," explained Vasquez.
"It's a bad part of history and people don't like to talk about "It's a bad part of history and people don't like to talk about it. It seems a long time ago, but it may be just four, five or six generations back in family history for descendants of slaves."
Vasquez continues, saying that today there are still 27 million people in slavery, and he discusses sex trade and clothing slaves to justify release of the offensive video.
Sadly, he is mixing two different types of slavery systems in the same way people often compare Roman slavery with slavery in the U.S.A. (not that slavery in any form should ever be condoned or not taking seriously). Through his exploitation of American slavery, he will only offend people the way similar comparisons are deemed offensive in the comment section about "Re-framing the Abortion Debate."
This promotion still gets a fail from me for the same reasons I discussed in my earlier post and on Twitter (see screen shot). I considered then that the producers may have been trying to draw attention to the horrors of slavery, but I felt the video did this serious and painful subject a disservice.
I applaud the documentary's producers' desire to sound the alarm on modern-day slavery, but I must condemn the method they've used to promote their series. By framing slavery as a game, the producers have shown little to no sensitivity to how painful the slavery topic is to the descendants of American-style slavery. They disrespect slavery's descendants in their video.
The video embedded in this post is from Democracy NOW! and is about a documentary co-produced by actor Danny Glover. As described on its YouTube page:
(the documentary and the clip feature "rare archival footage of Angela Davis, Huey P. Newton, Stokely. The Democracy NOW! episode and was) broadcast from Park City, Utah, home of the Sundance Film Festival, the nation's largest festival for independent cinema. One of this year's selection that is creating a lot of buzz is a documentary called "The Black Power Mixtape." The film features rare archival footage shot between 1967 and 1975 by two Swedish journalists and was discovered in the basement of Swedish public television 30 years later. We speak with renowned actor and activist Danny Glover who co-produced "The Black Power Mixtape."
For me, the clip brings back some memories worthy of more contemplation. Looking at the documentary's poster, I remember sitting in a chair at my grandmother's house reading a magazine with an article about Angela Davis and how I stared for a long while at her picture. I need to recapture what I was thinking then.
... [A]round 2007, Goran Hugo Olsson, a documentary filmmaker, stumbled upon the 16-millimeter material as he looked for footage for a project about the Philadelphia soul singer Billy Paul (“Me and Mrs. Jones”). The trove included interviews with members of the Black Panther Party and a candid conversation with Angela Davis in a California jail. “I immediately realized that these images couldn’t stay in this basement,” Mr. Olsson, 45, said during a recent visit to New York. “It was my duty to put them out for a new audience.”
Using material from some 20 different Swedish television productions, he conceived the backbone of a feature-length documentary eventually titled “The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975,” which opens in New York on Sept. 9. The movie also contains new audio interviews with veterans of the movement, including Ms. Davis, as well as younger artists and activists inspired by it, like the rapper Talib Kweli.
“There are striking juxtapositions between the documentary image of black power and our popular memory of it,” which he described as an “emotionally charged and destructive movement.”
As a black woman of 51 years, I grew up with the Black Power Movement as a common feature on the nightly news and as a topic under discussion at family gatherings. So, the themes of this documentary reside in my own memory. I do recollect thinking that the Black Power Movement had more radical rhetoric than Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s speeches, and I recall that its members were usually called "militants" and portrayed as "dangerous." These stereotypes popped up in television police dramas and blaxploitation films such as Sweet Sweetback's Badass Song as well as other movies such as The Spook Who Sat By The Door.
However, I don't remember being afraid of the movement's energy or focus. Perhaps I was not afraid because my mother also took me to plays at Free Southern Theater and gave me books that approached the black struggle in more complex terms. Therefore, I was drawn to ideas of the movement, and its emphases, its art, poetry, drama and music despite being too young to be seriously involved or to understand the sacrifice and danger of speaking out and associating black skin with any kind of power.
Nevertheless, I continued to identify with the right to equal freedom and equal influence, and when I think of the Black Power Movement now, I also recall a conversation in my 1973 Civics class at a girls boarding school in Virginia about the Olympic medal winners who raised their fist in what was perceived then to be a "black power salute" during the 1968 games. A white student, JK, the daughter of a judge, was very outspoken and if ever there was a girl who fully embraced her white privilege, she was it. She declared with much passion that those black men should have been "horsewhipped." I think she attributed the sentiment to her father, the judge, and I was suddenly aware that powerful people in the courts that were supposed to render justice were also often racists. The anger that swelled in me as I listened to her would have burned her alive if she could have felt it.
The concepts of that movement stayed with me so long that in 2006, still fascinated enough with its figures on a subconscious level, I jumped at the chance to attend a salon at Amiri Baraka's home in New Jersey just to get a feel for what he and his circle and the old days may have been like in person. I enjoyed a conversation then with his wife, Amina, also a creative artist, who was busy with food in the kitchen, a very warm, nurturing woman. And I was also able to talk to the poet himself very briefly, but that's sort of a blur. (I can't find my notes from the encounter at the moment or I'd share more about my impressions.) That night my mind kept shifting to new territory as I looked around. It flipped back and forth from black issues to women's issues while I observed the comings and goings of the evening, the trail of poets, dancers, musicians, aspiring this or thats, and the people who drew the spotlight.
'Twas the season of hurricanes, when all through the land,
creatures called "Whodats" scurried and ran
to Home Depot, to Lowe's, to Sam's and to Rouses
for candles and canned goods and fixin's for houses.
They tuned in TVs to local news stations,
dreading the word, "evacuation."
They counted their children and grandparents, too,
and hit ATMs and banks for their loot.
In New Orleans, where people love Jazz,
the second line stopped to fill cars with gas.
Folks checked radios and contraflow maps
while little ones dozed in afternoon naps.
Come Papa, come Mama, come Parran and Nannan,
come bébé, come boo, come cher and come tout,
come, let's prepare for some new hurricane,
and comfort our hearts so we remain sane.
They bow heads, remembering one called Katrina,
the nightmare that left them stronger but leaner.
And still they choose this land by the Gulf:
They love hard and hope; they live and they cope.
I am puzzled today and a tad distraught. Through a friend's Facebook post, I learned of a website for a supposed video game that may be real but is more than likely, ostensibly, bogus. It's called "Slavery the Game." While its website requires that you enter an age to verify you're old enough to see the horror behind the first page, the same video you see at that website is available for view on YouTube to anyone. This offensive "game" threatens to go live in Spring 2012.
When I first saw the website video, a lead ball dropped in my stomach. Clearly the "game" is about the middle passage, the transatlantic slave trade of Africans to the Americas. Could this ever be a major-market virtual reality game? (Here I could comment on the whole plantation/slave trade tourism that flourishes in the American South, a big money maker right here in Louisiana, but I don't have time.)
Next, I wondered if this were some kind of political statement. If so, it gets a big fat fail from me the same way the "Hit the Bitch" campaign did. Fail. Fail, fail, fail!
I tried to discern if the narrator's voice was that of a man of African-Diaspora descent. (Yes, you can sometimes tell ethnicity without visuals.) It sounds like it could be, but I'm not sure, and that led me to wonder, "What if a black creator is behind this? Would that change the purpose of the game's creation?"
The Escapist has also pondered who is behind this game. The writer suggests that it may be bogus, some kind of publicity stunt. According to his research:
... neither this game, nor the people making it seem to exist anywhere outside of that single web page.
The description on the YouTube clip up there claims the game is the work of UK-based Total War creators The Creative Assembly, but the game appears nowhere on that firm's site.
Javelin Reds Gaming, the title's supposed creator, doesn't exist as far as we can tell. The phone number listed on the site leads to a Google Voice inbox (with a Kentucky area code) and "info@javelinreds.com" appears to be a nonfunctional email address.
We even went so far as to plug "Javelin Reds" into an internet anagram generator, but as you can plainly see, the results offer little in the way of illumination.
I looked up slaverythegame.com on WhoIs and learned that the domain is registered through GoDaddy.com using its privacy proxy service. Seeing how secretive this creator or creators are, I'm inclined to believe that it's a malicious hoax unleashed on a fragile world by a person or people who have not yet grasped the ineffectiveness of ambiguity in marketing and messaging or the damage a mixed-message may do. It could also just as easily have been done by a bright but immature designer who still lives with his mom.
An avid gamer in my house immediately declared "it's a hoax." She says that you can tell it's a hoax by all the logos for major game companies at the bottom. She thinks it's "an exercise in hyperbole." (But it could be some crazy-azz way to try to sell the game to a company, a company that would have to have some kind of crazier-azz corporate death wish.)
The use of the company logos presents an intriguing issue for activists who want the video or website down. Can its creator use the logos without permission? Of course, if the creator is pressured to remove the logos, he/she will probably just edit the video and put it up again without the logos. Oh, where are the Super Hero Stuxnet hackers when you need them? Don't we have any of those who fight racist propaganda and hate speech?
Anyway, until we know who's behind this so-called game, we won't know if the creator is motivated to attack racism and slavery or glorify it. In the meantime, has this person done more damage than good for the world community? What is his/her game?
Yes, I, too, heard about J.C. Penney's sale of the disturbing T-shirt for little girls with the slogan, "I'm too pretty to do homework, so my brother has to do it for me." At BlogHer.com, Shannon L.C. Cate wrote about the controversy expressing the same concern that women and some men all over the Internet voiced as soon as news of the T-shirt broke.
The department store has since pulled the T-shirt from the shelves, but I decided to post Anderson Cooper's commentary on the matter anyway since in it he shows other sexist T-shirts marketed to youngsters that give stifling messages about gender roles. The CNN anchor added J. C. Penney to his RidicuList last night.
O.K. This is the kid, Brian Bradley, who was on The X Factor USA Thursday night rapping his song "Stop Looking at My Mom!" or to be more accurate "my momz." Apparently he had an "official video" already on YouTube with more than 80,000 hits. It was posted in October 2010 and it's cute, showing other kids protecting their moms from lusting eyes. You can buy the mp3 at Amazon.com.
