Category Archives: eclectic music

Hail To Pitt

27 Wednesday Apr 2011

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University of Pittsburgh Logo, April 27, 2011. http://www.pitt.edu

I can be hard on people, places and things, especially the ones I like and love. That’s as true of my undergraduate alma mater as anything else. Twenty years ago this date, I graduated from the University of Pittsburgh. I didn’t attend the cattle-call ceremony at the Civic Arena that Sunday in ’91. Almost none of my immediate circle of friends attended, either. My mother and my younger siblings, still in the midst of welfare, weren’t going to be there to see me anyway. The Penguins were on that day, in the middle of a dominant playoff run, with Lemieux scoring at will. And I had other things on my mind that day and weekend. Like, will I be able to go to grad school without taking out tens of thousands of dollars in student loans?

This was a time of major transition for me. Two years removed from the end of the reign of my ex-stepfather at 616, and four years after I graduated from Mount Vernon High School and my obsession

My B.A. degree, University of Pittsburgh, April 27, 2011. Note that this was Wesley Posvar's last graduation signature. The university president would retire the following month amid a $3 million golden parachute scandal.

with Crush #2. I was essentially the same person, and yet there was something inside me that had started clawing its way out over the previous year. It was a drive, a determination, a rage that I’d buried since my first year in Humanities and the summer of abuse that followed in ’82. I was going to graduate school, at least I hoped that I was. Or I was going to have to find a real job, something that made me feel like I had diarrhea.

I knew on my Pitt graduation date that the departments of history at NYU, University of Maryland and Pitt had accepted me into their masters programs. But NYU wanted me to make a signed commitment before they awarded me any financial aid. The University of Maryland conveniently lost my application packet during their graduate fellowship decision process. By the time my packet resurfaced, the department had awarded all of their fellowships, and decided to put me on provisional status. Not based on my grades, mind you, but based on how late they were in going through my application. Pitt had accepted me a couple of weeks before my graduation, but I was sixth on the alternate list for teaching fellowships that would cover my tuition and provide a stipend.

I felt a lot of anxiety about all of this uncertainty regarding my immediate future. It helped to have friends, even with my friends in the middle of their own uncertainty. My friend Marc was working at a Black newspaper, dreaming of law school but uncertain about his prospects. Three other friends, including someone I was sort of dating, were taking their last classes or unsure about grad school or law school. Even my summer job working for a project at the Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic was shaky. It only paid $5.20 an hour, and I could’ve easily gone back to Mount Vernon and New York making $8 an hour or more doing the same work.

But as uncertain as I felt about things, this much I was certain about. The four years I spent at Pitt were ones that cocooned me in a way that none of my time growing up in Mount Vernon, New York did. I began to heal while I was there, academically, socially, emotionally. I was far from done learning how to connect to people, but I wasn’t the twelve-year-old neophyte keeping only the most rudimentary connections to humans either. My education was a valuable part of that experience. The friendships and other bonds I forms, the lessons I learned about trust, the efforts — however limited — the university made toward creating a campus climate that embraced diversity were all appreciated.

Even at the time, I felt comfortable at Pitt because it was the first place I learned to be comfortable in my own skin. It was a place where my friends, my acquaintances and others around me didn’t look at me like I was a freak because I listened to U2, sang in high-falsetto or walked at Warp Factor 3 to get across campus.

Those are the feelings, those good feelings, that I have about my four years of undergrad and two years of grad school (more on that in May) at the University of Pittsburgh. So, “Hail to Pitt,” and to my Pitt friends and folks from the classes of ’90-’94, Happy Graduation Anniversary Day.

High Falsetto Highs and Lows

25 Monday Apr 2011

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I know that I’m weird, a freak, and if I were a quarter-century younger, a bit geekish. Well, maybe a geek in a tall man’s body with fourteen percent body fat. Music is one of those things that separates me as weird. Not just because of what I listen to from moment to moment. Smooth jazz to R&B to hip-hop soul to ’80s pop to ’90 White male angst grunge to rap to divas like Mariah Carey and Celine Dion. Few people I know — much less males, much, much less Black males — have any appreciation for eclectic musical tastes. But they’ve had almost no tolerance for my high-falsetto singing voice over the years.

Puberty was the reason I discovered it all. My closest friends and wife don’t believe me when I tell them that I used to be able to hold a tune. That in sixth, seventh and eight grade, I sang with my elementary school and middle school chorus. I was a baritone, and a decent one at that. But the voice changes of puberty cracked my voice and sent it into high falsetto in ’83, ’84 and into ’85, whenever I did try to sing.

So I went with it. Once I reconnected with music outside of school in the ’80s, I sang mostly in that ear-splitting, shaky and unevenly high tone and pitch to everything I liked. And that made me stand out, mostly as the weird guy with the Walkman that my fellow Black males made fun of for not being cool. Did I care? Sure, in an obvious, I-know-I-don’t-fit-in kind of way. But, did I care? For the most part, no. I knew enough to not walk down certain streets in Mount Vernon and certain part of the high school singing in that voice, walking to the beat of my own internal music box.

That voice was my release. As awful as I sounded in it, as imperfect and grating my tone, as much of a strain as I put on my cords, it was one of a handful of ways for me to experience happiness, joy, laughter. Other emotions besides rage, fear and anger. That’s what singing Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time,” Michael Jackson’s “Human Nature,” and a-ha’s “Take On Me” well outside my normal vocal range did for me. It gave me a high without the benefit of pot, and a low without the benefit of friends.

Singing in high falsetto still brings a natural high. Except now, I laugh at myself while doing it, and I don’t care about the people who think I’m a freak because I sound like a buffoon. Damn right.

Milky White Skin

21 Thursday Apr 2011

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Bethesda Literary Festival logo, April 21, 2011. http://www.bethesda.org

I attended the Bethesda Literary Festival last weekend. It’s been a while since I’ve gone to any conference involving writers, wannabe writers, published authors and other curiously weird types. I usually find these events somewhere between dreadfully boring and undeniably soul-sucking. I wish that I could say that the festival held at various parts of downtown Bethesda were an exception. But what I can say is that the Bethesda Literary Festival provided the best desserts — especially the cupcakes (my guess, from Georgetown Cupcakes) — I’ve had at any literary event.

Bethesda Literary Festival 2011 Logo, April 21, 2011. http://www.bethesda.org

The most poignant event at the festival for me was the Essay and Short Story Contest winners for ’11. Grouped into two categories — over 18 and young adults — the winners were announced and had the opportunity to read from their stories and essays. I must admit, some of the stories were compelling. (That word, compelling, a common word lit agents have used as a reason for rejection of Boy @ The Window. I often think that they’re working from an unspoken definition of what compelling really is.) But I also found most of the stories cliché, typical, White both in terms of the actual color as well in racial and cultural terms.

Listening to these aspiring authors, young and talented writers read their work reminded me so much of a line from Finding Forrester, where the character played by Sean Connery says, “Writers write so that readers can read. Let someone else read it.” It’s difficult for any writer to read something they’ve written with the passion and emotion contained within their own words. And with two exceptions — a mother reading for her daughter about a dying aunt, and a seventeen-year-old reading his essay in poetry slam fashion — the Forrester axiom was in full effect.

I kept checking my watch, hoping that I’d hear something that would inspire me or at least pique my interest. The latter did occur, but not in the way in which I would’ve expected. I listened to one forty-

Ridiculousness of Milky Skin, April 21, 2011. Donald Earl Collins

something short-story honorable mention read about a “tongue licking ice cream.” Earlier, there had been a young adult winner, reading phrases like “Same cloudless indigo eyes. Same auburn, frizzy locks. Same childish, pearly pudge of skin…”

It all took me back to novels and other pieces of literature from my high school days. Like Shakespearean plays in which actors described some young English woman as having “milky skin,” as a point of attraction and lust. That kind of writing, the constant shifting and sliding of adjectives and adverbs. It drove me crazy in ’85. Last weekend, it made my eyes glaze over, with both looking like the clear frosting on a glazed donut.

I yawned with the anticipation of more of the same stories that writers and publishers have been selling for as long as I’ve been alive. I knew what was coming. Stories of epiphanies and social consciousness, upper-middle-class-White-Bethesda-and-Potomac-style. Stories of parallel and pain, from climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro and grave illness to autism to death and dying. Universal stories that somehow were milky White, told in a style that made the messy truth of it as palatable as a slice of key lime pie.

I don’t write that way. But not because I can’t. I could write page after page in vivid description of Crush #1. I could count each hair on her well-muscled forearms on the way to measuring every mole on her shoulders, every tooth in magnitude of whiteness, every capillary in her eyeballs. I could spend a few pages describing the different smells of flatulence and excrement I grew up with at 616. From the sweetness of a spaghetti and meat sauce fart to the lingering death-knell scent of a bathroom after the flushing of what once was a combination of coffee, beer and fried chicken.

Literary nonfiction, memoir, or other serious writing endeavors, though, are about the balance between the sweet milky whiteness of the literary and the messy realness of me as the writer. In the case of Boy @ The Window, of me as the main character as well. Descriptions of milky or caramel colored skin do reside among its pages. But so do descriptions of conversations, characters, actions and emotions. All as part of telling a story, sharing some truth, beyond the romance of the purely literary.

Never As Good As The First Time

12 Tuesday Apr 2011

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I know. Today marks 150 years since a bunch of rebel rednecks besieged a fort in South Carolina after months of talk of civil war across the South and North, beginning the bloodiest conflict to date in American history. I’ll get to this in the next couple of days. Today, though, marks a more personal and bloody anniversary for me. You see, today’s the twenty-ninth anniversary of experiencing unadulterated child abuse for the first time.

Although much of what I’d gone through prior to April ’82 in terms of my parents’ and stepfather’s use of discipline would be considered abusive now, I wouldn’t have seen it that way when I was twelve. You run away from home, you get an ass-whuppin’. You tell a lie about your brother, you get whupped with a belt. You don’t clean up the kitchen properly, you stand in a corner of your room with the lights off, with one leg up in the air and your two arms balancing books for an hour.

Yeah, that was life at 616 before Maurice, Judah, whatever you want to call the man, became almost psychotic (based on my experience, actually bipolar) after becoming a Hebrew-Israelite in ’81. And, in the process, also making us Black Jews. Poor, misguided, conflicted Hebrew-Israelites we were. But not him.

Suge Knight Mugshot. Face and beard of my ex-stepfather from 30 years ago.

My idiot stepfather’s ego was stoked in this religion.

And it came out in the worst way on this second weekend in April ’82. It was a week after a freakish late winter/early spring storm had dumped 12-18 inches of snow on the New York City area — Mount Vernon included — and kept the schools closed for a few days. In the previous couple of months, Maurice had become a hanger-on at a newly opened Karate studio down the street from 616, next door to the old dry cleaner business on East Lincoln Avenue. He made me come to the studio because he wanted to show me “how to be a man.”

But when I’d see him on my almost daily runs to the grocery store, he mostly hung out with young Turks and wannabe thugs from the Pearsall Drive projects across the street. Maurice smoked up a storm of Benson & Hedges Menthol while talking about women, being a Hebrew-Israelite, and about me as his “book-smart kid,” at least when I happened to walk by.

I knew what that meant. My stepfather was making it known that he thought of me as soft. This would have disastrous consequences for me later on in ’82, as I’d come to be robbed by a guy called “Pookie.” But as far as this part of Mount Vernon was concerned, it was nothing like the poorer, almost exclusively Black South Side. At least where we lived, people didn’t go into parks with baseball bats attempting to put people’s heads in orbit, like with my father Jimme the year before.

Maurice had tried to teach me and my older brother Darren Isshin-ryu Karate two years earlier. Beyond that, he’d been showing us a variety of basic moves since ’77. Despite myself, I did pick up a few moves. Now he decided that I would learn how to fight no matter the consequences. It was all about breaking bones and inflicting maximum pain. When I told Maurice that I didn’t want to learn, he said “You will

D'Angelo Mugshot, circa 2010. A slightly better doppelgänger for idiot Maurice Washington from '82.

learn because I’m your father” as he started to throw hard punches into my midsection.

After I yelled “You’re not my father!,” he drop-kicked me to the floor. Maurice, all six-foot-one and 270 pounds of him, then pulled me up by my arms, slammed me back-first into a mirrored wall, and punched me several times in the head, chest, and stomach until several of the men in the studio surrounded him. My stepfather, completely exasperated and winded, yelled “Don’t you EVER say that again, muthafucka! I’ll kill you next time!” I ran for home with a knot on my forehead that didn’t go down for almost a week.

By the time that knot on my forehand began to shrink, I’d been feeling lonely and betrayed for nearly a year. It’d been exactly fifty-two weeks, a full year, since the asshole had come back into our lives with this earth-shattering religion. Now we were more broke than ever, I had lost my best friends, and in fact, had no one I could call friend. With this latest karate episode, I knew I was cursed, at least, that’s how I felt back then.

I wasn’t a normal kid before the Hebrew-Israelite period in my life. So I didn’t have a natural progression toward adulthood — I was struggling to remain a kid but succeeded at only having adult issues by the time a drop-kick knocked me to the floor of a karate studio. So, because of my virtually photographic memory and those terrible times, I often flip one of Sade’s refrains from “Never As Good As The First Time.” The thorns I remember, the roses, I forget (except for Crush #1). And Maurice second stint as a husband and father “didn’t live up to the dream,” ‘cuz his second time with us was “not quite what it seemed.”

Dumb, Discussion

31 Thursday Mar 2011

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Inspired by my friends Catherine Lugg (see her recent comments about the Obama Administration and their ignoring of the unemployed) and James Lee via Facebook (running a one-man crusade on our government’s daily hypocrisy), and my Twitter folk, the video above is for all of you. It is my montage to the past thirty years of obfuscation, dissembling, exaggeration, plausible deniability, and spittle-laden spin that is our everyday news and politics. Or, as the post-grunge band Live would say in their “White, Discussion,” (1994) the “decibels of this disenchanting discourse continue to dampen the day/the coin flips again and again and again and again, as our sanity walks away.”

So I put six minutes of video together from President Reagan’s “Evil Empire” speech (1983), a YouTube video “A Tour of Detroit’s Ghetto” from camosilver, and a couple of pictures I took from the Rally to Restore Sanity here in DC back in October. Along with clips from:

  • The Daily Show (with Jon Stewart eviscerating Bernie Goldberg and FOX News via “gospel,” April 20, ’10)
  • Real Time with Bill Maher (one with Keith Olbermann from last year, the other from a couple of weeks ago calling Rep. Ellison’s religion [Islam] one “filled with hate”)
  • Glenn Beck’s insanity on FOX News
  • The O’Reilly Factor
  • Sarah Palin being interviewed by Chris Wallace on FOX News last year
  • ITN’s coverage of the tsunami in northeast Japan earlier this month
  • Protests in Egypt after January 25 (Russian TV)
  • The protests in Madison, Wisconsin at the end of February (Russian TV)
  • Rachel Maddow’s “Home of the Whopper” segment from the Fall ’10 election cycle (MSNBC)
  • The infamous Jerry Falwell-Pat Robertson clip accusing all left-of-center folk of causing 9/11 (CBN)
  • President Obama’s Libya speech from Monday evening, March 28 (PBS).

Now I’ve given credit where credit is due and claim fair use under US copyright laws. But if our American public discourse doesn’t look dumb after watching it with Live’s “White, Discussion” playing in the background, I’d dare say that you’ll need to see an optometrist as soon as possible. In fact, I think we all need to get our brains, ears and eyes checked after three decades of being dummied down.

P.S. Also meant to give credit to NBA and Derrick Rose for a clip of his dunk against the Phoenix Suns last year.

AED Update – DOA for 50th Anniversary

04 Friday Mar 2011

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As of yesterday, the Academy for Educational Development (AED), my employer from December 2000 to February 2008 (and a place in which I remained a consultant from February-August 2008) is on the chopping block. Officially, the website mentioned in a press release that the AED Board of Directors “will pursue a process to sell itself of all of its highly valued programs and assets,” that this is “the only way to ensure the continuity of our programs and projects and to provide a new home and safe harbor for our talented staff within another appropriate for-profit or non-profit organization.” No explanation of why the Board found themselves making this allegedly difficult decision in the first place, however.

After all, as reported in the Washington Post, the Nonprofit News and the Los Angeles Times in December, USAID had put the organization’s $640 million in government grants on indefinite suspension after they learned of millions of dollars of malfeasance with two projects in Afghanistan/Pakistan. But it’s not until the sixth paragraph of its long press release on its website that AED even admits its time in the sun as an international development contractor is coming to a close.

There’s much more to this story than this press release, though. An undisclosed source confirmed that AED’s suspension has become permanent, as the government notified the organization of its decision to no longer do any business with the organization earlier this week. That puts the government grants that AED already administers on a death watch as well.

Despite all proclamations to the contrary, AED’s role since 1969 has been primarily as a government contractor with USAID and the US Department of State. With seventy percent of its business in government-funded international development programs, insufficient program diversification and a top-heavy business model — and not just funny bookkeeping — put AED on this road.

As a tribute to my former employer, below is a YouTube video of Gerry Rafferty’s big ’70s hit “Baker Street.” Gerry Rafferty – Baker Street It seems appropriate, since most of AED’s senior leadership was so ’60s and ’70s in their outlook on international development, education reform, gender and racial diversity and organizational management in general.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of AED’s founding. I started working there during AED’s year forty, and saw plenty of lavish celebrating of the organization’s ability to attract government funding, giving projects like mine — funded by the lowly Ford Foundation and Lumina Foundation for Education — short shrift in the process. Outside of love, friendship, wisdom and redemption, there’s nothing more remarkable in life than irony. I can hear the alto saxophone playing right now.

Mr. Mister’s “Kyrie”

01 Tuesday Mar 2011

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Mr. Mister, “Kyrie” Single Cover, August 8, 2010. Vanjagenije. Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws because of the image’s low resolution and because image illustrates subject of this blog post.

Twenty-five years ago this week, Mr. Mister’s “Kyrie” made it to the top of the Billboard pop charts, making me goofy and giddy beyond belief. March ’86 was the beginning of a great month of music for me. I bought my first Walkman — a Walkman-knockoff really — from Crazy Eddie’s on 47th and Fifth in Manhattan, as well as the first of what would be about 200 cassettes of my favorite music. Not to mention a ton of musical experimentation — most of it bad, goofy and un-listen-able for even the musically impaired.

For many of you, Mr. Mister’s “Kyrie” would likely fall into that last category. It was semi-religious rock at a time when the closest thing to that was Amy Grant. It was Creed a whole decade before Creed, but with better musicians. It was a group of studio musicians putting out a breakout album that actually stood apart from the super-serious or super-sugary music of the mid-80s. It was a perfect storm for a sixteen-year-old in search of inspiration beyond the chaos of 616 and the lonely march toward college via Humanities and Mount Vernon High School.

“Kyrie” was one of two songs that kept me in overdrive in and out of the classroom through most of my junior year at Mount Vernon High School. Simple Minds’ “Alive and Kicking” was the other song. It almost became my mantra in the months that straddled ’85 and ’86. Every time I heard that song, especially the album version, was like going on a game-winning touchdown drive at the end of the fourth quarter. Studying was time to throw screen passes or seven-yard slants, to run the ball on a power sweep or on a draw play. It was methodical, the drums and synthesizers, and put me in a determined, methodical mood as I prepared for a test.

But Mr. Mister’s “Kyrie” was magical. Short for “Kyrie Eleison” Latin/Greek for “Lord have mercy,” it became my go-to song for every big academic play I needed to make for the rest of the year, even for the rest of high school. “Kyrie” combined all of the elements that my vivid imagination relied on. My faith in The One, my hope for a better future, lyrics that made me think, music that evoked a big play, like throwing it deep and completing it for a game-changing score. It was as methodical as “Alive and Kicking,” but the bigger bass guitar and heavier synthesizers as the background gave me the feeling that God’s grace was with me wherever I went and whatever I did. It was a true underdog’s song.

It was like I was singing a high-falsetto, four-and-a half-minute prayer whenever I played “Kyrie.” Some of my classmates, as usual, didn’t appreciate whatever deeper meaning I saw in the song or in its lyrics. See, my being Black and high-pitched singing to it was another obvious sign of my weirdness. Yet somehow, when it came to music, I didn’t really care what any of them thought.

As I went off to college and became more sophisticated in my understanding of music, I realized that there were some songs I couldn’t completely part with, no matter how goofy or out-of-date the music video was. “Kyrie” was one of those songs for me. I didn’t play it regularly by the time I’d reached my mid-twenties, but that didn’t mean that I didn’t sing to it in high-falsetto while shopping at Giant Eagle in Pittsburgh when the song would come on over the PA system.

Once iPod and iTunes technology became part of my household in ’06, I uploaded the old song and listened to it regularly again. I’ve wondered from time to time what would the sixteen-year-old version of me would think about me at forty-one. I’ve achieved more, and been hurt and lost more, than I could’ve possibly imagined a quarter-century ago.

It’s taken me more than twenty years to fully understand Richard Page’s lyrics about “would I have followed down my chosen road, or only wish what I could be?” The answer is both. Life is a funny and winding journey, even when on the path of the straight and narrow. Christian or atheist or of some other faith, it’s always good to hope that someone is there to watch over us, to protect us, even our younger selves from our older and allegedly wiser versions of ourselves. And that’s what I here now when I listen to — and sing high-falsetto still to — “Kyrie.”