Category Archives: Movies

Michael Clayton vs. Jerome Kersey

14 Sunday Mar 2021

Posted by in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Movies, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Sports, Work

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Then Blazer Jerome Kersey slashing his way to a lay-up past Laker Magic Johnson and Byron Scott, n.d., but likely pre-1991-92 season. (Mike Powell, Getty Images; https://www.blazersedge.com/2015/2/18/8066753/jerome-kersey-dead-portland-trail-blazers-legend)

A few years ago, I declared myself the writer equivalent of the fictional character Michael Clayton, whom George Clooney played in a movie of the same name in 2007. Like Clayton, who straddled the worlds of police officers, attorneys, and fixers, I found myself a misfit between academia and writing, journalism and writing, and professional writing. Despite whatever successes I have had in recent years (if one can call them that), I do not think this equation has changed. I still often find myself pounding on the walls of stone temples, a world of white folks who would just as soon spit on me and my manuscripts as they would ignore my queries. Such is the world in which I inhabit as one of the Black folx.

But I am not just Michael Clayton. I am also like the late Jerome Kersey (1962-2015) (may his body rest in peace while his spirit takes a moment to read me out — hopefully). At least as a writer. The six-seven small forward who came from a one-time Division II school and played the bulk of his career with the Portland Trail Blazers was one of the best slashers and one of the better defenders in the NBA in the late-1980s and in the 1990s. Kersey was especially adept at weak-side defense and playing passing lanes, great at finishing off of full-court fast breaks, and could beat defenders off of give-and-gos in the half-court set with ease. His J (if one could call it that) was serviceable at best. Anything outside 12-15 feet was a risky proposition, especially in close playoff games. But if you needed a weak-side rebound and put-away dunk, Kersey was the man.

In his prime, he was a necessary asset as part of the Blazers’ runs to the NBA Finals in 1990 and 1992, part of Clyde “The Glide” Drexler’s underrated band of brothers who entertained us. At least until they ran into teams that liked beating up on their opponents, like the Detroit Pistons in 1990 and MJ and the Chicago Bulls in 1992. When Drexler left in a mid-season trade to the Houston Rockets in 1995, obviously hungry for a ring, I knew Kersey’s days as a Blazer were numbered. They still had the great Cliff Robinson, so they would be a playoff team for years to come, but not a championship team.

I think I write the same way Kersey approached basketball. I am not someone who can take on a team one-on-three or one-on-five. I am a good passer, but the Chris Webber no-looks or LBJ pocket passes, okay, but nothing to wax braggadocious about, either. But if I get one step past a defender, good luck in keeping me from making a lay-up. Also, don’t leave me wide-open from three. I’ll make at least one for every three I take on my best days. I will fight for rebounds while taking elbows to my cheeks and jaw and eye socket, while knocking knees and shins, and will fall to the ground to get the ball.

That’s how I write. I am straightforward in my approach, hoping that my wit, my goofiness, and my knowledge bleed through. But I am also counterintuitive, and will take big ideas and try to break them down in ways no one else I know in the writing world is doing (that’s how I’ve managed to publish the pieces I have over the past six years, hitting the occasional 3). I write like I defend, as if my life depends on it, precisely because it does.

And yes, this leaves me vulnerable. In today’s NBA, even in Kersey’s NBA, one cannot just put their head down to the floor and drive to the basket without looking cross-court for an open teammate. Or, in case a defender plants themselves firmly to the wood, waiting to take an offensive foul or to block your shot. That’s where Kersey’s slash-to-the-hoop game often worked against him, especially once the injuries piled up, as his first step became slower.

So, I might not have the slow yet deliberate pick-apart-a-defense moves of an all-time great like Walt “Clyde” Frazier, or can staccato through defenses like the Celtics’ Jaylen Brown, Kawhi Leonard, or current Blazer Damian Lillard, the equivalent of the way poetry slammer and author Bassey Ikpi writes. Nor do I have the quantum-level precision of pouring in points, beating defenses off the dribble, or making turn-around jumpers like Bernard King once did and MJ did with cold-blooded lethality, the way Colson Whitehead and Kiese Laymon weigh every single word, every phrase, every sentence, and every paragraph. Nor do I have the ability to flash killer smiles while also killing you with my post-up game, the way Magic Johnson once did and future WNBA hall-of-famer Candice Parker still does, which is how I see Roxane Gay, Tressie McMillan Cottom, and Walter Mosley (most of the time) as writers.

Kersey had a 17-year NBA career, won a title with the San Antonio Spurs in 1999 (against my Knicks), and is in the top-3 or top-5 in most team statistics all-time as a result of his 11 years in Portland with the Blazers. Maybe I am not a hall-of-fame writer. But my writer game as Jerome Kersey might make me a long-hauler in this calling. Even if agents and editors, journalists and academicians still only see me as Michael Clayton.

The Fight of the (Buick) Century

31 Saturday Oct 2020

Posted by in 1, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, High Rise Buildings, Marriage, Mount Vernon New York, Movies, New York City, Pop Culture, Religion, Sports, Youth

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Mike Tyson slamming his right fist into Michael Spinks’ left cheek and jaw, knocking him down and out (screen shot), Atlantic City, NJ, June 27, 1988. (https://www.gentside.co.uk/).

I hate bullies. There, I wrote it. There aren’t too many things I hate more than bullies. Because bullies are the ultimate liars. Their presumed strength is a mask for the same insecurities the rest of us humans have. Only, they’ve decided that beating up on others physically, verbally, and emotionally as the solution to their fears. The only way really to deal with bullies is to stand your ground and beat them into submission. Or, if you can’t win the fight, to make the fight so vicious and bloody that the bully would rather die than fight you again.

I was robbed four times growing up between age nine and a few weeks before my 14th birthday, all in Mount Vernon, New York (so much for my parents’ worries about me being out late at night in the Bronx or Manhattan!). Two of the four robberies were full-fledged muggings, where I had to fight. Two of the four robberies, my older brother Darren abandoned me with bags of groceries (April 1979) or three bags of laundered clothes in a laundry cart — seven people’s worth — (October 1983).

That next-to-last robbery was a calculated one. I was literally walking uphill near the Hutchinson River, about to cross the bridge over the parkway of the same name, with an overloaded cart and no help from Darren. As I strained with between 60 and 70 pounds of clothes in the cold and dank fall weather on this rickety cart that I had to pull from behind (no front facing wheels), Darren walked back toward me. Two wanna-be-hard-asses were a few steps behind. “They want you to give ’em five dollars,” Darren said, as if I was in the charity business.

Now the taller one was behind Darren, the shrimp to my left. After years of basic Isshin-ryu karate training and two years of taking my everyday bully, er, stepfather Maurice’s punches, kicks, and chokes, I could have easily taken the shrimp. But Darren, as he had done in my first mugging four years earlier, had fled the scene. My  choices were to fight and risk scattering and ruining six weeks’ worth of clean clothes for me, Darren, Mom, Maurice, and my three younger siblings, or give them the five dollars. I did the latter. “That’s the last five dollars you’re ever gonna get from me,” I said to the shrimp while gritting my teeth. He sneered, but when I stepped toward him as if I was going to hit him, he stepped back.

I never expected Darren to help me with anything after that. This was when I began to say, to anyone who asked about my positioning in the family, that I was the oldest brother by default. “Well, I’m actually the second oldest, but my older brother abdicated the throne when I was 12 or 13,” I said with sarcasm for the next 20 years after that day. Including on my college essays!

That shrimp’s name was Reggie. He was among a group of roving bullies from 616 and 630 East Lincoln and the Pearsall Drive projects in those not-so-long-ago days. Reggie had been robbing folks for years, stealing money and candy from ten and eleven-olds, trying to crack on boys for being “ugly,” talking shit to girls like they would give his Vasoline-needin’ ass the time of day.

I’m not going to lie. People like Reggie scared me when we first moved to the roughest part of North Side Mount Vernon in 1977. After being sexually assaulted the year before, pretty much everything scared seven-year-old-me. But that was before the Reagan Years, the Hebrew-Israelite years, before getting my head caved in and my ribs cracked and bruised by a 32-year-old bully, a fourth-degree black belt in leeching off a welfare-poor family, my mother’s second husband. It was before puberty had shot me up from five-two to six-feet even, and with a recognition that I had some physical skills. So no, my biggest fear that day wasn’t being robbed, mugged, or even standing up for myself. It was dealing with Maurice afterward.

Five or six months after I handed him an Abe, Reggie finally got his. It was after school, sometime in late March or April 1984. The Reggie incident was now long forgotten under a pile of high school assignments, my post-suicide attempt conversion to Christianity, and plotting another round of resistance against my idiot stepfather. As I stared out the second bedroom window on the third floor, toward the northwest corner of the A block of 616, a mob of preteens and teenagers, between 20 and 30 in all, surrounded Reggie the shrimp and another, lighter-skinned kid who had also shot up in height in the past year. It dawned on me later that the older Reggie was either still stuck in middle school or a high school dropout, but it wouldn’t have mattered to me if his mama dropped him on his head when he was three.

Words turned into fists as the crowd swelled into a rough circle. I could hear the taller kid’s (lets call him KJ) fists land hard on Reggie’s cheeks and the left side of Reggie’s jaw, as KJ threw what we would now call an MMA combination that landed Reggie’s short ass in the dirt and sparse grass of 616’s front yard. KJ then pounced on Reggie and beat him in the face and torso until the shrimp curled up. I don’t remember what the freshly-minted teen yelled at Reggie as he stood over him like Ali over Sonny Liston, but whatever he said, the crowd of kids cheered and celebrated.

UFC 207 between Amanda Nunes and Ronda Rousey (screenshot; a full KO beatdown administered by Nunes in 48 seconds), T-Mobile Arena, Las Vegas, December 30, 2016. (https://youtube.com).

Reggie, bloodied lip, bruised from forehead to belly, with dirt and grass and straw in his hair and all over his clothes, all but cried as he stood up a moment later. By then, the crowd had followed KJ to 630, or gone home somewhere between 616, 630, or to their single-family dwellings on the other side of the street, or to the Pearsall Drive projects at the end of the long block. He somehow looked even darker, shorter, and more diminished than he did when I jerked at him as if to hit him five or six months earlier. As much empathy as I can have for the vanquished, I had zero empathy for Reggie at all. The only wish I had at that moment was that I had joined in with KJ and swung-kicked some teeth down Reggie’s mf-ing throat.

This is how we should all deal with bullies, like 45 and his minions. Not with empathy or with regard to what in their backgrounds helped make them this way. That comes later, when we have a chance to implement for the long-term. No, the immediate threat is a bully who taunts and grifts and threatens. You beat the shit out of that person, or make it so that their victory costs them so much that it feels like a defeat. After all, this is about self-preservation, survival, and harm reduction. Or to quote Val Kilmer’s Doc Holliday from Tombstone (1993), “it’s not revenge that [we’re] after, it’s a reckonin’.” We need a reckoning this time around. Thanks, KJ, for showing the way.

Jordan Was Great, But He’s Also an All-Too-Typical American Narcissist

07 Thursday May 2020

Posted by in 1, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Movies, music, New York City, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Sports, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

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John Starks (NY Knicks) dunking on MJ, Horace Grant (Chicago Bulls) in final minute of Game 2, NBA Eastern Conference Finals, MSG, New York, May 25, 1993. (Getty Images).

I’ve been thinking on this for a few weeks now. Ever since the buildup to the first episode of the documentary The Last Dance that aired on April 19, I contemplated the idea of a docuseries on the last Chicago Bulls run for an NBA title, hoping it would be a larger commentary about Michael Jordan, about the Bulls, about basketball and the NBA, about sports and society and so much more. And, in a number of important ways, The Last Dance is a larger commentary. But mostly not in a good way. Mostly, it nakedly celebrates American racism and American narcissism, embodied in Michael Jordan, and enmeshed in every aspect of the docuseries’ text, context, and subtext.

Two of my favorite sports and society columnists have it right. Chuck Modiano writes in Deadspin that The Last Dance is “Michael Jordan’s 10-Part Nike-Approved Commercial.” And although I believe Dave Zirin is correct to describe Jordan as “showing us who he is—exactly who we thought he was” — an “antihero” — he is so much more typical than that. He is an American narcissist, one who has internalized and interpersonal racism issues, sprinkled with patriarchy (like, where are women in this series, particularly his wife and ex-wife?) and Black masculinity and gross classism to the point of zero empathy for marginalized people. All this makes Jordan all-too-typical, and all-too-ordinary, in the broader scheme.

I have written a bunch on the connections between American narcissism and American racism over the past four and a half years, on this blog and in mainstream publications. What I have not touched on much are the connections between American narcissism and American racism in popular culture. Mostly because the narcissism, racism, and cultural appropriating in pop culture is obvious. It’s more than just low-hanging fruit. It’s the fruit laying all on the ground, ripe and rotten, ready for folks to eat and to throw out, and at the same time.

Ah, but pop culture icons are by definition narcissists, no? They must be, because they self-aggrandize, they’re extroverts, they navel-gaze, they refer to themselves in the third-person, etc., right? Sure, as a general rule, whether a Hollywood actor, a bankable music artist, an over-the-top rapper, a famous out-in-the-world writer, or an athlete among the “greatest of all time,” narcissism might be a significant part of their personality matrix.

But, there’s a difference between confidence — even cockiness and bravado — and actual narcissism. For starters, narcissists tend to lack empathy, the ability to even begin to put themselves in the position of acknowledging the pain, suffering, and difficulties people who are not them face in life, some of which they may have caused themselves. So many in pop culture put on airs and take on public personas who are only a facsimile of who they are in real life. Some artists create an alter-ego in order to cope with the pressures of being in the fickle world of celebrity and fandom. It would be unfair to ascribe narcissism to every individual who has ever “made it” through movies, music, writing, or athletics.

However, so many like Jordan show us exactly who they are, and in the process, show us who we are as a society. And ours is a narcissistic society, of winners and losers, of great disparities in wealth justified with systemic and collective racism. That Jordan’s sneakers still sell for well over $100 million a year for Nike nearly two decades after his retirement says more about the US and the world, and about the narcissism we possess as a society and have exported around the globe, than anything else.

Air Jordans are as much a projection of American narcissism and racism as is the US military, a McDonald’s Big Mac and Coke, and a Starbucks’ venti latte. China has been producing Air Jordan’s at its factories for decades, where workers frequently make $120 a month to produce a pair at $16 raw value. They sell in the US and in the world for between $110 and $250 for mass-produced models, and as much as $100,000 for one-of-a-kind pairs or creations. I couldn’t afford Air Jordans in the years between 1985 and 1999, when they often sold for $150 a pair (and kids were mugging and killing each other over them). In the decades since, I have found that my feet need ergonomic support, something Jordans typically do not provide. Figures. So I am happy to say that while I have tried on a pair or two, I have never owned a pair.

But as for The Last Dance, Jordan’s fourth lap around the world is the text, but him getting in his digs at his friends’, nemeses and haters’ (real and imagined) expense is the context and subtext. His constant put-downs of former Bulls’ GM, the late Jerry Krause went quickly from funny to sad to mercilessly demeaning, all in Episode 1. Jordan’s lack of empathy and leadership, though, comes through with Episodes 2 and 3, in the side story of Scottie Pippen. Jordan, who would have zero titles without Pippen, did nothing but shake his head at Pippen’s low pay and contract woes. Seven years, and you couldn’t be bothered to use even one percent of your influence to get Jerry Reinsdorf to renegotiate for your compatriot? That alone makes Jordan not the GOAT, not in basketball, nor in terms of his humanity.

His complete ignoring of both Isiah Thomas and the Detroit Pistons in the universe of all-time great teams of his era, another example of Jordan’s narcissism, and quite frankly, racism. Pull up any quote from Jordan about the great teams he and the Bulls had to beat to get their first rings. Always “Larry and Magic,” “the Celtics and the Lakers.” Nothing about Isiah and the Pistons, not unless a reporter forces his acknowledgement, not unless Jordan can be begrudging and dismissive in the process. Hey, Jordan! The Pistons beat the Bulls three straight years in the playoffs, 1988, 1989, and 1990, on their way to three straight Finals appearances and two titles. Isiah played well in all the closeout games. Isiah may be an asshole, but he’s been far more gracious in victory and in defeat than you will ever be. But I guess that you needed to keep your distance from a man who has been calling out racism since his playing days. Because as we all know, “Republicans [really, White folx] buy sneakers too.”

As a die-hard Knicks fan, I knew there would be a snippet in an episode or two about the 1990s Knicks, Patrick Ewing, John Starks, and one-time Pitt Panther Charles Smith and their failures against Jordan and the Bulls. So I didn’t bother to watch those episodes. I mean, I lived and died by the Knicks every March, April, May (and sometimes June) between 1990 and 1999. Seeing Jordan smirk and smile in real time about my team and their blown layups, the uneven refereeing (Smith was fouled at least twice at the end of Game 5 of the Eastern Conference Finals in 1993), and the long scoring droughts mostly because of streak slumps and poor shooting choices was bad enough.

Why would I want to relive these memories via a self-serving docuseries? It would be like White men celebrating how their ancestors used to enslave Black men and rape Black women, and how their grandfathers and great-grandfathers used to lynch Blacks with impunity. Oh wait a minute — White men still do this! With idiotic protests to reopen states, with stand-your-ground laws, and by taking law enforcement jobs. And Jordan is the same way, but with a basketball and a microphone instead.

So, after watching parts of the first four episodes of The Last Dance, I am done. Jordan will never be the GOAT in basketball, as great as he was to dance between 1982 and 1999. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Wilt Chamberlain will always come first, with LeBron possibly somewhere in between. Objectively, MJ’s in the top three or four, but the other three have carried teams to the NBA Finals. But, more importantly, Jordan is the worst combination of American narcissist and indirect supporter of American racism the US has. Just like millions of other ordinary Americans. History will remember, because despite what autocrats think, history is as much determined by the downtrodden as it written by the victorious myth-makers.

“On the Next Episode of ‘Dumb MFers’…”

04 Saturday Jan 2020

Posted by in 1, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, Hebrew-Israelite, Mount Vernon New York, Movies, My Father, New York City, Patriotism, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

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Pre-speech prayers over President Donald J. Trump (led by Pastors Paula White-Cain — laying on hands — and Guillermo Maldonado), Evangelicals for Trump coalition rally,, El Rey Jesús International Ministry, West Kendall neighborhood, Miami, January 3, 2020. (Tom Brenner/Reuters via https://nationalpost.com/).

My wife can attest to this. Since the days of HBO’s The Wire (2002-2008), I have had the idea of Idris Elba doing a voice over leading into the next episode of an alternative television series. But instead of Elba narrating in his smooth American Russell “Stringer” Bell baritone, “On the next episode of The Wire,” I’d have him say, “On the next episode of Dumb Muthafuckas,” said exactly the way I’ve spelt it here. Then, the no-so-happy highlights from the next episode would ensue!

On the use of the MF word. I grew up around folx who didn’t use the n-word (with the notable exception of my idiot ex-stepfather, who said and wrote the n-word as “niggah” or “nigguh,” such were the influences of the late-1960s and 1970s on him). My mom would either say “Ns” or “Ens” (depending on spelling), or would grunt “un-un” in reference to Black folk she felt were assholes or fucking up in some way. But motherfucker, particularly the AAVE (African American Vernacular English) way of saying it as muthafucka? That could flow freely like the Hudson River after a spring or summer rainstorm, even during the Hebrew-Israelite years, though less so since we went evangelical Christian in the late-1980s! It could start a sentence and end a sentence, and in heated, violent arguments, often at the same time.

Screenshot of a younger Idris Elba as Stringer Bell in HBO’s The Wire (2002-2008), January 4, 2020. (https://hbo.com).

But it wasn’t just Mom. My father said “muddafucka” when he was in drinking mode growing up. I once played a game in my head, and counted up the number of times he used it at a bar in the Bronx to describe the other drunks, the barkeep, and other folks in the city. I lost count after 50, between “po’ ass muddafucka,” dumb muddafucka,” “git out of here, muddafucka,” and “Suck my dict, muddafucka!” And that was all in 45 minutes!

Their friends, their kids, and so many others I was around in Mount Vernon, the Bronx, and in Manhattan growing up all used variations of MF. I didn’t become regularly acquainted with the n-word outside of Roots or A Soldier’s Story until I went off to college and Pittsburgh. But when Bruce Willis said the line to Alan Rickman’s character Hans Gruber in Diehard (1988), “Yippee-ki-yay, muthafucka!,” he said it the way the Black and Brown folk I grew up around said it, and not the wimpy ways most Whites tend to use it. And every Black who was in the theater with me that night audibly gasped with delight

So when I use MF here, I am being tongue-in-cheek and as serious as a muthafucka. Especially when it comes to America’s daily reality TV show, 45 and his cabal of mostly obese in body, mind, and spirit privileged White man hell-bent on making America a blatantly White supremacist country again (see Mike Pompeo, William Barr, and Rudy Giuliani here, among a legion of others). They are stunningly craven, which also makes them stunningly stupid. They collectively are the person who comes along and knocks down the Jenga tower you have carefully constructed and deconstructed over several hours with a sledgehammer, and then burp in your face immediately afterward. All while not knowing the chain of events they have set off for themselves and for you. They are too orgasmically high on power and drunk off of spreading lies and fear to contemplate playing checkers, much less picking up a bishop to play chess.

And that’s why the show should be titled Dumb Motherfuckers. Because the 45 thesis is to destroy all of former President Barack Obama’s proverbial statues, statues, paintings, treaties, deals, orders, and obelisks in order to restore Whiteness in the White House. The problem is, the Obamas merely brought their Blackness to the White House. The government remained steeped in Whiteness in policies and in attitude the entire time Obama wore the trappings of American imperial power. But when your racism and narcissism is so great as to think that the first Black president was an affront to millions of Whites and some footsoldiers-for-racism Black and Brown folx, being a bunch of dumb motherfuckers lighting up the US and the world with tiki-torches is the result.

Screenshot of ancient Egypt’s Sphinx, complete with closeup of its smashed nose, January 4, 2020. (https://education.abc.net.au).

Now America enters season four of Dumb Motherfuckers. Season three ended with a cliffhanger, as the House of Representatives voted in favor of impeaching 45 on two counts. But, what will Nancy Pelosi do next? Will Mitch McConnell continue his pledge to march “in lockstep with the White House,” like a jackbooted SS officer in a parade at Nuremberg? Will 45 continue to play golf while the US continues its march toward full-on corporate plutocratic fascism? Stay tuned!

As of 36 hours ago, Dumb Motherfuckers‘ producers threw us a plot twist, assassinating Iran’s leading general, Qasem Soleimani, a sort of declaration of war, and certainly a violation of the Geneva Convention. Sure, this plot twist is a distraction from impeachment and the 2020 election cycle. But it is also another drumbeat toward a war that will cost hundreds of thousands of Black and Brown lives, and displace millions of people from their homes and their possible futures. But that doesn’t matter, right? Ratings, a.k.a., votes, do.

45 and his minions of motherfuckers don’t care about all that. Nor are they smart enough to know where this new plot direction will take them or the rest of the US and the world. What they do know is that there are roughly 60 million Americans who are down for anything that 45 does. If 45 ran over a White family with a steamroller, killing three children under the age of five and their Scottish terrier in the process, his fans would find an excuse, say he’s “making America great again,” call me a racist, and threaten me and my life. So know that they would support, “Bomb bomb bomb/Bomb bomb Iran,” just like the late Sen. John McCain did during his 2008 election run. And apparently, through prayers and supplications, through megachurches and the Gospel of Prosperity.

This is what makes watching Dumb Motherfuckers so frustrating, because it is all so predictable. The thinly-veiled imperialism, the rank anti-Black, anti-Brown, anti-Jewish racism, xenophobia as World War Z, and Islamophobia, the obvious women-are-meat misogyny, and the wicked hoarding of wealth. The use of blind patriotism and Christianity to rally Whiteness and White folk into supporting utter stupidity. Just like in 1968-1969, 1973, 1983, 1989, 1991, 2001, and 2002-03, from Vietnam and Grenada to Panama, the First Gulf War, and Afghanistan. Dumb Motherfuckers isn’t dumb just because the characters are dumb. It’s dumb because it will eventually leave the Whites who want to be rich and want Black and Brown people to suffer thoroughly and lethally screwed as well. But give the (White and internalized racism Black and Brown) public what it wants, right? Dumb muthafuckas — it’s a shame and a pitiful!

My Thoughts on Cut-Throat Finals Week

17 Tuesday Dec 2019

Posted by in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, Movies, Politics, Pop Culture, Religion, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

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Death Race (2008) Dreadnought scene screen shot, December 17, 2019. (https://youtube.com).

I have seen some shady shit as a student and educator over the years. Between my middle school and high school magnet programs in Money Earnin’ Mount Vernon, my four years as an undergrad at the University of Pittsburgh, my three years of grad school course work at Pitt and at Carnegie Mellon, and my years of contingent teaching, I have seen students do everything short of killing me or killing their classmates for a higher grade.

This semester provided some new wrinkles (really, old wrinkles I haven’t seen since my Humanities days in the 1980s) that actually shocked me. All as I taught my 77th, 78th, 79th, and 80th classes in my roller-coaster of a teaching career. I have felt a certain way toward some of my most demanding, hold-my-hand-for-an-A, spoiled-brat students over the years. This semester, I found myself actually despising three in particular across two universities and four classes. By no means does my grading reflect what I think of them, as I assigned each of them the grades they earned. But really, there is no letter in the alphabet low enough for them that I could assign. At least, one in which I would ever feel fully satisfied. And that is all because they all made the decision to be cut-throat, toward me and toward their peers.

I fully understand the compulsion. Six years in a magnet program that was one part Benetton commercial and three parts Death Race — the Jason Statham version from 2008 — showed me George Orwell’s Animal Farm as a live-action drama set from 1981 to 1987. Students giving each other incorrect notes from which to study. Classmates telling each other they were going to fail a final, or that they didn’t belong in Humanities. One Class of ’87 star making sure to say to another that they were only getting into an elite school because they were Black.

Hazing, bullying, torture, ostracism, denigration were all part of my experience, and that was before we started taking AP courses! I even snickered when our valedictorian received a 67 on an English essay in 11th grade because she failed to underline the title of a James Baldwin book (either Go Tell It on the Mountain or The Fire Next Time, who can remember such mundanity nearly 34 years later). We became good friends for a while after high school — go figure!

So, it’s not like I couldn’t conceive of setting up a classmate to fail, using someone else’s better words to substitute for my gross and imperfect writing, or spending money to hire a tutor to study for an AP exam. I could’ve really done it, if I had the will and/or the wealth. I just wouldn’t do it. You know, “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.” It’s in Matthews, the first book of the Gospels in the New Testament. It’s one of the few tenets that I have tried hard to follow in all my years as a human being and as a Christian. (The tenets I follow consistently are universal ones, so please do not get your atheistic drawers all twisted.)

But not always. During finals week my second semester at Pitt, at the end of April 1988, I put that Golden Rule aside, and for good reason. During our two-hour, multiple-choice final exam in Roman History, I noticed him. A skinny, geeky White yinzer with dirty blond hair sitting behind me in the Cathedral of Learning lecture hall on the ground floor. I noticed him because I heard him, somewhere around the question 70 mark. The only time his pencil made a noise was after I had filled in a bubble with an answer. By question 75, I knew the dumb mf was cheating off my answer sheet.

Denzel Washington’s character putting corkscrew to throw/soft palate/brain cavity, The Equalizer (2014), December 17, 2019. (https://imdb.com).

So I did what my years in Mount Vernon and in Humanities had trained me for. I proceeded to answer the next 25 questions on this 100-question exam incorrectly on purpose. It was rich and dripping with caramel-chocolate-on-ripe-strawberries revenge! I knew every correct answer and just kept bubbling in one wrong one after another. And as sure as dog-shit peppering dirty snow piles on Manhattan’s Upper West Side in February, Mr. Yinzer bubbled in his answers right after mine.

Then, I stopped. I paused for a half-minute after bubbling in question 100. I picked up my big eraser, and frantically rubbed out my incorrect answers to each of those last 25 questions. Then I turned around, and gave the yinzer a “Gotcha!” look. He was pissed and scared, his face the pale color of white pastel paint mixed with water. I turned back around, and carefully bubbled in my correct answers for the last quarter of the exam.

After I got up to submit my exam to the professor, I walked up the steps toward the back of the lecture hall, passing Mr. Yinzer along the way. He shot me a look, one where he knew he was caught, like a rat in an old-style trap, about to die from the pain of asphyxiation and a broken neck. I rolled my eyes with the thought, That’s what you get, dumb muthafucka!

I am not proud of that moment. Sure, the yinzer deserved it. But, I could’ve reported it to the professor. I could have just covered my answer sheet up better. I could have confronted the student directly. I could have even let the student ride my coattails toward an A on his final exam. Instead, I went all cut-throat and ensured that this student failed his final. In what way am I really better than him when I helped an academically drowning classmate swallow more water while holding his head down?

I know. What I did may seem milquetoast on the scale between blatant cheating and the viral slut-shaming of a peer with whom you are in academic competition. But that’s the point. None of this should be acceptable. My A in the course would not have changed, and Mr. Yinzer would still have struggled academically even if had succeeded at cheating on this one exam.

At just 10 days before I turn 50, I have figured out what I hate, actually hate, about other humans. I hate habitual liars, especially the ones who regularly lie to themselves while telling me their lies. I hate elitist assholery, even from those whom I admire, even from among my friends. I hate cheating, and those who think they can get away with it. I hate brown-nosing, as I smell this shit from a mile away. Now, I despise those who would eat A’s and A-‘s for their three squares a day before recognizing that education is about much more than a high grade an a job to pay off their student loans. Education is about freedom, having and making good choices, and finding yourself a crew that you can rely on and can rely on you long after graduation. Those who think otherwise are as lost as Dr. Manhattan caught in a quantum vortex.

Namby-Pamby Land

18 Sunday Aug 2019

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The Sound of Music (1965) poster with Julie Andrews. (Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy/AP; https://www.telegraph.co.uk/)

Last week marked an all-time milestone. Me and my future wife moved to the DMV on Tuesday, August 10, 1999, and moved into our luxury high-rise apartment in downtown Silver Spring, Maryland the next morning. It was a crazy move, done between two jobs and the crossroads of two careers, and with bronchitis on top of that. It was also two days after I proposed to Angelia. Lucky me, she was very, very kind in saying yes, despite my sometimes manly, trash-ass flaws!

Twenty years here in DC, in Suburban Maryland, and (mostly for work) in Confederate Northern Virginia has been both good and terrible at the same time. Living around here has been an exercise in outsized cosmopolitanism. The expensive apartments and homes, the high-salaried jobs that come with stress that will age you right into the grave, side-by-side with examples of poverty that reminded me of my Mount Vernon growing-up years. I’ve seen it happen, to 23-year-olds and 60-year-olds of every stripe. Not much different from what I’ve seen of New Yorkers over the years.

United Therapeutics headquarters (a block long, across from high-rise apartments), Silver Spring, MD, August 23, 2018. (https://moretocome.net).

Living in the DC-area has also been an exercise in patience. The area’s penchant for urban and suburban elitism is matched by its Southern and East Coast colloquial nature. Gentrification in NE and SE DC would be a case in point, with Trader Joe’s and restaurants serving osso bucco within a sniff of an old fried fish or crab shack. Or watching downtown Silver Spring, once dotted with dimly-lit bars and mom-and-pop eateries, turn into a gentrified nightmare, with two-dozen new luxury high-rise apartment buildings and a Star-Trek-like office starship that United Therapeutics had built across the street from our former place. All as Silver Spring has no mayor, save the Silver Spring Chamber of Commerce and Montgomery County executives selling off county buildings and parking lots to the lowest bidder. Only to see DC government match the suburbs in driving out its residents living with poverty, to rename neighborhoods in an effort to get White-suburbanite bodies and dollars while giving the trillion-dollar businesses of the world significant tax breaks.

But since I (mostly) left AED and the nonprofit world to go back into academia as a part-time and (since 2012) full-time contingent faculty member at two universities, I really don’t spend that much time in DC. Working on nationwide initiatives and programs tends to distort one’s view of DC, and it certainly did mine, at least in my time here before about 2006. Really, it shouldn’t have. I had lived in Shepherd Park while dissertation-ing for several months in 1995, and regularly visited across various communities between 1992 and 1998. Still, being solidly middle class after years of growing-up, welfare, and self-imposed-via-grad-school poverty does create a bias.

I thought DC was great those first years as a result. This despite the poverty I saw. This no matter the homelessness I breathed in, regardless of the LGBTQ discrimination I witnessed. This in contrast with the education “reforms” occurring in PG County and in DC itself, as politicians like Adrian Fenty and school supers like Michelle Rhee and John Deasy letting the corporate education reform vultures into the school districts. Only to create money-leeching charter schools that would only leave another generation of students with less educational resources and not improve their life chances while also decimating teachers’ autonomy and teachers unions.

I thought the same of Silver Spring and Montgomery County, especially after Angelia gave birth to our one and only egg in 2003. After all, we lived in middle class section of an upper-middle-class community in one of the best school districts in the US, and easily the best in the state. What I didn’t realize until we moved our son from daycare at a federal agency in DC to one adjacent to his eventual elementary school in Silver Spring was the level of White-bred provinciality our near-immediate neighbors possessed. Yes, even the Black ones. Whether Ivy League-educated, PhD-ed, JD-ed, school teacher, firefighter, nonprofit entrepreneur, lawyer, or government bureaucrat, they all seemed to know very little about the world beyond a two-square mile radius.

Now, some of this was because our kids were four or five years old. I didn’t watch anything other than PBS Kids Sprout, Disney Channel, and Nickelodeon (with the exceptions of The Wire and Grey’s Anatomy) between 2003 and 2010, except for news, of course. But as our kids became preteens and then teenagers, I knew it was more than that. My neighbors, though struggling through the Great Recession and a general downshift of the US middle class throughout the past two decades, still expressed little concern beyond their own day-to-day, as if nothing impacted them as individuals or a family. As our conversations did shift toward politics and -isms, they would cliché their way through them with platitudes like “If we could just get rid of the hate” and “Things have gotten better since the ’60s.” These conversations were so White that I sometimes clicked my tongue to signal to my prefrontal cortex that it was time to go in Standby mode.

That provincial laziness in thinking and general willful ignorance of the relationship with the world outside the community made me more aware of Namby-Pamby Land as a whole. From my fellow drivers (some I’ve recognized while driving) driving too slow, taking seconds to react to a green or red light, and blowing through stop signs, to my neighbors walking down sidewalks six abreast and forcing people into streets to go around them. And of course, their general resistance to changing intra-district boundaries because they didn’t want to “go over the bridge” across 495 to have little Johnny or Maddie attend school with less-well-off Latinx kids.

That’s the price I’ve paid for living in a suburban community of relative class privilege. The toxicity of it all has left me wanting for the New York of my youth (not Mount Vernon, mind you) as I’ve gotten older. But I guess it could be worse. It could Potomac or Bethesda, Maryland-worse.

Thanks, Away From Home

27 Tuesday Nov 2018

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Thank You — paying it forward, March 3, 2017. (Catlane/iStock; http://digital.vpr.net/)

Yet another Thanksgiving has come and gone. The holiday is problematic for so many reasons, between the erasure, cultural exploitation, and dehumanizing mythology of indigenous Americans and the climate-change-defying national pig-out that begins every late-November Thursday, and continues for weeks afterward, year after year. But the fact that the days off around Thanksgiving gives us worker bees time to spend with family, friends, and those we seriously like and love can’t be ignored.

Sure. At least for those of us who have such people in our lives with whom to share our time off from work, school, and life’s constant treadmill. My American University students reminded me of the allegedly normal ritual of returning home to eat and spend time with family, et al., this past week. Half of them contacted me to let me know they weren’t going to attend the two classes immediately before Thanksgiving, even after learning I wasn’t granting them an excused absence for the holiday week. All so that they could have a few extra days away from the stresses of higher education and the classroom. I envied them, just an iota, if only because they presumably had good reason to spend time with their families and loved ones. I also figured that not everyone in my class was going home to a welcoming environment, or really, going home at all.

“And this time, we didn’t forget the gravy” Looney Tunes “Chow Hound” episode of bullying, greed, and gluttony, originally aired June 16, 1951. (WB; http://tralfaz.blogspot.com/).

That last one was certainly the case for me during my student days. Growing up the way we grew up, in Mount Vernon, at 616, a good Thanksgiving was one where we had a regular meal to eat. Even before the Hebrew-Israelite years of 1981-84, our Thanksgivings weren’t seven-course eat-a-thons. We were lucky if my Uncle Sam came over to eat with us (which after 1978, was pretty rare), and we didn’t spend time around my Mom’s friends once we dived into being Black Jews and fell into grinding welfare poverty.

After I went off to the University of Pittsburgh in August 1987, I only came home to Mount Vernon and 616 one time for Thanksgiving, three months later. My Mom made the biggest Thanksgiving meal I’d seen her make since 1975. I remember mostly the mashed potatoes and gravy. But it wasn’t a family affair, not really. I was home mostly because I had grown used to the well-worn grooves of poverty, abuse, and adult-level responsibilities that had been my life since the fall of 1982. The food, while the first home-cooked meal I’d eaten in three months, was an escape from my normal attempts at escape.

Twelve months later, after six weeks of depression, getting over my Phyllis obsession, a semester of graduate school-like concentration, a summer of unemployment, a week of homelessness, and three months of financial woes and malnourishment, Thanksgiving 1988 had arrived. Between Ron Slater, Beverly, and finally having enough money to not worry about eating or bills for the first time in almost a year, it felt weird, only having gratitude as my companion for a few years.

But life got even weirder for me, as my friend Melissa had invited me to her father’s house for Thanksgiving. This was not a date of any kind, certainly not from my perspective. I think that Melissa sensed how rough my year had been, knew that I wasn’t going home to New York to see family, and did the Christian thing of looking after one’s neighbors. This even though things weren’t exactly great for her and her father at the time. Melissa’s father was an ailing contractor in his early sixties. I really don’t remember much about that Thanksgiving in terms of the food. I think there may have been dinner rolls or candied yams. What I do remember is the two-and-a-half hours I talked with Melissa and her father, about politics, the “Stillers,” Christianity, and Pitt. It was the most thankful holiday I’d ever experienced, and my first Thanksgiving seeing what Thanksgiving was like for family members who enjoyed each other’s company.

It was the first of seven straight Thanksgivings either spent with friends like Melissa, Howard, Kenny, the Gants and their families, or by myself. The “by myself” Thanksgiving was in 1990. It was a cold and rainy day, where I did nothing but watch football, made myself two double cheeseburgers, and found a nearly usable director’s chair outside a vintage furniture gallery in East Liberty. Even then, folks looked out for me. The next day, two of my older Swahili classmates swung by my apartment to bring me Thanksgiving leftovers. They brought me cornbread, dinner rolls, ham, turkey, mashed potatoes, dressing and stuffing, greens, and candied yams with marshmallows. I had tried to say no, but neither of the women would let me. It was really hard for me not to cry while being thankful for such generosity.

It seems like it’s been a lifetime since those naive and cynical days, where I didn’t trust anyone in my life. The bout with homelessness and the financial straits that followed changed my life in ways that I notice even today. Even with the years of working long hours and fighting for my career as a writer and an educator, I realize that I wouldn’t be here doing any of what I’m able to do today without the kindness of strangers and friends, the ability to weigh, sift, and analyze myself and my past or the sense that God had a purpose for me, a reason for living and being. Even after 30 years, I have this and so much else to be thankful for.