Category Archives: music

Reinventing the Writing Wheel

17 Saturday Dec 2011

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Inventing the Wheel cartoon, October 2, 2009. (Bill Abbott/http://www.toonpool.com/).

One of the side effects of having lived through the hell of my family struggles at 616 in Mount Vernon, New York between ’81 and ’89 was that I’d forgotten about the person I was before we became Hebrew-Israelites. As great as I am at recalling faces, smells, conversations, exact facts and phrases based on images and songs, I’ve been almost equally as good at blocking out whole sections of my personality. All in an effort to cope with the emotional pain and psychological trauma that is betrayal, abuse and neglect.

I have the unfortunate distinction of having seen myself as a writer in ’81 at the age of eleven, only to take nearly twenty years to see myself that way again. There were a few sign posts in the dark forest of confusion about my calling that I found on my way to getting back on the writing road. One of those sign posts was my teaching assistant and friend during my undergraduate years at the University of Pittsburgh in Paul Riggs.

Paul Riggs, Professor and Department Chair, Department of History, Valdosta State University (GA), December 17, 2011. (http://www.valdosta.edu).

Paul was the TA for my section of the Western Civilization II course taught by his advisor in Sy Drescher in the Spring semester of ’88. He was a second-year history grad student, a nice looking White guy for a nerd. Already in his mid-twenties with, his blonde-brown hair and around six-feet, Paul was a rarity on campus. So was his class. Paul found a way to do more than ask us a bunch of questions that were meant to quiz us on the textbook. We debated the significance of things like a richer diet and its impact on population growth and the expansion of European imperialism, the connections between Charles Darwin, evolution, and the advent of scientific racism at the end of the nineteenth century, and so many other things that allowed us to connect the dots.

Paul was also the first teacher I had at Pitt who assumed that I could do the work without acting as if I shouldn’t have been in their classroom. It helped that he occasionally indulged me. When our weekly discussion turned to the killing fields that had been northern France and Belgium for the bulk of the four years of World War I, I allowed my imagination to get the better of me. I made a comment that connected the tragedy of deadly trench warfare to a song by Sting called “Children’s Crusade.” I started quoting lyrics, like “virgins with rifles, a game of charade,” “the flower of England, faced down in the mud, and stained in the blood of a whole generation,” and “corpulent generals safe behind lines.”

I related it all to the documents book and Drescher’s lectures on the war that wiped out a generation of

Sting, The Dream of the Blue Turtle CD Cover (1985), December 17, 2011. (Donald Earl Collins).

young men in Western Europe. It took me two minutes of class time to draw all of the different connections. Paul, shaking his head at the end, got this incredulous smile on his face. All he said was, “um, you know Sting’s overrated?”

But Paul proved to be much more helpful a year and a half later. By then I was in my junior year at Pitt, no longer living in constant worry that I’d have to return to 616 to bury my mother and press charges against my idiot stepfather. By then, Maurice was my ex-stepfather, and thankfully so. For the first time in eight years, I kept a journal, putting together a series of stories based on my worst experiences at 616, on welfare, with my family, and in Mount Vernon.

All of it made me think about writing a book that looked at the sociological and psychological dimensions of the welfare system, for both recipients and for case managers charged with providing benefits. I wanted to make Westchester County Department of Social Services the centerpiece for such a book. I decided to talk to Paul about all of my ideas, not wanting to give away how personal this issue was for me. Paul asked me the questions that it would take another eleven years to answer. “What kind of writer do you want to be?,” and “How is history related to what you want to write about?,” he asked over the course of our conversation.

I really didn’t know the answers to either question. I wasn’t even sure that I wanted to pursue an advanced degree, become a professor, or become a writer. But I knew that I needed to find out.

Still, one thing that I decided to do that would determine most of my career travels over the next decade is to make myself into the semi-dispassionate scholar I knew I needed to become in order to be a better historian, which I presumed would make me a better writer. Only to spend this past decade reconnecting to my emotions and passion, which has made me the writer I once hoped to become.

The Top 1% – And Their Top Hits

15 Tuesday Nov 2011

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Protesters affiliated with the Occupy Wall Street movement rally in Foley Square before marching through Lower Manhattan, October 5, 2011. (Mario Tama/Getty Images via Amnesty International blog).

I had planned at the end of last week to write about what the top one-percent richest people, Wall Street banks and corporations in general want to hear from us – in the form of a greatest hits list in music and in movies. In light of the events of the past twenty-four hours in Oakland and in New York City, I’ve decided to go ahead with this list, Mayor Michael Bloomberg (hereafter known by me as “Mayor 1%”) included.

These folks want everything from us, like an abusive father and husband who wants his wife and children to smile, bruises and all. They not only want us to buy into their sick and ugly version of the American Dream, the one that favors them and their children over us and the planet. They not only want us to be quiet, to shut the heck up and take it prone without lubrication, all of this economic and political inequality. They want us  to do the very opposite of protesting, to smile about all of this, as if we all happy little pickaninnies and Raggedy Anns’ and Andys’, all happy workin’ fo’ our all-wise and all-kind massa, the so-called free market.

And the three-term mayor of New York, Mr. 1%, has been involved in vilifying and actively cracking down on

Occupy Wall Street arrests at Zuccotti Park, November 15, 2011. (Don Emmert/Agence France-Presse) via New York Times.

the Occupy Wall Street movement almost from day one of these protests. He was for police brutality and suspension of First Amendment rights back when only a dozen or so brave souls began to gather in Zuccotti Park in mid-September. And why wouldn’t Mayor 1% be so active? He wholly represents everything that the Occupy Wall Street movement’s protesting. An overbearing, out-of-touch and out-of-time opportunist who’s rigged the political and economic system to his favor.

Well, here’s to you, Mayor 1%, you and the rest of the people you represent, the folks that will have all of us debt slaves from here to eternity. Here are the song you’re playing and movies you’re watching these days:

1. “Rock The Boat” (1974), Hues Corporation – note both the lyrics – like “don’t tip the boat over” – as well as the fact that the group named Hues Corporation wrote this first (or second) disco hit.

2. Star Wars: Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back (1980) – the movie fits perfectly what Mayor 1% and Wall Street have wanted from politicians and protesters over the past thirty years. “Do what we say, take our dirty money to do our dirty deeds, or shut the heck up!” I guess Mayor 1% would be the emperor, or Darth Vader?

Star Wars: Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back (1980), June 25, 2011. (Nehrams2020 via Wikipedia). Qualifies as fair use under US copyright laws due to its low resolution and the subject of this blog post.

3. “Opportunities (Let’s Make Lots Of Money)” (1987), Pet Shop Boys – the song embodies everything the one percent types like Mayor 1% stands for – and what he wants the rest of us to stand for as well. Except they haven’t “had enough of scheming, and messing around with jerks” – they are the schemers and jerks, of course.

4. Boiler Room (2000) – not the greatest film about Madoff-esque Wall Street scheming. But the Wall Street brokers and bankers can sit, watch and critique the bonafides of the film, to point out what the characters played by Giovanni Ribisi, Vin Diesel and Ben Affleck all did wrong in getting caught.

5. The Devil’s Advocate (1997) – a dark, semi-horror (and for some, horrid) drama involving Al Pacino and Keanu Reeves as money and power-hungry go-getters. But get this. Mayor 1% hosts a dinner party with his other one-percent buddies, who dress like the movie’s characters. Mayor 1% dresses up as Al Pacino’s character, the Devil Incarnate. Then, they sit down and watch some of the film. Except they all think that Devil’s Advocate is a comedy.

6. “Out Of Touch” (1984), Hall & Oates – the top one-percent’s closing hit, telling the Occupy Wall Street protesters with derision, “You’re out of touch, I’m out of time.” The “out of time” part would either be about their ability to make money hand-over-fist in five minutes, or about them making that money before we notice another rise in economic and political inequality. Mayor 1%, though, would bring Darryl Hall and John Oates in to sing the one-percenter’s version of “Out Of Touch” to the Occupy Wall Street protesters.

It’s too hard to do a top-ten hits list for the top one-percent. Ten is too many for them to begin with, especially without an additional nine zeroes after that ten. And Mayor 1%, you’re officially worse than Mayor “a verb, a noun and 9/11” himself, Rudy Giuliani.

The Beatdown

05 Saturday Nov 2011

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Ironing out balled up paper, a bullying symbol, November 4, 2011. (Donald Earl Collins)

An anti-bullying video’s been trending in the social media sphere this week, in which a teacher demonstrates to her class the effects of bullying on a student’s psyche. All courtesy of balled up, stomped on and unfolded yet crumpled pieces of paper. It’s a good, though incomplete description, because it doesn’t address the great feeling of superiority that those dispensing the verbal, physical and psychological abuse get from bullying their classmates.

Though I seldom have thought of myself as someone who was bullied, by today’s definition, that’s exactly what happened to me for the better part of five months of seventh grade, from November ’81 through February ’82 and late-May to early June ’82 (see my post “The Legend of Captain Zimbabwe” from May ’09 for much more). I guess I’d been called so many names by so many people in 7S so first few months — and, to be truthful, did the same in response to a fair number of classmates myself — that I didn’t think too much of it as November ’81 began.

About two weeks after my fight with Brandie (see “Adverbs and A-Holes” post from last month), I experienced a serious physical bullying altercation (there were one or two attempts by neighborhood kids while I went to Nathan Hale and Holmes Elementary, and a couple of attempts in high school). The best way to describe it is that I got jumped and then beat-down after the end of the school day on the first Friday in November ’81.

It wasn’t a random jumping or beat-down, and not one that involved Davis’ Black or Latino students, who were always described to us super-nerds as “dangerous.” No, the perps in this case were from what I euphemistically called the “Italian Club,” a full two years before we had an official Italian Club in high school. They’d been on me in 7S homeroom and in Italian class with nearly constant verbal abuse for the two weeks or so since my scuffle with Brandie. Apparently, my decision to ignore them didn’t work well enough.

The leader of this pack of uncouth Italian or White working-class preteen Humanities boys was “A,” who presented himself as between John Travolta’s character on Welcome Back, Kotter and Arthur Fonzerelli from Happy Days. A’s favorite move those Humanities middle school years was to walk into our homeroom and belt out The Police’s “Roxanne” refrain, as if he were Eddie Murphy in 48 Hours. The way his band of Italian or Italian-esque brothers hung around him, you would’ve thought he was a rock star, someone like his fave, Mr. “White Wedding” himself, Billy Idol.

A Christmas Story (1982) screen shot of bunny suit kid, December 11, 2009. (http://myhealthypassion.wordpress.com). Qualifies as fair use under US copyright laws, between low resolution, cropping, and intent of use.

Led by A, about ten 7S classmates attacked me after school as I was on my way out the school’s side door closest to the Humanities wing to walk home. They grabbed, punched, and kicked me, and called me everything but a child of God. A, of course, wasn’t actually involved in any of the dirty work of beating on me. Like a about half a dozen other 7S classmates, A watched as he directed his gang.

That was my third A Christmas Story moment. Except I’d been better off wearing the pink bunny suit over my kufi! Bullying is a funny thing, even when you’re one being bullied.

But unlike the piece of trampled, stomped, balled up paper, I wasn’t scarred in the sense that my self-esteem was shattered. Far from it, my self-absorption and delusions of academic grandeur shielded me, made it possible for me to iron out most of the wrinkles in my psyche from being jumped that day. It took my grades, a crush, and events that played out at home, at 616, to shatter my childhood.

Of course, being called a “dumb ass” as if it were my nickname, or “Captain Zimbabwe,” as a proxy for “Negro” or the N-word, wasn’t exactly besides the point. Nor was the idea that a bunch of White kids could decide that they could gang up on me essentially because I was an enigma to them. Like me being weird, uncool and smart was too much for their pubervescent heads to handle.

The best revenge, though, was going through puberty myself, to find myself growing ten inches in twenty months, between March ’82 and December ’83. That, and taking care of my body, mind and spirit over the past thirty years. Not that I have a dart board of my tormentors or anything, but I think it would be hilarious if any of them attempted to bully the 225-pound me today. Of course, I’d probably laugh so hard that they’d get a couple of licks in, at least before my sense of righteous rage would kick in.

The moral here, I guess, is to have a sense of how to deal with bullying if and when it does occur, to not shrug it off as “boys just being boys” or, for that matter, “cliquish girls being cliquish girls.” By middle school, though, it’s not just about reporting it to teachers or parents. It’s about other students stepping in, and students the subject of bullies’ discontent defending themselves. And that is what I’m instilling in my son. Of course, I’ll step in when necessary, too.

Flexing muscles, as in too bad I didn't have these 30 years ago, November 4, 2011 (Donald Earl Collins).

A Question of My Blackness, Sexuality and Masculinity

01 Thursday Sep 2011

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Boyz N The Hood (1991) Screen Shot, September 1, 2011. (Source/http://freeinfosociety.com). 20 years since this movie, and we still inquisition Black males about their masculinity. By the way, I was NEVER this cool growing up.

About this time a quarter-century ago, I received regular reminders from the people in my life as family and classmates that I didn’t fit their definition of how a heterosexual Black male should behave. At least in Mount Vernon, New York. You see, I didn’t have to be a young Barack Obama or Lenny Kravitz to learn at an early age that I wasn’t Black enough, man enough or heterosexual enough for many folks in my life. The fact that I didn’t run around with the other boys skipping school and sniffing skirts was evidence enough of how different I was.

One of the more subtle forms of interrogation I experienced occurred at the end of eleventh grade, going into the summer of ’86. That day I walked into English class, and Crush #2 asked me about that song of the day, which happened to be Level 42’s “Something About You” Something About You. When I told her who it was, she started snapping her fingers to it. LJ, an on-and-off again classmate since third grade at William H. Holmes Elementary, walked by as we were talked. “Are they Black?,” she asked. When I said “No,” LJ shook her head and walked away. The group was White and from the Isle of Wight, no less, a bunch of off-shore British White guys. Somehow I’d violated some kind of code in LJ’s eyes. It was the last conversation we had before we graduated a year later.

South 10th Avenue, Mount Vernon, New York, November 19, 2006. (Source/http://weichert.com). The egg-shell white house in the center of the photo is where my father Jimme lived in ’86, an attic room. Looks better now than it did then.

I received a far less subtle hint that made LJ’s disgust look like romance by comparison. It was an incident just a week before the start of my senior year at Mount Vernon High School, something I’ve posted about before. By the time I’d gotten a crush on Crush #2, my sexuality was no longer in question, although I’d never seriously questioned it before. My father, though, still had his doubts. I’d hardly seen Jimme most of the summer of ’86, only coming over occasionally to see how he was doing or to bum a few bucks off of him. I found Jimme that last Saturday morning in August, hanging out on the street around the corner from his place, having already drunk his fill.

His mood was especially foul that day, like his body odor. He refused to give me any money. “I don’ give my money to no faggats!” Jimme yelled at me as he came walking and stumbling down his block toward me. He’d seen me come out of the front yard of the house in which he rented a room. I wasn’t in the mood for his crap. “I’m not a faggot and I’m not gay,” I yelled back. When he got closer, I could see that he’d been out too long already. Jimme’s clothes were a mess, and his face was in a twisted rage. He grabbed me by my arm.

“Did you get yo’ dict wet?,” he asked as usual.

“Even if I did, I wouldn’t tell you,” I said.

“YOU’RE A FAGGAT,” he yelled again.  (see my “In the Closet, On the Down Low” from June 1, 2009 for the full conversation and incident)

As I saw it then, I was a year away from college, and I was still in the streets dealing with my drunk ass father, my jealous and institutionalized older brother, a sham of a marriage at 616 and four younger siblings who were high on sugar all of the time. I’d done so much to change my life and yet almost everything in my life was the same. Up to this point the only things that had kept my head from exploding were God and school. As my senior year approached, I wondered how much longer I could maintain emotional control before I finally just lost myself in years of growing pain, like a volcano about to super-erupt.

As I see it now, it remains a shame that we as Black males have to run a gauntlet in our communities in order

A Question of Freedom (2009) Hardcover Cover, September 1, 2011. (Source/Donald Earl Collins).

to become Black men, at least in the eyes of others. We can talk about the K-12-to-prison system that is public education in many a community of color. Or the drug trade. Or the sheer lack of quality public services and interventions in our communities or lives, other than police forces. Or even the daily images that tell so many of us that aspiring to be a rapper, football or basketball player, or just to be cool is so much better than knowing anything. The latest good memoir on this is R. Dwayne Betts‘ A Question of Freedom (2009).

But we must also admit that the people who attempted to raise us — our families, relatives, neighbors and classmates — are just as often at fault for turning out Black males who aren’t ready to be Black men, human adult males with ideas and aspirations outside of the box. Until we get serious about the fact that those closest to us have put such idiotic notions of masculinity, heterosexuality and Black coolness in many a Black male’s head, we get nowhere in helping to transform the lives of people like me when I was a teenager.

For we can’t depend on people like me becoming homeless, embracing solitude, and leaving my community as the best way to learn how to be a man, an adult, a really serious yet compassionate (and goofy) human being.

Standing at the Crossroads

28 Sunday Aug 2011

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Cast Away movie (2000) screen shot, August 27, 2011. (Source/Donald Earl Collins). Qualifies as fair use under US copyright laws because it is of low resolution and is in no way being used to reproduce the original film.

It’s funny how things in our lives happen in cycles. Sometimes it’s because we haven’t heeded the wisdom we’ve accumulated in our lives to keep us from following that same bad habits, ones that lead to serious problems for much of our lives. Relationships with men and women, addictions and other vices, behaviors that lead to indecision. That last one has been a big one for me to overcome in my life, and it still has the power to keep me for achieving all that I know I can do in life.

It has led to several crossroads in my life. They usually occur in August or December. August, because of the twenty-two years I spent as a student (not to mention fourteen off and on as a professor). And December, because of Christmas, Jesus and my birthday. But Augusts, especially the last five days in August, tend to stand out as times of contemplation and revelation. August ’91 was the start of grad school, while August ’93 made me rethink how to approach grad school. August ’97 left me with bitterness about being unemployed, while August ’99 gave me a new appreciation for having a job, any job.

But, aside from now, no August was more revealing about my character than the one in ’88. About two weeks before I needed to go back to Pittsburgh for my sophomore year, I went to search for Jimme. I was still steamed with him for not getting me the money I needed to secure a dorm room for the upcoming school year. I hardly swung by to see him that summer, too busy taking care of my siblings and recovering from my second roughest year in the decade, one of four months of unemployment. So on the next to last Friday before I needed to get back, I bummed ten dollars from Mom and took the Metro-North down from Pelham to the city. I got off, took the shuttle over to Times Square and the 2 to 72nd before walking over the Levi brothers’ office on West 64th. Jimme wasn’t there, but Glen was. “He’s over at my brother’s on East 59th,” he said. I’d forgotten that Bruce Levi had his own cleaners and business on the East Side.

I walked the dozen or so blocks there. And there Jimme was. I caught him just as he was getting paid for the week. “Bo’ whatcha doin’ up here?,” he said with complete disbelief. We talked for just a few minutes, with me mentioning more than once how I needed money to secure some sort of apartment at school. “Donal’, I done messed up too much money dis summer,” Jimme said. Apparently my father had spent most of Summer ’88 going through one of his drinking binges. The Levi’s had bailed him out several times, as his landlord Mrs. Smalls had toyed with the idea of evicting him. Jimme gave me $100 on the spot, and promised to get me more money before I left. When I went to see him at work the following week, he’d given me $300 more.

In rapid succession, I packed up my stuff in the five-suitcase set Mom had bought me the year before. Two suitcases, two duffel bags, and a garment bag, all of which she’d ordered from a catalog for a measly eighty bucks. I went down to a travel agency that was down the street from the Pelham Metro-North station and C-Town and found a cheap one-way ticket on USAir for $35. I couldn’t buy a good steak dinner in midtown Manhattan for $35! I got myself mentally ready for finding an apartment, ideally a one-bedroom.

By that last Sunday in August, everything was ready, and I had everything I needed. I played songs with my siblings for almost two hours before I left. I gave them my Michael Jackson tapes and my radio cassette player, taking my beat-up Walkman with me. We all hugged and cried, much more so than we had the year before. Part of me really didn’t want to leave, and part of me knew that I wouldn’t be whole again if I didn’t.

I had no idea how tough the next five days would be, between that Sunday evening, August 28 and that Friday, September 2. I was homeless for five days, and within three days of heading back to New York and Mount Vernon when I finally found a one-room death-trap in a row house in which to live.

Fork in the road, August 27, 2011. (Source/http://optimumsportsperformance.com).

I was within three days of becoming a college dropout because I didn’t trust anybody. I was so close to losing something I’d dedicated seven years of my life to achieving because I had spent the previous year indecisive about whether what I wanted out of life was more important than helping out my mother and my younger siblings at 616. It made me think. What meaning could I draw from putting up with all the put-downs and disapprovals of classmates, teachers and families if things hadn’t worked out? The answer would’ve been, none at all.

Now, as then, I face a crossroads in many areas of my life. One where I have to decide, which part of me is most important in achieving my dreams, fulfilling my calling, providing for my son and family, possibly even in maintaining a marriage? Whatever decisions I do make, I need to stand firmly in them, to be decisive, to see them through. That formula has guided me for twenty-three years. And it has yet to let me down.

Crazy

13 Saturday Aug 2011

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Seal, CD Cover (1991), August 13, 2011. (Source/Donald Earl Collins).

There’s no doubt in my mind that I’m a late bloomer. I came to find myself a teenager in a twenty-one year old’s body twenty years ago, just as I’m a thirty-five year-old in a forty-one-and-a-half year-old’s body now. As the summer of ’91 began to wind down, though, I realized that I needed to go into my first year of grad school at Pitt with some inspiration, with a chip on my shoulder, really.

It didn’t take more than a simple thought to find that inspiration and chip, either. Between working for a bunch of folks at my Western Psych job who still thought that hunting down half-and-half was the extent of my work there on the one hand. And professors like Reid Andrews telling me after I’d received my grad school stipend award letter that I wasn’t “graduate school material” on the other hand. Livid is the minimal word I’d use to describe my mood in the three weeks before the start of my five-and-half-year odyssey. One of doing cartwheels at least three times better than my colleagues to prove that I was as good as anyone.

But I’m jumping ahead of the story here. I found some inspiration from music, as usual, in this case, on one of my daily walks home from work in Oakland to my studio apartment in East Liberty. Still searching for more new music for my ’90s collection, I found a radio station playing Seal’s first big hit, “Crazy.” I’d heard parts of the song before, all during that summer, but never from start to finish. As I reached the end of Ellsworth Avenue, where I’d walk up the steps to a bridge on Highland Avenue, one that went over the train tracks and busway into East Liberty, I heard the lyrics, really for the first time.

“In a sky full of people only some want to fly/Isn’t that crazy
In a world full of people only some want to fly/Isn’t that crazy/Crazy
In a heaven of people there’s only some want to fly/Ain’t that crazy”

Seal, "Crazy" 45 Single Cover (UK), January 8, 2009. (Source/http://cover6.cduniverse.com/MuzeAudioArt/140/141811.jpg). Qualifies as fair use under US copyright laws, as version is of low resolution for reproduction, and is part of larger commentary.

And yes, I wanted to fly. Besides, as far as most people were concerned, I was crazy anyway. For wearing that godforsaken kufi to school for three years. For becoming a newborn and sanctimonious Christian after that. For trying out for football, and later, baseball instead of basketball. For listening to Mr. Mister and Tears for Fears and Sting instead of bopping to Run-D.M.C. For walking way too fast, and talking a little too slow. For going off to college out-of-state, to a no-name school no less. For taking a grad course my junior year at Pitt. For deciding to go to grad school in history instead of law school or Black studies.

The list is as long as an introspective Eminem rap sequence, airing every negative ever tossed my way. I was crazy, and still am. But, as far as my first year of grad school was concerned, I made two deals with myself about the process. One was to not compare myself, my abilities, my limitations, to anyone else in the program. The other was to put aside all of my preconceptions about my professors, or the difficult courses ahead, or whether I would complete the master’s degree and move on to the doctoral portion of the program.

I didn’t want to limit myself to what others may have expected of me, or to what I could’ve possibly expected of myself at the time. I didn’t even like my friends saying that “the sky’s the limit,” because I didn’t want to limit myself to the sky. I simply wanted to be crazy enough, humble yet arrogant enough to know my limits, but push the envelope as hard as I could in order to make graduate school work for me.

Howard Hughes standing in front of his new Boeing Army Pursuit Plane, Inglewood, California in the 1940s, May 31, 2005. (Source/Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-63333 - In public domain). One of the craziest, yet great, innovators of the 20th century. Guess it works better when you're a rich White male.

That kind of thinking affords a very single-minded intensity — to the point of a near-psychotic passion — that leads to excellence, miracles and the exceeding of what may have been your craziest expectations. I know it was that way for me. It had to be. If I’d bought into all that my most hateful Humanities classmates, my mother and ex-stepfather, my father Jimme, my fellow Mount Vernonites and some of my teachers and professors thought of me, who’s knows? I’d likely become a sexually confused and frustrated Black male, a college dropout, wandering from one minimum wage job to another, living alone in a boarding room, as miserable as a character in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment.

I’d become a psychopath, not just crazy enough to believe in myself and the miracles of God in my life. I need to do be a little crazy now, even at this stage of my life. We all need to be a little crazy, not in a Tea Party sense, but much more in an Arab Spring kind of way. After all, “we’re never gonna survive unless we get a little crazy.”

Time, Love & Goofy-ness

21 Thursday Jul 2011

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Time, Love & Tenderness Album Cover, July 18, 2009. (Source/Donald Earl Collins)

Sometimes I have no choice but to confirm how weird I am. Especially when it comes to what moves me, including in my choices of music. It wasn’t hard for me to become a Michael Bolton fan when his first solo album dropped in ’87. “That’s What Love Is All About,” a minor hit, was something I enjoyed then, but appreciate much more now as a married man than I possibly could’ve as a freshman at Pitt. “Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay,” well, that’s another story. It’s a fine cover version (something that Bolton grew all too fond of doing in the late-’90s), but nothing will ever replace the Otis Redding original.

The summer of  ’91 was the clincher for me regarding Bolton and other artists from that period. I was in the midst of getting over myself getting over E (see “The Power of Another E” posting from April 2009) when I first heard Bolton’s “Time, Love and Tenderness.” 02 Time, Love and Tenderness.wma I was on my way home from work at Western Psych that hot and sweaty July evening, walking at Warp 3 like I always did back then when the local pop station began playing the song. I also knew the moment I heard it how schmaltzy it was. But it was exactly what I needed to hear and at the time I needed to hear it. I fell in love with the song immediately, and would eventually by the album. “Time, Love and Tenderness” remained one of my pre-iTunes playlist songs for the next three years.
Thus began a year-long odyssey of inviting new music into my life, music that would represent the more adult, contemporary, cool, eclectic and schmaltzy graduate school me. Bolton’s Time, Love and Tenderness album was just the first step. The months of July and August ’91 included music from Seal

My iPod, July 21, 2011 (Source/Donald Earl Collins). Every song named here is on it, but rarely do I play them consecutively.

(“Crazy” — I’ll talk about more in another post), Lenny Kravitz (“It Ain’t Over ‘Til It’s Over”), Vanessa Williams (“Comfort Zone”), and Mariah Carey (“Make It Happen”). Not to mention PE (“Can’t Truss It”), Naughty By Nature (O.P.P.), and Boyz II Men. It was the beginning of a new period of music experimentation for me, all caused by me tiring of being the odd wheel in a sea of dating friends.

It was the early ’90s, and I could already see how much music was changing. Fewer synthesizers, a faster more rhythmic pace, a much greater fusion of genres and styles. Heavy metal was morphing into grunge and White booty-call songs were turning into passion tales of White male (and female) angst. Whitney Houston’s music was becoming hip, and Michael Jackson was steadily making himself less popular. With me weeks away from beginning grad school, I felt like I’d found theme music that would fit nicely with my times.
Within a year and a master’s degree of “Time, Love and Tenderness,” I would add Grover Washington, Jr. and Jon Secada to my growing and eclectic music collection. Jon Secada? For many fans of the Miami Sound Machine (Gloria Estefan, et al.) not to mention various subgenres of Latino music and Latino fusion, Secada might as well have been Neil Diamond or Michael Bolton. But for me, it gave me a window into other forms of music that I didn’t have or understand before. The dogged and soaring passion with which Secada sang his “Just Another Day” I’d only heard in gospel or with divas like Patti LaBelle, Chaka Khan, Whitney Houston and — in the first two years of the ’90s — Mariah Carey. Men didn’t sing like that, certainly not in pop music!
I became enthralled with Secada and Bolton, Grover and Mariah, so much so that I continued to branch out. Coltrane, Celine Dion, The Cranberries, Sarah McLachlan, Pearl Jam, Tupac, grunge, world music, New Age — Deep Forest, Enya, Enigma — along with neo-soul — Maxwell and Erykah Badu — were all in my collection by the time I finished grad school.
Still, I needed my schmaltz, and I still do. Michael Bolton, for all of his vanity and overestimation of his voice (he’s done duets with Patti LaBelle and Celine Dion, for goodness sake’s), has been a part of my musical memory for twenty-two years. “Time, Love and Tenderness,” for all of its ’80s-esque quirks, is by far my favorite song by Bolton. It made the second half of the summer of ’91 not only bearable, but fun. It reminded me of how innocent I still was, of how it was a must that I keep my heart open to the possibility of love, even though I would undoubtedly get hurt from time to time.
Life is like that sometimes, and in my case, most of the time. I find myself learning more from loss, more determined because of betrayal and more committed when others tell me I can’t do something, like earning an advanced degree or doing a job successfully. For those times, schmaltzy music is often where I revert to for strength and encouragement, for the ability to move forward.