Donnell Alexander's Blog - Posts Tagged "donnell-alexander"
Ghetto Celebrity: LA to San Francisco
I’ll introduce this excerpt from Son of Ghetto Celebrity, the forthcoming digital update of my 2003 memoir, very briefly.
It’s a Friday in August of 1995 and I’m fresh off a late night at the downtown LA hip-hop club Unity. This was followed by an early morning at the Riviera Country Club. My new wife and I have flown back up to San Francisco, to meet some Deadheads in Gold Gate Park.
EASILY TEN THOUSAND PEOPLE HAD GATHERED AT the Polo Fields cops called hands-off on weed arrests and California love ruled. Here and there, serious hippie girls doffed their tops and danced, some threw off their dresses and cared not that they wore no bottoms, spinning round and round. Cats cried openly. Others banged out on percussion. Jerry made this happen. He summoned the drums, he and his drug music.
Amy and I slept together under the stars. When we woke up, five times as many people were there were five times as many people there, taking communion, first to the tunes of a New Orleans jazz procession, with horse-drawn carriages and swinging horn sections and a tab of acid helped Bev transform into a cipher for all the joy and pain being released.
Wavy Gravy took the stage. Jerry Garcia’s daughter thanked all of us for paying her college tuition.
Then jets strafed the Polo Fields.
Everyone’s heads — those of the nude girls, the heads of the acid heads, the jazz men and Bob Weir and Wavy Gravy — craned upward for a gander, and a thousand carnations swirled through the sky, making the planes silhouette gray. All around me the mourners were gently jostling for memento petals.
I looked at Amy and she was spinning, eyes closed, tie-dye in a blur. My love held her hands outstretched, and a carnation landed in her grasp. She drew my eyes to hers, smiled the naughtiest of smiles.
Amy knew. At that moment, our son Forrest Belle left the abstract life she and I had shared in our imaginations. He was coming for real.
As baggage, he would bring my father.
AND ISN’T IT FUNNY HOW COMPULSIVELY KEEPING track of your life can strain your credibility? The pink line showed…
It’s a Friday in August of 1995 and I’m fresh off a late night at the downtown LA hip-hop club Unity. This was followed by an early morning at the Riviera Country Club. My new wife and I have flown back up to San Francisco, to meet some Deadheads in Gold Gate Park.
EASILY TEN THOUSAND PEOPLE HAD GATHERED AT the Polo Fields cops called hands-off on weed arrests and California love ruled. Here and there, serious hippie girls doffed their tops and danced, some threw off their dresses and cared not that they wore no bottoms, spinning round and round. Cats cried openly. Others banged out on percussion. Jerry made this happen. He summoned the drums, he and his drug music.
Amy and I slept together under the stars. When we woke up, five times as many people were there were five times as many people there, taking communion, first to the tunes of a New Orleans jazz procession, with horse-drawn carriages and swinging horn sections and a tab of acid helped Bev transform into a cipher for all the joy and pain being released.
Wavy Gravy took the stage. Jerry Garcia’s daughter thanked all of us for paying her college tuition.
Then jets strafed the Polo Fields.
Everyone’s heads — those of the nude girls, the heads of the acid heads, the jazz men and Bob Weir and Wavy Gravy — craned upward for a gander, and a thousand carnations swirled through the sky, making the planes silhouette gray. All around me the mourners were gently jostling for memento petals.
I looked at Amy and she was spinning, eyes closed, tie-dye in a blur. My love held her hands outstretched, and a carnation landed in her grasp. She drew my eyes to hers, smiled the naughtiest of smiles.
Amy knew. At that moment, our son Forrest Belle left the abstract life she and I had shared in our imaginations. He was coming for real.
As baggage, he would bring my father.
AND ISN’T IT FUNNY HOW COMPULSIVELY KEEPING track of your life can strain your credibility? The pink line showed…
"Niggers" in Government
In case you were hopeful that Obama winning a second term was some kind of indication that racism doesn’t really exist anymore, check out Twitter. The amount of hate speech, referring to the president as a “nigger,” a “monkey,” calling for violence and for the south to “rise again” was...
http://donnellalexander.tumblr.com/po...
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The above is from Jezebel. This right here is ya boy Donny Shell. Let me take the conversation a lot deeper, very quickly.
Of the post-election analysis I’ve heard, there’s been little talk of the aforementioned component of America’s election process, which. This is bigger than words: A lot of white kids say “nigger” because their vocabularies are limited. But I’m more interested in the role played by the perspectives of these young tweeters’ parents and how theire P.O.V.’s play out in governing.
It’s tough for urbanites with some degree of sophistication to acknowledge that an entrenched portion of the populace in will never, ever like us. Never mind “like”; they won’t accept African-Americans as being even legitimate. Naturally, the people the parents of these young tweeters and some of the kids themselves, the older ones, send people to Washington who will represent their views on Capitol Hill.
When analysts ponder the nature of gridlock in Congress they absolutely must bring this—the fact that a significant percentage of the House of Representatives sees it as their job to oppose the man in the Oval Office—into account. Reporters, editors and producers must account for stubborn racism in quantifying why things don’t get done.
So far, this just hasn’t happened on anything close to a serious, commiserate level.
Don’t even pretend to cover what’s wrong with the federal level of the U.S. government and how the problems trickle down to stated, counties and cities until you’ve begun to contend with this. To do otherwise is to perform theater and call it journalism.
http://donnellalexander.tumblr.com/po...
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The above is from Jezebel. This right here is ya boy Donny Shell. Let me take the conversation a lot deeper, very quickly.
Of the post-election analysis I’ve heard, there’s been little talk of the aforementioned component of America’s election process, which. This is bigger than words: A lot of white kids say “nigger” because their vocabularies are limited. But I’m more interested in the role played by the perspectives of these young tweeters’ parents and how theire P.O.V.’s play out in governing.
It’s tough for urbanites with some degree of sophistication to acknowledge that an entrenched portion of the populace in will never, ever like us. Never mind “like”; they won’t accept African-Americans as being even legitimate. Naturally, the people the parents of these young tweeters and some of the kids themselves, the older ones, send people to Washington who will represent their views on Capitol Hill.
When analysts ponder the nature of gridlock in Congress they absolutely must bring this—the fact that a significant percentage of the House of Representatives sees it as their job to oppose the man in the Oval Office—into account. Reporters, editors and producers must account for stubborn racism in quantifying why things don’t get done.
So far, this just hasn’t happened on anything close to a serious, commiserate level.
Don’t even pretend to cover what’s wrong with the federal level of the U.S. government and how the problems trickle down to stated, counties and cities until you’ve begun to contend with this. To do otherwise is to perform theater and call it journalism.
