The Line-Up 11-13-2009 by retronius

I'm probably going to need some other service to upload my show. I'm open to any suggestions. Let me know you like what I'm doing. Or even if you hate what I'm doing. Seriously.

The Line-Up 11-13-2009  by  retronius

Ramsey Lewis - Rendesvous
Aaron Parks - Peaceful Warrior
Javon Jackson - Inner Glimpse
Christian McBride & Inside Straight - Theme for Kareem
George Braith & Grant Greeen - Boom Bop Bing Bash
Stefon Harris - African Tarantella
Jaco Pastorius Big Band - Good Morning Anya
Eric Alexander - Island

On Art, Craft, and Trusted Criticism

I was having a talk this evening with a friend of mine about grammar.  Really the talk was about head injuries (Ever bang your head against a wall really hard? Geez!) and things sort of devolved into the proper use of lay vs. lie.  You see, while I graduated cum laude from Morehouse College with a degree in English, I can still never remember the difference between lay and lie.  I figure I'll get it one day when my brain can keep that information in check (telling me in the comments of this post still likely won't make much of an impact, trust me), but for right now it's just one of those things that I'll miss from time to time, especially in unedited, extemporaneous conversational English.  The thing with this friend of mine is that he's a bit of a grammar fanatic and will correct any mistake made in the middle of a conversation.  I've come to accept this and ignore him immediately afterwards because I find this behavior to be rather gauche.  I doubt I'm alone in this sentiment.  But from there, the discussion went on to the nature of this blog and my malleable grasp of grammar.  I went on to bluntly tell him that there are few people to whom I turn on the matter of my writing.

Writers seem to be like this. The ones I know and have seen anyway.  There are those to whom we turn when we need an opinion on a take of an article or some quick editing of a letter or celebration over a published submission or commiseration over a rejection.  Among all my friends, there's a different level of trust I share with my writer friends.  Even with my closest friends, I don't always turn to them when I've written something.  It's a different level of trust.  Now, the manner in which I told my friend about my writing could certainly have been worded better, but that still won't change the fact that I only trust a certain few people when they give criticism on my work.

The thing is, most arts, crafts, and jobs are like this.  This isn't a far-fetched concept.  Every job has a certain degree of "paying one's dues."  A large part of this has to do with respecting a certain infrastructure but other parts of this involve "learning the ropes" and establishing that aforementioned trust with future colleagues.  There are some who may disagree with me but there's a certain degree of necessity for this system (not completely, although saying there's a need for it at all is still rather difficult for me to say).  When it comes to any kind of workplace, it doesn't just help to know a work record or read through letters of recommendation, you still need to work with someone a while.  You still need to figure out your new colleague's habits.  You need to establish trust.  This is harder for some people to do than it is for others.

Applying criticism works on a whole other level from this.  It's truly respected when you're in the fold.  Even a good idea is still without proper context if its source isn't from the fold it is criticizing.  Currently, my alma mater is receiving a lot of criticism for its new dress code and when I read that criticism, I'm going to weigh the opinion of Morehouse Men higher than that of anyone else because they have the distinct perspective necessary for this kind of matter.  Beside the fact, I trust them more for being cut from the same cloth and going through what I went through.  I'm not completely discrediting the opinion of others, but they certainly don't hold the same standing.

The same can be said after the Terry Teachout Wall Street Journal editorial.  Teachout's critique of jazz's reach and audience was particularly harmful and incendiary not only because it didn't offer any solutions and cited a rather skewed source, but also because Teachout isn't a true jazz fan.  Teachout was talking about something he didn't truly know.  Teachout isn't one of us, so why did he feel he could speak so knowingly of this matter.  If he actually is one of us, he certainly a) could have made a better show of it and b) he could have written a better piece with better research.  He criticism came from a very bad place and was in a very public forum.  That's a large reason why it raised such a fuss.

This is part of the nature of art, craft, and criticism.  As A. G. Amo's hermeneutic circle states, there is a connection between the separate spheres of work, author, and audience.  Because these spheres are separate, there's little that can be done to stop any of them from acting independently.  Yet, on the matter of criticism, the audience has the choice on how to discern a critical work.  In a way, an audience must be like Metacritic or Rotten Tomatoes: the audience is aware of criticism but must weigh some critics higher than others in order to discern who is more trustworthy based on compatibility with the author of said criticism, esteem in his/her industry, prestige of his/her publisher, and other attributes that are deemed important to each reader.

So because of this, a business does have the right to try by fire each employee to discern how close the rapport will be and then to discern whether said employees ideas are worth their salt.  Each artist will bind closer to other writer friends or kindred spirits to know how to improve his/her work.  And sometimes, we just have to tell our friends, "while I appreciate your input, when it comes to what I do, I just don't know you like that."  Art and criticism really aren't things to take lightly, especially when you're an artist.

The Line-Up 11-6-2009 by retronius

Here is the show for November 6. This show involved a lot of switching things around in the system and each song I played had a rather specific reason behind it which I'll explain in the notes here. You may want to follow along...
The Line-Up 11-6-2009  by  retronius

Kneebody - Never Remember
This band out of Austin has been on my radar here and there and I figured I'd start off the hour with them just because the name sort of stuck out in my head.  That's really just it but it was still a pretty good start to the show and I like that decision.
Robert Glasper - No Worries
The other day, I was talking with a friend of mine about Robert Glasper and his work with folks like Mos Def and Bilal.  Because of that conversation, I felt compelled to play Glasper again this week.  Beside the fact, Double Booked is a really good album and I knew I would want to play something from it again.  "No Worries" was one of the songs I played this week that stuck out in my head so that's why it's the specific track that played this evening.
Cassandra Wilson - Runs the Voodoo Down
I was really just in the mood for some Cassandra Wilson.  I honestly don't play her stuff often enough, on air or personally and I should fix that.
Medeski Martin and Wood - Professor Nohair
If you haven't been following the jazz crowd, Medeski Martin and Wood are huge and their Radiolarians project has been picking up as much steam as this auspicious series of albums merits.  It can be a little difficult to grapple but it's worth the effort.
Chick Corea & John McLaughlin - The Disguise
A few weeks ago, I got a hold of this album and I've been playing it pretty heavily this past week.  In fact, I was listening to it on the ride to the radio station for this show.
Roy Hargrove Big Band - Roy Allen
This album has been talked up a lot at the station and this is my favorite track off the album.
Brad Mehldau - Knives Out
I don't know if you've noticed but my first three weeks of my doing this show, I played a Brad Mehldau track each week.  After that third week, I told myself I was going to stop myself from playing Mehldau for a while.  Considering I was going to take a slightly different approach to my show this week, I lifted my self-imposed Mehldau fast and played one of my favorite tracks of his.  This is the strong start to one of the albums that I counted in my primer to modern jazz.  This is your turn on.
Nina Simone/Felix Da Housecat - Sinnerman (Heavenly House Mix)
HTC rolled out a new bunch of commercials last week in which this song was featured.  Add that to the fact that this was also the song used when NBC went behind the scenes in the Obama White House a few months back and suffice it to say, this song got stuck in my head and started driving me crazy.  So, I figured the station likely has this song since it's on the Verve Remixed 2 album.  It's been driving me crazy so I figured I'd drive you crazy, too, dear listener.

The Line-Up 10-30-2009 by retronius

Herein lies my radio show for October 30th, 2009. It should be here for a little while. I'm trying to do what I can to get this out better and I hope you have a clearer idea of what I do. Oh, and it's really hard to make a Halloween themed jazz show.

Quincy Jones - Theme from "Ironside"
Esbjörn Svensson Trio - Tide of Trepidation
Chick Corea - The Great Pumpkin Waltz
Justin Vasquez - Invitation
Grant Green - In the Middle
Christian McBride - Say Something
Miles Davis - Spanish Key
The Bad Plus - Iron Man

The Line-Up 10-30-2009  by  retronius

The Line-Up 10-23-2009 by retronius

I've found a better way to post past episodes of my show. In time, I hope to have all of them here. This is last week's show but tonight's show will be live in a couple of hours and I hope to probably have the stream of it here tomorrow. I'll also post the list of tracks here soon as well.

The Line-Up 10-23-2009  by  retronius

To Be Young, Gifted, Black, and a Jazz Enthusiast: Apparent Needle in a Haystack

About a month ago, Patrick Jarenwattananon of NPR's A Blog Supreme put together a group of lists of recent gateway jazz albums from prominent young jazz enthusiasts and bloggers.  The Jazz Now Project was a rather brilliant idea and opened up a lot of discussion and awareness about the future of jazz and really shows what the field looks like right now.  Early on the the culmination of this project, Jarenwattananon opened the submission of suggestions not only to those he specifically asked but also to other readers of the blog and on the email list.  So it didn't take me long for me to submit my own Jazz Now list.  (And special thanks to him for linking the post on the compilation of Jazz Now submissions. I got my highest hit count yet of 29 readers because of him. I really need more readers.) When I emailed him the link to my blog for submission, Jarenwattananon thanked me for my list and mentioned that I was the only black guy to have sent anything.  He figured that this may have been because of those he asked, the only active jazz bloggers he knew were mostly white guys.  He wondered if I had any ideas why that was.  The question stuck in my head for quite a while and while trying to figure it out, I threw the question out on Twitter the other day about where the black jazz bloggers are.  The only response someone could come up with was the Washington D.C. blogger, Willard Jenkins of The Independent Ear.  Jenkins in fact has his own series on his blog in which he interviews black jazz writers.  The "Ain't But a Few of Us:  Black jazz writers tell their story" series, while interesting reading, still lacks youth.  Jarenwattananon replied that he was aware of Jenkins and even met him but as it relates to the Millennial Generation, there aren't any black jazz bloggers that come to mind.

It's weird thinking about that, which is part of the reason why I've been writing more about jazz lately.  I may in fact be filling a desperately needed niche out there (and will have to work quite hard to do it justice).  My aforementioned "first love after Jesus" could use a spokesman from my specific demographic but I have to seriously ask, "Am I really it?"  Call it my low self-esteem but when folks give me compliments, I honestly don't think I can adequately live up to them.  When I first started my radio show, The Line-Up at KRTU San Antonio (I shall continue to plug this thing), a friend of mine wrote a blogpost promoting the show on a friend's blog for their band, Tendaberry (which rocks, it rocks quite hard).  In this blog, I was described as

Retro is probably the foremost authority on jazz music that any of us know, so we'll just say that he's the foremost authority on jazz period in our generation.

 Now, of course I am both black and southern.  I am not averse to hyperbole.  Besides, the folks at Tendaberry are good friends, of course, they're going to speak praisingly of me.  That's what friends do.  But the aforementioned Jarenwattananon knows way more about jazz than I do.  At my radio station, there are plenty of people with whom I work who make me feel like an idiot just being around them (although, the guy there who humbles me the most there is just barely a Gen-Xer with a serious vigor to him).  I've always described my archival knowledge of jazz as impressive only to people who know nothing about the subject.  I can be easily eclipsed by a real expert, but I'm still on the road to writing in publications about jazz in San Antonio and seeing where else it can take me down the pike (stay prayerful that one of my plans pan out, this plan is kept guarded with Wil Wheaton "crazy awesome"-type secrecy).  So, unless my unemployment bubble (which should also change soon, Insha'Allah) is blinding me of something, am I really the foremost African-American Millennial Generation jazz blogger in the seventh largest city in America (and the only one in this specific group that is paying attention to National Public Radio's online efforts)?  I can't be it.

So if I'm really it, there has to be a reason why.  I know there's someone out there smarter than me.  There has to be someone just as interested in jazz as I am and willing to talk about it on the internet with much more frequency than what I'm doing right now.  But if you were to look at the demographic breakdown of those who work at my radio station, I've only seen two black people with shows, and I'm one of them.  The other is a guy in his 50's who plays a two-hour contemporary jazz show on Sunday afternoons called "Sunday Best." (In the couple of times in which I've met the host, Neil Phelps, he seems like cool people, though.)  Most of the young people who work at KRTU are DJing shows in the rock-oriented after 10pm programming.  If you're to look at the demographics of the station, the KRTU Operations Manual and Policy Guide states,

Member (donor) information and market data tells us that the median age of our audience is around 53 - right smack dab in the middle of the 45-60 demographic - and that they are largely well-educated, middle-to-upper class professionals.

After that, we'll have to look at the national scale of jazz.  There recently haven't been a shortage of that kind of observation.  For ease, I'll link to sites that have given commentary and have their own links.  Of course, this summer has been ablaze with Terry Teachout's article in the Wall Street Journal claiming that jazz can't be saved.  Destination-Out has some good commentary about that in a recent post highlighting Alice Coltrane.  While Teachout states that the jazz audience is growing older and smaller, many across the internet claim this isn't so.  But the best, most accepting answer comes from Darcy James Argue (who I recently very highly praised) in which he says of course the audience is growing older and smaller.  You'd have to be blind not to notice that.  But the best course of action is to do what you can as an artist to make the work appealing and wide reaching to a new audience so it remains relevant to the public and the current audience must fervently support the art it so dearly loves and for which it heaps tons of internet rage upon its opponents.

So even if the NEA could use a better survey, it's pretty clear that the jazz audience is growing smaller and older.  There are some who are making their strides to change this and welcome changes they are.  But if you were to go with the law of averages here, if you have an audience that doesn't embrace technology as much and there are fewer people involved, there are lower chances that there will be a blogger in the midst.  That's just a straight numbers game.  I'm not saying counting bloggers is a zero-sum equation or something, but I am saying if the average blogger is 36-years-old and you are part of an audience that's crowding out its folks who are Gen-Xers and younger, you're possibly crowding out your bloggers.  If the average blogger makes less money than the general adult population, but the jazz audience is middle-to-upper class professionals, you're crowding out your bloggers.  A 1995 National Endowment of the Arts study [pdf] states,

...The audience remains predominantly white. White Americans make up 81 percent of the jazz attenders, 78 percent of those watching jazz on television or listening to jazz recordings, and 79 percent ofthose listening to jazz on the radio. This simply reflects the numerical predominance of whites in the population. African Americans, who account for 11 percent of the population as a whole, make up 17 percent of jazz attenders, 18 percent of the radio audience, 19 percent of the television audience, and nearly 20 percent of those who listen to jazz recordings. The remainder (2 to 3 percent) is accounted for by the category "other" (Asians, Native Americans).

Yet while that same study says blacks are one and one half times more likely to participate in jazz events, jazz is still rather proliferated by whites to a large degree (pardon the Mos Def-ism with rock music parallels).  I'm not doubting the footing that black people continue to make in jazz.  I still sing praises of Joe Sample. Stanley Clarke is getting back in gear.  Earl Klugh was recently featured in JazzTimes.  Robert Glasper, Stefon Harris, Christian McBride, those darn Marsalises, Esperanza Spalding, Jaspects, Jef Lee Johnson, Joshua Redman, etcetera etcetera etcetera.  Call it a matter of numbers or fighting an ongoing sea change but noting the sheer numbers involved in comparing how many black jazz musicians there are verses how many white jazz musicians there are can get rather dizzying.  Finding the reason why after that can get even worse.  But when you get right down to it, this does seem like quite a lot a white people for a black-invented art form, even if it is "America's classical music."  With numbers like these, it does seem like this could also be crowding out the bloggers.

If there are young black jazz bloggers out there, maybe they just don't pay attention to NPR.  I certainly wasn't before this past summer and apparently that was just me bucking the numbers.  A recent demographic study of NPR [pdf] shows 86% of NPR's listeners are white. Blacks make up 5% of NPR's audience (and 31% of jazz listeners).  Throw in the debated idea that NPR's music choices don't appeal to black people and maybe this question was brought about because Jarenwattananon's internet circles and the white elephant of a more prominent young black jazz blogger just happened to be like two ships passing in the night.

Either way, when you look at the numbers involved, I could just be part of a rare breed.  This of course concerns me because it means I'm rather lonely in my tastes.  It could be cool to be a kind of authority but it doesn't help when you don't feel qualified enough to be authoritative.  The criteria can't be as minimal as "intermediate knowledge and enough motivation to keep learning," can it?  Is it like the time I was in an African Methodist Episcopal church with a friend of mine and I noted that I'd be a catch to any young black woman because I'm a black man with a college degree in a church and I treat my mother right.  Is that enough to overlook my inability to drive and my unemployment?

In the meantime, I'll try to be the most adequate 23-year-old black jazz blogger I can occasionally be.  Plus, I do have a radio show.  Chicks dig guys with radio shows, right?

Late Deference to Taste and the Re-Imagining of the Big Band

For a preposterously long time, I've held to a rather peculiar rule as it relates to music recommendations. All recommendations that come from friends are ignored for at least three months. For example, a friend of mine told me about a year ago, "Hey, you should check out Esperanza Spalding." I gave my usual, "Um... yeah. Sure." Shrugged the whole thing off and continued on my merry way. Time passes and she's playing the Newport Jazz Festival this past summer and I decided to give her set a listen on NPR. Sure enough, my friend was right and now I pay her attention. I've even played her a few times on my radio show. The thing is, it took over a year for his wise words to sink in, partially because I like discovering stuff on my own or through the internet.

As our parents always say, "Oh, so you won't listen to me but you'll do whatever your little nappy-headed friends will say!" (Okay, so maybe not all our parents say that.) Ever since college, the internet has been my friend. It is a wave of information and outreach that I oddly trust more than those around me because it has some mystical sense of authority, even when it can be monumentally wrong. Sometimes, it can even break me down and change my mind about things.

Since I've gotten involved with KRTU, the folks there have been hyping up the Roy Hargrove Big Band. Yet for months, I've been telling them how the album really doesn't work for me. I never could gel with the medium of the big band. When you put a huge group of people like that together, they all have to work together and I think it hampers how outside of the limits a musician can go. When it comes to jazz, I'm a man of trios. Someone keeps rhythm, someone keeps beat, someone goes off and does something crazy. The more people you add, the less of a chance someone has of going crazy. Because this is how I generally enjoy music (i.e. adept, arhythmic insanity), it's a large reason why I don't have enough rhythm to dance (unless you count frenetic gyrations while in the kitchen by myself). So even if you do have the trumpeter who has played with Erykah Badu, D'Angelo, Common, and Shirley Horn, and Oscar Peterson, you get all those folks in a room and there isn't a lot of chances someone's going crazy. The big band is a medium more dependent on composition than improvisation. So giving a first listen to his new big band album, Emergence,leaves me a tad underwhelmed for most of the journey, even with people who know sooo much more than me playing it up.

But then the internet led me to Darcy James Argue's Secret Society. Argue has compiled a big band with a different bent to it. His compositions are very strong and moody, grand in scope and holding to a rather interesting theme: steampunk. The big band manages to go off how I like it because the composer has assembled a great group with great timing, enough room to give everyone adequate solos with a good measure of improvisation, but also create brilliant compositions with a great running concept. How exactly does one create "steampunk bigband" music? The big band is an invention of the early 20th Century and had to recede during the Depression. It certainly isn't Victorian, futuristic, modern, or technological. The concept of steampunk is as paradoxical as basing a subgenre of jazz around it in such an anachronistic form. But it totally works.

After hearing one track, I was hooked and hope was restored in the big band. I gave Hargrove another listen. Yes, I still don't think the compositions are inspired enough for the hype I'm hearing, but the medium of the big band isn't as tired as I thought it was before. Hargrove still adds a modern edge to it where he can, I mean... he has to. He's Roy Hargrove. Hargrove is as much a multi-talented jazz musician (in the way that he can absolutely transcend genres) as Robert Glasper, Stefon Harris, and Terrence Brown. Besides, if Darcy James Argue can make me rethink the whole medium, it's time I gave others a more fair shot.

That took me less than three months to figure out. It's a stupid rule, I know, but I'm learning. My own misconceptions about my having to discover on my own what I listen to is rather ridiculous and if I can recognize that others have good taste, the least I could do is actually take cues for it from time to time. I'd at least be able to figure out Roy Hargrove faster than I did.

Or not be late to the party with Esperanza Spalding.

Morehouse Puts Its Freshly Polished, Stacy Adams-Covered Foot Down

A few friends of mine have called me to the carpet on a certain issue pertaining my alma mater, Morehouse College. The school that I so dearly love is instituting a new dress code this month. While I saw many of my fellow alums complain vehemently about the new dress code, I frankly didn't care much about it. I felt like many upper middle class Americans in their 40s and have well-paid jobs with health benefits. Huh? What do you mean there are 25-30 million people who don't have healthcare in America? They're probably just lazy and not suffering as a result of a price-gouging system and the worst economic conditions since the 1930s. Like a libertarian, I simply thought, "I got mine, and I don't care who hasn't gotten his yet." But as time wore on, friends of mine have wondered what I thought on the subject, and the more I thought about this new "appropriate attire policy," the more I thought how wrong this was.

Of course, I'm not the only person who has commented on this policy. Those in favor of the policy seem to sound a lot like conservatives' opinions about liberals during the Bush 43 years. If they don't like the policy, they can just leave. Jonathan Pitts-Wiley (who I generally like) said this. Check the comments page on any story on this and you'll see the battle here on this policy. There's clearly a controversy pertaining to the homophobic elements. I'll get to that.

This story has made national news. CNN has covered it quite a bit 1) because it's interesting, 2) because it's easy to report on a story happening in the same city as your headquarters, and 3) because 24 hour news doesn't fill itself up pointlessly. Black people, known to be more conservative than most people in America other than WASPs, have heralded this policy as a step in the right direction. To a certain extent, this is right. Black youth do need to make positive strides in the workplace. They need to respect themselves and others. They should have good general appearance. For the classroom setting, many of these rules are good rules.

This policy is not about the classroom setting; this policy legislates overall behavior and campus life, something which I've said for years has seriously been lacking in the Atlanta University Center. Those who know me or have read my work for some time have known about how serious I am about wearing my hats. I've gone into the history of hat etiquette and I've combat administrators because of it. I am doing so here now, again.

Enacting a strict dress policy would make sense to restore professionalism in the classroom (which is why I typically removed my hat before entering a classroom while in college and why I typically do so when entering offices, but not office buildings, and why I do so at a dinner table, but not immediately upon entering a restaurant and other things of that ilk). Yet, when one lives on a campus, that campus is his home. The dining hall is his kitchen. The dorm lounges are his living rooms. The grassy areas are his front and back lawns. The library, his library. His classmates, his brothers. We are all part of one family in Morehouse College, at least that's what they instilled in us. This is our House. Should we not be comfortable? Should there not be a distinction between the professionalism of the classroom and the informality of campus life? Eliminating that distinction on one end harms the classroom environment. I can understand the need to stop sagging pants and do-rags when you're listening to Tobe Johnson talk about the importance of the 14th Amendment. But swinging the pendulum this drastically on the other end is creating an entirely different backlash. It makes a school policy national news and provides a publicity I'm pretty sure the school doesn't want, especially after the checkered past Morehouse has seemed to have since the turn of this century.

This new policy only perpetuates the idea that the black man is always on display, but now we have no control over the performance. As explained in this video by CNN, apparently all Morehouse Men should be dressed up because there could always be visitors.

But last I heard, other colleges don't have these standards. Graduate programs and Fortune 500 companies scout out other larger institutions that also have sagging students and keg parties and streaking, things that Morehouse wouldn't even dream of tolerating. I think any other standard school isn't concerned about this. And while I've heard time and again that black people have to work twice as hard to get half as far in white America, that doesn't mean I have to throw on a pair of jeans because I want a bowl of cereal on a Saturday morning in my own kitchen.

And let's look at the foundation of this policy. It treats men as children, which is rather belittling. Even further, it was in part composed by an 11-year-old, which is definitely belittling. And the homophobic elements specifically target five students on campus, which is belittling on an overall ethical level and in a power-hungry kind of way. But an even larger point is that it commodifies the idea of the Morehouse Man yet again. I have warned the campus of this before. This policy says there is one look of a Morehouse Man and it should be followed at all times. It's only a matter of time before the football team is playing in Stacy Adams'. They would probably have the exact same win/loss rate (or loss/loss rate, really).

There are multiple reasons why this is harmful. This policy was enacted because the current look of Morehouse was thought to be making a bad public image, and this is likely the case. Although, I doubt the solution to increasing interest in HBCUs in the 21st Century is "make more rules." When you have schools giving away iPods, using technology in new and inspiring ways, adding various facilities and restaurants to campus to make the atmosphere more appealing, and building new dorms and classrooms constantly, a "your pants must fit" rule isn't going to bring little Hakim over from Emory.

Conservatism has been instrumental in the history of the Atlanta University Center. The deep religious backgrounds of Morehouse, Spelman, Clark College, Atlanta University, Morris Brown, and the Interdenominational Theological Center have built the AUC into what is considered to some the "black ivy league." But what these institutions have failed to realize is that their less racially homogeneous counterpart (and source of their inferiority complex) has adapted over the years and so must the AUC. If Princeton can dole out more scholarships to all its poor students and Harvard can have a female president, surely Morehouse can let the campus life be campus life and the classroom be the classroom, and it can also change with the times. One comment I ran across on Facebook noted that if Spelman were to have done this, Spelman women would still not be allowed to wear jeans. There's a problem when Oral Roberts and Liberty University has the option of looking at my alma mater and saying, "yeah, you guys seem pretty strict." While Conservatism has cemented the AUC with strong values, it has also frozen those values in time. When Benjamin Elijah Mays said long ago that "A Morehouse Man always carries a pen," could that still be relevant in the age of the smartphone? When John Hope made the first housing project in America during the early 20th Century, could this still be considered a shining accomplishment on his resume when you look at those same closed down housing projects now?

If there is any conservative value these institutions must hold, it must be to the notion presented in Ecclesiastes that everything has its season. That while most wouldn't want to see a guy in a dress, what he does after hours very well should be his business. Whether or not one believes that to be a sin against God, that's still an issue he should take up with God personally and it is not an individual's job to be a fruit inspector (no pun intended, it's a biblical reference). And it certainly isn't an institution's job. GLBTQ organizations (how many more letters are they going to add?) are up in arms about this, and rightfully so. This is a violation of freedom of expression, even though this is a private institution and has the right to making a policy like this. But they're up in arms because the policy is wrong, according to their own special interest. I'm saying the policy is wrong according to my own special interest and I admit logically that other points that I don't fully follow have a lot of ground to stand on here.

At an institution of higher learning, the classroom is where the cultivation mostly happens. Outside of that, Morehouse should teach men to be men, but they should be their own men. I learned that from the experiences I got of Morehouse, not solely from what Morehouse tried to teach me. Had it been up to the majority of the administration, I certainly wouldn't have pestered them in the press as often and I'd be aspiring to work at some investment firm where I'd be quickly laid off because I just knew there was something fishy going on in the business world. But some of what made my college experience so great was that I had to make it myself, which included being far away from my own school as much as I possibly could. I seriously doubt the students at Arizona State do that.

This swinging of the pendulum so drastically to the other side is a bad move. It only gives bad attention to a still ailing school. It makes old fogey parents push their sons to Morehouse even harder than before while those same sons look more for a school that will enrich both his mind and his spirit. Academia isn't exactly in the place right now to make a school less appealing and this is what's happening to Morehouse. In essence, this policy was necessary but not in this form, not in this way, not to this extent, and certainly not with this spotlight.

The Rape Tunnel

A good friend of mine sent me an article that he wanted me to blog about. Frankly, I had a lot on my mind at the moment to write here and I'll be sure to have those ideas here soon, but after sitting with the idea for a little while, this post sort of wrote itself in my head. What is a rather shocking, terrible subject just sort of came out as preposterously humorous to me. I hope you share the same sentiment, otherwise this may get a little uncomfortable.

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Richard Whitehurst of Columbus, Ohio, is working on his next artistic piece to open at the William Strunk, Jr. Museum of Contemporary Art in Akron. This piece is... get ready now... The Rape Tunnel. Those who crawl into the 22-foot long, steadily shrinking tunnel will eventually find themselves in a small room in which Whitehurst will do all he can to rape those who cross his one-way path.


Ooooooooooeeeeeeeeeeooooooooooooo

Whitehurst claims he's undertaking this work because art lately is only relevant to the artistic community and he needs to do somethings so shocking that it reaches the world at large. By the mere fact that my friend sent me a link about this work and that I'm blogging about it here is essentially proving that point. But there's something more to the piece than just shock value.

The precursor to this work was Whitehurst's Punch-You-In-The-Face Tunnel. Those who enter the tunnel of similar design would enter a room in which the artist would punch the person in the face. Here's where things go a little awry. In this article, Whitehurst makes reference of a young woman who was a fledgling model who broke her nose after Whitehurst punched her in the face after crawling in the tunnel. She sued and after two years, the case is still in contention. I'm wondering what was she expecting to happen.

Let me get this straight. She sees a tunnel that's clearly marked and explained as a tunnel in which if you enter it, you'll get punched in the face. Was she expecting cake? It would be like crossing into Dante's Inferno and whistling a hopeful tune. Who does this woman think she is entering the tunnel and not expecting to get punched in the face? She entered a contract. There was a meeting of the minds. In fact, it would be a breach of contract if she didn't get punched in the face.

And did this go to trial? I don't want to see the case. I don't want to hear the arguments. I just want to witness the voir dire and then be a fly on the wall in the jury room.

"She should receive damages. Her nose is broken."
"It was called 'THE PUNCH-YOU-IN-THE-FACE TUNNEL.'"
"But how hard should she have been punched in the face?"
"Is there a soft face-punching I don't know about?"

Then we move forward into the rape. Of course it was the next logical step. There's less ambiguity should things become litigious.

"She chose to crawl in the tunnel. He can't be a fault."
"SHE WAS RAPED!"
"Yeah, I guess you're right. He's pretty guilty."

If Whitehurst isn't found to be at fault here for raping the willing, would this be considered soliciting prostitution? Oh sure, Whitehurst clearly states he "[plans] to make the experience as unpleasant as [he] possibly can to anyone who dares to crawl through the tunnel," but this could just mean each idiot who crawls into The Rape Tunnel and gets just what s/he asked for could be soliciting prostitution with a serious S&M edge to it. The state may not win the war here with law this vague in this case, but there could be a victory in the battle here for the City of Akron, unless the 1st Amendment wins out here (which it probably will).

But what really gets me here is that this is the actual depiction of a horror movie. You can truly witness a bad decision as it happens. Sure a house could look spooky, especially on a stormy night, but unless there's just bad construction or a shifting foundation, you could probably walk through a big scary house at night with no problem. This is a clear marked tunnel that will say, "if you enter here, bad things will surely happen. You're an idiot if you enter it." There should be a group of black people sitting right by the entrance, watching everyone in the gallery and then yelling at people who eye the tunnel too long, "NUH-UH GIRL! DON'T GO IN THERE! YOU GON' GET RAPED!"

Sure, Whitehurst is making a statement about how art makes a real statement to real people, but deep down, he's making a statement about how much people are willing to make obviously stupid decisions.

EDIT: It turns out this whole thing was a fake. Although, I totally know who William Strunk is; I just thought they named a museum after him as an honor, not as a punchline. It's a funny idea but now I feel sort of silly writing this thing out. At least it was funny. It was funny, right?

Thanks to my friend, Alvin, for shedding light on all this.

On Notice: Black People are Banned from Satire

While spending some time on the evermore ubiquitous Twitter, I ran across a story from The Root's feed. Black students at the humorously-named Slippery Rock University in Pennsylvania are complaining about an editorial cartoon depicting a black man hanging from a noose, asking the white crowd below, "You're doing this because I'm black, aren't you?" Those in the white crowd then say the black man is playing the race card.

While I haven't seen the cartoon (can a brotha' get a jpeg?), that description sounds pretty funny. But when you read the story, many seemed to disagree. If you read the story, you'd also find the artist of the cartoon is black. A black man made a comment through satire about how white people can at times persecute blacks and then say blacks are calling the race card, but so many of us see a black guy in a noose and start to call Rev. Sharpton (just wait).

When I heard about this story, I could only immediately think about another firestorm provoked by massive miscommunication: the fracas from that New Yorker cover. You know... this one:


Here we go again

How did we miss the point again? Did black people really think The New Yorker is full of racists? That elitist, liberal rag may be somewhat exclusionary at times, but it wouldn't dare be overtly racist. Once again, black people missed satire. The cartoon was about the republican perception of how the Obamas would "corrupt" the presidency. Considering it's been more than a year and hearing from birthers, deathers, Godwin's Law-breakers, and folks bandying about the word "socialism" without having a solitary clue what that entails, that cartoonist should get a raise for being so astute. I mean... if he's still employed because black people don't get satire.

There are so many of us who get our ire raised in a flash without thinking about meaning. Of course, every artist has to take the risk that his or her work may be misinterpreted, but perhaps black people should just quit trying with satire altogether. I'm not saying we as a people lack the higher order thinking and interpretive skills for it. There's clearly a guy at Slippery Rock who has the idea down. Boondocks creator Aaron McGruder is doing alright at it, although he did once tell me at a panel discussion years ago that it works when you put a cute face on it. But by and large, either black people really don't understand how satire works or we really like complaining about stuff. While I can complain with the best of them, I sort of like the stuff I complain about to have a point.

Maybe we as a people need a refresher course on the form. We should all read Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal and then discuss it. Anyone who believes we really should eat Irish babies should be briefed on why he or she will no longer be allowed to procreate. Eventually, the discussion will move onto why Stephen Colbert and The Onion aren't real news sources. Black people will perpetuate discourse on Bahktinian Carnivalesque in no time. The ones who aren't taken out back and flogged, anyway.

Chances are, I probably won't be able to assemble the resources for my "Satire for Negroes" course. If Fox News has such a close eye on ACORN right now, I don't even have a chance. But in the meantime, I think we can do our part to stop reading editorial cartoons. Otherwise, it's only a matter of time before some image of an AIDS treatment cocktail set on an ivory tower in the midst of a ghetto as a symbolism of how the condition is ravaging the black community and how our lack of healthcare is keeping it out of reach is misinterpreted and then we need to call Jesse Jackson and then he'll make another comment about chopping off someone's genitalia and we frankly don't need that kind of attention.

EDIT: Apparently, I wasn't paying attention to the story deeply enough. The comic in question was from the syndicated strip by Keith Knight, "The K Chronicles." So the artist in question isn't some really smart college kid who now has really pissed off peers but is instead an accomplished cartoonist who probably has readers lost about his work once more. Maybe the students of Slippery Rock should stick to Marmaduke.

Thanks to Sylvia5th for bringing this to my attention.

EDIT 2: I got that jpeg.
Thanks, The Comic Book Hook-Up & Brent.