Rogues

Rogues

Monday, November 15, 2010

Looking (1st Draft)

Looked out the window for the sun
Looked out the window for my son
Found Sun Gods in the space between Mommy’s palms
Was given God’s Son in the breaths between Sunday psalms
They were very superstitious…
Writing on the wall, writing on the moon
Trouble on the water, trouble in the field, fire in the house
Fire out the mouth…of preachers, teaching the fire next time
Telling it on the mountain
Looked in the library for Baldwin
Looked in the library for Batman
Looked at my people and thought,
“Which do you think fights crime better?”
Reading the books?
Or getting the book thrown at you
Because you was in the wrong place and chose to book it
Rather than be detained in Central Booking
Or taken to county where you aren’t allowed to read a book.

Wednesday, October 20, 2010

8-bit Nightmare

Ram3 is Ganon with the Triforce of Power/
Came from the south, flames out the mouth - Bowser/
Break your styles down in an hour/
Came back to the game SNK-style Krauser/

The enemy is time, I put punches between clock ticks/
Thirst the grab the 1st emerald - Robotnik/
Flow something like Dr. Wily know robotics/
And I ain't on the block a lot/
My mind's been evolving, revolving like Ocelot/

The rap game is FoxDie - I'm moving like Liquid/
Moving like a liquid/
My Soundwaves found slaves' underground graves/
And with a joint like this? I point like this/
And I moved the Pacific/

A mix between Mega Man and Malcolm/
Cuz I could switch the flow up and change the whole outcome/
And this is just a verse, imagine my album?/

Thursday, August 5, 2010

Dai Lee (for my Earth benders)

With my feet planted firm, yo I stand stiff/
Imprint this sanskrit/
Flick of my wrist, like this, makes sands shift/
You bandstand fans can't stand it/

My horse stance makes your whores glance and your land split/
Brought fire, water, air, and still couldn't dance with/
The Bronx Blind Bandit/
In touch with the Earth, Avatar, Captain Planet/

Indigenous people with internet bandwidth/
Living off the minerals/
Walk through Omashu or Ba Sing Se like a 4-star general/
The writing's on the wall - I wrote it in the ground, so it's legible/

From space, and I can see the tears on your face/
Which means you don't wanna die/
Cuz I redirect lightning like i'm Water Tribe/
Rock shock your block with a bop that change water tides/

Come back for more, I make sure you're immortalized/
Cuz all you got is ad-libs and pot shots/
But I could bust a stance that make your bullets look like pop rocks/

Killer In Cold Clothes

>(For anyone who has ever wanted to know what the story of the scar on the center my forehead)

Tuesday. Again. Waking up for school in the winter sucks. Especially on a Tuesday. Too close to Sunday to forget how fun the weekend was, just far enough into the week to forget how to have fun. That, and it’s still black as night at six-thirty in the morning in the Bronx, like God forgot to hit the switch on the sun here. I’m slipping on my clothes, which are cold as hell, which doesn’t really make sense, but if in hell they made your clothes out of ice that’s what this feels like. By the time I put on my Raiders hoody, which my mom got because they were sold out of Dallas ones, I swear I’m already frostbit. The streetlights reflecting off the snow are forcing orange through my window, so I can see my breath and everything. It looks like a ghost I gave life to by just breathing.

I make my way downstairs to head out for school, tip-toeing past mom’s room like a Navy SEAL behind enemy lines, each time my foot touches the floor it makes the sound of small firecrackers with short fuses popping off on a hot day. I sneak like this for like ten whole minutes, past her room, and pick up my backpack from the living room. I realize my house in the morning is like a train at four in the morning. ‘Cause you can remember it full of people and when it’s empty you feel like the world is upside-down. Anyway, I turn toward the kitchen and my there’s my mom, making juevos con tostones, filling the apartment with my infancy in PR. With half her Puerto Rican accent intact she says, “You know, it was cute to watch you sneak around when you was little. Not so much anymore.” She doesn’t know, but when mommy speaks, even when she’s mad, it feels so nice, ‘cause she gives me her attention. I said back to her, “You worry too much ma’. I’m twelve now, I can handle going to school by myself.”

“If that’s the case flaco, then how come your teachers say you miss school like twice a week? Don’t even try to answer, just take your butt to school, please!”

I leave the plate on the table, full, and steaming in the cold apartment. Mommy says some curses in Spanish at me, but I’m already out the front door, so it sounds like her mouth was duct taped, and she’s cursing her kidnappers out for dear life.

It makes me wish Papi was still here, he always knew how to calm her down. Mommy says he was a mad smooth Dominican chulo, and that he always wore pants so tight you could see his junk. That’s probably how he ended up with that Melinda lady. When I go with Papi some weekends she’s there with him, in their nice house, and she’s cool, and he’s happy. I have fun there, but when I think of how hard it is for mommy and me. I ask all the time, “Why did he leave?” She just gets mad and screams at me that I’m just like him, and I’m gonna leave her too. Makes me so mad to think about it, and I always think about it when mommy’s mad, which is all the time. Can’t be late, or they’ll mark me absent.

On my way to school I gotta watch my back, especially since it’s so dark out. I dip into the Domincan bakery on the corner of my block since it’s always lit up with bright pink and green neon lights that say Rainbow Diner spelled “Raimbow Dinner”. Knowing that when my mom comes in here for a coffee later, the pretty Domincan girl behind the counter with the beauty mark on her upper thigh that looks like Florida (my boy Alfredo told me) and them fake gold hoop earrings will tell her I came in and bought a bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich with my allowance. It’s like a message in a bottle that always get’s where you want it to go. Bochincheras are good for that. I killed the sandwich quickly and ran to the bus stop like I was getting an Olympic gold medal. Anyway, I go back to sleep on the bus ride to school, I don’t really have a choice, the bus driver has the heat set on ‘desert’, which the setting after ‘Cuba’ and before ‘Africa’. Getting to school early gives me the same feeling as when I’m in my living room in the morning, except for one difference: excitement. No one is here, and the playground gates are wide open.

After running and skipping with joy to the playground, carefully bounding over the broken glass of last night’s drunken morons and dropping my bag in the snow, my day comes to a screeching halt: there’s a boy on the tire swing. There’s this little black boy sitting in the swing, he’s so weak that he can’t even move it, but he’s laughing so loud. It’s like a little black smudge on the all-white painting of my day. The sun is starting to come up now, and the blue light is tearing shadows into the calm of my early morning. Between the sun and the boy on the swing, I can’t tell which is pissing me off more. Don’t know where it came from, but an idea was climbing up my spine using the spaces between the bones. Next thing I know, I threw my hood on and let the dark colors of my hoody into my actions. By the time I got to the swing, I was sure between the sun and the boy, I could at least cause the boy some pain. Anything to get my swing back.

He was wearing a thin denim jacket with a white, furry collar, navy blue uniform pants, a sky blue button-down uniform shirt, and some Payless loafers. His clothes were the exact same color as the morning. That made me angry. Changing my voice to sound older I said, “You want me to push you on the swing?” He was shocked, as if he didn’t know I was there. He responded in a small voice, “No thank you. I’m okay.” He had to be a third grader, how did he get to school before me, or any of the other fifth graders? The fact that this kid got here before me just pissed me off, so I started to push him on the swing. Faster, and faster, and higher, and higher, then spinning one way, then spinning the other; hoping he’d fall off. The boy started to yell for me to stop, so I pushed harder and harder. It started to drizzle a bit, then it rained a little. The playground was lit with an even, grey light, like the world matched my hoody, matched my mind, matched my heart. I stopped pushing when the boy started crying. I was just trying to scare him, but he wouldn’t let go.

I went to pick up my bag when I noticed that the boy was too small to get out of the moving swing, he looked like a baby bird trying to take first flight out of the nest, so scared. Then he jumped out of the swing at its highest point, it was a good jump too. He landed like a cat, perfectly on his feet. Then the speed of his jump forced his upper forward while his feet stayed planted in place, half a second later he was falling face first onto the stone stairs that led to the swings. There was a crunching sound when his face hit, like stepping into fresh powdered snow and compressing the first footprint. I froze. He jumped up like he was asleep and realized he was two hours late for class, took three steps and dropped down. I ran over to him and asked what his name was, he said something like, “France” or “French”, and I was gonna go get help. Then I noticed that all the students from school were there now, the playground fully lit in a bright grey light, the school bell ringing. Right then, I could hear my mom in my head saying, “Flaquito, go to school now!” So I started walking toward the sound of the bell. I looked back and saw a pool of blood surround his body like a black hole opening under him, devils and demons waiting to dress the boy in cold clothes. I never saw the boy again, but I remember watching his breath leaving his mouth and wondering if his ghost was following me to school.

Written By: Frantz Jerome
(All rights reserved to the author.)

Digital Tradition

For all the negative things said about the increasingly inorganic landscape of New York City, it begs to be said that there is much natural beauty here as well. Parks, miles-long streaks of green leaves and forest wildlife. Streams…Browning, babbling capillaries running perpetual laps from the Hudson to the gulf of the South Bronx. The sun, playing tricks along the tips of skyscrapers, and lie across the ground with imperfect perfection. My family…saw none of it. We were too busy playing video games. Eyes glued to computer monitors, television sets, flat panels, and flat screens. My family’s tradition was playing video games.
For all the skeptics out there thinking to themselves, “How can a hobby, barely forty years-old, be a family tradition?” The answer: Who the hell asked you? Video games became tradition when I realized that from the day I was born, video games were there. My mother, stepfather, older brother, and younger brothers are my immediate family. Our tradition is based in the ever-evolving technologies of the video game console.
At some point in 1967, Ralph Baer writes the first video game for television sets. My mother was seven years of age at the time. She was being raised on a farm in rural Mississippi. My mother’s strong sense of justice and inability to do anything but work would be key ingredients in the gaming gumbo of my family. Ralph Baer was an employee at Loral, a television electronics company. As fate would have it, my stepfather was an employee at Loral in the eighties, but I digress. In 1975, Atari releases the godfather of modern gaming: Pong. My stepfather gets a degree in information technology, sends his resume to Loral. The rest is my family history.
In 1985 Nintendo released it’s first North American console, the NES. I was two years of age, and totally unaware how this would affect my life. My younger brother, Ronald would be born four years later, on the cusp of the release of Sega’s Genesis console. It’s always been Sonic versus Mario in our household. This is the set-up. The beauty of this integration, this melding of man and technology, the summation of our social recombination comes on the heels of the most complicated political occurrence of the 21st century.
In 2001, Sony Entertainment released Metal Gear: Solid. A video game whose overarching theme is that of the gene, meme, scene and sense. I was sold on the graphics alone. The game’s themes were broken into three amazing sensory-blurring adventures. Metal Gear Solid dealt with genetics and the moral implications of genetic engineering, Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty deals with how identity can be affected by the philosophies of one's society (a 'meme') and the effects of censorship on society, Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater dealt with how the time and place one lives in (a 'scene') affects their identity and how politics change along with the times, and Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots dealt with the 'sense' that people die, things move on and times change and that life shouldn't be lived fighting. We played each of these games for days, as in the hours we’d played could be measured in twenty-four hour increments. The technology premiered in this fictional world blew my brother and I away. My step-father would sit and watch us play. One day, he leans over to us, smelling explicitly of Drakkar Noir, and say, “You know, this game is only ten years behind what we’re working on now at L------- M-----." Here comes the summation.
September 11th, 2001. Some crazy stuff went down. The political climate was torn asunder. My brother and I were dismissed from school early. As latchkey kids, we made our way home, sat in the living room and did what any kid home from school would do: played video games. My mother would come home shortly after, angered at having to leave work early. Her sunset pink nurse’s uniform was soaked under the arms, around the neck, and across her back. She’d run into the house like she was being chased by the Taliban high command. She slammed and locked the door, froze at the sight of us placated by the video game during this extreme tumult. Right when our eyes met our mother’s rigid frame, a lion sat on the front steps and roared. At least, that’s what it felt like, but for the vibrations that shattered every glass table we owned. In reality, planes were flying overhead. My mother screamed, hit the deck like a Marine ducking mortar fire. My brother and I: perfectly still. Utterly calm. Zen-like. My mother jumps towards us, hugging the breath out of my still-changing adolescent body, sobbing hysterically. My brother, eleven years of age at the time, turned his head what little he could in mom’s grasp and confidently said, “It’s ok mom, those are just F-22 Raptors making a net formation across the city. The shaking is from the after burners, they’re going mach 1, breaking the sound barrier. That’s why the tables broke, calm down. That means we’re safe.” I was in shock. My little brother, memorized and comprehended the entire day’s events, lost his innocence virtually, then actually. Somewhere between his newfound fear of girls and understanding of nuclear proliferation, I’d noticed that video games taught my brother more than school ever could. Since then, my mom has mastered every form of Tetris.

What Not: short story of a 'true' memory

I was rocking a white Kangol with a slight tilt, a white t-shirt one size too small, brown cargo pants, and a pair of white Nikes I saved my summer youth employment money to buy. It was July…or August, in the year of our lord 1999. Or I was wearing khaki cargo shorts, and black Nike uptowns, with a black tank top, or whatever she liked. I always did whatever she liked. Those were the terms of our relationship, terms that would eventually force me away. She liked when I wore dark pants and bright shirts, so I did just that. Alyx, my girlfriend, was never busy, but I could never get to her on that archaic Star Tac cell phone of hers. It would be five more years until I even had a beeper; her mom was well to do. Whether it was July or August escapes me, but it was hot! Newly tarred New York City streets were bleeding translucent waves of heat, but I was keeping my cool. She had this thing about ‘cool’ guys, and maybe I took it too literally, but I was determined to keep my disproportionately attractive girlfriend. I wasn’t pleased about having to make an appointment to see Alyx, (afraid she would start charging, she was so hot), but I was eager to see her. Or nervous, whichever.

In about ten hours from this memory, I’ll be in my room, taking off my clothes. With each article shed, removing a layer of her expectations thrust upon me by predetermined pubescent pressures. I would know who I was, and who she was forever after. Standing at the precipice of my becoming a man, I would look back on this day with regret. Ten years later (at twenty-seven) I would turn over to see my wife asleep, her fertile mind mothering some loving danger, and laugh at how hung up I was on Alyx.
Right now, I’m a seventeen-year-old black kid standing on a stoop in the East Village. Looking a gangly collaboration of brown and white, some rice and beans The Bronx spit out into Manhattan. The blanket of smarmy heat is so oppressive the ginkgo trees are sweating – but I looked like I just stepped out of the refrigerator. It helps to be the lone person of color amongst the homogenized hipster trash strolling carelessly along Avenue A and Ninth Street, my cocoa skin acting as cooling agent. So damned cool.

She's late for our appointment, five minutes of so, actually an hour, but I never mind when she’s late. I can remember her as being so attractive, like ‘too hot for a guy like me’ attractive. The perfect equation: equal parts track and field athlete, valedictorian, and my sexual equivalent to boot. She’d just moved to New York from its wicked step-sister New Jersey. We’d just reached the point in our courtship where we were meeting each others parents. You’d think that should’ve been before the sex, but clearly we thought otherwise. It’d been about a year since we met eyes and locked private parts in some Jersey playground at night, and this was our anniversary date…or it was a random Thursday with no particular meaning. Either way, I was getting to know her as a person, and I was falling inexorably in lo--. Hold that thought.

She finally comes downstairs. As she does a breeze slowly crawls up the block and grazes her frame in the vestibule, right when as she crosses it. Her long, boxed braids gently jumped from behind her ears and landed on the soft of her neck and shoulders. The hem of her tan, linen dress skipped up her knees and revealed the carved, mocha-hued musculature of her thigh. Wind, the gentle pervert. She looks at her watch, beauty and beast in synchronicity. Gracefully parting her lips to say inconsiderate things perfectly.

“Sorry about that.” She says, guiltily.
“About what?” I reply, knowingly.
She whispers in my ear, “You’re so sweet.”
Or was it, “You’re too sweet.” In a flat, cool, even tone to my face.

She made reservations at a cozy Latin bistro on Avenue B a few blocks away, that, or we just walked in a found a table. It was designed so that patrons could walk in, go through to a back yard, and eat outside. She ordered an appetizer, the most expensive entrée on the menu, and a modest desert. I had the chicken with mango salsa. Or just a water. Whichever. The summer sun was setting, the pink and zephyr sky painting her brown skin in ethereal pastels. She was glowing. All of which, coupled with my combustible hormones, fueled my most daring and foolhardy adventures in romance. I started to say,

“Alyx, I think I love y—“

Before I could finish, as if she’d had something just as amazing to say to me, comes:

“I’ve been thinking about the idea of free and universal love.” Dreamily delivered deathblow.
“Uh, what’s that?” I replied, genuinely baffled.
“You know, like, being with whoever you want sexually. But always coming back to us.”
“Hmm.” Was all I could muster.

I didn’t say another word to her. Like, ever. Until I bumped into her very pregnant belly at an airport in Arizona ten years later, en route to see my fiancé perform her one-woman show in LA. Alyx would go on to say that she remembered the amicable and lengthy break-up conversation, or was it the really awkward and short one. You know, the one that happened? Whichever.

Friday, July 30, 2010

Dream Warriors

Who else but Ram3 rocking a 3-piece/
Could spit it with the kick that'll wake you from 3 sleeps?/
Blood's thicker than water - I wade in it, knee deep/
Architect - change the landscape of these mean streets/

It's a paradox when my pen flows/
The ink hides the loops, now you caught in my Penrose/
The next Last Dragon, man - look how the pen glows/
The truth was on the page, from the moment my pen rose/
The ink hides the loops - a paradox when my pen flows/

Watch and learn, my crew - schooling the nation/
"A job this complex requires imagination"/
That's why I treat the mind like mi casa/
And run schemes like Mr. Eames from Gun Hill to Mombasa/

Super slick - I be dodging the snake's venom/
My verse is like a maze, I know that you're not getting/
But I keeps it really real - I know if the top's spinning/

Monday, July 19, 2010

Game Over (for Frankie)

When I move you move, is it Luda or inertia?/
Sick with the words, slick moves - Prince of Persia/
Word the - past meets the future like a Dinobot/
Ram3 hit the track, Atlas Shrugged - now he Bioshocked/

This is like Wayne's World, you are not worthy/
Eat rappers, take their skills like Mega Man and Kirby/
The best of both worlds - split personalities merging/
You sick? I'm Dr. Mario - they prepping me for surgery/

I rock the pen like Broken Sword wields a half knife/
Escaped from Black Mesa Projects, something like Half-Life/
I'm Gordon Freeman possessed by the Raging Demon/
Slice and dicing out with Raiden (mgs), shock like Raiden (mk) - leave 'em screaming/

I'm 1st player, you 2nd on the guest list/
Blah Blah, you move bricks - man, whatever I play Tetris/
Yea..and my specials never finish/
You on the ground, first round - Super Hyper Combo Finish/

--Digital Villainy

Monday, July 5, 2010

8-Bit Morning

It's an 8-bit day, I can be your Mega Man/
We could push through whatever hurts, measure it in Megahurtz/
She wanna Rock and Roll, Rush to the megabytes/
Looking like a fly Ninja Gaiden in some leather tights/
Stalked her like a Sphinx in the grass/
Said, "I can free you from your dungeon, be your Link to the Past"/
Or I can walk past, that could be the end of it/
She shot me through the heart, on some Duck Hunt Nintendo shit/
Caught me using cheat codes, now she Bruce Lee with kendo sticks/
Tried to build with her, like a Tetris-trained architect/
But she slept on me like a Tempur-pedic narcolept/
Thought I worked quick like, "Get ready, on your mark, get set"/ Go
Figure, she had me looking Up, Down, Left, Right - point A to B - right back to Start, Select/
She had me feeling like Low G-Man, floating/
But now it's Game Over, no continues, last token/

Monday, May 10, 2010

i celebrities final

In this installment, we explore the global phenomenon of modern police brutality, and note its origins in the media.










We as a 'wired' society know that this authoritarian brutality exists on almost every continent of our precious planet. What we don't know as a society are the factors that contribute to these events. One such issue is media representation and underrepresentation. Typically, Americans receive their national and international information via televised news. So do many other 'developed' nations. What stories are being told? From whose perspective? At what cost?

One of the most crucial, televised conflicts in modern human history is that between Israel and Palestine. Israel being a Jewish state, and Palestine an Arab state. Here are the media's negative views of both nations (Arab and Israeli respectively):







Now, the most negative Israeli media I could find was a collection of UN documents. Pretty clandestine material, not publicized to any great degree. On the other hand, we have decades worth of negative Arab imagery, at present actively vilified. Which lends itself to behavior like this as U.S. soldiers 'police' Arab nations:





The same dynamic plays out for anyone vilified well enough:














The news outlets have access to information not privy to the public, but outlets answer to the federal government. Where does the power lie to change these views? What keeps change from surfacing?

"Each news outlet, whether its FOX News or MSNBC has resorted to preaching to its own choir as opposed to objectively presenting the news. Meanwhile, ethnic media sites have also penetrated the marketplace, offering yet another alternative to the mainstream news. While this has resulted in a more diverse media landscape, especially for minority communities who have for years felt underrepresented and largely ignored by the mainstream media, it comes at a cost.

That cost: Collectively we are not coming to the table with an established set of facts. Based upon the outlets we frequent, we are getting divergent information, and there is a growing uncertainty on whether there is an objective truth anymore. The other cost: We are quickly devolving into various tribes as opposed to one electorate.

You could argue those tribes have always existed. And you would be right. But my point is that the current state of American journalism is furthering that gap as oppose to shrinking it."

"There's no doubt that polarization matters,” said David Wilson, a political psychologist. “The problem with the news media is it all depends on your perspective.”-- Devona Walker @theloop21.com


Which brings this expose to a close on one truth: Citizens are being led to separate conclusions by the media. Which brings us to one question, the same question: why? The answer: to force consent.

In none of the police brutality videos does anyone say "no" to them, even though they know what is happening is illegal. Somehow, the people find a way to submit. How can all these different people around the world be influenced to consent to being beaten? How can all of these different people around the world don a uniform be influenced to beat, maim, torture, and kill? Programming:




Remain Villains--

Sunday, May 2, 2010

Reflect on my Eternal

These feelings, emotions - hard to describe it/
And me, I'm a scribe and/
This thing is primal, tribal, insightful/
Cuz you as cute as Fieval, delightful, likeable/
A-Alike for life, it's fun to be just like you/
I love your dark skin and hair - and how your smile lights you/
From every different angle/
Our souls are tangled, never to be pulled apart, estranged, mangled/
Your voice in my ear is like the clanging of bangles/
To the touch: soft-hot, like hell birthed an angel/
But heaven works within you, how could I contain you?/
The distance between us - gets pretty painful/
But the sun shines behind you like a pretty rainfall/
There ain't enough words to say all/
Pictures to display all/
Poems to explain all/
Near you, I stay awed/
Audiences say, "Awww..."
My love eternal, who I would slay for/
You're a flower...a river...a rainbow/

Monday, April 19, 2010

Here Comes Everybody (4th book)

I do not like this book at this preliminary juncture. Perhaps I am being too stand-offish. I should say first that I commend Clay Shirky for documenting the effect current technology has on the generation gap and the new society birthed from said effect. However, there is so much societal history that is not accounted for in Shirky's book. The class stratification in the Americas and the consequent differences in access to information, these are the important caveats that work against the urgency of Shirky's argument that the changes in society stem from the changes in communication. Not including history in "changes in society" defeats itself as history tends to repeat itself, regardless of technological advances. Hopefully reading on will change my feelings about the book. We will see.

-- Literary Villainy..

Sunday, April 18, 2010

Everyday Hero..

More than anything, a hero needs to overcome some impossible odds to meet their greatness. The everyday hero I chose can be visited on about any day at 512 w. 143rd st. in Harlem. He is the co-founder of The Brotherhood component of The Brotherhood-SisterSol nonprofit organization. His name is Khary, my brothers and I call him 'K'.

Khary Lazarre White is a Harlem entrepreneur and philanthropist. However, his biggest and arguably most important title is as CEO of Brotherhood-SisterSol, an organization he started 15 years ago while still at Brown University.

The non-profit program, which provides a holistic wrap-around service (social, educational, employment etc) for at-risk youth in Harlem, has an impressive success rate - 95 percent of its students are college graduates or working full time. To date, nearly 500 students have gone through the program. It's this statistic, helping to empower an astonishing number of young men and women of color to overcome impossible odds, that makes Khary a hero. Elevated to everyday status by continuing his work in the neighborhood he lives in, a buoyant solution moving with purpose in an ocean of problems.

-- Of course a hero is the precursor to my villainy..

Wednesday, March 31, 2010

One Pen To Rule Them All

Cut you with what I got, off the top like a barber/
Black History like Malcolm, you George Washington Carver/
Cause for alarm like I traded arms with DARPA/
Multiple arms: Doc Ock v. Peter Parker/
You knew from the start that you ain't want no parts of/
These mystical arts, lyrical darts to the heart son/
The origin of tough, like Chuck Norris' father/
Big bang, small package; snub-nosed revolver/
Orangutang thunderstorm, Gorilla Monsoon/
Wrote this with a pen I found up in Mount Doom/
Hot as friction with the writtens - 'you'll find that it's quite cool'/
I'm dismissing your admissions to lyrically fly schools/
While my curriculum is killing 'em, homicide haikus/
Your pedagogy is sloppy, you best to copy my cues/
Ram3 - hit by a bus, he might bruise/
A gangstas gangsta - like the girl in a gang that fights dudes/

Friday, March 26, 2010

Avatar and Humanity

One can view the film Avatar by James Cameron as commentary on environmental issues. Such a view only scratches the surface. The environmental issues in real-life are staggering in not only their stupidity, but also in their evolution. The environmental issue is based upon the economic issue which is based upon the fundamentally flawed source of all these symptomatic concerns: the ideal of human progression. It's the empirical history of human society that permeates Avatar, the kind of society that allows Christopher Columbus to 'discover' and destroy the Taino and Arawak nations and be celebrated. The society we live in now is built upon the ideologies of men and women bent on subjugating 'the other'. This is the core of the film for me. In regards to its effect on environmentalism, minimal, since Pandora is nowhere near real. However, it may shine some light on some of the mining situations around the world, but even those have class and race issue at their core.

-- Villainy..

Thursday, March 25, 2010

In.Fluence vrs. 3

Flow never the same twice - I alternate live/
Schitzophrenic spitter - I alternate lives/
American Terrorist, when I terrorize/
Sounds like Uptown Saturday Night 1-9-7-9/
That's me, globe traveler grew up latchkey/
Real recognized real, and you looking mechanized/
Like Cycloptic fiber optics in Megatron's eyes/
Gangster Nerd, I cast the die with equivalent sides/
Which means I always win, which means I never die/
Ferris Bueller of rap - I don't slack, I scheme through it/
If getting free was a movie - this was the theme music/
Soundtrack to 'Why not sell Ki's"/
How not to be a Square Enix and roll with LC's/
Watching my Little Brother spit and record an LP/
What's real? What's The Matrix - you tell me/
I just write Psyence Fiction, U-N-K-L-E/

Life on Screen 100-end


This half of the reading was more challenging as Turkle begins to assess the psycho-social aspects of the generational effects of technology on youth (a mouthful).

There are moments in the book where Turkle has interviewed youth around their interactions with technology. It's the interviews that cue us, as the reader, in to what happens next in the blurring between the actual and the virtual: an organic, inborn understanding of the virtual. I think Turkle coined it by noting:

"The idea of talking to technology begins to seem more natural when the computer presents itself less like a traditional machine and more like a demi-person...The reconfiguration of machines as psychological objects and people as living machines..."

It's this deeply psychological inquiry, born in the minds of younger and younger generations, that move our youth toward less of a blurring and more of an symbiotic blending of the actual and the virtual.

Life on Screen 1-100


Sherry Turkle is in many ways writing an expose on the virtual self, from self analysis. I am very in touch with the issue of being seduced by the virtual world. I have a series of user names, and I am a retired hacker (means I got caught). In regards to the writing, Turkle touches upon the crux of the second self, namely, lure.

As an avid video game player, I can speak first hand to using space exploration in Starfox (for super nintendo) as a means of escaping the project buildings I lived in at the time. That was the first time, then it was focusing my frustrations in school on Soul Edge. I hadn't realized how big an issue the second self was for myself until I noticed my little brother had faithfully inherited the lure, his frustrations voiced through the wanton violence of Grand Theft Auto, his inadequacies in school overcompensated for by his desire to enforce nuclear proliferation and anti-terrorism in Metal Gear Solid.

This is the seduction awaiting each more 'wired' generation, Turkle notes how she is compelled to write using a computer, as if the archaic pen(cil) and paper no longer existed, like they never existed. It's Turkle's ties to the analog past that allow her to express her opinions of how the digital world is changing our society, copy and pasting the 'future' onto the past, and becoming the 'always'. What I take from the early half of this reading is that as time progresses, the fact that we weren't always digital in nature will become forgotten, then become myth. Therein lies the true villainy...

Tuesday, March 23, 2010

My avatar for the week




My avatar is Faith from the video game Mirror's Edge. She is a courier in her virtual world, a freerunner in our world. Her most deadly weapon is her vision, which then fuels her creativity, and ability to create paths while she traverses obstacles. I'd like to think that my most deadly weapon is also my vision, which fuels my desire for change.


Faith in action:

Counting Stars

On knees bent, I'm praying these kids don't walk the road we went/
Not because it was tough, that's the wrong reason/
But the path of the freedom fighter's called treason/
I'm fighting for change so that my son sees it/
And my daughter to understand that if she quits/
The revolution would die in that sequence/
In the meantime I produce like Seacrest/
Writing these poems to get a buzz like bees' nests/
With the people on my mind like Jesus/
Or Cassius Clay in the Congo; free us/
From preconceived notions and hatred/
Lenses, to help see through the fakeness/
Like Morpheus, been up and out of this matrix/
Came back - just to see who I could take with/
Counting stars and making new constellations/
Since zeroes and ones are still new calculations/

Monday, March 15, 2010

iCelebrities Midterm




On any given day, at any given time, what you just saw is likely to happen to any young person of color in New York City. Let's illustrate:



Statistics and video are a form of passive participation. Not to say these don't give a sense of how some folks feel, but there are ways to measure feelings. Rap/MC-ing is one of those things, an art form born of marginalization, criminalization, and strife.



Look What It's Done
Now what am I supposed to do?/
When just seeing cops makes me emotional?/
I'm talking about the anger building/
When the cops post up outside your building/
Like they're waiting for action, something appealing/
One in the chamber, and no feelings/
No connections to the blocks they beat/
Don't ask why we don't respect cops we see/
Never mind the deaths, cover-ups, and dealings
Focus on the entrepreneurs and the beatings/
Cuz we can't chill up in a nice sedan/
When the police just locked up the Icee man/
It's, almost all good in the hood/
Til the cops get shook, and try to get you for good/
Slam you up against the car and push your face up on the hood/
Try to run away - they put two through your hood/
Then, two through your wrists, two through your kicks/
And put the passion of our youth on a crucifix/
Now, how am I supposed to be?
When the victims all look like you and me?/
What happened to serve and protect?/
Somebody's gotta pay, it's not over yet/

Art like this is inspired by acts like these:



and these:



this was last November, involving some of our schoolmates:



in Michigan:



in Seattle:



in the South: from 10sec. in jump to 3:40



more from the South:



in the UK:



Los Angeles:



this is alarmingly normal:

A Record Number of Stops

An August 14, 2009 press release from the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) is titled “Record Number of Innocent New Yorkers Stopped, Interrogated by NYPD During First Half of Year.” Based on figures from the NYPD, the NYCLU reports that in the first six months of 2009 alone, cops in New York City stopped more than 273,000 people who—according to the police themselves—were not violating any laws. This represents the highest number of innocent people stopped and questioned by the NYPD in six months since the department began keeping stop-and-frisk data.

From January to June of this year, the NYPD as a whole (including the various precincts as well as bureaus such as housing, transit, and narcotics) stopped and frisked 311,646 people, the overwhelming majority of them Black and Latino. Of that total, more than 9 in 10—or 273,556 people—were not arrested or given a summons. In other words, by the NYPD’s own admission, in just the first six months of this year they had stopped and searched close to 275,000 people who were not even alleged to have committed any crime. It should be pointed out that the actual number of innocent New Yorkers subjected to these stop and frisks is no doubt even higher, since the figure does not account for people who were wrongfully accused of a crime by the police.

The stop-and-frisk figures are undeniable evidence of racial profiling by the NYPD. Of the total of 311,646 people stopped between January through June 2009, 163,118 (52.3 percent) are Black and 81,210 (32.1 percent) are Latino, while only 29,782 (9 percent) are white. Compare this with the overall New York City population figures according to nationality: 24 percent Black, 28 percent Latino, and 35 percent white (the rest are Native American, Asian American, and others).

Breaking down the data a bit further, of the 163,118 Black New Yorkers who were stopped and frisked, 148,731 (91.2 percent) were neither arrested nor given a summons. Similarly, of the 81,210 Latinos stopped, 68,689 (84.6 percent) were neither arrested nor given a summons.

The figures for the first half of 2009 come on top of the statistics for last year, when the NYPD stopped and frisked a record total of 531,159 times—again, overwhelmingly targeting Black and Latino people.

Michael Moore takes a stab at it:



back to NYC:





While this may seem irregular or out of place to some of you reading this, it is fairly commonplace in urban areas, or any place with a concentration of people of color and a disproportionately white police force. I can speak firsthand to this, and to the extreme urgency this issue demands, but media speaks so much louder.

~Let the villainy ensue..

Tuesday, March 9, 2010

A little on Kids With Cameras site

Kids with Cameras is what my friends call 'doing the work'. I am astounded by how docile wealthy nations are, and by how brave some members of said nations can be. What KWC is developing isn't small, westernized regions. They are creating the source for progression in regressive societal regions. There is no right or wrong in the places KWC does work, only what is needed to improve the quality of life the world over, this is also the work of every corporeal woman, whether she knows it or not.

The sustainable housing concept they are working on in Calcutta is what is need in many nations, I would hope the UN gets a good look at this work and recognize how easily this can be done to support Haiti and Chile after their quakes, Thailand and China after their tsunami and quake respectively, the US homeless and unemployed population and Native Americans on reservations, or a slew of other places/causes that can utilize this model to improve the quality of life of billions. This site is barebones on the outside, but all heart on the in.

Am I a viral thinker? (week six response)

I have truly gone to extraordinary lengths in life to rarely follow the ideas of others. I can actually say that I don't participate in viral thoughts, at least on a conscious level. However, I have been 'ground zero' for a few things, and started a few viral trends; nothing too contagious, but I've given folks something else to be distracted by while working on the internet. I've made it a habit to 'tag' people in my notes (most of which are poetry) in Facebook. Also I subscribe to HAWP (Hey Ash, Whatcha' Playing?) which is a video game-themed web comedy series by a brother and sister, and I have brought them hundreds of followers by suggesting them to friends and their friends (http://www.heyash.com/). I'd never given it a second though as to whether it was a success, but I noticed that after a year, HAWP was asked to do a live taping at E3 (the biggest video-game convention to date), and was able to press a DVD of their work for distribution. Maybe I'd measure the 'success' by noting the success of others building their work from the ground up.

Friday, February 19, 2010

About the wisdom of crowds...

Oddly enough, I have been so predisposed to the concept of individualism in a sea of conformity as positive, it had never occurred to me that there could be a beneficial aspect of appealing to groups on any scale. The analogy of the 'waggle dance' and ox-weighing experiment actually changed my mind in regards to relying on group dynamic for analysis; then I remembered how some families have those black boxes that monitor what they watch on television 24/7 and are sent readouts of what these families purchase as a result of the commercials they see on television. I'd like to think that there's some benevolent and people-powered positivity in the wisdom of crowds, but in our hyper-mass marketed country, I can't help but feel that an individual with well-rounded skill sets stands a better chance of figuring something out. after further review I may feel different.

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

In.Fluence vrs.2

I got that - Knowledge of Self Scientific/
The worth of my wealth? Prolific/
Sitting of the shelf? Forget it/
See...we know what Nas Is Like, I know what I was like/
Impatient, rebellious - counting down the hours like/
One Day It'll All Make Sense; something my elders and I have in Common/
This a tape deck grenade, you can call it a 'SoundBombing'/
My bad, too soon? They like, "You a jerk!"/
I'm like, "Nah, I'm an Architect - I'm a Kool Herc"/
While these mooks do dirt, I build new work/
Inside a Razorblade Suitcase with brand new locks/
Sitting in D-Block, waiting for some brand new Lox/
Arrested in Fort Minor - for trying to steal Instrumentals from a Box/
Whole thing was a Fiasco/
Should've known the block was bottled heat like Tobasco/
But that's how that go/

Tuesday, February 9, 2010

In.Fluence vrs.1

Way before me, way before pistols, way before Cristal, way before crystal/
There was just Kris...Parker/
Not Peter, a Criminal Minded leader/
Whose lyrical rhyming meter was fluid in measured liters/
Absorbed by these Roots, at the Tipping Point/
Before Things Fall Apart, with the Blackest of Thoughts, I spit the joint/
Make 'em dance, a pimp with the providence, champion of chance/
Raw with the Dice - Dave Chappelle, Leonard Washington/
They say he M.Illitant, but he just dilligent/
The say sky's the limit, so I'm hanging with the ceiling fan/
Biohazardous, stay spitting sicker than/
Your lyric slinging coughing guy/
Marching with the Pharoahe - spit the glyphs off sarcophagi/
Simon Says see The Light - The Truth, y'all be walking by/
I been spitting that Panthro - waving red and blue nunchucks/
Way ahead of you numb nuts, educating the young ones/
Rebounding redundants/

Monday, February 8, 2010

Net Neutraility

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWt0XUocViE

The internet under fire..

Wednesday, February 3, 2010

Week In Review

They think we're savages, like, "Do they even bleed?"/
When's the last time you'd though you'd seen/
People treated like they were not allowed to dream?/
Was it the scene, where Martin Luther King got shot/
Was it not that far back, but somewhere that you've been?/
Like kids acting grown at the age of nineteen/
With their eyes wide shut and their minds wiped clean/

Because, they think we're blind, like, "Do they even see?"/
Past the here and now, how short-sighted can we be?/
We spit, sunflower seeds in the street/
Many minds can't fly cuz they high on trees/
I try to make smart moves like wise guys on skis/
A chess prodigy with his eyes on a queen/
Or Prince Akeem with his eye on Queens/

Knowledge must be power..
'Cuz they think we dumb, "Do they even perceive?"/
The alliance between our oppression and compliance/
The way we mix the sex with the violence/
Or maybe that too is just a dream/
Where in the end we don't have to justify what it means/
Just put the parts together like A-D-D/
Watch the minutes roll over like A-T-T/
Cuz 'get rich or die trying' you will not see me/
Maybe 'get free first' like Ayiti/

Monday, February 1, 2010

The Tipping Point (also an amazing album by The Roots!)

I am amazed to read this 'biography of an idea', simply because about a year ago I was mouthing off to everyone that I had this new epiphany around understanding trends (only to find that this book was written; and reaffirm that there is nothing 'new'). No matter how far I read, I was forced to return to the introduction over and over for the lens with which to ascertain all the ideas Gladwell brings into the light throughout the book. His 'yawning as a trend' example was a brilliant understanding of the way ideas move as contagions, and should be studied in the same manner as epidemics. Perhaps, even with the same seriousness if we're to prevent more violent and earth-shattering ideas from becoming commonplace.

Myself, I'd like to say I try really hard as a reader to never judge the author as someone writing to convert minds to their way of thinking, but as someone sharing their deepest secret: how they see the world. If not for that distinct difference in critique, I would easily surmise that Gladwell is an egocentric know-it-all with plans for world domination. However, upon reading the introduction a second time(which I'll outright suggest we all do for this book), I almost know that Gladwell's work is already on the desk of some out of control corporate despot CEO as their marketing version of 'the anarchist's cookbook'. Gladwell's examples of the idea spreading as a virus might be the most sound since 1+1=2. I wonder if he means to say, "People are not stupid, just malleable as all get out. Look what I've made you into."

This book is indeed at the core of True Villainy, and one person's villain is always someone else's hero.

Tuesday, January 5, 2010

Fall '09 Writing final "My City Unseen" (13 pages, A-)

For those lost when we were found-

“Tyger! Tyger! burning bright,
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?”
– William Blake

My city is every contradiction. A beautiful monster that sits in a small nook called the biggest city in the world. The scene is set, and these streets have limbs. Dressed in designer drugs, drenched in human conflict. Accessorized with burnt building cufflinks and broken innocence bracelets. Welcome to the graceful struggle between the corner, perpendicular, and parallel. Filled to the brim with possibility, with potent people laced with latent potential. Shiny - happy folks rubbed raw often, rolling with the punches and still punching out on time to be back to work late the next day. Welcome to my city, get uncomfortable with the contradiction.
From the outside, my city is a fishbowl with tinted windows. You should be able to see in, but until you get wet, you have no idea what you’re getting into. As an outsider, Federico Garcia Lorca saw my city with his eyes. They met halfway down a dark alley, and Lorca never turned away from what must’ve been frightening in the midst of so much dark, the sun.

“Dawn arrives and no one receives it in his mouth
because morning and hope are impossible there:…”

Locked within the recesses of Lorca’s tortured mind, somewhere between his Granada and my city, is the sense that life in New York is trying, from sun up to sun down. In his poem “Dawn”, Lorca moves about the city as a lyrical observer, wringing sensational truthfulness from the souls of passers-by. His mind’s eye scanning the visible city spectrum to find that stigmatic moment from which his art will pull inspiration, duende.

“Those that go out early know in their bones…they know they will be mired in numbers and laws…”

Even as an outsider, Lorca shows tremendous intuitive knowing, placing his ear to the skyscraper and listening to the stories of it’s builders. It was clear to my reading of his work that Lorca spent a great deal of time observing the poor of New York City.

“the three of them buried:
Lorenzo in one of Flora’s breasts;
Emilio in the dead gin forgotten in the glass;
Enrique, in the ant, sea, and empty eyes of birds.”

My city is famous for its’ perpetual motion and subsequent insomnia. Like a Ritalin deprived pre-teen in front of a two thousand-channel television, my city sits and feeds off each channel, then moves on to the next. Each channel is a poor family. In “Dawn”, the daily hopelessness of downtrodden folks is expressed and recognized; reading it gave me the sense I was looking in a dull mirror at a reflection I recalled but couldn’t touch. When Lorca says, “…and no one receives it in his mouth…” he alludes to the inability of people without hope to wake up into the new day, or arrive at some great change. My city has long been the paradigm for strife, perceived as impenetrable by nouveau pioneers like Lorca and other lovers of these streets.
It’s a matter or importance that the world knows my city is comes from a famous family. NYC’s Kennedy-esque geographic lineage reaches out to all of the non-existent corners of the globe; Egypt, Rome, Constantinople, Paris, and London. While Lorca watched New York’s gears of industry turn as an outsider, William Blake laid the groundwork for noting the nature of a city as contradictory. Horror and joy are often seen walking hand in hand in Blake’s invisible interpretation of London. Coupled with his interest in gothic architecture and his experience unraveling and interpreting the Bible, it’s of no surprise that he tackles the most spiritual of connections in his London, the most unholy of places for its time. Connected by time, flesh, blood, and effort are sons to their fathers. Often in his work, Blake evokes images of the father and the Father, usually in a recipe for some beautiful horror.

“Speak, father, speak to your little boy,
Or else I shall be lost…
The night was dark, no father was there;
The mire was deep, & the child did weep,
And away the vapour flew.”

Blake tells the story of a boy let down, or even let go, by his father. This excerpt from the poem, “The Little Boy Lost” paints a haunting, actually ghostly image of a boy losing his father to death. While the circumstances that have led to the death remain unknown to the reader and unwritten by the author, it is known by the closing line that like a spirit on the wind the father is gone from the boy. There’s this looming ambivalence at the beauty of the sons’ innocence, speaking to his father in the ether; then like a knife dropped from on high, the sudden plunge and pang of hurt in realizing that innocent moment is born of the horror of pleading with the apparition of a loved one.
Many of the citizens in my city know the bitter-tasting pain of growing up without their fathers. The picture of incompletion it’s been my displeasure to paint to shocking detail. Boys in my city are told not to cry, so with eyes that behave more like gelatinous orbs with mouths we yell our anger and frustrations in a show bravado that is perceived as rebellion. Although my father is not dead, he has always been a spirit on the wind to me. I know in my heart of hearts why this ‘Little Boy Lost’ is indeed lost, and have always looked to ‘find’ other boys lost, and feed them hope from small spoons shaped in the fashion of their future fatherhood. My city breeds broken sons.
The story of manhood does only so much without an understanding of its counterpart, the feminine mystique. While many on the poems on display will be interpreted through the contradiction of my city’s nature, no city has been as schizophrenic as Baudelaire’s Paris. “Everywhere in his … poems is a backdrop of Parisian vice…the most wretched strata of this unchaste city…at the same time, he has stopped and chatted at every street-corner in town …” Evidence of this two-sided social experiment/analysis in poetry bleeds through in the poems, “The Thoroughbred” and “The Eyes of the Poor”. The written-out concept of life flourishing in the shadow of the awful, questioning: what really happens within a city during modernization and assumed ‘progress’?

“She is quite ugly. Nevertheless she’s delicious!
The claws of Time and Love have marked her…
She is truly ugly…but she is also drink, restorative, witchcraft!”

Like star-crossed lovers are the two faces of Baudelaire’s Paris, meeting moments before cessation. Parisians, by extension exhibit the same quality. This woman, revealed by Baudelaire to be a dichotomous deviation defying the laws of human/equine distinction, is wrapped in the “…indestructible elegance of her frame.” In much of the poem, the mortal beauty of the woman is met by the immortality of nature and consequent elements. Here Baudelaire personifies his city’s duality. In this woman’s eyes lie the mystique of the arcades, the bangles about her wrists clanging with the boisterousness of Parisian night life; all of which survives in her actions and persists in spite of her never-dying opposition, ‘Time’ and ‘Love’. Baudelaire treats us to a trip through time with his Paris, using the ‘woman’ persona as a metaphor for his city, and the city’s landmarks to mark its passage through time. Roads? Where Baudelaire’s Paris was going, he didn’t need roads.
I love where I’m from, I hate where I’m from, that’s exactly why I can’t escape where I’m from. My city has too many secrets to be a man, even in poetic device. My city is a throbbing bright light that has seen the peak of her half-life, and is on the wane, peeking in on her own shelf life. Barreling through time lit like a Roman candle, my city somehow takes just enough Botox to stay beautiful enough for tourists to never notice the ugly lingering all about them like ghosts of past lovers. Baudelaire’s unused title for the collection that would become Paris Spleen was Lycanthropic Poems, and our cities are separated by a century but unified in the idea of being beastly cities. Depending on moon phases, sensation chasers are pursued by gorgeous, gargantuan werewolves called New Yorkers. Fashion on the forefront with fangs on the pulse, just below the skin, pumping venomous, viscous sin. You can’t look away from her voluminous skyscrapers. My city loves you, my city loves to eat you.

“I was moved by this family of eyes, but I also felt a little ashamed of our glasses and our carafes, which were larger than our thirst. I turned my gaze toward your's… and then you said to me: "I can't stand those people over there, with their eyes wide open like carriage gates! Can't you tell the head-waiter to send them away?"

Baudelaire’s city eats people too. Le Spleen de Paris alludes not to an organ within the human body, but lends itself to a secondary definition of the word in French, ‘bad temper’. The poor of Paris knew how bad the temper was, as the decadent ways of the wealthy were often on display at every turn. “The Eyes of the Poor” turn in reality the eyes of the rich toward a critical look at their own cruel practices and feigned innocence/ignorance. The story Baudelaire illustrates sheds light on the occurrence of new cafes being built in close proximity to the poor, who can’t afford to visit these eateries, let alone eat or drink there. The gaslight’s lamps, and unfinished walls are intricately detailed. As are the stories written on the colored irises of the poor family walking by. The moral ends up revolving more around how two people in love can maintain a working relationship even though they think differently about they communicate on issues (and how differently they feel about those issues). The contradiction monster rears its head in the window again. Not only is this a love poem and not a social justice piece, but also the manner in which this is revealed takes the reader through the entire empathic journey of a socialite with a conscience, and his ignorant lover.
My city and I have engaged in phantom fisticuffs over class division often, even in classrooms! ‘Get off my block! And take Starbucks with you. Take your cafes, bistros, and boutiques out of my shopping centers - your demographic doesn’t deserve to live here... Get off my block! Jogging at midnight, with your toy dog, and exposed ipod, in a
neighborhood you wouldn’t be caught dead in two years ago. Take your overpriced, low-income displacing condos with you…No, leave the condos - but you...get OFF my block!’ For all her childish wonderment, blinding and euphoric, my city still upholds fatal illusions about how the poor can live so far from the wealthy, but never far enough to not be gentrified. My city weeps for her poor.
For all the dark and secretive traits that envelop my city, there are lights! Bulbs that dance on the edges of marquees, rays that stand in place of towers, there are lights!
James Weldon Johnson asks in his poem, “My City” what it is he will miss about his city when he passes away.

“What to me then will be the keenest loss,
When this bright world blurs on my fading sight?”

Adding to the sensationalism of city life, Johnson lists a group of natural phenomena in which he could miss (in the event of his demise) but immediately dismisses, in light of the titillating temper of the town named twice. Johnson displays pride in the human accomplishment inherent in New York City. As an African-American poet, prominent in the Harlem Renaissance, this pride comes through in Johnson’s work despite discrimination and other institutionalized, racist actions against him, in his city. It’s this pride in ones’ city that binds New York to its’ transcontinental lineage as a renaissance city. Johnson goes the length in reveling in the marriage of the organic and inorganic city elements, the green and grey cacophony. There is celebration evident in Johnson’s poem, the type that forces a smile on your face against seemingly insurmountable odds. My favorite kind of smile.

“Will it be that no more I shall see the trees…
Or hear the singing birds…
No, I am sure it will be none of these.
But, ah! Manhattan's sights and sounds, her smells…”

Being a young man of color myself, I recognize the love/hate relationship with this city/country. It wanders in and out of the Harlem Renaissance verses, stanzas, and prose like a jaded vagabond. My city has had me dodging bullets, and watching my back. While being underrepresented, and overexposed. Shown me indignation, disrespect...they have been building a new stadium, so they have been raising my rent. City newspapers speak about congressional decisions to deepen my debt. My city squeezes the very last drop of hope from its’ folk like tequila with lime; but as long as Black mothers baptize their babies’ faces with Vaseline on cold days, they must always shine. The lights are always on (us) in my city. Scrutiny is the stage on which we live, ergo, we perform is our livelihood, hence music played loud in lively ‘hoods. My city makes me smile, makes you smile too.
Many city-dwellers identify with their city. Many transplants from smaller towns use their city to cover their own identity. Lastly, there are those who use their city as an escape. The latter is the case with Marina Tsvetaeva. Born in Moscow, the largest city in Russia. Unbeknownst to many, Tsvetaeva spent a great deal of her youth living with a stepfamily, with her father, and two half-siblings (from another mother (who were favored over her by her own mother!), and her mother. Much of Marina’s (we’re on first name basis, her and I) poetry dealt with her conflicts with her own identity. Marina would write of her loves, sexual liberation, and the private emotion on paper. These issues in her time led to adventure and then exile from her Moscow. In the time before famine struck Moscow, Marina would write of her identity with the fluidity social scientists would call advanced.

“My city’s vastness is submerged in night.
Away from sleeping buildings, I take flight.
The people that I see think: daughter, wife,-
But I remembered one thing only: night.”

Marina Tsvetaeva married her identity to her city’s and birthed this poem. By submerging her city’s vastness in night, she leaves behind all convention and moves into the ether with her and her city’s identity. Existing in the same luminal sense as Wenders’ angels, she observes other Muscovites and their perceptions of her. Marina then submerges herself into night, joining her Moscow, away from the perceptions of others, and remembering nothing but being in the night with it.
My city and I are loving, fighting...It's all we’ve ever done. Against odds etched in slabs, but here we stand. Where my ancestors worked themselves to death, and received no land. Bought with by baubles from natives who perceived no scam. Here, we stand; thriving in a desert where opportunities are the sands, and originality the oasis. In fear of brass, since bullets seek to keep this thesis in stasis, but here we stand. Because my uncles were killed at sit - ins, and we want to see my enemies...in the eye. We stand here, 'cuz face down's how my kin used to die. More than our identities are identical between my city and I, our destinies are intertwined. My city knows me like a brother. But standing here is not enough, we must move forward. Our survival was written in stone, but our success has no blueprint, we must move forward. Subsidized loans provide shelter, but not a people's movement, we must move forward. Between sand dunes' harsh crests, civilizations are cradled - we must move forward. Pieces of lead took my leaders, we will lead in their stead - my passions enabled, we must move forward. Forward, past blaming others for our misfortune. We must move forward - no longer gazing into the evening, but pressing toward the morning...But here...we stand. My city is one with me.
Chicago, Los Angeles, Detroit, San Diego, Denver, Newark, New York City, Boston, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Seattle, Washington, D.C., and Baltimore share many things, but nothing more relevant to ‘a city on the make’ then that they are ‘Panther cities’. These are cities that housed the Black Panther Party in the 1960’s and 70’s. Nelson Algren resided in Chicago, and penned a book-long poem about his city, in all its’ gritty glory. In regards to race and its noted effect on his Chicago, Algren keeps it concise.

“The city divided by the river is further divided by racial and linguistic differences…For the beat of the city’s enormous heart…is unheard out in this spiritual Sahara.”

Algren knows the back alleys and storefronts like a book he read as a child and reread as a college student. He seemed to love whatever city he lived in, and wrote on it, like doting on a lover’s flaws. He’d gone to Latin America, New Jersey, written on the connection between Ashland Avenue and Warsaw, Poland; he was a literary journalist of the highest degree. This last characteristic seemed to garner the attention of the FBI, and cause him to be sought out to write the article on the trial of Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, which would become the film “Hurricane”, starring Denzel Washington (which dealt mostly with racism and discrimination in the court system over decades).
In my city we stand in the foreground of the American stage play, when we
were casted as the extra’s understudy. Again in the foreground,
the bastard child of four fathers, now scorned by our forefathers for
disrespecting our single mothers in public. The revolution done
changed, Black man changed shades, Black girl turned blonde, I thought
I heard echoes of victory - turned around and the sorrow in this
song... Can you hear it?

Listen, my people speak, spill blood in these streets/
It takes a toll on my soul, everyday I feel like leaving/
I hear my people crying, and them tears keep streaming/
Every time I try I try to leave...they start to scream like/

From forefathers, to martyrs, folk don't seem to regard us/
But they seen waters walked on, seen brothers auctioned/
Topics that talk on, people see and walk on/
Get tripped up, on what I spit up - now they sidewalks is chalked on/
I'm locked on - focused on the heat that makes the beat dope/
I blow the winds of change just to ventilate the weed smoke/
You speak frail, what I spit you can feel, son I speak Braille/
I spit fire, that's why you kill dragons when they inhale/

Two niggas fought under orange lamps,
Such a sorry sight forced me to cast away hope.
Being one observer, long I watch and thought,
"How redundant the term 'project growth”.
You see I, I speak the word less spoken by,
And all my people show me is indifference...
Can you hear it?

Listen, my people speak, spilling blood in these streets/
It takes a toll on my soul, everyday I feel like leaving/
I hear my people crying, and them tears keep streaming/
Every time I try I try to leave...they start to scream like/

Good Evening my people. I say 'evening' because I see the sun setting
on our culture, our very way of living. I see the decades and
centuries cascade past skyscrapers; the struggle, the
progress...chasing the fleeting sunlight. I say 'good evening', 'cause
I'm afraid we just missed twilight in my city.
Can you hear it?