Gotham City Soul

I was not going to post this blog entry because I feared it might come off as me being a killjoy during the holiday season. I mean, oh boy, a blog about death on New Year's—way to go Audrey. But I wrote this in good faith, spirit, and humor and it is something I wanted to share with you at the end of this year and the beginning of the next. Because I love you, not because I want to bum you out. Plus you have to admit, that picture above is pretty fun ny . I do have a plan to get back to history and soul and New York City and all that good jazz in 2008. But for now . . . Joe Black: Don't be feisty, sista . Jamaican Woman: I not be feisty mista . You com' for me that's good news. Joe Black: Can do no right by people. I com' to take you, you want to stay - I leave you stay, you want to go. from Meet Joe Black By now people who read my blog might think I’m a bit preoccupied with death . I’m not, really. But the “death” of 2007 makes me think of it. And in my own way, ...

So I arrived in Newark Airport from Savannah yesterday around 4 o’clock in the afternoon. I prefer Newark to LaGuardia and JFK for a couple of reasons, not the least of them being state loyalty. Yes, I will travel out of New York City to Jersey paying the $15 surcharge to the Taxi and Limousine Commission to fly out of Newark. Newark Airport makes sense to me. It’s laid out in a way that I can navigate. I just like it better. I traveled to Newark via cab last Friday because I just couldn’t get up early enough to do anything else, and bless the Supershuttle for being so cheap ($21, one-way; 12 for additional people in your party) and proletarian, but it has its issues (namely, you’re packed in like a sardine; they pick you up way too early for your flight—3 am for a 7 am takeoff, for example; there’s always somebody who is stunningly late for his or her flight (because he or she lied to the dispatcher about the time of the flight) and is killing the driver in a death by a thousand irri...

I've been so wrapped up in work I haven't had a chance to piece together enough decent blogs. I'm doing a drive-by today, telling you quickly about an event our magazine (actually our events planner and publisher put together) a youth forum for teenage boys to meet men who have done great and good things for the community and the world in general. The four men this year were Louis Gossett Jr. , Byron Lewis , the founder, in 1969, of Uniworld Group Inc. , a media planning company targeting the black and Latino markets; Ohio Congressman Louis Stokes , who served 15-consecutive and highly productive terms in office (during which he helped cofound the Congressional Black Caucus ); and Percy Sutton, Jr. , elder statesman of Harlem, and lawyer for Malcolm X, among many other things. Because I'm just quickly dropping in, I've provided the links (just click on the names for the bios) and a photo of the men with students, and at an awards ceremony we held at the Schomburg...

I couldn’t let the day go by without acknowledging that it’s St. Nicholas Day in the Netherlands and Germany and other parts of Europe. We never celebrated it when I was a kid, but my Mom sure did, and I’m writing about it here because for me, it marks the beginning of Weihnachtsdelerium , a German specific fever centered on Christmas that begins around now and ends on January 6, Three Kings Day. She and her brother, my Uncle Heinz (who is traveling to Tunisia for Christmas; ironic that my old German uncle has been to Africa a half dozen times or more and I haven’t been once) put their shoes outside their front door the night before, and St. Nicholas would come knocking at this door, with his faithful sidekick, Knecht Ruprecht (farmhand Ruprecht). St. Nick would ask my mom and uncle specific questions about their behavior throughout the year; if he determined that they were good, he would leave gifts in their shoes. If he decided they weren ’t, they might get switches. What children ...

I’m usually willing to give artistic expression, and many things quite a bit of latitude, but I’m going to go ahead and be grumpy about something today. I’m not going to see American Gangster . I like Denzel Washington’s work. I loved his directorial debut Antwone Fisher , and of course there is the well-known portrayal of Malcolm X ; and the lesser vaunted, but equally wonderful performance as Creasy in Man on Fire , the story of a burned out ex CIA operative and assassin who finds redemption in the process of saving the life of a little girl, whom he has grown to love as his own. The Hurricane, in which Washington starred as the embattled boxer Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, is a topic for another blog entry altogether, as there is deep controversy over the facts surrounding the story of Carter’s life. But I loved Washington’s Oscar-worthy performance all the same. But I don’t want to contribute one thin dime to American Gangster . I fail to see why I should care to know the details of ...

I have to jump in here today to rant. I realize solving the homeless problem is a difficult one, but I've just about had enough of people "in charge", who either don't have a clue, or don't want to have a clue about living in the real world, the world where the majority of people on this planet live. For example, is it me, or do you think it is completely absurd of the city, and more specifically Mayor Bloomberg (whom I actually like well enough on many issues), to turn homeless families away from shelters, telling them that they should seek shelter with family members? Do the people who try to shape these policies have a lick of sense? Do they understand that the reason most of these people are homeless in the first place is because they DON’T HAVE FAMILY MEMBERS TO LIVE WITH? Even if the family members exist, how can we force them to take in their homeless relatives? This may seem like a simplistic solution but maybe if we built more shelters, and better yet, a...

Back to Vodou , In the wake of all of the Halloween revelry (note to rabid Christians: It’s not a holiday to celebrate the cult of death—it derives from All Saints and All Souls day on November 1 and 2 in the Roman Catholic Church, and may even stretch back further than that to early harvest festivals in Europe) I thought it might be interesting to speak about the African traditional religion of Vodou. It’s a bit easier to understand, I think, if you are Catholic, because the Church basically appropriated or blended ancient pagan rituals, such as the autumnal equinox and the winter solstice, with its own to keep everybody happy. Followers of Vodou did the opposite—they (as well as a host of other African Traditional Religions) hid the rites they brought from Africa in the rituals of the Catholic Church, syncretising their spirits, called lwa (note that they are not gods; the Vodou religion recognizes one supreme God, Bondye ) to Catholic saints. The lwa and ancestors are spirits...

Today is All Souls Day in the Roman Catholic Church. It is also the Mexican Dia de los Muertos, and the first day of Fet Gede or the Vodou Feast of the Sacred Dead, which is what I want to write about. But before I do, I want to talk about something I saw on Halloween, which was supposed to be yesterday’s entry. Oh well, I get sidetracked sometimes. So I switched on the Today show on Halloween, mostly to see what kind of goofy get ups the cast were wearing this year (the Munsters, with Al Roker as Grandpa Munster), and there was a segment called “The Supernatural: Fact vs. Fiction” . Natalie Morales (Eddie Munster) was interviewing a ghost hunter (I didn’t get her name), and she couldn’t have been more discomfited. The fact or fiction statements were really pretty worn thin, I mean who doesn’t know that the Amityville Horror sprung from a true-life crime? It was as if the writers for the show tried to pick the most inoffensive, chewed over material they could find so as not to in a...

Tonight CNN is investigating the history of the noose and its re-emergence at 8 pm Eastern Time. I'm of the opinion, at this point, that if all of this brings about legislation making the displaying of a noose anywhere outside of an educational context a felony, then maybe something useful can come out of all of this. For more information click here. Above: A Howard University student protests the omission of lynching from the agenda of a national conference on crime, 1934.

After a fortnight I’m back, not with warnings to noose hangers, or moral dilemmas, we’re not even staying in New York today. We are, in a figurative way, going to Germany. I’m in the mood for fairy tales . . . I grew up in an American home, but some of the customs that my mother, who is of German descent, brought with her to the United States became part of our childhood, especially at Christmas (more on that closer to the that holiday). One bit of the culture that I did not learn about until I was an adult, was Der Struwwelpeter. Loosely translated, it means Slovenly or Shockhaired Peter. He is a boy who doesn’t comb or cut his hair, has long dirty nails, and a dirty face. He’s not so popular. This filthy boy serves as the introduction and title of children’s tales written by Heinrich Hoffmann, a nineteenth century German psychiatrist. Tales is putting it lightly, these little Geschichte are brutal. One tells, for example, the story of a boy who won’t stop sucking his thumb. He’s wa...

I’ ve held forth about noose hanging in an earlier post about Jena. But now we’ ve got copycats on Long Island, and yesterday, Columbia University. I’ ve got two things to say about that, but before I say anything about racism being alive and well all over the United States, even in the so-called "enlightened" cosmopolitan areas like New York City, I’ ve got a message for the noose-hangers: I’m putting this out there to anyone who has hung a noose or is planning to hang a noose to try to intimidate black people: Why don’t you show your faces and admit that you’re racists? If you feel so strongly that black people should be degraded, subjugated, treated as second-class citizens, and stripped of their civil rights, why don’t you come say it to our faces. Why don’t you stand in front of the TV cameras waving your nooses? Your sneaking around only shows you for the cowards you are. You’re the same people who leave anonymous crud on message boards and blogs because then you do...

The beautiful gentleman you see above is living history. He was part of the only crew of African-American sailors to take a warship, the USS Mason , into combat during World War II. The Mason 's war record included its safe escort of convoys across the Atlantic and its exemplary service in the hunter-killer groups that finally destroyed the German U-Boats that had infested Allied waters. And for its outstanding bravery in guiding an important convoy to port in the thick of a huge storm. It would be nearly 50 years before the men would receive the commendations, (from Pres. Bill Clinton), that the convoy's commander had recommended. I know Mr. DuFau because the story of the Mason was on the cover of the second issue of American Legacy. I wasn't the editor then, but Mr. DuFau keeps in touch, dropping by the office from time to time, and attending some of our events with his wife. He is a truly sweet gentle man, who, last time he went fishing, and knowing that I love seafood, ...

Reparations have not been on my mind lately, but I'm blogging on the subject now because the day fast approaches (October 10 th ) when an artist named Damali Ayo launches her National Day of Panhandling for Reparations. Whatever the arguments for or against reparations—and I'm of the belief that throwing money at a problem doesn't necessarily solve it—the woman has taken the rancor out of the debate by turning it into performance art. Her Web site describes the one-day event: "People of all races across the United States will sit outside of businesses, libraries, museums, art galleries, or on busy street corners. We will collect reparations from white Americans for the enslavement of Africans and African Americans. This money will be immediately paid out to black passersby. Both parties will be offered a receipt." I watched a video of her one-woman effort, and I laughed—it's really comical in its own way. I have thought about the idea of reparatio...

In 1936 a 21-year old Orson Welles directed a stage version of Shakespeare's Macbeth. The cast was all-black, and the setting was Haiti, not Scotland. It was mounted with money from the Federal Theater Project, which had helped set up black theater projects throughout the country. He got paid $50 a week, much less than what he got in his job as radio announcer. I'm going to borrow from the author and history professor Joshua Zeitz, who wrote an article about the production: "The cast and crew of Harlem's Macbeth were a diverse assemblage of experienced and inexperienced characters whose convergence on the Lafayette Theatre only contributed to the considerable amount of rumor swirling around the production. For the troupe's choreographer, Welles chose a a Sierra Leonean percussion expert. Asodata Dafora Horton, who coordinated the drumming and chanting that accompanied the drama, performed by dancers from the west coast of Africa. Their leader was a genuine witch ...

So it's time to play catch-up. First we have a review for the opera Margaret Garner from Fred Allen, a colleague of mine who runs things at www.americanheritage.com. He is a trusted source when it comes to things musical, particularly classical music. Unfortunately, the news isn't good, and the reasons behind the critique sound, so I felt I should share it with you: I saw Margaret Garner when it opened, and I have to say I was disappointed. The problem was partly the dull music but partly the story’s being very problematic for opera, for two reasons. First, you’ve got a heroine who is very morally ambiguous in a way that an opera, or at least this one, can’t get into. Killing your child is very disturbing no matter how good the reason, and killing her while letting yourself live, for whatever reason, doesn’t help. Beloved is so great because it’s about the ghost of the child coming back to haunt the mother, right? This is about the mother being a purely noble victim for killin...

I’ve been down off my soapbox long enough I think. I’ve purposely not talked about the Jena Six case because I feel that it finally has enough media coverage.I'm not going to say anything that hasn't already been said, but I really wanted to go on record. Also, I think some folks are missing the point of it all. I don't believe that racial taunts should be met with violence. I do think that the administrators of the school* and local law enforcement should have done the right thing and thoroughly investigated and properly punished the white students who hung the nooses on the tree in the first place! I guess hope just always springs eternal with me. Instead, the students were suspended for a few days. They should have been expelled, thrown right out of that school and charged with a hate crime. They may be minors, but they're not children. That would have made it clear as day that that sort of behavior would not be tolerated. But they just slapped them on the wrist. I...

I’ ve been trying to find an excuse to write about the artist Kara Walker for some time. But because much of what I write here is New York-related, and there weren ’t any current exhibitions open, I’ v e held off. Today I have an excuse: Walker has opened a show, presented by no other than New York City Opera, a companion exhibition to the opera’s production of Margaret Garner, of which I wrote a few days ago. You may have seen Walker’s work: silhouettes created with all of the delicacy and grace of their eighteenth and nineteenth century counterparts. Then you look closer and you have to ask “what the . . .?” It’s sex and violence on the plantation. Her work has been called works of “imagined slave narratives” . I say “Imagined? Really?” I wouldn ’t be surprised if nearly everything in Walker’s images didn ’t happen at least once. If you look at the drama of the painting “The Modern Medea” by Thomas Satterwhite Nobles from last Tuesday's blog, you can see a kinship. My first ...

The Modern Medea by Thomas Satterwhite Nobles, 1867 It happened this way: One winter day in 1856, a group of slaves from Kentucky slipped away and made their way to the free state of Ohio. Some got safely away. A husband and wife, Robert and Margaret Garner, along with their four children, managed to get to the house of a formerly enslaved black man named Kite. But before they could get to Canada, the "Promised Land", slave catchers and police* surrounded, then stormed the house. The Garners and slavers fought room to room, and Robert shot one of them, a deputy marshal, in the process. When the slave catchers got to the room in which Margaret was cornered, a bloody sight met their eyes: Margaret had taken a knife and cut her toddler daughter's throat rather than, as she told it, allow her to be a slave again. She was preparing to kill all of her children, and then herself, when the posse burst in on her. The white world was shocked and horrified, as were, I'm sure, ...